• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“This’ll be my first, I reckon.”

“Shee-it.” Coyote shook his head with a rueful grin. “We’re gonna die.”

I looked sharply at him. “Are you approachin’ this like a suicide trip? You figgerin’ it’s okay to die and leave me there without no one to watch my back, ’cause you can just come back from the dead anyway? I’ll tell ya right now, Coyote, I’m plannin’ on livin’ a long time after this. If you ain’t plannin’ on survivin’, tell me straight and I’ll go get someone else to help me.”

“Aw, cool your britches, Mr. Druid. I ain’t gonna walk on up to ’im and ask ’im to eat me.” Coyote threw up his hands. “All I’m sayin’ is this ain’t gonna be no picnic. A fallen angel’s gonna be a far sight smarter than a reg’lar demon, and more’n a little stronger too.”

“All right, then. You got any idea where the demon is?”

“Last I saw, he was perched on one o’ their buildings overlookin’ a courtyard area. It’s got some grass and trees in it, so you can draw power there.”

“We’re gonna have to go through the school building to get there, though?”

“That’s what I ’spect.”

“We’ll have to go camouflaged. School officials tend to get worried about people bringin’ weapons onto their campuses.”

Skyline High School is a monolithic building of stucco-sprayed cement block trimmed in hunter green. I parked in the no-parking drop-off zone, because I just didn’t care about parking etiquette. I cast camouflage on both myself and Coyote, then got out and opened the cargo area, where I camouflaged both our bows, the quiver of arrows, and Fragarach too. It didn’t make us completely invisible, especially in the rain, but it sure helped. Once inside, we’d blend into the bland institutional décor without trouble. Coyote pitched in by giving us something he called “Clever Stalking,” which really meant we wouldn’t make any noise when we moved. (I’m not sure why he didn’t call it Silent Stalking; I suppose Coyote thought it was clever of him to think stalking should be a silent exercise.)

We glided by the reception desk without disturbing the matronly woman sitting there; she seemed to be emotionally involved with a game of solitaire on her computer. There were two full-time employees working at the attendance window (because taking attendance and getting money from the state is the most important job at public schools), but they were listening to parents lie on the phone about why their children weren’t in school that day, so they weren’t even looking up to see what was dripping all across the industrial carpet in the hallway. The doors to the courtyard gave a high-pitched squeak when we opened them, and the sound of pouring rain caused the attendance clerks to look up, but we slipped out without them spotting us.

Class was in session and the courtyard was deserted. We were underneath a roofed area that traveled around the perimeter, providing shelter for rare rainy days like this but usually offering shade the rest of the year. Thick ropes of runoff water slapped noisily on the concrete before coursing in swift rivulets toward drainage grates.

I turned on my faerie specs and had no trouble figuring out where Basasael was lurking. He was directly across from us, perched on the steel roof, in a Doppler-shifted cloud of wrong. The feathered wings he had eons ago were now leathery and batlike. The rest of him was still humanoid in appearance, just blackened and spiky and pulsing with evil, like a subwoofer vibrating a car’s windows and blurring the view.

What made him particularly repellent at the moment was his open mouth, out of which dangled another teenage victim’s leg—some poor kid who’d been on his way to the nurse’s office, perhaps, or called down to see the counselor. As we watched, the fallen angel’s teeth crunched down and his lower jaw slid sideways in a grotesque chewing motion.

Coyote saw it at the same time I did. “Too late to help that one, I reckon,” he whispered to my right. I couldn’t see him in the normal spectrum, but with my faerie specs on, he looked like a colorful collection