Peregrine laughed, and her wings fanned out behind her. “Oh, Jimmy, I do so love it when you get all businesslike. I remember snorting coke with you off some bar in Jokertown in the eighties.”

Jimmy started taking more pictures while they chatted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, snapping away. “Besides, you’ll give the kid the wrong idea.”

Michelle draped an arm around Amare’s shoulders and floated three cantaloupe-sized bubbles in front of them.

“Jimmy, you know very well I grew up modeling. Nothing surprises me.”

Peregrine laughed and opened her wings wide, framing both herself and Michelle in white and brown feathers. Then she rose a little off the ground.

“That’s the shot,” Jimmy said.

The Angel had a room in a Holiday Inn Express right over the border from Jokertown in a slightly more respectable Manhattan neighborhood. It was small and not exactly luxurious, but it met her needs. It was nice, unostentatious, conveniently located, and cheap. For Manhattan. Anything more glamorous would have made her feel uncomfortable—her poverty-stricken small-town upbringing still affected her greatly—and although she was of course on an expense account her innate frugality always made her budget conscious. Although Billy kept telling her that one agent’s expenses didn’t make a gnat’s ass worth of difference to the budget, she still liked to do the best she could to keep the notoriously underfunded agency in the black. The room was comfortable and cosy and she didn’t need anything more.

She set Jamal’s computer on the nightstand beside her neatly made single bed, sat down on the chair next to the deskette, took off her gauntlets and unlaced and removed her boots. She stood and shimmied out of her leather jumpsuit. It was a little damp and although it had been a warm early summer day, her finely-toned skin was clammy in places where the deluge from the hotel’s sprinklers had eventually leaked through. She unbound her braided hair and feathered it across her shoulders and chest, and stood again, looking at her body in the deskette’s mirror.

She’d been lucky enough over the years since she’d joined SCARE not to add any scars to it. She pulled her heavy-duty sports bra over her head and let it fall to the floor. She’d been lucky, too, with her explosive metabolism, that she hadn’t gained an ounce, either. It’d only been since being with Billy—and it had taken several years, even then—that she could look at herself in the mirror and feel pride in what she saw instead of shame. Almost unconsciously, her hand traveled across her flat stomach and traced the long, curving scar that stood out against her pale skin just as clearly as it had the day her mother had caught her kissing a boy on the front porch and after running him off their property had taken a kitchen knife and cut out her uterus while screaming and calling her terrible names.