3
Last Friday we’d set up the carnival. We weren’t that far outside Mexico City, fifty miles or so, which meant we had a nice, steady stream of prey not only from the local village but from the big city as well, but this crowd of about five hundred was nothing compared to the crowd we’d get on the first and second.
In two days it’d be November. Halloween wasn’t a big deal in this part of the world, but Día de Los Muertos was. Already I’d seen about twenty banners nailed to the sides of businesses proclaiming the holiday and activities and events planned around it.
One of them was the parade we’d been hosting every year for the past seven. This year Vyxen was in charge of ceremonies. I couldn’t wait to see what she had planned. And yes, I am being sarcastic.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I felt oddly hungry.
My kind really doesn’t need to eat, at least not food, to survive. We’re each inhabited by one of the seven deadly sins. Some of us, like myself, carry around extra demons, but in order to survive, we have to frequently feed whatever major demon possesses us. In my case, Lust. Which means my form of “food” is usually sex. Without it, I grow weaker than a mortal and easy prey for any of my hundreds of enemies out there.
So it was strange that my stomach was grumbling. I’ve gone days at a stretch without actual food before and usually only eat because I’m craving something, as opposed to feeling I might die of starvation. I’m not quite there yet, but I felt strangely compelled to get something.
Stomach rumbling, I followed the heady scent trail of roasted meat to the nearest outdoor food vendor. A large group of guys and one girl were laughing and hanging out by the bar area, shoveling homemade tacos into their mouths. The griddle snapped with steak grease. The cook was an elderly woman flipping tortillas with one hand while stirring her meat-and-veggie concoction with the other. Her movements were brisk and efficient and she was clearly ambidextrous.
My mouth was literally watering, which felt good.
I smiled because I hadn’t felt this sort of anticipation for anything in the past but sex. The novelty intrigued me.
Holding up two fingers to the young girl standing in front of a tray of fresh lettuce, radishes, crema, and cheese, I placed my order. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, fifteen tops. Her cheeks were flushed a bright red from the heat emanating off the griddle and her liquid black hair was pulled back into a tight bun. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand and nodded at me, and her eyes instantly caught my attention.
One was brown and the other green. It’s both rare and beautiful. And for a second I was so tempted to pretend I really am normal and can just enjoy tacos for dinner and not worry about freaking zombies, or prophecies, or Hell, or even that damn Billy.
I was entranced by her speedy movements, how she shoveled a perfect scoop of meat, then slapped on my garnishes, and in probably less than a minute was sliding my plate to me. It was a Monday night—in the States she’d be at home, finishing up homework, getting ready for school the next day, or more than likely talking to her BFF on the phone and gossiping about boys.
But things move differently here—it’s a juxtaposition I’ve always enjoyed.
I wasn’t looking to find a “date” tonight, so I made sure to go to the farthest end of the makeshift countertop before I took a seat. The first bite was an explosion of crunchy brown steak, caramelized onions, and pungent garlic. Somewhere in there I even tasted a faint hint of chili pepper, a staple in this part of the world.
The cook’s brow was total concentration as she flipped and stirred; her lined brown skin and arthritis-crippled fingers didn’t seem to slow her down one bit. She had the reflexes of a woman half her age, and somewhere in the middle of my maudlin thoughts I got shoved into from behind, causing the delicious meat cocooned in my tortilla wrapper to spill down the front of my white shirt.
Snarling, an explosion of fury consumed me. I didn’t think or reason; I was a creature of “feel.” I grabbed the wrist of the culprit and felt Pestilence slink excitedly through me, felt the frosty shock of the demon exiting me and entering the man. And if I hadn’t been lost to the anger, I would have realized just what I was doing.
The second my conscience caught up to my reflexes, I jerked my hand back, horrified at my actions, waiting to see the boils and pus appear, to smell the stench of rotting flesh. To witness the horrors of pestilence gone mad.
But the man standing in front of me only blinked with a dazed expression on his strangely familiar face. His bronze skin was coated in sweat, and his pupils were very dilated. The black nearly overwhelmed the brown irises, but he wasn’t reacting like he’d just been envenomed by my poison, more like he was already in the grips of some other hell.
Then two things happened simultaneously. The part of my brain that kept thinking I’d seen his bloated face before realized I hadn’t been experiencing a weird case of déjà vu; no, this was Tubby from the bar and Skinny was nowhere to be seen. And as I registered this, he stumbled so hard that he backed into the group of guys at the other end of the counter.
Beers and food were spilled, and Tubby got shoved back so violently that he tripped over his booted foot, falling into a brackish puddle of water in an ungraceful heap.
My heart was hammering in my throat because I felt like I was outside myself, stunned as I watched this scene unfold. I’d touched that man, poured Pestilence into him. Apart from looking dazed, he wasn’t really responsive. So was he infected or wasn’t he? And if he was, was the man who pushed him?
Licking my lips as the magnitude of what I’d just done slapped me in the face, I whipped my neck back and forth between Tubby and the guy who’d pushed him, looking like some broken marionette doll as I tried to figure out whether I’d just caused the start of the bubonic plague two point oh.
The guy who did the pushing was laughing and tossing his arms around the girl with him. Tubby, however, was still just sitting there, his mouth opening and closing, and then he started moaning gibberish.
“Crap,” I bit out as I knelt beside him. Whether he was infected or not, I couldn’t leave him there. Something was definitely not right.
“Hey,” I snapped at him. From this distance, I could smell his rancid sweat and the stench of decay offended my nostrils. It was a sweet, sour, putrid kind of odor. Kind of like a mix between almonds and ten-day-old beef melt. He smelled like a corpse, but he definitely wasn’t dead and I already knew he wasn’t zombie, at least not yet, anyway. But he’d been around something that left a mark on him.
He didn’t even turn in my direction. The group of people only now seemed to be aware that something was very off about the situation. No longer laughing, they stared in wide-eyed shock at the two of us. I could feel the weighted press of their gazes as they tried to figure it all out.
“You.” I turned to the guy who’d shoved him.
A flare of panic flickered through his green eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt him, I swear. I thought he was drunk,” he stuttered in Spanish.
Tubby was leaning his entire body weight on me now, heaving and panting, his breaths choppy and painful to hear.
I might look small, but I’m plenty strong. Even so, the weight of him pressing into my thighs made them tingle with restricted blood flow.
I shook my head as the pusher started trying to back out of there. “You stay here,” I growled. He couldn’t go anywhere—I had to monitor him and make sure that what I’d poured into Tubby couldn’t transfer to him just with touch.
I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but his skin was definitely starting to look shinier, and it felt clammier. My heart sank. I hoped I was wrong.
He didn’t answer, just grabbed his girlfriend’s hand and tried to beat a path out of there.
“Damn it all to hell,” I muttered under my breath, completely unsure what I should do. Leave Tubby and race after the other guy, or stay here and lose him, potentially allowing a ticking time bomb to move out and infect others?
I’d never had this happen before. I didn’t know if Pestilence spread through contact, was airborne, or if it was self-contained within the object I touch. But the way Billy had demanded I suck it back in, I had a horrible feeling I wouldn’t be so lucky.
“Don’t touch him!” I stood up and pointed at Tubby, who was now curled in the fetal position with half his face in the water.
Several cell phones were out and if I had to guess, a call or two had already been placed to emergency services. This had turned into an effing cluster. At least one thing I knew, no one was even trying to come to his aid. They were all keeping a healthy distance from him. You wouldn’t need a sensitive nose like mine to smell the stench wafting off him.
“You”—I pointed at the young woman who’d made my tacos—“watch him, please. Don’t let anyone touch him. Anyone,” I said, stressing it with a firm shake of my head.
Swallowing hard, she agreed.
This was one of the few times I wished I weren’t a technology hater, because a cell phone could have really come in handy. Then again, it’s not like I had a single number memorized. I cringed, realizing Luc might be right after all about it being time for me to fully embrace the twenty-first century.
Pusher and girlfriend are gone, but I knew I couldn’t let them get far. Following their scent trail of spilled beer and greasy meat, I twisted and turned down crowded streets, making sure to keep a lock on Pestilence.
I worried that it would take me too long to find them, or that I might not be able to find them at all. So I was stunned when less than five minutes later, I literally stumbled across their bodies. They were lying facedown in the red dirt road, huddled together right outside a closed gate that led to a graveyard of discarded metal, moaning and clutching their stomachs as they grunted and groaned with horrible, inhuman noises.
Then the woman suddenly shot up and crawled on her hands and knees a little distance off, where she began heaving green chunks. The man was going into a seizure of sorts.
While I tried to assess who was worse off, a pack of dogs with their ribs poking out and mangy-looking spots on their coats began to circle the two of them like sharks, sticking their black noses up in the air as they sniffed and whined with obvious interest.
Even from here I smelled death. It was leeching out of their pores, sliding through the musk of their sweat. They’d be lucky to last another hour.
Their skin was the dusky gray tone of people who’ve been sick for weeks, not just minutes. My eyesight at night isn’t the greatest, but they were right under a streetlight, and even from this distance I could tell their skin was dry as sunbaked clay.
The dogs looked like they hadn’t eaten a proper meal in months, and I curled my nose at the thought of what was obviously on their minds.
There was a feral gleam in the lead dog’s flat, black eyes, and I grabbed a rusted rebar rod and tossed it at him, striking the mutt in the back heel.
It whirled and, with hackles raised, looked like it wanted to attack me now. Pack mentality had the rest of the group veering away from the bodies. They were now all working their way slowly and menacingly toward me.
“Screw this.” Snarling, I exposed my fangs and curved my fingers, letting the devils inside me glow through my eyes.
Animals have always had an uncanny ability to smell something rotten, because the second they caught a whiff of the nasty I actually am, they scurried for cover, knocking each other over in their haste to disappear.
I never was an animal person.
Both the guy and girl were in dire straits. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see there was something majorly wrong with them. Because the woman was closest to me, I went to her first and grabbed her head, making sure Pestilence was tucked away where it should be. I doubted I could infect her twice, but it wasn’t a chance I wanted to take.
“Mujer.” Woman, I said in Spanish. “Look at me.”
Her lashes fluttered and I saw as she tipped her gaze upward that there was still a little lucidity left when her eyes widened and her mouth trembled. She remembered me from the stall.
“Were you sick earlier today?” I asked her in Spanish.
She dry heaved and clutched her stomach. Her lips were cracked and bleeding and her eyes fought not to roll into the back of her head. “No,” she finally croaked.
“Dammit.” In my heart I’d known this infection happened to them because of me, but somewhere I must have still hoped I was wrong, because it felt like I’d just swallowed a ten-pound rock.
I didn’t know how to control Pestilence. Really didn’t have a clue what to do to make this stop. A horrible idea kept pressing in on me—that I should just kill them now to prevent any type of plague from spreading, because I now knew it could definitely spread through touch.
But I wasn’t as heartless as I’d feared earlier that I’d become, because I desperately wanted to save them. This was my mess to clean up and no one else should suffer because of it.
A powerful ripple moved through her abdomen, so hard that I saw it through the layer of her shirt, and then she was puking again. Bits of it splashed against my knee, making me cringe as the smell of bile blasted my nostrils.
When Billy had tackled me, he’d told me to suck it back inside. I hadn’t thought it would work, but it had. Thing is, the fog hadn’t infected the person yet. Could I heal her by taking it out? Was it even possible at this point?
The fluttering of panic beat at the pulse of my throat. Visions of bloated faces with their chest cavities exploded open rolled through my head. Red gore was everywhere, black blood caked stems of grass.
And Pestilence was happy, he was showing me what was going to happen to these two if I didn’t kill them, and anywhere the bile of their bodies touched, the disease would spread. But even slitting their throats and spilling their blood would infect the land, causing this potential plague to spread.
“No, no, no...” I shook my pounding head; this couldn’t be happening. I wasn’t going to have more death on my hands. They were already stained with too much blood.
This village had only ever brought me good memories. I couldn’t destroy it; I just couldn’t allow this to happen.
“Shut the hell up,” I snarled to the pest sharing my body. I’d learned through the years that Lust could always color my viewpoints with her own, but ultimately I was the one to make the final decision. My demons lived only for what made them happy; they could give a crap about me. Lust had lied to me before. She’d do whatever she had to to convince me to do things her way. Maybe that’s what Pestilence was doing too.
My soul grew cold and I knew I’d just royally pissed him off. I laughed even through the pain of the frost burning down my veins. “I can take it out, can’t I?”
Grabbing the woman’s hand, I brought it to my chest. She didn’t protest, in fact, she could barely move now. Her body was contorted on the ground, her head bent at an odd angle as the vomit coated her pale blue lips.
The man wasn’t moving anymore either, except for his stomach, which had bloated to twice its normal size. The woman’s was grumbling now too. My vision of an eviscerated midsection was going to come true any minute.
Ice floated through my blood, burned my flesh from the inside out. But I fought through Pestilence’s tantrum and called that dark power back into me.
When I’m using Lust, I can tap into a person’s deepest, darkest corner of passion and manipulate it as I will. The mechanics here were pretty much the same. Closing my eyes, I attuned my senses to finding the demon spawn I’d unleashed.
At first there was nothing but the humming whoosh of blood through her veins, but then the sensation of prickly tentacles crawled over me, made me break out in a wash of goose bumps. Swallowing my revulsion at its insidious touch, I imagined myself pulling it back into me like I was tugging on a long length of rope—one hand over the other, pulling it inward slowly but steadily.
And the more I pulled, the more the pain inside my body intensified. The cold was turning my fingers numb, my feet felt like blocks of ice, and my teeth were chattering.
Pestilence was not happy.
“You... can’t... make... me... stop,” I stuttered at it until finally I knew I had pulled it all out of her. The fog of death now rolled through me. Opening my eyes, teeth clacking so hard I worried I’d break them soon, I looked at her. She was calm, color was slowly flooding her skin again, and her breathing was nice and even. Her eyes were still closed, but she would survive.
Crawling over to the man who looked like he was on his last breath, I repeated the process. Five minutes later, with arms trembling and curls of frost feathering from between my lips, I clutched my own stomach and what little bit I’d managed to eat was now forcefully coming back up.
Hands shaking, I stayed on my knees for a while. No one but Billy knew of my second possession. Luc had accused me of being different; little did he know how different I was. In the past I would have been able to ask Grace for guidance on this, or at least trusted her to tell me the truth. But that truth had been razed the second I’d fallen into Hell.
Luc could barely stomach being around me. His temper flared any time I was near and I knew it was because I was pushing him away, but I just couldn’t ask him about this.
I had no one to talk to, no one to help me understand this or even help me figure out if I could get rid of Pestilence.
Lust was just a great big ball of nothing—she no longer really talked to me, and apart from her momentary excitement at seeing Billy, she’d gone dormant again.
But none of that really mattered right now, because I still had to get back to Tubby. Vision blurry and slightly hazy, I got to my feet, standing still for a second as vertigo held me in a viselike grip. I’d taken most of Pestilence back into me, but the disease still permeated the vomit littering the grass.
Using my very limited ability to ward, I passed my hand over the puddles and murmured a spell, my hands heating to molten levels as I shrouded the grass and the affected areas in death.
Now nothing, not a human, not even a bug, would want to cross these dead zones. I’d done what I could for these guys, but just in case any asshole came their way and tried to mug them while they were still out, I placed a protective ward on them too. It wasn’t my best work and would be lucky to last an hour, but I really needed to get back to the market.
Every step I took was excruciating. Each time I planted my leg, fire bolted up my sides, making me get a hell of a stitch under my ribs. I wrapped my arms around my chest and just focused on getting there.
It took twice as long to get back as it had to find the couple, but when I finally returned to the marketplace, I immediately noticed the man was gone.
“What happened?” I asked a stranger who made to move past me.
She quirked a thin eyebrow in question.
“The man who was lying there?” I pointed to the puddle of water. “Where’d he go?”
I only hoped the paramedics hadn’t picked him up already. Just when I thought I’d staved off an apocalypse, things were taking a turn for the worse again.
She just shook her head and shrugged, pointing to her ear buds before moving on.
“Nice,” I sneered, hating the digital age all over again. People were slowly devolving into mindless creatures obsessed with self, too busy in their own heads to notice or give a damn about the world around them anymore.
Anger propelling me, I forgot about the pain. Walking to the counter, I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “What happened to the man?”
The young girl whom I’d set to guard him looked up at me with a perplexed frown twisting her dark brows. “No man.”
What. The. Hell?
I was already irritated, my body was sore in a million different places, some of which I’d never even known could get sore before, and my patience was nothing but a delicate strand at this point. A stiff breeze would make me snap. Gritting my teeth and curling my hands into the countertop, I took a deep, calming breath.
“I told you to watch him. Where did he go?”
She just shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The old cook looked up then.
I licked my lips, willing my emotions to get under freaking control. “The man! He was dying. He was lying right there!”
The old woman gently pulled the girl behind her back. She hissed; she didn’t say anything, just gave me a cold, furious look, and I figured the girl had to be either her granddaughter or daughter.
Realizing I was making a spectacle of myself, I dropped my head to my chest, intending to take some calming breaths, when I noticed the meat stain on my shirt.
I hadn’t imagined him. I wasn’t going crazy. I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.
Narrowing my eyes, I held up my hand and nodded. “Fine, I’ll go, but I just have one question for you. Did you see me order food earlier?”
The old woman didn’t answer, but the obviously frightened girl shook her head vehemently.
Luc has a friggin’ lie detector for a nose; he can literally smell fact from fiction. But I’m not so bad at reading body language, and the absolute terror in her eyes told me she at least believed what she was saying.
I hadn’t imagined those tacos, hadn’t imagined the man.
Something had happened while I’d been with the couple, because I had a huge grease stain on my shirt. The proof was in the pudding. I wasn’t nuts.
So if I wasn’t mad, then what was happening?
That was a question I had absolutely no answer for. I spent the next two hours searching the streets, not only for Tubby, but for any other bodies that might have touched him. I went to the local clinic to see if he’d been taken there; I did everything I could possibly think to do to make sure sickness wouldn’t soon spread through the town.
As absolutely, wildly impossible as it was to believe, the man was gone. If someone had picked him up, if someone had touched him, he would have left a trail of bodies in his wake. So either he’d gotten up and walked off, which I highly doubted, or I was starting to lose my mind.
At this point, anything was possible.