I tried to move closer to the door so I could get line of sight. The door shut as I tried to throw myself toward the opening and get one last look at the demon. I wasn’t sure that I could even change it from big to small; that was harder to do to spiritual beings even when they were less solid. Small changes, though, small was easier.
There was a crash of something heavier than a person being thrown against the door. They didn’t have a gun, so I could stand in the doorway without worrying about cover. I pushed on the door; it moved a few inches and then it caught on something solid. I put my shoulder into it, but I couldn’t get it to move more. They’d wedged something in the door.
The woman screamed again.
Miller came over and put his shoulder with mine. We tried kicking it. The door wouldn’t move.
The woman’s scream turned to one word: “No!”
Her fingers found the crack at the edge of the wedged door. “Help me!”
I touched her fingertips, leaning in so I could see that she had brown eyes. Her fingers curled around mine; the opening wasn’t big enough for anything more. I didn’t know why the demon hadn’t dragged her back yet.
“What’s your name?”
“Kate, I’m Kate.”
I held her fingers in mine. “I’m Detective Havelock.”
“Detective what?” she asked. Her eyes looked too big for her face. She looked young and innocent and I wanted to keep her that way.
“Havoc,” I said.
“Havoc, get me out of here, okay?”
“What’s against the door, Kate?”
“The bed.”
“What’s the demon doing?”
Her eyes darted back into the room, then came back to look at me. “Just standing there.”
I didn’t know what the demon was waiting for, and I didn’t want to wait to find out. “Kate, can you move the bed away from the door?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
“Can you try? Please.”
I’d thought she was holding on to me tight, but I’d been wrong, because now she squeezed harder. Her skin paled with the pressure of it.
“I’d have to get closer to it.”
“I’m sorry, Kate, but the bed needs to move so we can get you out.”
“She’s too weak to move the bed.” The demon’s voice held that whining note that was Mark Cookson.
“Will you let her try?” I asked. I didn’t know why he hadn’t hurt her again, but I was going to use it.
“Sure,” he said, as if he was being magnanimous.
“Kate, you can do this.” I was more saying that she was brave enough to let go of my hand, than move the bed. If we couldn’t move it from this side, I wasn’t sure she could do anything on that side, but trying was better than giving up.
“Are you really going to let me try to move the bed?” she asked, and I realized she wasn’t asking me.
“I said sure.”
She squeezed my hand one more time, and then she left the small opening. I was left looking into the empty half of the hospital room. I could hear her moving around. I felt the door move under my hand and for a moment I thought she’d done it, but the door didn’t open. I could feel the vibrations of her trying to manipulate the bed and whatever the demon had done to wedge it against the door. She wrapped her hands around the opening and pulled; I put my shoulder against it and pushed. Miller joined me. It moved a few more inches, but that was it.
I could see more of her now, her body lost in the oversized hospital gown, but her face was oval with a sprinkling of pale freckles; her lips were full, the kind that always seemed half pouting, the real deal that all the fake duckfaces on the internet imitate. Her eyes were big and brown with dark lashes and eyebrows arched just right in that way that women care about more than any straight man I’d ever met. She could have been missing an eyebrow and she would still have been lovely. Her hair was dark, curly, and just long enough to touch the tops of her shoulders.
Her hand and lower arm were small enough that she reached through the open doorway and held my hand. She could get her arm to the shoulder through the opening, but at the shoulder her body was too wide. She was still trapped.
“That’s it, I can’t move it any more,” she said.
I heard the demon stir in the room. I couldn’t see what it was doing, but I could hear it doing something.
“Havoc, don’t leave me, okay?”
I squeezed her hand in mine. “I won’t leave you, Kate.”
She smiled, just a little, and squeezed back.
“I’m taller than he is,” the demon said. “I’ve got more muscles, but I’m still not good enough for you.”
Kate glanced into the room at him, then back to me.
“Look at me, bitch.”
She shook her head and gave me some of the best eye contact I’d gotten from a woman in a while. If it had been a date, I’d have been thrilled. I put my other hand around her wrist, so I was holding her as tight as I could.
“Look at me, you fucking cunt!” the demon yelled.
“No,” she said. Her eyes were so wide. She clung to me and I wanted more than anything to be able to protect her from what was about to happen if we couldn’t get this door open in the next few seconds.
She looked away from me to something in the room that I couldn’t see. Her hand tightened around mine. Even in profile I could see the terror on her face as she looked at the demon. I could see her arm rise as if she was trying to push something away, but I couldn’t see her hand or what she was motioning at, but I knew. It was the demon and she wasn’t going to be able to push it away like a date that got out of hand.
“Come on, Katie, give us a kiss,” the demon said.
“It’s Kate, not Katie, and I said no.” Her voice quavered, but she said it like she meant it. I held her hand and marveled at her presence of mind. Damn, she was brave.
Her body jerked and I knew it had grabbed her other arm before she said, “Let go of me!”
Kate held on to me and I held on to her with both hands and the demon still dragged most of her out of sight behind the door. Miller went to one knee and shoved his face into the opening so he could put an arm through the narrow opening and shoot the demon some more; maybe if we put enough bullets into him it might actually kill him. Kate plastered herself against the door and I saw her other arm trying to cover one ear against the noise. The demon had let her go.
I yelled, “Miller, get back!”
He started to pull his arm out of the doorway, but suddenly he lurched forward. His gun fired once more and then his shoulder was wedged into the opening of the door. If he hadn’t been kneeling and Kate standing, there wouldn’t have been room for them both, but more of her was against the front of the door, only her arm was outside. Miller’s body shook as if the demon were shaking his arm like a dog with a tug rope.
Miller yelled. Kate screamed. She was looking down at something I couldn’t see. I heard a wet, tearing sound. Miller screamed. He fell back from the door, blood spraying out of his shoulder where his arm used to be.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I tried to pull away from Kate to help Miller, but she held on so tight that I looked back at her. “Get me out of here!” There were spots of blood on her face now, competing with the freckles. Her eyes were wide with terror and I couldn’t blame her, but I couldn’t let Miller bleed to death either. The spray had slowed to that thick pumping that will bleed you out in minutes. Prescott was there kneeling beside Miller; she started packing the wound to try to slow down the blood.
She yelled, “Help me move him!”
I wasn’t sure who she was yelling at until another male nurse came and helped drag Miller to safety, or as much safety as he could have now. I prayed that they’d be able to save his life.
“Your turn, cunt,” the demon said.
Kate looked at me with her pale, blood-splattered face and said, “Havoc, help me.”
I don’t know what I would have
said, because her body jerked in my grip. The demon had grabbed her other arm. I almost let her go—I didn’t want to see her arm torn away like Miller’s—but she dug her fingers into me.
“Don’t you dare let go!”
The demon pulled harder, but I held on and she held on tighter than both of us. The demon and I were playing tug-of-war and there was really no way for me to win.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I braced my foot against the doorframe to help me hold Kate’s arm outside the room. I could feel her fingernails beginning to cut into my arm through my suit jacket. It reminded me of how my wife had held on to me when our son was born. Now I held on to Kate and she clung to me not out of pain and life but out of pure terror; the pain would come later.
She screamed and I jumped because nothing had changed that I could see. That one second of lost concentration let the demon pull her farther into the room, so that my knuckles banged on the doorframe. I prayed that the Big Guy would help me hold on, that he would help me be strong enough to save her, and I fought to gain back a few inches.
“My shoulder,” Kate said, “dislocated.”
Still hidden by the door, the demon said, “You’re strong for a human, Havoc; may I call you Havoc? I like the name, by the way; are you sure you’re not one of ours? Kate here is made of sterner stuff than the cop was, but if you hold on tight enough to pretty Kate here, we’ll tear her apart, too, and that’s fine with me. You can keep one arm while we fuck her. It takes time to bleed to death; she’ll still be warm when we finish.”
“I thought demons had more stamina than that,” a woman’s voice from behind me said.
I felt Kate move toward me, as if the demon had lost concentration this time.
I didn’t turn around to see Detective Lila Bridges, but I knew the voice and the attitude. She was a real ball buster and I half loved her for it in that moment.
“Bridges, thought you’d never show up,” I said.
“Hey, Havoc,” she said, and then louder, “Demon, you in the room, are you telling me that all that hype about demons being fantastic fucks is a lie? Hell’s bells, there go all my teenage fantasies. Satan take you back to Hell if you disappoint us that much.”
The demon hesitated again, and I gained a little bit more arm outside the door, but even if I got Kate back to the most of her out the door, the opening still wasn’t wide enough to get her out of the room. We needed an opening big enough to get her out.
“I heard you weren’t bulletproof, demon; what kind of demon isn’t bulletproof, for fuck’s sake?” Bridges said.
“I will tear the woman apart and fuck the pieces!” It pulled harder and I braced against the doorjamb and the door.
Kate whimpered as the demon pulled on her dislocated shoulder; most people would have been screaming by now.
“Where’s the famous seduction of demonkind? Is that just a lie like the whole bulletproof thing, or are you just not that powerful a demon? Is that why they let you out of Hell, because you’re just so fucking weak?” Bridges said, her voice thick with scorn.
“I am not weak!” the demon screamed this time, and it was more whine than roar. Kate screamed as he pulled so hard I had to give ground or pull her apart.
“Come out and prove it to me, demon, or are you just another weak-ass creep? I bet you’re Hell’s version of that creepy guy who lives in his mom’s basement and whines online that he can’t get a woman to fuck him. Oh wait, that is what Mark Cookson is, except he lived in the dorm.”
“Shut up, you fucking bitch!”
“Tough talk, brimstone boy, come out of the room and make me shut up, if you’re demon enough to do it.”
“No,” the demon said, but he didn’t yell it.
“No, you’re not demon enough to do it. Good on you admitting it out loud.”
“She is baiting us,” the demon said; he wasn’t talking to any of us.
“I have the body of a god!”
“With a tiny little penis,” she said, her delivery so dry that it almost made me smile, except I was looking at Kate’s face going paler by the second. Things were breaking in her arms and shoulders from the tug-of-war; if she passed out from the pain, I wasn’t sure what would happen.
Kate swallowed hard enough for me to hear it, and whispered, “I like her.”
“We’ll all go out for drinks later,” I said, voice tight with the effort to hold her and not hurt her more than I had to.
The deep voice growled, “Let go of her, Detective, or I will pull her arm off as I did to the other police officer.”
“What will you do to her if I let go?” I asked.
“Fuck her, better than she’s ever been fucked before! Just like I did to that bitch Megan! I showed her.” The rhythm of the words was different again; it was demon Mark.
“Don’t let go,” Kate said, her voice hoarse from pain and screaming.
The deeper voice said, “I will tear you apart, girl.”
“Then do it,” she said.
“You don’t mean that,” I said.
She looked at me, and she was having trouble focusing on me; shit, she was going to pass out, which meant she was in more pain than she was letting on. Please God, help her.
“I would rather die quick than let that thing kill me slowly.”
“She’s no fun,” demon Mark said; I’d never known that a voice that deep could whine like that.
“You won’t even come out and play with me, you’re the most unfun demon I’ve ever met,” Bridges taunted.
I looked into Kate’s face and said, “You sure?”
She nodded. “I’m sure.”
“I’ll fuck her and then you’re next, cunt!” Demon Mark’s whine again.
“Big talk from a demon that has to hide behind doors because he’s afraid of bullets,” she said.
The demon screamed, roared, and the sound made some of the cops behind me cry out, because you can’t hear the wails of the damned for the first time without it haunting you.
A red-skinned arm went around Kate’s waist. I had a second to decide if I’d hold on and force the demon to tear her in half while I was still holding her hand. I let go.
She screamed and clung tighter to me. “Don’t let me go!”
“Stay alive, we’ll get you out.”
“NO!” she wailed, and her nails cut into my skin through my sleeve, and then carved bloody streaks down my hand. I had one last glimpse of her pale face and then she was around the door out of our sight. The screams started, and I screamed with her, “God help us!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He will,” a voice said. I turned to find Gimble standing outside his room. He looked even shorter and younger in the oversized hospital gown. He smiled at me, face still soft and shining with the memory of his first angel sighting. It hadn’t made me this happy even at ten when I’d met my Guardian Angel. For a second I resented him his joy. How could he smile with Kate’s screams filling the hallway? The sound made me want to start yelling for SWAT or explosives, anything to get through that door.
“You’ve got an IV hanging from your arm, Gimble,” Detective Lila Bridges said.
He smiled at her as if nothing was wrong, and I wanted to hit him. “Stop smiling, Gimble, stop smiling while she’s screaming,” I said; my voice was thick with wanting to yell, to strike out at something, anything.
“No one is screaming, Havoc,” he said in that happy, relaxed voice.
He was right, shit! “Kate! Kate! Answer me!” I yelled it with my hand on that damned stuck door.
“I’m here, Havoc. I’m . . . okay,” she said; her voice was scared, but it wasn’t a scream.
“Where’s the demon?” I asked.
“I am still here, human.” But there was something in the tone of the voice that had changed.
“What’s happening?” demon Mark asked.
“Tell her to come to the door,” Gimble said.
“It’s stuck shut,” I said.
“Call her to you,
Havoc, it’ll be all right.” He smiled that beatific smile at me.
I started to ask the demon to let her come to the door, but Gimble laid a hand on my shoulder. The power thrilled over my skin like being hit with the warmest, coziest blanket while someone stuck your finger in a light socket, so that it felt better than anything and hurt all at the same time. No wonder so many humans who worked with angels ended up being masochists, because that’s what it was: angelic power.
“How?” I started to ask, but Gimble looked at me and there was something older than him looking out of his hazel eyes, something achingly older than he would ever be.
“Do not ask the permission of the enemy, Havoc. You do not need it, just act, do, they cannot stop you.” The word choice wasn’t even his, as if he were as possessed as Mark Cookson.
Gimble’s face frowned at me. “You know better than to equate this with the monstrosity in the other room.”
I thought, of course, but I didn’t really believe it. I’d gotten adept at thinking one thing and feeling another when angels were in my head.
The face frowned again, but it wasn’t any expression I’d ever seen on Gimble’s face. “Oh, Havoc, how sorrowful you have become.”
I wanted to tell the angel to get out of my head, but I wanted Kate saved more. “Help me save her.”
Gimble smiled at me, so happy. “That’s why we’re here, we heard your prayer for her.”
I swallowed, trying not to be afraid for Gimble. I’d never seen this happen outside of the College of Angels and only to Angel Speakers, those of us who interacted directly with the angelic. It shouldn’t have worked like this for Gimble from just seeing one in its true form. It didn’t work this way, but I stopped questioning it and let that power flow over me, through me. The less I fought the better it felt, like sliding into a bath that was just suddenly the perfect temperature, not too hot, not too cold, just right, except it was power that I let cover me, a power I’d sworn I’d never allow near me again. I tried to think of it like finding a weapon that could save Kate and not like a spiritual magic that had almost destroyed me once.
A Terrible Fall of Angels Page 7