Angel stepped right up to her and seized her by the arms. “Look in my eyes. Tell me what you see. Go on, look!”
Squirming to break free, but held fast by Angel’s strong grip, the woman did as she was told. It was impossible to say what she saw there, but Angel knew what the effect would be. It was a skill she had learned when she had become a Knight of the Word, although she was the only one she knew who could do it. She pictured the worst things she had ever been witness to; she conjured the most terrible images of the most heinous acts of the demons and the once-men.
Something of that horror reflected in her eyes when she did so, and anyone looking caught a momentary glimpse of Hell.
“Oh, my God!” the woman breathed. She shrank down inside herself as if deflated; she would have fallen if Angel wasn’t holding her. Her hands covered her face and tears began running down her cheeks. “Don’t show me any more!
Please, please don’t!”
She was shaking now, completely undone. The others who had supported her clustered about protectively, hands reaching for her, faces stricken. Angel gave the woman over to them and motioned them back. “Don’t interfere further in this.
Either help with the children or stand aside.”
They stood aside, consoling the demoralized woman, huddling together and whispering furiously. Angel ignored them, sending Helen to those who had agreed to help in readying the children for departure. They were already standing in lines, hands joined, eyes darting this way and that as they waited for instructions. A few exchanged momentary glances with her, but no one tried to speak. She gave it a few more seconds, then moved over to reopen the section of wall that would take them to safety.
“Quietly, now,” she whispered.
They went back through the hidden door, climbed the stairs to the basement level, and went down the narrow corridor to the larger, more brightly lit one beyond. Angel, in the lead, glanced back repeatedly, making sure the children and their escorts were keeping up while at the same time listening for anything that seemed out of place. She believed they had not been discovered yet, but there was no point in taking chances.
At the mouth of the corridor, she brought the procession to a halt, letting those in the rear close up the gaps between themselves and those in the front. She took a moment to scan ahead, searching for movement. The corridor seemed empty. She stepped out into the light, beckoned to those who followed her, and moved back down toward the doors and stairs that led to the abandoned hotel and the streets beyond.
She was all the way to the last door, the one that opened onto the stairwell leading up to the hotel, when she sensed the presence of the demon.
It was ahead of her, waiting at the top of the stairs. She could smell its stink and feel its heat, and her stomach reacted as it always did when she was in the presence of evil—with a sudden lurch and a queasiness that threatened to bring her to her knees. She stopped where she was, waiting for the feeling to pass, for her training to reassert itself.
Behind her, the line of children and women slowed to a ragged halt.
Helen appeared at her elbow. “What is it?”
Angel didn’t answer. She stared at the door ahead, trying to think what she could do. The one thing she could not do was to tell Helen the truth: that they were trapped.
*
WHEN HER PARENTS die, Angel Perez becomes a true child of the streets. She has no family and no home. She has no one to look after her. She has no skills and no knowledge of how to forage for food and water or how to find shelter or how to survive for more than a day. She is eight years old.
But luck favors her. She manages to survive for five days by staying hidden and living on the little food and water her parents scavenged before the plague took them. She fights down her fear and spends her time trying to think what to do.
Then Johnny finds her.
His given name is Juan Gonzalez, and like her parents he has come over the border to make a better life. He seems old to her, even though he is only fortyfive. His hair is wild and long, his face bearded and scarred, and his hands weathered and gnarled. But his voice is kind, and when he finds her hiding in the rubble of the home her parents made for her, he doesn’t try to approach her too quickly or play the son of games that might frighten her. He simply starts talking to her, calling her little one and telling her she can’t stay where she is, that it is too dangerous, that all of LA is too dangerous for an eight-yearold girl. She must come with him, he says. He has a place not far from there and she can stay there with him. He is tired of living alone anyway, and he wants someone to talk to. She is under no obligation to stay.