A Terrible Fall of Angels (Zaniel Havelock #1)(111)

The man passed behind us, and the angel at his back screamed for help. The psychic push of it stabbed through me like a spear. I pulled away from Miranda, but my arms were still on her arms; the flowers fell to the sidewalk as I turned to watch the man walking away from us.

My angel flared halo-bright at my back and I could see Miranda’s glow white and pale yellow in the sun, but the angel on the man’s back . . . It should have been all light, or a tall humanlike figure at his back with outspread wings and hands on his shoulders or spread above his head, but the white figure was covered in blackness like tar or ink had been poured over it, and the arm I could see was white and free of the blackness but was bent at horrible angles as if it had been broken in multiple places and let heal that way. It turned its head like the blackness was a hood over it, like the kind a kidnapper would use except this darkness wasn’t cloth but something liquid and heavy that clung. The angel opened its mouth like a hole in the darkness and screamed again. The sound stabbed through me, but I braced for it this time. I’d heard the cries of the damned before, and this was a shadow of it, except that angels couldn’t be tortured like this; they could choose to take some of the damage that their human suffered. I’d seen guardians that were damaged from that, but that was part of them helping their human in this lifetime. What I was seeing now wasn’t that. The man looked and felt fine; if his angel had taken damage for him it would have shown more on the human. He would not have been able to stride past us confident and whole.

“What’s wrong?” Miranda asked.

“Where’s your car?”

She smiled, but her eyes were still worried. “That way.” And she nodded in the same direction the man was walking. “Go back inside the florist, no, go back to the Cozy Cauldron and stay inside until it’s safe.”

“What are you talking about?”

I moved my oversized shirt enough for her to glimpse the badge at my waistband. I picked up the dropped flowers and put them in her hands. “Please, Miranda, I have to go, but I want you safe.”

She nodded. “I’ll go save us a table,” she said, trying for normal.

“Get under the table when it starts.”

“When what starts?” she asked.

I glanced back and saw the man reaching for the door of the jewelry store just like I’d known he would. I didn’t know how, but I knew that was Mark Cookson if he’d hit the gym and put muscle on his thin frame, with better clothes, a better haircut. It was like a demonic makeover. I prayed that he would try to seduce Shelby away from her boyfriend, because that would give me more time to think of something.

“I have to go.”

She handed me a Kleenex. “Clean off the lipstick or the other cops will make fun of you.”

I had to smile. I realized that her face was smeared with it too. We both started cleaning our faces.

I started hurrying toward the jewelry store, just another guy looking for an engagement ring for the woman he’d just seen me kissing. I prayed that Mark Cookson would pretend to be normal while I pretended to look for rings.

Mark Cookson paused and looked at the window just like Shelby and her boyfriend had done. I hit Charleston on speed dial as I walked toward Cookson. “Subject is inside Newton’s Jewelry Store, ninety percent certain our suspect is about to walk inside and confront her and the boyfriend.”

“Uniforms should be on the street five minutes, ten tops. We have security footage that shows a man that matches Cookson’s height and general coloring coming out of crime scene covered in blood.”

“New clothes and haircut,” I whispered, and then was too close to the man, so I switched to a normal voice and said, “Looking for a ring to pop the question.”

“Does he recognize you?”

“No, Dad, I don’t need you to help me get the ring.”

“Be careful, Havoc.”

“Of course,” I said, smiling and happy, doing my best to show only that as I paused at the door and asked, “Are you about to go in? Don’t want to cut in line.”

The man turned and looked at me; the moment I saw his eyes I knew it was Cookson. Once I was sure, I could see that the bone structure of the face was the same; the demon had just given him the body he’d have had if he took better care of it. Like all demons, it could only give the person what they could have accomplished on their own with hard work or steal it from somewhere else.

His lip curled up in an expression I’d seen at the hospital, and I held my breath thinking he’d recognized me. “No, Chad, you go ahead, I’m still deciding.”

“Um, I’m not Chad, my name’s Hank,” I said, because I couldn’t remember if Miranda had called me Havoc within his hearing, and Hank was the closest soundalike I could think of in the moment. I couldn’t risk him hearing Havoc and remembering who I really was.

The disdain on his face took the handsome face and curled it back into the ugly one he’d had at the hospital. “Hank, Chad, you’re all the same.”

I frowned at him as if I didn’t understand what he meant, because he’d basically called me a dudebro jock. “Sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t think too hard about it, Hank.”

“Okay,” I said, being puzzled and being Hank. I opened the door, keeping my attention half on him as I went through, but as a confused college-age Hank, not as police officer Havoc who didn’t want to turn his back on the bad guy.