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Cassie Robinson opens her door to a man who looks like 500 miles of bad road and five years of bad decisions.
“Dean?”
He licks chapped lips. Bright morning sunlight gilds his hair and highlights every old scar and new line on his face, giving him the same battered patina as his leather jacket.
“Nice house,” he rasps. “I didn’t call because—”
“Come in,” she says, tugging at his sleeve. Her common sense blares a belated warning. She’s learned in four years’ reading that there are monsters who can enter only if you invite them.
She scoots the big rattan chair so it’s under a binding sigil disguised as a mural of leaves and flowers. “Sit. You look like you need coffee.”
“I don’t have time—”
“You drove here instead of calling. You have time to sit and talk.” She can see him from the narrow kitchen as she busies herself with the familiar routine of pouring water and tamping coffee grounds. “If you lost my phone number, all you had to do was call the newsroom and it’d be forwarded to me.”
“I was in the neighborhood.” That’s more Dean’s familiar cocky tone. “We were working a case in Minnesota and I thought I’d drop by.”
“Minnesota is in the neighborhood of nothing except Canada.” She picks two white mugs printed with Jasmine Mans poems, adds a plate of ginger cookies and the usual accessories, and brings the tray to the coffee table.
“What’s going on, Dean? You don’t call for four years, then you drive across three states to drop by. You’re lucky yesterday was a late police commission meeting, so I get some free time this morning.”
“You’re on the police commission?” he mumbles into his coffee. The way he dunks and gobbles cookies suggests he hasn’t had breakfast, but she’s not in the mood to drop everything and start scrambling eggs.
“I cover it. Reporter, remember?”
“Oh yeah. Used to interview your stuffed animals instead of having tea parties.”
“No, I did both.” She gives her milky coffee another stir and sits back on the sofa. “Dean. What’s wrong?”
He looks around the room instead of answering. She tries to see it as he sees it: polished woodwork, comfortable chairs, every wall wildly painted in vines and flowers (her friend Shanice’s work) with funky local art on top of that. Her desk under the side window is a solid chunk of maple from a demolished schoolhouse, surrounded by mismatched bookshelves filled with the red-white-black bindings that mean politics.
It’s a far cry from her pastel college apartment with framed Monet posters or her parents’ genteel good taste. She’s grown into herself, while Dean looks the same, only tattered.
“Look.” Dean shifts in his chair. “I have no illusions, okay. I know the life I live. I know how it’s gonna end for me. I just wanted to say…” He looks into his coffee, then around at the walls, as if the words have skittered away to hide in the protective signs disguised as blossoms.
Her reporter’s training tells her to let the silence stretch until he speaks again.
“You don’t know the life I live,” she says gently. They were in love once, after all. If he’s come here because the deepest need of his soul is to talk, he’s nonetheless not an interview subject.
Dean shakes his head. “I wanted you to know. When I picture myself happy, it’s with you. A home. An apple-pie life. Maybe a kid someday.”
His mouth twists down on that last sentence. She didn’t get to be a reporter without having an eye for tells. There’s already a kid somewhere, with a mother who thinks her child deserves better than a rootless drifter.
“That’s the prepared speech,” Cassie says. “Now let’s talk about why the Midwest’s getting hit with earthquakes, forest fires, and rains of frogs. Is this the kind of thing you know something about?”
His mouth snaps shut. “Global warming?”
“Frogs. Raining down. My friend Luisa’s working on her doctorate in ecology, so don’t try to bluff past this one.”
He sighs, sinking deep into that leather coat. “There might be an apocalypse coming. I might have to stop it.”
“How?”
“By being the vessel for the Archangel Michael.” He looks at his mug like he doesn’t recognize it, then sets it cautiously on the coffee table. “Angels. They exist, and they’re nothing like Roma Downey. They gotta use a human as a vessel to walk the earth. So they bred my brother and me as vessels for Michael and Lucifer. Who’s out of Hell. That was kind of Sammy’s fault. They want us to let them take us over and… fight. To the death. Winner take all. Heaven or Hell. Superbowl of supernatural.”
“Wait,” she says against fury simmering inside her. “Did you just say you were bred for your bodies to be used as tools?”
Dean blinks at her. “I tell you about angels feeling fine about the end of the world as we know it, and that’s hits you?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what hits me.” She sets her own mug down so she won’t drop it or throw it. “This time, after you left, I did some reading. There’s more weirdness out there than I ever imagined, so if you say there are angels and you say your brother released Satan from Hell, I guess that’s a thing that could happen.”
She tries to look him in the eyes, but he’s focused on a particular vine painted around the big front window. “Breeding people to use their bodies is what made the whole nation the mess it is today. It’s the first step that ends with that monster truck going after my father and his friends. So when you tell me angels do it, yes, that’s what hits me.”
“Angels are dicks.” It’s a gun blast of a phrase. “Cas says… Castiel, angel of the lord, says it’s because the most powerful angels can only be contained by humans with some kind of crazy mojo.”
“There’s always an excuse. Are you sure your friend’s an angel? Because breeding bodies to use has a solid history of being evil.”
“I told you, angels are dicks. Demons are assholes. Angels gotta go ‘mother may I?’ and get a yes because there’s a whole rulebook of dickery.”
She considers giving him a briefing on how consent under duress isn’t true consent, then decides someone who keeps an arsenal in the trunk of his car is by definition a shoot first, ask questions later person. “You’re going to say no, right? You can do that?”
“If I say no and Sammy says yes, we’re on the midnight train for eternal Hell.”
“If you both say no?”
“More Hell. You wanna know what takes us down to Paradise City? Both of us saying yes and me killing my brother.”
Now he looks her in the eye, daring her to be shocked.
“Find another way,” is all Cassie says.
“Do you think we haven’t been trying? The dicks—the angels keep shoving us back on this track.”
“Try harder. The entire premise here is deeply, scarily ethically flawed. Framing it as saving the world doesn’t change that you’re… you’re used like a fighting cock until you bleed to death.”
“What does that mean when it’s not in college-girl language?”
She’s seen that defense mechanism so often, from so many people, that her face goes stone so she won’t escalate by rolling her eyes. She chooses her words, and the most wrong-side-of-the-tracks tone she can manage. “It’s jacked up and you gotta not do it.”
“I just want to be sure some people are safe. I won’t agree to anything unless people are safe.”
He’s dropped a burden at her feet that’s too big for anyone to shoulder. Too big for him alone, too big for her to share. Too big for a decent person to turn away from.
“So it really is the Apocalypse?” she asks. “Earth splitting, monsters in the deep, rains of fire?”
“All that and more.”
“And you should be somewhere stopping it?”
“Bobby’s place, probably. He’s working on the lore.” Dean pats his pockets. “I should call Sammy, see if he’s hotwir—if I need to pick him up in Minnesota.”
“Okay.” She looks around her tiny, comfortable living room for what she hopes isn’t the last time. “I need to make some calls, and then I can be packed in an hour. Make yourself breakfast if you’re hungry.”
His jaw sets in a way she remembers with more irritation than fondness. “You’re not in this. I came here because I need you to be safe.”
“Tell that to the mother of your child,” she snaps, and she isn’t sorry to see from his wince that the dart lands in the bullseye. “I’m a reporter. I can cover civic groups and school board meetings and picketers at the supermarket, round and round like a cuckoo clock. Or I can report live from the center of the Apocalypse, up close and personal.”
He tries to argue with her between calls—one to her mother, one to Shanice to ask her to house-sit, one to her nanna’s pastor because if there were ever a moment to be lifted up in prayer, the Apocalypse is it.
The final call is to her newspaper editor to explain that she’s chasing a huge scoop and needs to shift board meetings to someone else. The maybe you’d be better off as a freelancer conversation stings—she’s invested her life in this newspaper—but with new management, nobody’s job is secure except Rafe Tolliver, who covers high school sports and has to apologize annually for his choice of words.
Dean keeps arguing with her as he fries eggs and makes toast. Cassie throws things into the gym bag that she rarely has time to take to the gym. How war-zone reporters manage to pack enough changes of clothes, plus hair products, vitamins, and phone chargers baffles her, but the Apocalypse probably is workplace casual, so she can get by with two pairs of shoes. She folds her silk pillowcase to a tiny square that tucks in a corner, along with a couple head scarves because who knows what rains of frogs do to hair.
Dean’s still arguing when he walks her out to the Impala and opens the trunk, but the force has diminished to routine bickering. “It’s dangerous out there. You don’t even know how to shoot a gun.”
“It’s dangerous to stay here even when the world’s not ending.”
“Have you ever exorcised a demon?”
“Teach me. I’ll learn.” She tosses her bag in the trunk, on top of enough weapons for a small army, a ratty blanket, and a giant bag of Herr’s crab-flavored potato chips. She lets him slam the trunk shut because it’s his Baby, but she makes sure she has the last word.
“Come on, Dean. We have work to do.”