Down the Chimney Read online

  Technically you weren’t supposed to puncture the deer head with darts, but I got the impression this tavern had seen far more rowdy behavior because they seemed willing to overlook my makeshift dartboard.

  “Try it again, Cockroach,” Gregory commanded.

  I planted my feet and glared at him. “Worst. Date. Night. Ever. You suck, you know that? Actually you aren’t sucking anything right now, which is part of the problem. Let’s go eat, drink, play darts, and screw.”

  “Please?”

  The word still had the edge of command to it, but I was almost as much a sucker for Gregory’s requests as I was Nyalla’s and Lux’s.

  “Once more, Cockroach. Then we’ll throw things at deer and eat their wings.”

  I had a sneaking suspicion that Samael could get into Aaru. He was an Ancient. Technically he should have now been allowed in under the same “forgiveness” that allowed Remiel and the other Ancients to enter. Although as the Ancients had discovered, life in Aaru wasn’t really paradise when they were no longer able to shed their corporeal forms and exist as beings of spirit.

  I’ll admit I was less than motivated in this task. Yes, I wanted Gregory and his brothers back in their home, but part of me thought this banishment evened the score for the absolutely shitty thing they’d done to the Angels of Chaos two-and-a-half-million years ago. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t give a shit if none of the other angels ever saw their homeland again. And call me mean, but I felt like Gregory and his brothers should probably experience a bit of what they’d condemned their brother to so long ago.

  So yeah. No wonder I couldn’t muster up enough “feeling” to break through my own banishment.

  “Once more,” I told him. Then I did my best impression of a warrior cry, raised my sword, and hurtled myself through the wild gate.

  Only to find myself hurtled right back out again. Gregory helped me up. I dusted my pants off, dismissed my sword, and we began to walk to the tavern. The walk was pretty silent with Gregory brooding the whole way and me feeling guilty all over again.

  “I bought a toy for Lux,” I told him, trying to turn his mood around. It was the week before Christmas. Asshole needed to be jolly and not scowling his way across Antietam Battlefield. “I had to bid on one on eBay. Don’t ask me how much that fucker ended up costing me, especially since I needed to pay for express shipping. I hope he likes it because I’ve never gone to this much trouble for anyone in my entire fucking life.”

  “So says the imp who took on a high-level demon to protect her brother, and who signed a breeding contract with a psychopathic Ancient to protect her household.” He raised his eyebrows. “But I’m sure buying a toy from an internet auction is the most trouble you’ve ever gone to for anyone.”

  “It was a fucking lot of work,” I insisted. “What did you get him?”

  “I only was made aware of this gift tradition a short time ago, and I personally feel that material items are not a suitable way to celebrate the spirit of this holiday, especially for an angel.”

  “You’re one of those parents, aren’t you?” I kicked a rock out of the way, hoping I’d distracted him sufficiently from his crappy mood that we could actually salvage this “date night”. “Grinch. So what’s your idea of a suitable way to celebrate the spirit of this human holiday?”

  “Spending the day assisting those who are suffering and in need.”

  “Seriously?” I made a face. “I ordered an eighty-four pound turkey. I’ll send some leftovers to Hel for my Lows as well as the local soup kitchen. Will that suffice?”

  “And attempting to raise vibration levels through contemplation and centering.”

  I snorted. “Now you sound like Gabe.”

  “And spending the day in the company of those closest to us, bonding as a family and as a community.”

  Well, that’s what I was planning. Sort of.

  “Nyalla talked me into a big-ass Christmas Day thing. Over thirty people are coming to eat, drink, and do this bonding thing. And afterward, if you can pry Lux away from the fucking amazing toy I’m giving him, then you both can go feed people at the soup kitchen and do the Gabe thing on a mountaintop or something. I’ll be home, watching movies and eating leftovers, and maybe seeing what’s so intriguing about a Godzilla Droid.”

  “That sounds ideal.” A tiny frown creased Gregory’s brow. “Everyone is coming? To this celebration at your house?”

  I knew exactly who he meant. And I was sorry to say that even with me practically littering Hel with notices that Samael should get his fucking ass to my Christmas Day shindig, I doubted he’d show up.

  And I didn’t have the heart to tell Gregory that.

  “Yeah. Everyone is coming.”

  I felt that faint, fragile note of hope from him, and decided that maybe I should send out a few more fliers. Maybe I should ask Rutter and a few of the other Lows to try and track down Gimlet. Damn it, the guy never seemed to be where I thought he was lately.

  And I wanted him to be there Christmas Day. For Gregory’s sake. For Gabe, Rafi, and Uriel’s sake. And most of all for Lux’s sake. The kid adored his uncle, and somehow I knew Christmas wouldn’t be complete for any of the people I loved unless Samael made an appearance, no matter how brief.

  Chapter 4

  There were a few things Gabe had neglected to tell me about the Lisbon Christmas Parade. First, I wasn’t announcing it, I was supposed to be in it. Dressed as Santa. On horseback, because evidently the whole parade was on horseback.

  The last detail posed a bit of a problem because I hadn’t ridden my two horses in over a year. Being the Iblis, fighting in a couple of wars, and getting the entire angelic host kicked out of Aaru pretty much had taken up all my free-time, so for the last year my horses had just been grazing in the pasture and living the good lazy life. Nyalla spent a lot of time grooming and petting them and so did Lux. They weren’t ignored, they were just being treated as if they were large outdoor dogs.

  Piper would have been my go-to boy for this sort of event. He was calm, unflappable, and a year off work only affected his level of fitness, not his willingness to do as I directed or his generally plodding sort of personality. So with mild irritation at having to play Santa in a local parade, I hooked my trailer up to the Suburban and went to load my horse, only to find him lame.

  “You’re fucking joking me,” I told Piper who just looked at me with big soft eyes and nuzzled my shoulder.

  “Abscess,” Lux intoned, staring down at the horse’s right front hoof. The little angel had followed me down to the stables, fascinated by all this unusual activity around the horses and excited over the prospect of seeing me in a parade, which Nyalla had patiently described to him.

  Abscess. At least it wasn’t anything serious. But Santa couldn’t ride into town on a lame horse and Wyatt had taken Vegas off for some trail ride somewhere, so that left me with one option.

  Diablo.

  The half-demon/half-horse wasn’t the easiest animal to handle when he was being ridden regularly. A year off would only make him more skittish, wild, and generally insane. I glanced over at the horse who was watching us with wide, wary eyes, and prophesized that there would be disaster at the Christmas Parade.

  “I need you to be a good boy today, Diablo,” I told him. “You’re Santa’s horse, so act like it, okay?”

  Lux squealed and clapped his hands. “Mommy ride Dee-blo? I wuv Dee-blo!”

  Ugh, the baby talk was fucking killing me. Yes, he called me “Mommy” and Gregory “Daddy”. Nyalla’s influence there. I was pretty sure the baby talk was partially due to Nyalla as well. Lux had discovered that he got a whole lot more cuddles if he manifested a human infant form and acted like one, so around Nyalla he tended to be under the age of one, two at the very oldest. I wasn’t all that into cuddling human infants, and around me Lux had discovered that he needed to be a bit more self-sufficient if he didn’t want to miss out on things, so he appeared as a four or five-year-old, but the baby-
talk persisted on occasion. I think he did it to annoy me, and it worked.

  “Yes, I’m going to ride Diablo. Pronounce it correctly, Lux. You’re an angel. You should have enough control over your physical form to pronounce words correctly and use decent grammar.”

  “Fuck that.”

  Those words were perfectly intelligible, but they were followed up by a lightning-fast stream of angel-speak that was far from intelligible and made my head ache. Something about how I was going to get bucked off and land on my ass.

  “Probably,” I agreed. “And don’t say ‘fuck’. Your daddy doesn’t like it when you say ‘fuck’.”

  Lux shot me a stern, accusatory look.

  “I know. I say it all the time, but evidently it’s not proper for angels to use vulgarity or human curse words.”

  Another accusatory look with more angel-speak.

  “Yes, technically I am an angel too, but I’m an Angel of Chaos and identify as a demon and an imp. You’re an Angel of Order, so you need to live by those rules. Because you’re all about rules, you know.”

  He launched himself at me, wrapping his arms around one of my legs. But I want to be like you. I want to be an imp like you.

  I hoisted him up into my arms, holding his four-year-old human body tight. I’d never known an infant angel before, but it didn’t take Gregory’s occasionally perplexed expressions around our adopted child to know that Lux wasn’t a typical Angel of Order. He healed, although as he was young, I wouldn’t necessarily want to be on the receiving end of his medical treatments. He did like rules. He had a strong sense of justice, a need to make things right in the world, and he had more empathy than any angel I’d ever met. After watching a gangster movie, he’d obsessively checked on the horses, terrified that a mobster was going to show up, decapitate one and put its head in my bed. He’d built a little land-bridge for ants after a hard rain had left part of my azalea bed flooded. He saved his pizza crusts for Boomer and made sure all the bird feeders had seed in them.

  He’d also unexpectedly turned the propane delivery guy into a pile of ash one day, informing me that he was a “bad man”. I took the rap for that one and filed out the four-nine-five report, thankful that the guy’s FICO score was crap so I had some excuse for executing the dude. Then I sat down with Lux and had a firmly worded discussion about how angels just didn’t go around killing humans, that there were forms and reports and committees that needed to be done first, complete with Venn diagrams and Gantt charts. He took it all in with the wide eyes and enthusiasm that I would have expected from an Angel of Order. When we were done, he promised not to do it again without going through the proper procedures and approval process, then we both agreed not to tell Daddy about this.

  But in spite of his organizing my DVD collection, obsessively washing every dish the second it hit the sink, and making his bed with military-like standards every morning, Lux had a wicked streak. He sometimes lied, although he was worse than me at it. He liked to play pranks, especially on his Uncle Gabe. And he thought I was the most amazing, incredible, awe-inspiring being in the universe.

  I squeezed him tighter, burying my face in his golden curls and feeling the warmth of his spirit-self against mine.

  Okay, maybe sometimes I liked to cuddle too.

  After an embarrassingly long hug, I cleared my throat and sat my kid down, glad that no one had been around to see.

  “Help me get Diablo on the trailer, and I’ll save you a piece of candy from my bag,” I told Lux, knowing the kid would do just about anything for a piece of candy. Angels, it seemed, were genetically predisposed to have a killer sweet-tooth.

  He grinned and skipped over to the stall. “Diablo too?”

  I eyed the horse who eyed me back and flared his nostrils. “Diablo too, but only if he’s good.”

  Diablo was not good. All the coaxing in the world wasn’t going to get him on that trailer. He snorted and bucked and reared, yanking the lead rope out of my hands at one point and taking off down the driveway. We tried to bribe him on with peppermints. We tried a chain across the noseband of his halter. Finally I sent Lux inside on some stupid errand and used far more demonic methods to get my horse on the fucking trailer. By the time Lux came back, Diablo was loaded for travel and contentedly munching hay, but somehow the young angel knew exactly what I’d done to get the horse there.

  “Hurt Diablo?” His voice wavered a bit and he handed me the bar of soap I’d sent him off to retrieve.

  “Hurt isn’t the same with demons,” I told him. “It’s not like hurting humans. I would never do this to Piper or Vegas, but Diablo is half-demon.” Diablo acted like he was full demon sometimes, the shithead. “But you shouldn’t do things like this. Angels shouldn’t, not even to demons. Well, unless it’s a consensual, sexy-times thing, but you’re a bit young to be thinking about that.”

  Judging from the expression on his face, Lux was not too young to be thinking about that. I remembered how much he loved snuggling up against Nyalla’s boobs and wondered if we needed to have The Talk.

  “Be like Daddy, not like Mommy,” he said somewhat sadly.

  “Well, not exactly like Daddy. He’s got issues, you know. Anger. Pride. Dude does a better job with some sins than all the Ancients in Hel combined. How about you be like you? No labels, okay? Just be Lux, and don’t worry about the rest of this shit.”

  “Don’t worry about fucking shit,” he agreed.

  I winced. Gregory was going to kill me. “Yeah. Don’t worry about fucking shit.”

  Diablo behaved himself for the short drive to Lisbon—Maryland, not Portugal—and unloaded from the trailer as if he were the very model of a well-behaved equine.

  That’s about where the well-behaved equine behavior ended. Diablo was not happy about the Santa suit I needed to wear. He especially took exception to the hat, snorting at it and at one point trying to bite the fluffy white ball off the end. He was less than enthusiastic about the poinsettias and holly I braided into his mane and swished his tail anxiously at the huge red bow I’d affixed at the top. Climbing into the saddle, I could tell by the way he danced around, whites of his eyes showing and nostrils flaring, that this was going to be more like Santa-at-the-rodeo than a Christmas parade.

  “You’re bringing up the rear so you can toss out the candy,” a parade official told me. Then he handed me a giant black bag and got the heck out of the way.

  Good thing, because a giant black bag full of candy was clearly the most terrifying thing Diablo had ever encountered in his life. He reared and spun, then backed up faster than a Ferrari at the track, not stopping until we were practically out of the parking area. I loudly cursed at him the whole way, drawing alarmed stares from the other participants. I’m sure the parade officials were regretting extending this invitation.

  Finally I managed to get Diablo under enough control to position him at the back of the parade. Once there, he forgot about his accessories and the bag and focused on a sudden hatred he’d developed for the poor Quarter Horse gelding in front of us. The parade route was an out-and-back, with us basically following a traffic pattern where the folks on the right-hand side of the road would see us heading out, and those on the left would see us heading back. That meant Diablo got to not only stare at the ass of his new worst enemy, but he got to see the front line of the parade coming toward him as they returned to the parking area. This is when I discovered that Diablo apparently didn’t just hate mild-mannered buckskin Quarter Horses, he disliked draft horses pulling wagons, minis, mules, donkeys, and anyone dressed as an elf.

  I didn’t exactly blame him about the elf thing.

  The first half of the parade Diablo alternated between trying to race up and bite the gelding, and freaking out over oncoming animals, wagons, and costumes. Every now and then he’d catch a glimpse of his tail ribbon out of the corner of his eye and suddenly remember his decorations, starting to the side and snorting as if he expected the bow to sprout fangs and bite his ass.

 
I somehow managed to stay on him, digging into the black bag and pelting children alongside the parade route with candy. Occasionally I’d let out a “Ho, ho, fucking whoa you damned asshole horse, ho.”

  As we approached the halfway point where the majority of the people had congregated, I saw Nyalla, a baby Lux cuddled in her arms. She waved, and Lux took a brief second from rubbing himself against her boobs to wave and shout his approval. Diablo snorted, and I realized the stupid fucking horse was now having an issue with the giant banner stretched over the road. The announcer said something over the loudspeaker about the group in front of us, and Diablo halted, locking his legs. I nearly went over his head, my bag of candy crashing against his neck.

  The horse was so unnerved by the banner and the announcer that he was momentarily unbothered by the previously terrifying bag of candy.

  “Come on. Move.” I urged him forward with a kick. “We’re almost done. Halfway there. Past that banner, and it’s back to the trailer we go. Move, you asshole. I’ve even let you eat the rest of the candy in the bag if you just fucking move.”

  The horse trembled, taking one small step forward, then halting.

  “And up next, one of our very own angels from the Ruling Council as Santa!” the announcer boomed. “Let’s see some wings, Santa! Show us your wings!”

  I’ll be fucking damned if I was going to manifest my wings, ripping them through my Santa suit just because some asshole with a mic told me too. Instead I gritted my teeth and urged Diablo forward one cautious step at a time.

  “Wings, wings, wings,” the crowd chanted. I looked over at Nyalla and Lux and saw they were chanting as well.

  Fuck it. It’s not like this whole thing could get any worse, could it? I manifested my huge black wings, hearing the fabric of the suit tear. Diablo danced to the side, but seemed less concerned about the wings than the banner that had begun to gently sway in the chill December breeze.