"You're sure he's here?" I asked.
Summer flicked a huge cloud of fairy dust over the assembled throng. Instead of walking away with a very bad case of short-term memory loss, the group stilled as if they were the best cadre of freeze-tag players in the country.
"Am I sure Jimmy's here?" Summer repeated, and approached the woman in the green dress. She tugged down the mock turtleneck to reveal familiar puncture wounds before her gaze met mine.
"I'm sure," she said.
CHAPTER 5
Summer clapped her hands, and the people wandered off without ever looking in our direction.
I felt as frozen as the townsfolk had been. Jimmy was the demon in the mountains. Now what was I going to do?
Kill him, most likely.
"We need to get the names of the seers out of him before—" I paused at Summer's gasp.
"You can't kill him!"
"Oh, yeah, I can."
"You love him."
"What's love got to do with it?"
Maybe I did still love Jimmy. Probably. But I hated him, too. He'd hurt me so many times in so many ways. Not more than a month ago, he'd kept me as his sex slave; he'd nearly killed me. That he'd been possessed by a medieval vampire witch—a strega—who just happened to be his dear old dad was beside the point.
Jimmy was a dhampir—part vampire, part human— a breed. He had many vampire characteristics—blinding speed, incredible strength, and the ability to heal just about anything—combined with a dhampir's talent at identifying creatures of the night. However, once he'd shared blood with Daddy, his vampire nature had been aroused. He'd gone off to try and put it back. From the appearance of Barnaby's Gap, he hadn't had much luck.
I turned, headed for my duffel, where I'd not only stowed the silver knife, but also, since we were traveling by car, the gun I'd retrieved from the safe.
I knew how to kill a dhampir. Strike twice in the same way. Last time, I'd only managed to stake the bastard once. I wouldn't make that mistake again.
"He hasn't killed anyone," Summer hurried along at my side.
"We don't know that."
She stopped dead, and I did, too, though I have no idea why. Her fairy dust didn't work on me.
"He wouldn't," Summer said, "and I'll prove it." She spun on her boot heels and clippety-clopped back down the sidewalk.
Pausing a few storefronts away, she glanced at the sign, barnaby's gap medical clinic.
Ah, hell. What was she up to?
Before I could ask, she yanked a wallet out of the back pocket of her jeans—how she could have squeezed a wallet in there along with her ass, I wasn't quite sure, had to be magic—and opened the door.
I joined her as she flipped the thing open and snapped, "FBI. Have there been any unexplained deaths?"
I probably gaped as badly as the young man at the reception desk. Except he was gaping at her face, I was gaping at the ID. It seemed pretty real to me.
"I—uh, well. Hmm. I don't rightly know. You'd better talk to the doctor, Agent—" He leaned over, squinting at the ID. "Tink." He disappeared into the back.
"Agent Tink?" I asked. "You think that's funny?"
"Hilarious," Summer said, though her lips were tight and her eyes weren't laughing, either.
I lowered my voice to just above a whisper. "Where did you get that ID?"
"Where do you think?"
I opened my mouth to demand an answer, then shut it again. What did it matter where she'd gotten it—if it was real or if it was magic?
"You think DKs can just wander around killing people?" she continued.
I hadn't really thought about it at all. And I didn't think Nephilim were people. Not anymore.
Except they looked human, led human lives in order to blend in, cause the most havoc. When they disappeared, questions would be asked, even though, for the most part, Nephilim disintegrated into ashes if you killed them the right way. No body solved a lot of problems, but not all of the problems, and in a lot of cases, no body probably only served to create a different set of problems.
"Sometimes, even with the seers' visions to guide us," Summer continued, "we have to hunt these things down. It helps to have a free pass." She wiggled her wallet.
"Why don't you just hit everyone with glitter dust and make them spill everything in their heads?"
"Compelling people to tell me information gets me just the information."
"And that's bad why?"
"I don't get impressions, thoughts, feelings, which, when dealing with the supernatural, are important. For instance, if someone saw something bizarre and rationalized it away as most people do, they wouldn't tell me about it if I hit them with the truth dust."
"But they'll tell the FBI about the demon in the mountains?"
"You'd be surprised what people will tell the FBI."
Somehow, I doubted that.
"What happens if a person checks with the bureau about the unbelievably pretty agent who was asking some very strange questions?"
Summer cast me another withering glance and I understood.
"You hit them with a dose of 'forget me now' as soon as you're done."