Had there been anything remotely sexual in the comment, she’d have known how to react. But there wasn’t.
Why were her ears so hot?
She tried a provocative smile anyway.
Harry deflected it with amused indulgence.
Her ears grew hotter. So did her cheeks. What the hell was going on?
“I’llgohelpwithdinner.” The words came out weirdly strung together. Hurrying into the kitchen, she held on tightly to the thought of the rat poison and getting her world back on track.
It took only a little more momentum to bounce into Eva and spill cranberry juice all over her.
“Oops, sorry, dear.”
Byleth closed her eyes and counted to three. “Why,” she demanded when she opened them, “are you apologizing? I bumped you.”
“True enough. I spoke to Harry and he says if you still want to go to the city in the morning, he’ll drive you to the bus station in Huntsville.”
The bus? There was just no way she was taking the bus. Smelly people took the bus. Poor people took the bus. People being environmentally aware and not driving their cars took the bus. Demons did not take the bus. Unless they took it somewhere really, really nasty and left it there. If Harry wanted to play taxi, he could drive her all the way to the city. He’d be easy enough to coerce.
“Byleth? Would you mind stirring the gravy?”
Since Harry had just become useful and she couldn’t poison Eva without killing him, there could be only one answer. “Yes.”
“Thanks, dear.”
Staring at the spoon in her hand, the other end circling around in the pan of gravy, she wondered how that had gone wrong.
519 Church Street served food but couldn’t provide shelter for the night. Unwilling to lose the company of the only other angel he’d ever met, Samuel followed Doug out the door and fell into step beside him.
They walked for a while in silence. Higher knowledge informed him that pigeons roosted after dark so, until sunrise, life was good. Or it would have been except…
“What’s the matter, kid?”
He shook his head, he wasn’t sure. “There’s pressure.” A quick glance down showed a small wet spot on the front of his trousers. “And I’m leaking! Again. First my hands and now this. Am I supposed to be leaking?”
“Must be time to take a piss.” Grabbing for the front of his own trousers, Doug crossed the sidewalk and stood facing the wall of Harris’ Auto Body.
“We can’t take something that doesn’t belong to us.” In a world of uncertainties, this he remained sure of.
Doug rolled his eyes as a stream of liquid hit the bricks with enough force to knock off a few peeling paint chips and wash them down to float in the streaming puddle on the concrete. “Urinate, kid. Your. En. Eight.”
Discharge urine. A pale-yellow fluid secreted as waste by the kidneys, stored in the bladder, discharged through the urethra.
“Oh.” Opening the zipper turned out to be more difficult than it looked. Closing it when he finished…
“Don’t worry about it, kid. Hardly anyone keeps their foreskin these days.”
Still unable to completely straighten, Samuel found that of little actual comfort. Moving awkwardly, he followed Doug up a set of broad steps and was astonished to discover they were entering a cathedral. When he paused, Doug grabbed his arm and pulled him ahead.
“St. Mike’s only got room for fifty, kid. He who hesitates sleeps outside. Merry Christmas, Father.”
The priest nodded without glancing up from the clipboard. “Names?”
“I’m Doug. This here’s Samuel. Samuel, not Sam. We’re angels.”
“You know the rules?”
“You betcha, Father.”
“Go on, then. Clear the door.”
“This is my favorite flop in the whole city,” Doug confided as he dragged Samuel across the nave and in through the big double doors. “Whadda you think?”
The peace and beauty of the Sanctuary wrapped around the angel like a blanket. Like arms of light.
“Did you know your eyes was glowin’, kid?”
“Sorry.”
“Not a problem. Kind of pretty.” Arms spread wide, Doug turned on the spot, thin gray ponytail streaming out behind him, dirty gray overcoat flapping like wings. Pigeon wings. But why ruin the image. “Can you think of a better place for two angels to sleep?”
Actually, he couldn’t.
Byleth had merely picked at dinner, pushing the food in circles around her plate, unable to forget how huge her butt had looked in the overalls. Then Eva brought out the lemon meringue pie, a quivering three inches deep with drops of liquid sugar glistening in the valleys of the meringue. Suddenly remembering that gluttony was one of the big seven, she had three pieces. An hour later, when the sugar high suddenly wore off, she’d found herself blinking stupidly at White Christmas—a movie too woogie for words—and had allowed Eva to steer her unprotesting up to bed.
She made an explicitly salacious invitation—more because she felt she should than through any desire to corrupt—which Eva didn’t even begin to understand. Without the energy to explain the unfamiliar terms, she merely took the offered nightgown and staggered off to bed.
The sheets in the spare room smelled of fabric softener. The mattress was soft. The blankets warm. She had nothing against comfort; a lot of very nasty things had been done for comfort’s sake.
“She’s certainly rude.”
“Yes, she is.”
Rolling over on her stomach, she peered off the edge of the bed at the hot air grate set into the old linoleum floor.
“She left the bathroom in a mess and borrowed my makeup without asking.”
“I saw that.”
Eva’s and Harry’s voices drifted up through the grate from the living room below.
“Her table manners are atrocious. You’d think she’d never held a fork before.”
“And the hysterics in the bathroom later…”
Well, how was she to know that was supposed to happen?
At least she seemed to be having a negative effect on the Porters. As long as they were complaining about her, the evening hadn’t been a total waste.
“Did you see her go through that pie?”
“I know; isn’t it nice to have a teenager in the house again?”
“I am not a teenager!” Both palms hit the floor as she threw herself off the bed toward the voices. “I am a demon!”
The house was silent for a moment.
Then…
“Did you put Byleth in the front bedroom?”
“Yes, I did.”
Eva’s voice grew suddenly louder, as though she now stood directly under the grate. “Sorry, dear. We forgot you could hear us.”
Teenager.
That apology, she’d accept.
Claire closed her new laptop with a snap. The machine and the e-mail account had been another Christmas present from her parents. While she appreciated the difficulties the Apothecary’d overcome setting the system up, she couldn’t help thinking that socks and underwear would have been more useful. “According to Diana, Father Harris has no idea where the angel went. Didn’t even realize it—he—was an angel.”
“So what are we after doing?”
“We keep answering the Summons…” She frowned, searching for a plural. “…s I get. Nothing else we can do.”
Unconvinced, Dean sat beside her on the bed. “Shouldn’t we tell someone, then?”
“Who?”
“Other Keepers?”
“Actually, they know.”
“They know?”
“Not exactly about the angel, but they know we, uh, consummated our relationship. Apparently it echoed through the possibilities.” He looked so appalled, she managed what she hoped was an encouraging smile in spite of her own pique. “Everyone was very impressed. Keepers who’ve never used anything more complicated than a ballpoint pen suddenly felt obliged to send me an e-mail about it. Isn’t technology wonderful. But,” she added emphatically, the smile slipping, “since the world’s in no danger, I’m not telling them about the angel until we absolutely have to. There’s no point giving them more to discuss, is there? They’ll all start telling me we should have used precautions.”