2
I’d meant to ask around town, see if any of the locals knew of or had heard about any recent or strange deaths, but I was a stranger to them. A gringa (white face), they wouldn’t trust me enough to answer me.
Part of Lust’s glamour was that I could turn myself into the walking embodiment of anybody’s deepest desire, but doing so also required that I had sex recently. A sort of tit for tat kind of arrangement.
But since that night and the possession of my third soul, Lust wasn’t working so well for me anymore. My desire for sex was practically nil. Luc was the first person I’d slept with since waking from my semi-coma, and even that had left me empty and cold.
I knew I should be a lot more worried than I actually was—I dunno, maybe Lust was still in shock after our stint in Hell. Meeting Wrath had done things to Lust, screwed with her head. She was like a whimpering, terrified dog tucking tail and hiding in a corner, and there wasn’t much I could do to bring her out.
So I had to do this sleuthing thing the good old-fashioned way. Being as old as I am, you get a feeling for people. The outer shell might be different, but the inside was always the same. If I wanted to find what I was looking for, I had to go someplace designed to loosen tongues and get men talking. Get a man drunk enough and he’ll tell you anything you want to know.
Opening the door to the first dive I found in town, I entered and stood just inside as my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lighting.
Taking off my Stetson, I wiped my brow and then headed for the bar where I leaned against the chipped and pitted wood. I lifted my finger and ordered a beer. A second later, the paunchy bartender with moles all over his face slid a cold bottle at me. I lazily sipped on my Corona, eyeing what few customers there were at this hour.
This place was your typical townie dive. Floors tacky with food and drink, a battered billiard table sat to the back. It was dark save for the few red jalapeno Christmas lights strung along the corners of the ceiling. The walls were covered in posters of half-nude women draped around the necks of grinning luchadores.
There were no windows in this building. Everything was designed in such a way as to get a man deep into his cups without realizing how much time had passed. But I knew it was nearly dusk.
I had an hour before I needed to meet with Grace. I took another long pull on the bottle, swallowing the bitter drink with a grimace. If only I had the power to slow time down, meeting Grace was something I’d put off as long as I possibly could.
“De verdad, lo ve con mis ojos, Juan.”
The excited whisper of the gangly man sitting with his back toward me at the table nearest the door snagged my attention. He leaned closer to his ruddy-complected friend and bobbed his head up and down, shaggy black hair dancing around his face with his furious gesture.
“Tu si eres loco, Antonio. él no está muerto. Hable con Eduardo ayer.” The one called Juan snorted as if he’d heard a funny story and started chugging his brew.
I grabbed my hat and nonchalantly sidled closer. I pretended to study my nails as I sat down at one of the empty tables. The hard, torn plastic of the chair cut into the backs of my thighs, but I ignored it as I continued to listen.
My Spanish is exceptional. There’d been a period in my life—about three hundred years ago, give or take—when I’d seriously considered planting roots and settling down. I’d bought hundreds of acres of land in the interior of Mexico. I could speak with barely the trace of an accent and I could understand it even better.
Skinny had apparently stumbled across the dead body of an acquaintance. Tubby didn’t believe him.
Antonio slammed his palm down on the table. “No soy mentiroso,” he snarled between clenched teeth as he vehemently denied that he was lying.
“Como puedes estar cierto? Tú me acabas decir que la cara estaba desfigurada.” Juan snorted again and chuckled.
Tubby was drilling him about being certain, especially because Skinny apparently mentioned the face being disfigured, so the possibility of facial recognition would be slim. I shifted around on my seat and took another sip of my drink, barely even tasting it.
A disfigured corpse was one of the hallmarks of a zombie-style killing. But I’d never overlook the possibility of it being a human killer either. Sometimes you can’t always blame a monster for what goes wrong in this world.
Though my family and I run a carnival, which is why we’re supposedly here in Mexico in the first place, the truth is Nephilim hunt down Others. Creatures of the dark. Vampires, shifters, zombies, and some you’ve probably never heard of. Before leaving our last assignment, Grace had told me of a possible zombie uprising (pun intended).
But she’s lied to me before. My last assignment had been nothing but a red herring meant to distract me from the truth. What that truth actually was, I’m still not even sure. But I will find out. Even if finding out means I have to plead ignorance to her deception.
Antonio smirked, wearing the pleased look of a man who knew his next statement would make a believer of his skeptical friend. “Un cicatriz, aquí”—he pointed to the tip of his index finger and traced a jagged line to the crook of his elbow—“hasta aquí.” He lifted a brow, waiting in the expectant silence.
Except for the telltale curling of Juan’s fingers around the neck of his beer bottle, it almost seemed as if he hadn’t heard Antonio.
But I could tell the mention of the dead man’s childhood scar had unnerved him. The rich hue of his copper skin turned almost white around his mouth, and the muscle in his right cheek started twitching.
“Dios mío!” Juan gasped, hurtling the chair he sat on to the floor as he shoved to his feet and ran out the door.
Antonio’s lips twitched with the ghost of a smile, then he laid down some cash, tipped his hat toward the barkeep, and followed his friend.
I licked my lips and waited a moment for the room to quiet down. The men’s sudden departure had turned the tiny bar into a buzz of disjointed conversations.
The whispered voices wondered about the men and what they’d been talking about, but none of them seemed clued in to the body. I likely wasn’t gonna learn much more.
I stood, rolled my shoulders until the bones popped, and gave a satisfied sigh as if I hadn’t a care in the world. I winked at the barkeep, a surly old man with pockmarked cheeks, and smiled.
For a second I could have sworn I’d felt the swirl of Lust coming to attention.
I could tell he wanted me, could see the flush of sweat on his skin and the throbbing pulse at the side of his neck.
I waited for Lust to get demanding and bossy as she usually did when confronted with prey. Fill my head with visions of me walking up to the man, grabbing his sweat-stained shirt, and dragging him behind the club for a quickie.
My brows lowered.
Granted, I’d just had sex with Luc, but sex was sex, and for Lust that was everything. Nothing existed for her outside her need for it.
Yet aside from the initial twitch of a reaction she’d had, she was silent.
Unnerved, I dropped some cash on the table and jogged outside, leaning against a pillar of wood for support. It smelled like sewage, droppings, and piss. I didn’t care. I took in long, greedy gulps of air and fought to quiet the sudden trembling of my hands.
What in the hell was wrong with me?
Why should I care that Lust no longer seemed to control my every word and thought? I was more in control and yet—I closed my eyes, aware of the alien presence inside me—I was far from all right.
“Estas bien, gringa?”
“Hmm?” I mumbled, opening my eyes to see a small child, no older than eight or nine, staring up at me with large, wide eyes. He shoved a greasy hank of hair out of his face. He was far too skinny. The pants he wore were a size too small; knobby knees protruded from jagged holes.
I wondered where his parents were, then realized he was probably one of the many orphaned children living in the streets.
He looked genuinely worried, and suddenly I remembered another little face. Brianna. At least there’d been one child saved that night. Maybe it was my memories of her and not him, but a reluctant grin tugged at the corners of my lips. Reaching into my pocket, I grabbed a hundred-peso note, roughly eight American dollars, and handed it to him.
“I’m fine,” I told him in Spanish, but he didn’t look at me. Rather, he stared at the bank note as if he were afraid it might disappear. He swallowed hard, then began to back up slowly.
“Go,” I muttered and flicked my wrist.
He needed no other prompting and quickly disappeared inside the maze of shacks and alleyways.
I took one last steadying breath. It was time to meet Grace.
The sun had long since set, and the night rang with the sounds of locusts and nesting birds. I walked slowly, my hands shoved deep into my pockets, and kept within shadow.
I moved down back alleys for several blocks with nothing but rats and stray dogs for company. I caught a few sets of eyes studying me. Some with curiosity, others with malicious intent. I was a lone, beautiful woman. Clearly not a local. Easy prey.
Or so they thought.
But I walked with a sense of confidence and eventually the hard gazes disappeared.
Many times I have no idea where Grace plans to meet up, but she and I have met in Mexico for many decades now. I hardly paid attention to my surroundings, letting instinct guide me.
Light, glowing a buttery copper color, caught my eye. I snarled as my anger flared to a violent pitch. Not a hundred yards in front of me sat a mud-thatched shack. Inside, Grace waited for me.
Now that I was here, I wasn’t sure I could do this. Pretend she hadn’t betrayed me. Betrayed us.
I stopped walking, staring at the light like a moth trapped in the deadly glow of flame.
I was a veritable weapons cache. There was a razor fan tucked between my boobs, a flip knife down each snakeskin boot. Two nine mils were strapped to my back, and the hairpin that was holding my hair up wasn’t a pin at all, but rather an ice pick.
Was I plotting to destroy Grace? It would seem so. And maybe subconsciously it’s why I’d come down here so loaded, but revenge wasn’t a luxury I had at the moment. The minutes were ticking by, and then a dark silhouette moved behind her closed curtains. Grace was pacing, probably wondering where the hell I was. But I just couldn’t move.
Frozen with indecision, I might have remained there forever if the heavy press of eyes hadn’t just drilled a hole through my consciousness, snapping me out of my trancelike state.
Narrowing my eyes, I turned in the direction of the hot gaze and caught a flash of black that wasn’t shadow.
The sun was so low there was hardly any natural light left in the town, but my heart was thumping like a rabbit on crack because deep down in the darkest corners of my mind, I could swear that build and shape could only belong to one person.
With a growl, I ran toward it. Hurriedly I moved down the narrow alleyways of a shantytown, the shacks stacked one against the other against the other, scraping my knuckles and face raw as I’d take a turn into a rusty nail or roughened termite-riddled wood But the amorphous shape was always just out of reach, leading me on a long and dizzying path so that I’d completely lost my bearing because I was too focused on catching up.
“Hey!” I finally panted at it after what felt like hours. “Stop running.”
Heads poked out their houses, staring at me with quizzically raised brows and worried gleams in their inky eyes. I ignored them.
The blur didn’t listen and a fire like I’d never felt before zipped down my spine, blurring my vision. “I said stop!” I roared. It was mindless and crazy-sounding, but I was mindless and crazy.
I wasn’t thinking straight, that much was obvious. But what I didn’t notice, and I probably should have, was that the second I screamed, frost burned my skin.
A powerful something barreled into me, knocking the air from my lungs and shoving me to the dirt. Otherworldly power ran like a shock of electricity against my flesh before a hand clamped itself over my mouth.
Panic clawed at my throat, turned my blurry vision hazy, made my fangs lengthen and my claws unfurl.
“Shut the hell up,” the voice hissed in my ear. “Get your fucking panic under control or so help me, I’ll cut your head off.”
The voice literally made my brain feel about to short-circuit, and I blinked, breathing heavily, feeling as stupid as I’d ever felt in my life because there was no way in hell that what I was hearing, who I was hearing, was really...
“Billy?” I mumbled around a half sob of surprise. I couldn’t see his face—he was obscured within the voluminous folds of his hoodie sweater—but that voice. That voice would haunt me forever.
And this time Lust didn’t just twitch, she roared.
My body went from hot to molten. My skin was so sensitive that I was unbelievably aware of his form on my body. Anywhere we touched. His pelvis grinding into mine, his knee between my thighs, his breath brushing against my neckline.
“Good,” he rumbled, and damn if I didn’t want to yank the black sweater off him immediately. “I’ve halted time, but it won’t last. When you screamed, your demon came out.”
“Lust?” I couldn’t believe the breathy quality of my voice, because I should want to rip his hands off, gouge his eyes out, and saw his tongue in two for making me believe he’d died. For making me hurt and ache and need and want. But the emotion working through me wasn’t hate, it was desire and more. So much more.
My body tingled, shivered, and my back teeth clacked.
“Look over my shoulder,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear. “You see the boy?”
I looked and spied a small head, four, maybe five years old. He was leaning out of his doorway with eyes grown wide. Hovering before him was a puke-green mist. I nodded.
“You see the miasma in front of him?”
I nodded again, unable to trust my voice not to give me away. Now that Lust was dominating my thoughts, Pestilence wasn’t nearly as loud or powerful as earlier. It felt good, right, to have control of my body, to feel it again the way it once was. I strummed my finger down the length of his muscular back, wanting to weep from the exquisite torture of having him back in my arms.
“That’s Pestilence,” he said. “Before I can release time, you have to suck that demon spawn back inside you. If you don’t, the outbreak will level this village.”
I felt the cold of time stood still, looked at the faces all frozen, all staring down at me. I kept expecting them to blink or breathe, but they didn’t move. Just stared at me with horror in their flat gazes. I should care more than I did. Only a few days ago I would have cared, but I had changed. The only thought drilling away at me was... just how powerful was he? How was Billy doing this?
“Billy?” I said his name like a prayer and then laughed, because absolutely nothing was making sense. I’d seen Billy die in hell, seen his body shatter into a bolt of white light; he’d been taken from me. My death priest had been violently killed in front of me, funny how I still claimed the bastard, even though he’d tried many times to kill me himself. Stabbing me, punching me in the temple until I’d blacked out, I couldn’t trust the man as far as I could throw him. Even though he was currently covered in a shadowy hoodie, it didn’t matter because I was as attuned to his soul as I was to Lust.
This man was my obsession and possibly even my destruction, but none of that mattered because he was here. With me right now, and I desperately needed answers.
“Suck it back into you, Pandora, I can’t hang on much longer.” He said it through gritted teeth, and it was the thread of annoyed desperation in his scratchy voice that finally brought me to my senses.
I’d not taken the time to learn how to properly use Pestilence; Lust and I had grown together over two millennia. This other demon was new to me, but if the mechanics were the same, then focusing on drawing the power back into me should do it.
Looking back at the fog, I mentally called it back to me. Not because I wanted it back—I wanted it out of me—but I needed to talk with Billy, and not while all his attention was focused on saving those around us.
I was shocked when the fog curled back toward me, moving in a slow helix undulation, mostly because everything was still frozen and a part of me had expected this not to work.
Lust quieted almost the second the fog rolled through my body once more. Nostrils flaring as Pestilence’s oily infection ran through my system once again, I could only nod when the last of it sank like a thorny barb into my brain.
Pestilence hissed, roiling and spitting its displeasure at being contained yet again. For many nights I’d seen visions and nightmares of what the demon had done in its previous form, the utter anarchy it delighted in creating.
There was a shudder in the air, like the snap of a taut rubber band being let go, and I knew without looking that time was back as it should be.
His hand was covering my mouth and again I felt something prickly against my flesh. My body was humming, blood singing with untold masses of energy as power rolled between us. Obscuring us from the prying eyes of witnesses.
I’d felt this level of electrifying power before, and I couldn’t deny my confusion. Things just weren’t adding up.
Billy’s face was masked by deep shadow, but his body was as firm and strong as I remembered it. His smell saturated my senses. I wanted a visual cue that what I was sensing was really him, but he wasn’t giving it to me. Why was he so covered? What in the hell was going on?
“We don’t have much time. You have to make that meeting with Grace.” His hand finally moved, but he made no move to get off me, not that I cared. I wanted him all over me. Lust was in heat again and this was an itch only my death priest could quench.
“How do you know about my meeting? What’s going on here?”
He shook his head. “We don’t have much time. I’ve been watching you, demon.”
I mean, I was all for a little Peeping Tom action, especially when it was Billy watching me, but it hadn’t exactly sounded like he’d been happy to do it. “Jeez, Billy.” I slammed his chest with my fist, wanting to hurt him even a little, because as tough as I sometimes pretended to be, that idiot had just hurt me. “I thought you were dead, you ass. The least you can do is be nicer. And my name is Pandora!” I bit out through clenched teeth.
“Shut up and listen to me,” he growled. “You’re already late, you have no idea what’s going on, and the truth goes much deeper than you think. You got me?”
It sat in my gut like a raging river of bile to have him order me around, but I wouldn’t deny that curiosity more than anything else kept my questions at bay.
For now.
I narrowed my eyes.
“Pandora.” The way he said my name, soft and with a hint of a growl, like he was confused and exasperated all at once, made my heart thump harder.
“What do you know? You sound like you know something. Tell me, Billy.”
My lashes fluttered. I wished I could help the way my body reacted to him, wished I could stop it, make it go away. It would be so much easier. But this man who was created for the express purpose of ending not only my life, but anyone else like me, had a way of getting under my skin and making me want things in a way that bordered on lunacy.
“You need to go,” he finally said.
“Why’d you come to me, Billy?” I gripped his shoulders, digging into them with my nails. My hair was probably coated in mud and other things, my clothes were definitely ripped, and I just didn’t give a damn. I could lay like this, with him, forever.
For the first time in days I felt like me again, like I could think and reason and breathe. The world was still in chaos around me, but my beacon had returned and maybe, just maybe, I could figure things out.
He shook his head, but no words left his lips.
I wanted to toss his hoodie back, wanted to run my fingers through his silver spikes. Wanted to drown in his taste, his essence. Lust purred inside me; she wanted the same things. We’d claimed this man as ours long ago, he was the only thing we’d ever agreed on.
“Are you letting me walk away from you again?” I whispered, leaning up a little so my mouth grazed the corner of his covered cheek.
I knew it wasn’t in my head that his muscles trembled on top of me. That his voice had grown more hoarse as he said, “We have to talk.”
“Then talk to me now.”
“Pandora, we play a dangerous game. One wrong move and it’s over. Do you understand me?”
I nodded but continued to gently rub my body along his; the movements built tension and friction between my thighs and I couldn’t stop the moan that rolled down my tongue. His fingers drove deeper into the muscle of my arms. They’d bruise tonight. I didn’t care.
“I don’t understand anything.” I shook my head and ran my nose along the length of his covered-up neck. Somehow he must have spelled the sweater not to move an inch, because no matter how I moved or touched him, the damn thing didn’t shift. “I don’t understand how you survived. I don’t understand why you keep just letting me walk away; I don’t understand how come there are no eyes watching us anymore. How you froze time. What are you doing to me, Billy? Why do you keep coming to me? Are you going to kill me?”
His fingers curled even harder, making me hiss with pleasure and pain. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have. Many times. You have to know the truth.”
“Then tell me.”
“Not now. We don’t have time. Look in that book.”
I frowned. “What book? You’ve seen my trailer—I have thousands.”
“The one Grace’s assistant gave you about me.” I could almost picture the amusement flickering in his dull brown eyes. I wasn’t even surprised that he knew. Billy had always seemed to be ten steps ahead of me. So rather than pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, I shrugged.
“There’s nothing in that damn thing. A bunch of useless crap. The lines were all blacked out.”
“Not that one. The poems. Read it.”
I felt the pressure of his body shift, sensed he was seconds away from getting up. Panicked, I wrapped my legs around his waist like steel bands.
“You tell me we have to talk and now you’re leaving. Wait for me, talk to me after I’m done with her. What’s so important about those stupid poems? It’s Middle English scribbles. I’ve read the damn thing, none of it makes sense.”
He looked up and then growled. “If I keep us hidden too much longer, whoever’s tailing you will know.”
I shivered because I’d not sensed any eyes on me, not even his.
“Who? The Order?”
“I’m not sure yet, but don’t worry about it. There’s so much”—he paused and I sensed his anger in the words—“so much you don’t know. I’ve got to go.”
“No! Not yet. You’ve got to tell me what’s going on here... You’ve got to give me something.”
Then his fingers were trailing hot along my cheek, feathering down my neck, and I couldn’t stop myself from trembling, from whispering his name.
“I’ll find you again,” he mumbled vehemently. “Read the book.”
Then just like that, he was gone. My arms were empty and the streets were buzzing with noise again. Previously empty doorways were full of people, and they were all staring down at me lying on my back in the middle of the filthy, flea-infested dirt road, and the eyes that were always watching me were back.
With a snarl, I stood and dusted my backside. But I only smeared the mud worse. I didn’t even bother with my hair.
Knowing the night wouldn’t keep my secrets, I didn’t say his name again. There was something in the way he’d kept us hidden that let me know Billy’s secrets, whatever they were, ran as deep as mine. I wasn’t sure if we’d just formed an uneasy alliance or if he was still plotting to destroy me. But where he was concerned, my personal safety had always been a back-burner issue.
Thanks to Grace’s betrayal, I’d learned to listen to my gut. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t be possessed by Pestilence now, and for damn sure Kemen would still be alive. Something inside me screamed to trust Billy, and it wasn’t because he’d really given me any outward signs that I should. But then again, maybe it was just Lust coloring my better judgment.
With a snarl, I hid inside the deepest slice of shadow and traced to Grace’s, leaving nothing but the scent of sulfur in my wake.
***
Sitting in Grace’s one-bedroom adobe ten minutes later, I had to apply every bit of acting skill I had as I waited for the old bat to come out of the bathroom. Her new assistant had led me to a worn, overstuffed leather chair.
I sometimes wondered what had happened to Mary (Grace’s previous assistant), She’d been so scared of me when I’d first met her, but she was also the one who’d given me that book of Middle English poems that Billy insisted I now read.
I was in the middle of a giant effing conspiracy, and I hated with the heat of a thousand burning fires that I was too stupid to just figure it out. Grace was a rotten seed, the Order was nothing but a bunch of murderous bastards, Billy was still alive, Luc hated my guts I was sure, Kemen was dead...
I swallowed hard because that one still made me want to curl into a ball and cry.
“Pandora!” Grace’s shrill voice sliced through my thoughts. She walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her, and opened her frail-looking arms to me.
Once, I would have run to her. Hugged her with every ounce of love left in me. There used to be a time when I’d thought myself more human than demon, because of her. Because of the lies she’d spoon-fed me and made me believe.
But I knew the opposite to be true now. I wasn’t human. Not really. I never would be. She’d played me for a fool, and all I wanted to do was shove my claws through her chest and rip her heart out. Make her hurt in the same way she’d hurt me.
Lucky for her, Billy had gotten to me first. Made me see I needed to focus and put petty things like revenge off, at least for a while.
Plastering a smile on my face, I stood. “Grace.” I forced warmth into her name and walked to her side, where I grabbed a hold of her elbow and helped guide her to the chair I’d been previously occupying. “It’s so good to see you.” I smiled.
Why hadn’t I noticed the shifty look in her pale blue eyes before? Or the way her pulse increased by a notch, booming like a bullet’s ricochet in my ears?
But even as I asked it, I knew the answer. I’d seen it happen in a million different ways in a million different people. Because when you wanted to believe something, you would. I wasn’t fooled anymore, though I wondered what she would think if she realized the shoe was now on the other foot?
How she must have mocked me to my back, thought me a stupid idiot. I’d heard her tape recording—it’d been sent to me by the Gray Man—her laughing into the line, calling me a fool desperate to believe she actually loved me.
I smiled wider, exposing the full length of my fangs, and experienced a cheap thrill when her eyes widened slightly.
“Always good to see you,” I said, acting the part of the loving adopted daughter I’d once foolishly thought I was. “I’m sorry I’m late. I was scouting the village and heard rumors that I was trying to follow up on, lost track of time.”
Grace cleared her throat and sat. Her smile wasn’t as wide as I usually remembered it. Her skin was definitely more yellow-looking. An obvious sign of a failing liver. Grace was old and would probably die of natural causes soon. But only if I let her. I hadn’t decided yet.
She lifted a hand. “Much better furnishings this time, no?”
She referred, of course, to her previous digs. The place Mary had decorated. It’d been a hideous amalgam of Christmas and gaudy Liberace rolled into one. This small adobe structure wasn’t much to look at on the outside, but inside it was clean. The floors were a sandy-hued tile, the walls stucco, and there were exposed wooden planks in the ceiling. Traditional woven tapestries decorated the walls in a colorful burst of pinks, teals and oranges, and extremely fat beeswax candles lit the sparsely decorated room. There was just the couch I sat on, the leather chair Grace sat on, and one floor rug.
“Better,” I agreed. I’d always been of the less-is-more variety.
“Aye.” She nodded, but I sensed she wasn’t altogether here. She was more distracted than normal, and I’m sure I knew why.
I wasn’t supposed to have survived my night in Hell. And I probably wouldn’t have if Billy hadn’t been there. I saw that night so differently now, when at the time I’d been confused as to whether he meant to kill me himself or rescue me.
The last place in the world I wanted to be was here now. I wanted to talk to Billy, wanted to figure this impossible situation out, which meant I had to be perfect.
“Grace, you’re distracted.” I smiled sympathetically. “What’s the matter?”
Her eyes jerked back to my face and she shook her head. “You always were good at reading me.”
I shrugged and wondered if she knew that the night I’d returned from Hell I’d hovered over her bed with a knife in my hand, ready to slit her from neck to sternum. “You’re like the mom I never had, Grace. I just worry about you.”
“That’s nice.”
“Sooo...,” I drawled when another ten minutes passed. What was up with Grace? She was definitely not on it tonight; it had to be more than just the fact that I’d survived her betrayal. No, she was definitely off her game. “Where’s you’re assistant? Shouldn’t she be bringing my files? You told us to come to Mexico. Something to do with zombies, right?”
Jerking as if she’d been slapped, Grace rubbed her forehead with the back of her liver-spotted hand. “I gave Lupe the night off. But you’re right.” She nodded. “I am distracted and not just about the case.”
Feigning interest, my brows twitched. “Oh? What’s the matter?”
Her smile was weak, never reaching her eyes. “Just a phone call I got before you arrived.” She swished her hand.
When you live as long as I have, you come to learn tells pretty well. Most of them, believe it or not, are fairly universal across distance and language barriers. Grimaces for bad smells. Eyes widening for a lie. Swallowing compulsively from nerves.
She was moistening her lips and swallowing hard. An obvious sign that she was nervous about something. Very nervous.
I can’t deny that got my curiosity burning. Very few things had ever made Grace this way. She was the quintessential example of cool under fire.
“My documents are over there.” She pointed a gnarled finger at the pitifully tiny kitchen counter. “Next to the hot plate. Can you grab them?”
I quickly retrieved the papers and started thumbing through them. Same routine as all the other times before. “So what’s up, Grace?”
“Zombie hive has activated for some reason. We’ve kept an eye on this part of the region for a while, suspecting that perhaps the hive might be planning something.”
You might hear hive and feel a little confused. Point in fact, zombies are not the mindless killers books have made them out to be. They do have a pack mentality, but they only attack when ordered by their creator or, as they refer to her, their queen. Of all the paranormal baddies in the world, zombies were pretty all right by me. They liked to eat brains and mostly kept to themselves. But if you didn’t bother them, they usually wouldn’t bother you. Unless of course you were dinner and well... then all bets were off.
But knowing that, I couldn’t help but think of the conversation I’d heard back in the bar. True, zombies ate humans for food, and yes there was a hallmark to their style of killing but I only knew that when I happened to interrupt one in the middle of feeding, which wasn’t often. Like I said, they’re not the murderous band of killers movies have depicted them to be. But uninterrupted they didn’t usually go around leaving disfigured corpses in their wake. If they were gonna eat ya, trust me, there’d be nothing left. Sort of like lions in the wild, they didn’t kill for fun.
I flipped through the pictures of bodies, most of them with limbs missing and heads cracked open, brains oozing out of them, reminding me a little of a mealy watermelon, except more putrid-looking.
I’d seen worse.
Lifting a brow, I flipped to a particularly gruesome image of a desiccated corpse, maybe in his fifties. I had to judge that strictly off the liver marks on his hands. His head was gone—there was only a neck, a torso, two arms, and one leg. None of it attached, however. The rib cavity had been cracked open and two of the ribs had clearly been gnawed on.
“Lovely.” I slipped the picture back into the folder. “They’re getting a little sloppy though, aren’t they? Not usually their style.”
“Mm.” Grace nodded and smoothed her silvery-white flyaways.
She obviously wasn’t in the mood to make small talk, and honestly, neither was I. This was straining the limits of my patience. “Orders?”
Shaking her head, her gaze turned back to me. What was making her so damned distracted? Stretching my senses, I listened for the not so obvious. Last time I’d been to one of Grace’s safe houses, I’d failed to note the portal to Hell she kept hidden in her bedroom. Clues like that would have spared Kemen his life, would have made me realize who my true enemy was.
I wasn’t making that same mistake again.
It was a common misconception that the entrance to Hell was coated in fire. Not true. Hell was cold. Bitterly, brutally cold. The type of cold that sank into your lungs like a parasite and froze you from the inside out.
I’d experienced that type of cold only once in my life, but ever since Pestilence infected me, my body was acting weird. Because the next time I’d come across the portal, I’d felt nothing. Not a buzz or flicker of awareness. That same nothing was what I was feeling now. I got the feeling that I could no longer sense it because Pestilence had been a full-blooded lower-caste demon who wouldn’t register Hell as anything other than home, permanently nullifying my ability to feel for it.
Jutting my jaw, I realized I should have asked Luc to attach the infrared. We’d discovered that pure-blooded demons—Lower Caste and High Caste, or LCDs and HCDs—and the Nephilim transmitted color on a different spectrum and that tiny black box had also picked up an anomalous marker when I’d walked into Grace’s home. In hindsight we figured out that what it had actually picked up was the gateway.
If I hadn’t been so freaking determined to get away from Luc this afternoon, I might have thought this through sooner rather than later.
“Aye.” She nodded and then shook herself like a dog coming back to its senses. “The zombies. Hives rarely stay put in any one place too long, it’s how they have successfully managed to remain hidden in big towns. But the circumference of their movements has been fairly consistent. The very final picture is an aerial shot of the Sierra Madre range.”
Yanking the picture out, I studied the overhead and widespread shot of rugged peaks and winding valleys dotted over with shrubs and trees.
“They are somewhere within the red circle.” Her fingers fluttered in the direction of the picture.
“Grace, our carnival is parked at least a day’s travel from this area.” My impatience was clearly evident.
Her look was bland as she said, “Dora, you know Mexico like the back of your hand. It is nothing for you to work the carnival at night and search out the network of caves during the day.”
My nostrils flared at the implication. “Alone? That’s what you’re saying, right?”
Did she think I had stupid tattooed on my head? Did she really think for a second that I would just blindly walk into another trap? Clearly Grace wasn’t as smart as I’d originally thought her to be.
“I don’t think so,” I finished, tossing myself back and shaking my head. “I barely got out of the last assignment alive, or have you forgotten?”
She licked her front teeth and the meaning glimmering behind her eyes was completely closed off to me. Grace was shielding herself in a way she never had before. Maybe she wasn’t na?ve after all.
I don’t know—obviously at this point I was a feather tossed about in choppy winds. Questioning everything, having no definitive answers for anything. Story of my life these last two weeks.
“I’ve forgotten nothing,” she muttered. “Take someone with you then, anyone you trust. I don’t care, just find that hive.”
And there was a “but” in there, I sensed it, felt the word dancing on her tongue... but it never came out, which left me feeling sort of like I was standing on tiptoe at the top of a sheer drop, a hundred miles up in the air, that sort of breathless anticipation of possibility. I shook my head.
“That it?”
She nodded. “For now.” Rubbing her skull, she winced and huddled so far into the recliner that she was in danger of disappearing within its overstuffed folds. Grace was a hundred pounds soaking wet, if that. And today she was looking more lethargic and just plain old and human than she normally did.
She sighed. “Once you find them, come back to me, let me know where, and you’ll get the next set of orders.”
“And the bodies littering the town? You telling me that has something to do with our zombies? ‘Cause last I checked, those rotten corpses weren’t exactly known for their speed. If they really are in the ranges, how are they making it all the way out here without anyone detecting them?”
Damn, wasn’t that the crap Grace should have been thinking of already? It wasn’t passing the common-sense test. Zombies were almost indestructible, mainly because it didn’t matter what you did to their bodies, they still moved on. They didn’t need to breathe or even take a dump to survive. They were a lot like roaches that way. A nuclear holocaust would probably not be enough to snuff the bastards out.
She cocked her head. “Dora?”
My name was an obvious question and there was a wealth of meaning hidden in that one word. A million different questions, none of which I had answers for. Her eyes held an edge of freneticism to them. Gray, bushy brows lowered over a set of blue eyes that gleamed just as intelligently today as they had thirty years ago. Bird chest puffing in and out, Grace appeared to be struggling with something.
Lifting a brow, I waited for her to finish her thought.
Her smile was grim as she said, “I’m glad you’re okay. You know that, right?”
I snorted. “Yup. Sure, I know that, Grace.” And with that lie echoing between us, I stood and slid the manila envelope behind my back so that it poked out of the top of my jeans. Patting my shirt back into place, I nodded.
“Guess I’ll call you?”
“Aye. Godspeed.”
It took everything I possessed not to spit in her face, and invoking God’s name while addressing me... She was more blasphemous than I could, or would, ever be. I didn’t look back, I didn’t hug her good-bye, and if she suspected why, I really didn’t give a damn either.
Grace’s days were numbered.
She would die and I was the hand of judgment. Grace loved quoting her Bible verses, and as I walked out the door, I muttered one under my breath. Not just words, but a promise to myself, to her, to Kemen.
“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”