He stops. Blinks his watery eyes. Both his gaze and his gun bob downward. “What the fuck?” he blurts.
“Huh?” I follow his tear-soaked gaze downward. The light isn’t coming from a streetlamp at all; its coming from my stomach. My stomach is… glowing? Or rather, the outline of Lilith’s sigil is glowing, clearly delineated by a sharp, white light even through my shirt and tie. I blink at it. “What the fuck?” I parrot stupidly.
Before I can take advantage of his confusion, he takes advantage of mine. The gun snaps back up.
“Stop it!” he screams, finger pulled piano-wire-tight against the trigger. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it!”
“I’m not doing anything, I swear I’m not—”
“STOP IT!”
A brick falls on his head.
I barely see it happen in the uneven light. All I know is there’s a CRACK of clay meeting skull, and then the gunman is crumpling like a paper bag. As the initial shock trickles away, I stare down at the brick by my foot, then at the unconscious body in front of me. The guy landed face down, and through his matted hair I can see a bloody gash at the crown of his head, oozing muddy scarlet onto the pavement.
A flutter of pages. Something THWAPs onto the top of my own head, making me stagger. A cheerful voice wafts down from above.
“Oops. Hey, Witchy, you mind picking that up for me?”
I bend down without quite thinking the motion through, groping in partial blindness. I discover a smallish paperback book with a familiar orange cover just behind my right heel and scoop it up. I squint down at it, then up.
Lilith’s shadowed form is leaning over the railing of a fire escape a good five floors up, her hair hanging down around her face like a thick lace curtain and swaying in the breeze. Her face is entirely obscured, but I can still see the gleam of her brilliant white teeth.
I make a face at her. Then I wave The Pirate’s Mistress, beckoning her down.
Lilith hops up onto the railing, walking it like a tightrope, and leaps lightly to the balcony on the floor below her. She does a hop-skip-twirl, leaps again—I almost think she’s missed her footing, but she catches the rail of the fire escape stairs, swings like a trapeze artist, and lets go. She twists as she falls, her hair streaming up and the thin fabric of her dress rippling—her tail lashes once, and she lands on the outer edge of the sidewalk in a silent crouch. She parts the dark curtain of her hair with both hands as she gets back up, grinning cheekily at me through the gap. She’s back in her ivory nightgown, which sports a few new creases but is somehow without a single spot of dirt. She’s also wearing a jean jacket, one I’ve never seen before. Where do demons get clothes? Macy’s?
The thought dries up as her eyes properly meet mine, and the bruises under my own clothes throb with the rhythm of my racing pulse.
“You dropped a book on me,” I complain, holding it up. She shrugs glibly.
“At least it wasn’t a brick.”
We both turn to look at the gunman in his strange, miserable spotlight under the street lamp, the growing puddle of crimson now soaking his shirt.
“You know this guy?” Lilith asks, leaning to poke him in the shoulder with a clawed toe.
My arm shoots out across her torso, barring her way and pushing her a small step back. “Don’t move him, it could kill him.”
Lilith goes deathly still. She raises a thick eyebrow at the arm in her way, then up at me. I hastily retract my arm. As an afterthought, I also offer her the book; she takes it and holds it loosely at her side.
She keeps her eyes fixed on mine during the whole exchange. She doesn’t even blink. Her full lips part. “You know,” she says, her tone just a shade too dark to be conversational, “that he was going to kill you, right?”
I open my mouth to respond—and the unconscious man on the floor makes a thick, wet gurgling noise. “Crap, he’s alive,” I hiss, dropping to one knee in front of him. “Gun, where’s the gun?”
Lilith points with her tail. The revolver is on the ground just a little ways off from my attacker’s head, leisurely marinating in the expanding pool of blood. I pick it up gingerly with my coat sleeves covering my fingertips and push out the cylinder, squinting into it in the dim light: all six bullets are present and accounted for.
“Hey,” I say to Lilith, “how do you feel about guns?”
She shrugs. “Never really thought about them.”
“Wanna fire one into the sky for no good reason?”
Her eyes shine. I hold the revolver by the barrel and she takes it, immediately sticking out her tongue. “Ew, it’s sticky. Any tips?”
“You’re supposed to squeeze the trigger gently and brace for kickback, but that’s about all I know.”
Lilith raises her arm, and I cover my ears. The six, booming shots illuminate her face like a lightning storm; for the first, her brows are dipped in concentration. By the last, the curve of her exhilarated grin and the pinpoints of her dimples are stamped forever into my memory. It’s cinematic, honestly. Good thing I was prepared, or I might’ve fallen in love.
Lilith hands the gun back to me. I wipe it down and drop it where I found it, then keep my hands covered to rifle through the gunman’s pockets. Aha, there’s his wallet. As I pocket it, I glimpse slats of light shining through a window that was dark just moments ago. I don’t know if the person behind the shutters can see me, but I give a quick wave anyway.
“Alright, we’re good,” I say, getting up to walk briskly away from the scene. Lilith catches up easily with a smooth, rolling gait that entirely negates the disadvantage of her shorter legs.
“Ooh, are we running from the police now?” she says, her eyes glinting in the low light.
“No, we’re not running, we’re just… leaving.” I duck into an alley.
“What was the point of shooting the gun?”
“Someone will hopefully call an ambulance for the guy we left. If not, well, it’s the same bind he would have left me in, so I’m not broken up about it. And I didn’t want to carry the gun, so we left it empty so no one else would get shot. That answer your question?”
“Yeah-huh.”
“Good, ‘cause now I have some questions for you.”
Lilith makes another noise like a “Sure, why not.” Then she proceeds to pirouette around me in effortless circles, while I’m still power-walking down the alley. Showoff.
“First, how the Hell did you do that?” I say.
“Do what?” Her voice is sweet and innocent as she cuts across my field of vision in a whirl of hair.
“Drop a brick on that guy. You’re a demon. I doubt he consented to a mortal head injury, there’s no way that could have counted as retaliation, and for gods’ sake could you stop spinning around me like that? You’re giving me a headache.”
She giggles and spins around me one more time, just as I exit the alleyway onto the other side of the block. She faces me while walking backward, flashing her fangs. “I didn’t need justification. Because I never dropped a brick on anybody.”
I stop and narrow my eyes at her. She shrugs with one shoulder.
“I was just sitting on the fire escape, reading my book and playing with my pet brick. I put them both down on the rail, then whoops, they fell off. Silly me, I guess.”
I’m going to get a permanent wrinkle between my eyebrows if I keep up this scowl. “How do you even know he was going to kill me? He’s not a professional, he could have chickened out any second.”
“But he wasn’t going to.”
“You don’t know that.”
“He was going to.”
“How do you know that?”
She skips closer to me without her feet making a sound, then, in one graceful motion, pokes me in the bellybutton. I stumble backward.
“Ow! What was—” Then I remember the sigil glowing through my shirt. It’s not there anymore. I grab the plain white fabric of my shirt in my hands, flattening it against my stomach and staring at it.
“The sigil t
ells me when you’re about to die,” Lilith says.
“What? When did I agree to that?” I nearly shout.
“When I asked permission to carve into you like a Thanksgiving turkey, you said ‘Sure, go ahead.’ Verbatim. You weren’t particularly discriminating about the nature of the sigil, so I took a slight liberty.”
It takes a moment. Then I smack the heel of my hand onto my forehead.
“You slipped a warning system into the contract. Because if I die without being damned, I win the bet. You rigged the game.”
Her eyes twinkle. She lifts The Pirate’s Mistress and opens it, flipping quickly through the pages until she finds one occupied by a folded brown napkin. She holds the napkin up by a corner like forensic evidence, proudly displaying the various squiggles and symbols I penned onto it earlier while eating breakfast at the outdoor sandwich place.
“Christ on a cracker,” I say, “don’t you have anything better to do than follow me around all day?”
“You’re trying to figure out how to ward me out of the apartment.” She wiggles the napkin, making it flutter.
“Well, yeah, of course I am.”
“If you get to cheat, then so do I.”
“I’m not cheating, I’m just—” I let out a frustrated growl. “What would you even do with my soul?”
She shrugs, sliding the napkin-slash-bookmark back into place and snapping the book shut. Humming introspectively, she rolls her eyes up to the moonlit sky. “Haven’t decided yet. I might keep you in a jar, take you out to play with if I get bored. Nibble on your fingers when I get snacky. Hang you up on the wall on a plaque like one of those funny moose heads on TV.”
I suppress a violent shudder, compressing it into a quick twitch. “So, you just want my soul for shits and giggles?”
“Like I said. Haven’t decided yet.”
The wail of distant sirens prompts me to start walking again. Lilith tilts her head to one side as she follows me, her ears lengthening into delicate points, and listens for about four or five steps. “Who was that guy, anyway?” she says, one ear flicking. It’s more elongated and floppy than a cat’s ear, more like a goat’s. “I knew you weren’t a bigshot, but I figured anyone coming to kill you would at least be a higher grade. As assassins go, he was pretty pathetic.”
Recognition breaks a chair over my head, stopping me in my tracks. “Oh! I do know him! His name is—is—” I snatch the wallet I took out of my pocket and rifle through it until I find an ID to confirm my suspicions. “—Jones? Joey? George—George! I was hired by his coworker about a week ago, right before that whole mess with the Merestis. Alice, the coworker, thought he was trying to curse her, but it turned out he was trying to get her under a love spell. I was destroying the spell the first time I saw you.”
Lilith claps her hands together, The Pirate’s Mistress between them, and presents a mockingly adoring simper. “Aww, you remember our first date!” she says, voice dripping with sugar.
I roll my eyes, shoving my hands into my pockets and stalking away. “Whatever, do your demon thing, laugh it up. Anyway, now I know why that guy wanted to kill me.”
“What about the others?”
I blink. “What others?”
“The ones in the van.”
“The ones in the what?”
Lilith stands up on her tiptoes—or rather, stands up even higher on her toes, since she’s got those fancy digitigrade cat feet—and pats the top of my head. “It’s okay, Witchy, it’s not your fault you’re stupid,” she consoles in a voice that’s entirely too charitable for her smug face.
I duck out from under the condescending head-pat and scowl at her. “Lilith, what van?”
A wicked smirk, and a conspiratorial whisper: “I’ll tell you if you gimme a kiss.”
Her lips are full and wonderfully inviting and I think about the way she kissed me into the mattress last night, a closed-mouth kiss becoming a wet, open-mouthed one, the taste of her tongue sliding against mine, leaving me panting and ready for a different kiss—one that’s scalding hot and dripping with a uniquely tangy, bittersweet taste, slick and slippery and filling me nose to lung with a thick, intoxicating smell—
A payphone booth appears out of nowhere and smacks into my face. Never mind that it’s made of unmissably opaque stainless steel, or that there’s a person inside cussing loudly into a receiver. He pokes his head out to cuss drunkenly at me as I hit the sidewalk; I just stare blearily up at the imprint of my face on the rusted steel. Lilith’s raucous laughter echoes all around me in stereo surround sound, and the bruises on my ass are screaming again.
The guy in the phone booth turns his ire on Lilith—and goes silent, stuck in the molasses of her whiskey-deep eyes. Like a zebra seeing the stripes of a tiger in the grass; familiar, but not-quite-right, not-quite-safe. He leaves the payphone dangling on its cord and stumbles away.
Lilith is still losing it, cackling her heart out as she dances in circles around me. Then she stops, bending to peer intently down at my face. “You’re not concussed, are you?” she says. “That would be sucky. Concussed people are boring.”
“I’m not—not concussed—” I scramble onto my hands and knees, then shove myself upright. The world around me spins wildly. “Oh, Jesus.” The only thing that keeps me from falling again is the unfailing knowledge that Lilith won’t catch me. “We were talking about something. A train? A bus. What bus?”
“A van, Witchy, a van,” Lilith chides, shaking her head. “Your amateur assassin, he was dropped off by a bunch of guys in a black van. They drove off when the fun started.”
That strikes me as important—very, very important. I round on Lilith, in a manner that would be much more urgent and intimidating if I weren’t still wobbling like a baby penguin.
“Did you get their plates?”
“Didn’t even look at them. I’m not here to do your job for you, Witchy. Evil soul-stealing demon here, remember?” She tilts her head, smiling innocently. “Besides, what am I going to do when another startlingly incompetent hit squad comes for you, drop a brick on one of them? You know I can’t do that. It’s not personal, just interplanar rules.”
A pounding pressure has started in my skull, just under the skin of my forehead. Or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it until now. I grit my teeth, rubbing the heel of my hand against the spot. “I am so warding you out of my apartment.”
Lilith stares up at me through thick black lashes, the gold in her eyes stirring like burnt honey. She blinks; her sclera are suddenly inky black. The skin of her face splits, starting at the corners of her mouth and continuing in ragged lines back toward her ears, and her newly exposed, too-sharp molars gleam. I don’t even hear the sound of creaking bones until I realize with a jolt that she’s standing at equal height with me. Her forked tongue snakes out, and she runs it over her upper lip and the tips of her protruding fangs.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to stick around?” she coos, her voice impossibly smooth and amplified. There’s a husky, rumbling undertone to it, something that slips under my skin and leaves a buzzing aftershock like the bass at a metal concert. “You begged so pretty last night…”
Something in the hollow of my chest, just behind my sternum, aches with the need to have her skin against mine. Even just the memory of her is enough to steal my breath away, and I’ve got the real thing right here on this sidewalk, so close that I could just lean forward a bit, fall onto my knees, fall into her, let her warmth and softness block off the whole rest of the world, give up all my fears and obligations and control and do nothing but feel—
I swallow thickly, forcing my feet to lift and turn me away from her. Then I stuff my hands into my pockets and take a deep, measured breath.
“See, Harry,” I mutter on the exhale, closing my eyes and tipping my aching head back. “This is why fucking the demon was a bad idea.”
Lilith’s giggle is liquid mercury. When I look at her again she’s right back to her original 5’5” form, as though she n
ever changed. “Alright,” she says in her playful human voice, her tail curling lazily behind her. “If you’re not in the mood, we can play another game.”
“The game where you stalk me all day and annoy the crap out of me?”
“The game where we bet on whether or not you can make a ward that works against me.”
That gets my attention. I look at her without speaking, an eyebrow raised as a request to continue. She grins.
“Make an original ward. I’ll test it out. If it doesn’t work, I get to ask you a question. And you’ll answer on the spot, truthfully, to your full capability.”
I cock my head to one side. “And if it does work?”
“Then you get to ask me a question. And I’ll answer it on the spot, truthfully, to my full capability. And then the game is over.”
I wrinkle my nose. “That’s not fair. I can fail a hundred times, but I can’t succeed more than once.”
She shrugs. “What did you expect? You don’t have to play if you don’t want to.”
What’s your real name?
The question creeps up on me out of nowhere, but once I’ve voiced it in my head I can’t let it go.
What’s your real name?
Your real name?
Your name?
“Alright, I’ll play,” I find myself saying. “Could be a slow game though, I’m busy at the moment.”
“That’s fine,” Lilith answers, grinning wider than ever. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
She slips the napkin back out of her book and holds it out to me. As I take it I feel a tingle of two-way energy, of the contract we’ve just outlined being sealed through the exchange of a gift.
Lilith saunters away down the street, opening one side of her jean jacket to store The Pirate’s Mistress safely inside, and turns a corner into an alleyway. I know that if I chase after her, she’ll be nowhere to be found. I rub my thumb over the rough surface of the napkin, thinking. Then I shake my head, tuck the thin brown square into my coat pocket, and return to the task at hand.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Too Late
Bloodbath Page 8