“Will the other girls?”
“Not at all.”
“And their minds are shielded. So they know something, and they know to hide away what they’re feeling.”
“Yes. Whether they just know the truth about Jason or saw more than they let on, I’m not sure. But there’s something they know, and if it helps me get a bead on the demon, I need to find it.”
Radha’s crafty, conspiratorial smile appeared. “So, which one do you want to pretend to be? I’ll distract the real one while you talk to Miklia.”
He had to laugh. “I’m not shape-shifting to look like a girl.” Not yet. He would eventually, though, if it became necessary. “Because if there’s one thing true about small towns, it’s that someone always knows something—even if they don’t realize they do.”
“What? Riddles aren’t any fun, Marc.”
“But seeing me as a girl would be?”
She blinked innocently.
Shaking his head, he looked to the school doors again. “One thing that everyone in this town knows is that Miklia didn’t always hang out with those girls—and that there’d been a rivalry between them up until Jason was killed.”
“So something apparently happened to bring them together.”
“I think so, yes.”
“Then why aren’t we following them? Who are we waiting for?”
We? He didn’t question it.
“The former best friend,” he said. “The one Miklia left behind.”
“Oh.” Radha suddenly grinned. “Teen drama. I can’t wait.”
CHAPTER 2
Radha should have been gone already. Or better yet, she shouldn’t have come in the first place. And she definitely shouldn’t have cared how he was doing—not Marc Revoire, the bastard who’d once asked God to forgive him for fornicating with her. For a hundred and forty years, she’d determinedly pushed Marc from her heart and thoughts, except for when she wondered how she could have ever fallen for a man who thought of her as something that should be washed off. And she’d done a good job of pushing him from her mind.
Until the week before, when she’d been stupid enough to look his way during the gathering. When she’d been stupid enough to care that he’d seemed so alone.
Assholes didn’t deserve friends. But still . . . She’d been shocked by the changes in him.
He looked older. Not old, but not a youth anymore, either. Physically, he resembled a hardworking human in his midthirties, sunstreaked brown hair, broader through the shoulders than he’d once been, and just as lean through the hips—like the man he might have become if he hadn’t sacrificed his life first.
But that wasn’t what had surprised her. Many Guardians changed their appearance over time, either to match the demands of their current mission or to blend in with a population. Even Radha had chosen a younger form than the fifty-year-old woman she’d been upon her human death, because after her transformation she’d felt younger. Guardians often took a form that reflected what they wanted to be, rather than what they’d once been.
So what the hell had Marc been through that he appeared to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders? Radha didn’t know, and she hadn’t heard of any terrible loss that he’d suffered, or any soulbreaking trial that a demon might have put him through. And she would have heard of it. The Guardians’ gossip mill was as strong as any small town’s.
Yet it hadn’t just been the loneliness or his apparent age. As he’d taken in Caelum’s destruction, he hadn’t seemed devastated as so many others were. He hadn’t seemed afraid. He’d seemed resigned.
As if everything that had happened in the past years had left him little to hope for. As if it had left him little to live for. As if he were tired of fighting.
As if he’d lost faith.
She hadn’t believed it. Not Marc, not the man determined to be God’s chosen warrior at the cost of everything else. But the memory of his weary resignation had nagged at her, and even after the gathering ended, she’d worried for him.
Like an idiot, she’d talked herself into coming here, to watch him in secret and determine whether there was truly anything to worry about. Not that she cared. But she was a Guardian, and Guardians took care of their own.
Too bad that she’d forgotten how capable he was of sussing out the holes in her illusions.
So she’d been found out, but Marc seemed all right, anyway. At least, he wasn’t flogging himself or crying in a bathroom somewhere. She could have gone.
Except, maybe he wasn’t all right. He’d always been good at concealing his true feelings from her. After all, she’d spent thousands of hours with him over the course of a single year and never realized that he considered her the biblical equivalent of a diseased whore. So she’d wait a little longer and make certain.
If she helped him track down a demon in the process, all the better. Slaying one was always fun—except for when it was difficult and horrifying. If that happened, it was best that she was here to back him up.
He didn’t need the backup yet, though. The kid who came out of the school possessed a wide-open mind, and as soon as he spotted Marc, he trembled with uncertainty and excitement.
So cute. Tall, a bit thin and awkward, with a mop of curly dark hair and determinedly nerdy glasses—but as soon as he grew into his body, Radha suspected the girls in the area would be in trouble.
“Sam Briffee?”
Marc held up his identification, and Radha took a quick look at it. Special Investigations. A legitimate federal law enforcement division, and a legitimate identification, thanks to an arrangement the Guardians had made with the United States government. Radha rarely operated in this country, so she didn’t have one.
But then, she didn’t really need one. When Marc introduced himself as Special Agent Revoire, she held up a piece of paper. Surrounded by her illusions, the blank paper would feel and look like a real wallet and identification, even if the boy examined it up close. To her disappointment, he didn’t—but she had to grin when Marc glanced back at her and paused before saying,
“. . . and this is Special Agent Bhattacharyya.”
Impressive. He pronounced it correctly. It wasn’t really her surname—Radha didn’t bother with that ridiculousness—but she liked the rhythm of it.
“I’m Sam.” Wary, the boy looked from Radha to Marc. “Why are you looking for me?”
Marc kept his tone even, friendly. “Just to ask a few questions. Another investigation has opened up new leads in Jason Ward’s murder, and so we’re looking at a few details. We understand that you’re Miklia’s friend?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. Then more strongly, “Yeah, I am. So his murder is connected to someone else’s?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. Do you have a few minutes to talk? Not out here,” he added, when the boy hunched in his light jacket and looked up at the sky. “The diner across the street. Our treat.”
“Yeah, all right.”
Oh, teen boys and their stomachs. Too easy—but it might have been anyway. Curiosity filled him now, and anticipation. Maybe at having a story to tell his peers the next day, or simply at the possibility of learning some grisly detail about the crime.
Maybe she’d show him fake photographs from the fake investigation into that other murder. It would support Marc’s cover story and give this boy a little something extra to talk about—and maybe confuse the demon enough that he’d ask questions about the supposed murder, revealing himself.
Though Marc turned and waited, politely gesturing for her to start off first, she shook her head, indicating for him to go on ahead with the boy. This was his show. She’d take up the rear and listen to the other ways the demon revealed himself.
From farther down the street, two people in one of the offices had begun arguing. Only snippets of the fight reached her ears, but it was exactly what she’d have expected.
—You stood here yesterday and told me that! Are you saying now that you didn’t?—
No. Whatever that person was being accused of lying about, he probably hadn’t said it. That was often how a demon worked: shape-shifting to resemble a real person, making promises to loved ones, spreading lies, destroying trust.
And it was what made some demons so difficult to locate. Arrogant and vain, many demons chose to create their own human identity and form, often in the guise of a rich, handsome male, and hunting them was merely a matter of making certain he was a demon and finding an opportunity to slay him. But a demon who made a practice of shape-shifting posed a different challenge: though it often kept a default, day-to-day human identity, the demon could be anyone, at any time, and appearing in the form of a person that the Guardian had already determined wasn’t a demon. The low-level psychic sweeps Guardians performed wouldn’t differentiate human from demon—yet any stronger probes would reveal their own nature, which might send the demon running from Riverbend and starting again elsewhere.
Losing him, unless Marc happened across another town at the right time. They wouldn’t want to take that risk.
At the diner’s entrance, she vanished her wings rather than trying to maneuver them through the small space. Marc held the door open for her, waiting for her to pass through. Did federal agents bother with such niceties? Radha didn’t know. Assholes usually didn’t bother, and she wished that it was easier to remember that Marc was one. She wished that it was easier to forget how much she’d loved being with him, the conversations they’d had, and how well they’d fit together. She wished that he didn’t look at her now with the quiet concern that she knew had to be false—and she wished that he made his opinion of her overt instead of hiding it behind polite human rituals.
A different sort of illusion, but one she didn’t appreciate.
Inside, her own illusion was simple to maintain, creating a lighter echo of Marc’s footsteps to cover her lack of shoes. As they crossed to a booth in an empty corner, the wet tracks she left behind on the linoleum had to appear as if they came from leather soles rather than bare feet. The whisper of her scarves became the heavy sound of a wool coat sliding across a vinyl bench seat. Perhaps she missed a few small reflections in the spoons she passed, in the silver carafe of syrup, in the shining wire that made up the baskets holding the jellies, but she altered the reflections in the windows and in the gleaming tabletop.