Up the stairs we went, with Candy carrying my clothing and trying several times to encourage me to put them back on. Just to irritate her, I ignored her motions and continued to walk around buck naked.
Wyatt quickly overcame the passwords on the upstairs computer and we watched six grainy black and white boxes of video displaying boring images of people walking about, eating, watching TV. The majority of the recording time was just empty blank rooms. Wyatt sectioned out and expanded the downstairs camera, but the resolution was horrible blown up. He reduced it to a more clear size and zipped through the time code stamp on the lower corner of the image. At nine in the evening, the female werewolf clicked off the TV, kissed the male who was on the laptop and said some indecipherable words to him before heading up the stairs.
“The audio on these cameras is horrible, so I don’t think we’re going to know what they are saying,” Wyatt said.
Wyatt fast forwarded slowly until a few minutes after ten, when the male werewolf looked like he was ready to get up. He stood and stretched a bit, then sat down to do a few more things on the laptop.
“Based on the laptop record, he was just doing some random surfing. News site, clicked on a few links, nothing noteworthy,” Wyatt pointed out.
Hmm, no illicit porn surfing, snuff videos, or werewolf revolutionary front chat rooms. I didn’t see where this guy could possibly have violated the admittedly strict existence contract. He was squeaky clean, from what I could tell.
A dark shape appeared quickly in the room. “Whoa,” Wyatt said, freezing the screen and backing it up a frame at a time.
At ten twelve PM, a dark shape showed at the edge of the stairs, quickly, and silently, approached the werewolf from the rear, and snapped his neck with a smooth, clean motion. He had to have been amazingly strong to have done that, even with the element of surprise on his side. The werewolf fell back and sideways out of the chair as his body attempted to follow the movement of his head. We couldn’t see the angel’s face clearly from the poor quality of the picture and the angle of the camera, but it didn’t matter to me. I had his energy signature; I didn’t need to know what he looked like.
The angel paused, kneeling for some time beside the werewolf before bending down and placing his hand on the temple. A blur appeared around his hand and he withdrew it to stare at the body again.
“What is taking the stupid shit so long?” I muttered. “Does he want to get caught or something? I would have been halfway to Baltimore by now.”
Finally, he reached down with a finger and a blaze of light traced the cut in the body’s midsection. A scream bellowed out of the computer and we all jumped with hearts racing. The whole death had been silent, and I, for one, had forgotten that there was a soundtrack, no matter how shitty. The female werewolf stood at the bottom of the stairs.
Wyatt was forced to move frame by frame at this point to keep everything from being a blur of speed in real time. Crap, these people were fast, fast. The female had screamed, and simultaneously her claws and snout shot out as the angel whirled around, energy flaring. He lashed at her with energy bursts and moved to the side as if trying to push her away from the stairs. She held her location blocking the stairs, but advanced toward him and managed to rake him twice. Once across the face with her right, and a downward strike from his right shoulder with her left.
It was remarkable she’d been able to advance at all with the energy bursts he was tossing around. Reeling from the claw marks, the angel brought energy in a steady stream, a blade shape up from his left, slicing the deep fatal cut into her right thigh. Dissolving the blade, he grabbed the front of her shirt and flung her up against the wall as he dashed from the room and up the stairs. The rest of the video showed her frame by frame sliding down the wall to rest in a crumpled heap of spreading blood. Wyatt paused the video.
“One angel killed them both,” he said.
“Yes, but he ran out before she had hit the wall. I wonder if he even knew he’d killed her?” I mused. “And where is the second angel. There is a second angel.” I insisted.
Wyatt fast forwarded the video and for a few speeded up seconds we saw the blood pool expand across the carpet, then a whole lot of nothing for hours. Finally, as the time clock showed around one in the morning, a blurred figure appeared.
“Whoa, there he is!” I shouted. As if I was the only one who noticed.
Wyatt backed up the video and we saw the angel descend the stairs to stop at the bottom and scan the room. He was tall and built like a bull. It looked to my eyes to be the same angel as in The Wine Room.
“Do they all look alike? Because I’m thinking that is the one from the bar earlier this week.” I asked Candy.
Wyatt paused the video and looked up. “What do you mean ‘the one from the bar earlier this week’? You told me you had an angel after you, but you didn’t tell me you had seen one up close and personal.”
“No, they don’t all look alike, although they have similarities,” Candy explained. She turned to Wyatt. “That’s Gregory,” she said pointing to the screen. “He’s the angel that kills any demons who cross into this world. We saw him last Friday at The Wine Room.”
Wyatt glared at me. He was pissed that I’d neglected to tell him that particular detail when I’d let him know that angels were after me. I felt guilty and it was a weird feeling. I knew what guilt felt like. The humans I owned had all felt guilt many times in their lives, and I had all their memories and feelings stored within me. I didn’t like feeling guilty, myself. I’d really been wearing this human form too long and leaning too heavily on human memories. Why would I tell him? It’s not like he could do anything to help me out. He’d just worry and do some stupid human macho thing that would get him killed. I didn’t know what to say.
Wyatt stared long enough for me to feel even more uncomfortable, then turned around and resumed the video. Gregory walked over to the male victim and looked at him carefully without touching him. He shook his head, but it was hard to read his expression from the poor quality of the tape. He walked over to the female and glanced up at the smear on the wall. Then he bent down over the female.
“Slow it down,” I told Wyatt, leaning in. “Frame by frame.”
The angel examined her wounds and ran a hand over her rounded belly, less than an inch from the surface. Checking the baby for life? In the slow motion of the frame by frame I saw him reach his other hand to her temple and a flash of light as he left the wing mark.
“Wait,” I shouted to Wyatt. “Back it up one more frame.” There. Was there a flash of light from his other hand too? I darted from the room and charged down the stairs to the bodies. Pressing my hand against the female’s belly, I searched and searched and found. There. An energy signature. A mark of angels wings on the temple of the fetus’ head.
Wyatt and Candy reached the downstairs just as I stood up. “He marked the baby,” I told them, and I was feeling pretty outraged about it. “He put the angel’s wings on the baby’s head. And on the female’s. What the fuck? The mark is supposed to be a sign of guilt. He’s covering it up. Althean fucked up and killed an innocent female and an unborn child, and Gregory covered it up by marking them as if they were guilty of a crime. How could an unborn child ever be guilty of a crime? It’s against their creed.”
“They are all innocent,” Candy said indignantly. “Hundreds of kills in the past five years and we can’t tell they’ve done anything wrong.”
“Yes, but they can always twist the contract, find some tiny little detail somewhere to justify it. Nothing justifies this,” I gestured to the pregnant female. “Is Gregory in on it, too? Or is he cleaning up Althean’s mess and hoping to catch him and set him right before the other angels discover his misdeeds and come down on his head as the boss? Because with this, it’s going to be a very short time before Althean finds himself in deep angel doo–doo.”
We reviewed the rest of the video, but found nothing else beyond long stretches of no activity punctuated by the local werewolves and their investigative efforts, then us arriving. Wyatt took the laptop thinking he might find something in there that would have caused this couple to be a target, or even be on the angel’s radar.
“Do you still have the information on your predictions?” I asked Wyatt. “That repression analysis you did?”
“Regression analysis. I’ll add in this data and we should be able to narrow things down further. He’s definitely moving faster. If we can identify one or two targets, we’ll need to think about how we’re going to handle it. Probably some kind of stake out, since alarms and such won’t give us enough time to arrive all the way from Maryland and catch him in the act.”
Stake out. The thought depressed me.
We drove to a nearby breakfast diner so Wyatt could run his registration analysis and we could all have Moons Over My Hammy with some much needed coffee.
Candy and I were arguing over my supposedly excessive ketchup use on the hash browns, when Wyatt interrupted us by shoving his tablet in our faces.
“There,” Wyatt said pointing at the map. “These three places are very close together and all within the modified predictive line. I’m worried about the timeline though. My model shows two to three days, but I don’t have enough recent data points, and it could be as soon as tomorrow.”
“Gettysburg,” Candy said looking at the map. “Let’s head there now, grab the closest hotel room to these three likely spots, and then hit the outlets for a couple changes of clothes and toiletries. We’ll reconnaissance the spots today, well before we think the hit will be, then be ready tonight and tomorrow. We’ll just pull this straight through. We really need to catch him this week, before his trajectory takes him further away from home and we have to deal with travel.”
“Cool, we can go down Route 30,” I told her. “It goes straight into Gettysburg.”
Wyatt looked at me with disgust. “Not Route 30, again. We just crawled down there, and now we have to go back?”
“It is the quickest way to Gettysburg,” Candy told him.
So back down Route 30 we went. Traffic wasn’t quite as slow, but it was steady and crowded through all the tiny little towns. As we got closer in to Gettysburg, the small houses in various stages of neglect got closer together and became more interspersed with an eclectic array of businesses. There were used car lots, thrift shops, a sheet metal manufacturer, tile wholesaler, and, oddly, a gourmet tobacco store.
The modern houses gave way to restored Victorian homes as we entered the city limits, then majestic historic mansions and row houses as we entered downtown Gettysburg. The historic knickknack shops, coffee houses, inns and restaurants enchanted me. Crowds of people peering at brochures choked the streets and sidewalks. At my insistence, we searched the downtown inns only to find that none had any vacancies. A helpful coffee house employee informed us that this was the height of their tourist season and we probably wouldn’t find anything this close to the battlefield. He recommended we head back north out of town, closer to the highway, where some privately owned motels may have vacancies.
Hours later, we were tired and grumpy from the endless stream of ‘no vacancy’ signs when we finally found a place. It was fairly close to the houses we needed to investigate, but was by no means our first pick of sleeping quarters.
Our home away from home was one of those two story local owned motels popular fifty years ago. The white paint was patched in not–quite matching colors all over the cement block walls. I hadn’t realized white came in so many shades. The doors and trim were a thick red, as if twenty layers of glossy paint had been stacked on top of each other over the decades. Chips along the door and window frames revealed the trim had at times been green, blue, and a lovely shade of baby poop yellow. Judging from the frequency that cars came and left from the parking lot, the motel mostly catered to a rent–by–the–hour crowd.
The guy at the front desk took one look at hot young Wyatt in the company of two middle aged women and made some pretty lurid assumptions based on his expression. He took a bit of convincing that we were indeed planning to stay at least the night, if not several days. Candy begged and badgered, but couldn’t get him to give us a ground floor room. I wondered if they were reserved for the hour rentals. People could make quick getaways if needed, maybe out a back window. Plus, ground floor would be easier for the frequent maid service needed with hourly rentals. That is, if they bothered to clean between rentals. Ick.
It had become overcast as we left York. A kind of hot humidity filled the air as it always does in mid August and I doubted whether the threatened rain would cool things off. The old air conditioning units whirred and hummed away, spewing hot air at us as we climbed the cement stairs and headed down the outside hallway toward our room. Ours was the one with the big pool of air conditioning water spilling across the walk and dripping down onto the parking lot below. I imagined the cold dirty water dropping down on some unsuspecting cheating person as they went in to meet up for an afternoon delight. The inside wasn’t terrible, but I could tell by Candy’s face that this was a huge sacrifice in comfort on her part. Two double beds with cheap floral bedspreads were crammed in the room with just enough space to squeeze by them and the fiberboard dresser placed against the opposite wall. An old TV squatted on top of the dresser, and the beds shared a painted plywood bedside table with a phone and a cheap alarm clock. Laminated and firmly taped to the bedside table was a sheet indicating various charges for phone calls, and pay movies.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Wyatt said as he walked over to the TV. I thought he was referring to the age, poor quality, and limited channels of the unit. He reached up and grabbed the remote off the top and I saw it had been drilled and outfitted with a ring which was connected by a long metal chain to an identical ring on the TV. I laughed. All that trouble to safeguard a ten dollar universal remote. If we really wanted to steal it, a good set of tin snips, heck probably a decent pocket knife, could have freed it from the chain. Or we could have just grabbed the TV too.
“What, no mini bar? No room service?” I asked, delighted. I was enchanted by the place. Sleazy sex downstairs, tacky theft prevention. I wondered if the bed vibrated. Yes! There was a coin operated box on the side. I dug around for a quarter and threw myself on the bed to enjoy the ride. Better than the kiddy rides outside Walmart.
Candy was not so amused. She looked as though she was about ready to grab some Clorox wipes and go to town. The expression on her face as I set the bed to shaking was priceless. This was going to be the most fun hunt ever. More fun even then catching that sorcerer for the elves a few centuries back.
Candy pointed to the bed closest to the door. The one I wasn’t lying on.
“This is my bed. I don’t want to see you sleeping in it, I don’t want you having sex in it with him or anyone, or even by yourself. I don’t want anything involving bodily fluids going on in this bed. In fact, I don’t even want you to sit on it. Especially not naked. You too,” she added as an afterthought pointing at Wyatt.
“What if I put a plastic bag down first?” I asked playfully. “I can spray some disinfectant on it afterward to kill the germs.”
Candy glared at me. I guess that was a no.
There were some logistical negotiations regarding the shopping expedition. It was silly for us all to go out to buy toothbrushes and cheap jeans, but Candy was afraid to let me shop for her and Wyatt needed incomprehensible stuff at an electronics store. I think he was a little worried about me shopping for him too. He should have been. I purchased more on entertainment value than fashion sense. With me in charge, Candy was liable to end up in a French maid outfit and Wyatt in a bondage harness.
Finally, Candy took down our sizes and preferences and agreed to do the clothing and necessity shopping. She was immersed in one of her lists when I decided that I just had to do something this afternoon or I’d explode.
“Go with Candy,” I told Wyatt. “There’s got to be an electronics store at the outlets. I’m going to go canvass one of our three potential sites.”
“It’s starting to rain,” Candy noted. “Why don’t you wait until I get a change of clothes for you?”
“I’m really fidgety. I can’t hang out here for hours and watch network TV or porn.” I had to get out of that hotel room and shake the wiggles out or I’d be liable to make poor decisions later. “The one site is only three miles from here and it’s not raining hard. I think I’m going to jog.”
“Cool, I can take your car then,” Wyatt said before the words left my mouth.
“Nope. Nobody drives my car.” Like nobody sits on Candy’s bed, I thought.
“It will be faster if we don’t have to ride together. I swear I’ll be careful.”
“No.”
“Sam, I’ve known you for two years. You can trust me to take good care of it. I know how much it means to you.”
“No.”
“You trust me with the key to your safe, to take care of all your affairs if needed, but you won’t let me drive your car?”
“No. It’s my car.”
“So, if you have to flee back to your home land, am I allowed to drive it then? Or do I have to let it sit and rot wherever you left it last? You’d rather some redneck with plumber’s butt hoist your car onto a flat bed or drag it down the road on a hook to the impound lot than allow me to drive it?”
I thought for a moment. “Well, maybe then,” I said, grudgingly. “But not now. You can’t drive it now. Or in the foreseeable future.”
Wyatt glared at me. This was clearly an issue he would continue to address. I realized that I’d probably eventually have to let him drive my car sometime or he’d harp on it forever. Not now though. Maybe after we’d had sex.
The pair left to run their errands and I was alone in the no–tell motel room. I’d looked at the map and directions on Wyatt’s tablet, and he’d set it up on my cell phone so I could use the GPS feature to get there and back if I took a detour. I sat for a moment to prepare myself and bring back up the angel’s DNA and energy signature. It was like waving a dirty sock in front of a Bloodhound. I focused and a great anticipation grabbed me. I hoped the angel marked his victims prior to the kill. Scouted out their homes, watched them to see their habits, planned his moves. I had so much on him, if he so much as coughed on a twig I’d notice.
I locked the door, with an actual key no less, and headed out. Thankfully the light rain had stopped, although the humidity would have me just as soaked in thirty minutes. I jogged down the busy four lane commercial route trying to look like I was just out for some exercise. Six blocks, then a left. Two more blocks then a right. The tightly packed houses started to spread apart with more sizable yards, then separated by fields of corn or soybean. A mile down and I turned onto a winding hilly country road that didn’t seem wide enough for two modern cars to pass. Heck, two Suburbans would have to four wheel it, especially with no shoulder on the road. Little clusters of three or four modern houses broke the expanses of crops, hay fields, and cattle pasture. I listened carefully for cars. They’d never be able to see me with the hills and curves in the road until they were almost on me. Jumping out of the way into a muddy ditch or barbed wire would have been my only option on a few stretches.
I quickly realized that running in blue jeans was a horrible idea. They clung to me in the wet heat and the seams were rubbing and chafing. Thankfully I’d worn a supportive bra and a pair of old running shoes, or the situation would have been dire. Still, I was seriously contemplating taking the damned jeans off and running in my underwear. The road was pretty deserted this time of day. I considered it, but decided I’d rather suffer than draw attention to myself when I was on a hunt. That’s all I needed was some country boy trying to get lucky with streaker girl.
I was only a hundred yards from the house when the sky opened up and sheets of rain poured down on me. Fuck, could this get any worse? The jeans were like two hundred pounds of wet sandpaper at this point, and my running shoes squelched water with every stride. This was hell. Not that medieval painting of horned dudes gnawing on limbs and fucking asses. Wet jeans were far worse than chewed up limbs and a sore rectum. I knew this for a fact.
I looked up at the house through the haze of grey rain and wet hair. It was set back from the road down a long driveway. Two story, colonial style with shutters on the windows and vinyl siding. No trees, no deck or patio, no front porch, no landscaping bushes, no cover at all. Just a straight shot until you reached the house where there was a small detached garage and a prefab shed. Couldn’t anybody have planted any trees? Or a nice stone fence? Or a privet hedge?
I pretended to tie my shoe and thought for a second. That’s when I saw it. There was a drainage ditch running along the driveway about two feet out. It was about two feet wide and eighteen inches deep. This was going to suck big time. Staying bent over, I slithered into the ditch. The downpour was not kind to me. The ditch wasn’t full enough of water to splash my way up, but it was wet enough to create a good two inches of mud at the bottom. Where was that rock hard Maryland red clay when you needed it? Did it just stop as you crossed the Pennsylvania border?
I did my best imitation of an army crawl through that muddy ditch. I got to say that, although crawling about twenty yards through mud and rain was physically exerting and dirty business, it wasn’t anywhere near as painful as jogging in soaking wet jeans. By the time I reached the end of the ditch at the side of the garage, I was unrecognizable. I couldn’t even tell the color of my pants or shirt under the brown sludge. I carefully looked up out of the ditch and didn’t see anyone around the house or garage. There were no cars or trucks anywhere, and this guy supposedly lived alone. He was probably at work in a nice warm dry office with all the good people of the world. I was the only fool out here, crawling through the mud in a downpour.
The roof stuck slightly out from the side of the two–car garage and I plastered my sludge–covered ass against the wall, gaining a bit of a reprieve from the rain. Not like I could get any wetter. Wiping my muddy hands on my equally muddy pants proved ineffectual, so I tried wiping them on the side of the garage instead. It didn’t help.
I wasn’t having any luck sensing Althean, or even Gregory. With Gregory, I only had a dim energy signature. It would be a huge long shot to pick anything up from him, but Althean I should have been able to sense. So either this place wasn’t a target in the immediate future, or he didn’t do planning or reconnaissance whatsoever before moving in for the kill. I didn’t think he was quite that insane, since he’d managed to get away with this so far and a lack of planning will get you caught pretty fast. Still, I thought it might be best to get a closer look in case he was trickier than I thought. I checked around the shed area first and found nothing but an old riding mower and some lawn tools. The backyard revealed that a neighbor’s cat occasionally came over to prowl and pee on the sand of the horseshoe pits. That had to piss a werewolf off to no end.
I looped around between the garage and the house. There was simply no cover at all around this place. It looked like a divine hand had plopped a house and outbuildings smack down in the middle of a mowed hay field. If the angel came here, he’d need to be ballsy enough to stride right up the driveway in full view. There had to be an easier target. One with less risk. I wanted to be thorough before I ruled this place out though. Since no one was home, I walked around the house peering in windows where I could. It was a typical house. Decent furniture in a living room, a pile of mail on the dining room table, comfortable looking sofa and a wood stove in the TV room. The yard sloped a bit and the kitchen windows in the back of the house were a too high for me to see through. I hooked my hands on the sill and carefully pushed my weight up to stand on an outdoor faucet. The kitchen had a couple of dishes on the counter, a coffee cup on the breakfast table, newspapers piled on a chair.
I managed to ease off the faucet without slipping, but before I could congratulate myself, my other foot sank deep and firmly into sucking mud and I went down on my rear. Well, it wasn’t like I could get any more muddy. That was when I heard the familiar click of the safety on a gun. I sat very still.
“Keep your hands where I can see them and stand up slowly.”
That was truly easier said than done. Like a game of Twister, I rotated at the waist and onto my hands and knees. The mud retained its firm hold on my shoe and that foot was stuck at an odd angle. I looked up and through my dripping hair I saw a man. A man holding a shotgun. The gun looked like the one Wyatt had back in his gun safe. The guy was in his early thirties, lean and muscled with tan work boots, and a sleeveless shirt advertising a high school sports team. The brim of his baseball cap shaded his face from my view, but I could see a well trimmed short beard decorating his jawline.
“My foot is stuck.” I told him.
“Well, pull it out, but keep your hands on the ground,” he said unsympathetically.
I braced my weight on my hands and other foot and pulled. And twisted. Finally I tried rocking back and forth and the foot slowly came free. I stood, careful to keep my hands where shotgun guy could see them. He looked me over.
“Who are you and why are you prowling around my house?” The rain had slowed thankfully and he no longer had to shout to be heard above the racket.
“Samantha Martin. I was out for a jog and was just trying to get some shelter from the rain until it stopped.” I so wanted to push my wet and muddy hair out of my face, but I really didn’t want to get shot. Especially at this range.
“In jeans? And getting out of the rain involves dragging yourself to the house in a muddy ditch rather than walking up the driveway like a normal person? And instead of standing under the garage roof, you sneak around the buildings and look in my windows?” Suspicious kind of guy. He looked ready to shoot first and finish with the questions later. Actually, he looked rather scared. Strange for him to be scared, him a fit werewolf with a gun and me a soaking wet middle aged woman with no visible weapon. There was a good reason for him to be scared, but he wasn’t supposed to know about it.
“Is this not the first time you’ve had someone prowling around your house recently?”
The guy looked at me a moment. “Hold still.”
I held very still while he reached down, grabbed the hose nozzle and proceeded to spray me down. It was pretty humiliating to stand there with my hands in the air while some guy with a shotgun blasted me with water. It was uncomfortable too. The water was icy cold and it stung with the force of a fire hose.
“Turn around slowly,” he told me.
I complied and had the further humiliation of having my ass sprayed off.
I turned around to face him again while he looked. At least the blast of water had pushed my hair back out of my face. I did my best to look harmless. It was easier than usual since I was soaking wet.
“There were some murders up in York late yesterday night,” he said slowly. “They are part of a series of murders, so I’m a bit careful.”
There is no way he should have known about that couple. It wasn’t common knowledge, and there hadn’t even been enough time for the gossip mill to get going. I wondered if he’d been part of the local cleanup crew who discovered the bodies. The tape had been too grainy to easily recognize faces, and I still couldn’t see this guy clearly with the brim of his cap so low.
“Do you have reason to believe you may be a target?” I asked trying to give him a significant look. One of us was just going to have to come out and say it soon because all this dancing around was not good for my patience.
“Are you an angel?” There, shotgun guy did it for me. I liked him more and more.