Straight to Heaven (21 page)

I returned to the Everston Recreation Area to get my car. All the way home, I tried to figure out a way around William and those angels. I came at the problem from every angle I could, but even an hour-long car ride didn’t generate any new ideas.

When I picked up Grace, she greeted me with a rib-cracking hug. “She missed you,” Kate said.

“I missed you, too,” I told Grace, hugging her back tightly. I brushed her bangs away from her face. “How about we have some girl time tonight? We could go miniature golfing.”

“And ride the go-karts, too?” When I agreed, she squealed, hugged Kate goodbye and ran to the car.

This assignment with Craig had taken over my life to the point where I was neglecting my own child. No wonder Grace was becoming more and more of a daddy’s girl. I wanted the job done and done quickly! It had already eaten up too much of my time and energy.

After miniature golfing, I stopped at the grocery store on the way home. When we left, I was so preoccupied that I automatically pressed the button on my key fob to open the car’s trunk. Grace, ready to help me load the bags inside, suddenly stopped. “What’s that?”

Luckily, my dad’s gun was in a long, black case that did not resemble a gun, but I still scrambled for a lie. “It’s a, uh, trombone.”

Her eyes lit up. “Really?” I yelled for her to stop, but my arms were too full of bags to prevent her from flipping the clasps open. Her eyes widened. “That’s a gun!”

“It’s not loaded,” I said. Okay, it was probably the stupidest thing I could have told her, yet it was the only thing that came to mind.

“What are you doing with a gun? Can I touch it?” She reached out one finger.

“No!” I shoved the packages at her, and immediately reclosed the case. “It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to, um, Mr. Clerk. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want you touching it.”

“Why does Mr. Clerk have a gun? Why is he letting you use it?”

Grace pestered me with these and other endless questions as we left the parking lot. “Why do you keep it in the trunk of your car? Why won’t you let me touch it?”

“Because,” I said. “Because and because and because.”

She stuck out her chin. “Those aren’t answers. They’re excuses.”

Smart kid.

She finally lapsed into silence, and I made a mental note to return the weapon to my dad’s basement as quickly as possible. If Ted ever found out that I had a gun at the house, he’d file for sole custody faster than I could spell ‘NRA’.

We rode in silence until we reached the first red light. Then an earsplitting shriek filled my head. I NEED YOU AUNT LILLY!!

It was like a grenade had gone off in my skull. The force of the message snapped my head backwards against the padded seat. There was a moment of agony, and my vision grayed.

“Mom, the light’s green now,” Grace said. “People are honking. Mom? Mom! Your nose is bleeding!” She shook my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, coming out of my daze. I felt preternaturally calm. Wiping my bleeding nose on a tissue, I told Grace to call Ariel. Several cars angrily whizzed past me, honking their horns because I’d blocked the intersection. I regarded them with detached curiosity.

Grace, however, was in full panic mode. Her face was pale, and her eyes huge. “Ari won’t answer her phone. What’s wrong?”

The second mental message from Ari came a moment later. It was calmer, but still desperate: Aunt Lilly! Where are you?!

“Mom! Are you sure you’re okay? Is something wrong with Ariel?”

“Everything will be fine,” I said.

Find Ariel, I told my demon.

We headed towards the sound of police sirens. A minute later, we found the collision. Luckily, it wasn’t a terrible accident. Unluckily, it had been Tanya’s fault. Not only that, she’d been pulling out from the parking lot of a liquor store. While that might not have been a big deal for other people, I knew right away that she’d gone back to drinking.

I parked my car in the lot of a neighboring video store and ordered Grace to stay seated. Then I went looking for my niece.

I didn’t have to look far. She was perched on a concrete curb, holding a bandage to her bleeding forehead while an EMT squatted beside her, asking her questions. When Ariel saw me, she burst into tears.

I sank down next to her and wrapped my arms around her skinny shoulders. “You okay, kid?”

“She must have a guardian angel or something,” the EMT said. “She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt and there was no airbag, but she’s only got a cut and a few bruises. It doesn’t look like a concussion, either. It could have been a lot worse.” He was a young kid. In my opinion, far too young to be making that kind of medical assessment. Then again, I had to admit that my niece looked okay. Shaken, but okay.

Ariel’s mother began shrieking. Her words were so slurred it was hard to understand them. “That little bitch is a liar. No matter what she says, she’s lying.”

Ari pressed against me more tightly. We both knew who ‘that little bitch’ was. “When did she start drinking?” I asked.

“A few days ago,” Ari said. “Right after her boyfriend lost his job.”

So she couldn’t even stay sober for a week around her kid. Nice job, Tanya, I thought.

Ari’s breath came in bunched-up sobs. “I tried to get her to stop, Aunt Lil. I swear I did. I kept finding her bottles and throwing them away, but she kept going out for more.”

So that’s why my niece had been climbing on the chair to reach that uppermost kitchen cupboard. She’d been searching for her mother’s stash.

“I know you tried your best to help your mom, but s
he’s
got to make the decision to stop drinking. You can’t do it for her. You understand that, right?”

Ari didn’t say anything.

A scrawny guy wearing a dirty T-shirt stood facing one of the police cars. His hands were planted on the roof, and his legs were spread. An officer patted him down and took something from the cuff of his turned-up jeans.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Aldo. My mom’s boyfriend.” Ari pressed closer to me.

The police officer handcuffed Aldo and turned him around. The guy was at least a dozen years older than Tanya, and he wore an expression of such hostility that it would have made a demon proud. A face like that belonged behind barbed wire and a chain link fence, and even then, you wouldn’t feel safe looking at it. I couldn’t imagine how Ariel had managed to fall asleep in the same apartment as that man for the past week.

“Did he hurt you?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“What about your mom? Did he hurt her?”

Ari stared at her feet.

Seeing Tanya, Aldo began screaming at her, using language so crass that Grace put her hands over her ears. He tried to lunge in Ari’s direction, but a pair of police officers wrangled him into the back of the patrol car.

“That bastard hit me!” Tanya shrieked. She pointed to the side of her face where a bruise bloomed under her eye.

Ariel stubbornly released her tears one at a time. “I hate that son of a bitch,” she said.

I leaned in close, stroking her hair. She smelled like cigarette smoke. “Me, too,” I said.

I caught a flash in the corner of my eye and when I turned my head, I saw Jed, Ariel’s guardian angel, peering at me from the otherworld doorway. Blood dripped onto his shirt from a long cut in his chin. Nevertheless, I was so furious that I wanted to drag him out of Heaven and beat the shit out of him. Because the place was crowded with humans, I had to settle for a vicious look instead. I only hoped he understood that I was gunning for him.

I talked to the police officers, and ignored Tanya who was bleating at me about what a good mother she was. When she was bundled into the cruiser, I flipped her off for good measure.

Finally, after the wreckers arrived, and the rubberneckers had dispersed, I got back into my car with the girls. “Looks like you’ll be staying with us for a while,” I told Ariel.

Grace had been silent and wide-eyed throughout everything. “Don’t worry, Ari. My mom has a gun now, so she can defend you if Aunt Tanya’s boyfriend comes around.” She looked at me proudly, as if I was the female reincarnation of Rambo.

I dropped my forehead against the steering wheel. Just what I needed. “The gun’s going back to Mr. Clerk,” I said. “He’s picking it up tonight.” When Grace looked disappointed, I tilted my head towards Ariel who was in the back seat and raised my eyebrows meaningfully.

Grace’s eyes went wide again as she realized her mistake. Even young as she was, she understood that letting her cousin know that there were firearms in the house wasn’t wise.

Before going home, I took Ariel to an emergency walk-in clinic near the house to make sure she really was fine. Ari’s angel hovered nearby the entire time. He looked miserable. His chin had been bandaged, and his arm was in a sling. When our eyes met, he nodded towards Ari and smiled slightly as if to say, “I protected her pretty well, didn’t I?”

I was having none of it. I narrowed my eyes at him.

When the girls and I got home, we settled down and watched a Disney DVD. Even Drinking Tea did his part by jumping into Ariel’s lap and purring. Ari stared at the movie, her eyes distant. Several times, she asked me about her mother. “Will she go to jail?”

“Probably,” I said. “I don’t know for sure.”

“If she does, will you pay her bail?”

“I’ll talk to a lawyer,” I promised, “but I want to see her in rehab.”

“What about Aldo? Will you bail him out?”

“Of course not,” I said.

Ariel leaned her head against my shoulder. “Good. Because that guy scares me.”

Halfway through the movie, I got up to use the bathroom and make popcorn. When I returned, Grace was sitting by herself, staring at the TV. “Where’s Ariel?” I asked.

She shrugged.

Worried, I went looking for my niece. “Ariel? Ari?” She wasn’t in the kitchen or by the pool. I was checking her bedroom when, looking through the window, I saw her in the driveway. She’d opened the trunk of my car and was reaching inside.

I flew down the stairs, out the front door, and across the yard, but even so, I got there too late to prevent my niece from opening the gun case and taking out the rifle. “Put that back,” I demanded. “Right now!”

“I only wanted to look at it.”

“No looking. No touching.” My heart pounded in my chest.

“I know how to use it,” she argued. “My mom’s old boyfriend taught me how to load one. And every time I’d get him a beer from the fridge, he’d let me shoot it.”

Shoot it? Dear gods! I took the gun from her hands. “How did you get in there anyway?”

She rolled her eyes. “Your car was unlocked, and I got inside and pressed the button that opened the trunk.”

I cursed myself for being so stupid. In the short time that Ariel had been gone, I’d let myself get careless.

I was three words into a really good lecture about gun safety when Casey Scarsdale crossed the yard. “Is that a
gun
?” Casey looked over the tops of her sunglasses. “Lilith Straight, what on earth are you doing with a
gun
?”

I opened my mouth to explain then realized I couldn’t. Her question hit hard. Because what
was
I doing with a gun? Yes, it was a prop to help me tempt my client, but it was also something more. A symbol. Yes, a symbol of how bizarre my life had become. I now lived in a world where tempting people to sin was normal. Where I was gunned down by demon assassins and roughed up by angry angels. Where I overlooked the consequences of what I was doing because I wanted to make my evil overlord happy! Casey’s question was like Mr. Clerk’s magnifying glass, and I felt as though I were looking at my own life on one of his scrolls. Suddenly, I felt sick.

Casey continued to wait for my answer, but all I could do was swallow and shrug. “The important thing,” I said, “is that this gun doesn’t belong to me, and it’s going back to its rightful owner. Tonight.” I put the gun back into its case, secured the latches, and slammed the trunk of my car. Then I flipped the locks on the car to prevent Ari from getting inside again. Thank God Ariel wasn’t as good a thief as her mother. I knew from experience that a locked car wouldn’t stop Tanya from getting at something she really wanted.

Lucky for me, Casey was far less interested in the gun than she was in William. “So where’s your boyfriend?”

“Mom doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Grace said.

Casey’s lips quirked upwards. “So that adorable, dark-haired beauty I saw at your house the other day is available?”

“Girls, go in the house,” I said. “I’ll be right there.” At the tone of my voice, even Ariel complied without an argument.

I turned to Casey, ready to explain, but once again words failed me. William, too, was a part of my bizarre new life. A part that I’d completely misjudged. All this time, I really
had
thought a good heart hid beneath his incubus nonsense. But you don’t send a pair of demons after a woman you care about. Without meaning to, I began to cry.

“Oh Lilith, what happened? Did that man cheat on you, too? You really do have the worst taste in men.” Casey’s tone dripped with sympathy, but she was smirking. Unable to bear her look, I went into the house without saying a thing.

When the movie ended, and the girls went to bed, Ari panicked. “Tommy’s spacer,” she said. “It’s still at my mom’s apartment.” Ariel had lived the life of a street-wise twenty-five-year-old, but now she broke down like a toddler. “I can’t sleep without it.”

“We can get it tomorrow,” Grace suggested.

“No! I need the spacer. Tommy gave it to me!” Ariel looked up at me tearfully. “Please, Auntie Lil, I need it.”

Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t deny my niece. I used a tissue to wipe her face. “Lay down in bed, and I swear I’ll find it before you fall asleep.” I didn’t care if I was risking discovery; I’d use the otherworld tunnels to get the gauge.

Ariel looked doubtful, but she put on an old T-shirt of Grace’s and climbed into bed. “You promise you’ll get it?”

“I swear,” I said.

It took only a minute for me to travel from my kitchen to Tanya’s apartment where I located Tommy’s metal gauge. Ariel had strung it on a filthy shoelace and hung it around her bedpost.