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As soon as the words registered in his mind, the spell was broken by a clap of thunder so loud that all of the salesmen inside the dealership ducked and covered their heads, and even Ad dove into the Mini for safety.
The woman’s body stiffened with such force that her arms and legs shot straight out from her torso and she fell back, flat as a pancake. On reflex, Eddie grabbed her before she hit the sidewalk, and lowered her carefully onto the ground—and he had a sixth sense about what was coming next. Sure enough, the seizure that struck her was so violent, it was as if she were a tap dancer, every part of her in movement, things slapping, clapping, flapping on the concrete.
Over at the Mini, Ad reemerged, his body surging forward as he started to run over—
Eddie’s palm stopped him in mid-rush, and when he was certain his favorite firebrand wasn’t going to continue to come on strong, he rubbed his palms together, and hovered his hands over the woman’s chest—
Energy sizzled up, called into Eddie’s corporeal form, the licking, sparking charge entering him and making his eyes roll back. Distant voices chattered around him, swirling in a spin that his brain told him was about his perception, not any physical rotation, and yet suddenly he was the earth and they were the sun and—
“I got you.”
From out of the chaos, Adrian was a constant, their roles briefly reversed, the wild child becoming the calm in the center of the storm. Strong arms gathered Eddie up and broke the connection before he, too, fell onto the concrete.
Flickering lights now, and he wondered why the sky had a short in it. Except no, it was just his lids going haywire.
Man, there was a lot of plaid around him all of a sudden.
Before he could do the math on that one, Ad’s face appeared right above his own, the angel’s piercings seeming to sparkle with all the blinking. “It’s okay, just breathe with me. Eddie, I need you to breathe—my guy, you’re not breathing. Do it with me.”
As his best friend held him tight, Eddie followed the instruction because he didn’t have a B plan, and with his mind shorting out, he wasn’t going to come up with one anytime soon. Part of his problem was that it wasn’t just about the energy he’d taken into himself. It was that he knew what the message meant.
Great Bear Mountain.
Three years. They had been searching in vain for so long, their mission a failure, their target eluding them. And now a direction had been served, likely because the Creator had lost any faith they could do the job He’d given them.
They had to go to… Great Bear.
Next to him, Stephanie Anne Kowalski sat up and looked around at the plaid-clads who’d come out of the dealership.
“You’re all right,” Ad murmured as Eddie likewise hauled his torso off the sidewalk. “Yup, you’re okay—”
“I know where Lassiter is.”
The other fallen angel grew perfectly still.
Then Ad glanced back at the Mini with resignation. “Well, at least I know why I brought us here. And, hey, now we have wheels.”
CHAPTER TWO
10.8 miles north of Great Bear Mountain
Adirondack Park, Upstate New York
In the gathering dusk, the mountain air smelled of pine and kindling buds, the scents carried on a lazy, cold draft that trickled down the elevation, weaving around and over boulders and branches, weeds and wildlife, the frigidity of space encroaching upon the earth. Across the valley, the sun’s very last rays created a hearth in a juncture of peaks, the intersection of surging topographies a cup of palms in which the light was nestling for a brief, dying time, only embers now, no warmth to speak of.
As Lassiter, the fallen angel, emerged from the cave, he thought of McDonald’s.
Drawn by the finality of the peach glow, he walked out to a keyhole view of the splendor, tossing a small satchel back and forth between his hands. Like the golden arches memory that was suddenly dogging him, the sight before his eyes was a distillation of experience rather than something currently sensed, a refraction of the world as opposed to that which was in-the-moment sensed and seen.
In his current frame of mind, the present was as the past brought to mind, a memory that was subject to faulty interpretation and accuracy.
Had it been a Big Mac and fries? he wondered idly. Or a Quarter Pounder?
Those specifics were gone now, but he had most of the rest of the details of what had started him on the path that led here, to this night, this view. Three years ago he had been sent by the Creator to rescue the Black Dagger Brother Tohrment, son of Hharm, from grief. The mission had been an oxymoron combination of promotion and punishment. Lassiter hadn’t been looking for the former, and had had too much of the latter, but in any event, his opinion about it all was as irrelevant as where the assignment took him. The Creator had had a plan for him and, like destiny, hadn’t cared about what he thought.
