Angel Candidate, page 6
part #3 of Lucas Johnson Series
Well, good that I was undercover because most of these people would recognize me if I was in my own body.
We sat down at a large table and Liam ordered a round of shots of something called Arrack. The waiter brought the shots, together with all the soft drinks we ordered, and placed the glasses with brown liquid onto the table.
Liam took one and motioned the rest of us to do the same. Reluctantly, we all did.
“Yesterday didn’t go well,” Liam said for the toast. “But tomorrow will be better. For the Church!” And he drank the shot.
“For the Church,” everyone repeated and downed their shot.
We started chit-chatting, talking about weather and the terrible toilets at the barracks. Oh, those were dreadful.
Things got weird soon afterward. Suddenly, I stared at my hand, not sure what I was saying or why. My vision spun slightly, and I was uncharacteristically full of energy. And I was drunk.
How did that happen? I looked at the others. Amaranta was narrating something to Robert, speaking in pure Italian, gesticulating wildly. Due to inheriting the soul of Lucifer, I spoke Latin, but that wasn’t close enough to Italian for me to understand her speech. Robert sat relaxed on the couch, staring blankly at the ceiling, completely out of his senses. Liam stared into a bowl half-full of noodles, trying to hit them with a fork, without success.
The Twins were giggling madly, eating some rice-based meal with their hands. What the fuck?
I rose and stumbled toward the toilet. The door gave in and I stared at four women standing by the sinks. Wrong door. They shrieked, I turned and walked to the correct toilet. With unstable steps, I reached the stall, raised the toilet seat, bent over, and struck two fingers into my throat.
Vomiting was not pleasant. My throat burned as I retched, my eyes were watery, and a pulse beat in my temples. I waited for a minute, went to a sink, washed my face, drank an unhealthy amount of tap water, and looked at myself into the mirror. Yep, I was drunk. I fished out my phone and the time said 2300. When the hell did three hours pass?
I returned to the lobby and sat back at the table. Everyone stared at me. I blinked a few times and realized I sat at a table with four oversized men and a teenage girl with extremely long, black hair. Wrong table. I looked at the girl, put on a cheeky grin, and asked, “Why so sad?”
Her gaze darted away for a second before she looked back at me. “You should go.”
The men at the table rose.
I ignored them and glanced in the direction she did. I knew that sideways look she gave. It was the oh shit, I need to check if whatever I’m hiding is still hidden type of look suspects did when being investigated.
In the direction was nothing, only a wall and two men. I frowned. They wore suits with bumps from carrying weapons but there wasn’t anything but a wall to guard.
Two men grabbed me by shoulders and raised me. I didn’t struggle. They carried me through the room and threw me at my original seat. I frowned and looked at the Twins. It took a while of staring for them to turn toward me.
“Did you cast a spell on us?” I asked.
“Maybe.” They both giggled in perfect synchronization.
“Look, darlings,” I leaned closer so the others wouldn’t overhear us. “my friend recently escaped from Tul Sar Naar. He told me he met twins there who spoke at the same time and had really weird magic. Do the others know it’s you, I wonder?”
They froze. “We experimented with a spell,” one of them, Tanya, I though, said. “It was supposed to make us all lucky for the evening.”
“But it apparently broke our bodies’ ability to absorb alcohol,” I pointed out. “Let’s agree you won’t ever do that again.”
They both nodded frantically.
I relaxed into the couch. A spell that made us lucky… I glanced at the table where I sat by accident. Nobody sat there anymore. I stumbled into someone important, didn’t I? But I was too drunk to figure out whom.
The staff kicked us out of the bar at midnight. We lurched toward the barracks. Amaranta wouldn’t shut up with Italian flooding out of her mouth. Robert and Liam needed the Twins’ help to walk.
The receptionist let us in, rolling her eyes, and I helped Sonya with Liam to get him to his room. He guided us with grunts.
We reached his room. Shame my vision was so blurry I couldn’t pick out any interesting details. I motioned Sonya to take him to the bed. As she did, I opened the largest window, but only slightly.
Liam fell to the bed and stopped moving. Sonya and I stumbled out of the room.
“So, errr…” She gave me a worried look. “Do you know why we were in Tul Sar Naar?”
“No.”
“We were framed for a murder.” She put on a faint smiled. “And after we came out, we cleared our names and got back into the VI. But we don’t want others to know, okay?”
“Sure.” I turned and headed toward my room. Once inside, I set my alarm for 0330 and crashed into the bed. I was too drunk to work now, but three hours of sleep would help.
My door flung open and Amaranta waltzed in. I sat upright in the bed.
She slammed the door shut, flipped on the light, and shouted, “Ispezione della camera!”
I stared at her blankly, lost for words. The luck spell has probably worn off. She walked to the nearest wardrobe, opened its door and started throwing out the clothes. What the fuck?
For a moment, I had an intense urge to fly out of this body, get to my main one, grab the rocket launcher from work and level this entire building to the ground.
I remembered the cross pressed against my chest and decided not to do that. Though I spent most of the day putting the apartment back in order and Amaranta was just plucking the drawers out of a cabinet, throwing them on the ground, giggling.
I relaxed into the bed and soon fell asleep.
My alarm woke me up at 0330. The lights were still on. My head pounded, my throat was dry as a desert, but my vision was clear. I was tired, had a hangover, but functioned. I counted to five and rose from the bed at the count’s end.
I stumbled to the other room. Amaranta lay atop a pile of my clothes, snoring. I shook my head. What the hell got into her? She probably decided she had to find a solid proof that I was an impostor and acted upon it with the finesse of a battering ram. Or she brought it up to the local leadership, got shut down—possibly by Jack—and was now determined to prove them wrong.
With a gentle move, I raised her from the ground and carried her into the bed. Yeah, this was a good opportunity to search her pockets for a phone and potentially unlock it using her fingerprint. Or I could swipe her access card and go search her room.
But I had some standards.
And the odds of her being the traitor were somewhere around zero. Not just because of the whole Cross of Uriel thing, but also because literally nothing she did fit the psychological profile of a suspect. She started our interactions by coming to talk to me, a man she never met, while someone hiding guilt would want to be isolated. And a traitor would also not enter a spotlight, like she did by coming to bully me. Especially today, since if she was the culprit, she would have realized my secret phone could mean I was an investigator looking for her, and thus the last thing she would do would be to burst into my room drunk.
I tucked her into the duvet and left the room, switching off the lights.
The sports bag awaited me on the roof. I put on thin leather gloves, went to the roof above Sergeant King’s room and fixed hooks by the antennas. I attached one end of the rope to the hooks and the other end to my waist.
After a set of steadying breaths and a swift warm-up, I dropped the rope’s middle off the roof. It hit the ground with a soft thud. The city around me was calm, asleep at this ungodly hour. I caught the rope and started descending the wall.
Luckily, no one came around Sergeant’s room to close the window that I opened in his room earlier. I slid into the room and observed the neatly arranged place in the moonlight.
With swift, soundless moves, I rolled up the rope not to leave it dangling. I unattached the rope from my waist and turned on my phone’s torch. I aimed the light downward so it wouldn’t be too noticeable from the outside. While shifting my weight not to make any sound, I listened to the snoring of the sleeping Sergeant, and searched the room. His table was neatly arranged with a turned-off laptop.
The first drawer contained a set of pens, pencils, and a half-covered pad of paer where, upon closer look, he was writing down his speeches and schedule for the next day. An interesting log, but I doubted he would write down he was a traitor… if he was one at all.
The second drawer contained empty envelopes and postcards. He had a stack of over fifty of each item, neatly arranged into piles. Each postcard differed from the others, but they were all displaying something from New York.
The third drawer contained a reserve charger for a phone and one for his laptop.
I went to his wardrobes. They contained sets of casual clothes, uniforms, and two suits, all perfectly arranged.
With a glance into the bathroom, I confirmed he didn’t have anything weird in there. Seeing toothpaste, a toothbrush, dental floss, a razor, shaving foam, a deodorant, an antiperspirant, and a two-in-one shower gel, I concluded we could switch bathrooms without noticing.
Time to search the bedroom. I stepped lightly, though by the snoring, he wouldn’t notice a tank driving through the front door. His night table held two pictures. The smaller one displayed a younger-looking Sergeant King next to a dashing woman and three young kids. His family.
But the other one interested me. It displayed about a hundred men dressed in US army uniforms. Slowly, I picked up the picture and opened the frame. The photograph slid out. On its back, written in ballpoint pen was: God bless your newborn, Captain King. And roughly a hundred signatures surrounded the words.
Captain?
I returned the picture into the frame, placed the frame where it belonged and returned to the window. If he hid anything thoroughly, I would need to come when he wasn’t in the room. But I didn’t think he did, or that I needed more. His potential motive was whatever turned him from a captain into a sergeant and his means of communication were the letters.
Okay, this did not remove the Sergeant from the list of suspects. Quite the opposite.
Chapter 6
THE NEXT MORNING was peaceful. I sat at my laptop, digging through social networks to find info about the other team members. Just as I was combing the Twins’ Facebook profile, rustling sounded from the bedroom. Vomiting followed. Fuck. I couldn’t even go in there now because she would think I’m invading her room and fry me with lightning.
Half an hour later, soft steps approached from the bedroom. I turned, wearing a compassionate smile. Amaranta’s face was dark red and she was tiptoeing, hoping to get out unnoticed. “None of this ever happened,” she whispered, dashed to the door, and slid out.
Apparently, the honor of cleaning up after her was mine.
And she vomited a lot. How much noodles and spaghetti did the woman eat? After I cleaned that up, I left the barracks and went to check my PO box. Everything arrived, including an unnecessarily detailed manual from Matthew on how to stick a USB stick into a laptop. The most important part was that I had to tell him I was about to do something because he needed to be online and do stuff on his end. Yeah, this wasn’t very specific. And there wasn’t any guide of how to break into a phone, so he hasn’t prepared for that.
Whatever. I also got a new phone, where I was pleased to see Aunt Marry saved in the contact list. I memorized the number and then I sent him a message to confirm I got the stuff and hid everything in the sports bag atop the roof.
In the afternoon, our whole squad met and Amaranta did her best to avoid me, unsurprisingly. We did a light practice and then went to get some rest for tonight’s mission.
Sitting fully geared up in a VI van, we eyed a large, brick-built block of apartments in Brooklyn, right at Brooklyn Avenue. We parked behind Lenox Hill Radiology and everything was silent since it was three in the morning. Even if magic wasn’t secret from the public, which it was, we needed to approach unseen. And a group of people dressed in tactical, combat armor holding assault rifles would have attracted too much attention during the day.
From what I picked up earlier, reconnaissance found the truck used to transport the demonifying agent. They couldn’t find where that went, but they tracked some of the armed men into this building. We were going to pay them a visit.
The comm crackled in my ear. “Let’s move.”
The SWAT-standard facemask slightly distorted all our voices. This was still clearly Sergeant King though. We filed out of the van and with light steps, we approached the house’s back door.
Sergeant King motioned at the iron door. Robert stepped forward and kicked the lock. The door flung open with a crack. Okay, Robert was using strengthening magic. We entered, Robert first, Sergeant last.
We dashed up to the fourth floor. Much to my dismay, that made me sweat and my pulse rose. The designated door stood in front of us.
“On three,” Sergeant King whispered into the comm and then counted down. At the count’s end, Robert kicked in the door and burst into the apartment. The sergeant remained in the hallway to guard the exit. Strike team one was Robert and Amaranta, team two were the Twins and me.
Clean tiles made the floor. The white walls, and brown furniture were all clean as well. Strike team one moved ahead while we started checking the rooms. We opened the door of a bedroom. In the small room were two unarranged beds, piles of clothes, two assault rifles and a sniper rifle braced against the far wall. The air smelled of sweat, but only lightly. One of the clothes piles contained a bulletproof vest with marks of three bullet hits, none of which got through. Charging cables were plugged into the sockets, but no phones or laptops were present.
I motioned at the two wardrobes and stepped in, pistol in hand.
“No one’s here,” the Twins said, not using the comm. Right, magic-users.
With a frown, I headed back to the hallway and tried another door. Bathroom, empty.
“We meant the whole apartment,” the Twins added.
I returned to the bedroom, removed my glove and put my hand on the sheets. Still warm. I turned on the comm. “There’s an exit from this apartment other than the door and they used it under ten minutes ago. Find it.” I realized I wasn’t in command a second later, but I didn’t care. The rest of the team was smarter than to argue.
“Found it,” Amaranta said few seconds later. “Last northern room.”
We ran there. A boxing bag lay by the wall. Attached to the hook that originally held the bag were ropes, which led out through the window. In the parking lot ahead, a group of men carrying an assortment of sports bags and luggage were just getting in two cars.
“Team one go after them. I’ll stop one car,” I said and whirled.
Amaranta grabbed the rope and swung herself out of the window. This must have been extremely frustrating for her. She could have fried them all using her lightning. But there was no way she could use a spell like that in the middle of Brooklyn.
I bolted back to the first bedroom. I opened the window, grabbed the sniper rifle, and checked it had a loaded bullet. One was enough.
I braced the rifle against the window’s frame and focused. The men were already in the cars and going on the road. Amaranta and Robert were descending the ropes with no hope of catching up. I breathed in and reached for my aether.
Three seconds. One to draw the aether and mold it within my body. The world’s colors inverted, and all my muscles steadied.
I fired.
The shot echoed through the room. The bullet cleaved the air and hit the driver of one of the cars in the head. His body jerked sideways, spinning the wheel and hitting a streetlamp in a thunderous crash.
Third second to flush aether out of my body. I felt cold. My teeth rattled and my hands shook. I dropped the sniper rifle. I exhaled and turned. Behind me stood Sergeant King, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “We will need to talk about this after the mission,” he said, not using the comm.
“Sure thing, Sarge,” I whispered, my head spinning. He was smarter than I anticipated. Sure, he could have shouted at me in the comms when I took command, but he chose not to so he could see what I would do.
An explosion thundered from outside. The Sergeant ran to the window. The van we came in was in flames.
Gunfire filled the air. Amaranta and Robert caught up to the crashed car and exchanged fire with the men that got out. Windows started lighting up in the houses.
“Strike team one, apprehend the suspects,” Sergeant King said into the comm. “The rest get back on the stairs. We need to leave.”
The Twins joined us, both slightly pale and sweating, and we ran down the stairs. Halfway down the first flight of stairs, my knees gave out and I fell. The floor hit my face. Sergeant King grabbed me under the shoulder and carried me out.
When we left the building, gunfire had already died, replaced with the wailing of police sirens. Good that we had facemasks, because we were about to star in a hundred YouTube videos.
I regained my ability to walk and got free from Sergeant King’s grasp. I was still freezing and that wouldn’t change until I got a full night’s sleep. We passed our burning van. The remainder of the driver still burned behind the wheel. I didn’t even know his name. My gut clenched and I turned away, focused on the car. Four corpses surrounded the vehicle and Robert was just taking their bags from the trunk.
Yeah, not the proper police procedure, but we didn’t exactly play by those rules. Sergeant King was already on the phone, calling the local police leadership to explain to them why they weren’t supposed to shoot us.
Minutes later, the policemen that came had apparently already heard it over radio, so they didn’t draw guns on us. They started blocking off the area and we called for a pickup.
