Мишель Роуэн - Angel with Attitude

The nine-year-old girl who was the answer to Val’s problems was actually a psychic, and through hard work and a good chunk of luck, Val had an appointment with her. Tomorrow.

She’d channel somebody Up There and then Val could ask what went wrong and how she could fix things as soon as possible. Two months was more than enough time for her to decide, most definitely, that while there were certain elements to being a human that weren’t entirely distasteful—although she’d be hard pressed to give any examples at present—it was not something she wanted to be for any extended amount of time.

She’d been extremely lucky, too. Two months and she hadn’t run into any of those alleged

Tempter Demons the golden scroll had so adamantly warned against. She’d kept a vigilant watch, too. Most nights losing a ton of sleep shivering and shaking, waiting for some nasty demon to pounce on her and carry her off to Hell. But nothing happened. No pouncing. She figured the seeming lack of interest in the demon community proved her situation was all an unfortunate error. She must have been off demon radar. And that was just fine by her.

Val sneezed and wiped her nose on her sleeve as she walked along the darkened street. Bad head cold, her first one. At first she’d panicked, thinking it would kill her, but then remembered that colds were mostly harmless—just incredibly annoying. She was on her way back to the Paradise Inn after a midnight drugstore run in the chill of early December. She needed NyQuil. It was nice to have a goal that was easy to accomplish. Plus, it was on sale.

Buy two, get one free. She’d bought ten just in case.

How did she get the cold in the first place? From a good deed gone bad: attempting to save a jumper from throwing himself over the Falls only resulted in getting her wet. And being wet in below-zero temperature was a surefire way of getting majorly sick.

She learned something new about being human every day.

The falling snow stung her face and she gathered her thin, hooded sweatshirt closer. A pathetic sight to say the least. The self-pity she felt was almost palpable and completely uncontrollable. She stopped walking for a moment and pulled out a notebook from the pocket of her hoody and opened it up.

“The only snow in Heaven is on the Heavenly Slopes ski hill.”

She let out a long breath. Just reading from what she’d dubbed her Heavenly Memories

Notebook put her mind at ease. It was immediate stress relief. Every memory of Heaven that came to mind got written down in the book, just in case she forgot. And, sadly, her memory was getting worse with every passing day. She figured it had to do with having a human brain.

It simply couldn’t possibly hold all the wonders that she’d experienced as an angel. That had to be the reason. She kept the notebook with her at all hours of the day while she tried not to feel sorry for herself.

Well, not any more than absolutely necessary.

Luckily, with it being well after midnight by then, there wasn’t an audience for her extreme misery.

The immediate goal was to go back to tiny room seventeen at the motel, chug back the cold medicine, get into bed and pull the covers up over her head. She might get up sometime early the next afternoon and watch a soap or two before her all-important, most certainly life-

changing, appointment with the psychic. She had to get her quota of TV viewing in. One thing she had to admit she enjoyed about being human was watching television—it was an excellent place to study realistic human interaction—as suggested in the stupid, golden scroll. In fact, she liked it so much, that when she got back to Heaven she wanted to get cable Up There so she could keep up with Days of Our Lives.

The motel loomed in front of her, its VACANCY sign a tacky beacon in the darkness. It was only a few blocks away from the drugstore, a distance that felt three times as far when feeling sick as a dog in the sub-zero temperature.

She felt a sneeze coming on. Or maybe she was going to throw up. Maybe both.

She was so not going to miss any of this. The sickness, the cold weather, the way her back hurt in the morning from the lousy mattress in her room. But it was only for one more night.

Tomorrow she’d fix everything.

She heard something then. Voices. She stopped walking and turned around. It was a man shouting obscenities from around a corner. He sounded angry.

Then she heard a woman’s voice. Smaller, meeker, pleading with him, but Val couldn’t hear what she was saying.

Without thinking, she found herself moving toward the voices.

A large man, roughly the size of an obese grizzly bear, had a woman up against the brick wall by her throat.

“There. Try to get away from me now, bitch.”

“Let me go,” the woman sobbed. Flakes of snow swirled around the dark alleyway from the cold wind.

“Lemme think about that.” He cocked his head to one side. “No.”

“Why? Please! I didn’t do anything to you.”

He grinned. “Little girls shouldn’t be out late at night. The big bad wolf might get them and eat them up.” He moved closer to her face and snapped his teeth.

“Excuse me,” Val said as she ran a hand under her clogged nose. “Do either of you happen to have the time?”

His head whipped around in her direction, his eyes wide. She’d surprised him.

“Time for you to mind your own business,” he growled. “Get lost.”

Val gritted her teeth and tried to look brave. “Why don’t you let her go and we can all get lost?”

His eyes narrowed. “Go away. I mean it.”

The woman had taken this small distraction as her one opportunity. She sank her teeth into his hand and when he released her with a loud yelp of pain, she kicked him in the shin and ran away, her high-heels clicking against the icy pavement.

Val’s good deed for the night was accomplished successfully. She hoped somebody Up There was keeping track of these things.

She turned around just as a hand clamped down on her shoulder. The obese grizzly bear roughly turned her back to face his furious expression.

“I thought I told you to mind your own business?” he snarled.

She stood her ground and tried to ignore the sick, sinking feeling in her stomach. “Look, I don’t want any trouble.”

“Could have fooled me. Looks to me like you’re looking for trouble. Looks like you want to know what I do to people who get in my way.”

He dug his fingers into her upper arm, pulling her close enough to get an unpleasant whiff of his dollar-store cologne. It didn’t quite make up for the putrid stench of his breath, though.

She was almost thankful that her nose was nearly stuffed shut from the cold.

His black eyes narrowed. “You owe me now.”

“I owe you?”

“You let her escape. I didn’t get her purse or anything else. You owe me.”

Val gasped as his grip tightened. “I don’t have any money.”

He stared down at her for a few moments before his scowl turned into a lecherous grin.

“Maybe we can work something out, pretty thing.” He licked his thin lips and moved his face toward hers.

“Forget it.” She slapped him across the face hard enough to make her hand sting.

The grin vanished and his expression darkened. “Who said I was giving you a choice?”

Before she could make another move to protect herself, he clamped his sweaty hand over her mouth. Her ankle twisted as he dragged her farther into the alley and she dropped her bag of cold medication so she could fight him with everything she had—but it wasn’t going to be enough. The guy was strong and built like a truck. She felt fingers of panic squeeze her already rapidly beating heart.

He pushed her up against the wall behind a Dumpster and took a step back to get a better look.