Devil’s Luck

by Kory M. Shrum

  “Yes.”

  “You’re serious right now.” Diana laughed. “Oh god, Louie. It’s a shame you’re about to die. It really is. You’re the most interesting person I’ve met in years. Possibly ever.”

  And if I survive this, I’ll be the last person you ever meet, Lou thought. Because it couldn’t end any other way. If Diana was alive, they’d never be safe.

  Piper, Dani, King, or Mel.

  A strange longing fluttered in her chest. She tried to find a word for it, but all that came was affection, and even that wasn’t quite right.

  Lou had known in theory that she’d liked her little crew. It was a dim acknowledgment that if they needed her she would come, without question. But now it was more than that. Diana had put them into sharp relief.

  They weren’t simply a way to pass the time.

  They’d given her a reason to go on.

  After Angelo. After all the hunting and longing and anger—they’d given her something to hold on to. The way she’d hung on to her father, his strength, as her growing power to slip threatened to tear her apart.

  And here was some asshole trying to take it. Again.

  That old, familiar ache rose up in her. The one she’d been waiting for.

  Diana grinned as if she’d seen the shift herself. “Look at that smile. Are we about to have fun, you and me? You’re starting to look fun.”

  Diana shoved Dani hard, the girl’s body bowing as if punched. Her spine rolled over the concrete edge, tipping dangerously into the sky.

  Without thinking, Lou shot her arm out. She grabbed a fistful of shirt and felt the fabric rip.

  Instead of pulling her back onto the roof, to darkness and safety, they were pitched forward by Dani’s weight.

  Then hands shoved hard into Lou’s back and over the side they went.

  The wind was a force, tearing at their faces, their clothes. Lou managed to pull Dani against her, but that drop-sink feeling in her gut multiplied.

  Come on, come on, come on, her mind begged. Give us a soft landing. If we have to fall, give us somewhere soft.

  She knew she had six seconds at most, falling from this height. But she’d never believed herself fully in control of her trajectory. Now was a hell of a time to prove otherwise.

  Five…four…

  Please…

  Three…two…

  Oh oh…

  One.

  * * *

  Lou expected death. She expected her brains splattered on the business district sidewalk for some unfortunate soul in an ironed suit to find.

  But she was slowing down.

  Or at least, it felt like she was slowing down. The wind that had been terrorizing her a moment before lessened.

  She opened her eyes to see the city of New Orleans was gone. The lights of the business district had been snuffed out. She was in the dark place. Her dark place.

  In the world between worlds.

  But slowing down wasn’t the same as stopping, and after this heartbeat pause, the dark broke open again.

  It wasn’t concrete that slammed into Lou’s back. It was water.

  It was as if a horse had kicked her. The force was enough to knock the air out of her, even with her vest taking the brunt of the impact. Dani’s body was cradled against the front of her torso and mostly spared.

  Lou began to sink into dark depths.

  She kicked for the surface in a circle, trying to get a sense of what body of water they were in.

  Fresh. No salt.

  She felt that pull at her leg, the membrane thinning again. An offer to sidestep this world into La Loon.

  Lou broke the surface, checking to make sure Dani’s head was above the water.

  “No,” she said, spitting water from her mouth and kicking her legs as if to free them. “Not now.”

  She paddled a circle, searching for shore.

  And there it was. A familiar and welcoming sight. It was the shore of her lake, her place of eternal night.

  “Dani, can you swim?”

  No answer.

  “Dani?” Lou turned the girl in the water, checked breathing and pulse. She was alive, but her eyes were closed and she remained unresponsive. Whatever Dani needed to wake up, she couldn’t get it here.

  One problem at a time.

  Lou lifeguard-dragged Dani onto the muddy bank. This was the first time she’d pulled an unconscious body out of her lake, rather than into it.

  On the shore, she panted, catching her breath. Her fingers sank into the mud, cold against her palms. A slight breeze chilled the droplets on her neck. Water dripped from her nose, splattering the side of Dani’s cheek. Wind whispered through the trees.

  She dragged her hand down her face, clearing it of water.

  Then she laughed. A high, hysterical sound.

  She couldn’t stop until her throbbing shoulder made it impossible to draw a breath.

  Her body was a buzzing tank of adrenaline—and she needed every drop of it to take on Diana.

  Go now, she thought. Right now, before she has a chance to understand what happened.

  * * *

  Piper paced the floor, back and forth, until it threatened to leave a grooved trail in the hardwood. Her face hurt. Her body hurt. She wanted to skin Diana Dennard alive.

  Every time the woman’s face flashed across her mind, a murderous fury consumed her, heating her whole body. But she wasn’t angry for herself. She was angry for Dani. The sick truth, she knew, was that if Diana had only hurt her, she wouldn’t be mad at all. She’d be terrified.

  And she was pissed about that too.

  “They’ll be okay,” Melandra said. She turned over another tarot card on Piper’s coffee table.

  Piper didn’t like that Five of Wands. “Is that what the cards say?” she asked with a derisive snort.

  “That’s what I say,” Mel said.

  “Lou is very capable,” King added, opening the carton of pork lo mein in his hand and dumping it onto a plate. “Would you like some of this?”

  Piper shook her head. She couldn’t imagine doing something as simple and controlled as sitting down and eating right now. She felt like her skin was trying to crawl off her bones.

  Her ears popped and she staggered.

  Lou was on her hands and knees, crouching over Dani on the other side of King’s coffee table. They were both soaked, Lou’s hair sticking to her face.

  Dani wasn’t moving.

  “Oh god, is she—”

  “She’s breathing,” Lou said. “Just unconscious. Where’s Konstantine?”

  “He stepped outside to make some calls. What happened?” Piper demanded.

  “Diana pushed us off a building.”

  “What?” Piper, Mel, and King asked in unison.

  Mel left the room before appearing with three large towels. She offered one to Lou, who began to dab at her face and hair, shaking out her jacket.

  King sat down on the couch. “Is Diana—”

  “I’m going back,” Lou said.

  “To kill her?” Piper asked. To her surprise, she was suddenly afraid for Lou, her anger completely overshadowed. If Diana was capable of throwing Lou off a building—Lou, her invincible, faultless Lou—what else could that woman do?

  Lou flicked her eyes up to meet Piper’s.

  Piper’s stomach dropped.

  “Yes,” Lou said. “Like you wanted me to since day one.”

  Before Piper could say anything, apologize or explain, or even hug Lou, Lou was gone, leaving a mess of water in her wake.

  “It’s not just water.” Mel turned the towel in the light, frowning. “There’s blood. A lot of it.”

  They searched Dani but didn’t find a scratch on her.

  “It must be Lou,” King said solemnly. “Something must’ve happened before they were thrown off the building.”

  Don’t you die, Piper prayed. Don’t die and I swear to God, I’ll apologize for everything. I’ll stop being a whiny little ass and make it all up to you, Lou.
I swear. Just don’t you dare die.

  41

  “What do you mean, she never came down?” Diana spat, whirling on the sidewalk.

  The New Orleans humidity made the hair around her face curl. Sweat was beginning to bead in her body’s creases, her elbows, knees, pits, and neck. She hated this place.

  She searched the sidewalk stretching in either direction, disbelieving. But there were no bodies. There wasn’t so much as a drop of blood. The sidewalk was unblemished, as long as one didn’t count the crushed paper to-go cups in the gutter and the black gum ground into crevices by passing shoes.

  There was absolutely no sign of two women hitting the pavement at all. And she’d had a lookout on the ground the whole time, so it wasn’t a question of a cleanup crew. Lou might have a full support team, an organization capable of removing all evidence of her existence if it came to that, but they’d have at least seen the bodies being carried away.

  People can’t just disappear from the air, she thought. Unless she can fly.

  “I told you,” Blair hissed in her ear. “I know what I saw. Now you’re fucked.”

  Blair punched Diana’s chest hard enough to knock her back. Her boots stumbled along the pavement before she regained lost ground.

  The fear climbing up the back of her neck bloomed to rage. She whirled, ready to throw her own punch until she saw the tears standing out in her sister’s eyes.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Diana asked, deflating. “Pull yourself together.”

  “She’s going to kill you,” Blair said, lip trembling. “She’s going to kill you.”

  Diana looped an arm around the girl’s neck. “She can try.”

  Blair sobbed against her.

  But her words were absent of their usual bravado. If Blair was right, if Lou could appear and disappear at will, then—

  I want what she has.

  Blair screamed, her shrill cry splitting Diana’s ears, setting them to ringing. Her grip tightened on Diana but it made no difference.

  She was torn from Diana’s arms and thrown. She rolled, tumbling along the pavement before crashing into the side of the building. The wind from her rolling body scattered the trash in the gutter.

  Diana already knew who she would see before the hand closed over her throat.

  Murderous eyes the color of fire met hers.

  Even in her periphery, she saw Blair pulling her gun, her crew lunging forward.

  Too slow, she thought.

  And they were.

  The hot, rank streets of downtown New Orleans were replaced with resplendent pine. It reminded Diana of the Christmas tree farm their parents had taken them to as children each Thanksgiving weekend. Blair balling up a handful of snow and tossing it at her, laughing.

  So long ago. Another life.

  Diana’s knees gave in the shift, the fluid in her ears trembling, contributing to her dizziness. But the hand on her throat held fast, keeping her on her feet before a punch slammed into the side of her face.

  Pain bloomed red and fragrant across her cheek. She hit the earth like a rock. Her teeth cracked on stone. Mud filled her mouth.

  She spat and held up a hand. “Wait!”

  Lou’s leg lifted, slamming down on Diana’s knee. Something snapped and pain radiated down to her toes and up through her chest. Her heart stuttered and all the air left her.

  Thought was obliterated from her mind.

  There was no mind, only the body. Only pain.

  Some aware, ever-awake part of her knew that the screaming animal in the distance was her.

  Fists gathered up her shirt, hauling her limp body up to a sitting position. Any movement in the knee was enough to make her vision blur.

  “Is this what you wanted?” Lou shook her until Diana’s eyes fluttered open and she was forced to meet that black gaze. “You wanted me to prove what I was? Do you still want to see what I can do?”

  Her voice was calm. There was no anger in it. No fury. The pure, impenetrable reserve was like a patina of ice, a tundra extending beneath an empty, starless sky.

  Lou slammed her against the ground, once, twice. On the third time, Diana’s head hit something hard and it felt like the back of her skull split open. On the fifth slam, she bit her tongue. Blood bloomed in her mouth, spilling over her lip and chin.

  “How?” Diana asked, spitting blood. It was warm on her skin. It was filling her mouth so fast she was forced to swallow it down or risk choking. “How?”

  Her mind raced with possibilities. Government serum, some top-secret program that turned assassins into dangerous, obedient creatures. Fulfilling agendas on some political party’s whim.

  She suddenly, desperately, wanted to know who Konstantine was. Had he given her this gift?

  “It runs in my family,” Lou said.

  Diana struggled to meet her gaze. But her eyes wouldn’t focus. It was genetic?

  No. No. “No.”

  Lou released her. “I thought you wanted to help the children, but this was about you.”

  The children? Who cared about children? Hurt kids grow up to hurt other kids. Didn’t she know that very well? That boy Diana had seen in Lou’s arms was just going to be another rapist, another pedophile.

  And this bitch had the gall to suggest that Diana was the clueless one?

  Diana laughed, a low, throaty sound. She turned and spit blood onto the ground. As she did, she thought she saw a tooth in the mud. A small fleck of enamel. One swipe of her tongue told her all of hers were accounted for.

  Someone else’s then. Was this a graveyard?

  She looked around, saw the dark water and endless forest and what she didn’t see. Any sign of civilization. No lights or smoke. No salvation.

  She met Lou’s eyes.

  “Why should you have it?”

  “I don’t know. My aunt could do it too.”

  “Family heirlooms.” Diana gave herself over to laughter. It sounded hysterical even to her. “If you want to kill me, kill me. Because I won’t stop until I have what you have. If I have to slit your throat and drink all of your blood, I’ll do it.”

  “I know,” Lou said.

  That was when the gun appeared, as if it had always been in Lou’s right hand.

  Diana had only a moment to register the cool muzzle pressing into the stretched skin of her forehead before even the dark forest blinked out.

  42

  Diana weighed nearly nothing. It was weird when that happened, when a body with so much weight to it one moment became a husk the next. Lou wondered if the soul, in fact, held all the gravity of a person. Or if humans were soulless, perhaps the weight came from the burden of living.

  She walked out into the cold water slowly, Diana floating behind her until the depth was chest high. Her boots sank into the mud with each step. Her teeth were chattering. Her limbs weak.

  Sleepiness pressed itself against the edge of her vision.

  Almost done, she assured herself. Just a little more.

  Still she dove, pulling the corpse under with her.

  When the purple waters gave way to red and she found the embankment rising, she floated the body to shore. No sign of the reptilian orcas. In the distance, near the yellow mountains, she thought she saw the small cut of a fin. Perhaps that was their choice hunting location this evening.

  Jabbers was already on the embankment, sitting on her haunches, chewing her webbed paw like a cat. She rolled those eyes up to Lou’s as if expecting her. She was more than a little interested in the body she brought with her.

  Jabbers’ eyes tracked the corpse as Lou dumped it onto the shore, then turned to Lou. It was as if those eyes said, This is new.

  Or maybe it was blood-drained Lou’s imagination. Maybe she was projecting and Jabbers couldn’t tell the difference between a female corpse and a male one.

  “I know,” Lou said with a tired laugh, walking backward into the water. Blair’s and Spencer’s faces flashed in her mind. “And there will be more.”

 
; * * *

  With what was left of her strength, she slipped through the shadow of a tall, proud evergreen and onto the bench seat of a moving truck.

  Ahead of her, the yellow dash of the centerline ticked out the seconds, a headlight painting the black concrete bright. Blair was behind the wheel, one hand resting on it, the other on the stick shift protruding from the wide floorboard in front of the bench seat.

  As soon as Lou appeared, her boot came down hard on the brake, pitching Lou forward into the dust-coated dashboard.

  She was winded on impact, her chest connecting hard with the plastic casing of the dash. Slowly, she pushed herself back against the seat, but it was too late. Her hand was empty. The gun had fallen to the floorboard and her upper body was numb from the blow.

  Breathe, she commanded. Breathe.

  Her chest remained compressed and unforgiving.

  Blair pointed a Glock at Lou’s face, her pulse visibly jumping in her throat.

  Lou still couldn’t breathe. Her limbs were suddenly too cold to move. And the deep shadows pressing in from the corners of her vision, overtaking her sight in undulating waves, were not the kind she could command.

  Blood loss, she thought vaguely, her last thought before passing out.

  * * *

  Lou heard the beeping first. A slow, steady beep beep beep.

  Something was up her nose and she pulled it out, detesting the feel of anything against her face. Plastic tubing came away in her hand. More, she soon realized, was affixed to her left arm.

  The blurry lights cleared and her bed, the stiff hospital linens, and the low light came into view.

  She thought maybe she’d slipped from the truck into Konstantine’s apartment, as she’d done on the brink of death before.

  But the nurses outside her room were speaking English. Perhaps it was King, then, who had hauled her to the blood supply she so desperately needed.

  Then she saw her, still in her leather pants and studded boots. One leg was thrown over her knee as her unflinching eyes regarded her.

  “We’re still in Louisiana,” Blair said. “If you’re curious.”