Angels of Darkness

ask a few questions. Another investigation has opened up new leads in Jason Ward’s murder, and so we’re looking at a few details. We understand that you’re Miklia’s friend?”
    â€œYeah,” the boy said. Then more strongly, “Yeah, I am. So his murder is connected to someone else’s?”
    â€œThat’s what we’re trying to find out. Do you have a few minutes to talk? Not out here,” he added, when the boy hunched in his light jacket and looked up at the sky. “The diner across the street. Our treat.”
    â€œYeah, all right.”
    Oh, teen boys and their stomachs. Too easy—but it might have been anyway. Curiosity filled him now, and anticipation. Maybe at having a story to tell his peers the next day, or simply at the possibility of learning some grisly detail about the crime.
    Maybe she’d show him fake photographs from the fake investigation into that other murder. It would support Marc’s cover story and give this boy a little something extra to talk about—and maybe confuse the demon enough that he’d ask questions about the supposed murder, revealing himself.
    Though Marc turned and waited, politely gesturing for her to start off first, she shook her head, indicating for him to go on ahead with the boy. This was his show. She’d take up the rear and listen to the other ways the demon revealed himself.
    From farther down the street, two people in one of the offices had begun arguing. Only snippets of the fight reached her ears, but it was exactly what she’d have expected.
    â€” You stood here yesterday and told me that! Are you saying now that you didn’t?—
    No. Whatever that person was being accused of lying about, he probably hadn’t said it. That was often how a demon worked: shape-shifting to resemble a real person, making promises to loved ones, spreading lies, destroying trust.
    And it was what made some demons so difficult to locate. Arrogant and vain, many demons chose to create their own human identity and form, often in the guise of a rich, handsome male, and hunting them was merely a matter of making certain he was a demon and finding an opportunity to slay him. But a demon who made a practice of shape-shifting posed a different challenge: though it often kept a default, day-to-day human identity, the demon could be anyone, at any time, and appearing in the form of a person that the Guardian had already determined wasn’t a demon. The low-level psychic sweeps Guardians performed wouldn’t differentiate human from demon—yet any stronger probes would reveal their own nature, which might send the demon running from Riverbend and starting again elsewhere.
    Losing him, unless Marc happened across another town at the right time. They wouldn’t want to take that risk.
    At the diner’s entrance, she vanished her wings rather than trying to maneuver them through the small space. Marc held the door open for her, waiting for her to pass through. Did federal agents bother with such niceties? Radha didn’t know. Assholes usually didn’t bother, and she wished that it was easier to remember that Marc was one. She wished that it was easier to forget how much she’d loved being with him, the conversations they’d had, and how well they’d fit together. She wished that he didn’t look at her now with the quiet concern that she knew had to be false—and she wished that he made his opinion of her overt instead of hiding it behind polite human rituals.
    A different sort of illusion, but one she didn’t appreciate.
    Inside, her own illusion was simple to maintain, creating a lighter echo of Marc’s footsteps to cover her lack of shoes. As they crossed to a booth in an empty corner, the wet tracks she left behind on the linoleum had to appear as if they came from leather soles rather than bare feet. The whisper of her scarves became the heavy sound of a wool coat sliding across a vinyl bench seat. Perhaps she missed a few small reflections in the spoons she passed, in the silver carafe of syrup, in the shining wire that made up the baskets holding the jellies, but she altered the reflections in the windows and in the gleaming tabletop.
    No one but Marc would look any closer. No one but Marc would know to look any closer—and that likely included a demon. If she felt a sudden burst of confusion from one of the people in the diner, she’d know that some part