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I sit up. Rub a hand over my face.
“I was in a cave with the Angra. They were talking to me. One was. Ten Thousand Shadows. She wanted me to summon them.”
“Who is she?”
“The one I saw in Kill City.”
She pushes my hair back off my forehead.
“It was just a dream. How could the Angra be talking to you?”
“I’ve always had funny dreams that way. And that chop-shop prick bit me. Maybe we made some kind of connection.”
“Or maybe it was just a damned dream. You’re all stressed out about work. You get hurt and you remember the one fragment of an Angra you ever saw.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I’m always right.”
Candy pushes me back down onto the bed and pulls the covers over me.
“Should I tell the Shonin about it?”
“Definitely not,” she says. “You said Wells is trying to connect you and Saint Nick. All anyone over there needs to hear is that you’re having pillow talk with an old God.”
“Good point.”
“I’ll be back,” she says, and gets out of bed. A minute later I hear her in the bathroom throwing up.
I’ll call Allegra tomorrow about those goddamn tests.
IN THE MORNING, the bite is just bruises and a scab. There’s no fieldwork or car chases scheduled for the Vigil today, so Candy heads off to help out at the clinic.
At Vigil headquarters, instead of the sneers and behind-the-back comments I usually hear, there’s dead silence when I walk through. Julie Sola and Vidocq are coming out of the break room. Vidocq has a cup of tea and Sola is carrying a container of yogurt.
I say, “What’s with the silent treatment around here? Did I suddenly get boring?”
“Just the opposite,” says Vidocq.
Sola peels back the lip from the top of the yogurt and sticks in a spoon.
“Everyone knows about what you did yesterday. The flaming sword.”
“The Gladius.”
“You have to understand, even with all the fundamentalists around here, angels are still mostly a
n abstraction. To see something like that right in front of their eyes, well, you blew a few people’s minds.”
Vidocq says, “That silence you hear isn’t boredom. It’s awe.”
“I don’t like it.”
Sola eats a spoonful of her yogurt.
“It’s too late now. Even the old-timers only ever saw Aelita produce the Gladius, so they know you’re at least as powerful as her. The younger ones, the ones who grew up with slasher movies and Ozzy, some of them think you’re the Angel of Death.”
It’s funny how you get used to things and then when you do them in front of other people it doesn’t get exactly the effect you intended. I just want a paycheck from these people. The last thing I want is to be put in any category that Aelita is a part of.
