Airs & Graces: The Angel's Grace Trilogy Book I Read online

  AN URBAN FANTASY

  JEFFREY COOK

  A.J. DOWNEY

  Addy’s boss has been murdered. She’s next. She’s been folded into something that supernatural forces want, and it looks like she’ll have no choice in the matter.

  Tab’s been through hell to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen - literally. The red-winged Angel of Free Will cares vehemently about individual agency in human destiny. How much he cares about Addy herself may be another thing entirely, but at any rate, she has a better chance with him than with the rest of the Angelic family, Fallen or otherwise.

  In a run for her life and a race in which the involvement of the Devil himself is considered among the least of their worries, Addy must find enough moments of calm to unfold the Angel’s Grace inside her, learn from the visions it provides, and find the keys to Heaven and Hell.

  Dedication

  To Jeff, Jennifer and Kate. For making the dream of this one a reality. For keeping me sane and for the big push to get ‘er done. Thank you. – AJ

  To Jen, the love of my life, for all the support, and the frequent inspiration, as well as the pushes to keep at it. And to AJ Downey, for bringing me in on this world and sharing her inspirations – Jeff

  Chapter One

  Adelaide

  You know how random people always ask you things like “How’s your day?” or “How you doing?” and the natural response is always “It’s good,” or “I’m good, thanks,” no matter how bad their lives really are? No one is ever honest. No one ever says, “Oh, you know, my dog died yesterday,” or “My wife left me,” or “I got this wicked hangnail.” No one ever tells the truth, like the guy that cut in front of me in line at the coffee shop this morning as I stared into the window glass to put my long, dark hair, into a braid. Or the cashier that let him, only to turn around and pretend that nothing happened. Seriously annoying! I knew this particular cashier too. She shot me dirty looks every time I hit the counter, and I’d overheard her the week before saying I wouldn’t be working in the fancy antiques store if I didn’t look the way I did.

  When she asked him how his day was, all saccharine-sweet, he replied with a grin and said, “It’s good; thanks for asking.” He got his coffee after a brief exchange with the barista and left as I stepped up to the counter.

  “Hello and how is your day?” she asked when I got to the register, all pretense of sweetness gone from her expression.

  I was all out of pretty little lies, so I told her, “It sucks; thanks for asking.”

  “I’m sorry?” she stammered.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, ordering my coffee and a muffin. “And can I get that without you looking like I bought my job with my breasts this morning? Kay, thanks.”

  She stood there, open-mouthed, with my money in her hand, and I smiled, said, “Keep the change,” and went for my waiting coffee and muffin. The barista’s eyes glittered with silent laughter as he handed me my order, and he winked at me when he said, “Have a nice day.”

  I hauled ass out of the Starbucks and up the block, stopping outside the side door to my own job, then thought about it some more and sighed. Things aren’t always good. As I tipped my face up into the rare Seattle sunshine, it was never more apparent than right then, already late to work on a Monday morning thanks to the jackass that cut in line. My boss, Piorre, was going to be pissed as it was, so I stopped to take in a little extra moment of the good before subjecting myself to the old man’s scolding.

  The inside of my eyelids glowed red as the sun warmed my face while I stood on the bustling sidewalk. I breathed deep the scent of Elliot Bay and the waterfront: that mixed smell of the Sound, frying fish, car exhaust, and old metal that the majority of people found offensive, but to me, always smelled like home. The steady thrum of traffic that passed overhead on the Alaska Way viaduct was at once familiar and soothing, almost like an echo of the city’s heartbeat as the tires of the cars and trucks thumped rhythmically over the aging structure’s expansion joints. I was actually one of the few people who was going to miss the monstrosity when it came down to make way for the tunnel to replace it.

  The thick paper Starbucks cup warmed my left palm even as the juggled mix of gripping my keys and breakfast in the other hand threatened to squash my morning muffin. I took a few seconds to take a drink of my coffee until some suit, in his rush to get up the hill, bashed into me and knocked me off kilter. I dropped my keys but managed to save my muffin – yeah, point for me, but it still made me sigh. Thrust back into reality, my good moment over, I tucked my coffee into the crook of my elbow and stooped to retrieve the ring of keys, grabbing up the one I needed to enter the side door of the antique shop I worked at.

  I stepped out of the warmth of the summer sunshine and into the gloom of the old building’s back office, hastily setting down my muffin and coffee on the old desk that had been fished out of some ‘70s surplus line. It was that institutional green of so many ugly desks of yesteryear, and all banged up. I sometimes wished Piorre would use one of the nice antique wooden desks we sometimes got in stock, but this one worked, and why keep something that could be sold? I checked the calendar on the desktop blotter for any notes. Finding none, I fished my phone out of my pocket and dropped it on the desk beside my keys as I called out to the older man.

  “Piorre? I’m sorry I’m late! I know what you’re gonna say, but traffic was hell this morning, and then this jackass cut in line at the coffee place…” I stopped myself before I went down a lane of thought that would just put me in hotter water with him. I flipped on lights from the circuit breaker by the back door I had just entered. “Who am I kidding? You’re right, ‘excuses are just that… excuses, Adelaide,’ but I want to remind you, who stayed late two Fridays ago to take in that shipment of milk glass for you so you could play checkers or chess or whatever with your friend, eh? I have to have scored at least a few points I can cash in for that now.”

  I started to take off my leather jacket and continue rambling while waiting for his response, but when the typical shuffle of his feet on the worn hardwood, followed by his creaky but steady voice with his typical responses to my ravings, never came, I got worried. Piorre was always here before me, and I do mean always. I fell silent, shrugging my jacket back onto my shoulders, and listened for several heartbeats.

  “Piorre?” I called, a little softer and more uncertain now, standing very still, listening for anything. I heard a weak and strangled cough from out in the store and moved forward, more worried than ever. I passed the front wooden counter with its ancient register, stopping cold in my tracks at what lay before me.

  “Piorre!” I shouted, scrambling forward to the old man’s side. He lay on his back, the white collar of his shirt turning a crimson that closely matched the burgundy of his wool sweater-vest. His throat was cut, and he was choking. As I collapsed to my knees, his gnarled hands reached for mine. I gripped his bloody hand with one of mine and pulled at the knot in his bloody bowtie with the other. He gasped, more of his blood bubbling up to coat his teeth and stain the corner of his mouth as he struggled to speak to me. My face was wet with tears, and my chest squeezed tight as I tried to do something, scrambling for my phone in my jacket pocket.

  “No, my rosary, Addy girl… get me my rosary,” he choked at me, and I nodded, dashing to my feet and going for the register. I snatched up the cordless phone from beneath the counter and dialed 911 as I keyed the register and turned the old crank, the bell rang and the drawer popped open. There was no sound on the other end of the phone, no ringing, no dial tone, just empty air. I grabbed the rosary out of the far change pocke
t of the register and scrambled back to Piorre’s side, twining the mahogany beads in his fingers, holding his hand in mine.

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just leave him like that, and so I told him, “Just hang on. I have to get help. My phone is just in the office; just hang on.”

  I rose to get up, but his hand convulsed in mine. His eyes, so wide without his half-moon glasses on, and the old rosary beads, which dug into my flesh, made me still. “No,” he said. “No, don’t go yet, Addy Girl.” He struggled to breathe some more.

  “Don’t try to talk, P. I have to call for help…” I tried to untangle my hand from the string of rosary beads, but his old hand, so gnarled with arthritis, suddenly convulsed around mine tighter, in an iron grip that made me gasp. I could almost feel the bones in my hand grind together with bruising force as the smooth wooden beads of his rosary dug harder into my skin.

  “I’m sorry Addy Girl,” he said. “So sorry.” Clasping his other hand against my neck, he stroked his thumb along the curve of my jaw, it was hot and slick with his blood.

  “No, I’m not going to let you die, not like this, not in your own store.” Nearby, on a stack of papers under an antique desk that we hadn’t been able to sell, I saw an old-style telephone, just sitting in a spot where I’d never noticed it before. When I pulled the receiver to my ear, I heard a loud noise on the other end, like a trumpet. The receiver fell from my hand as I was startled, and I lost my balance. Knocking over several things under the desk in my effort to get up, I must have triggered some kind of projector. I could see images flashing around the room and hear a man’s voice talking. I looked for the off switch but saw only papers and stacked boxes. In frustration at not making the extra distraction stop, I turned my attention to Piorre.

  I heard someone say, “Okay, you called me. Come on out!” from the back of the store where I’d come in. My first thought was that the police had arrived, but before I could react, the lights went out, the talking stopped, and I just sat there stunned.

  It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds until the lights came back on, and when they did, there was a guy there, tugging on my arm, babbling something. I looked down at Piorre, the tears slicking down my face, but he was gone, eyes staring sightless and still at the ceiling of his old-as-dirt antique shop. His fingertips slipped from mine, leaving his rosary to dangle nerveless in my grasp.

  I sat there through the intensive tugging on my arm and just stared at the old man in shock, before finally turning to look up at the man that had come in after me. He stopped tugging on my arm and said something, and all I could do was blink at him. He was tall and clad in black, from his biker boots, with their silver buckles, to his faded black jeans to the leather coat, with what looked like a black tank-top peeking out low from under the collar. He was beautiful, which I know sounds weird when you are talking about a man, but I don’t know how else to explain him. He was slender and his skin pale, almost white, which was striking underneath the shock of short black hair, so dark that it had blueish highlights, like a crow’s wing, under the dim store lights. Still, the most noticeable feature of this beautiful man was his eyes; they were a pale silvery gray that was just absolutely surreal to look into. He said something to me again, and I blinked and thought hard, finally asking in a voice I barely recognized as my own, it sounded so far away…

  “What?”

  He stared at me for several heartbeats, a muscle along his jaw tense and almost twitching with his impatience. Or was it anger? I’m not sure what.

  “Are the door I came in and the front door the only ways into this place?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I answered and looked back down at Piorre. “I have to call the police,” I said finally and struggled to get up off the floor. The man jerked my arm roughly to help me to my feet, his long slim fingers locking around my forearm as unforgiving as steel.

  “Do that, and you’ll be in a cage when they come to kill you too,” he said, his glance shifting around the room, darting from corner to corner.

  My head swam, and I asked him, again in that far away little-girl voice. “What? My boss is dead; someone killed him. I have to call the police.”

  I must not have done what he wanted, because he got angry, shaking me violently and pulling me close to stare eye-to-eye with me. His eye color… shifted – it’s the best I can describe – between gray and ice blue for just a second. They seemed to flash, then return to their normal color, or what I assumed was normal for him. “Listen, I don’t have time for you to catch up on the learning curve. Understand this: your boss dead – you’re dead next! Unless we can find a way out of here…” He looked up suddenly and grimaced. “I am not the only one in here.”

  I felt a surge of something: anger? …fear? Either way, I looked up at him and snapped, “No shit, you aren’t the only one here. I’m standing right here with you,” adding a muttered “Epic fucking genius you are,” under my breath. I tried to shake my arm loose from his grasp but felt like I was about to rip my shoulder out of my socket instead. He was standing very still, and his hand had gone to sheer granite where it gripped my arm with crushing force.

  “You’re hurting me,” I said, and this seemed to bring him back to the present. He turned those strange liquid gray eyes on me and said, “Let’s move.” He dragged me back towards the office and scooped up my keys and phone off the desk with the hand he wasn’t busy assaulting me with. I was trying to put up a struggle, but he just dragged me along like an errant puppy, the soles of my Doc Martens squeaking against the well-worn hardwood floors of the shop. No matter how hard I tried to jerk him off-balance to make him let me go, he was solid. It was like pulling against one of the concrete supports for the viaduct, totally unmoving.

  He stopped, as if listening, and glanced at my key ring in his hand. He rounded on me and demanded, “Where’s your car?” I couldn’t get out of his grip no matter how I pried at his fingers with my free hand, and by now what had to be shock was giving way to adrenaline. So I did the next best thing: I kicked him as hard as I could in the shin, my own eyes going wide when it didn’t even faze him.

  He sighed, his shoulders dropping with the motion, and he said, “I’m trying to save you, now… where is your car?”

  He sounded tired, and it took me aback, and before I knew it my free hand had come up and slapped him a good one right across the face.

  “Let go of my arm,” I said, and I was proud of myself that my voice only quavered a little bit, but I don’t think he noticed.

  “I can’t do that. You’re wasting time. I said I wasn’t here to hurt you, but I will if I have to. Now, where is your car?”

  I sucked in a breath and searched his face for a heartbeat, but there was nothing sinister on it. He actually looked kind of bored – or tired or… hell, I don’t know what! Truth was, he was hard as hell to read. I swallowed, sent up a little prayer inside my head, and took a leap of faith that he was really here to do as he said, I’m trying to save you.

  “It’s in the garage around the block, to the back of the building.” I blinked in surprise as he let out an explosive breath I hadn’t seen him holding. He towed me by my arm toward the back door and stopped cold in the archway. Carried by my own momentum I crashed into his back, which was solid, muscular, and hiding something hard and stick-like down his spine, beneath the thick leather of his coat.

  “Tab, so kind of you to be here. What is that you have with you?” The voice was male and overly formal, the enunciation of his words crisp. I couldn’t see who spoke, but the guy who had a hold of my arm seemed to know who it was and, if he’d been a cat, would have been bristling. I stiffened and retreated a half-step when the guy with a hold on me brought his other hand back, placed the flat of it against my stomach, and shoved me further behind him. It was at this point that I realized he was taller than me by almost a half a foot, which made him really tall, because I stood five foot ten.

  I couldn’t see around him, so I couldn’t see who w
as talking, but I tuned into the conversation again just in time to hear Tab, who I assumed was the guy that had the titan grip on my arm, say, “She’s nobody, just Piorre’s little shop girl.”

  “Mmmm, but she’s more than that now, isn’t she?” the voice said, “I may not have gotten what I came for from the old man… I was so rudely interrupted by his ‘little shop girl’ before I could finish. I was hoping he would tell her where it was, so I could simply go and get it, but no… the old man did one better. He always was so very good at hiding things, wasn’t he?”

  “Regardless of what she is or isn’t now, she’s mine and not yours, Rahab. Even you aren’t stupid enough to tangle with me over a vessel, right?”

  I stumbled back another couple of steps as the man who had a hold of me began a slow retreat away from the proper voice, belonging to whoever had just admitted he had killed a little old man in his little old antique shop for something that was probably here and just worthless old junk anyways.

  I felt sick, but it was about to get worse. As we drew even with the front counter, and the architecture opened up inside the old building, I could see around the black clad shoulder of the man that had found me over my boss’ body, and I could now see who advanced on us.

  He was tall, too, but not quite as tall as the guy directly in front of me, maybe six foot two instead of six foot four. He wore a cream-colored three-piece suit with a bronze-colored tie under an expensive looking light tan trench coat, and he was covered in a Rorschach-worthy bloodstain across his chest, hips, and the tops of his thighs. The dagger he’d done it with was clasped in one hand, the other hanging loose at his side. His expression was cold; his eyes a pale, pale green, set in a pale white face beneath long hair that was so blond it looked white too. His face was pretty, too effeminate to be called handsome, his cheekbones high, but his jaw just a tad too narrow to be considered masculine. He was slim, but in a dancer’s sort of way, not like the man in black, who was slender but solid in an athletic way and who was pushing me back behind him again, which is when Rahab, the guy in cream, grinned, and all the pretense of pretty boy went down the drain. His teeth, every single one of them, had been filed and filled his mouth with nothing but wicked points. When he saw my expression, it caused him to grin wider, and after that, I was all too willing to duck behind Tab and hide.