Conspiracy of Angels by Michelle Belanger Page B

that.
    Angry ex-girlfriend was probably off the list.
    “Seriously, lady. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    She made a disgusted noise, then pulled out her cell phone. Setting it to speaker, she held it up in my direction. My own voice spoke urgently at me.
    “Hope this is still your number, Lil. They have your sister. Not sure what’s going on, but the Nephilim are involved. I’m going to try to get her back. Hope I don’t disappear like the others… Gotta go.”
    “Lailah,” I breathed. The name came to me on a sudden tidal wave of emotion—fury, urgency, a cutting sense of loss. She was the one with the pleading eyes and the flowing, midnight hair. The trapped one. “She’s in trouble,” I said and felt it thunderously.
    “Of course she’s in trouble,” the woman spat. “She got tangled up with you.”
    I wanted to argue her point, but a lingering sense of guilt rose from the muddied depths of my memory. The meaning behind the sensation tantalized just beyond my reach. I ground my teeth in frustration, overwhelmed with the urge to hit something.
    “Can I hear that again?” I asked, making a grab for the phone.
    She slapped my hand away. I half-expected a barrage of psychic images from the contact, but my mind’s eye seemed blind to her. Not that I was complaining.
    “You don’t touch my phone,” she snarled. “Now where is she? Where’s Lailah?”
    I struggled to catch anything else that crashed to the surface along with the name, but it was like trying to pluck fish from the ocean. It was all too slippery. I held my hands out a little helplessly.
    “I don’t know.”
    The woman’s gray eyes flashed. “You better start talking, Anarch. Anything happens to her, I hold you responsible.”
    “Anarch? What?” I said. That was a new one.
    More sirens wailed in the distance.
    “I really need to get out of here,” I said, taking a few steps away from her shiny green convertible. “I can’t help anyone if I’m in jail.”
    She put her hands on her hips and maneuvered in front of me.
    “You’re not skating away that easily,” she declared. “Not till I get some answers. What were you doing with the Voluptuous Ones just now? Is she in there? If she’s in there, cops or no cops, I’ll go in and tear the place apart.”
    “Lady, have you been paying attention? I don’t know you, and I don’t remember your sister.” I glanced back in the direction of Club Heaven as someone shouted orders through a loudspeaker. “Dammit. Could we discuss this somewhere that won’t be crawling with cops in the next five minutes?”
    The woman narrowed her eyes. “With your friends on the force, what are you so worried about?”
    “Friends?” I scoffed. “That’s not likely.”
    “What kind of shit-pot did you stir? Sal doesn’t normally call the police. It’s bad for business.” With undisguised satisfaction, she added, “I’d pay good money to see the look on the old bastard’s face about now.”
    “People died.”
    She gave me a weird look. “So?”
    “What the hell is
wrong
with you?” I demanded. Exasperated, I said, “Look, I woke up half in the lake. I don’t remember shit, and I’ve got cops and cocademons trying to track me down. I don’t have time to argue with you.”
    “Cacodaimons? You can’t be serious.”
    I tried to step around her again to make a break for the motorcycle, but she just matched me movement for movement. Her little chin jutted.
    “Explanations,” she snarled. “Now.”
    I threw my hands up. “That’s what Remy called them. I don’t know what the fuck they were aside from hella-creepy,” I said with a shudder. “Nothing should crawl into dead things and make them get up and walk around again.”
    She studied me, frowning. The full weight of her gray-eyed gaze bore down.
    “Those things don’t come out of the deep places where they live,” she murmured.
    “Tell that to all the dead people in the club,” I replied.
    She considered a