Nobody's Angel (The Earth Angels) by Stacy Gail

relationship?”
    “They were in a relationship, a very serious relationship. After what happened with his father that night, he must have decided to not tell me about poor Denise. Oh, my poor boy must be heartbroken.”
    “Ah...yes. Would it be possible to talk with your son, Mrs. Denton?”
    “No,” she said again, her dour lips curling back in a snarl. “Hasn’t the kid been through enough? Get the hell out of here and don’t come back!” With that, the door slammed in Kendall’s face. She stood statue-still as she stared at the door, but he wasn’t fooled into thinking she was stunned by the rude behavior. By now he knew that look, and it made his heart drop like one of Wile E. Coyote’s Acme anvils.
    Kendall was thinking.
    Before he could decide how best to get her moving, a familiar pulse stabbed behind his eyes. In an instant, the white-hot shock of adrenaline mainlined through his system.
    Where is it? Where the hell is it?
    He slipped between the layers of shadow just as the door between himself and Kendall opened, and a beefy middle-aged man stepped out in nothing more than boxers and a stained undershirt.
    The undershirt was nasty enough in its own right, but it was the sledgehammer the man cradled that got his attention.
    “Kendall!”
    If she hadn’t pivoted, she would have been made into a grease spot. The sickly aura of the geist housed within the hammer-wielding man throbbed and oozed. Soulfire surged from his hands, readying him to pass the geist into the afterlife. But even as he rocketed forward to snatch up the maddened spirit once and for all, the geist shot out of its host and blurred into the side of the apartment like the spirit it was, that bizarre rippling of the air suddenly everywhere he looked.
    Dazed, the beefy neighbor looked at the hammer. “How’d I get out here?”
    Kendall backed away, her eyes on the hammer just as another door opened behind her.
    This time Zeke thought he was prepared. He launched, pulling at the shadows around him, every nerve alive and thrumming with adrenaline and soulfire. He cocked an arm back to blast the new enemy, only to falter when a tottering, blue-haired lady with an osteo-humped back and orthopedic shoes shuffled out, a pair of shiny metal knitting needles in hand and the geist’s aura boiling around her. This time Kendall didn’t need a warning as she flinched back from her ancient attacker, even as Zeke nearly crashed into the open doorframe to stop himself from breaking the elderly woman’s frail body into a thousand pieces.
    “You need to get out of here, now!” he yelled to Kendall, then hissed with surprise when the geist-possessed woman swung the needles down and nearly stabbed his arm.
    Great. Almost punctured by Grandma Moses and her knitting needles of doom. He was getting soft.
    “No!” Kendall leapt forward, much to his dismay, because the geist suddenly belched out of the needle-wielding granny and once again took possession of the man behind Kendall. The beefy guy swiftly closed the distance, sledgehammer lofted over his head for a blow that would have made the mighty Thor proud.
    Kendall was caught in a pickle and on the verge of being tagged out—permanently.
    With the geist bouncing between two armed hosts at such a fast clip, there was only one thing left to do.
    Retreat.
    Hauling Kendall into his arms, Zeke leaped off the second-story apartment balcony and aimed for the sky.
    * * *
    A scream burst from Kendall when terra firma was ripped out from under her feet, and she fully expected a plummet down to the parking area below. But there was no plummet, no bone-snapping splat where she feared her rescuer would take the brunt of their fall. There was no fall. Her mind seemed to bend in two as they defied every law of gravity in the universe, and shot straight up toward the moon. Somehow they were on an invisible express elevator powered by...by...
    Wings.
    Another scream wanted out, but it had no strength to gain escape,