Everything slowed down at that point. It was like someone had pressed the slow-mo button on my entire world. No sound reached me. I lurched after Chloe, though it felt like my speed couldn't match that of an eighty-year-old on a stroll to the park. I closed my eyes. I just wanted all of this to be over. Or, more accurately, I wished that it had never begun.

I wished that I'd never heard of Lyle house. I wished that I'd never figured out the Edison Group's sick plot…I even wished I'd never met Chloe. Maybe that way she wouldn't be here. She wouldn't be sprinting towards a maniac with a knife. She wouldn't have had to go through all of this crap that no person our age should have to endure. I wished that she had gone on living in the real world. The world where there was no such thing as ghosts and demons. No witches or wizards. No werewolves. A world where I didn't exist. A safe world.

I opened my eyes to see Diane's knife dive through the air and right into the chest of—

Ezra.

My ears popped, welcoming in all of the noise that my brain had somehow muted. It flooded into my ears like a strong wave on an empty beach. Chloe's gasp was soon followed by the slapping sound of her hands covering her mouth. Ezra looked straight down, crossing her eyes as she tried to focus on the object that had planted itself into her blank tank top and the flesh underneath it. Diane Enright's hand was still clutched to the handle.

I expected Ezra's head to bob to the side, waited to see her eyes to roll up towards her forehead before she crumpled to the floor. However, that didn't seem like her plan.

Ezra lifted her head to where her small nose was angled straight at Mrs. Enright. A smile glazed her face. Not a normal smile, but one of those grins that someone puts on when they know something that you don't. She tilted her head as the sound of frying eggs cut through the air. I squinted, not believing what I was seeing. Was there smoke rising from my hand?

Mrs. Enright shrieked and tried to jerk my hand away from the blade that was still stuck in Ezra's chest. Apparently this knife was different than the butcher knife that she'd been wielding. This one actually caused her pain. Finally, with a yank and a sickening peeling sound, Mrs. Enright unstuck my hand from the blade. She clutched it, and I saw the redness that had started to coat my palm.

Ezra sighed as if she was unamused. Chloe glanced at me before running to me. I wrapped my arms around her, knowing that, although I couldn't feel her skin against mine, Chloe needed me to embrace her.

A sound similar to lightening but much quieter sounded from beside me. I didn't have to look over to know that Simon was readying a spell. A flash of light pierced the air, and for a moment all lighting went out, leaving all of us in darkness. An inhuman howl coupled with a crash echoed through the house before the lights turned back on. When they did, my body was halfway in the room, halfway stuck in the wall on the other side of the room. Simon was getting pretty good with his knock back spell.

Ezra, seeming to no longer notice the weapon embedded so close to her heart, reached into the back pocket of her jeans. I assumed what she brought out was a dagger, though it was only about as long as brand new pencil, handle and all. She held it out in front of her, its tip pointing towards the ceiling. It started dripping. It was like it was bleeding. Just tiny droplets, but it was enough to cover the whole surface area of the blade. Everyone and everything was quiet. Even Mrs. Enright kept her lips sealed and eyes on the blonde-haired girl.

"I hope the next world you find yourself will be better than this one." Ezra said emotionlessly. She stomped towards Tori's mom. Diane's lip twitched with something between contempt and pure fear, but otherwise she didn't move. Ezra pulled the blade back before slashing it sideways, leaving a perfectly straight line across the center of the familiar forehead that Mrs. Enright was inhabiting. The tensed limbs went limp, and the eyes closed. Ezra turned to all of us. Droplets still poured down from her dagger, washing away the fresh blood that coated its tip. "Dear Lord she was annoying. Ever since she was inside of Chloe I'd wanted to do that." Ezra exclaimed before realizing the nature of the stares that were locked on her. "I'm guessing it's time to explain a few things."

"Damn right!" Troy cried from somewhere behind me. I sensed more than saw as everyone who had been at the staircase joined Simon, Chloe I. Ezra let out another one of her slightly bored sighs and re-pocketed her small, but obviously lethal weapon.

"No need to be snippy," she said "I just got rid of one nasty demon bitch for you guys. You should be showering me with flowers or whatever it is people do when they're congratulating one another."

"That 'nasty demon bitch' was my mom." Tori interjected. Her voice was a whisper, but everyone in the house could easily hear it. She walked past me, and straight towards my unmoving body. She stood in front of it, staring down at it as if she expected her mother to re-enter it at any second.

"Oh," Ezra said "sorry." Her apology held absolutely no sincerity, especially since she seemed to be too busy sliding the knife out of her skin to pay too much attention to what anyone was saying.

"Where is she now?" Tori asked without the slightest shift from where she was standing. Her black locks were wet with perspiration, and maybe even tears. I didn't know if she was the crying type, but if there was a time to shed tears, now seemed to be it.

"Beyond. Wherever that is." Ezra said as she tossed away the butcher knife and crossed her arms. Her shirt was torn, but there was no blood or gash where she'd been impaled.

"You…you sent her 'beyond'? Do you mean heaven?" Simon asked shakily. Ezra stared at him.

"Just because I happen to be able to exercise spirits doesn't mean that I'm the expert on exactly where they end up after that."

"So…you're some kind of necromancer?" I inferred. Ezra tilted her head back and laughed.

"Necromancer? Necromancers are nothing more than communicators. Except for those who decide to mess up with the balance and bring back ghosts. That just makes a big mess for me to clear up." Ezra scoffed. Chloe wrinkled her eyebrows, but stayed quiet.

"Then you're something more powerful than that." Casey drawled.

"Much, much more." Ezra said in a bragging tone. "I may not have the halo thing going on, but, besides that, I pretty much fit the stereotype." Halo thing?

"You're an…angel?" I said, not sure if what I was saying was even plausible. How many more weird, supposedly mythological things were there?

"And you win today's round. Tune in next time for another episode of 'Guess That Creature'." Ezra said as she pointed one slender finger at me. A flapping sound erupted in the room, and I looked around, expecting to see that some bird had made its way through the chimney or something. I almost cried out from sheer shock as two long, ruby-red rows of feathers waved at me from behind Ezra's back. The pair looked like they wouldn't be able to fit through a doorway, let alone remain hidden somewhere on the four-foot-something girls standing in front of us. Chloe turned completely around, and I dropped my arm from her shoulder.

"I-if you're an angel," Chloe sputtered "shouldn't you be a b-bit of an exp-p-pert on the whole 'beyond' thing?"

"My job is to follow orders, not ask questions." Ezra moved her left wing to where it was halfway in front of her so that she could pluck what looked like a fuzz ball from her feathers. The body language showed that grooming her feathers was more important than answering our questions. However, ever since I'd met her, I'd gotten the feeling that she'd always had something better to do, something more important going on that we weren't a part of. Now, I understood that she probably had a million things better to do. I gulped, finding it hard to believe that a higher being like her would tolerate us.

"Orders?" Simon choked out "you mean…"

"Honestly, I'm not sure exactly where they come from. They could be from The Big Guy, but I've been locked in this gig for a long time, and I'm still as clueless as I was when I died and became one of these things. I'll probably never know," Ezra interrupted "I just kinda get mental messages when it's time for my next job." I took note that apparently Ezra had died, therefore must've been human. I wasn't going to let any minor detail slip by.

"Why would an angel need to come down here and exercise a spirit?" Tori said, finally turning away from my slashed body. I had been too busy interrogating Ezra to notice that Tori had crouched down, and was now sitting on her heels in front of my body.

"Because apparently you guys are doing some pretty important stuff, and I couldn't let a ghost with a little temper tantrum mess up the whole thing." Ezra said.

"Important?" I echoed. Ezra shrugged. "You're telling me that us rescuing supernatural experiments is a blessed mission?"

"All I know is that Earth needs Mr. Derek Souza and friends to keep doing what they're doing."

"If only we were better at it." I chuckled. I wasn't sure what I found more funny, the fact that we sucked at retrieving people, or that angels, heavenly creatures, actually cared about what we were doing. The second notion seemed ridiculous, but, here we were, standing right in front of a 'soldier of heaven'.

"I knew it." A soft voice said. Everyone turned to look at a pink-cheeked Alaina. "I told you Casey, I told you angels were real." Casey smiled despite himself.

"Yeah yeah, we're awesome." Ezra said with a cough, distracting all of us from gawking at Casey's younger sibling. "Now, down to business." With that, she strolled towards me, one index finger straight out. I was about to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing when her nail grazed my chin, and everything went white.