17

SIZING UP THE COMPETITION

I kept the soul fragments in a coffee can. The dull little dinguses were nearly indistinguishable from the grounds. I gave the can a few shakes for good measure. Then I returned the coffee to the kitchen cabinet, and added an extra lock to the door to my apartment.

It used to be that things were quiet and simple. The way I liked it. But then Gabby had gone and gotten himself scratched, and I had gotten tangled up with flametop, and it had been one damn thing after another ever since. Trouble was her business. That cluck had me wrapped up so tight I spent most of my time staring at the back of my own head. Much more of that and I’d save a small fortune on corkscrews.

I had to clear my head. I needed friendly company. I needed to get shellacked. A willing girl and an open bottle can cure a host of ills.

The telephone rang while I brushed my teeth. But I was too busy spitting in the sink to pay it any heed. I rinsed, spat again, scraped my face. Seemed like forever since I’d had some quality time with a joy girl. But I took my time; I’m not some lowly skirt chasing tomcat. Happy ladies take a shine to the fellas who clean up nice. Fellas like me.

I slipped my best unopened bottle of rye into the pocket of my overcoat. Didn’t bother with tumblers and ice; we’d ring room service. Maybe we’d put the house chef to work, too. Surf and turf if the wren could tuck in or maybe a salad niçoise, hold the anchovies, if she couldn’t. I still had a few leaves of cabbage left over from hocking Gabriel’s feather so I wasn’t on the market for some fleabag joint with a revolving door and hourly rates. The occasion, and my mood, called for something flossier than my usual haunts. Ladies enjoy a night on the town with a high roller. I departed my Magisterium and shook the dust of the Pleroma from my heels.

I went with a soft-spoken brunette dish. Recent events had put me off redheads and their wicked jaws. She was a nice girl with big eyes, a tiny mouth, and a long slender neck just begging for a string of pearls. But I wasn’t feeling that flush. She told me her name was Violet. It was the best kind of lie, the kind you wanted to believe because it matched her eyes. I lied in kind, and told her my name was Bayliss.

We took the bottle to the Blue Room. I knew a guy there. He rolled the eyes when he saw I’d brought my own, but gave me a break on the corkage and treated my date like a lady. She liked that. Liked to dance, too. And wasn’t I pleased to see she could flow to the old stuff. Sometimes you pick a good one. I was overdue for a run of good luck.

“How’s a girl like you familiar with music like this?”

The music was slow, her body warm, her dancing slower and warmer still.

“Aww. Half this job is role playing,” she said. “You meet all sorts in this line of work. Lots of freaks and creeps.” She swayed, shimmied, and did something to my insides.

“Which one am I?”

She chanced a look at my eyes but flinched away. Hid it well, though, by laying her head on my shoulder. “You, I can’t figure. You didn’t climb all over me the minute we met.” I’m a gentleman. I don’t paw. “Usually that means you’re looking to pretend I’m a real date, willing to pay anything just so I’ll gasp out an ’I love you’ or two when you heave yourself on top of me. But I don’t get that sense from you, either. You’re a strange one.”

I drank my rye. Violet was a gimlet girl. She nibbled the lime and didn’t make a face. I liked that.

We danced, and drank, and never pretended it wasn’t a business relationship. She danced like somebody who listened to the music, nothing like the full-body grand mal seizures that passed for hoofing it these days. She had genuine rhythm. That boded well for the rest of the evening. Dancing with Violet, I could almost forget what it had been like to ride in one of the penitentes’ close sweaty bodies. Almost.

“You ever step out with a penitente?”

What an old-fashioned twist: she blew a raspberry. “Those kooks? They give me the willies.”

“You and me both, sister. You and me both.”

We turned some heads on the dance floor. She was a cut above the usual bims and frills that passed through a place like this. Violet lined up more business while I settled the tab. Solid work ethic, that girl.

She took my arm. I’d picked a hotel along the waterfront, so we blunted the sharpest edges of the hooch with a slow stroll along the bay. Not too slow, though; I was paying by the hour, and her old-fashioned dancing left me with an antique case of the hot pants. The gimlets had her pie-eyed just enough that I chanced stitching together a few shortcuts through the Pleroma. If she did notice anything off-kilter, she didn’t squawk. What a trooper.

Our room had a wardrobe with real wooden hangers. A bed, too. I helped Violet out of her coat, hung it in the former, and tried not to look too obviously at the latter. I called down to room service for a bucket of ice and a bowl of strawberries. Violet kicked off her heels and sidled into the bathroom like she’d never stopped dancing.

A bellhop delivered the ice before it had melted, and for that he earned a decent tip, but nothing extravagant. He would have understood had he seen the dish. He wished me good night and bowed out. But I’d just enough time to set down the ice and the strawberries when he knocked again. I figured he’d taken a closer look at his tip.

I opened the door. Molly said, “Miss me?”

Inwardly, I moaned. Outwardly, I groaned. Molly stepped around me. The ice and the strawberries earned a quirked eyebrow; her lips settled into a little moue of disapproval when she saw the heels and the closed bathroom door. She doesn’t miss a trick, flametop.

I held the door open, hoping she’d take the hint. Take it outside. No soap. “Not that it ain’t a pleasure to see you again, but what say you we put this on hold until tomorrow? It’s late and I’m wrecked.”

She sniffed the air between our faces. “You’ve been drinking, I see. Having a good time?”

“Don’t get sore, angel. One snootful of rye doesn’t make a fella tight.”

My date emerged from the bathroom, a sylph in silk. That long graceful neck continued all the way down her pipe stems. She wore a postage stamp and not enough ribbon to hold it in place. I feared she’d catch pneumonia from the icy scowls flametop flung at us.

She struck a pose and gave me a smile that should have melted the ice. Then she noticed Molly.

Violet wilted.

Molly said, “Wow, Bayliss. And here I thought you couldn’t get any classier.”

Violet asked, in a tone of bored and idle curiosity, “Are you the wife or the girlfriend?”

Bored because she’d probably seen this scene a dozen times before. Idle because it was no skin off her nose either way; she’d already made most of her green for the evening, and did it all without taking off her shoes. A banner night.

Molly hiked a thumb over her shoulder. “Put your clothes on and get lost,” she said.

Violet gave a bored shrug and disappeared into the bathroom again. The lock clicked.

Molly wheeled on me. “You unbelievable jerk,” she said. And then socked me in the kisser. I toppled backward over the ottoman, hands pressed to my face.

“Ouch! What gives, you damn cuckoo frail?” My voice sounded like it was trying to wriggle through a soda straw.

“That’s for not telling me the truth about METATRON and the MOC.”

She loomed over me. I inched backward. Soft carpet in this joint.

“What are you yapping about? I told you all about it. Maybe some details slipped my mind, but so what? I gave you the headlines.”

“Details? You call the Jericho Event a detail?”

Oh. That.

Flametop wound up for a swift kick with her pointed boots. I was getting a little tired of playing punching bag for all the crazy dames in my life. Careful, Bayliss. It’s becoming a habit with you.

My date emerged from the bathroom again, looking like she’d only ever gone in there to powder her nose in the first place. Looking like a nice, respectable girl a guy could take for dancing and drinks. Took her all of two seconds to survey the situation. She’d seen this scene a few times before, too. I’d wager the argument was usually about infidelity rather than the teleological origins of reality, but, you know, details. Molly paused in her abuse long enough for me to say good night to my date. She was the heart of kindness.

I helped Violet into her coat. As she stepped into her shoes, I kissed her on the cheek and said, “It was swell.”

“Sure. See ya.” And then she was out the door.

I listened until the ding of the elevator told me Violet was well and truly gone. I looked around the room, looking to see if she’d left behind anything, like a handbag, or her lips. She hadn’t. I sighed, then turned to flametop. “You’re a real piece of work. There’s no parade you can’t rain on, is there?”

“Shove it. Don’t play the victim card with me.”

Something warm and wet tickled my nose. I put a trio of fingertips to my upper lip; they came away warm, wet, and red. Flametop had done a real number on me.

I perched at the edge of the bed and squinted at her. “You seem different. You get your hair done?”

Molly reached into the bathroom, tossed me a washcloth. I wrapped it around a handful of ice from the bucket and pressed the bundle to my face.

By way of answering my question, she set aside her human form and momentarily became something else. None too graceful, this transition: she stumbled through it like somebody hopping around late for church with one leg stuck in a new pair of trousers. But for an instant she blazed so brightly it seemed a miracle we didn’t leave my silhouette scorched into the wallpaper. Maybe we did. The bruise-colored afterimages shimmying through my field of vision made it hard to tell. Afterimages of wings and things. Then she snapped back into her human form. A faint heiligenschein glow clung to her skin. It faded slowly away as she got it under control, like somebody turning the dimmer switch on a ceiling fan.

“Well, well, well. Look who’s all grown up.”

“No thanks to you, asshole. Do you even remember our agreement, or have you been spending all your time on hookers and blow?”

Well. That’s gratitude for you. I said as much. “You know, I’ve taken a few punches for you since our last heart-to-heart. I’d just as lief let you fend for yourself from now on.”

“It hasn’t been a picnic for me, either,” she said.

“Anybody smack you with a phone book?”

“No.”

“Fancy that.”

We compared notes over a bowl of strawberries. They were juicy and so was the gossip. I explained how I’d erased the evidence connecting her to Gabriel (she still pleaded innocent on that charge) and described my subsequent run-ins with the Thrones and Uriel. She told me about the PI recipients and their dreams of the Choir. I took the news well until she got to the part where the churchy types were turning up stiff. That’s when I choked on a berry.

“Say that again. How many are dead?”

“Four.”

“And when did you say the Pole squiffed it?”

“Last night, I think.”

I cast my thoughts back to Sam’s rapid departure from my diner. The timing fit. Sam and his pals detected a new Nephil right around the time Molly’s pal punched out. So I told her what I’d learned about the Nephilim: what the Thrones told me; the failed attempt to evict one; and what Sam had shared. I worried she’d have another conniption when I hit the part about secret vaults and penitente souls. But by the end she looked like somebody had kicked her dog.

“Jesus. How complicated can this get?” Flametop rested her head in her hands, twined her fingers through that curly coppery mop. “Maybe we just caught a break.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I never know what you’re thinking. Most of the time I can’t even tell what you’re talking about.”

“Enough sneering, already. Your face will get stuck like that. I’m thinking Father Santorelli’s prodigal sheep and the Nephilim come out of the same box. The former die on Earth and the latter pop up in the Pleroma.” I whistled. “What a slick racket.”

“Yeah, but what are they?”

I shrugged. She sighed.

“Somebody went to a shitload of trouble to set this up. Why? What are the Nephilim for? What are they doing?”

“Beats me. But I’m putting my money on nothing good.”

“Well,” she said, “the good news is there won’t be any more. I cured the surviving recipients.”

I blinked. “Come again?”

“I’ve been making the rounds, banishing the dreams. Glimpses of the Pleroma. Whatever they are.”

I tried not to sound too condescending. “Look. Angel. I know you’re feeling your oats because you’ve started to get the hang of things. But don’t let it go to your head. I’ve been around the block a few times and, I have to tell you, I don’t know how they’re playing this trick, much less how to fix it. So what exactly did you do when you say you cured them?”

She told me. I responded by taking a long draw of rye because damn if it didn’t sound like she’d put the nightmares on ice for several nights running. This dame was one quick study. Who was she?

Flametop fished a piece of ice from the bucket, inspected it for blood, and then, finding it clean, popped it in her mouth. It crunched in her teeth. “What else haven’t you told me?”

“That’s all I know about the Nephilim. Pretty much all anybody knows. There ain’t more to tell because there ain’t more to know.”

“Screw the Nephilim. What else haven’t you told me about Gabriel? Do you know how he died? You must have suspicions, or a theory. And what about the Choir? The Pleroma? The MOC, and METATRON, and God knows what else?”

“Anybody ever tell you you’ve got paranoid tendencies? I’m your strongest supporter, lady. Your only supporter, if you want to get technical about it.”

“First, you accidentally shoved me under a tram. But hey, that’s okay, because after all you were aiming for my brother. And then, after you dragged me into this whole fucking nightmare of a mess, you insinuated that my predecessor had simply chosen to move on, instead of telling me that he’d been murdered. You failed to warn me about METATRON, which led to all sorts of fun and made me the most popular woman in the Choir. And then, when I pressed you for details, you still somehow managed to omit the full story, and I had to learn about the Jericho Event from some freaky two-faced angel.”

I should have known. Lousy Virtues. Can’t keep their noses out of other people’s business.

She continued, “Call me crazy, but after a while I just can’t help but notice a pattern. And I just can’t help but wonder what other surprises await me.” She crunched another ice cube down to its component molecules.

“You know, you’ve got a killer case of selective memory, doll. The way I remember it, you were so wrapped up in your own issues that you barely heard two things I said when I tried to give you a rundown on the Pleroma.”

“That’s because I had just died, you shit!”

“Don’t get all philosophical on me. So what if you had? You really think you’d have taken it all in if I’d laid out all the cards at once? You’ve been a drip since day one. You meet everything I say with weeps, frowns, and melodrama. Toss in a fainting spell and you could be gunning for a studio contract.”

“Screw you, too.”

“Yeah, well, I was working on that, until you showed up and scotched the whole evening.”

Flametop ate more ice. She chomped the crystals down to molecules, the molecules down to atoms. She exhaled twinned jets of hydrogen and oxygen. I wondered if she was aware of what she was doing. Good thing I hadn’t lit any candles for Violet.

“You’ve known all along that this mess was so much more than a single impossible murder. This is a schism, isn’t it? A fight over something much larger than one dead angel.” Molly jumped to her feet. Her halo returned, the glow soft and gentle as a solar flare. She grabbed my shoulders and flung me against the wall. The impact knocked down a painting. “When pressed, you basically came out and admitted you were acting under orders from one of these factions when you roped me into this! So don’t feed me some bullshit line that you don’t know any more than I do!”

This was my least favorite topic. The weight of it bowed my shoulders, forced me to the floor. I crumpled. Dead angels are heavier than broken promises.

“Look at me!” I said. “Look! You’ve seen Cherubim and Virtues and even yourself. What am I compared to all that? I’m the lowest of the low. I’m a shabby, two-bit nickel-grabbing twerp with no choice but to draw as little water as possible so that nobody decides to step on me. You? You’ve got a future. But I’m stuck in the margins. That’s all I’ll ever be, a cheap chiseler. And there are things out there greater and more mysterious than the best of us. So yeah, I did what I was told. What choice did I have?”

I hefted the bottle, drowned my tonsils. Stewed to the gills was old Bayliss; his tears smelled like above-average rye. My face burned with shame and embarrassment. The tears flared into sizzling flamedrops as they trickled down my face. I looked up at Molly through a smoldering veil of weak flames, like a mummer-show Cherub.

“How do you flip God the bird?” I asked. “What if it notices?”

*   *   *

By the time I banished the weeps and returned to my senses, my dignity had fled and so had flametop. The bottle was emptier than a hobo’s money clip, the air dark as my prospects. Smoke wisps curlicued from blackened spots where my burning tears had fallen on the carpet.

My hat had been draped over the doorknob. The note tucked in the band had been scratched out on the back of a room service menu with a dying ballpoint.

Gone to find the source of the Indulgences. Try to verify connection with the Nephilim. This is our chance. Don’t fuck it up.

It wasn’t signed. It didn’t have to be. I’d know that inspirational tone anywhere. She really missed her calling. I’d heard the angel of compassion was looking for an intern.

The melted-plastic stink of smoldering synthetic fibers was giving me a headache. Or maybe it was riffing on a drumbeat the last fumes of rye had set to echoing inside my skull. What a combo they had going. All they needed was a xylophone player and they’d be ready for the club circuit.

I made it to my feet with the grudging help of a chair and the wall. When I was reasonably sure the room wasn’t about to pull a dipsy-doodle on me, I shuffled to the bathroom, filled the sink with cold tap water, and dipped my face. The water steamed. I nudged the bed to cover the burns in the floor. Then I grabbed my hat, planted it on my crown at a rakish angle, and headed back to my Magisterium.

The door showed no sign of disturbance. Ditto the kitchen, and the coffee can. The penitente soul fragments were just where I’d left them. Good thing, because what Molly told me had the gears turning. I lit my pipe, cleared away the pieces with a swipe of my arm, and emptied the can on the chessboard. I reimagined the electric dipole moment of methyl groups in the caffeine—my house, my rules—which made it a snap to separate the coffee grounds from the soul fragments: I ran a comb through my hair and used static electricity to pull out the coffee. Soon I had two piles on the chessboard. One the scorched color of French roast; the other leaden gray.

My reasoning started with the Nephilim and snaked backward through the thicket like this: Those goons were remnants of the Plenary Indulgence recipients that Gabriel had been lamping. But the PIs were tainted, such that death transformed those monkeys into immutable topological defects in the Pleroma. That was a pretty trick; whoever worked this racket carried some mean medicine in their pocket. Father Santorelli was the bagman, dishing out the special Indulgences to lucky members of the faith. Gabby must have known this, or suspected some of it, because he’d been watching Santorelli, too. Gabby’s interest in the Indulgences, plus his stewardship of the Jericho Trumpet, eventually got him pinked. Meanwhile somebody—The same somebody? Or was this a different faction?—had started clipping out little hidey-holes in the souls of the penitentes down on Earth. So when a well-meaning dope blundered into the middle of this flop and started sniffing around, somebody took a quick jaunt down from the Pleroma to hitch a ride inside a penitente and silence the priest.

Why go to all that trouble? I had a hunch. The only members of the Choir with recent practice mingling with the monkeys were me and flametop. News would spread quickly if angels started appearing on Earth again, meddling in human affairs. Would it tip off the opposing faction? Would it rouse METATRON? Better to hitch a ride and avoid the risk.

Gabby had been watching Molly, too. Still didn’t know how she fit into all this. But she was right about one thing. The connection between the Nephilim and the Plenary Indulgences was our big break. Meanwhile, whoever ran the penitentes was in this past the mud on their necks. That made it past time I took a closer look at those loons. So I pinched a soul from the top of the pile, stuck it in my eye, and—

—found ourselves sitting with head bowed at a dinner table laid with potato casserole and cans of soda, mumbling along as our family said grace. Our shoulders ached so severely that simply raising a fork to our mouth was agony. The big guy at the end of the table, let’s call him Dad, noticed it, and laid in to us.

“That’s what you get for joining up with those freaks,” he said. “Bet they didn’t even sterilize properly. You’ll get tetanus or worse, and I’ll have to take a second mortgage on the house we already can’t afford just to put your body back the way God made it in the first place. It would serve you right if they had to amputate both your arms.” He washed down the bile with a swig of beer. His breath smelled of potatoes and cigarettes.

The woman across from him, let’s call her Mom, frowned. “Not at the dinner table. You promised.”

And then he called her a stupid bitch and told her to shut her fucking mouth, because it was her goddamned fault their worthless son had turned out such a retard. Our eyes brimmed with tears, but we fought them to a standstill. We wouldn’t cry. Not at the table. We reached up with as much nonchalance as any seventeen-year-old had ever mustered to scratch an imaginary itch under our eye—

—and flicked the soul fragment into the empty coffee can. I sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon. I picked another fragment—

—and found ourselves under a tangle of naked, sweaty bodies, doing something very personal to somebody we didn’t know while somebody else was in the same situation with us. Every pulse of our heart sent lightning crackling through our veins, sent pharmaceutical gold streaming across the blood-brain barrier to fill our synapses with a champagne fizz hyperawareness of the orgiastic coupling of counterfeit fallen angels all around us. This was dangerous and careless and we didn’t care. We saw smoke, and dancers, and so many of our fellow penitentes twined together, wounds and stigmata naked to the world. A tickle on our lip; we spat away a bloody pinfeather. A man beside us shook out long hair, stippling our face with sweat. Salt stung our eyes—

I flicked that fragment into the can. I paused for a draw on my dying pipe before queuing up number three—

A metal collar clamped around our neck, another around our waist, two more around our forearms. The cold surgical table made gooseflesh of our naked chest. This impromptu clinic wasn’t listed and it wouldn’t exist tomorrow. All we could see were floor tiles with a drain in the center, and a corner of the room where two walls of mirror-bright nanodiamond came together. Through a fringe of eyelashes we caught vague reflections of the others, an unlicensed surgeon and our sponsor. Her reassuring touch pumped warmth into the small of our back.

“It doesn’t hurt at all,” she whispered. We sought her face in the reflections, sought more reassuring lies, sought to impress her with a confident wink. But we couldn’t see her face because, just for an instant, it was obscured by starlight flickering in the burnished diamond. We blinked, looked again, but then the laser scalpel was unzipping my flesh and we were too busy trying not to scream because penitentes eschewed anesthetic. We bit our tongue. Tears ran freely—

Who was that? Had she seen me? Had she looked into her poor sap’s eyes and realized the passenger seat wasn’t empty? My pipe had smoldered out. I left it alone.

Fragment number four found us attending Mass. Fragment five found us weeping, sitting on a toilet seat, staring at a pregnancy test. Fragment six landed us in the middle of a sales meeting; we spent half the time pretending to pay attention and the other half reminiscing about the previous night. Our coworkers didn’t know of our life outside of work because we hid our wounds under bland business attire. Secretly, we sneered at them.

Fragment seven put us in another club, this one lit by twisting vapor trails of luminous mist. We stood at a bar, ordering a drink. Our fellow penitentes wiggled on the dance floor, bodies and rhythms twinned by the mirror behind the bar. A sister penitente leaned backward on a stool, resting her head atop the bar, mouth agape; others held her steady while the bartender mixed a drink right in her kisser. Cute trick. One of the surrounding penitentes squeezed his stigmatic palm to dribble sterile blood into the mix. “Communion Wine,” we called this drink. The bartender handed him a swizzle stick: a short piece of green plastic molded into the shape of a pirate’s cutlass. But in the mirror it became a sword blazing with the fires of Creation.

We gasped. He paused in his fiery stirring to look up. We ran a hand over our eyes—

Close one, that. I paused to empty and repack the pipe after that one. It took several mouthfuls of sweet, cherry-flavored smoke until I could no longer hear the receding whistle of the bullet that had just parted my hair. I wasn’t the only member of the Choir taking a ride in the hollowed-out monkeys. Bits and pieces of Pleromatic overlay followed us like pieces of a tenacious dream that refused to dissipate upon the arrival of morning. It came through stronger on the high rollers, manifesting as glimpses of ancient starlight and flaming swords and who knew what else. Resolving to keep my own weak-tea glamour on a tighter leash, I went back to work.

Around and around the world, variations on a theme: snatches of family life, snatches of work life, snatches of club life, snatches of love and hate and hunger and sorrow, woven throughout with cuckoo pseudoangelic malarkey. Here and there, but glimpsed only in the corner of the eye, my fellow penitentes sprouted wings of brass, and third eyes, and scorpion tails. I wondered if my hosts could see them, too. I figured they could, and that they attributed this to burgeoning religious epiphany. In striving to emulate us, to emulate their warped and limited misconceptions of us, they became us. Or so they believed. The poor saps didn’t know they were possessed. What a bunch of suckers.

Such were my thoughts as I eased into my next host, who was crammed between two bulky penitentes in the backseat of a car. Two more penitentes rode up front, including the driver. We were somewhere in the Midwest, entering a one-horse town where half the storefronts had been boarded over. Our companions in that cozy little clown car had the windows rolled down. We caught a whiff of river water. It seemed familiar, this place, but I couldn’t place it. This was our first visit, as Bayliss or penitent loon. The jane in the front passenger seat was speaking to the driver. We eavesdropped.

“… the library first. If she isn’t there, we’ll go to the apartment.” With that, she flicked one dainty bleeding palm toward the hardware store sliding past on our right. Nice manicure.

Something hard dug into our ribs. We shifted. So did the loogans to our left and right. Which is how we came to realize they were rodded; it was the bulge of a shoulder rig poking us. Odd, that. This was a first. None of my other encounters with the penitentes had involved iron.

I took in more scenery, tried to draw a bead on how I knew this place. That got me nowhere fast. Sunlight glinted from the storefront windows of a café that used to be something else. We glanced quickly to left and right, inspecting the loogans from the corners of our eyes while the light distracted our conscious mind. When viewed through a Pleromatic veil, the faces of the muggs to either side of me were obscured by flickering sheets of flame. No wonder we were crammed like sardines; those hard boys had wings grand enough to scrape dust from the moon.

That’s when I realized how I knew this burg.

I had to warn flametop. We reached for our eye—

—but somebody grabbed our wrist.

“Going somewhere, Bayliss?”

The jane in front leaned over the back of her seat, leering at us through the ghostly flickering image of an eagle’s face. Her grip was stronger than the metal shackles in the impromptu surgical clinic. She clucked her tongue. It works better in a human mouth, though; her beak turned the clucking into the hollow clacking of cheap castanets.

“Who’s Bayliss?” my host asked. But then he glimpsed the things riding inside his fellow carpoolers and fell silent. A warm wet stain spread through our trousers.

“We did warn you,” said the woman with the angel inside her. I wondered if that was Uriel’s hand on the reins, but didn’t have a chance to find out. The loogan on my right reached for his shoulder rig. We tried to block him, but the human I wore had all the reflexes of a coma patient. We managed to get an elbow in his face before he could bring the heater to bear. But all that squirming kept leftie free to show some initiative. We heard the creak of leather and tried to duck. There was little room to swing a sap in that car, but damned if leftie didn’t gave it his all. He swung like a pennant race hung in the balance.

The cosh came down on the back of our head. My host’s human skull did its best impression of Humpty Dumpty. I figure that made me the yolk. I landed in darkness, and it wasn’t over easy.