Feng pursed her lips, but gave an almost imperceptible shrug.
My heart slammed itself against my rib cage and my mouth suddenly felt impossibly dry. I rubbed my palms on my jeans and when my voice came out it was low, breathy. “What’s it like?”
A single cocked eyebrow. “What is what like?”
I looked around the shadowed room, taking in the sparse furnishing, the cold existence. “Your job. I mean—I work in an office. I stamp papers and give people”—I almost choked on the word—“info sessions to get them acquainted with their new insurance policies and positions.”
It wasn’t a complete lie. There were papers and stamps and even insurance policies. But my “people” were generally dead and their new position was generally an afterlife one. And most of my life insurance policies were collectable once the holder died and then came back to life.
But I wasn’t going to tell Feng that. Or that the whole of my employable existence consisted of trying not to be killed by my clients.
Currently, I run the Fallen Angel Division of the Underworld Detection Agency. Fallen angels are everywhere, but my clients are few and far in between, I suppose the consensus on that one being, “If I’m bad enough to get ejected from Heaven, I’m bad enough to avoid some UDA paperwork.” Not a lot of them come in to register. So, I do a lot of Internet searches, determining if certain weird news “events” could have been caused by one of the fallen rather than just your garden-variety sociopath. Sometimes I hit. Sometimes I get hit. More often I miss.
But that’s beside the point.
“I mean, my job is pretty boring, pretty run of the mill.” It is, if your office fridge is stocked with blood bags and your bathroom has three normal stalls and one tiny one with very high walls for pixies.
Pixies are notoriously, dangerously private.
Feng shifted her weight, resting her elbows on her desk. She looked like she was considering my question, thinking of what she wanted to tell me—and what she didn’t.
There was a moment of stiff, uncomfortable silence and I briefly wondered if Feng had triggered some sort of silent alarm, if maybe the Anime Army wasn’t strapping on bubbly pink shields and climbing astride unicorns to come kill me. I only hoped that Alex would be able to sweet-talk Xian enough to at least get her to leave the nunchucks behind.
Feng’s eyes sliced back to me, part scrutinizing, part studying. My heartbeat sped up and I readied myself for the soliloquy where she told me that she was born into the family legacy of a werewolf hunting and she did it so as not to disappoint her overbearing father, but she really wanted to be a ballerina or an accountant.
“It’s incredible,” Feng said instead. I watched her lick her lips as if just the very idea of hunting was delicious. Her eyes were fixed but dreamy, and her shoulders tensed under her faded black baby tee. She pushed a lock of her glossy black hair over one shoulder and leaned into me, chin resting on her hands.
“It’s best at night, when the moon is full. There’s this silvery glow over everything and you just—you just know when they’re near. There’s this deathly quiet first. It feels like there’s no one alive in the world—it’s just you and it.”
“It?”
“The beast. The dog.” She bit her words off hard and I felt a stripe of terror run down my spine.
“Go on.”
“You close in on it.” Feng stiffened now, her whole body reacting to her words. “You step closer and you can hear your own breath. Your heart is—it’s like, thundering in your ears. You can hear your own blood rushing. And then”—her eyes flashed—“You hear it.”
I swallowed hard, horrified but rapt.
“Its breathing is hard. Once the dog knows he’s cornered, his fear is everywhere. You can smell it. It layers your skin; it’s practically—”
“Palpable,” I said with a shaking voice.
Feng nodded her head rapidly, her dark hair bouncing over her shoulders. “You can almost taste it. Once you get it in your sight—” She slowly cocked her head to the right, her ear near her shoulder. She closed her left eye, and pantomimed holding a gun, her right arm pulling back, her left steadying the barrel.
I felt myself leaning closer to Feng, my heart pounding, my eye closing, trying to get her sight.
“Then boom!” Her voice was so loud and booming I squelched a startled yelp.
“You blow the fucker’s head off. Nothing but brains and fur on the back wall.” Feng was grinning and splaying her hands, heinous, psychopathic jazz-hand style. She giggled and bile clawed at the back of my throat.
I thought of Sampson and her words reverberated in my head—His fear is everywhere . . . brains and fur on the back wall. . . .
And then she giggled.