A black tendril wafted upward where Clyde lay on the bed, slinking, shrugging off the body it’d had been attached to.
With wild eyes, Delaney pinpointed Vincent’s soul erupting from Clyde in an explosion of vile, rippling ebony streams.
Her half brother had arrived.
The suck-up.
So now it was two against two.
Without thought, without a qualm, Marcella launched herself at Lucifer, tackling him with a bone-crunching slam to the floor. The hospital bed swerved sideways, yanking at the machines and cords Clyde had been attached to with a precarious jerk. Lights blinked, alarms blared with ear-splitting quality. Yet no one came.
And then it got butt ugly.
Shrieks of thunder crashed, booming off the walls of the ICU room until she was certain she’d be learning some Helen Keller moves if she survived this. Rain, like wet little pelting needles, pummeled her exposed skin, drenching her in seconds.
As if in a dream, she watched Marcella scramble to her feet, slipping on the rain-slick floor, Satan but a mere infuriated step behind her and far more confident on his sneakered feet. “Get out!” she screamed to Delaney, her head snapping backward when Satan grabbed a long, dark handful of hair, wrenching it viciously. Marcella bit out angry words in her native language. “Descarado sin espina, hijo de puta! Si tocas un pelo en su cabello, sea a verte en el hoyo!”
Hissing infiltrated her ears, clawing at her eardrums, the screeching ssssss pounding painfully against them. A shiver she had no control over skittered from her sodden head to her toes. What was it with the flippin’ reptilian family, already? For the love of squirmy, slithering things—snakes, what seemed like thousands, shimmied across the floor, up her legs, wrapping around her ankles and edging their way to her waist. She screamed, shaking them off and shuddering, her chest heaving, her brain racing for a solution.
And then there were locusts, emerging from the dim light of the room in swarms, clacking to the ground and bashing themselves against her face.
Marcella clawed at the hands that dragged her, twisting and turning her lithe body like some captured wild animal. “Get ooooout, Deeee!” Her hoarse cry mingled with the deep, crazed laughter of her captor.
Fury clamped down on Delaney like a vise, forcing her to take action. The hell she’d leave Marcella.
Her eyes scanned the room with wild desperation, pushing her to think. Delaney hurled herself at a lone chair in the corner of the room just as fire exploded in a starburst of blue and orange flames. They writhed at her feet, dancing their demonic rhythm to block her path. Terror made her legs pump like she’d run the minute and a half all her life.
She latched on to the chair’s back, lifting it high over her head, bellowing in a wet warble, “Duuuuck!” before she sent it sailing across the room at Satan, only to have it fruitlessly slam against the far wall and splinter to the ground.
And that was when she heard it—the incessant rapid-fire bong of Clyde’s heart monitor.
Oh, and then there was her friend’s lithe figure, beautiful, fiery, hot-tempered, and the closest thing she’d had to a BFF, dead or otherwise, in all of her life, hurtling toward her. Marcella’s glossy black hair billowing in soaking wet streams was the last thing Delaney saw before she was body-slammed with such force she crumpled, her head hitting the sink with a crack so sharp and ominous she knew it meant bad shit.
Slinking to the floor, helpless to save herself or her friend, Delaney had one last moment of consciousness.
In that moment, she heard the sweet, sweet sound of Clyde’s heart monitor.
Flatlining.
Two thumbs up.
twenty-three
Victory just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
For sure she didn’t feel like going to Disney World.
Warm heat bathed her back, calling for her to turn around and lift her face to it.
But that was damned hard to do when you couldn’t tear your eyes away from a train wreck.
Her jacked-up body being the train wreck and all.
Really, there was nothing like identifying with your work, Delaney thought while peering down at her broken, soaking wet, just a little too bloody for her taste, body.
Lucifer toed her using the tip of his foot, nudging her ribs with a look of disgust when Delaney’s body gave him no reaction while he clung to Vincent’s soul. He held up the struggling black wisp of light in his hand and examined it. “Oh, Vinny. Come to Papa. Did you miss me? And look at this mess, would you? Now I’ll have to send in the cleanup crew. They need far more direction than I have time for tonight,” he cackled.
Realization was slow and thick like pea soup.
When it finally came—it was much like that defining moment she’d heard so much about. She totally got it. Just like that.
Holy fucksticks, Batman.
She was dead.
Epically so.
She looked down again at her battered, broken body.
Yep, there was no recovering from that. Not even bionics and Oscar Goldman could save her.