Free Defending Angels by Mary Stanton

Pride. Bree scanned the summary of the defense with mild astonishment; Lucifer had quite a rap sheet. Bree read on, chuckling—a forced, panicky sort of chuckle—but a chuckle nonetheless. As pastiche, this was pretty funny. Elaborate, but pretty funny. The disposition of the case was no surprise; Lucifer was remanded into custody, and sent back to hell for all eternity, with little, if any, hope of an appeal.
    Somebody had spent years putting this together. Probably a whole group of somebodies. And this sort of elaborate fantasy wasn’t without precedent. She could walk into any Borders bookstore and find scholarly volumes dedicated to unicorns, dragons, and witches. Not to mention vampires, fairies, and werewolves.
    Celestial law might even be a saner subject than most. It certainly had more academic heft than, say, elves, if one were inclined to whimsy. She looked up and down the rows of gorgeously bound volumes. Uncle Franklin’s collection was just more elaborate than usual. Clearly, this was a man who hadn’t done things by halves.
    The door from the living room opened. Bree jumped, as guilty as if she’d been caught reading personal mail.
    “Put-it-back, put-it-back, put-it-back,” Archie squawked.
    Bree gave the bird a nasty look, closed Volume One carefully, and slipped it back on the shelf.
    Professor Cianquino said, “We’re ready for you, Bree. If you would join us, please?”
    Bree picked up the blue folder containing the background information about Liz Overshaw, and followed his wheelchair into the living room.

Six
    I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
    —“Lead, Kindly Light,” John Henry Newman
     
    Liz Overshaw sat on the cream leather couch in front of the fireplace, one thin leg crossed over the other. Bree had seen pictures of her in newspapers and magazines. She was the chief financial officer of Skinner Worldwide, Inc. Corporate America flung her achievements in front of the media every time a gender discrimination suit was filed in federal court. She was in her late forties, too thin, with the polished, sort of tightened-up look of someone with a lot of money to spend on age-denying surgeries. She was dressed in Armani—a conventional, skirted suit of beige gabardine. She wore a sapphire and diamond Rolex, and her pearl drop earrings were huge and obviously real. Her graying hair was short, uncombed, and she was in need of a shampoo. She’d also chewed off most of her lipstick. And, as Antonia would have said had she seen them, you could put groceries in the bags under her eyes.
    Liz stared pensively at the floor and turned the Rolex she wore around and around her wrist with an agitated forefinger. She looked up as Bree approached her, then cast a sideways glance at Professor Cianquino. “She looks like some kind of albino.”
    “It’s her hair, Liz,” he said. “That silver blonde is, of course, unusual.”
    “I’d dye it, if I were you,” Liz Overshaw said to Bree. “But then, you probably like the attention. I’ll tell you something, young woman. You don’t want to stand out in a crowd if you want serious people to take you seriously. You especially don’t want to look like a dimwit model. Business life is hard enough for women as it is, especially in the South.”
    Bree drew a deep breath, opened her mouth, and then got a fit of the giggles. Talking owls, a multivolume encyclopedia of celestial law, and now positively the rudest woman she’d ever met in her life. It wasn’t memories of Payton the Rat that made Melrose an uncomfortable place to be; it was the lunatics in it. “Oh my,” she said. “I do apologize. I can tell you, Ms. Overshaw, I haven’t modeled a thing since I handled Play-Doh in kindergarten twenty-five years ago. As for the dimwit part, you’ll just have to judge for yourself, after we talk.”
    Liz Overshaw looked at her coldly. “Cianquino, this is a mistake.”
    “You’ll find that she’s exactly the lawyer you