by Glen Frost
Without realizing it, Anya had balled her fists and had the right cocked back to her ear, ready to smash the Goth's face in. The red mist had descended on her the instant she had perceived a threat to her beloved Darya's life.
"I...am sorry," she admitted grudgingly, forcing her stance to soften and her fists to unclench. "My precious Darya is everything to me. Everything."
"Hey, I understand. Don't worry, sugar tits, no offense taken. Want to kiss and make up?" she asked optimistically, opening her arms wide for an embrace.
"Perhaps later."
"Uh, okay. Raincheck, then." Lydia sounded disappointed. Anya was now absolutely certain that the girl had never driven stick in her life...which was fine with her. When the mood took her, she often enjoyed a little girl-on-girl playtime. It was just that now wasn't the time. Not even close.
"You'll just have to satiate your disgusting lusts some other time," Emily interjected primly.
"Fucking homophobe."
"Pervert."
"Enough! I can hardly hear myself think straight!" Anya massaged her temples with her fingertips. "Why are you both here, anyway? What is it that you want?"
"Don't you enjoy our company?" The Goth conspired to sound even more hurt now.
"That is not the point, and you know it." Anya looked up at her sharply, her eyes narrowing. "Please do not insult me by pretending that those you serve do not have some purpose behind sending you to me."
Lydia and Emily eyed one another, their expressions carefully neutral...but was that a hint of guilt flashing across Emily's face, just for a second? It was there one moment and gone the next, but Anya could have sworn that she looked like a child caught with its hand in the cookie jar. She sighed. Despite the fact that her lungs no longer moved air, it was a habit that she was finding hard to break.
"Just tell me the truth, please."
Emily approached Anya, her tone placating. She reached out a hand toward the Russian girl's shoulder as though to offer comfort, but suddenly seemed to think better of the idea. "It's like this, you see...you made a compact with the Prince of Darkness. A deal, if you like. Your soul, in exchange for the power to exact revenge upon those vermin that murdered you."
Anya nodded, motioning for her to continue.
"You haven't broken the compact, strictly speaking. If you had, then the Prince of Lies—"
"Hey! That's my boss you're talking about!"
Emily ignored Lydia's indignant interruption. "—the Prince of Lies would have been able to seize your soul and claim it for his own."
"But Lydia said that I double-crossed him..."
"It is more accurate to say that you obeyed the letter of the compact, but violated the spirit," Emily explained. Lydia's silence spoke volumes about the truth of that particular statement. "Marko is dead, yes, and hopefully burning in hell as we speak, but Piotr still lives...if you can call the tortured state in which you left him, living."
"I have no regrets. He deserved it. Every last drop of pain, he deserved."
Now it was Emily's turn to sigh. "Before my own death, and even for a short while afterward, I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly. But now...well, let's just say that I have been gifted with a broader perspective. An eternal one, if you prefer. Ultimately, revenge solves nothing. Cruelty begets more cruelty."
"Easy for you to say. Your child is not growing up without her mother." The bitterness was back, engulfing Anya like a tsunami storming a beach.
"I concede that," Emily admitted, "but violence really is not the answer. Not even for a murderer like Piotr."
"You just called them vermin, Lady Di," sneered Lydia, "and somebody who looked suspiciously like you also wished one of 'em was burning in hell not a few seconds ago. So knock off with all the sweetness and light bullshit. You're a fucking hypocrite."
Anya gave Emily a look that seemed to say, She has a point.
"I'm hardly an enlightened soul yet. I still have a long, long way to go on my spiritual journey. Forgiveness has been an easy concept for me to understand, and a very difficult one for me to actually master."
"Forgiveness is overrated." Lydia lit another cigarette, taking a long drag and closing her eyes in bliss. "Revenge feels a lot better."
"Revenge corrodes the spirit. It retards spiritual growth."
"The only retard in here is you," the Goth mocked her white-robed adversary, "for buying into all of that 'harps and angels' bullshit."
"Please, please. Enough, okay? This is getting us nowhere. I will ask you again. What do you both want?" Anya's frustration was starting to show. She began to pace back and forth from one end of the room to the other and back again.
Lydia opened her mouth to speak, but Emily cut in first. "It isn't too late for you to renounce this evil pact that you have made and come back to the light, Anya," she implored. "The Lord is all-merciful, all-forgiving. You must simply renounce The Devil and all his works. Your contract will then be null and void. You will be most welcome in the higher realms of being."
"Just like that?" Anya asked, instantly suspicious. "Total forgiveness for all of my sins? No cost?"
"There will be certain...penances to be observed," the English girl admitted.
"Penances such as what?"
"That's...beyond my scope," Emily admitted. "But surely you must agree that nothing in life is free? The same holds true with the afterlife. Heaven will be yours...eventually."
Anya wasn't sure that she liked the sound of that. It was disconcertingly vague. She turned to face Lydia.
"Her master wants me to beg forgiveness and pay whatever price He deems fit. What does yours want of me?"
Lydia shrugged. "Just what you've already agreed. Your soul. In exchange for revenge."
"I must burn in Hell for ever?"
"Don't be a fucking child! Hell isn't all fire and brimstone and Old Testament shit. Those are just fairy stories, the two thousand year old ramblings of some desert tribal elders. There ain't no pitchforks, horns, and pointy tails!"
Anya blinked, genuinely taken aback. "What, then?"
"Baby, Hell is one twenty-four-seven par-tay, for all eternity. The boss likes to party, and he likes to party hard!"
"That...doesn't sound so bad," the Russian girl admitted.
"I know, right! It's an amazing place, honey. Fuckin' amazing!" Lydia was warming to her theme. "Everywhere you look, orgies. Fuck men. Fuck women. Hey, fuck a God-damned horse if you want to! Anything and everything goes. The bars never close and the booze is all free. So is the coke, and every other drug you can think of."
"That sounds...incredible."
"You have no fucking idea!" Leaning in close to Anya, she whispered conspiratorially, "Picture the greatest nightclub you were ever in, sugar tits. The baddest dudes. The hottest bitches. The best dance tunes and a DJ that never gets tired of spinning those decks. Picture all that...times ten thousand. And you're still not even close to what it's like down there." She pointed down toward her feet with an index finger.
"But I don't understand," Anya protested, "if Hell is one big party, why doesn't everybody simply choose to go there."
"Spiritual stagnation." Now it was Emily's turn to make her counter-pitch. "What she's describing...so far as I know, she's telling you the truth, dear. But while that might sound wonderful to a certain type of person, how long before it got to be dull? Then annoying? Then downright miserable? Then agonizing? A year? Two? Ten? Fifty? A thousand? Sooner or later, even the most incredible experience becomes its own form of Hell. You just have to give it time. And when you get down there, Anya, you have nothing left but time. That's what eternity is. Unchanging, never-ending...forever."
"And Heaven is different because...?"
"Because there is the chance to grow spiritually. There are options to reincarnate. To become something new, something different. Become a baby boy in India, or come back as a baby girl in Japan. I hear that one can even incarnate as a totally diff
erent life form entirely on planets that are somewhere out there." She swept an arm out in a half-circle, presumably to indicate the cosmos in general. "You cannot begin to imagine the options that will be available for you. It's hard work, yes, and there are no drug-fueled parties and none of the sexual depravity that her kind seem to be so fond of, but there is something far more important than all of that."
"Which is?"
"Hope. Hope, and fulfillment. That is the true meaning of it all, Anya...not some never-ending orgy."
Anya closed her eyes and stood silently for a while, mulling it all over. It was a lot to take in, and her emotions were still a whirlwind. Both of them made a strong case. Both of them were probably telling as much of the truth as they were allowed to, or at least as much as they had been told themselves...
But Anya had made herself a promise late last night, when she had brought her own brand of vigilante justice down upon Marko and Piotr. The thought of what they had done to her, of what they had done to Emily, and what men like them were even now doing to hundreds, if not thousands of other girls had made her blood boil. It was an absolute wrong, a cancer upon the world. And thanks to her deal with darkness, she had been given the power to help fight those evil men and to right that wrong.
She was just one woman. Supernaturally powerful, yes, but even so, her efforts might hardly make a dent. Unless...she climbed the food chain and started going after bigger and badder members of the smuggling hierarchy.
How long did she have? The compact she had made had been that she was empowered to remain on Earth and seek vengeance until the last of her murderers was dead. That was undeniably Piotr. Yet she had held back at the crucial moment, crippling him and gravely wounding him rather than actually taking his life. Some inner voice, some indescribable instinct had steered her in that direction at the critical moment, and now that she had a little time to reflect upon it, she thought she knew why.
Piotr was blind and crippled by her own hand, and she would always take great satisfaction in that. The paramedics had arrived just as she was fleeing. Denver's paramedics were good, very good indeed (the local newspapers had said that they were some of the best in the nation) and that meant he would probably reach the hospital alive. If the doctors there were able to stabilize him, then he might live for days...weeks...or even, perhaps, years...
Then there was Darya to think of, her oh so precious Darya. Although Anya's parents would do the very best job of raising their granddaughter that they possibly could, she believed with all of her heart that nothing could substitute for the love that only a mother could give. How would she ever forgive herself if she went on to the next life, whichever of the two paths she finally took, and left her little girl behind without holding her in her arms at least one more time?
Anya shook her head. She simply couldn't face it. And if that meant dodging her deal with The Devil for as long as was humanly possible, then so be it. Although it sounded strange to think it to herself, there really were worse things in the world than spending an eternity of suffering in Hell...such as the sure and certain knowledge that she had abandoned the one precious thing she cared about most in her entire miserable existence.
Without realizing it, her hands bunched into fists at her sides. No, there was no choice at all when she got right down to it. She would play the hand that she had been dealt, keep on running, keep on fighting her way to her daughter, until finally The Devil had his due. If luck was with her, then it might still be possible for her to get enough money together to bring Darya and her parents across to America and set them up to live in comfort for the rest of their lives.
That was the thing about human traffickers. They had lots of untraceable money, and the world was a much better place without them in it...
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Interstate 25 was treacherous this morning. As the junior of the two agents, Dennis Alvers pulled driving duty while Padilla spent a lot of the northbound drive on the secure phone link, doing his research and putting the various pieces in play. By the time they reached the southern outskirts of Denver, the Supervisory Agent was beginning to develop a much clearer picture of the situation.
"The cop who took a bullet last night was a homicide detective named Jim Daniels," he explained to Alvers, who kept his eyes on the road but listened attentively nonetheless. "Daniels was investigating the murder of another homicide cop, a guy named Forsberg."
"That name rings a bell, sir."
"It should. The story was all over the media. Shot dead execution-style in his own home. No wonder there was a tabloid feeding frenzy over it."
"Yeah. Now that you come to mention it, I seem to recall seeing it on CNN not too long ago."
"I just spoke to Daniels' captain, a guy named Wentzl. He thinks we're the FBI, by the way."
"We're using that cover story again, sir?"
"Can you think of a better one?" When the junior agent didn't answer, Padilla went on, "Anyway, Wentzl paired Daniels up with a detective named DiTirro, also from Homicide."
"Smart move with a high-profile case like that, sir. Second set of eyes." Alvers cursed under his breath as an eighteen wheeler overtook them on the inside lane, splattering snow all over the right hand side of the car. "Fucker's going to get himself killed if he doesn't slow down. Visibility's already for shit and the roads are still slick as snot."
"You'll get no argument from me. Keep your speed right where it's at."
"Will do, sir."
Padilla grunted. "So where was I? Oh yeah, DiTirro. So the pair of them are hunting down leads. One turns out to be a working girl, goes by the name of — get this — Chastity White."
"Chastity White?" Alvers repeated, sounding skeptical. "No shit, sir?"
"No shit," Padilla intoned solemnly. "They bring Ms. White in for questioning, and she proceeds to tell them that a dead woman walked into the motel room she was using to entertain one of her johns...and killed him."
"Killed him? What for?"
"This guy was a pastor from our neck of the woods: The Springs. Turns out, if the lovely Chastity can be believed, that he got his rocks off from hurting girls. Especially hookers. He was into some pretty nasty shit with her before this so-called 'dead woman' made it onto the scene."
"Do I really want to know what, sir?"
"No you do not, Alvers. No you do not. There are some things you can't un-hear. Let's just say that the way this dead woman supposedly killed the pastor was downright brutal. Couldn't have been done without her being immensely strong."
"As in...supernaturally strong?"
"Got it in one. None of the cops could believe what they were hearing, but they had no other leads, so Daniels figures 'what the hell, why not lean on her a little and see what else she spills?' Turns out she knew the name of the dead girl's pimp. One Piotr Blinov."
While he talked, Padilla was swiping his way through a database of criminals and known suspects on his Agency-issued tablet.
"Do we have anything on Blinov?" Alvers wanted to know, his tone eager.
"As a matter of fact we do. Prostitution, two counts. Last one was six months ago. He posted bail in used bills and was out within an hour of being arrested. None of the charges stuck. But he's dirty alright. Wentzl transferred my call over to Vice. Blinov's been on their radar ever since that last arrest. They know he's a pimp, but the cop I spoke to told me they think he's into something much bigger."
"Let me guess. Human trafficking."
"Right on the nose. Blinov's Russian. No surprise with a name like that. Vice stopped picking him up and put a tail on him. Turns out they've been building a case for a while, but they're not all that interested in Blinov. He's nothing more than a bottom feeder. They want the big fish."
"Do they know who the big fish is?"
Padilla nodded, consulting the tablet once more. "One Vasily Guskov. Suspected to be the ringleader of Colorado's biggest pipeline of foreign sex slaves. Now, Vice has been trying to get
shit on him for years, without too much luck. Guskov has more money than he knows what to do with. His hands are squeaky clean, on paper at least. He doesn't appear in this database at all. But the man runs at least a third of all the pimps in Denver, and an estimated fifty percent of the hookers."
Letting out a low whistle, Alvers said, "What does Guskov have to do with our revenant?"
"That's the one thing we don't know yet," the Supervisory Agent admitted. "Maybe something. Maybe nothing. We just don't have the data to say one way or the other. Going back to Blinov, though, Chastity White claimed that our revenant was one of Blinov's girls. She insists that he murdered her in a fit of anger and dumped the body somewhere..."
"...which is why she came back from the dead," Alvers finished the sentence for him. "But there's something about that that doesn't make any sense."
"The fact that Blinov's not dead?"
"Right. The whole deal with coming back as a revenant is that you get to fulfill a mission as part of the bargain. That mission is usually one of revenge, right? If Blinov and the other dead man are the ones that killed our girl, why leave him alive?"
"Have to admit, you've got a point," Padilla agreed. "Maybe she botched the job?"
"Doubtful, sir. We've seen revenants before. Those things are killing machines. If she really wanted Blinov dead, he'd be dead; not crippled."
"Then there's something we're missing. Some piece of the puzzle we haven't found yet."
"He's going up the chain," Alvers stated with confidence.
"Up the chain?"
"Right. If she doesn't want Blinov, then what about his boss, Guskov? Perhaps she sees him as being every bit as responsible for what happened to her as his pimp was."
"Hmmm."
Both men fell silent for a while, watching the snowflakes zipping past the windshield, each lost in their own thoughts.
A huge green sign declared that it was only seven miles to Denver.
"What's our next move, sir?" Alvers wanted to know. "The hospital? Police station?"