Firestorm (Smoke & Ashes Book 1)

by D. N. Hoxa

“Somebody here is going to tell us who the owner of this fucking place is or you’re all dead.” Empty threat, but I figured it would make them more willing to cooperate.

  Except…

  “There’ll be no need for that.”

  I spun around so fast I almost lost my balance. The door hadn’t opened, not that I’d heard, yet in front of it now was a man I had never seen before. He was maybe six feet tall, his cropped blond hair shining as if it were made of honey, almost identical to the color of his eyes. He wasn’t big, but he was muscular. I doubted he could even zip his leather jacket all the way if he tried. I couldn’t feel a pull toward him, but he definitely didn’t look human, and he didn’t feel like a shifter, either. Or any other creature I’d come across, to be honest.

  “Who the hell are you?” I watched his arms closely, so I could see the exact moment he decided to reach for a weapon, even though I couldn’t see one. His jacket covered him well.

  “I’m not looking for trouble, but I do need to talk to you.” He raised his hands, palms facing us. I looked at Lexar, but he only shook his head. He had no idea who this guy was, either. “My name is Abrah,” the guy said and started walking toward us real slow. He had to go around the bodies of the succubi we’d killed, and while he looked down at them, he didn’t even flinch. Still, I wasn’t alarmed, mostly because I could see every movement of his body and because my instincts said he wasn’t going to attack us. He looked very…calm somehow. Completely relaxed. It made me want to relax, too.

  “You mean Abraham?”

  He smiled, and I could swear I heard birds chirping. Something about him was definitely off.

  “No, just Abrah.” He stopped about five feet away from us before lowering his hands.

  “Wow. Your parents must be assholes.” Who in the world was too lazy to finish a name? Did they run out of ink at the hospital where he was born?

  The man raised his blond brows, but the amused look on his face didn’t fade. “My parents are descendants of angels, actually.”

  I blinked. “Beg your pardon?”

  “Nephilim—the offspring of angels. You’ve heard of angels. Your fathers used to be ones, too.” Like I said—definitely not human.

  “How did you get in here without us hearing you?” Lexar asked.

  Ah, yes. That was an important question.

  “I just opened the door, but you were too busy with the shifters to notice,” he said with a shrug, and it had bullshit written all over it.

  “Wait, what do you mean, descendants of angels? Like real angels?” Because I’d never heard about anything like that. Not even Daddy Dearest had ever mentioned it during Bonding Time—or on his few short visits.

  “Yes,” the guy said without even batting an eye. “My parents are the seventh generation of Nephilim, and I’m the eighth.”

  I raised my index finger. “Hold that thought for a moment, will you?” I grabbed Lexar by the arm and spun him around. “Have you ever heard about something like this?”

  “In theory, angels are just as capable of producing offspring as the Fallen, so it could be the truth. But I’ve never heard of anything like it Downstairs,” he said, just as confused as I was. I risked a quick look behind to see the new guy with his hands on his hips, looking at the tied-up shifters with pity in his eyes.

  “I don’t like this.” If even Lexar had never heard of people like Abraham, something stank here.

  “Let’s see what he has to say first. We can decide later,” Lexar said.

  He was right. We had no time to waste now when Chelsea was in his apartment, waiting.

  I turned around with a deep breath to face the new guy, then waved for him to come closer. He smiled, like he thought my gesture was cute, but he came closer anyway.

  “So, Abraham, what exactly do you know about what we’re doing here?” I asked because he’d walked in the bar and claimed that there was no need to kill anyone for information. I could be wrong, but that usually meant that that person had the information we were looking for.

  “It’s Abrah,” he corrected.

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe we should step outside for this? You’ve already made quite a mess of this place,” he said, waving behind at the bodies of the two succubi. The blood and gore didn’t seem to bother him at all.

  “He has a point,” Lexar said, throwing a look at the tied-up shifters, who refused to make a single sound. “Come on.”

  Before I could argue, both men made for the door. I could see the reason behind this—we wouldn’t want those shifters or the bartender to know what we were doing, but it didn’t mean I liked it.

  “Don’t move,” I said to the shifters, just in case we needed to come back in here and question them. “And don’t untie them,” I warned the bartender. The poor guy only nodded and leaned away as if he couldn’t see that I was at least seven feet away from him.

  Then I followed the guys outside.

  The sun shone brightly in the sky, and it fell right on my face, making me squint my eyes. Abraham was the same, but not Lexar. For whatever fucked up reason, the sun couldn’t reach his eyes, or maybe the color in them devoured all the light. Like always, there was a shade covering half his face like he was wearing invisible sunglasses.

  “We’re all ears,” he said to Abraham while I took out my pack of cigarettes from my hoodie and lit one. Thankfully, the blood on the outside of the pack hadn’t made it inside.

  “I know that you’re looking for the nocturnal witch who’s been causing trouble around here. And I know that she’s working with one of your kind,” he said.

  Again, he spoke so calmly, it was really starting to irritate me a bit. Nobody was that calm all the damn time.

  I raised a brow. “Our kind?”

  “A child of the Fallen,” Abraham said.

  Lexar and I looked at each other. Faces flashed in front of my eyes like a carousel. The Fallen had a lot of children, and I didn’t even know half of them. But did I believe that an offspring of the Fallen could be working with a nocturnal witch to release an evil spirit into the world?

  Hell, yeah. They were all evil as fuck. Except maybe Lexar, but I would never tell him that.

  “What else?” Lexar asked.

  Abraham smiled again, like he thought the question was cute, like he believed himself superior to us, but he was letting us have our fun for now. I wondered if he’d feel that way if he saw me turn into a giant fucking firebird and devour him with one bite.

  With a look around to make sure nobody was watching us, Abraham whispered: “They’re working together to find something that’s been buried here in this city a long time ago. A gift from the angels to mankind.”

  “Except angels didn’t gift mankind shit,” I reminded him. If that had happened, the Fallen wouldn’t have been free to roam around the world and do whatever they wanted for thousands of years.

  But Abraham didn’t even flinch. “You’d be surprised by how wrong you are.” Not even an insult. Wow.

  “What is it? What is the gift?” Lexar said. He wasn’t as affected by Abraham’s lack of emotion as I was, apparently.

  “See, I don’t know that—or where it is. All I know is that they want it,” he said.

  “And you want to get it before they do?” The man nodded. “So, you’re basically hunting the witch, too.” Not that I believed in what he said, but assuming he was telling the truth, that would make this whole thing even worse than it already was.

  “I am, yes. That’s why I came to find you,” he said, looking curiously at the smoke coming out of my mouth.

  “How did you find us, anyway?” That should have probably been one of the first questions, but oh, well.

  “I spoke to Hank O’Riley. He told me that you were asking about a nocturnal witch, too. Both of you. And when I saw you, I knew what you were, so I followed you to that apartment where you’re staying and then here.”

  I didn’t know whether to be impressed first or just move straight to pissed
off. This guy had followed us, and we hadn’t even realized it. Here I thought I could always tell what was going on around me. My poor bruised ego.

  “And you couldn’t talk to us sooner?” Lexar asked, his voice dangerously low, like it got when he was about to fuck something up, but I doubted Abraham knew that.

  “I wasn’t sure if that man had told me the truth. I needed to confirm that you were after the witch first.”

  “And you confirmed that, how?”

  “When you went in there and started killing people and planned to torture others to give you information.” He even shrugged for good measure, like what he was talking about was nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Those weren’t people. They were maggots.” The succubi are the worst kind there is. They are pretty much unstoppable because…well, have you ever known a man to turn down an incredibly hot woman who wanted to fuck his brains out?

  Exactly.

  “Infernals,” Lexar corrected.

  “Same thing.”

  “Infernal creatures, yes. I’ve come across a few,” Abraham said, nodding. As you all know by now, my bullshit radar is highly refined, and it went off again just now. This guy hadn’t come across a few maggots at all. He was lying about it through his teeth.

  “What I don’t get, Abraham, is how you know about the witch at all.” I squinted my eyes at him, my cigarette between my lips.

  “I told you, it’s Abrah,” he said with a chuckle. “I know about the witch because I’ve been sent visions.”

  Visions. Through the corner of my eye, I could see Lexar shaking his head. “Visions, like images or thoughts popping into your head, or something like that?”

  “Exactly like that,” the guy said, again, like we were talking about the weather here.

  “Huh. Why not a meeting?” They’d called me to a meeting Down There, to tell me about the witch. It just seemed more efficient.

  “Oh, I can’t go to Heaven.” Abraham laughed, like what I’d suggested was truly ridiculous.

  “Well, I can go to Hell. If you wanna join me sometime, you’re welcome,” I said with a wink. “Now cut the shit and tell me the truth—who sent you here?”

  “Angels,” he repeated without an ounce of hesitation. He was very good at this, or he really was telling the truth.

  “Through visions,” I said, just to make sure I remembered right.

  “Yes.” Not a man of many words, this guy.

  “And what exactly did those visions tell you?” Lexar asked. He was even more suspicious of our new buddy here than I was.

  “They showed me that the nocturnal witch and the Fallen child will unleash evil onto the world.” This time, Abraham’s eyes darkened a bit.

  Wasn’t it strange that he knew that? “She did. She released an evil spirit. We saw it. I fought it.”

  “A dybbuk,” Lexar added.

  Abraham nodded. “It’s not just one dybbuk, though. They’re going to unleash a lot of them if they get their hands on the angels’ gift.”

  “That’s impossible. The power needed for that kind of thing is incredible. Not even the Fallen could do it if they tried,” Lexar said.

  Exactly my thoughts. This was getting very dangerous. Agreeing with him on everything was the surest way to get me right back to where I started with him a year ago.

  I gritted my teeth and reminded myself that there was no way in Hell or Earth that was going to happen. Not even in Heaven.

  I threw away the butt of the cigarette and rubbed my hands together.

  “Right, so. This brings us back to the beginning. I’m going to go in there and find out who owns this place, and then we can talk more. How ‘bout that?” I turned around and walked into the bar again. I didn’t really expect the shifters to still be tied up to the chairs, but it was still a surprise to find them all standing. The bartender was still as I’d left him, though, arms up in surrender, lips opening and closing like he was a fish out of water.

  The shifters looked at me, raw disgust in their eyes as they pulled their hands into fists, ready to attack once more. Maybe I’d given them a bit too much time to get themselves together, but I could still kick all their asses. I pulled two of my knives from the holster.

  “All right, fellas. Who wants to die first?”

  They all charged me at once.

  15

  I only got to kill two shifters because Lexar insisted we’d need the other two to actually give us the information we needed. Too bad—I was just getting warmed up. Literally. I had to use my fire because the assholes shifted. In broad daylight. What the hell were they even thinking, right?

  They were were-dogs. They looked pretty much like oversized dogs with really big teeth and a nasty growl. But they weren’t all that powerful, not like wolves or lions or tigers. Still, Lexar managed to knock the last two out, and then we had to wait for like half an hour for them to shift back and come to.

  All the while, Abraham sat by the door and watched us, a smile on his face, his expression perfectly calm. Maybe he was a monk or something. His calm was unnerving.

  “Just give us a name. You don’t want to end up like your friends, do you?” Lexar asked the butt-naked shifters. We hadn’t bothered to tie them up this time. They weren’t going anywhere, and they knew it, so they weren’t even trying to get up.

  Or cover up. I could see all their assets perfectly.

  “You think you’re untouchable, don’t you,” one of them said. “You killed two dogs. Now the pack is going to get involved.”

  “Let us worry about the pack and just answer the question,” I said. The were-dog pack that lived in Philly wasn’t big. I knew a few of them, and the alpha was an old woman who didn’t leave their territory often. They might want to cause us trouble about this, yes, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle—after we were done with the nocturnal bitch. I wouldn’t have killed those were-dogs if they hadn’t shifted and attacked me, so it was self-defense. Add the fact that they weren’t supposed to shift in daytime, in a human neighborhood, and I was sure I would be able to reach an agreement with the alpha in no time.

  “Or maybe we should take you to your pack right now,” Lexar said. “You can’t disobey a direct order from your alpha, can you?”

  I grinned. “And I’m sure she’d want to know why you’re shifting in daylight and trying so hard to keep that name away from us.”

  For a second there, I thought both the were-dogs were going to laugh at us. If we sent them back to their territory, their lives would no longer be in our hands. There’d be a lot more shifters to fight to get to them, but to my utter surprise, the shifters looked terrified at the mention of their alpha.

  “You know we can demand pack cooperation, right?” Lexar said.

  That was only partially true. Our daddies could, and since we were here on their behalf for the nocturnal bitch, so could we. All paranormals were, in a way, descendants of the Fallen—a product of their magic. Except this guy Abraham, apparently. And everybody here answered to the Fallen one way or the other.

  “Our pack isn’t going to cooperate with the likes of you,” the other guy said, and he looked about ready to spit at us, like his other friend had. The big guy who was now dead on the floor a couple feet behind me. The smell from all that blood was really starting to get to me.

  Lightning struck suddenly, and it hit the guy who’d spoken right on the shoulder. He let out a loud cry, and his friend gritted his teeth. I kicked his leg.

  “Just tell us already. I’m bored, and when I get bored, I get even more bloodthirsty. Plus, my friend kind of needs me, so I’d really like to be on my way soon.” It was only fair that I told him the truth.

  “Giovanni,” the guy Lexar had struck with his lightning said, eyes squeezed shut as his body still convulsed a little bit.

  “Shut up!” his friend hissed, but the guy was over all this apparently.

  “Nobody knows exactly who he is, but they call him Giovanni. He owns a few bars and restaurants around
the city that serve paranormals primarily. That’s all I know, I swear,” the guy said.

  I squatted down in front of him. “Here’s what I find funny. Why would you almost die to protect such simple information?”

  He blinked, his yellowish eyes moving to the floor quickly.

  “Because he’s powerful,” the other guy said. Weren’t they both full of surprises? “And he kills people for talking about him.”

  “What is he?” Lexar asked.

  The guy actually flinched. “He’s one of you.”

  I turned and looked at Abraham, still sitting there quietly, looking at us.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where we can find this Giovanni guy, do you?” No offspring of the Fallen that I knew of was named Giovanni. Whoever this guy was, he’d lied about his name. Not very surprising. I’d have tried to hide my identity, too, if I’d planned to do something the Fallen explicitly forbade.

  “Nobody knows where he is,” the first guy said, his hand over his shoulder still, where Lexar had struck him. “Ask anyone.”

  “But we’re asking you. What are you to him? Do you work for him? Because that bartender looked right at you the second we came in here,” I reminded them, just in case they hadn’t noticed.

  “No, we run errands for the manager,” the shifter said. His eyes were closed now, head resting against the wall, like he’d already given up. I almost felt bad.

  “The Joey guy, right?” He nodded. Finally, some good news. “And where can we find Joey?”

  Five minutes later, we left the bar—and the two shifters, alive. Whoever Joey was, he was going to have a hell of a time cleaning up the mess we left behind. Right after he spoke to Lexar. The were-dogs had given us the address of an apartment where Joey apparently lived, and as much as I wanted to go meet him in person, I was going to have to let Lexar go alone.

  I had something else to do before I went back to Chelsea.

  “I really believe we should stick together for this. This is bigger than we know, Sapphire,” Abraham said as we turned the street corner. Lexar had gone the other way, alone, and this guy had decided to come after me.