Was Tree Trunk genuinely mad at me? Had my mentor become my enemy?
“Nava!” Two unfamiliar men poured through the door.
Baruch’s expression didn’t soften and the newcomers obviously had some kind of expectations around me. All this on top of today’s already ragged emotional journey. I wanted to back into a corner and take a freaking minute to regroup.
Instead, I waved a hand at them, a teasing smile firmly in place. “Relax, boys. There’s more than enough of me to go around.”
Rohan snorted, the men swept me away, and my talk with Baruch was thankfully put on hold. For now.
10
These two dudes were a riot. First to introduce himself was the cocky, Native American Cisco with the chiseled cheekbones and short ponytail, the oldest of the L.A. group in his early thirties. Then there was wisecracking Danilo from the Philippines, totally tatted up with a shaved head and built like an MMA fighter.
As they toured me around upstairs, the men peppered me with questions: which demons had been hardest to kill, what my first gig as lead Rasha had been, and what I’d been doing when my power manifested.
Cisco was bent double over the kitchen counter, howling with laughter at my hand job story, while Danilo rooted through the fridge proclaiming that we were going to need more beer.
“Chama, you’re going to fit in fine with this bunch,” said a male voice with a Spanish accent. A dark-skinned man in jeans with ragged hems lounged against the doorframe, his black curls damp against his scalp. His startlingly green eyes were alight with amusement as he looked over the room.
“Thank you?” I said.
Rohan barked a laugh.
Cisco straightened, wiping a tear from his eyes and pointed at the newcomer. “Bastijn, if Nava’s brother is anything like her, you’ll want to move in on that fast.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Yeah. Sorry. He’s not exactly single.”
“Isn’t that always the way?” Bastijn grabbed a beer from Danilo’s hand.
I tried not to track his ass, but damn, was it tight.
“Where’s Zander?” Danilo asked.
Bastijn mimed smoking a joint.
Cisco and Rohan shared a concerned look, then Cisco suggested we move our party to the living room.
Unlike in Vancouver, only Zander and Danilo lived here. The others had their own places. Considering this floor looked like a giant mancave, I was thrilled I’d landed a spot in the bungalow.
We settled in and the guys asked me more questions, but from the darting glances they kept shooting at the door, I only had half their attention.
I was about to suggest that we wrap this visit up and go see Gary Randall when Cisco clapped his hands. “Enough small talk. Give up the goods on Ro’s sexual prowess. Is he as good as he posts on his fan boards?”
I grinned and took another handful of chips from the snacks they’d set out for my interrogation.
“Coño. For a guy who claims to be straight, you’re awfully fascinated with Ro’s dick,” Bastijn said.
“Exactly what I keep saying.” Ro had seated me on his lap, idly playing with my hair. I snuggled back against him.
“For a guy who claims to be gay, you’re awfully uninterested in Ro’s dick,” Cisco fired back at Bastijn.
“Also, exactly what I keep saying.” Ro stole my last chip.
I smelled Zander before I saw him: a total surfer dude about my age with shaggy blond hair and red-rimmed eyes, reeking of pot.
“Hey man,” Danilo said. “You good?”
Zander blinked twice at him, like he needed the time to process Danilo’s words. “Yeah. Seen Ethan?” He had that Southern Cali drawl, way more pronounced than Ro’s.
“He’ll be here soon,” Cisco said.
Zander nodded and shuffled away.
Bastijn watched him leave, frowning. “It’s out of control and he won’t talk about it.”
“We’re gonna have to force the issue,” Cisco said. “He can’t keep this shit up.”
The men fell into a contemplative silence.
Gary could wait a bit longer. In order to buy Ro some time to speak with his friends, I stood up, brushing chip dust from my shirt. “More beer, anyone?”
Danilo asked me to bring another couple of six-packs from the fridge.
I made a note to ask Ro if any of them were aligned with Mandelbaum, though unlike with Rabbi Wahl, I didn’t get any bad vibes off them. Team Mandelbaum radar, though useful, was not yet a skill set I’d nailed, unlike my stellar gaydar.
I rooted through the fridge, choosing one six-pack of pale ale and one of Guinness, and popped the tab on one of the lighter beers.
A black-and-white blur smashed into the white cupboard next to me.
“Shit!” I jerked, splashing beer at my feet. I grabbed some paper towels to mop it up.
“You’re a girl.” A very young, Asian Harry Potter lookalike in a grubby Batman sweatshirt scooped up his soccer ball, tucking it under his arm as he regarded me gravely.
“Yup. I’m also Rasha.”
The Kindergartner sucked on his top lip as he digested this.
I dumped the soggy clump of toweling paper in the trash. “Are you an initiate?” He nodded. “I’m Nava. What’s your name?”
“Benjy.”
I shook his pudgy hand while he stared at me with the fascination usually reserved for meeting an alien species.
“You’re the first initiate I’ve met since I became Rasha,” I said, “so I’m very pleased to meet you.”
All Brotherhood members in Western Canada, whether initiate, hunter, or rabbi, came through my Vancouver chapter. I’d been warned that sometimes we might have a handful of initiates training and studying for years or go months at a time without anyone there.
It was weird and cool to meet a mini Rasha-to-be.
The kid continued to stare at me.
“You like Batman?” I asked, motioning at his shirt, and wondering if he and Ro had bonded.
Not a big talker but he’d perfected his “d’uh” look. “I’m gonna be like Batman one day,” he said. “Helping people.” His eyes lit up. “Like Rohan.”
Yup. They’d bonded.
“Do you know him?” he asked.
“He’s my boyfriend.”
Benjy scrunched up his face in universal little boy “ick.” Whoops. I’d lost Ro some cred. “Are you going to be here long?”
“Not sure.” I picked up my beer, cradling the other unopened cans.
He gave a long-suffering sigh. “Okay.”
Speak of the devil. Ro poked his head in the door. “We have an email from Orwell.”
“Rohan, I printed all my letters properly.” Benjy held out his hand.
Ro scratched his chin. “I dunno. Which way does the small ‘d’ face?”
“Round part goes left of the stick.”
“Good job.” He pulled out a tub of sour keys from a cupboard and dropped two into Benjy’s hand. The kid immediately sucked one into his mouth, thanking Ro through a mouthful of candy.
Danilo called out for Benjy to hurry up because his dad was double-parked outside.
“See you soon?” I said.
“Uh-huh.” He turned to Ro with an expectant look.
Ro crouched down to his level and fist-bumped him. Two dark heads bent in towards each other in total focus.
“R-E-S,” he began.
“P-E-C-T,” Benjy finished.
Ro mussed up his hair. “All right, little dude. Be good.”
Benjy nodded and flung his soccer ball out the door, running into the hallway after it.
“You okay?” Ro said. “You look weird.”
Just unclenching my ovaries. “Cute kid.”
I dropped the beers off for the rest of the guys and followed Rohan into a computer room, equipped with a couple of laptops and printers. One of the printers was chugging pages out.
“What’s with this doc they sent?” Ro asked.
I explained about cross-referen
cing these incidents with Gary’s to form a profile and narrow down which potential demon we were dealing with. Pierre had already sent me one batch of cold cases and these were the last ones he’d found.
Rohan straightened some pages before they slipped off the printed stack. “Good idea.”
“You know it.” I held my beer up in cheers. “Wait! Selfie!”
“Jesus,” he groaned.
I handed him a beer. “Okay. Clink. Again. Yeah, that did it. Now one for us and not the public.”
We clinked cans…
…and were rocked off our feet.
Foamy liquid sprayed like blood across the white wall.
We bolted from the room and sprinted down the stairs. It took us less than a minute to get there, but all was already chaos and bloodshed.
And screaming. I’ll never forget the sounds of Helen’s keening. I peered over a desk to see what had set her off and gagged. It was a blackened lump, an adult burned past all recognition.
My heart clawed its way up my throat. “Benjy!”
I ran to Helen and tripped. Over another burned body, this one recognizable from his blond hair. Zander. I stumbled to my feet, trying not to hyperventilate. “Helen. Please. Where’s Benjy?”
She’d pressed her fist to her stomach, rocking with low cries.
I threw an arm around her. “Ro!”
He couldn’t hear me over Helen and the panicking DSI support staff, who he was trying to herd to the front foyer.
Danilo grabbed my arm. “Benjy’s safe. I helped him into his dad’s car five minutes ago.”
I pressed a hand to my thundering heart. “Help me with her?”
“The rabbi,” Helen sobbed. “He killed him.”
Before I could ask who, Baruch crashed into our room through an enormous, jagged hole in the wall that had not been part of the decor when I’d first arrived. It would have been comical, had he, Cisco, and Bastijn not been battling a flaming creature.
“Turn it off, Ethan,” Baruch growled.
Not a creature. A man.
A Rasha.
Baruch wailed on him with a flurry of punches, ignoring the burns to his skin, but his super strength didn’t even slow Ethan down. Neither did smashing his fist into Ethan’s nose. Ethan’s head jolted sideways, blood spraying out in an arc, but he kept grappling.
I held up my hand against the splattering drops.
Helen’s head lolled back like she was about to faint.
“Stay with me,” I said.
Danilo and I ushered her toward the front door. I kept one arm slung around her, rubbing her back as she sobbed into my chest.
Cisco flexed his fingers and the cement under his feet cracked. Vines slithered up, tiny at first, but growing into fat ropes in the seconds they took to wrap around Ethan’s legs and bring him crashing down.
Ethan flared brighter. Bastijn squatted down and touched the bare earth that Cisco had exposed. The floor rumbled.
Danilo and I each seized one of Helen’s arms and ran as dirt geysered up, burying Ethan’s body. Smothering the fire.
In all the video games I’d played or watched Ari play growing up, earth was weak to fire. It burned. But now I saw how wrong that was. Plants burned, but earth suffocated. The still-visible flames on Ethan’s head flickered and died under an avalanche of soil and stone.
There was a collective sigh of relief, then Cisco stepped forward. “Listen, man–”
Eyes rolling back in his head, Ethan bucked so hard that a bone broke with a sharp snap. Dirt trickled off his half-exposed body.
Helen fainted. I’d lost my hold on her because I was shaking violently.
Rohan ran in from the front foyer. “Everyone is outside…” Ro charged a half-dozen steps in my direction, then stopped. He kept a careful eye on me, but didn’t treat me any differently from the other Rasha who’d been in the room.
I appreciated that, willing down my trembling with a steely control.
“What the fuck?” Danilo pressed a soot-streaked fingertip to his scorched side and hissed.
Cisco had lost a shoe somehow, staring at his sock like he couldn’t compute its existence. “Ethan went rogue.”
A pulsing throb started up at the nape of my neck. My skin prickled from head-to-toe, like it had shrunk in the wash.
“He killed Rabbi Wahl,” Bastijn said, his gaze hollow. He checked Helen’s pulse. “Zander, too.”
“We’re sure that was actually Ethan and not a demon?” Cisco said.
“Were the wards breached?” Ro said.
The pulsing ran down into my shoulder and along my arm. I turned my palm over, drawn by the smear of Ethan’s blood along one side.
“I’ll check,” Baruch said. “What about the rest of the staff? Bystanders? Do we need to set up some kind of perimeter? Deal with a possible police presence?”
“From outside there was no sign of anything odd happening,” Danilo said.
“Most of the staff hadn’t actually seen anything because it all went down so fast,” Rohan said. “I sent the calm ones home and the others I put in a taxi to Dr. Ramirez. He’ll take care of them.”
The room went hazy and gauzy, the only clear image Ethan’s blood on my skin. I sniffed my palm. Yesssssss.
I touched my tongue to it and stiffened, an electric jolt snapping through me.
Eww. No. I wasn’t some weird vamp wannabe.
I flicked my tongue against it again. Just the tip.
Then a longer lick, its taste as intoxicating as the finest wine.
Ro strong-armed me, muscling me toward the stairs. He shielded me from the others, whom I could only see through a milky cloud tinged at the edges with red. His mouth was working but I couldn’t hear him, deafened by the slow glug of my heart.
Tick tock.
The beat of my heart.
Blood to rule the might.
Ethan’s blood.
Freezing water sluiced over my head. I blinked, shaking like a wet dog, and jerked my head out from under the bathtub tap, sputtering.
Ro held himself in check, his mouth a flat line. “You said Lilith wasn’t controlling you.”
“She’s not.”
“I was calling you for twenty minutes. Smacking your cheek. Pinching you. You didn’t react. And that was after your eyes had gone cloudy and you stiffened up like a board. We barely got out of the room in time.” A muscle jumped in the hard set of his jaw.
I sank down against the white floor tiles, my back against the tub. Water ran from my hair down under the neck of my shirt. “Snowflake, I’m fine. I promise you she’s not awake.”
“You might not know. And if I’m talking to Lilith right now, she’s hardly going to admit to running the show.” Ro wrenched off the cold water with such force I half expected the tap to snap off. He’d probably broken about seven California bylaws letting it run that long.
Ro’s guilt wasn’t going to ease up if I explained exactly what was going on, and he wasn’t going to get any less angry at me, but how could I hope for us to move forward if I left him in the dark?
Full disclosure sucked, but not having Rohan in my corner was worse. I nudged the bathroom door shut with my foot, and using my shirt to blot myself dry, told him about the lamia, drawing on Lilith’s leaking magic, and my looming one-month deadline before she broke free. I did it as quickly and succinctly as I could, praying that our fragile re-connection held.
Ro had gone full-body knifeman by the end of my story, gauging deep slashes into the bathroom floor tile, his fingers tensed like claws.
“The black magic called to me downstairs,” I said. “Not like ‘come to the dark side’ or anything, more in recognition.”
“Because it’s part of you!”
“Let’s not overreact. Is Lilith shitting her magic into my body? Yes. But I’m hardly the Wicked Witch of the West.”
“You are literally using dark magic. It kills people.” He yanked his blades out of the floor, retracting them with visible effort. “One
month.”
Even after our time apart and our choppy emotional waters, it seemed I still couldn’t handle Rohan being in pain. I was the one at risk, and all I wanted to do was soothe his hurt. I patted his leg.
“The witches are working on it and meantime, absorbing it like I am may be the best course of action. I’ve become my own magic purification system.”
He scrubbed a bladeless hand over his face. “You’re acting like you’ve solved it, but you’re just hoping for the best.”
“Is letting the magic float around inside me the better option?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. Neither does Esther. We’re in unchartered territory here. The fact of the matter is that the dark magic is inside me and I can’t just sit here and do nothing.” I’d lived my life feeling helpless and at the mercy of the universe’s cruel whims for too many years. Fuck that.
“And what if you hasten along your death because you’re messing with things you don’t understand? Or you hurt some innocent person because this dark magic has totally screwed with your ability to see right from wrong anymore and you think you’re infallible?”
Caring a little less about his feelings right now. “My moral center is intact. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Addiction and fucking up because you think you know best?” He barked a harsh laugh. “Yeah, sweetheart, I do. I also know exactly how easy it is to pull the wool over the eyes of the people closest to you.”
Rohan had lived that path and it had cost him Asha. Much as I wanted to wrap my anger around me in a cloak of self-righteousness, I appreciated that this situation had to be a living hell for him and I refused to flashback him into the worst time in his life.
I pushed to my feet. “I’m doing what instinctively feels right, and I’m being open and honest with the people I trust to watch my back on this. But I can’t swear that the magic won’t tip me into a bad place. And I understand if you can’t be around that. I really do.”
There were only a few feet between me and the door. If I blinked my eyes really fast and moved right now, I could get out of here with my dignity intact.
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter: Fall Page 11