“Okay, I’m
in charge by virtue that, one, I ordered the pizza, and two, that I can still
stand,” Wally declared to the conference room.
“Order more
pizza and I agree,” someone said.
“Seconded,”
came from several people, including Natalie and me.
“Already
done,” Wally said, wincing and grabbing for his side, but he stopped shy of the
blistered skin.
“Wally,
maybe you should get that looked at,” I said.
“S’okay,
Reilly. I got some guys going to set up an aid station across the hall for us.”
“Money is
good,” Natalie said sleepily.
“Hey now,
none of that! All of you, wake your asses up. We need a plan. That fallen angel
bastard kicked our asses. What are we going to do?”
“What can
we do?” Delphine asked, her Creole even thicker, now. She slumped in her chair,
an ice pack over half her face and a bottle of pills in front of her.
She picked up a pill from a small
pile and swallowed it dry. It was probably Vicodin or Percocet, and that likely
wasn’t her first, or even her tenth. We metabolized things pretty quickly, and
we all had our favorite painkillers and migraine medicines.
Hope
Wally’s aid station includes some prescriptions. I’m running low.
“We gotta come up with a way to
fight this thing. This is the shithead that came through in Kansas, right?”
Delphine, Natalie, and I nodded. We
were there. Jack and Anna Marie had been there, too, but they were overseas,
now.
“Okay, so since I’m guessing we
can’t destroy a fallen angel, can we send him back? Send him anywhere for that
matter?”
“Intentionally rip open a rift and
push him through?” Rich asked. “It’s not unheard of, but whenever it’s been
done, the . . . thing . . . has been subdued, first. I don’t want to try and
rip open a rift with this guy throwing hellfire at us.”
More murmurs of agreement.
“Can we reach out to the others? If
ever we needed cooperation, it’s now.”
“Yeah, we’re working on it.”
I thought about contacting Maddie.
Together, we could tap into the power of Jack Frost, but would it work on a
fallen angel?
Not
even Rich would take odds on if that.
“Can we even outpower this guy?” I
said. “I mean, fallen angel. Fallen fucking angel!”
“What else is there?” Natalie
asked.
“He’s not God. He’s got to have a
weakness,” Wally said.
“What be that?” Delphine said
“I don’t know. I don’t know
anything about this guy except he kicked our asses.”
“So how do we find out?” Rich
asked.
“What do I look like, information?”
Wally said, easing and wincing into a chair.
“I . . . know a guy who might know,
or at least who could figure it out,” Kate said.
All eyes went to her, and then the
light bulb went off in my head. “That detective guy Jack told me about.”
Kate nodded.
“Okay, see, this is what coming up
with a plan looks like,” Wally grinned slowly. “Where the hell are those new
pizzas?”