by Steve Vera
In a habit she’d acquired from Gavin, or whatever the hell his name was, Amanda massaged her eyelids with her thumb and forefinger and tried to navigate the minefield of exploding emotions rocking through her thought-stream.
Her mocha threatened to resurface at any minute.
Nothing. You. Feel. Nothing.
She looked down at her ring.
No matter how smudged it got, the carat and a half blue diamond set in platinum managed to throw prisms of light every time her hand moved. How many times had she gazed into it, imagining her life to come with the man she’d trusted her heart to?
She squeezed both of her hands into fists. It was all a lie. Her ring winked mockingly at her. Disgusted, she clawed it from her finger and glared at it in her palm. Hammer? Toilet?
Her stomach gurgled. Please don’t puke; I don’t wanna puke. Amanda closed her fist around the ring, tried to figure out what she was feeling, surrendered and then flung the ring across the room. It bounced against the kitchen wall and clattered on the tile floor.
As if that wasn’t enough, in less than two hours she would be speeding toward the other side of the world on a Gulfstream. What was she going to tell her parents? They were absolutely going to fuh-reak. She’d only just told them she was engaged, for crying out loud.
Was engaged.
Not to mention that she’d be flushing an entire semester at Trinity down the toilet, thirty grand and her GPA. Mom and Dad were going to love that. It’s a good thing they didn’t spent a lifetime saving up for my college, eh, Manders? Her nausea spread.
Amanda hung her head. How was I supposed to see this coming?
She glanced at her phone. No calls. Not that she wanted any, but really? No calls? She hugged herself and failed to control the tremor in her sigh. How could this be happening? How could everything that was so good, in one day…? She watched the numbers on her phone change from 11:13 to 11:14. Forty-six minutes, and life as she knew ended. The phone rang in her hand. “Hello?” she said immediately, fumbling it to her ear. Unknown caller.
“Amanda Casey?” A deep, professional voice.
“Who’s this?”
“My name is Raymond Callahan. I’m driving you to the airport today.”
She pulled the phone away from her ear to recheck the time. “You’re early.”
“Traffic was light. I just wanted to confirm that I was at the right place.”
“You’re here already?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Amanda went to the window and pushed the curtain to the side. A black stretch limousine idled in the apartment complex parking lot. A limousine? Really? “I thought you were going to be here at noon.”
“Like I said ma’am, traffic was light.”
“Well, c’mon up. I guess I can put on some coffee or something, I’m almost done packing.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The line went dead.
Why were these guys here and not Gavin? Surely yesterday really wasn’t the last time they were going to see each other?
The driver’s door opened and out emerged a mountain. A small mountain, maybe, next to Tarzadon (Tarsidion? Whatever his name was) but still huge. The massive driver took a good look around the parking lot and only then opened the passenger’s door. Out stepped a thirty-something man in a suit with a loosened tie. Whoever he was, he moved with the subtle air of aristocracy.
And naturally, the pair made for the wrong building. Amanda’s forehead made contact with the kitchen window. Why did everybody do that? Now she’d have to go down and get them, looking like a bedraggled scarecrow. With a resigned growl she took off out her front door, down the hall and three flights of stairs.
“Hey!”
She’d caught them just in time. Mountain man snapped his head in her direction and tapped the smaller one. Their eyes connected.
He was handsome in a Johnny Quarterback kind of way, with short-cut brown hair that was the balance between boring business and contemporary professional. Until he opened his mouth. Amanda winced at the brightness of his smile.
“Miss Casey?”
“That’s me.”
“Finally!” he gushed. “I get to meet you. Gav’s so damn private,” he said, offering a manicured yet firm handshake. “I’m Max Sullivan, and this is Ray. We’re here to bring you to the airport.” The six-foot four bear standing next to him bowed in acknowledgement. “Are you ready?”
“Uh,” she said, looking up at Ray. He wasn’t bigger than Tarzadon, but he got an A for effort. “Well, like I said, you’re early. I haven’t even packed, truth be told.”
“Perfect!” He brightened brighter. “We’ll just buy whatever you need when we get there.”
“Say what?” Retail therapy, seriously, Gavin?
“This trip’s on me. All expenses paid.” He smiled as if nothing in the world would please him more.
“How did you say you know Gavin again?” Amanda asked.
“Well, technically I’m his employer.”
A lightbulb went off in her head. “So you’re the one he’s always gallivanting around the world with. Aren’t you, like, the vice president of Dexcom or something?”
“Senior vice president, actually,” Max said with a smile that edged toward a grin. She found herself liking this bright man. Maybe she was overreacting after all.
“Shouldn’t you be in a meeting or something?”
“This is more fun,” he said, steering her back to her own building. “Besides, in all the time I’ve known Gavin, this is the first time he’s ever asked me to do anything. It’s the least I could do for getting him shot.”
“Gavin’s been shot?”
“Yeah, like, three times.” Max’s moved his head backward. “He never told you?”
“No,” Amanda said indignantly. “He did not.”
“We were in Berlin. It made international news. Google the story—it’s somewhere, I’m sure.”
Google it?
I’ll Google him.
Max was shaking his head. “So damn typical. You can’t buy a better story to tell, and he just keeps it under wraps. So damn humble it’s nauseating.” He chattered on, but she lost most of it. It wasn’t until he was leaning closely to her cheek that she clicked back on. “Amanda,” he said, the levity in his voice vanished. She startled. “He wants you in the air by nightfall. It was very important to him.”
Back to reality.
Max’s phone rang. He waved it apologetically. “I gotta take this. Ray, go up with her, get her passport and do not let her pack.” He winked and then turned away, already in conversation.
She looked up at Raymond. “You don’t have to come, you know.”
“I’ll get lonely,” he said with a beefy smile. “Let’s go.”
Raymond stayed on her heels as she retraversed the three flights of stairs. She never bothered with the elevator. It moved at the speed of growing grass. They passed the couple who lived across the hall (both did a double-take on Raymond) and for a moment she resented them for their normal lives, for not having a clue as to what it felt like to know that their lives were in danger…for being her yesterday.
When they arrived at her door, Raymond stepped to the side. Amanda slid her key into the keyhole and opened it. All she’d done so far was pack her Louis Vuitton tote bag with her ginger chews, her glasses and her camera. She hadn’t even put her passport in it yet. “This is it?” Ray asked, pleasantly surprised.
“Yeah but, uh, I thought I put my passport right here.” She scratched her head, which felt fuzzy
and weightless.
“I could help you look for it.”
Amanda gave a halfhearted glance around her living room and into the kitchen. She didn’t see it. “I bet I just tossed it on my bed or something.”
“I’ll be right here.”
Amanda hurried off to her room, an unseen force needling her to just get out of here and into the air. By nightfall. Yeah, maybe her world would make more sense from the sky—all disjointed fields sewn into a patchwork quilt and some ocean.
“This isn’t the most flattering picture of you,” came an eerie voice as raspy as sandpaper.
Amanda screamed.
A second later Raymond barreled into the room, pistol in hand. The tips of his eyebrows met over flared eyes. “Identify yourself,” he ordered, leveling the weapon at the intruder’s chest.
Standing right there in her own room, right next to her mauve towel draped over the brass frame of her bed, was the creep from the coffeehouse. The red sunglasses remained. He paid no heed to Raymond’s order or to the large caliber handgun aimed point blank at his chest. His gaze remained transfixed on her picture as if in deep thought.
“Your gun is unnecessary,” he said. His voice was coarse and grainy, as if he’d been forced to scream at the top of his lungs for a couple of years.
“What the hell are you doing in my apartment?” Amanda demanded.
“Answer her, or I’ll put a hole in your head,” Raymond said with a growl.
The man’s attention up until this point had remained on the passport, his thoughtful pose undisturbed. Without changing his posture, his eyes locked onto Raymond’s. “Were it my intent to kill you,” he said, “I would have dispensed with these pleasantries.”
“That would be a neat trick.”
“Don’t make me change my mind.”
As unsettling as he was, she couldn’t get over how beautiful he was; his features were perfectly symmetrical—if that was possible—elegant cheekbones precisely spaced from a strong but graceful nose that was the centerpiece of a face sculpted by some artistic prodigy. His jaw was strong but finely chiseled. It was his eyes, however, that called most to her, even more than the scar across his neck. There was power there, pooling behind those damn lenses, calling to her even while triggering an alarm klaxon in the front of her mind. Warning. Bad. Run. Escape. Flee…The stranger’s lips twisted upward.
She was breathless and all he was doing was standing there.
“I will ask you some questions,” the intruder said, dismissing Raymond, “and you will answer them. Give me what I want and I will be on my way.”
Amanda’s heart slammed into the back of her ribcage. Her lips parted.
“Next words that come out of your mouth that are not an explanation, I take off a kneecap,” Raymond said in a growl.
Do it, she thought.
Without prelude or warning, the stranger’s body blurred so quickly it defied focus. In one fluid motion, Raymond’s gun disappeared while his arm was stretched behind him to the point of breaking, driving his head firmly into the floor. The intruder trained the newly acquired weapon an inch from Amanda’s face. He did it so smoothly it might have been part of a play.
“If you say one word, just one, I will break two of your bones,” he said to her, though he was talking to Raymond. To emphasize his point he flicked his eyes toward the bodyguard, who was doing his best to control his grunts of pain, unable to help his head from being mashed into the floor by the angle. “Do you understand me?” he demanded.
Raymond responded with a grunt.
“Now,” he said to Amanda. “Answer my questions and I will be on my way. Is there anything about those instructions that you don’t understand with crystal clarity?”
He loomed in her face though they were roughly the same height. His breath was strange, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, like some sort of spice or herb, and for some reason reminded her of trees.
“What do you want?” she murmured.
Without a word the invader trained his pistol to Raymond’s kneecap. The big man’s eyes pinned wide, his mouth open in a textbook O.
“Don’t!” she screamed. “I understand! I understand!”
His finger curled around the trigger.
“Anything!” she screamed. “What do you want? I’ll tell you whatever you want!”
“Go into the living room,” he said and released Raymond, slinging him forward. He didn’t even point the gun at them, just let it hang almost casually by his side as if daring them to make a move. Amanda would be doing no such thing.
Raymond’s face was flushed where blood had rushed to his head. He clutched his arm to his chest, rubbing hard enough to nearly conceal its shaking.
“Now,” the stranger said.
Amanda’s heart pounded so hard her vision shook. She tried to gauge how fast she could make a break for her door but it was closed. And he had a gun.
“You’d never make it,” he whispered a scant centimeter from her ear.
She flinched, not expecting him to be so close to her. Gavin’s monster had come, and now he wanted to play. He shoved them onto her couch.
Not only did he have Raymond’s gun, he had four of his own, two strapped low on each thigh within perfect reach and another two under his armpits, holstered in black nylon. He was a walking arsenal. Everything about him was dark or black, except for his California skin and golden hair that fell over the sharp-creased collar of his tactical jacket. And, of course, his red sunglasses.
He’s an assassin. Hired by whoever Gavin had sent to jail, and now she was going to be tortured. Or maybe it was him.
Along with his four pistols, the handle of a large knife protruded from a sheath strapped to his black military fatigues. Impeccable. Professional. Deadly.
“Tell me about this man,” he said, pointing at Amanda’s favorite picture, both her and Gavin dressed to the hilt, her in a slinky black dress and Gavin in a dark cranberry shirt beneath a black sports jacket. They’d been so happy that day.
“Not until I know your intentions,” she said as bravely as she could muster.
The intruder’s arm catapulted from its resting position like a canon shot and backhanded her so hard she saw a flash of white. His hand was like a brick, smashing her into the coffee table as she spilled onto the floor.
Raymond charged with a roar, but a moment later his body was hurled past her against her living room wall. He bounced off her entertainment center with a scream and a crash, sending CDs, trinkets and speakers, not to mention Raymond, crashing to the floor.
Feel free to call the police, anybody! Her head rang like a gong and she tasted blood on her palate.
Raymond moaned.
Before the room could even begin to stop spinning, she felt iron fingers claw into her hair and haul her up by her locks. With a shriek she lurched up to prevent being scalped and gasped as he threw her back onto the couch.
“I thought I had made myself crystal clear.”
Amanda whimpered.
“Because I’m feeling particularly magnanimous today, I will be even more specific. Tell me what you know about Gavin Blackburn and I will be on my way. Defy me,” the invader rasped in her ear, “and I will make you suffer.”
“I don’t know anything!” she screamed.
“Tell me,” he said, making a fist.
Trembling, Amanda screwed her eyes shut and scrunched up her face in anticipation of the next blow. “I’m not telling you shit until you tell me what you want with him. Fuck you!” She cringed in dread, already feeling pain explode through her body, but the blow never fell.
/> Daring to peek through her eyelids, she saw his intense, penetrating gaze dissecting her like some biology project. He reached down to his thigh and pulled out one of his guns. Amanda shrieked and threw up her hands but he didn’t point it at her; instead, he aimed it at the door. A moment later it opened.
“What’s taking you guys so—” Max froze, eyebrows raised in the classic comic rendition of shock, hands up just like Amanda. Gavin’s employer Max Sullivan, senior vice president of Dexcom, stared down the barrel of the stranger’s pistol.
“Have a seat, Mr. Sullivan.”
“What is this?”
“Close the door behind you,” the stranger said. “And don’t say another word if you enjoy having two balls.”
Max’s hands flew down to his groin. He looked at the two of them, Raymond lying sprawled among the debris of her living room, and Amanda, whose face and lips were swelling more with each pump of her heart.
The young stranger beckoned him with the gun to sit down on the couch. “We were just discussing Gavin Blackburn. Tell me, Mr. Sullivan, what you know about him?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Skip’s mouth was dry. He glanced down again at his notes and then back up at the five, feeling like an inmate being evaluated by a parole board.
“Now,” Skip said, putting his hands together, elbows on the table beside his empty plate. “When you say ‘Lord of the Underworld,’ what exactly does that entail? We talking Satan here? Hades? Something else?”
“Something else. Asmodeous is the ruler of the Drynn, and the Drynn rule the Underworld,” Noah said drily, as if explaining to a child. “They are one of the original races.”
“Are they physical or spiritual?”
“Physical,” Noah answered.
“So there are other races?”
“Yes,” Noah said.