Of Love and Evil (The Songs of the Seraphim 2)

This is someone to love. This is someone to love with all your heart the way you loved those people then, when you were with the angels, when you were with people you could never bring to your heart. All these ten years you’ve lived at a remove from every living being, but this is someone as real as Malchiah’s people were real, a person that you can truly and totally love. Never mind whether or not you can get her to love you. You can love her. And this little boy, you can love him.

As we crowded into the little elevator together, Toby showed me other pictures of me from the yearbook. He’d been carrying them around for a long time too.

“So you always knew my name,” I said to him, not knowing what to say really, and so stressing the obvious, and he replied that yes, he told everybody his daddy was Toby O’Dare.

“I’m glad. I’m glad you’ve done that. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “You don’t even know what I’m really like.” He was just small enough that his voice had a child’s ring to it rather than an older boy’s, and when he said these words they had a crisp clever sound. “I could be a bad student for all you know.”

“Ah, but your mother was a brilliant student,” I said.

“Yes, and she still is. She goes to Loyola to take courses. She’s not happy teaching grammar school. She makes straight A’s.”

“And you do too, don’t you?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’d skip a grade if they’d let me. They think it would be bad for my social development, and my grandfather thinks so too.”

We’d come to the rooftop and I shepherded them around the balconies and then down the long red-tiled veranda. They had the suites in the hotel at the end of the veranda which were close to my own.

Now the Innkeeper’s Suite at the Mission Inn is the only one that is really modern and lavish in the five-star sort of way. It’s only available when the owners of the hotel aren’t in residence, so I’d made certain that I could reserve it for this time.

They were suitably impressed with the three fireplaces, the immense marble bath, the lovely open veranda, and even more impressed when they discovered I’d engaged the adjacent room for Toby on the grounds that being ten years of age he might well want his own room and bed.

Then I took them into the Amistad Suite, my favorite, to show them the beautiful painted dome, and the tester bed, and the quaint fireplace that didn’t work, and they did note it was very “like New Orleans” but I think they were thrilled with the luxurious digs they had, and so the whole thing went as I’d planned.

We sat down together at the iron-and-glass table, and I ordered some wine for Liona, and a Coke for Toby because he admitted that now and then, bad as it was for you, he did drink a Coke.

He took out his Apple iPhone and showed me all the things it could do. He had filed all the pictures of me in it and now, if it was all right with me, he was going to take a bunch more.

“Absolutely,” I said, and he instantly became the professional photographer, backing up, holding the phone out the way an old painter might have held out his thumb, and photographed us from numerous angles as he moved around the table.

At this point, as Toby took picture after picture, a chilling realization descended on me. I’d done murder in the Amistad Suite. I’d done murder here at the Mission Inn, and yet I had brought these two people here as if this had never happened.

Of course Malchiah had come to me here, a Seraph who asked me why in the name of God I didn’t repent of the miserable life I’d been living. And I had repented, and my entire existence had been forever altered.

He’d lifted me out of the twenty-first century, and sent me back in time to avert disaster for am imperiled community in medieval England. And when I’d finished that first assignment for my new angelic boss, I’d awakened here, at the Mission Inn, and it was here that I’d written out my entire account of that first journey into Angel Time. The manuscript was in the room. It was on the desk where I’d killed my last victim with a needle to the neck. And it was here that I’d called my old boss, The Right Man, and told him I would never kill for him again.

Notwithstanding, I’d done murder here. And it had been cold, calculated murder, the kind for which Lucky the Fox was justly famous. I shuddered inwardly, murmuring a prayer that no shadow of that evil would ever touch Liona or Toby, that no consequence of that evil would ever harm them.

This place had been my solace before that murder. It had been the one place where I felt at ease, and it was for this reason surely that I’d brought Liona and my son to this very spot, this very table where Malchiah and I had talked together. It seemed natural that they should be here, it seemed natural that I should experience this new joy of having them both, in this place where my grim, sarcastic prayers for redemption had actually been answered.

All right, my own ways made some sense to me. And what safer place was there for Lucky the Fox than the scene of his most recent crime? Who would ever expect a hired killer to go back to the scene of the crime? No one. I was confident of that. After all, I’d been a contract assassin for ten years and I’d never gone back to the scene of a single crime, until now.

But I had to admit, I’d brought these beloved innocents to a place of remarkable significance.

I was so unworthy of my long-ago love, and my newfound son, so utterly unworthy, and they had no conception of it.

And you had better make sure they never know, because if they do know who you were and what you did, if they ever glimpse the blood on your hands, you will have done them the most unspeakable harm and you know it.

I felt I heard a small voice, not very far away, say distinctly. “That’s right. Not a word that could harm them.”

I looked up to see a young man passing by, making his way along the wall, past the door of the Amistad Suite and off out of my vision. It was that same young man I’d seen below by the lobby doors, same suit identical to mine, and the shock of reddish blond hair, and the urgent engaging eyes.

I will not hurt them!

“Did you say something?” Liona asked.

“No, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I mean I was talking to myself, I think. I’m sorry.”

I stared at the door of the Amistad Suite. I wanted to get that murder out of my mind. The needle to the neck, the banker dying as if from a stroke, an execution carried out so smoothly no one had ever suspected foul play.