about the lab. I wanted to think about my new nifty angel powers, but I was so fucking tired. I nestled into Leif and Aeron’s arms.
“Angel superpowers tomorrow. I’m exhausted.
Leif kissed my forehead, and Aeron kissed my neck.
“Get some sleep, Speedy. We still have work to do tomorrow.”
Chapter 32
I
had a bounce in my step when I woke up. Aeron and Leif were in their usual places on the sofa. I took a running leap and dove into their lap. Leif buried his face in my stomach and blew a raspberry. Aeron just stroked my thigh.
“You need to eat, Ariel,” Aeron said.
Yeah, I did. Even after everything I ate at the party, I was still starving. I climbed out of their laps and started digging into breakfast.
“What’s the plan for today? Angel powers 101?”
“Dice wants to teach you about that,” Leif said.
“Don’t I need to learn about that soon? I’m blowing light bulbs left and right.”
“Dice is coming soon. Once I have a working serum, he will meet us here, and we will all travel to his base in Florida.”
“Right. How are you coming on the serum?”
“Well, I already know how to synthesize angel blood. I’m still figuring out yours. Patient Q should be easy. We’ll probably never know what kind of demon he was, and that sort of thing would have set me back for a little while, but Doctor X already did the work. He deserves to have his sick research twisted into something good.”
“And that knife wound to the gut,” Aeron said. “What do you want to do today, Ariel?”
“We still need someone going through those flash drives. The emails make me sick, but we need to know if something worse is coming.”
“Is there a flash drive I could actually understand?” Aeron said.
“You could help go through the emails,” Leif said. “I’ve already copied them to my second computer. Ariel started at the beginning. You can start at the end, and you can meet in the middle. Since when do you want to look at emails instead of killing things?”
“There are plenty of things to kill right now. There will be a lot more, and no one left to save if Doctor X found a way to infect everyone with immunity. The person I really want to kill right now is sitting in the Oval Office and finding little ways to ruin his day just puckers my butthole.”
“Yeah, Asher’s reports are pretty satisfying,” Leif said.
“Care to share?” I asked.
“Remember that president that spent all day on Twitter? That’s Isaiah and his radio show. The Antichrist needs acolytes and followers to succeed. His angel superpower is charm. That’s how he got so many people do tap into their darkness and do awful things. Dice took away his radio show, and now he’s pissed. It’s like getting banned from Twitter if Twitter was still around. He’s pitching tantrums all over the White House trying to get someone to fix it, but any time they turn a radio on, they hear Dice and his music. Dice is treating the entire thing like an apocalypse podcast with a playlist. Your father is listening, not because he’s trying to find out what we are up to. He’s like some narcissist asshole reading all the bad press about him and getting mad about it.”
That hit me right in the feels. The kind of feels you got when you were being a rotten bitch, and you knew it. I didn’t know Dice and Asher, but now I really wanted to meet them. While we were here doing our thing, they were pissing off my father and preparing for us to all eventually meet and kill him.
“Let’s get to the lab then. And I want to hear all about my father’s tantrums.”
Chapter 33
A
eron agreed to help, but he was having trouble sitting still. He kept tapping a pen on the table, and I was ready to shove it in his ear. I was pretty sure it was irritating Leif too because he took out a radio so we could listen to Dice’s show. Dice didn’t appear to be in a chatty mood at the moment, but he had excellent taste in music.
Now that I wasn’t listening to that infernal tapping, I could focus on the emails, and Aeron could sit still better.
“Listen to this,” Aeron said, nearly knocking over his tea. “I don’t think Doctor X finished what he was working on. He was still emailing your father when the place had been overrun with Rage