feather boas, young kids laughing at the theme, middle-aged former punks who’d been dancing to this music for twenty-five years. And plenty just like me and Cheryl, in jeans and T-shirts, looking for a good night out.
Everyone here but me was human, as far as I could tell. The smells were all normal—sweat, alcohol, drywall that needed repairs, a floor that needed to be cleaned. No fur under the skin, no chilled blood on the air, no weird magic. I hadn’t felt this mainstream in years.
I could watch people all night, leaning back in the booth and sipping my soda, Wolf resting contentedly for once. Half the people on the floor were dancing and texting at the same time, which made for a pretty neat trick. More songs followed, and it didn’t seem possible but each seemed more iconic and nostalgia-inducing than the one before it. Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Blondie …
Next to me, Cheryl wiped at her cheek and sniffed. More tears followed.
“Hey,” I said, leaning in.
Her face grimaced in a vain attempt at a smile. “This is making me maudlin.”
I hadn’t meant to make her cry. I just wanted to get her out of the house. “We can go—”
She kept talking. “You know I think it’s been twenty years since I heard this song? How did that happen? What have I been doing all this time?”
“Living?”
“It seems like I should have done … more.”
I put my arm across her shoulders and pulled her close. We sat like that through the next dozen songs, until around midnight, when the music starting turning harsher, more industrial and less New Wave, and Cheryl was ready to go home.
* * *
A COUPLE of weeks later, Cormac called and said he’d found something.
The first time he came over to the new house, he never really said whether he liked it. He looked around at the spacious living room, out the sliding glass door to the great outdoors, and said, “Awfully domestic of you.”
“I thought that was the point,” I said. Cormac had never been very domestic, and I couldn’t imagine him ever choosing a house in the suburbs. I felt a little bit of a pang at that thought, at the long lost might-have-beens. We’d traveled a long way since then.
“And next time you break your arm, we have a guest room for you,” Ben said.
“I hope I never break a damn thing again.”
By this visit, his arm was out of the cast and sling and in a neoprene brace. He still kept it close, favoring it. He was supposed to be going to physical therapy to get it back to its former strength and usefulness. I bugged him about it, asking if he was actually going, and he never gave me a straight answer. I hoped that Amelia was making him go. It was her arm, too, in a way.
Times like these, it was almost like they were married, which was an odd thought. I didn’t dwell on it.
We sat on stools around the island counter in the kitchen and ate pizza. That had been another consideration in choosing this house—wilderness was nice and all, but we had to be in range of pizza delivery. After eating and small talk, Cormac pulled a book from a jacket pocket—a thick hardcover with a fraying cloth binding. I couldn’t see a title.
“I’ve been reading up on that thing that attacked the church. What I have isn’t real satisfying,” he said. He looked down, watched his fingers tap the edges of the cover. “It’s a demon, but that’s a catchall term. Lots of supernatural beings get called demons if people don’t know what else to call them, or the name is untranslatable. This one didn’t do much to identify herself—she might even have been a human magician if it weren’t for the smoke, and the way she escaped—”
“Wait, she escaped? She’s not … gone?” I didn’t say dead, which might not have meant much, depending on her origin.
“She got pulled back to wherever she came from,” he said.
Ben asked, “So what is she?”
Cormac pursed his lips like he didn’t want to answer. Then he said, “Amelia thinks she was one of the fallen.”
“Fallen what?” I said.
“Fallen angels.”
We stared at him, absorbing that little tidbit.
“You’re serious,” Ben said finally.
Cormac opened the book to a page he’d marked and started reading, following the line with a finger. “‘Such place Eternal Justice had prepared for those rebellious, here their prison ordained in utter darkness…’”