“Your cell phone isn’t working.” She waved at the mountains. “Might be those.”
I reached into my pocket and withdrew the phone. I’d spoken with Megan; the thing had worked just fine then. But mountains were tricky. One minute you had service and the next— I glanced at the display. Blank. I shook it. Not that shaking had ever helped.
“You don’t need that here,” Sawyer said.
I had a sudden, sneaking suspicion and opened the battery case. It was empty.
I scowled in Sawyer’s direction. “Give that back.”
He lifted a brow and didn’t answer.
“I do need it. Jimmy couldn’t call. He had to send—” I waved my hand furiously in Summer’s direction.
“Yes, well, that was poor form, wasn’t it?”
Poor form? Had he learned English from the English?
I narrowed my eyes. How much did Sawyer know about Jimmy and Summer? More than I wanted him to, obviously.
My cheeks burned, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it short of finding the memory sector of Sawyer’s brain and destroying it.
“You’re here to learn,” he continued. “You don’t need any interruptions.”
“A phone call would have been much less of an interruption than this.”
“What did you see when you touched her?” Sawyer murmured. “Sanducci banging the natives again?”
I lifted my chin. “I have no idea.” I’d let her go before I’d seen too much.
“He came to question me,” Summer said. “He’s questioning all of Ruthie’s DKs.”
“You must have passed the test,” Sawyer drawled. “You’re still breathing.”
She cast him a quick, suspicious glance. “Jimmy wouldn’t—”
“Oh, he would,” Sawyer interrupted. “I don’t like much about him, but I do like that.”
“Why are you in New Mexico?” I asked.
It seemed a bit too coincidental that we were here and so was she.
“She’s supposed to keep an eye on me,” Sawyer murmured.
In Summer’s face I saw a shred of fear. Maybe she wasn’t as blond as she looked.
“You think I didn’t know?” he continued, his voice so deceptively soft and conversational, I got a chill. Summer appeared as if she might puke.
“It isn’t—”
“It is. You’re a spy for Sanducci.”
She had the good sense not to deny it. I wondered what he would have done if she had.
“It doesn’t matter now. We have much bigger problems than a lack of trust between him and me. What happened?”
For an instant she stood there blinking her baby blues as if she had no idea why she’d come. Sawyer gave an impatient growl that had us both jumping as if goosed. “Why are you here, Summer?”
“Oh—yes. Jimmy, he—” She swallowed and glanced at me apologetically. “There’s been another death.”
My heart caught. Jimmy.
I must have made a soft sound of distress because Sawyer blew a derisive breath out his nose. “Worry about yourself, Phoenix, Sanducci is nearly as hard to kill as lam.”
“He’s fine,” Summer said quickly. “He left—”
“Focus,” Sawyer snapped. “Who is dead?”
She spread her hands. Her nails were manicured and painted the same pink as her lips. I wanted to snap them off, one by one. Her nails, not her fingers. At least not yet.
“A seer. In New York City.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Jimmy wouldn’t tell me. As soon as he got the call, he went to check things out.”
Sawyer’s gaze shifted to Mount Taylor. “Run along,” he murmured.
She ran.
When the rumble of her engine had faded to nothing but a purr, I murmured, “Fairies? Seriously?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“But they’re not Nephilim.”
“No. They’re not human either.”
“Let’s cut to the chase.” I rubbed my forehead. “Just tell me what she is. How she got here. What she does.”
“Besides Sanducci?”
I let my hand fall back to my side and met his eyes. “Yes, besides that.”
He hesitated, glancing north with a worried frown, before turning back. “You know the story of the angels’ fall?”
He didn’t wait for my nod, but continued as if he were in a hurry. “When the angels were cast out, God closed heaven. The good ones were on one side of the gate with him, the rebellious ones were on the other. Those who disobeyed his command and interbred with the humans were confined in a hell dimension.”
“Tartarus,” I murmured.
“Yes. Their offspring, the Nephilim, remained on earth.”
“Why didn’t God send them all to hell?”
“He will, once we win this war. But earth isn’t Eden. There has to be evil. The Nephilim are our test.”
“If the Grigori are locked up in a fiery pit, they can’t create more Nephilim. We keep killing them off and eventually we’ll win.”
“Theoretically. However, Nephilim can breed with Nephilim and then you get some really strange things.”
I rubbed my forehead. “Stranger than what we’ve got?”
“Nephilim are evil, but put two of them together and what do you think you’ll get?”
“Double the evil, double the fun.”
“Exactly.”