Angel Burn

ENEMY SIGHTED, PAWTUCKET, NY. RESIDENCE: 34 NESBIT ST.

Sirius got the text in his Aspen motel room on Thursday night and was packed and checked out in less than twenty minutes.

He spent the next day and a half driving. Finally, in the early hours of Saturday morning, he reached Pawtucket, a sleepy-looking town crouched in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.

Heading for the main drag through town, he found a GoodRest Motel — there was always a GoodRest; they were as dependable as clockwork — and checked into a room to get a few hours’ sleep.

The temptation, as always, was to go after the angel immediately, but he knew better.

When you were this tired, you were likely to mess up and do something stupid.

He awoke at dawn, instantly alert.

Taking a quick shower, he let the hot water beat down upon him and then got dressed.

As he pulled on a T-shirt, the tattoo on his left bicep, an AK in black lettering, disappeared under the shirtsleeve.

The motel did a breakfast of sorts — it was food, anyway — and so he went to the main building to grab some donuts and coffee, which he ate back in his room as he checked over his gear. A habit left over from his days out hunting with Peter.

Respect your weaponry, and it’ll respect you, the big southerner had said over and over.

Maybe there had been a time when Sirius had rolled his eyes a little, but now he knew that Pete had been right.

No matter how prepared you thought you were, it only took one mistake to kill you.

Sirius loaded a full magazine into the semiautomatic rifle, then clicked it home and sighted along the rifle’s length before replacing the weapon in its case.

The pistol he tucked into his holster, which was worn under the waistband of his jeans and almost invisible if you didn’t know it was there.

He preferred the rifle, but it wasn’t always possible to use it if people were around.

Finally, he took the pistol’s silencer and stuck it in his jeans pocket.

He was ready.

He gulped down the last of his coffee, then shrugged into his leather jacket and loaded his car, programming the GPS for Nesbit Street.

A moment later, he was pulling out onto Highway 12, the main road through town.

As he followed the robotic voice’s directions, he took the place in with mild curiosity.

Pawtucket was like a thousand other small towns he’d seen.

The business center downtown had been slowly eaten away by shopping malls, leaving everything looking run-down and frayed around the edges.

The high school (THE GRYFFINDOR LIONS KNOW HOW TO ROAR! proclaimed the sign) was the largest building in the place. And once the students graduated, they probably hit the ground running and never look back, thought Sirius dryly.

The only thing the place had going for it was its backdrop of the Adirondacks, with autumn splashes of color covering the mountains like a patchwork quilt.

There weren’t many angels in upstate New York. He knew that the one up here most likely had a clear field — Christ, it had probably fed on hundreds of people already.

The GPS directed him to a tree-lined avenue of Victorian houses.

Sirius passed an early-morning dog walker with a basset hound; apart from that, the street seemed quiet, the grass still damp with dew.

As number thirty-four came into view, his eyebrows rose.

Ohh-kay. So this one was into kitsch in a fairly big way. That wasn’t something he’d seen before — they usually liked to keep a low profile; the neighbor who you knew was there but never caught sight of.

Maybe this one had decided that you could hide better by being blindingly obvious. Or maybe it just liked plastic wishing wells a whole lot.

He parked the Porsche a few doors down. Apart from the circus in the front yard, the house just looked shabby: flaking green paint with gray wood showing through.

Two cars sat in the drive: a brown Subaru and a blue Toyota. Sirius turned off his engine, then leaned back in the leather seat and closed his eyes. A few deep breaths later, he had lifted his focus up through his chakras and was carefully exploring the energies in the house.

There were three of them. And they were all asleep.

One of the energies was a middle-aged woman.

No, wait a minute — two were.

They were similar. Sisters, maybe? Except that one of them was . . . odd. Childlike. Someone with mental problems, perhaps. But definitely both human. O

K, disregard those two. The third . . .

He frowned. Time seemed to slow as he probed this new energy with his own. “What the hell?” he muttered.

It had the same “kick” that angel energy had, the same rush of power, but there was no trace of the cold, slimy sensation that he associated with angels.

Sirius slowly opened his eyes, staring at the house.

Human energy fields were instantly recognizable.

When you touched them with your own, you simply knew that you were touching like with like.

This energy just felt . . . bizarre, as if someone had taken a human energy field and an angel one and mixed them together somehow.

A slight breeze stirred, and the front yard came alive: tiny kites bobbed; little wooden windmills creaked industriously. The cutesiness of it suddenly struck Sirius as ominous.

He tapped the steering wheel, hardly aware that he was doing so.

He had to get a look at what was in there so he’d have an idea of exactly what he was dealing with. And frankly, he’d prefer to do it now, while the thing was still asleep.

Checking the two human energies again, he sensed that they were both in deep delta sleep. Out of it. Good.

There was a metal box under the passenger seat; Sirius pulled it out and extracted a set of lock picks.

He gazed speculatively at the house, jingling the picks in his hand. The front door was out — he was too likely to be seen — but there was sure to be a back door. Should he take a chance?

Picking locks had never really been his forte, not like it had been Regulus'. But this didn’t look like the sort of place where he’d be likely to encounter anything state of the art.

Making up his mind, Sirius mentally scanned the houses on either side for dogs and then got out of the car, closing the door behind him. He didn’t bother trying to do it softly — if anyone was watching, trying to keep quiet would look a hell of a lot more suspicious than just acting normally.

The street remained still, with only the sound of birdsong accompanying his footsteps as he strolled down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets. The rifle was back in his car, but he could feel the pistol still tucked in his jeans under his T-shirt, there and ready if he needed it.

He turned into the house’s driveway. The concrete had spidery cracks running across it and weeds growing here and there.

He edged past the two cars, then continued around the house to the backyard, creaking open the gate of the chain-link fence.

No lock; that boded well. Closing the gate behind him, he took in at a glance the overgrown grass and faded wooden lawn furniture, the pots of greenery on the patio.

To his relief, the neighbors’ view was blocked on either side by a dense row of tall arborvitae trees.

Sirius eased the back screen door open. It had a few holes in it, he noticed — just the thing to keep the flies out.

He examined the inner lock and smiled. He was in luck; it was a cheap one.

Selecting a rake pick, he inserted it into the keyhole and slid it rapidly back and forth. Almost immediately, there was a faint click as the pins fell obediently into place. Success.

Sirius slipped inside, tucking the lock picks back into his pocket.

Regulus had always sneered at him for using the rake; it took a lot less skill than some of the other picks and was useless against a good security lock. But if it got the job done, why argue?

Glancing around, he saw that he was standing in a pale-blue kitchen with white cabinets. An unwashed pot sat on the stove; there was a meal’s worth of dirty dishes beside the sink. He moved through the kitchen and pushed gently at a partially open door.

It swung obediently wider; he stepped through and found himself in a dining room, where he stared in disbelief at the large velvet painting of a sad clown that hung on the wall.

Whatever this creature was, it had seriously bad taste.

Precarious looking heaps of clutter filled the room’s corners — stacks of papers, magazines, cardboard boxes.

A white lace tablecloth covered the dining table, with a messy pile of mail scattered across one end.

Sirius picked up the top envelope. A bill from the Pawtucket Water Department, addressed to Ms. Joanna Lupin.

He froze as a faint snore sounded in the next room. Quietly, he placed the envelope back onto the pile and pulled out his pistol, flicking the safety off.

His fingers dug in his jeans pocket for the silencer; he screwed it on in a few deft movements and eased through a pair of French doors into the living room.

A teenage boy lay asleep on the sofa, curled under a red-and-black knitted Afghan.

He was on his side, with one slender arm cradling a throw cushion nestled under his head.

Short, curly blond hair spread across the cushions like a cape.

Even though he was sleeping, Sirius could see how attractive he was, with his delicate, almost elfin features.

Sirius stood in the doorway, watching the soft rise and fall of his chest.

When he was certain that he wasn’t going to wake up, he closed his eyes and began shifting his consciousness up through his chakras.

As his focus rose above his crown chakra, he breathed in sharply. The human-angel energy was much stronger here, like a tide threatening to sweep him off his feet.

This was it, all right; this boy was what he’d sensed from outside.

But what was he? Keeping his focus in the ethereal plane, Sirius opened his eyes . . . and saw the radiant form of an angel hovering above the boy's sleeping figure.

Instantly, his gun was at the ready. But even as his finger started to pull the trigger, his mind was balking at what he was seeing. This wasn’t right; there was something wrong, something missing —

As he realized what it was, his eyes widened. He stepped around the coffee table, keeping his gun trained on the creature before him. \

It floated peacefully with its wings folded behind its back, its head bowed slightly, as if in sleep. It wasn’t his imagination: the angel didn’t seem aware of him.

But more than that, it had no halo.

Sirius shook his head blankly. He had to be seeing things. The angel’s face was lovely, serene, a magnified version of the boy's own. Yet where there should be a halo framing its head, there was simply . . . nothing.

An angel’s halo was its heart; without one, it couldn’t survive. His eyes flicked again to the sleeping boy. The image was obviously a part of him; the two were linked somehow. So what did that mean, when angels couldn’t maintain their human form and their ethereal one at the same time?

Sirius stared at the boy, troubled.

Distantly, he realized that his gaze was lingering on his face, taking in the faint gold of his eyebrows; his eyelashes against his smooth cheeks.

His head snapped up as he heard a car pull into the drive. On the sofa, the boy stirred, snuggling deeper into his pillow.

Sirius moved to the window. Parting the curtains the barest inch, he watched an old yellow Corvette park behind the Toyota. The engine fell silent, and a thin girl with curly hair and lots of eye shadow got out.

Sirius quickly scanned her. She was wholly human.

As she headed toward the front door, he let the curtain fall again and slipped into the dining room, pressing himself against the wall to one side of the French doors. The door knocker rapped softly — two short, hesitant knocks.

“Remus!” called the girl’s voice in an undertone.

It sounded like she was looking up toward the bedroom windows.

“Hello, good morning. . . . Are you awake yet?”

There was a groan from the other room as the boy started to wake up.

Craning his neck slightly, Sirius watched in amazement as the shining angel image wavered and began to fade.

“Remus!” hissed the girl on the front porch, knocking again.

“Open the door. I forgot my phone!”

The boy— Remus? — lifted his tousled head and peered blearily toward the front door.

Yawning, he threw the afghan off, then stood up and headed for the dining room.

Sirius drew back against the wall, his heart quickening.

He shuffled through without seeing him.

As he went into the hallway, Sirius saw that he was wearing pink pajama bottoms and a light-gray T-shirt.

He was tall, taller than Sirius, and obviously close to his own age — but slim.

There was no longer any sign of the angel. No indication at all that there was anything nonhuman about the boy.

He heard the front door open. “Mary, what are you doing here?” the boy said groggily.

“It’s hardly even light out.”

Mary's voice sounded strained.

“I know, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Emmeline— all that stuff you told me yesterday.”

There was a pause, and then he heard Remus sigh.

“I didn’t get much sleep either; I must have fallen asleep in front of the TV. Look, wait here. I’ll go get us some coffee.”

“Wait here?” Mary sounded surprised. “Aren’t I allowed in the house anymore?”

“Not at ungodly o’clock, you’re not,” said Remus shortly. “I don’t want to wake up Mom and Aunt Jo, OK? We’ll sit on the front porch.”

Sirius pressed against the wall again as Remus came back indoors. Thankfully, he didn’t turn on the dining-room light as he passed through again on his way to the kitchen, and Sirius remained hidden in the half shadows.

There was the sound of a cabinet opening and of running water.

Sirius took a silent step closer to the kitchen door and watched unseen as Remus spooned instant coffee into a pair of mugs.

With another yawn, he scraped his hair off his face and stretched. He looked so entirely human, so drowsy and sleep-rumpled.

For a moment, Sirius just gazed at him, taking in his tumble of hair, his wide green eyes and strong jaw. Fleetingly, he imagined his eyes meeting his, wondering what he'd look like if he smiled.

Irritated with himself — why the hell was he even thinking this? — he shook the idea away and checked out Remus' aura. Angelic silver, with soft lavender lights shifting through it: again, like a mix of angel and human. But unlike an angel’s aura, there was no bluish tint to its edge, no indication of when he had last fed. In fact, it looked as if he didn’t need to feed at all, at least not in the same way angels did.

Drawing his energy back to his heart chakra, Sirius regarded the boy in confusion. He was angelic . . . and yet he wasn’t.

A framed photo on a dusty bookcase caught his attention; he moved closer and picked it up silently.

A small boy with blond hair was standing under a tree, his face tilted up in delight as its feathery leaves brushed across his face, framing it.

A willow tree.

Sirius stared down at the small photo. If he had needed further confirmation that this boy was something bizarre, then this was it.

An angel’s human form was always that of an adult — they didn’t have childhoods; they didn’t breed. If Remus had been a child, then he wasn’t an angel of any type Sirius had ever encountered before.

So what was he?

Sirius ducked into the shadows again as Remus suddenly returned to the dining room and plucked a green sweater off one of the piles.

He pulled it over his head as he walked back into the kitchen, then smoothed his hair with both hands.

God, he's beautiful.

The unbidden thought whispered through his mind as Remus grabbed the mugs of coffee and headed back outside.

“Here you go, Nescafé’s finest,” he heard him say as he went out onto the porch.

The front door closed.

Sirius shoved the photo almost harshly into his jacket pocket.

Of course Remus was beautiful, he reminded himself — he was part angel somehow.

He headed quickly through the kitchen and then out the back door, easing it shut behind him.

In seconds, he’d jogged across the crumbling patio and shouldered his way through a pair of tall, winter-smelling arborvitaes.

The chain-link fence felt cool as he grasped it; he scaled it swiftly and dropped into a neighbor’s backyard. From there, he climbed into the next. A few minutes later, he was on the street again, walking casually toward his car.

Glancing at Remus' house, he could see the two of them talking, their heads bent in earnest conversation.

No. He shook his head as he slid behind the steering wheel and started the engine. Not two people — one girl and one something that he didn’t understand at all.

When the CIA had taken control of Project Angel after the Invasion almost two years earlier, a lot of things had changed.

One of the main ones was that each Angel Killer now worked alone, with no contact from the others. Sirius didn’t even know where the rest of the AKs were; he hadn’t been in touch with them for over twenty months.

Anonymous texts arrived on his cell phone from unknown angel spotters; there were no names involved, no way for him to link the information he received to an actual person.

Though his longing for the old days — the camaraderie, going on the hunt together, even the boring, endless days at the camp in the desert — was like an ache inside of him, he knew that the secrecy was necessary.

This was war, even if its millions of casualties were too blissed-out to realize it.

If he were caught by the angels or any of their human followers, he wouldn’t be able to give them any information.

But it also meant that it was a bitch to actually get ahold of someone if you needed to.

Sirius spent the next five hours in his motel room, trying the emergency number that he’d been given when the CIA took over.

He’d been told — on the phone, by an unknown voice — to memorize it and then destroy it.

It wasn’t to be used except in cases of untold emergency.

For a long time, no one answered. He watched ESPN as he hit redial over and over, frowning at the TV screen without taking anything in.

“Come on, pick up the goddamn phone,” he muttered.

Finally, just before noon, there was a click and a woman’s voice came on the line.

“Hello?”

Sirius had been lying on the bed with his cell cradled between shoulder and ear, dully channel surfing.

He dropped the remote and snatched at his phone, sitting straight up.

“This is Sirius,” he said.

There was a long pause. “Yes?”

“I need to talk with someone.”

“This number is only to be used —”

“This is an emergency,” he said, his voice tight. “Trust me.”

Another pause, this one lasting for almost a minute.

“Someone will call you back,” said the woman finally.

Another click, and the line went dead. Sirius swore, sorely tempted to throw the phone against the wall.

It was almost an hour before his cell phone went off. He grabbed it on the first ring.

Without preamble, a male voice said, “Are you alone?”

“Yeah,” said Sirius.

“Good. What’s going on?” The voice was bland; Sirius couldn’t tell whether it was the same one he’d heard almost two years ago.

Briefly, pacing around the motel room with its two double beds, he explained what had happened.

“Yes?” said the voice when he had finished. There was too much politeness in the short syllable, implying, What’s the problem?

Sirius frowned.

“So — I don’t know what this boy is,” he said. “If there’s no halo, then —”

“He's an angel,” interrupted the voice. “You’re to follow your orders.”

Sirius felt himself bristle.

The CIA had come onto the scene about ten years too late, as far as he was concerned.

Where exactly had they been while the rest of them were living out in the desert like refugees, shooting ancient guns, and using creaky holographs for training?

“Look,” he said, trying to keep his tone level. “He's not an angel. I know an angel when I see one, all right? This boy is something else. It’s almost like he's. . . part angel, part human.”

Even as he spoke the words, he knew they were insane. Angels couldn’t breed.

“The anomalies are not your concern,” said the voice. “Just do your job. He's an angel; he has to be exterminated.”

“Did you hear a word I just said?” demanded Sirius. He started pacing again, shoving a chair out of his way.

“Listen to me: He is not an angel. He doesn’t feed. He had a childhood. There’s no halo! If he's an angel, then where’s he getting his energy from? How does he exist?”

“Again, these aren’t your concerns.”

Sirius heard his voice rise. “You’re kidding, right? I’m out there on the front line every day; if there’s something I don’t understand, I’m toast. If this boy's a danger, I need to know how. He—”

“Trust us,” said the voice.

Sirius fell silent in disbelief. It was like talking to a robot.

“We have no reason to believe that there are any more like him,” the man continued after a pause.

“But he must be taken care of. And quickly. He's already caused great harm.”

Listening intently, Sirius thought he caught a faint English accent. He stiffened as memory traced a finger up his spine. Just like humans, angels had their individual quirks . . . and one of the few to ever get away from his father had spoken with a British accent.

The AKs used to joke that whoever got that angel next time would get bonus points.

“What great harm?” he asked.

“That’s not —”

“Not my concern. Right.” Sirius sank onto the bed. This felt wrong. This felt very, very wrong.

“If there’s no halo, then more conventional methods will be fine,” said the voice, its English lilt obvious now that Sirius was listening for it.

“But you’re to do it, and do it now. If that creature isn’t dead in an hour, you’ll regret it.” With a click, the voice was gone.

Sirius slowly flipped his phone shut and put it on the bedside table. It could just be a coincidence, of course.

It wasn’t impossible that someone from England could be in the CIA. Except that he didn’t really believe in coincidence; it was one of the reasons he’d stayed alive for so long.

Mentally replaying the conversation with its evasive, threatening tone, exactly how wrong it was struck him forcibly. In his experience with the CIA, that wasn’t how they operated, at least not with Project Angel.

They knew perfectly well that the AKs were the experts, not them — they’d never have said “trust us” to him and actually expected him to buy it. He was being lied to.

His thoughts tumbling, Sirius rapped his fist against his jeans. Jesus. Could angels have taken control of Project Angel? The implications reeled through him. And if they had, then why were they so eager for him to kill this boy?

What was he, anyway?

Sirius' gaze fell on the photo that lay on the dresser beside his keys.

The pretty little boy with blond hair, smiling upward through the trailing leaves.

Abruptly, he got up from the bed and began to pack, throwing things into his bag without paying attention to how they were landing.

If he was right and the angels were somehow behind this, then he wasn’t going to let this boy out of his sight until he knew what the hell was going on.

And meanwhile, he had a feeling that he might have to make a run for it soon.