Extraits

Arkady m'attendait devant la porte et portait toujours son T-shirt "Laissez-moi m'exprimer gayment". J'étais impressionnée de voir à quel point il était à l'aise. Il ne cachait à personne son identité. C'était comme ça que je souhaitais vivre. Libre et fidèle à moi-même.

- Menacer le gars, c’est pas des préliminaires entre vous deux ?

- Bon sang, Pri, grommelai-je en jetant par inadvertance un regard dans le rétroviseur pour voir la réaction de Levi.

Non pas que je discute des détails de ma vie sexuelle avec elle, mais les mecs pensaient que oui.

- Tu t’ennuies et tu veux jouer à Scooby-Doo dans ma vie parce que c’est bien plus marrant que d’être directeur de Maison.

Il eut l’air manifestement tourneboulé pendant dix bonnes secondes. C’était un but dans ma vie dont je n’avais jamais soupçonné l’existence.

Tout comme l’amour n’était pas suffisant pour faire fonctionner un mariage, compte tenu du taux de divorce d’environ trente pour cent, mes talents semblaient frêles comparés à l’immensité des ténèbres qui s’ouvraient devant moi. Je n’avais aucun problème de confiance en moi, mais ça, c’était le coup suivant d’une partie en cours, et j’étais tombée sur l’échiquier en tant que pion.

Chapter 1

I never expected Touched by an Angel to stray into bad touch territory.

“Tall, white robes, white wings. Was there a celestial light? Did anyone see a halo?” The questions I asked in pursuit of the truth.

“It’s an Angel of Death. It kills people.” Husani Tannous, a late-twenty-something Egyptian, adjusted his baseball cap to hide his receding hairline. “It doesn’t get a halo.”

Ironclad logic from a man who’d paired his masculinity issues with the semi-automatic at his feet. Like fine wine with cheese. Or gasoline with a match.

This living room was as much a battlefield as any muddy trench. There was even a dead body upstairs, and if the animosity down here got out of hand, more casualties to come. The fluttering in my stomach did double duty as nerves and a coiled excitement.

“I’m not trying to be facetious,” I said, steepling my fingers and leaning back in a fancily embroidered chair. “But I do need the facts.”

“The facts are that it murdered my brother!” He shook his fist. “And I will avenge him!”

His cousin, Chione, slowly stroked a finger over the handgun in her lap, all the while sucking butter off her toast.

I leaned in, fascinated by her particular brand of multitasking.

“Big talker, Husani. How will you find this angel? Are you going to fly up into the sky?” Chione said in Arabic-accented English.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Flying magic doesn’t exist.” Rachel Dershowitz, early fifties and mother of the bride-to-be Shannon, was as bitter as the gin and tonic she gulped down. The gaudy rock on her finger had fewer facets than the sneer she shot Chione.

Chione’s hand twitched on her gun and I stepped between the two women. “Did Omar have any enemies? Any reason why anyone would come after him?”

“Omar is a good boy. No enemies. This is a hate crime. Those sons of dogs killed our firstborns before and they’re doing it again!” Thank you, Masika Tannous, the grandmother and matriarch of the clan visiting from Cairo. While the little old lady was knitting a sweater like many a sweet grandma, she wielded her needles with a savage ferocity that scared me more than the Uzi of questionable origin propped against her side.

Between Masika, Husani, and Chione, this mercenary family packed more firepower than the Canadian Armed Forces, but like I’d always said, Mundanes didn’t require magic to be dangerous.

The physical weapons from the Tannouses were countered by serpents made of light magic that writhed above the table, ready to pounce on their victim and squeeze the life out of them.

I wanted to smack sense into all of them, but it was hard enough doing my job, never mind exuding enough badass vibes to keep these two families in line.

“You brought death into my home. Jews shouldn’t mix with Egyptians,” said Ivan Dershowitz. The fleshy home-owner on my left sat next to his wife and daughter on a high-backed chair with spindly legs that strained under his weight. His light magic bobbed like a cobra.