by RS Black
Opening the door to the first dive I found in town, I entered and stood just inside as my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lighting.
Taking off my Stetson, I wiped my brow and then headed for the bar where I leaned against the chipped and pitted wood. I lifted my finger and ordered a beer. A second later, the paunchy bartender with moles all over his face slid a cold bottle at me. I lazily sipped on my Corona, eyeing what few customers there were at this hour.
This place was your typical townie dive. Floors tacky with food and drink, a battered billiard table sat to the back. It was dark save for the few red jalapeno Christmas lights strung along the corners of the ceiling. The walls were covered in posters of half-nude women draped around the necks of grinning luchadores.
There were no windows in this building. Everything was designed in such a way as to get a man deep into his cups without realizing how much time had passed. But I knew it was nearly dusk.
I had an hour before I needed to meet with Grace. I took another long pull on the bottle, swallowing the bitter drink with a grimace. If only I had the power to slow time down, meeting Grace was something I’d put off as long as I possibly could.
“De verdad, lo ve con mis ojos, Juan.”
The excited whisper of the gangly man sitting with his back toward me at the table nearest the door snagged my attention. He leaned closer to his ruddy-complected friend and bobbed his head up and down, shaggy black hair dancing around his face with his furious gesture.
“Tu si eres loco, Antonio. Él no está muerto. Hable con Eduardo ayer.” The one called Juan snorted as if he’d heard a funny story and started chugging his brew.
I grabbed my hat and nonchalantly sidled closer. I pretended to study my nails as I sat down at one of the empty tables. The hard, torn plastic of the chair cut into the backs of my thighs, but I ignored it as I continued to listen.
My Spanish is exceptional. There’d been a period in my life—about three hundred years ago, give or take—when I’d seriously considered planting roots and settling down. I’d bought hundreds of acres of land in the interior of Mexico. I could speak with barely the trace of an accent and I could understand it even better.
Skinny had apparently stumbled across the dead body of an acquaintance. Tubby didn’t believe him.
Antonio slammed his palm down on the table. “No soy mentiroso,” he snarled between clenched teeth as he vehemently denied that he was lying.
“Como puede estar cierto? Tú me acabas decir que la cara estaba desfigurada.” Juan snorted again and chuckled.
Tubby was drilling him about being certain, especially because Skinny apparently mentioned the face being disfigured, so the possibility of facial recognition would be slim. I shifted around on my seat and took another sip of my drink, barely even tasting it.
A disfigured corpse was one of the hallmarks of a zombie-style killing. But I’d never overlook the possibility of it being a human killer either. Sometimes you can’t always blame a monster for what goes wrong in this world.
Though my family and I run a carnival, which is why we’re supposedly here in Mexico in the first place, the truth is Nephilim hunt down Others. Creatures of the dark. Vampires, shifters, zombies, and some you’ve probably never heard of. Before leaving our last assignment, Grace had told me of a possible zombie uprising (pun intended).
But she’s lied to me before. My last assignment had been nothing but a red herring meant to distract me from the truth. What that truth actually was, I’m still not even sure. But I will find out. Even if finding out means I have to plead ignorance to her deception.
Antonio smirked, wearing the pleased look of a man who knew his next statement would make a believer of his skeptical friend. “Un cicatriz, aquí”—he pointed to the tip of his index finger and traced a jagged line to the crook of his elbow—“hasta aquí.” He lifted a brow, waiting in the expectant silence.
Except for the telltale curling of Juan’s fingers around the neck of his beer bottle, it almost seemed as if he hadn’t heard Antonio.
But I could tell the mention of the dead man’s childhood scar had unnerved him. The rich hue of his copper skin turned almost white around his mouth, and the muscle in his right cheek started twitching.
“Dios mío!” Juan gasped, hurtling the chair he sat on to the floor as he shoved to his feet and ran out the door.
Antonio’s lips twitched with the ghost of a smile, then he laid down some cash, tipped his hat toward the barkeep, and followed his friend.
I licked my lips and waited a moment for the room to quiet down. The men’s sudden departure had turned the tiny bar into a buzz of disjointed conversations.
The whispered voices wondered about the men and what they’d been talking about, but none of them seemed clued in to the body. I likely wasn’t gonna learn much more.
I stood, rolled my shoulders until the bones popped, and gave a satisfied sigh as if I hadn’t a care in the world. I winked at the barkeep, a surly old man with pockmarked cheeks, and smiled.
For a second I could have sworn I’d felt the swirl of Lust coming to attention.
I could tell he wanted me, could see the flush of sweat on his skin and the throbbing pulse at the side of his neck.
I waited for Lust to get demanding and bossy as she usually did when confronted with prey. Fill my head with visions of me walking up to the man, grabbing his sweat-stained shirt, and dragging him behind the club for a quickie.
My brows lowered.
Granted, I’d just had sex with Luc, but sex was sex, and for Lust that was everything. Nothing existed for her outside her need for it.
Yet aside from the initial twitch of a reaction she’d had, she was silent.
Unnerved, I dropped some cash on the table and jogged outside, leaning against a pillar of wood for support. It smelled like sewage, droppings, and piss. I didn’t care. I took in long, greedy gulps of air and fought to quiet the sudden trembling of my hands.
What in the hell was wrong with me?
Why should I care that Lust no longer seemed to control my every word and thought? I was more in control and yet—I closed my eyes, aware of the alien presence inside me—I was far from all right.
“Estas bien, gringa?”
“Hmm?” I mumbled, opening my eyes to see a small child, no older than eight or nine, staring up at me with large, wide eyes. He shoved a greasy hank of hair out of his face. He was far too skinny. The pants he wore were a size too small; knobby knees protruded from jagged holes at the knees of his pants.
I wondered where his parents were, then realized he was probably one of the many orphaned children living in the streets.
He looked genuinely worried, and suddenly I remembered another little face. Brianna. At least there’d been one child saved that night. Maybe it was my memories of her and not him, but a reluctant grin tugged at the corners of my lips. Reaching into my pocket, I grabbed a hundred-peso note, roughly eight American dollars, and handed it to him.
“I’m fine,” I told him in Spanish, but he didn’t look at me. Rather, he stared at the bank note as if he were afraid it might disappear. He swallowed hard, then began to back up slowly.
“Go,” I muttered and flicked my wrist.
He needed no other prompting and quickly disappeared inside the maze of shacks and alleyways.
I took one last steadying breath. It was time to meet Grace.
The sun had long since set, and the night rang with the sounds of locusts and nesting birds. I walked slowly, my hands shoved deep into my pockets, and kept within shadow.
I moved down back alleys for several blocks with nothing but rats and stray dogs for company. I caught a few sets of eyes studying me. Some with curiosity, others with malicious intent. I was a lone, beautiful woman. Clearly not a local. Easy prey.
Or so they thought.
But I walked with a sense of confidence and eventually the hard gazes disappeared.
Many times I have no idea where Grace plans to meet up, but
she and I have met in Mexico for many decades now. I hardly paid attention to my surroundings, letting instinct guide me.
Light, glowing a buttery copper color, caught my eye. I snarled as my anger flared to a violent pitch. Not a hundred yards in front of me sat a mud-thatched shack. Inside, Grace waited for me.
Now that I was here, I wasn’t sure I could do this. Pretend she hadn’t betrayed me. Betrayed us.
I stopped walking, staring at the light like a moth trapped in the deadly glow of flame.
I was a veritable weapons cache. There was a razor fan tucked between my boobs, a flip knife down each snakeskin boot. Two nine mils were strapped to my back, and the hairpin that was holding my hair up wasn’t a pin at all, but rather an ice pick.
Was I plotting to destroy Grace? It would seem so. And maybe subconsciously it’s why I’d come down here so loaded, but revenge wasn’t a luxury I had at the moment. The minutes were ticking by, and then a dark silhouette moved behind her closed curtains. Grace was pacing, probably wondering where the hell I was. But I just couldn’t move.
Frozen with indecision, I might have remained there forever if the heavy press of eyes hadn’t just drilled a hole through my consciousness, snapping me out of my trancelike state.
Narrowing my eyes, I turned in the direction of the hot gaze and caught a flash of black that wasn’t shadow.
The sun was so low there was hardly any natural light left in the town, but my heart was thumping like a rabbit on crack because deep down in the darkest corners of my mind, I could swear that build and shape could only belong to one person.
With a growl, I ran toward it. Hurriedly I moved down the narrow alleyways of a shantytown, the shacks stacked one against the other against the other, scraping my knuckles and face raw as I’d take a turn into a rusty nail or roughened termite-riddled wood But the amorphous shape was always just out of reach, leading me on a long and dizzying path so that I’d completely lost my bearing because I was too focused on catching up.
“Hey!” I finally panted at it after what felt like hours. “Stop running.”
Heads poked out their houses, staring at me with quizzically raised brows and worried gleams in their inky eyes. I ignored them.
The blur didn’t listen and a fire like I’d never felt before zipped down my spine, blurring my vision. “I said stop!” I roared. It was mindless and crazy-sounding, but I was mindless and crazy.
I wasn’t thinking straight, that much was obvious. But what I didn’t notice, and I probably should have, was that the second I screamed, frost burned my skin.
A powerful something barreled into me, knocking the air from my lungs and shoving me to the dirt. Otherworldly power ran like a shock of electricity against my flesh before a hand clamped itself over my mouth.
Panic clawed at my throat, turned my blurry vision hazy, made my fangs lengthen and my claws unfurl.
“Shut the hell up,” the voice hissed in my ear. “Get your fucking panic under control or so help me, I’ll cut your head off.”
The voice literally made my brain feel about to short-circuit, and I blinked, breathing heavily, feeling as stupid as I’d ever felt in my life because there was no way in hell that what I was hearing, who I was hearing, was really…
“Billy?” I mumbled around a half sob of surprise. I couldn’t see his face—he was obscured within the voluminous folds of his hoodie sweater—but that voice. That voice would haunt me forever.
And this time Lust didn’t just twitch, she roared.
My body went from hot to molten. My skin was so sensitive that I was unbelievably aware of his form on my body. Anywhere we touched. His pelvis grinding into mine, his knee between my thighs, his breath brushing against my neckline.
“Good,” he rumbled, and damn if I didn’t want to yank the black sweater off him immediately. “I’ve halted time, but it won’t last. When you screamed, your demon came out.”
“Lust?” I couldn’t believe the breathy quality of my voice, because I should want to rip his hands off, gouge his eyes out, and saw his tongue in two for making me believe he’d died. For making me hurt and ache and need and want. But the emotion working through me wasn’t hate, it was desire and more. So much more.
My body tingled, shivered, and my back teeth clacked.
“Look over my shoulder,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear. “You see the boy?”
I looked and spied a small head, four, maybe five years old. He was leaning out of his doorway with eyes grown wide. Hovering before him was a puke-green mist. I nodded.
“You see the miasma in front of him?”
I nodded again, unable to trust my voice not to give me away again. Now that Lust was dominating my thoughts, Pestilence wasn’t nearly as loud or powerful as earlier. It felt good, right, to have control of my body, to feel it again the way it once was. I strummed my finger down the length of his muscular back, wanting to weep from the exquisite torture of having him back in my arms.
“That’s Pestilence,” he said. “Before I can release time, you have to suck that demon spawn back inside you. If you don’t, the outbreak will level this village.”
I felt the cold of time stood still, looked at the faces all frozen, all staring down at me. I kept expecting them to blink or breathe, but they didn’t move. Just stared at me with horror in their flat gazes. I should care more than I did. Only a few days ago I would have cared, but I had changed. The only thought drilling away at me was… just how powerful was he? How was Billy doing this?
“Billy?” I said his name like a prayer and then laughed, because absolutely nothing was making sense. I’d seen Billy die in hell, seen his body shatter into a bolt of white light; he’d been taken from me. My death priest had been violently killed in front of me, funny how I still claimed the bastard, even though he’d tried many times to kill me himself. Stabbing me, punching me in the temple until I’d blacked out, I couldn’t trust the man as far as I could throw him. Even though he was currently covered in a shadowy hoodie, it didn’t matter because I was as attuned to his soul as I was to Lust.
This man was my obsession and possibly even my destruction, but none of that mattered because he was here. With me right now, and I desperately needed answers.
“Suck it back into you, Pandora, I can’t hang on much longer.” He said it through gritted teeth, and it was the thread of annoyed desperation in his scratchy voice that finally brought me to my senses.
I’d not taken the time to learn how to properly use Pestilence; Lust and I had grown together over two millennia. This other demon was new to me, but if the mechanics were the same, then focusing on drawing the power back into me should do it.
Looking back at the fog, I mentally called it back to me. Not because I wanted it back—I wanted it out of me—but I needed to talk with Billy, and not while all his attention was focused on saving those around us.
I was shocked when the fog curled back toward me, moving in a slow helix undulation, mostly because everything was still frozen and a part of me had expected this not to work.
Lust quieted almost the second the fog rolled through my body once more. Nostrils flaring as Pestilence’s oily infection ran through my system once again, I could only nod when the last of it sank like a thorny barb into my brain.
Pestilence hissed, roiling and spitting its displeasure at being contained yet again. For many nights I’d seen visions and nightmares of what the demon had done in its previous form, the utter anarchy it delighted in creating.
There was a shudder in the air, like the snap of a taut rubber band being let go, and I knew without looking that time was back as it should be.
His hand was covering my mouth and again I felt something prickly against my flesh. My body was humming, blood singing with untold masses of energy as power rolled between us. Obscuring us from the prying eyes of witnesses.
I’d felt this level of electrifying power before, and I couldn’t deny my confusion. Things just weren’t adding up.
&n
bsp; Billy’s face was masked by deep shadow, but his body was as firm and strong as I remembered it. His smell saturated my senses. I wanted a visual cue that what I was sensing was really him, but he wasn’t giving it to me. Why was he so covered? What in the hell was going on?
“We don’t have much time. You have to make that meeting with Grace.” His hand finally moved, but he made no move to get off me, not that I cared. I wanted him all over me. Lust was in heat again and this was an itch only my death priest could quench.
“How do you know about my meeting? What’s going on here?”
He shook his head. “We don’t have much time. I’ve been watching you, demon.”
I mean, I was all for a little Peeping Tom action, especially when it was Billy watching me, but it hadn’t exactly sounded like he’d been happy to do it. “Jeez, Billy.” I slammed his chest with my fist, wanting to hurt him even a little, because as tough as I sometimes pretended to be, that idiot had just hurt me. “I thought you were dead, you ass. The least you can do is be nicer. And my name is Pandora!” I bit out through clenched teeth.
“Shut up and listen to me,” he growled. “You’re already late, you have no idea what’s going on, and the truth goes much deeper than you think. You got me?”
It sat in my gut like a raging river of bile to have him order me around, but I wouldn’t deny that curiosity more than anything else kept my questions at bay.
For now.
I narrowed my eyes.
“Pandora.” The way he said my name, soft and with a hint of a growl, like he was confused and exasperated all at once, made my heart thump harder.
“What do you know? You sound like you know something. Tell me, Billy.”
My lashes fluttered. I wished I could help the way my body reacted to him, wished I could stop it, make it go away. It would be so much easier. But this man who was created for the express purpose of ending not only my life, but anyone else like me, had a way of getting under my skin and making me want things in a way that bordered on lunacy.