“Eat shit and die,” she returned.
“Um, you mind?” Jimmy tugged on his arms. “You make me feel like you’re going to split me down the middle like a wishbone.”
I started; so did Jimmy. We’d both made use of that practice to kill when we were vamps. The spray of blood was like a Las Vegas fountain.
Do it again, whispered the demon.
Jimmy licked his lips. I knew what he was thinking. Same thing I was. Or same thing my demon was.
He shifted his arm. I let him go. Summer didn’t, so I grabbed him again and he sighed. “You can go back to your room, Elizabeth. Get some sleep. I’ll be fine.”
As if I could sleep—
“What about her?” I asked. My voice sounded childish, petulant, which worked out because that was how I felt. I wanted to kick Summer, and Jimmy, in the shins. “Is she going back to her room?”
Jimmy didn’t answer. Instead he limped into the bathroom, and he took Summer along.
Which, I guess, was answer enough.
At least his damn Yankee shirt was toast.
My cell phone was ringing when I got back to my room. The connecting door was busted, so I left it hanging open and snatched the phone from the dresser.
“Phoenix,” I answered.
“Yes, hello.”
The voice was familiar, but not one I immediately recognized. Not surprising since the remaining members of the federation all had my number, yet most of them I’d never met.
“This is Xander Whitelaw.”
Not federation, but he at least knew the score. Alexander Whitelaw was a professor at Brownport Bible College in southern Indiana. Specialty: revelatory prophecy. However, before he’d gotten his doctorate in that, he’d studied obscure supernatural legends, particularly those of the Navajo. He’d been a great help last month when I’d needed to find a way to destroy the Naye’i, a particularly nasty Navajo witch with an Antichrist complex.
“Dr. Whitelaw, what can I do for you?”
“I found something,” he said.
I’d sent Whitelaw to look for the Book of Samyaza and the Key of Solomon, or at least a clue about the location of either one. He was a fantastic researcher, but I hadn’t figured he was this fantastic. He’d only been at it for a few weeks, and those books had been lost for . . . hard to say, since one of them had never been seen and the other was mostly a rumor.
“You need to come to Brownport.”
“You can’t just tell me?” I asked.
“Not a good idea.”
He didn’t elaborate, but I could hear what he wasn’t saying even without touching him.
Cell phones aren’t secure, and the information he had for me wasn’t information that we wanted in the wrong hands, for obvious reasons.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said, and hung up.
The eastern horizon was turning a murky peach when I strode back through the broken door. I hadn’t heard anyone come out of the bathroom. The bedroom, the bed, was empty—thank God—but . . .
Outside the closed bathroom door, I hesitated, biting my lip; then I knocked once and walked in.
Jimmy lay in the bathtub, the water tinged rusty with blood, his skin paler than usual, ghostly white against the blue-black length of his hair.
For an instant I thought he was dead, and my gaze went to his hands as I imagined the horizontal slashes on his wrists. Of course they weren’t there. Jimmy couldn’t kill himself that easily.
Nevertheless, I gasped, and he opened his eyes. “What’s the matter?”
The image of Jimmy dead in the water fled and another took its place—the real one, the one in front of me now.
Sanducci sprawled naked in the tub, one leg hanging over the rim, his hair curling from the heat, the ends floating on the surface, tickling his shoulders, his chest muscles, his abdomen slick and moist.
I couldn’t help it. I licked my lips, and the curiosity in his eyes turned to disgust.
“No,” he said, and sat up, twitching the curtain across the rod with a shriek that nearly made me jump out of my shivering skin.
No. That was new. Since the first time he’d touched me the answer—at least to that particular question—had always been yes. Of course we were no longer the people we’d been at seventeen. We weren’t really people at all.
“Don’t you knock?” Jimmy asked.
“I knocked.”
“I didn’t hear you or I’d have said, ‘Go away.’ ”
I was getting pissed, probably because I understood his disgust, felt it myself. I hated the vampire inside of me almost as much as I hated the one inside of him.
The demon began to laugh.
“Shut up,” I muttered.
Jimmy cast me a quick, sharp glance around the edge of the curtain. I wondered how much his vampire whispered to him—and how often he listened.
“We’ve gotta go.”
The water sloshed as Jimmy sat up. “What and where?”
He thought we’d gotten a call. We had—or at least I had—but not that kind of call. “Not Nephilim,” I said. “A lead on the key.” Or maybe the book.
“All right.” Water sloshed again. “Can you—uh—get out?”
I blinked. “What?”