Could Hayyel be bound to a statue, and not to a building? Or...
I wasn’t going to say it aloud but maybe one of the statues was a real being, like frozen. All I could think of was Han Solo stuck in carbonite. Or like trapped by a curse in a statue. Could Hayyel himself be bound in one of these? Could it be so easy to find him?
I shined my light on the faces, and though none looked like Hayyel, the Jesus got hotter. “I think one of the statues is more than it seems.” I removed the Jesus icon from my pocket and held it out over each statue in turn. There were a lot of them and as I moved through the angels and saints, I was able to narrow it down to three that were standing close to together. “Can you separate these three? It’s one of them.”
Bruiser was stronger than a normal human, but thethree statues were solid stone and incredibly heavy, so Eli holstered his weapon and the two men tilted and slid each of the interesting statues out a few feet. I walked around the perfect stone bodies, wondering suddenly if vamps had stood for the sculptor, able to remain unmoving for extended periods of time, unbreathing, their bodies perfect in undeath, and some as pale as the marble I was looking at. My flashlight glinted off the stained glass windows whenever I tilted it wrong and created strange glowing shadows, as if the statues were moving. The glints of red and blue matched my visions.
Could Hayyel be trapped inside a statue? I placed a fingertip on one cold-as-stone chest. The Jesus focal didn’t react.
Playing the Hot and Cold game, I eliminated two of the statues, settling on one white marble angel statue that was now facing the pulpit, or whatever Catholics called it. Probably something fancy with a Latin origin. The angel had folded wings covering his lower body, and long curling hair with androgynous features. One beautifully carved, lifelike foot was exposed, partially covered with a carved robe. I looked up to see Leo watching through the open window.
Bending, I ran the Jesus up and down the statue, concentrating on the halo, the hands, the wings, but the icon stayed the current temp. I knelt and ran it along the base. At the feather-covered foot, the Jesus went scorching red. I dropped it with a few words for which I’d have gotten my mouth washed out had I said them as a kid. “Sorry,” I mumbled to the angel statue. With one of the hankies I now carried around, I lifted the Jesus and slid it to the side to cool before I put it in my pocket. “The foot. Something about the foot.”
Eli and Bruiser searched the statue with the lights and their fingers but found nothing. “Underneath,” Eli said. He tilted the statue, taking the weight on his boot to protect the stone.
Bruiser, kneeling on the floor with me, ran his hands under the base. “Nothing,” he said, “except a little irregular place here.” His fingers moved in the shadows under the statue. “It feels as if the marble was damaged, roughlyrepaired, and wasn’t smoothed properly.” He shined his cell phone light beneath the statue and took a photo. He enlarged the pic, and when he spoke, his voice went sharp and animated. “The patch isn’t marble. It’s old, crumbling plaster.”
CHAPTER 17
Undead Strippers and Tex in Love
I heard a scraping sound as Bruiser’s fingers moved in the slanted light. Beside me, the cloth-wrapped Jesus was glowing, too hot to touch. A chill passed over me and I looked to Eli. His eyes were sweeping the room. High in the arches, a passing car’s headlights made its way through a crack in the wood that covered a stained glass window. The reflection painted the ceiling in reds and blues and more dancing shadows.
In the odd light, for a moment, the sanctuary looked exactly like the vision of my soul home, as Hayyel’s angel wings draped down the mold-stained walls, feathers bright in the reflected light.Holy crap.Hayyel washere. Here and somewhere else too. Here and not here. A between place? Pocket universe?
A breeze blew through, chilled and clammy, like dead flesh.
I drew in a breath. Pulled a weapon. If someone was going to attack, then with Eli’s hands full and Bruiser on his knees now was the time.
Quint, Fawn, and I and scoured the space, weapons ready, searching for encom.
The only change was on the walls. An image of wings brightened there, as if the feathers brought their own light, becoming fully visible.
Bruiser took a sharp breath. Whipped his hand away from the statue as if it burned him.
Eli’s heart rate sped. He jerked his boot out, as if the marble flared hot, yet I knew it hadn’t. He set it flat, dropping it upright so quickly that the statue rocked. Pulled two weapons. This was no personal, spiritual vision. We could all see the wings.
But there was no physical threat. Just... angel wings on the walls. Into the shadows around us I asked, “How did you get trapped?”
Hayyel’s wings glowed on the walls, shaped like a hawk’s, now glowing with color in teal and charcoal and iridescent black. He didn’t always look the same, yet I always knew him. Something flickered on the statue, close by Eli. Weapons still drawn, I turned my attention to it.
The marble statue seemed to darken. In seconds, the white stone grayed into the dark of a cloud-shrouded dawn. The statue rocked again, all by itself this time, a heavy grating sound. It went dark and then darker, not as if shadows were falling over it, but as if the white marble was... changing.
We stepped away.
Eli murmured into his mic, “Team Koppa. High alert. Maintain positions.”
The statue deepened, dimmed until it was fully dark, lightless as black onyx, the same lightless shade as Hayyel’s real skin in the visions I had of him. Hayyel’s face reshaped the stone, bold features, unearthly beautiful. He blinked and his golden eyes roamed the church. The wings that were folded back from the black marble shifted from snowy white into golden tones with brown and red spots, streaks of teal, the feathers looking so real I almost reached out to them. In my pocket, the Glob grew warm, warning me not to touch. Something was off.
Except for his face and eyes, he still looked like a statue,and yet also like Hayyel, stone and angel-flesh all at once. Hayyel had both replaced the statue and become the statue. Around his waist hung a silver chain. I had seen that before, in the last vision at Aggie One Feather’s sweathouse.
Hayyel’s bright eyes alighted on me and he smiled. “How is your godchild, the one who is our... asset?”
Holy crap.There was a lot encapsulated in that question. Mostly that Hayyel had been listening in on my life. I was an asset. He had clearly heard that conversation. And Angie.
The angel had become Angelina Everhart Trueblood’s guardian angel when I prayed for her, when I became her godmother. That made Hayyel and me, together, her guardians, and Angieour asset.
“She’s good. Ummm. What’s up?”Crap. Did I really just ask an angel of the Most High “What’s up?”
