She sighed shortly, as if he were trying her patience. She turned back to him. “To a Night Angel humanoids radiate a beacon of light, rather like if you had stepped onto a searchlight that streams up around you and on into the vastness of the night sky. Now imagine that there are words being projected onto this light, in all colors, shapes, and sizes. Projected from within the heart of your soul, Leo Alvarez. What is in your heart is there for all to see who are able to. The brighter the word, the more recent it has been stamped into your light. Your rage. Your fear. Your pain. Your light screams words like ‘betrayed,’ ‘helpless,’ ‘disillusioned,’ and ‘violated.’ The brightness of it tells me it has all been created very recently. And that then leads me to believe something happened to you, a traumatic event that showed you the measure of yourself as a man. Since the words ‘Bodywalkers’ and ‘Nightwalkers,’ and such are also clearly new, I can only assume that these are all conjoined aspects of your recent experience. Am I wrong?” It was obvious she did not think she was wrong in the least. “If so, I apologize for my presumption.”

She dismissed him once more, clearly not caring if she were forgiven or not. Very un-angel-like in his opinion.

His limited, human opinion. After all, what did he really know about angels? Pictures of human interpretation and expectation? Fair-haired, white-winged, halo wearers? White-skinned? It brought back a warm memory, something he hadn’t thought of in years.

“Mama, aren’t there any Spanish angels?” he had asked her shortly after he had turned five. He had been staring up at a white angel ornament on the top of their Christmas tree, the most recent in a long line of images of angels he had seen that holiday season.

“Oh mijo, there are many Spanish angels. Why would you think there aren’t?”

“Because they’re all blond and have white skin,” he said, pointing to the ornament. Then he reached to wind a finger thoughtfully into his own black curls.

“Ah. So you think the men and women who make these pictures and ornaments know the true face of the angels?”

“Don’t they?”

“They think they do. But the only way we’ll ever really know is when we die and meet God in Heaven. But I am very certain that they have Spanish angels who look and speak just like us.”

“But if no one really knows, then how are you so sure?”

“Ah,” she said, sweeping him up into her arms, her familiar oatmeal cookie smell falling like a blanket of comfort over him. “My smart boy. There has to be Spanish angels. When we die we all become angels. Tia Maria is an angel. She is watching over us even now and she most certainly is a Spanish angel.”

That made him smile. He remembered his aunt. It made him happy to know she was an angel.

“Okay, Mama,” he said, hugging her around her neck as hard as he could. “But I don’t want you to be an angel too soon.”

“Oh mijo, don’t worry about that. I’ll be here for a very long time.”

Leo couldn’t have stopped the soft smile touching his lips even if he’d tried. That was from a time when he had been innocent and when he’d thought his mother knew everything there was to know about anything.

Regretfully, neither had lasted past his teenaged years, his mother included.

Leo shook off the tumult of emotions this creature had sent washing through him with just a few sentences.

“Isn’t that a little redundant?” he heard himself asking with a sneer in his tone. Shut up, Leo. Shut up! he argued with himself. “An angel named Faith?”

“No different, I imagine, than a man being named Dick,” she said dryly.

He heard everyone in the room release a startled joint laugh, most of it through tight throats full of tears and tragic emotion. Then once they started laughing, they couldn’t seem to stop. Well, hell. If bearing the brunt of her set downs eased the suffocating tension of fear and anxiety, he was willing to take it on the chin. And he didn’t blame them for their laughter. He’d been out of line and Faith had set him back on his ass. Deservedly so. It wasn’t her fault he couldn’t find his footing in this ever-changing dynamic he called his life. It was probably a good thing that she refused to let him get away with it.

As he watched her placid expression, however, he could swear her lips curled ever so slightly at the corners. She was taking pride in her ability to deflect his raging bullshit. And so she should, he thought. There was nothing Leo appreciated more than a smart-ass.

He couldn’t help himself. It made him smile as well. That made twice now in as many minutes. If he kept this up he’d be guffawing any day now. He liked a good guffaw. It’d be a damn shame if he couldn’t find it in himself to guffaw ever again.

Then, as he watched, those beautiful electric wings of hers protracted. It was such a graceful sweep of glowing blue lines of energy, flowing directly toward him. He didn’t step back like the others did in order to give them the breadth they needed for full extension. He should have. After everything he’d been through, he ought to have avoided letting them touch him as if she were a carrier of the bubonic plague. But there was a part of him that was eaten up with curiosity. Were they just light? Would they bump up against him or pass right through him?

Because he didn’t move, they swept against him and then, before he could react with any belated protective reflexes, they passed right through his chest and body.

His first instinct should’ve been to be horrified and appalled at the intrusion, but it never came to fruition. Even though it ought to have been deemed no different than Chatha’s brutal incursions into his body, all possible hostile feelings died a stunning death when breathtaking heat and energy bled into him, quickly followed by a sensation of peace and well-being. It was a feeling he had thought he would never again know in his lifetime, a peace that stole through him literally from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet and toes.

But it wasn’t just well-being he felt. There was something else…something more visceral…something very much like what he had felt the very first time a girl had ever touched him intimately. Although it was many years ago, he could never forget the eagerness of wanting it, the overwhelming excitement of it, and the needful readiness of his erection. There was no denying it was exactly the same overwhelming desire pulsing through him now, as well as the same glory of that first touch, thinking it would bring a measure of relief only to find out it just made things hotter, made things harder.

As he stood there he felt himself react to the memory invoked by the sensation, his body growing hard in response to it and the sensations he was awash in. He wanted to jerk away, to force himself to feel it for the violation it should be, but he couldn’t bring himself to sully it. And when he saw her turn toward him with a startled, soundless gasp, he realized she was not intentionally trying to pull these things out of him. It had been happenstance. But he also knew by the look in her yellow-green eyes that she was one hundred percent cognizant to what he was thinking…what he was feeling. He wanted it to be a private feeling, he wanted to huddle it close in the confines of his mind and soul, not share it with someone he didn’t know the first thing about. But he simply couldn’t make himself hate anything about what he was feeling or her part in having brought it about.

She withdrew her wing and all its energy from him, the jerking movement almost like the too quick removal of a Band-Aid from a healing wound. But like that pain, it flew away in the next instant, and he was left simply stunned, still feeling everything he was feeling, and more than a little overwhelmed.

Seeing how uncomfortable she was, how awkward it was for her to hold that wing away from him, he stepped back at last, the movement alone reminding him he had a hell of an erection. She looked at him, her eyes partly accusing and partly…well, without really knowing her he could only make a guess, but it seemed like she was almost…curious.

But the impression only lasted a moment because she was turning away from him and looking back down at Jackson. Her left wing trembled a little, as if it were tautly ready to draw away again if he came too close. He took another step back, the shift of her eyes telling him she saw the movement. The wing slowly relaxed and he understood that she was trusting him not to come in contact with her again.

She needn’t worry. He’d be damned if he was going to let it happen again.

Leo sighed, knowing instantly that the attempt to brush up his indignation was false and therefore it fell flat. The truth was that he wanted to step forward again, to feel the touch of that energy, craving the feelings the act had evoked so unexpectedly. Not the arousal, though that was a part of it, he admitted to himself, but the fresh, innocent feeling of it. The feeling so pure and untouched by the difficulties and tragedies of adult life.

Not that his youth had been a blaze of contented ignorance. There was very little opportunity for innocence in a boy from the barrio, the son of a single mother trying to do the best she could to keep her children happy and healthy, while the world thwarted her at every turn.

Bringing his attention back to the room around him and the concerns of the present day, he watched as the angel’s wings curled forward past her shoulders, the left one passing briefly through Marissa before wrapping around Jackson. Leo heard Marissa draw in a stuttering breath, a sudden storm of emotions scouring across her features, one after another appearing for a brief flash of time. Bewilderment. Anxiety. Grief. Then quietness, reverence, and wonder as she found comfort in the next sensations marching through her.

And hope. The last was a welling expression of hope that made her sit back on her heels, the hands she had so tightly wrapped around Jackson’s pulling in slowly until she was pressing the jumble of fingers into her stomach, just below the solar plexus, cradling his hand against her as if it were a child in need of comfort.

Whatever the Angel felt from the contact was tightly masked in her face, not even a flicker of emotion touching her, unlike when he had been touched. Maybe because she had been prepared for it this time? Or perhaps it was because she did it purposefully in order to give Marissa solace? He didn’t know. And not knowing what her intentions were really bothered him.

Those graceful lines of blue energy wrapped around Leo’s best friend tightly, until she was pulled in to just about being chest to chest with him, her cheek resting over Jackson’s heart and her eyes closing. In another moment the lines that defined the shape of her wings became wider and wider, until there was no discerning one from the other and both she and Jackson were engulfed in a completely blue aura of energy.

Jackson body jolted suddenly beneath her, as if she’d given him a hit with defibrillation paddles. Leo tensed, his body going automatically tight with energy, the acrid taste of bile suddenly in the back of his throat. Jackson jolted again, this time his body locking hard in an arch of what could only be described as agony.

Leo lurched forward, wanting immediately to grab her and rip her away from him, but she threw up a staying hand in his direction, even though her eyes were closed and she couldn’t possibly have seen his movement or his reaction.

Why he hesitated, he didn’t know. Any other time, any other place, any other person and he would have shredded through the threat he perceived, neutralizing it to his satisfaction. But she stayed him, and somehow he obeyed, like a dog trained to its master. Not because the master was subjugating the animal, but like Jackson and his K-9 partner, with companionable understanding that each had to trust the other to do what they were supposed to do and believing that they would.

Having faith. Having trust.

He balked at the thought and anger raged through him. He clenched his already tight fists even tighter, his entire body equipped for defense…and now offense as well.

Then, as he watched, Jackson’s body seemed to blur beneath the black beauty, something inside of him spilling out around him, like a yellow aura within the energetic blue glow that she had wrapped around him. Together the colors combined into a vivid kelly green. Then the blurring aura seemed to split into two distinctive halves, each straining as if wanting to fall to either side of Jackson’s body. For an instant Leo recognized one half as Jackson, the man he had called brother from the moment they had first met, and the other half another man entirely, a stranger to him in almost every sense of the word.

He realized with no little awe that he was seeing the two distinct souls that were housed in Jackson’s corporeal body. Anxiety clawed with raw demand down his throat and into his chest. He felt himself starting to shake, and told himself it was from the sudden dump of adrenaline in his body. He lurched forward, reaching to grab for her, to rip her away from Jackson. But this time the hands that stayed him were physical. He felt one lock around his biceps on his right arm, the other clamping onto his left shoulder. He was jerked back away from the Angel, and he rounded on the interference with a savage snarl of fury.