“How’s your back?” Leo asked.

“Well, I’m off it, unlike your Amazonian ex, so that’s something,” I retorted, resting a shoulder against the iron pole holding up the canopy.

“This is ridiculous. If you would just . . . ,” he started.

“No.”

He sighed and passed over two Tylenol, a far stretch from what my back really needed, but it would have to do. “Once, my brother lied and told my father, this was after he and I stopped speaking, that I was spending time with you. . . .” He shook his head, the black braid undulating along his back. “I heard that the old bastard laughed so long and hard that he choked on his venison and passed out at the table.”

Our families were familiar with one another, to say the least, and we followed the same general ideological path, had the same long lineage. What my family knew of the world, Leo’s knew equally as well. We hadn’t grown up next door, hardly anything that mundane with the travel blood so strong in me and mine, but we passed their way now and again. Leo’s family had what Jeb had wanted: roots. Leo could follow his family back as long as I could, an oral history that put the most convoluted and far-reaching of family trees to shame. Back to the mammoths and beyond wouldn’t be an exaggeration. A historian would be foaming at the mouth to talk to him. Of all of his family, though, only Leo was a wanderer now. When you’re kicked out of house and home, you don’t have much choice.

“Did he think I would be a little much for you?” I rested my sunglasses in my hair.

“More than that. He thought you’d be the death of me.” He pulled off his hat and waved it at a raven far overhead. “And I’m not so sure he would be wrong.”

“Chicken,” I teased. “Oh, come on. Where’s the harm? Lots of twosomes do just fine. Friends or lovers, and living it up.” I toasted him with the can of lemonade.

“Like Butch and Sundance?” he said knowingly. “Thelma and Louise? Romeo and Juliet? Nitroglycerin and a pogo stick?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” I tsked as I finished the flat lemon drink. “And I think the wake has started. Let’s go see who didn’t show up.”

About six people were there, including the truck molester. We mixed and mingled. I’d dressed down. Leo looked like he looked. We had “good folk” written all over us. After some talking, we discovered the only friend of Jeb’s missing was John Wilbur. I’d wriggled directions to the guy’s place out of Artie. Normally, he wouldn’t have, but I was playing cute and feisty for all I was worth and Leo was dessert from the looks of him. Charisma, Leo and I had it in spades when we wanted. Demons weren’t the only ones who could bring out the flash, and even Artie couldn’t stand against it. “You’d make great con men,” he’d grumbled as we took off.

Isn’t it great when your calling and your work are the same?

It was dark by the time we reached John Wilbur’s short, squat mobile home. There was a bright generator light flooding the place and the sand around it. In that sand someone had literally drawn the line. And it surrounded the trailer in a circle twice as brilliant as the generator light. My sunglasses were in the glove compartment, although I wished I had them back as I shaded my eyes for a better look. Flakes—minute flakes of glass or crystal made up the circle, and the fact they glowed almost as bright as the sun said one thing and one thing only.

The Light. They came from the Light.

Leo mirrored my frown. “Someone knows something.”

There was the faintest of sounds behind us. A whisper of sand. A rustle of cloth against cloth.

“Our Mr. Wilbur is clever . . . for a human.” The tone was so bored. So very “have been there and had a stained-glass window designed in my image.” So “Why oh why must I suffer the indignity of discoursing with the unfaithful and the sinning?” I turned and considered shooting the angel dead center in his chest. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d shot one. But I knew if I did, he would bleed a ray of luminous white light for a few seconds; then he would be whole again. It would be all for nothing. While the angel I had once shot had deserved it, I wasn’t sure this one did simply for being annoyingly superior and in the right place at the right time—when I wished he weren’t.

“Look at this. Temptation in the desert, but it’s not the devil this time—only a parakeet with delusions of grandeur.” I kept the gun aimed at him. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure you could kill an angel. Then again, maybe the same would hold for them as held for demons. If you could keep their bodies anchored on Earth and blow out their brains . . . After all, as Solomon had said, he was an angel too—simply a fallen one. Seemed what would work for one, destruction-wise, would work for the other. I’d never had the need to put it to the test. Yet. But if he got between me and the Light, that might change.

And where did angels and demons go when they “died”? Because it was death, at least for a demon. They didn’t go back down to Hell for a little detention and pop up again later. At least, I’d never seen one that had. Once the brain was gone, it was gone for good. What then? Per their doctrine, there was no place higher to step up to for the angels and no lower for the demons, right?

Curious.

So was death really and truly death for them? The nothingness of nonexistence?

Maybe I’d ask this one. “Hey,” I started, until a familiar elbow impacted my side. Leo. He knew exactly what I was thinking. He usually did.

“Sorry.” I gave in, not graciously, but I did give in. A great woman had once said, The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. That did describe me down to the molecular level, but, sadly, there was a time and place. This was not it. I nudged my thoughts back to the more important matter at hand: the Light.

The angel that was here to fetch it was a man in the same way that demons are men. Although, to give credit, demons were women too. Same MO. Female demons were just as drop-dead gorgeous as the males, sweating unbelievable sex appeal, the eye of a hurricane of pheromones—the whole nine yards. Demons were equal-opportunity salespeople. We’ll take your soul, male, female; bring whatever you have and we’ll be whatever you want. But now that I thought about it, the few angels I’d seen had always been male. It made me a little sorry that I hadn’t shot this one after all. Sexist pigeon.

Instead, I asked, “What do you want here?” I knew very well what he wanted. “Never mind,” I dismissed him. “Whatever it is, you’re not getting it. Take a hike, or a flight, and don’t look back. Turning into a pillar of salt would be the least of your concerns.”

I hadn’t seen his wings, but now I noticed a shimmer of dark purple-blue light hit a curve, almost as if the wings were there but made of glass. Solemn, promising eyes of the same twilight color peered through his white-blond bangs. “Trixa. Leo. We’ve been waiting for you.” Then he smiled and I was in that twilight . . . a glorious spring one, warm and silken. Surrounded by it. Caressed.

I looked over to see a faint sweat over the cords of Leo’s neck. “Really?” I said, surprised. “You go that way now and again? I had no idea.”

“No, I don’t. And you do have an attention span. Use it,” he gritted, flushing lightly before turning his head to the right. “Well, shit,” he said in disgust.

Solomon, our Solomon, stepped out of the darkness there. I knew he was up to his neck in this—might’ve even killed Jeb himself. It hadn’t looked like a demon kill—had lacked a certain level of violence and definitely didn’t smell like demon—but it wasn’t beyond him to fake it to look otherwise. I had no idea who had done Jeb in, Eden House or a demon. Either way, Solomon was in the game; that I’d known for some time. “Whatever this molting chicken has to tell you isn’t worth hearing,” he said, giving a dismissive nod at the angel.