Ace of Shades (Magic After Midlife #7) Paperback

Chapter 1

“Celestial beings are colossal dicks,” Dumah, the angel currently presenting as my cousin Goldie, said. Her plastic clogs slapped against the rough-hewn paving stones of an enormous courtyard and orange blossoms fluttered into her frizzy gray hair from surrounding trees. “Present company included.”

One second, I’d been in my living room, having the shock of my life realizing that the three angels Senoi, Sansenoi, and Sammaneglof had been the ones who killed my parents and Fred McMurtry. The next, Dumah-Goldie had appeared in a blast of trumpets and was ushering me into Gehenna. If only solving my jigsaw puzzles earned me this same kind of fanfare.

Hummingbirds in a rainbow of iridescent colors dipped and soared between patches of swaying wildflowers, while the air was fresh and sweet. I spun slowly, eyes wide. This was the land of the dead where wicked spirits resided?

“Stop.” I pinched myself, half convinced this was some go-into-the-light scenario, especially since my magic was gone. A distant part of me freaked out at my helplessness, but most of me fell into line with the chill vibe exuded here.

Not once in my life had I been described as chill.

“Are you compelling me into being calm?” I said, abruptly becoming even less calm.

“Compulsions are so passive-aggressive. If I wanted you calm, I’d say so.” The older woman tugged up her shapeless jeans with a little hip wriggle. It was such quintessentially Goldie behavior that I squeaked, plowing my fingers into my hair. Though my real cousin, who lived in Florida, veered less to jeans and more to floral capris these days.

At least the angel didn’t smell like tea tree oil, that fresh camphor scent from my cousin’s favorite lotion. It might have sent me over the edge.

“You look like you’re gonna plotz.” Dumah-Goldie jerked her chin at two elaborately carved chairs on the grassy bank overlooking the water. “Sit. Take a load off.”

Fumbling for the armrest, I crashed into the seat then squinted up at the sun, shielding my face with one hand.

The storm clouds and fog that were visible every time Laurent tore open a portal to this place were notably missing, and the fluffy cloud drifting overhead looked like a bunny rabbit. Not even a bunny rabbit with fangs or rabies of the damned. Huh. I peered into the crystalline depths of the meandering river, but unless the fat koi sunning themselves were repositories for especially malevolent souls who’d been terrified of water, I had nothing.

Where were all the tortured dybbuks? It was one thing for Dumah to assume my cousin’s image to accommodate the limits of my brain in looking upon the angel, but either the angel had done a massive cleanup campaign before I got here, or… I shook my head. Nope. I had nothing.

“Shouldn’t it be black and ringing with tortured screams?”

She scoffed. “Oy. Who wants to listen to that 24/7? This is Ḥaẓarmavet, the Courtyard of Death, also known as my happy place.”

“Wait! So, I am dead?” I half rose up off my seat, feeling for a heartbeat.

She lowered herself into the chair next to mine, leaned over, and smooshed my cheeks with her hand. “Ah, matzoh ball, always with the worries. Stress and lack of fiber: they’ll do you in far too soon.”

I wrenched free, massaging my aching cheeks, because for a celestial being, she had a wrestler’s grip. “Please don’t call me by Goldie’s nickname.” My cousin’s way of keeping my real initials—M.B. for Miriam Blum—alive after I took her surname; this was the second time the angel had used it in our brief acquaintanceship, and it was getting weird. “Also, being dead is a pretty fair thing to worry about.”

“You’re alive and kicking.” She snapped her fingers and a black smudgy shadow appeared.

The demon was both too large and too small, had too many horns and too few limbs, but mostly I couldn’t process the sight because its utter malevolence was causing my brain to curl into a quivering lump. I looked away.

It growled something, to which the angel replied, “Prosecco, I think. Thanks, Tad.”

The air pulled taut and Gehenna’s stench of rotting onions that had been missing from this courtyard suddenly wafted in, then with a sproingy snap, all was serenity and orange blossoms once more.

I cautiously looked back, but we were alone. “The demon is called Tad?”

Was that the most important question right now? Of course not, but my mind was screaming at me that I was in Gehenna and that angels had murdered my parents, and I could grasp only the low-hanging fruit of knowledge.

“No,” the angel said, “but if I said its full name, along with all its titles, we’d be here forever. Also, your ears would be bleeding.” She shrugged. “Easier to use names of people Goldie likes.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “Goldie doesn’t know any Tads.”

“Disagreeing here, since she checked in on him every day for years.”

It took me a second, but then the penny dropped, and I stifled a snort. The angel was talking about a soap opera character. “Right. That Tad.”

Speak of the devil. I hurriedly dropped my gaze to my feet, because the demon was back. Glass clanked softly, there was another growl, more onion disgustingness, and that same air stretch and pop.

I cautiously raised my eyes again.

A table with a white cloth held two champagne flutes and a bucket with a bottle of chilled prosecco. There were a few scorch marks in the fabric and something had taken a bite out of one side, but in the face of much-needed booze, I was willing to overlook a few minor horrors.

As the angel poured our drinks, a blue and green butterfly flew over and settled in her hair.

“L’chaim.” Doubting I’d been brought here to be poisoned, I clinked my glass to hers and took a healthy slug. Fruity, light, and fizzy. Setting the glass down, I bolstered my courage. “We should talk about…” I lowered my voice. “The three.”

Dumah-Goldie boomed her laugh, and startled, the hummingbird zipped off. “The schmuck trio. You can say their names, though I refer to them very differently.” The angel’s eyes morphed from Goldie’s warm honey brown to an unforgiving gold with black vertical slits for pupils, cold-blooded as a snake.

I shivered, but in the next blink they were Goldie’s familiar ones. The abrupt shift was more unsettling.

A small tin containing hard lemon candies appeared in the angel’s palm, her nails bitten to the quick, just like my cousin’s. She popped a candy in her mouth with a pleased hum before offering one to me, but when I shook my head, the tin vanished.

“I’ve been watching you, matz—Miriam.”

“I gathered.” I clasped my fingers in my lap to keep from downing the rest of the booze, since I required a sober head right now. “You don’t want to be freed, do you?”

The angel topped up our prosecco from the bottle. “Big fish, small pond. No politics. I’ve got a good life here.” She belched and covered her mouth with the same half giggle as when Goldie got tipsy. “Tell me what you’ve figured out, I’ll fill in the blanks, and we’ll go from there.”

Go from there? To where? What more was there? An icy tendril danced down my spine. The angel could serve me delicious drinks and take on Goldie’s appearance, but the fact of the matter was that I was in Gehenna and at her mercy. I didn’t think she’d hurt me physically, but I had a history of supernatural beings cornering me into doing their dangerous bidding. If this self-admitted dick of a celestial creature requested something, I was in no position to refuse. She got points for self-awareness, but given the whole angel thing, that was only mildly reassuring.

“Okay.” I twisted my old engagement ring around my finger, slotting my thoughts into the correct order. Taking a leap of faith that the three other angels couldn’t hear this conversation, I spoke.

“Senoi, Sansenoi, and Sammaneglof wanted a Banim Shovavim to use the Ascendant to free you. Why?” I rubbed away a smudge on the ring’s band. “I’m torn between them either wanting to kill you or exile you like they did with the Leviathan. But what I don’t know is why they’d go to all that effort.”

“Because they hate that I’ve found a measure of peace and satisfaction here. Should I jailbreak out of my fine prison, freeing the dybbuks and causing death and chaos, they’ll swoop in and play winged avengers, finally putting me in my proper place.”

“They don’t care about the Ohrists who’d be inhabited, just that you’d damned yourself.” I saluted the angel with my glass. “Joke’s on them since you don’t want to leave.”

The puffy clouds flickered and darkened, their edges sharpening like razor wire, and Dumah-Goldie’s smile had a strained quality to it before she drained her glass. It was the same expression Eli had worn when he’d arranged a picnic dinner for our anniversary one year, eventually admitting that he’d forgotten about it until his partner, Detective Rose Tanaka, had reminded him at the eleventh hour.

Was it because Dumah enjoyed their life here even though it involved torturing dybbuks? Those wicked spirits had earned their damnation and, in my opinion, Dumah had nothing to feel bad about. Not like Gehenna’s former visitor, Kian, who’d enjoyed the pain she’d inflicted, even if it had been payback for⁠—

I gasped. “If I use the Ascendant on you, you won’t have a choice about whether to stay. Kian was forced to leave and you would be as well.”

“Yes.” She opened her mouth but took another sip instead of speaking. Why was she acting cagey?

“Destroy the Ascendant,” I said. “Problem solved.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” She set her glass on the table and leaned back in her chair, her face tilted up and her hands linked behind her head. “It was once believed that angels were the souls of stars.”

Goosebumps broke out on my skin. Stars meant ascendancy, and worse, mazel. Every choice I’d ever made, every path taken, curled in on me in tighter and tighter coils leading to this moment. I rejected the concept of mazel, but I’d been sure that I’d made the decision to destroy the Ascendant out of free will, and not because all the possibilities had narrowed down to an inevitable set of options.

“You can’t destroy the artifact, can you?” I said in a dull voice. “Is that why I’m here?” Forget it. I’d hide the Ascendant away and take my chances on it not being found before I became anyone’s pawn.

“That’s not why I brought you, so put that stubborn face away. Only an angel can destroy the Ascendant.” Her lips twisted wryly. “Look at you, all disappointed. Well, join the club. By ‘only an angel’ I mean ‘only a true, unfallen angel,’ which means I’m shit out of luck myself. The Ascendant was forged in stardust, the ultimate light relic to combat the forces of darkness. Ironically, only Banim Shovavim can wield it as part of darkness balancing that intense light.” She plucked one of the four-leaf clovers that sprang up around her feet and twisted it around in her fingers. “Any supernatural being with even a hint of darkness is helpless to its call.”

Like Kian. Something shifted in the pit of my stomach. “Was the estrie happy here?”

“If I say yes, will you torture yourself?” The angel pulled off the first of the four leaflets. “She was happy.” Pluck. “Not happy.” Pluck. “Happy.” She handed me the clover with the remaining leaflet.

“Unhappy.” I shredded the clover. “Except she wasn’t.”

“You have no more proof of that than what a clover tells you is true.”

“Why won’t you give me a straight answer?” I demanded.

“Because what’s done is done. Is knowing going to give you closure? Straight answers aren’t always the right answers, Miriam. Sometimes lies are. Or not having any answer at all. Sometimes it’s best to make your peace with remaining in the dark.”

That was annoyingly inscrutable. I wiped my hands on my yoga pants. “Why don’t Senoi, Sansenoi, and Sammaneglof like you? Is it truly as simplistic as you’re, uh, fallen?”

“I besmirched our kind with my actions.” The angel spoke in a haughty, mocking tone. “They’ve killed weaker angels for lesser infractions. But then again, to a purity complex, all morally ambiguous entities are worthy of destruction as soon as they stop toeing the line.” She paused. “I stood up for Lilith, you know.”

“No way.”

“Way.” She nodded. “They ran tattling and I got a slap on the wrist.” She tipped the bottle into the glass, but when nothing came out, tossed it onto the grass. “But nooo. That wasn’t good enough for the schmuck trio and they pushed for me to be exiled.” She lifted her glass, which had magically refilled itself. “The smug bastards were fine until it got out that I was getting a bit too comfy here.”

There was a ringing in my ears and something wet trickled down from my nose. When I touched it, my hand came away red. I screwed my eyes shut, realizing the demon had returned.

“I told you before, Tad, this isn’t a union shop, so no, I’m not overstepping by refilling my own glass, and if you have a problem with that, you can take it up with the boss.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, wait. That’s me.”

As the angel spoke, ice formed under my feet, a layer of frost crawling up my legs and along my torso. I wrapped my arms around myself, my teeth chattering and my eyes still very much closed.

Tad’s growls intensified and an acrid smoke tickled my nostrils. Okay, the demon wasn’t responsible for the ice. That was less comforting.

“Well, I don’t like your attitude either,” the angel said, “and I always win.”

Meaty chunks rained down on me, whapping me over the head. Screaming, I slid off my chair and pulled it over myself like a shield.

“Jeez, Tad,” Dumah-Goldie said, “where were you hiding that gut?”

Spitting demon bits out of my mouth, I white-knuckled the chair. If I died from ingesting demon blubber, I was going on an afterlife rampage starting with this batshit angel. What was I thinking coming here? I mean, it wasn’t like I had a choice, but still. Angels, all of them, were clearly unstable.

Silence fell.

Wiping goo off my face, I opened my eyes.

Dumah-Goldie stood in a splash-free zone, the one remaining circle of pristine lawn. Sadly, the rest of the courtyard hadn’t fared as well, because the grass that wasn’t stained black and red had acquired an oily texture, and oddly shaped bits floated down the river.

A knot of hummingbirds swooped down to feast and I gagged.

The angel placed her hands on her hips. “And here we were, almost at a week with no turnover,” she said. “Erica!”

This new demon was an enormous cube of red eczema’d skin, its eyes on stalks drooping off the top. Stumpy arms with terrifyingly sharp claws covered the cube, each claw stabbing a writhing, yowling dybbuk. She looked nothing like the glamorous character from the same soap opera as Tad.

“Holy shit,” I muttered. The demon didn’t melt my brain, but it still vibed evil. I scrambled back on my ass, landing in a puddle of Tad ooze, which stung mildly through my clothes. Please don’t let me grow a third ass cheek like the fish with extra eyes in polluted waters.

Erica beeped out some sounds.

“Tad’s gone. Congratulations. You’re my new personal assistant.”

The demon chittered excitedly and disappeared.

The angel motioned impatiently at me. “Did I tell you to stop speaking?”

“No?” What was the topic? Think, Feldman. Righting my chair, which immediately fell over again thanks to a broken leg, I envisioned my office whiteboard with all my notes. “Almost thirty years ago, Senoi, Sansenoi, and Sammaneglof convinced Arlo Garcia to steal the Ascendant and use its magic to free you. He used it for himself instead, resulting in his eternal torture in the Kefitzat Haderech. The schmuck trio was none the wiser that you didn’t want to leave Gehenna.”

“Keep going.” The angel cocked her head and narrowed her eyes.

I flinched, but all that happened was she restored the Courtyard of Death to its former glory. She’d even fixed my chair and put me back in it, nice and clean.

A hummingbird flitted in front of my face, but I waved it away, positive there was a lethal glint in its eyes that the ones on earth didn’t have. Or at least didn’t show.

“Arlo had already turned the Ascendant over to his subcontractor,” I continued, “and as angels aren’t omniscient—” Thank fuck, because I’d be in a shitload of trouble with the three for this conversation. “The trio had to track it down, which brought them to my parents, another couple of Banim Shovavim with the amplifier.” I bit the inside of my cheek, needing the sharp pain to keep my voice steady. “But my parents had given it to Calvin Jones, the Ohrist who hired them. Why didn’t the three leave Mom and Dad alone?” My voice cracked. “Why kill them?”

“They refused to help.” Dumah-Goldie eyed the river, changed the koi to octopi, shook her head, and switched them back. “You don’t say no to those angels.”

“Mom and Dad didn’t refuse,” I argued. “There was nothing they could have done even if they wanted to. They didn’t have the Ascendant anymore.” My stomach twisted into a knot; semantics wouldn’t matter to the trio.

Dumah-Goldie waved a hand like that was of no concern. “They’d stolen it once, they could have stolen it again. Your parents wouldn’t free me, allowing dybbuks to flood the world, and that’s why they were killed.”

I rubbed a hand over my chest, a single ray of sunlight breaking through the morass in my heart. My parents may have been petty thieves, but they’d died for their line in the sand. They were good people. I swiped at my damp eyes, conscious of the angel’s fidgeting.

“One thing you should know,” Dumah-Goldie finally said, “is that it wasn’t angels. Hunters killed your parents.”

I flinched. “Not a fire demon and an Ohrist?”

She made a raspberry noise. “Like they’d trust demons to carry out their orders. Besides, they founded the hunters, and even though Lonestars had banned them years before, some were still around.”

I stood up abruptly, wanting to kick something, or throw my chair, but I took deep breaths and walked it off until I was calm enough to continue. “The three lost track of the Ascendant after Mom and Dad,” I said. “Cut to years later when James Learsdon starts chasing after it. Maybe they turned him on to the artifact, but I think he learned of it through his archaeology pursuits, and they latched on to that, whispering to him, and eventually connecting him to me.”

“The Blank who wasn’t so Blank.” Dumah-Goldie snorted. “The schmuck trio did not appreciate you showing them up in the Kefitzat Haderech by solving the riddle. That’s when I took note of you.”

The breeze picked up.

Dumah-Goldie licked the pad of her finger, held it up, and nodded. “Erica! Time for walksies.”

The ground shook and I whipped my head around, expecting some Cerberus-like hellhound to come bounding out, but it was so much worse. The river bubbled, heat rising off it, and the far bank exploded, unleashing a tornado of pulsing, howling, furious slashes of crimson and gray.

I reached for my magic, but as it hadn’t miraculously reappeared, ducked behind the angel’s chair.

The tornado grew until it blocked out all light. Wind lashed my hair around, its force driving me to my knees. I scratched at my skin, trying to tear it off—anything to get away from the fury and evil emanating from the other shore.

The angel whistled sharply, and the gale stopped.

Erica popped into view, all her claws pointing left, and the dybbuks streamed into a relatively peaceful line flowing in that direction. The demon kept pace, bobbing along next to them like a guard overseeing the prisoners’ time in the yard.

Shaking, I pushed to my feet and mopped my face with a sleeve. Dizzy and nauseous from this many dybbuks, I couldn’t stay here much longer, and I rushed through the rest of my summation.

“The three angels bribed a Lonestar into covering up my parents’ deaths, then killed him when he was going to rat them out to me.” They could have cured McMurtry themselves, I bet, but used a demon parasite as a red herring. “I found the Ascendant and handed it to you. In turn, you pursued me with that engraved amulet and here we are.”

Dumah-Goldie cracked her knuckles. “They almost killed you after you found the Ascendant, did you know that? They didn’t want to risk another member of the Blum family having their own agenda for it. But you gave me the orb in the nick of time and got to live. They probably think I’m convincing you to free me right now.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. “Will they murder me if I don’t?”

“Not immediately.” She sounded so blasé about my imminent death. The angel whistled again, and Erica and dybbuks switched direction.

“You have a plan, right? You’re going to protect me?”

She chuckled. “I can’t interfere.”

A muscle ticked in my jaw. “Then what?”

The angel leaned in close. Her eyes were snake slits once more, but this time they danced with a deadly arctic chill. “You’re going take Senoi, Sansenoi, and Sammaneglof down.”