by Jenn Stark
She paused, and Gregori could see it again, that flash of pain, anger, and distress. There was no fear this time, though. It was as if she’d already noticed its appearance and had made adjustments to shove it farther back into her mind.
“Unfortunate,” she finally said. “However, now this situation has expanded to threaten the lives of yet more innocent people, people who didn’t sign up for the job of being a potential terrorist target. It has also become a situation that has attracted the interests of whatever branch of Homeland Security feels justified in lying directly to my face and not providing me with any sort of debriefing when it’s obvious they’re lying. As I said before, I find myself at a significant disadvantage. I’d like to rectify that situation.”
It seemed that the more formal and measured Angela’s speech became, the more obvious it was that she was drifting closer and closer to the brink. The brink of what, Gregori wasn’t quite sure, but once again, he didn’t think he’d like the answer.
“There are two ways to go about this,” he said abruptly, before he could choose a safer course. “I could tell you what I am, or I could show you. But my personal nature is secondary to your other question, which is why I am here. So, let me start with that.”
“Fine. Go.”
“I work for an organization that believes in demons. Ah—that’s DEM Enforcement. I’m still with them.”
She blinked, but, to her credit, didn’t interrupt him. On the floor beside him, Hellboy perked up.
“And yes,” he continued. “I do mean actual fire-and-brimstone demons, which have existed since the beginning of time. The difference now, however, is that there’s been a recent influx of the beasts across the globe. My organization is interested in eliminating as much of that influx as possible before more of Go—” He caught himself in time, and redirected. “Humanity is affected negatively. Granted, another person viewing the situation from a limited perspective might simply designate these demons as human terrorists. Accordingly, my organization is one of many that outwardly state that their mission is to help eliminate a new worldwide terrorist organization.”
“But your group believes these are actual demons afflicting humanity.”
She couldn’t quite keep her disbelief from coloring her tone. Gregori merely nodded. She’d come to believe soon enough, but there was more information he needed to share with her before that happened.
“I was called in to mitigate one such threat at the rally in Atlanta, where you were accosted by several gunmen. Those gunmen didn’t shoot you. They appeared more inclined to take you unharmed. Fortunately, the kidnapping did not take place. However, there are several anomalies within that event that I think you’ll agree have not been adequately explained.”
“The complete disappearance of all the assailants,” she said flatly. “Even when some had clearly been struck down during the course of the attack. The disappearance of all that black goop that coated damned near everything in the midst of the battle but wasn’t found several hours after everyone cleared out. It wasn’t on my clothing or Joe’s either. Even the samples of said black goop that the crime scene techs were able to recover from the scene strangely evaporated in their sealed containers.”
Gregori lifted his brows. He hadn’t realized Angela had done additional research on the crime scene, but it didn’t surprise him. “And the guns,” he finished for her.
“And the guns. The guns that nobody can explain the appearance of in such numbers, given the stadium’s security. One, maybe two such weapons could easily have slipped through, but not as many as there were, regardless of their construction. They were simply too big.” She gave him a wan smile. “I will say, I hadn’t thought of a supernatural explanation for the attack, but I can see how it certainly makes sense. Assuming, of course, that demons exist.”
Gregori sighed. He lifted his gaze to Angela. Beautiful, perfect Angela, locked behind her walls of ice and stone. She’d carefully built those walls brick by brick, he suspected, after the horrors she had endured in her past, possibly far in her past. He’d only glimpsed a bit of her deeply buried pain, but she’d definitely survived something worth burying, to create the woman who sat before him now. He needed to know more about that time, but he hadn’t earned the right yet to ask that of her. Not when he still withheld so much himself.
For one long moment, their gazes met, and he could feel the wellspring of Angela’s emotion like a physical blow, pressing him back into his overstuffed chair. She wasn’t revealing herself, but her seeking energy was so strong, so absolute, there was no denying it. And so, he simply…didn’t deny it.
With a soft, shuddering breath, he let his glamour fall away.
Hellboy yipped and scrambled back—while Angela froze.
For a heartbeat, there was no breath, no thought, not even a quiver of energy emanating from her body.
Then, finally she spoke, her voice trembling with emotion.
“You bastards,” she seethed, her hands coming up, her fingers arching into claws, her eyes wild. “I told you if you ever came back, I would rip you limb from limb. How dare you do this to me again!”
She attacked.
10
Angela was at the creature’s face almost before she realized what she was doing, her fingers diving deep toward the hollow sockets, searching for the eyes she knew had to be there. The beast howled in pain and what sounded like genuine terror a moment before she touched it, but it let her strike anyway, only turning its head at the last moment to allow the bulk of her attack to rock its enormous, scarred, and twisted body.
“You said you’d done your worst!” she raged, clenching her hands into fists and continuing to pummel the monster. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even think. Her lungs squeezed, her heart burned, and everything inside her turned to jelly. This was exactly like the nightmares she’d had when she was a little girl, after the eighty-seven days in the crate. Nightmares of ordinary-looking people having their skin fall off to reveal hideously distorted and grotesque figures beneath, leering at her, laughing at her, warding off her attacks with callous ease, whispering to her that it would never end.
They’d been right.
Intellectually, she knew there was nothing she could do to harm this creature. They’d taught her that as well. She’d broken bones, dislocated joints, ravaged her own skin across scales and teeth and horns and hide that burned like acid. But there was something deep within her that could never stop trying, could never accept the truth for what it was. And there was something in them, in those creatures, that’d kept letting her try. She’d known that was important; she just hadn’t known how important.
And now they were back.
“Angela,” the creature said with its ruined mouth.
“Don’t you dare speak my name!”
She wrenched herself away from the creature. It didn’t try to stop her. If anything, it seemed to hunch down within itself, glowering at her from its ruined face, somehow able to see without sight.
When she was eight years old, she’d never thought of the beasts as demons. She hadn’t known what that word meant. She still hadn’t made the connection when Gregori Stearns—or whatever his true name was—had started talking about the mythological creatures. Neither she nor her parents believed in anything so ridiculous as a Judeo-Christian god. That was for fools. Demons were no different from orcs or werewolves, part of the ever-evolving lexicon of humans desperate to believe in something outside themselves.
Now she scowled at the creature before her, still refusing to believe it. “Demon,” she snarled, practically spitting the word. “Hallucination, more like.”
Sudden pounding sounded at her condo door, Joe’s nearly frantic voice barking in panic. “Angela!”
She jerked up stiffly, shooting her gaze first to the door and then back—to see Gregori appearing completely normal again. He sat in his chair, his back stiff, his hands on his knees…and the dog was back beside him, looking up at him with wide, adoring ey
es.
“You bastard,” she said again, hissing the word. Hellboy shrank back at her tone, which caught her up short, instantly piercing her mood.
“No, no, you’re okay. You’re my sweet boy.”
She returned her glare to Gregori. “You, however, are a bastard.”
Gregori grimaced with what appeared to be genuine regret, but he made no move to stand as she strode across the room, scooping up her phone as she did before shouting, “Joe! Enough.”
Then she unlocked the door and pulled it open.
Her security team exploded through the entry—first Joe, then three more people whose names she hadn’t even learned yet, all of them stopping short as she glared at them with folded arms.
“What the hell were you shouting like that for?” Joe demanded, his gaze darting around the room. “You sounded like the hounds of hell were after you, or you were after them. Where are the dogs?”
“The dogs are hiding. And all that was Gregori’s fault,” Angela snapped, jerking her thumb back to Gregori and then turning around to Joe again. Gregori had the grace to look embarrassed and wholly confused. “When I insisted he didn’t need to hover, he accused me of not being able to defend myself appropriately even in the face of a surprise attack. Not two seconds later, he lunged for me and took me down—while hardly laying a hand on me. I didn’t think someone his size could move so quickly, and I know Krav Maga. Needless to say, I didn’t take my humiliation very well.”
Joe squinted at Gregori. “You seriously did that? And then you let her get you?”
Gregori shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Angela realized for the first time that blood dripped down his face from the corner of one eye.
“Surprise works both ways,” he rumbled. “She went down too fast, and I was so concerned about that, I wasn’t prepared for her to rebound so quickly.”
He turned toward her, though notably, he didn’t meet her gaze directly. “Fighting back is sometimes more important than defending yourself in the first place. You can’t always protect yourself from being taken, but you can always protect yourself from giving up.”
Angela felt the surge of tears behind her eyes, and her throat burned as she lifted her hands to her hair, resetting her ponytail. She furiously knotted it back together, desperate to regain her equilibrium. How had he known exactly what to say? How much did he already know about her?
It took another ten minutes to calm Joe down, including Gregori being forced to give an impromptu demonstration of what he’d done to startle Angela. To his credit, the big man managed to catch Joe off guard as well by doing nothing more than turning and lunging while not moving his feet. The impact of so much bulk moving that quickly from a standing position was alarming to say the least. Joe stumbled back, then immediately burst into laughter.
“No wonder Hellboy likes you,” he said, rubbing his chin.
Gregori glanced down at the little dachshund, whose tail was once more thumping the carpet, but nodded. “When the client is being harassed by idiots, scaring the idiots away is often the best measure.”
“You got that right. You good?” Joe asked Angela.
She gave him the best smile she could manage. “I’m good. And I appreciate your concern, as always. I’ll do my best not to scream like a banshee again.”
“Scream as often as you want. But if you keep that door locked, you need to know that I’ve got no problem knocking it down if it’s in my way. So you may have to add a little extra to your maintenance fee this month.”
“Noted.” She watched them as they left again, maintaining her cheerful expression until they were out of the room. Then she swiveled back to Gregori, folding her arms once again.
“Explain,” she said brusquely.
“Which part?” he shot back. “The part of who and what I am and how I came to be that way, or the part where I tell you what actually happened to you every time you were pulled out of that crate you endured for eighty-seven days?”
She stiffened, stumbling to the side until she could collapse onto the sofa. Gregori continued standing, several feet away from her. She was okay with that.
“How do you know anything about that?” she whispered. “Were you there?”
“No.” The word was quiet and absolute. “But you’re right in that I have special skills. One of those skills is reading emotions, and sometimes those emotions are so vivid, they carry thoughts and words and memories along with them. When you attacked me, I…saw things.”
She scowled at him. “You mean you’re psychic.”
“Not in the way you’re thinking. I can’t read minds. I can’t predict the future. I’m an empath. I can feel what others feel, sometimes quite strongly.”
“Do you feel it more when you touch someone?” she asked, her gaze straying again to his hands. They were uncovered. Had they been uncovered when she flung herself at him, scraping and clawing? She was pretty sure the answer to that was yes.
He frowned. “I try not to touch another person if I can avoid it, particularly in a crowd where I can’t discern one person from another. If you’ve noticed it, though, others will too. I’ll lose the gloves.”
“You don’t need to on my account—”
He gestured curtly. “It’s not a problem.”
Okay… She decided to push on. “Let’s start with what happened to me when I was a child. What’s your take on that?”
He didn’t hesitate. “You were abducted by one or more of the Possessed. Humans who were taken over by demons. It’s likely that one or more demons were attempting to possess you as well, but you resisted. Humans don’t resist. It’s not in their makeup, especially if they’re weak or vulnerable. Which made you an anomaly the horde or their keepers couldn’t resist. I suspect you weren’t sexually abused in any way, though there was pain. Significant pain. But not defilement.”
His expression had taken on a faraway cast, his face tilted away from her, his eyes on a distant point. “Even among demons, there are levels of degradation to which some will not go. Not all of them, but some. The group that held you had a mission to possess you, not damage you. Whether you were simply a novelty or there was something more to you, something important, I don’t know. I can only gather so much from a flash of emotion. To learn more takes a much more focused attempt.”
That startled her. “You can learn more?”
He grimaced. “I suspect that’s why I was given this assignment, as you rightly stated. Because of my abilities, and because of something you know, something that’s important to what’s happening to you now. Something you may have thought you’d forgotten, but you haven’t.”
She blew out a long breath. “I’ve tried for a lot of years to forget what happened back then. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered something significant if there’d been anything to remember. There was no one else in any of the cages. I used to pray that others would be brought to fill them up, just so I wouldn’t be so alone. Then I hated myself for thinking something so terrible. And then I hated myself even more for crying desperate tears when I would wake up again and realize I was still alone.”
“How many other cages were there besides yours?” Gregori asked. “A dozen? Less?”
She shook her head. “More, actually, though most of them still smelled like animals. Almost like they were being prepared for people, but I’d come along too quickly.”
“Or you hadn’t been expected at all,” Gregori said thoughtfully.
“Or that. But once again, it makes no sense. What did they want from me? I was never posed any questions. No one ever answered any of my pleas. No one spoke much to me at all. Most of the people I saw looked like people. There were only a few that appeared like…you just did. They tried to scare me, get close to me, and I fought back so hard, I hurt myself.”
Angela realized she was rocking on the edge of the couch, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “They seemed distressed when I hurt myself, actually. I do remember that. It was what I eventually realize
d could get me out of there, so I kept trying to…escalate. When I broke my arm in two places trying to escape, I was set free. Dropped off at the hospital, if you can believe that. I woke up as I was being rushed into surgery. Even as a little girl, I knew they had let me go, that I was free, but I was afraid to sleep. They always came when I was asleep. But then…I think I slept a lot. I couldn’t help it.”
“And your parents came for you in the hospital?”
“They did.” She nodded. “We lived in a pretty small town outside Atlanta, and my disappearance would ordinarily have made national news, but there was something else going on. I can’t remember what. In the end, when I went back to look, only a couple of articles remained, and they were all my old name.”
“Old name?” Gregori asked. “You changed your name after the abduction?”
“My parents did, yes. Before the abduction, they called me Jane. Afterward, they called me Angela because they said I kept saying the word ‘angels’ in my sleep. They thought it was pretty and it seemed to give me comfort. I didn’t know any of this until much later. The months after my experience are still a little blurry to me. And that wasn’t the first time I sort of…lost time, I guess you’d say.”
Something in her voice must have alerted him, because he stiffened. “What do you mean?”
“There was…another incident. I was barely five years old, being watched by my grandmother.” She didn’t know why she was telling him this, but with her parents looking so old and frail today, collapsed on the lobby floor…maybe that was it. She shrugged, more to herself than him. “She had a heart attack while watching me, and—well, I always felt it was my fault somehow. But I don’t remember what I did to cause it, don’t remember much of anything that night, really, or the weeks after she got sick. It’s all just a blur.”