“You licked the plate,” Damiel said.
“Of course I licked the plate. It tasted so good that I then reached into the trash and fished out the strawberry tarts. And that’s how my father discovered me, my hands in the trash bin, my face streaked with strawberries and cream.”
Damiel laughed.
“My punishment was a week of the hardest training I’d experienced yet, but it was completely worth those few blissful bites.” I sighed.
“It appears you neglected to learn the lesson General Silverstar had set out to teach you,” Damiel observed.
“What can I say? We all have mortal weaknesses, even angels, and mine is strawberry tarts.”
Damiel gave me a brisk nod. “Duly noted. The next time we go into battle together, I’ll make sure the enemy is not in possession of strawberry tarts, or you might betray me in exchange for a single bite.”
“I’d like to think my ability to resist temptation has improved since I was eight. I’d never sell you out for a single bite of strawberry tart.”
“Good to know.”
I flashed him a wide grin. “The enemy soldiers would need to offer me at least two or three whole tarts to make it truly worth my while.”
“You’re joking,” he said, watching me.
“Am I? Are you so sure?”
“Yes. But, just in case, I promise you that no matter how many strawberry tarts the enemy offers you, I am prepared to double their offer.”
“Nice to know,” I laughed.
And he laughed too. Though his laugh was more of a grunt.
“See?” I said. “This isn’t so hard.”
“What isn’t hard?”
“Having friends,” I told him. “Getting along with other angels.”
“You aren’t like other angels.”
“That’s why I’m helping you.”
He looked perplexed.
“Helping you by testing out your flight techniques,” I clarified.
“Ah.”
“In fact, you could say my help is invaluable, considering that no other angel will agree to do it.”
His eyebrows drew together. “What are you getting at?”
“Without me, your experiments are impossible,” I said with a smile. “I think that’s at least worth your undying gratitude, don’t you?”
“You tricked me.”
“I will enjoy your continued, eternal gratitude. After all, why win a single unspecified favor, when you can have them all?” I quoted his own words back at him. Then I winked.
He looked at me for several long seconds—then he chuckled. “You definitely aren’t like any other angel. No, you are far more devious—perhaps even more cunning than all the rest of the angels put together.”
“Hello, pot. Meet kettle.”
“What if I want to be the kettle this time?” he said smoothly.
“I’m sure that can be arranged.” I cleared my dry throat. “The way you reacted last time, when I said those words to you during our first mission, I wasn’t sure you knew what the idiom means.”
“Oh, I know what it means. I was merely baffled by the casual way it slipped off your tongue when speaking to the big, bad Master Interrogator.”
“Maybe I didn’t find you so big and bad?” I teased my lower lip coyly between my teeth.
I was out of my mind. I was flirting with the Master Interrogator. Again.
“You did find me big and bad,” he declared. “But that changed by the end of our first mission. And now you’re living under the delusion that I’m an actual, honest-to-goodness real person. Not a monster like them.” He waved at the sea.
As if in response, a rocky tentacle shot out of the water, a hundred feet into the air. Damiel and I swerved to avoid it.
“It appears the monster is trying to absorb us, as well as the land,” Damiel observed. “It wants to add our matter to its growing body.”
“The sea monsters’ appetite isn’t solely for rock and sand,” I said. “They’ll eat anything that’s foolish enough to get too close.”
Damiel looked down. “And here comes the next one.”
A muddy tentacle shot at us. The other beast.
“I’ll take care of them,” I told him.
I flew between the beasts, darting around their tentacles. There were eight of them now, four from each monster. They snapped and cracked, trying to grab me. I was faster—and the two monsters ended up tangled in each other’s tentacles.
I darted around the tangled double monster mess and continued flying toward the island. Damiel flew up beside me.
“That was clever,” he told me.
“Not really. The monsters are just really dumb. They’ve been falling for that same trick for years, ever since I started coming here. The beasts might be growing larger, but they certainly aren’t growing any smarter. They don’t learn.”
“Yes, they are as dumb as rocks,” he said solemnly.
I chuckled at his silly joke. And so did he.
I liked to see this part of him. It was the part he let out around me, when other people weren’t around. It was the person he was when he didn’t have to pretend to be a humorless hardass, just to maintain his reputation or ward off other angels. Angels interpreted humor and kindness as signs of weakness. When they sensed it, they moved in without mercy, like a shark who’d smelled blood in the water.
When I saw Damiel like this, funny and even a little flirtatious, it gave me hope that he could hold on to the person he was. I dared to believe that the Master Interrogator persona would not totally consume the true Damiel.
I knew the tangled monsters wouldn’t be out for long. They might have been dumb, but they were also resilient. Eventually, they’d pull at each other so hard that their tentacles would snap off and then get absorbed back into the beasts’ larger masses. Then the angry beasts would come after us, aiming for some payback, to deal a lot of pain.
Damiel and I set down on the island he’d identified. Very little life lived on the rocky lump, and all of it came from the sea. There were a few sea plants and flowers. Some sea muscle shells were glued to the rock face. They provided some grip on the slimy, slippery ground.
“We need to search the island for the way down into an underground cavern,” Damiel said.
I sneezed. The sharp scent of sea salt in the air burned my nose. Damiel didn’t comment on my transgression, and I was glad. My father would have. He’d often told me that sneezes, hiccups, and snores were beneath an angel—and the child of an angel, for that matter. According to his mantra, any and all bodily functions could be silenced at will. It required only a disciplined mind.
“What could Colonel Spellstorm be planning?” I wondered aloud as we searched the island. “Why did he come here? And how will he break the curse on the demons that keeps them away from the Earth?”
“We’ll ask him when we find him.”
Damiel leaned over and grabbed on to the ground—no, it was a hard stone hatch in the ground. He pulled it open. He’d found the way down into an underground area—and that hatch definitely didn’t look like a natural formation. Someone had used this island to hide at some point. Was Damiel right? Was it Colonel Spellstorm? And was he still here?