Part 55
Michael was silent on the drive home and as soon as the truck was parked in the garage he climbed out and went inside. He went straight to his room to change clothes, shedding the oppressive weight they represented and pulling on his usual khaki's and a sleeveless tee shirt. He knew Maria would change as well and then go into the kitchen to start dinner since neither of them had been able to stomach the thought of eating before the funeral.
He pulled a thick hardcover book out of the second drawer in his nightstand and carried it into the living room, setting it down on the end table next to his chair before heading for the kitchen. He picked up the glass of iced tea already sitting on the counter that Maria pointed to when she saw him on his way to retrieve a bottle of beer.
Maria was pulling ingredients out and mixing them together in a bowl and he leaned over her shoulder for a moment, scanning over the items. She nudged him back with an elbow and he took the hint, moving to lean against the counter next to her.
"What're you makin'?" he asked.
"Barbeque chicken… with a sweet and hot sauce to top it off; why don't you run outside and get the grill ready," she suggested. "Take the chicken breasts on the second shelf out and toss them on when you're finished."
She smiled to herself when he went to do her bidding without complaint or argument. He didn't have to say anything for her to know that he wanted things to feel as normal as possible, especially after the words Hawkins had thrown at him. He would never admit it, but on some level she knew he was still questioning his ability to protect after losing his partner in the field. Stone had trusted him with her life and he felt like he had failed her; for him it was the ultimate failure.
"Chicken's on the grill," Michael said as he came back in and moved to sit down on one of the barstools, bare feet hooked on the bottom rung as he watched her move around the room. She had changed like he had predicted and she was wearing a pair of comfortably worn jeans with a red shirt. Her feet made a quiet slap-slap sound indicating that she was barefooted and he suddenly realized just how accustomed he had become to evenings like this.
Maria pulled a dish out of the refrigerator and drained the marinade off of the fresh vegetables before transferring them to the grill basket waiting on the island. She just smiled when he leaned forward and made a face.
"What's all that?" he asked.
"Don't worry about it; just take it out and put it on the grill." She placed two small bowls next to the basket along with a couple of basting brushes. "Brush this marinade over the vegetables and the sauce over the chicken."
"Is that squash in there? I don't like squash, Maria," he complained. "I don't mind all the peppers and the potatoes, but – "
"Then you can pick it out after it's cooked." She handed the basket to him and waved him towards the back deck. "Don't pick it out before it's grilled, Michael."
"You wanna eat on the deck?" he offered, pausing at the entrance to the kitchen.
"Yeah, that'll be nice. I'll bring the plates and stuff out."
"Dessert, too?"
Maria laughed and nodded. "Yes, I made dessert, too."
Michael was turning the chicken over when she stepped out on the deck with the plates and utensils in one hand and a glass of lemonade in the other. She set everything down on the table and then went back inside for the promised dessert. He brushed another coat of barbeque sauce over the chicken and then did the same with the marinade and the vegetables.
He looked up when Maria came out and set a cake on the table; white frosting, coconut shavings, and limes were quartered and placed on top. "What kinda cake is that?" Not that it really mattered because he knew it would be good.
"Coconut-lime, you'll like it." She sat down and watched him as he put the finishing touches on dinner. "I didn't realize that Gabriel had a connection to Stone."
"It was a connection that existed through his brother," he said to make sure she understood what he was saying.
Maria's mind was turning over that information and her eyebrows shot up. "Azrael was his brother?"
"Yeah." He placed the chicken on the plates and added the vegetables before turning the grill off and sitting down across from her.
"You'd never know it," she mused. "I mean, no one's ever said anything; I always just assumed that they must have been friends."
"It's not exactly somethin' you advertise in this line of work." He shrugged as he cut into the chicken. He took a bite and chewed it, enjoying the mix of sweet and hot flavors as they combined to create an interesting flavor. "This's good," he muttered around the next mouthful as he picked the squash out and set it aside.
Maria rolled her eyes when he started dividing his vegetables up. "It's a new recipe." She turned the conversation back to the current topic before he could get sidetracked. "Were Stone and Azrael married?"
He shook his head. "Huh-uh, but they were together for a long time. Never worked the same assignments because that's too risky; emotional involvement only complicates things and it makes the operative an easy target. It gives the enemy leverage against you once it becomes known that there's any kind of relationship between operatives and they can target that weakness."
"You saw their relationship as a weakness?" she asked.
"It would have been if they had taken it into the field."
Maria nodded, surprised that he hadn't immediately jumped on her question and expounded upon the weakness of such a relationship. "Do you know how they met?"
"She was sent in to kill him."
Maria was so shocked by his answer and the emotionless delivery that she dropped her fork on her plate where it clattered loudly. "Sent to kill him?"
"She wasn't workin' for the Company back then; she worked freelance and she had been hired to kill him. Azrael had already been in the business for a while and he got the drop on her. She said he held her hostage until he convinced her that she was working for enemies of our government and that he had been targeted because he was a threat to her employers."
"So, not exactly love at first sight?"
He snorted at the notion. "Lust at first sight, maybe." He finished off his second piece of chicken and grabbed one of the smaller plates she had set on the table next to the cake. "They were together for quite a few years before he was killed and she never got involved with anyone else; she maintained that loyalty to him until…" He swallowed hard. "Until she was taken out… she never compromised that."
Maria handed him the knife she had brought out to cut the cake and he removed a sizable hunk and dropped it on his plate. He didn't talk about Stone's relationship with Azrael as any kind of great romance, there were no flowery words, and it was obvious that he didn't really understand it, but she could hear the grudging respect in his tone. "Did you ever work with him?"
"Oh, yeah, on quite a few of the missions when we were in Africa; he was an enigma in the field, but he was one of the best agents I ever worked with. He was relentless in the field, driven to save the lives of everyone in the villages we were sent into; he was deadly in the field, so no one questioned his need to save people who we weren't required to save. It was more than just the assignment, but I'll be damned if I ever understood it."
"Did you ever question it?"
"Only once." He didn't elaborate on his answer; he wasn't particularly interested in remembering Azrael's wrath at being questioned by a rookie field agent. It had been one mistake he had been sure never to repeat.
"Was he killed on an assignment?"
Michael nodded. "He was on a mission in Yemen trying to save some tourists when his team was ambushed… most of his team was lost on that mission. Bastard managed to get all of the civilians out though." He pulled himself out of his thoughts and cut into his cake, taking a bite and chewing slowly.
"It's never easy to lose someone," she said quietly.
"No, it's not." He licked the icing off of his fork and glanced at her, recognizing the faraway look in her eyes that indicated she was back in that other universe. He wanted to ask, but he was afraid that she'd just bring up her dead lover and he wasn't ready to deal with that.
"Back in high school I had a friend named Alex Whitman… I may have told you about him when I first met you and bombarded you with all that information about my universe. We had been friends since we were in grade school and he got drawn into the alien abyss and it ended up costing him his life."
"He was taken out by that Tess character, right? He was translatin' some book or somethin' and she screwed with his brain?"
Maria wrinkled her nose at his commentary and nodded. "Yeah, that's basically what happened. It was a difficult time; his death was so sudden and unexpected… it was hard to deal with and it nearly destroyed the rest of us as a group."
He watched her, tilting his head to one side as he studied her features. "And as individuals?" he asked.
"It was… painful. He was such a good person and he was a great friend."
Why the hell had he asked that question? She was moving into dangerous territory, he realized. Her thoughts were going to lead her right back to her dead lover if he didn't find a way to get her off of that subject. "It's even harder when that person means somethin' to you."
She looked up at him, seeing the distant look in his eyes and she reached over to cover his fisted hand without thinking. "It wasn't your fault, Michael."
"She wasn't scared to die; her only concern was bein' buried next to Azrael."
"She must've loved him very much."
"I guess it was fitting that she'd go out that way; she died doin' what she was trained to do." He shook his head. "She hadn't really been alive since his death and she told me she'd just been buyin' time, waitin' till she could be with him again."
Maria maintained contact with him when he leaned back in his chair and stared out into the desert, lost in his thoughts. He didn't understand that kind of connection and she wondered if he was trying to figure it out or if he was still going over every moment of the mission, looking for some small thing that would've changed the outcome of events.