Harsh Gods E-Book

Michelle Belanger

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Zack Westland awakens on the shore of Lake Erie, his memory gone. Assaulted by powerful psychic fragments, he learns that he belongs to a tribe of angels—one of several living on Earth since the Blood Wars. Pursued by cacodaimons intent on killing him—again—he seeks to end war between the tribes.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Michelle Belanger

Title Page

Copyright

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM MICHELLE BELANGER AND TITAN BOOKS

Conspiracy of AngelsThe Resurrection Game (August 2017)

HARSH GODSPrint edition ISBN: 9781783299546E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299553

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: August 2016

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 Michelle Belanger.All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Did you enjoy this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.

To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our Web site:

www.titanbooks.com

In memory of Michael Wiggins (1965–2016).

You asked to see an early draft of this story, but I thought you had more time. We all did. Journey well, old friend.

1

Three more steps for the perfect kill shot. I checked the ammo on the crossbow to be sure I had the right poison applied to the tip. This had to be quick and neat. I was tired of getting clobbered by the city guard.

The chair squeaked as I hunched closer to the computer screen. A muscle cramped in my neck. I ignored it, shifting my wings. Two hours I’d been at this, and I still didn’t have the damned achievement. Fighting the tension in my fingers, I advanced my character by slow inches.

Flawless victory would be worth the pain.

Across from my character’s position, the target paced a restless circuit on a high balcony at the back of his manor house. The corrupt nobleman paused every six seconds to lean on the railing and peer at a hideously ornate fountain that squatted in the middle of his garden. Fat cherubs erupted like boils from the fountain’s central spire, water cascading around their stunted wings. If I angled the shot just right, I’d be able to pass the crossbow bolt through a small space between a curtain of water and one ugly cherub’s head.

That had to be the way to get this achievement—I couldn’t see any other clear shots that allowed my character to remain hidden, and I’d skulked through every corner of this damned map.

I brought up the targeting reticle, holding down the mouse button till the icon went from gray to red. The nobleman took out a snuff box, dosing both nostrils, then rested a hand on the railing, just like he had every other time I’d fucked up this stage of the assignment. I had approximately three seconds before he started moving again. I took a breath, feeling a tremor in my pointer finger.

Someone pounded on the door to my apartment.

My mouse hand jerked. The crossbow bolt smashed into the head of the cherub, alerting the manor guards. Uniformed non-player characters dashed in from every corner, quickly swarming me. My computer screen filled with splashes of vivid red.

“Fuck me running,” I snarled. Cursing the nobleman, the game designers, and whoever thought it was a good idea to come knocking at nearly eleven o’clock at night, I slammed my fist on the desk.

I almost had that shot!

The four terracotta demon jars sitting at the base of the computer tower jumped with the impact. Anakesiel’s jar toppled right over, rolling dangerously close to the edge. The game forgotten, I snatched up the jar before it crashed to the floor. Breaking it shouldn’t release the spirit, but I didn’t want to chance it.

The person at the door knocked again, louder this time. Briefly, I debated relocating to the apartment’s single bedroom, grabbing a paperback, and ignoring them till they got bored and went away. There weren’t a whole lot of people I wanted to see who might come to my door at this hour of night, not even on a Friday.

The few who leapt to mind didn’t actually qualify as people.

Whoever it was, they were stubborn. The knocking settled into a nerve-shattering pattern of dogged persistence.

“Hang on!” I said loudly. My voice came out all gravel and phlegm. The only talking I’d been doing over the past couple of weeks involved swearing at the computer and ringing up restaurants for deliveries.

Closing out of the computer game, I scooped up the rest of the demon jars from where they rested on my notes. Yanking open the bottom drawer of the desk, I stowed the four spirit-prisons inside. I slammed the drawer, feeling the neat regiment of wards lock into place.

My computer desk was hardly the most secure location for the stolen artifacts, but I’d warded it as best I could until I could come up with a more permanent solution. The demon jars—and the spirits trapped inside them—posed an awkward responsibility. I didn’t like the idea of babysitting them indefinitely, but I couldn’t trust them to anyone else.

Setting them free wasn’t really an option, not with what I knew. Despite the names of the vessels, the spirits imprisoned in them weren’t demons, but angels. That didn’t mean they were nice guys though. They were family—and my family was fucking terrifying.

Scowling, I scrubbed at my face like I could wipe away all my concerns with that simple gesture. As if. A week’s worth of stubble rasped beneath my palm. Normally clean-shaven, somewhere between the insomnia and the nightmares that galloped madly along after it, I’d stopped giving a damn. One sick day had turned into seven, and now I was burning vacation days fast.

The apartment looked like hell, too.

My unwanted visitor continued to knock.

“This had better be good,” I grumbled. Murmuring the phrase that obscured all the important items on the desk, I pushed out of the computer chair and headed for the door.

There were wards there, too, and they glimmered faintly in the wan light of the living room lamp. They kept the door from being a point of open access over on the Shadowside. Without them, anything wandering that non-physical echo of the flesh-and-blood world could just saunter into my apartment however it pleased.

I’d used the trick often enough myself.

The floor creaked as I approached the door—at six foot three, I wasn’t exactly light on my feet. The knocking slowed, and I paused with my hand above the doorknob. I had a lot of enemies in the world—certainly more enemies than friends. The door to my apartment had the standard fish-eye peephole, but I’d learned not to trust what could be seen.

So I closed my eyes.

Unclenching the imaginary fist I kept tightly wrapped, I let my psychic senses spill forth. Like a belling hound barely broken to the leash, my awareness surged into the hall, spreading to the apartment across the way, then rushing eagerly down the stairwell to the floor beneath. Dizzying and wild, the perceptions threatened to expand beyond my ability to contain them. I’d lost my finesse, and struggled to rein it all in.

“Focus,” I breathed, and I did.

Disjointed impressions drifted in from beyond the door, most of them the dregs left in the wake of mortal lives—worn scraps of emotions, echoes of intent, the sense of ceaseless motion from one space to the next. The instant I recognized anything from a neighbor, I cast that information aside. What remained was a tenuous perception—nothing so clear as a picture. One person.

Slight in build. Human. Nervous. Rushed.

If not for the door, I could have reached out and touched her.

Female. That was another piece.

Young—not a child, though. A young adult. There was more information fluttering at the edges, and I probably could have picked it out, had I pushed, but I had more than enough.

With an effort that felt like sucking a hurricane into a knapsack, I reined my senses back in, shoving them to their regimented corner of my mind. My eyes snapped open, and my fingers still hovered above the handle to the door. A scant few seconds had ticked away.

Satisfied that my visitor offered no threat, I flipped the deadbolt and pulled open the door. The young woman outside blinked up at me with unusually dark eyes, peering through glasses with hipster-black frames. Her puffy winter coat was snow-bunny pink with faux fur trim that hoped some day to meet a real rabbit. Long, glossy black hair spilled out from under a knitted cap with a little pompom on the top. Despite the heavy coat and ridiculous hat, her arms were wrapped tightly across her midsection, as if she was struggling not to shiver.

When she saw me looming in the door, her cinnamon-colored skin went several shades lighter. The hair and whiskers probably made me look like a crazy man, but I hadn’t expected that kind of reaction.

I must have looked worse than I felt.

“You’re Professor Zachary Westland?” she asked. She didn’t sound too sure about it. Leaning a shoulder against the doorframe, I slouched a little in the hope of putting her at ease. I was nearly a foot taller than her, and that height bothered some people.

An anxious little voice in the back of my head whispered that she’d noticed something else about me—my hidden nature. I told the little voice to shut the hell up.

“Just Zack,” I answered. “I haven’t taught at Case for nearly two years.”

She chewed her lower lip and fussed with her car keys. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty. Not old enough to be one of my graduate students, not young enough to be selling Girl Scout cookies—which was a shame. Some thin mints would have seriously improved my mood.

“What can I do for you?” I asked to break the silence. My voice still carried a jagged edge. I cleared my throat, trying to remember how to talk like a normal person. My words could channel a lot of power—literal magic—and this girl didn’t deserve to get hammered just because I’d been cooped up too long.

“Father Frank sent me,” she replied, flashing a nervous smile.

She said it like I should know the name. I didn’t. Then again, it might have been one of the things that had been taken from me. I didn’t want to explain my mutilated memory, and I really didn’t want to hear any well-intentioned platitudes from a complete stranger. Those would just drive me to slam the door in her face. So I played it off.

“What did Father Frank want, exactly?” I asked.

She brightened a little, saying, “He needs your help with a case. He told me to tell you that he understands you don’t want to be bothered right now, but it’s really important. And she lives close—I can take you there tonight.” She held up the car keys like they were some kind of talisman.

I wracked my broken brain for any recollection about Father Frank, and whatever sort of “case” he typically managed—particularly at eleven o’clock on a Friday night. The best I dredged up was a brief flash of an older man, nearly as tall as me, and built like a welterweight boxer. It might have been a memory—or I might have pulled it out of the girl’s head. That usually took physical contact, but catching a stray thought or two wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

Then a larger concern began to gnaw at me. It was probably just residual paranoia from the nightmares, but it couldn’t be ignored.

“If it’s that important,” I asked suspiciously, “why didn’t he come here to speak with me himself?”

Something in my look made her back up a step. Anxiety that verged upon fear wafted from her like a sour perfume. I was pretty sure she was responding to my physical appearance—lazy bachelor with a side of Unabomber—but out of reflex I pulled my wings tight against my back. She probably couldn’t see them.

My wings weren’t part of the physical world, and mortals gifted with enough sight to peer through to the Shadowside were few and far between. Nevertheless, I felt oddly naked in front of her, despite my jeans and rumpled T-shirt. Belatedly, I tried focusing on a cowl to tuck my inhuman nature more or less out of sight. I was terrible at the things, though, and half the time I forgot to keep one up.

No wonder so many of my nightmares revolved around having my nature exposed in front of a mob of angry mortals. It was my personal version of naked-in-front-of-the-class.

So I pictured the veil of energy settling over me, wings and all, and tried to radiate just a normal guy. It didn’t seem to help, though, and my late-night visitor still couldn’t meet my eyes.

“When you wouldn’t respond to his texts or his calls, he was going to head up here,” she mumbled in a subdued voice. “But then Halley started seizing again. So he sent me.”

That broke my concentration, and the cowl shivered to pieces. Pompom Hat Girl didn’t seem to notice. Whatever she might be, she wasn’t psychic.

“Hold on,” I said. “Seizing? What kind of case are we talking about?”

A look of confusion flickered across her dark features.

“An exorcism, of course.”

I stammered as thoughts whirled too fast for my mouth to keep up. A priest wanted my help with an exorcism. Seriously? That was a smothering level of irony, considering my many winged relations. Was this a regular thing or was the universe having extra fun with me?

How much did my inhuman nature tie into the request? He couldn’t possibly know about me—could he?

I mentally tallied half a dozen scenarios, few of which I found desirable. Eventually, I managed to reply.

“Why don’t you come inside and tell me the whole story?” I offered, hoping it didn’t make me look like a creeper. “And start from the beginning.”

“No.” She shook her head, and the little pompom at the top of her hat bobbled. “I’m supposed to take you directly to the Davis house, or just head back there myself.”

I started to object. She squared her stance and dragged her eyes to meet mine with a hard-won look of defiance. Her anxiety still quavered beneath the surface—something about me had really rattled her—but she held it back with a steely sense of purpose. Her throat hitched with a convulsive swallow, but when she spoke again, a little of that steel could be heard in her voice.

“I don’t really know you,” she said. “I just know that Father Frank trusts you. He needs your help.” At those last four words, I felt an all-too-familiar compulsion tug in my chest.

Fuck.

Had I taken some vow in the distant past, to just drop everything when someone asked for help? If so, I’d forgotten about it—along with nearly everything else—but clearly, forgetting didn’t let me wiggle around the consequences.

I sighed. “Let me grab my leather.”

2

I snagged my biker jacket from where it had fallen behind the couch, then went in search of my cellphone. I’d thrown that somewhere and had done my best to forget about it. Funny thing, me and memory. There was so much I fought to remember, and just as much I struggled to forget.

While I dug around for the phone, the girl lingered awkwardly in the doorway. She hugged herself in her puffy pink coat, though I couldn’t imagine how she was still cold. The super kept the apartment building somewhere next to boiling in the winter—most of the residents were retirees, except for me.

Her obsidian-chip eyes flickered behind her glasses, taking in the whole of my apartment—the packed bookshelves that lined the living room, the framed pages of illuminated manuscripts hung on the walls, the milk-carton-sized TARDIS perched next to the computer tower not far from an old-school Han Solo posed with his blaster.

Han always shoots first.

The books and art and toys were lovingly maintained, everything orderly and in its place—but then there were the stacks of empty take-out cartons scattered across the coffee table. A pile of dirty laundry had made it as far as the easy chair and had sprawled, forgotten, ever since. Half-empty coffee mugs stood like stranded soldiers atop the counters, the side tables, and the mantle over the gas fireplace.

“I know it’s a mess,” I muttered.

“I didn’t say that,” she responded guiltily, looking away from the sink full of dirty dishes.

“Word of advice?” I offered as I finally spied the smartphone half under a pile of notes on the Book of Enoch. I checked the charge—it was in the red—and pocketed it anyway. Striding over to my visitor, I said, “Don’t play poker.”

She pouted, then used her middle finger to shove her glasses up her thin, straight nose. On anyone else, it would have been a none-too-veiled response to my smartass comment. With her, it seemed both habitual and oblivious.

While she hovered at the threshold, I buckled the biker jacket like I was girding for war. A vintage piece from the post-punk ’80s, it had been through a lot with me, especially one cold November night on the dark waters of Lake Erie.

My friend Lil paid a professional leather cleaner a small fortune to restore it—a “kindness” she gleefully dangled over my head whenever she could. I’d had my own guy go over it back in January to make a few strategic changes, including a whole new lining with a custom inner holster for my new favorite gun. The thick, black leather with its many zippers and buckles settled across my shoulders with a reassuring weight. I felt comfortable in the hardy second skin. The subtle lines of the SIG against my ribs certainly didn’t hurt.

“All right,” I intoned. “Take me to your leader.”

She stared blankly at me. I was kind of used to that. One thing I’d retained was a near-encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. I found the references amusing, but had long ago stopped expecting anyone else to follow along.

“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Nodding, the girl turned and headed down the stairs. Pushing through the vestibule door, she fought with the outer one, straining against the wind. It was practically like an airlock, and an icy blast from off the lake swept into the glassed-in space. March had come in like a lion, and was still mauling the city with chilly tooth and claw.

Once outside, she winced as the relentless fingers of the wind plucked at the edges of her coat. Quickly, she zipped it all the way to the top before tugging her hat down to cover her ears.

My body registered the temperature in a distant manner. She stared for a moment, then led me to her car—an anonymous white compact. I climbed in and ended up sitting with my knees up my nose. As she put the keys in the ignition, she stole a sidelong glance in my direction. She pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything.

A colorful, laminated rectangle dangled from her rearview mirror, decorated with a little brown tassel. I sent it spinning as I struggled to adjust the seat. Then I caught it between my first two fingers, stilling its wild orbit and muttering an apology.

Looking closer, I expected to see a picture of Saint Christopher. Instead, the image of a woman in a headscarf gleamed in bright, almost cartoon-like colors. She rode a white horse through what looked like a Mughal horde, casually lopping off an opponent’s head with her gleaming scimitar.

“That’s Mai Bhag Kaur,” Pompom Hat Girl explained. “She’s a warrior-saint.”

“I’ve heard of her,” I replied. “She’s Sikh, right?”

My reluctant chauffeur gave me another sideways stare.

“Yes. Not many people know that.”

I snorted. “Don’t let the leather jacket fool you. I’m not some knuckle-dragger. I taught at Case, remember?”

She did that nervous thing with her glasses, then turned her full attention to her crowded ring of keys. Singling one out, she inserted it into the ignition. I tapped the icon of Mai Bhag Kaur, sending it spinning again.

“I didn’t think Sikhs believed in anything like Christian possession,” I said casually. “How’d you end up doing exorcisms with Father Frank?”

“I don’t do exorcisms,” she said curtly. “He teaches me judo and mixed martial arts. In exchange, I give him some of my time. Tonight, that involves driving.”

It was my turn to stare. “Trying to live up to your warrior-saint?” I asked.

She grabbed the icon, stilling it. Her throat worked as she swallowed.

“I don’t like being afraid.”

So I shut the hell up. She put the car in gear and headed toward Mayfield Road. Instead of making small talk, I scoured my cellphone for any calls or texts I might have missed, especially from this mysterious Father Frank who taught judo to Sikh girls and did exorcisms on weekends.

My sibling Remy had sent about a dozen texts over the past two weeks, all of which I’d chosen to ignore. Most of them only said, “Call me,” anyway. There were a couple of calls from work—likewise ignored.

Nothing about an exorcism.

“When did you say this guy was calling me?” I asked. If I hadn’t gotten such a wholly guileless vibe from her, I would have been plotting ways to get out of the vehicle—there were a lot of reasons to doubt her story. Given the life I led, it was a good policy to assume everyone was out to get me. Most of the time, they were.

“Last night. Most of today,” she answered. “Maybe fifteen minutes before I showed up. It kept going straight to voicemail, but he said sometimes, you get real busy and turn it off.”

I powered down the smartphone then brought everything online again—which was about the extent of my knowledge of how to screw with the thing. Give me a search engine and I could perform miracles—hand me the hardware that ran the search engine, and I felt like a Neanderthal working a Wii.

The screen reloaded at what felt like a geologic pace. I checked for texts again.

“Nope,” I said. “Nothing.”

As I put the phone away, the scar on that hand gave a twinge. I massaged it automatically. It had been giving me trouble for a couple of months now, always itchy on the wrong side of my skin.

“I made the last three calls myself,” the girl said. “I heard your voice on the message. You have a very distinctive voice.”

“I don’t know what you’re calling, but it can’t be my cellphone.”

“It’s your voice,” she insisted, pulling up to a light.

“I’m telling you, I’ve had this phone since November, and nothing about exorcisms has come through—”

I cut myself off, twitching with the force of revelation. Pompom Hat Girl caught the motion from the corner of her eye, turning her attention from the road long enough to spear me with a quizzical glance. Churning anxiety spiked through my gut, and I didn’t know how much of it made it to my face.

Someone behind us honked as she idled too long, and the car rabbited forward as she gave it too much gas. I barely noticed—my thoughts spun back to a night of pitiless skies, cold, seething waters, and the nightmare shrill of cacodaimons rising from Erie’s muddy depths.

I’d lost so much on that lake.

“Do you have a work phone?” she asked tentatively. I made a monosyllabic sound that wasn’t really a response. Our little compact glided past the high stone wall of Lake View Cemetery, and I found myself drowning in memories.

I’d had a cellphone before that awful night—used it to call the apartment with panicked messages for Lailah. Beautiful Lailah. Dead even in my dreams.

I shoved the thoughts away before they could gut me. I’d spent weeks now fighting not to think of her, video games filling the hole where my memories should be, because whiskey didn’t do shit.

The phone was probably somewhere at the bottom of Lake Erie, buried in the silt and the dark along with the Eye of Nefer-Ka. All I had left of that horror was my Swiss-cheese brain and the scar on my hand.

Sensitive on some level to what I was feeling, my driver sat rigidly behind her steering wheel, eyes resolutely fixed on the road. It made me wonder if some of my emotions were spilling out. The laminated image of her warrior-saint rocked lazily with the motion of the tiny car as we descended into Little Italy.

“When you get a chance, I need that number,” I said.

Maybe there were more voicemails. Maybe one of them was Lailah, and I could finally hear her voice again outside of nightmares. But if my old cellphone lay at the bottom of the lake, how was it even taking calls? It shouldn’t even be in service—I hadn’t paid any bills on it since November.

It made no sense.

“You want the number to your own cellphone?”

“Humor me.”

She frowned, and again, I caught the sour whiff of anxiety, verging upon fear.

“Is my head on backwards or something?” I asked, damping down irritation. “You keep staring at me like I belong in a sideshow. I know I haven’t cut my hair or shaved in a while, but seriously—I can’t look that bad.”

Pompom Hat Girl hunched her shoulders and focused on the road. There wasn’t much cause for that level of concentration—traffic was light, and it was too cold out for snow. Old drifts piled up against the sides of the cars parked along the curb, but the street itself was clear.

“You look like someone I met a long time ago.”

“Pretty sure I’ve never seen you before,” I responded.

She stopped at a crosswalk to let a trio of tattered pedestrians pass. Their clothes were insufficient for the weather, and they hunched miserably against the wind.

“If you were him, I would never have let you into my car,” she said. Some of the night’s chill had crept into her voice. The stumbling group of homeless finished their slow procession across the road, and she nearly spun the wheels when she accelerated.

Curiosity welled up in me—and I did my best to beat it to death with a mental stick. If I focused too hard on her while she was immersed in those emotions, there was a decent chance I’d pick up on some of what she was feeling. It didn’t take a psychic to guess it involved some kind of trauma.

I had enough of my own shit to deal with.

Clenching the imaginary fist in my mind while the nails of my left hand bit into my tingling scar, I got so focused on shielding myself from the echoes of her trauma that I failed to notice when she stopped the car in front of a row of houses along East 124th.

“Someone took my parking spot,” she said, and she pouted.

Her annoyance broke the cycle. I relaxed my hold on the shields a bit. Closing my mind off like that might keep me sane, but it also made me feel claustrophobic and—if I was being honest—a little scatterbrained. I hadn’t worked out a good middle ground.

“It’s that house,” she said, pointing to an old Craftsman painted a fading shade of slate. “You get out. I’ll go park.”

“It’s late, and it’s dark,” I observed. “Sure you don’t want me to walk you back from wherever you end up parking this thing?”

“I can take care of myself.”

The whetted edge to her words reminded me momentarily of Lil, my dead girlfriend’s gray-eyed sister. She regarded me with Lil’s same intractable glare, so I shut my mouth and got out of the car. She started pulling away as soon as I closed the door—another echo of Lil.

At least she wasn’t as terrifying a driver.

I stood for a moment on the icy stretch of street in front of the tired-looking house. A very practical—and legitimately suspicious—portion of my brain kept warning me that this could be a trap, but that little voice was sounding increasingly irrational. I didn’t think the girl could lie convincingly if she wanted to, and the house she indicated seemed excruciatingly normal.

An electric-blue tricycle with shiny Mylar ribbons on the handlebars sat half-buried in a drift of snow near the front steps. Lights in pastel Easter colors were strung across the porch while the front door sported a wreath of colorful straw and plastic eggs. Little clings of rabbits, eggs, and crosses were visible in the windows stretching all the way along the porch. Even the welcome mat had a seasonal theme—though if the weather kept up, Peter Cottontail was going to freeze his ass off when he came to deliver his chocolate eggs.

“Yep,” I told myself, just before pressing the doorbell. “Only thing you have to worry about here is being kitsched to death.”

3

The doorbell didn’t seem to work, so I tried knocking. Immediately, I heard footsteps from the other side of the door, then a woman’s voice, muffled.

“Sanjeet—I told you,” she called cheerfully. “You don’t have to knock any more.” The door swung open, as she continued, “You’ve been over enough you can just walk—”

The woman stopped short once she caught sight of me. Her mouth remained slightly agape. Comfortably curvy, she looked to be on the near side of forty. Her dark-blonde hair had even darker roots, and her hazel eyes were shadowed by bruised circles of fatigue.

“You’re not Sanjeet,” she said.

“Nope,” I responded.

“Well, it’s late and we don’t want any.” She started closing the door in my face.

“Late? You people sent for me,” I responded. “I’m here to see Father Frank.”

She caught the door at the last instant, keeping it open a crack, peering through the narrow slice of space.

“Where’s Sanjeet?” she asked.

I hooked a thumb in the direction of the street. “Pompom Hat Girl is out parking her car.” Yep. I said that with my out-loud voice. Hermit life didn’t help much with my social filters.

The woman silently mouthed the nickname, brows creasing in a frown. She was saved from offering comment when a strident boy’s falsetto erupted from deep within the home.