Jack lifted his foot off the brake and let his Toyota inch forward, creeping up on the bumper of the car in front of him. The bastard stayed where he was, with way too much room in front of his car so that people kept zipping over and slowing the whole lane down. “Moron oughta get a clue,” Jack said. But he was stuck here, with the cars to his left and right packed far too tightly for him to ease in. “Figures I’d end up with someone like you in front of me.”
Damn, he was tired. He’d gone to work at three yesterday afternoon and ended up pulling a double shift when one of the fools he worked with called in sick. He could use the money, sure, but he wasn’t used to graveyard hours; now all he wanted was to get home and crawl into bed. Who would’ve figured there’d be traffic at this time of the morning going out of the city? Nowadays there was traffic all the time, in all damned directions. Too many people in Chicago, that’s what—hell, in the whole world. All those lowlifes, multiplying like rabbits just to get an extra shot of welfare money every month for the next brat they squeezed out.
Jack pulled his shoulders forward, stretching his oversized muscles, trying to work some of the night’s tension out of them. He’d been bodybuilding since he was nineteen, and he was damned proud of the way he looked. Hell, if he hadn’t gotten mixed up with women so quickly—a pregnant girlfriend, then wasting eight good years of his life with a broad who’d been a good lay but zero in the brain cell department—he might’ve ended up on the big circuit, had his picture on the cover of Muscleman magazine. Now he had a brainless ex-wife and a kid he never saw who cost him five hundred a month in child support.
He really needed to get to the gym, hit the weights, and do some time with the heavy bag. The extra hours from last night would pad his paycheck but he’d missed his workout, and that would make his muscles dense and sore. He hated that, and the more he thought about it, the more pissed off he got. It was Rita’s fault, damn it, always spending his money on that ungrateful kid of hers, buying him some new gadget or T-shirt or—and this really ate at Jack—some piece of sterling-fucking-silver jewelry for the latest hole the brat had poked into his face or his ear. The boy was just now discovering tattoos, and while Jack at least thought those were okay, buying into an obsession with getting inked was a damned expensive one. He already looked like a freak. The skinny little shit wasn’t Jack’s own blood, and so Jack wasn’t going to pay for the boy’s skin paintings whether his mother said it was okay or not.
Shit. He’d really thought he could put off getting the radiator hose replaced for, well, as long he could. Yeah, it was old and cracking, but he’d run some Gorilla tape around it. He had better things to do with his cash, and something else was always coming up anyway. Like last Sunday, when Rita said she needed a new uniform top because he’d ripped hers when he’d grabbed her by the collar the night before. Cheap-ass fabric, and if she hadn’t run her mouth to begin with about him coming in late after going out with his buddies, the whole thing would never had happened. It was all her fault, but the downside was that he’d had to fork it over anyway; he’d put all the money from her puny check—she made almost nothing as a part-time appointment clerk for a dentist’s office—into his account and she couldn’t go to work without wearing some medical-looking blouse thing. So there went another sixty bucks, and for barely paying her above fucking minimum wage, they sure required an expensive uniform. Still, after the ass-beating he’d given her, she’d rethink bitching at him about what time he came home. He’d be there whenever the hell he pleased.
Damn it, the temperature gauge was still creeping up there, and he could feel the heat from the engine on his legs, rolling right through the firewall. Here it was September, the dog days of summer, and he might as well have the heater on high. And was that steam coming out from under the hood?
Jack stuck his head out the window. “Move your asses, damn it!” he yelled. “I haven’t got all fucking day!”
If any of the other drivers heard him, they made no sign of it, and the cars in front of him didn’t budge a single inch. The assholes around him all had their windows closed and their sweet air-conditioning on high while he sat here and baked. He had a nice, sharp pain in the middle of his forehead now, thanks as much to the traffic and the overheating car as it was to thinking about how much Rita and her boy—his stepson—aggravated the shit out of him. Yeah, Jack decided, he needed to have a talk with that kid, a real face-to-face about appreciation and behavior, and how it was more than past time for him to straighten up and fly right in Jack’s world. Jack had been looking the other way too long, thinking that common sense would somehow leak from Kendall’s mother into him. Lead by example, like in the military, but that wasn’t working here, because the woman had no damned sense of her own. It was time to pull off his leather belt and let it do the teaching. If Kendall turned out to be too old for that, then Jack was perfectly willing to come in with his fists. Sometimes the hard way was the best way.
Damn, it was hot in here. He shifted uncomfortably and squinted through the dirtlinndshield. Yeah, definitely steam, a lot of it, coming from under his hood. The temperature gauge was all the way in the red now—he needed to pull over and shut off the engine before something really fucked-up happened, like he blew the head gasket, or worse, cracked the block.
He eased the car forward a few feet and glanced to the right, but no luck. The cars were practically on top of each others’ bumpers, with all the drivers safe inside their cool little compartments and staring straight ahead, like a bunch of brain-dead zombies. Did they all think the fucking world revolved around them, that no one else on the expressway might be having a problem?
Jack stabbed at the button on the door until the passenger side window rolled down. “Hey—hey!” He’d been going to ask the guy to let him in front of him, but the moron didn’t even know he existed.
“Great,” he muttered. Damn, his knees were burning, they were so hot. He scowled and put the car in park, then tried to look between his knees and the dashboard, but there was nothing down there but his work boots and the dirty floor mat. Still, when he reached a hand beneath the steering wheel, the amount of heat coming out of there was enough to cook a hamburger, and the tops of his fingers stung when they brushed against the underside of the dash as he pulled them back out.
“What the fuck?” Something flickered in his peripheral vision, and when his gaze cut back to the windshield, he got the shock of his life.
The whole front of the car was in flames.
“Jesus!” he screamed. He grabbed at the door handle and tried to get out as the door flew open, but the seat belt snagged around him. The flames had grown fast and were now sparkling against the windshield. Jack yanked at the seat belt, then belatedly realized he needed to press the button by his hip to get the damned thing to release. His fingers scrabbled, found it, and pushed at it.
Nothing happened.
“Open up, you bastard!” he bellowed. He pried and jerked, but it was useless. All those years of bodybuilding had literally screwed him—that first, powerful tug had firmly jammed the mechanism, and he wasn’t going anywhere. “No—oh, God, no!” Panic sucked away his air and he forgot everything, everything, as he writhed inside the seat belt, trying desperately to claw his way freBut it was no good, he couldn’t get out, he couldn’t even get the fucking thing to loosen—
—and the flames were engulfing the windshield now, filling the car with super-heated air, cooking his lungs as he tried to breathe—
—curling around the open windows as his cheeks started to blister and his hair singed, he was going to die in here—
He was shrieking and flailing at the flames when a hand holding something silver and long reached through the fire and filled his vision. A knife—a knife that slid between his chest and the seat belt and parted the tough nylon fabric like it was nothing. The knife dropped away and someone grabbed his smoking, stinking clothes and hauled him out of the car. He fell on the ground and his rescuer straddled him and slapped wi
ldly at the fire still trying to consume what was left of his hair and his shirt. From somewhere Jack heard a siren and a dim part of his brain realized it was coming for him, to help him, and he sure hoped so because his mouth and throat were on fire and it hurt so damned much when he tried to inhale.
He closed his eyes and let the siren sing him to a cool and restful sleep.
Seven
Guilt.
It was just so exquisite.
Jashire circled the chair slowly, then ran the tip of one finger across the sweating, overheated forehead of the man tied to it. She pushed against the skin below the wet hair hanging in his eyes and when he didn’t move, she dug in a little harder with the sharp end of her fingernail, testing to see how far she could go before he’d respond. Finally her prisoner shuddered and tried to pull away. A useless attempt; she had both his arms and legs tightly bound and he was too delirious to do more than roll his head from one side to the other. A deeper jab made him groan, and that was enough to make her smile with satisfaction.
Yes . . . exquisite was definitely the word of her day. It applied to so many things—her prisoner, her plans, but most of all, her luck in getting all this to come together so well. But was it luck? Perhaps not—she might be giving herself too little credit here. After all, she’d come to this playground with nothing more than a nebulous desire to do something dark and delightfully corrupt, a deed or two that would be fun but that would also catch the fire-saturated gaze of her master, Lucifer, and fill him with approval. Because with approval came rewards, and Lucifer could be very, very generous.
But Jashire would never have guessed how well this would all work out. She had Lahash to thank for that, although she would never admit that to him face-to-face. He was the one who had discovered the woman, and what she could do, although his only attempt to use that information in the latest of his quests to eliminate a nephilim had failed miserably. Alas Lahash was strictly a linear thinker and he really couldn’t work things out if something in his script strayed from whatever straight and narrow arrangement he had dreamed up. The idiot had been so flustered he hadn’t been able to figure out what to do next—he had that great list of nephilim names from the Korean guy, but now he was too freaked out to do anything with it. Jashire, on the other hand—she thrived on such unforeseen chances. The unexpected, the emergency shift at the last minute to make a scheme work out—those were excellent, the meat and the excitement of everything. She’d picked a name from the list and had taken off running.
And fear—oh, baby. The more the better, and if it was her own, that just seasoned the pot and made it tastier. If everything went right all the time, where was the fun? Where was the excitement, the rush? As far as she was concerned, Lahash was a coward, no better than a flea-infested alley cat that hissed and showed its claws but still fled at the first opportunity. That was exactly what he’d done because of Astarte, and why? Because the word in Lucifer’s kingdom was that she had somehow managed to kill a Hunter. Jashire could have understood it if Astarte had bested Lahash himself, but this other was nothing but rumor . . . probably. And even if it were true, so what? There wasn’t that much skill involved. Hunters were big and often lethal, but they were also as dumb as the molten rock from which they were formed. Astarte was in a world full of humans who had fashioned weapons and means of eliminating almost anything organic. She was intelligent and devastatingly cunning, and Jashire wasn’t at all surprised she had found a way to use those inventions to her advantage.
So let Lahash run back to Hell with his tail between his demon legs until he regrew his testicles. Jashire had work to do here, lots and lots of work, and she was going to have a damned fun time with it.
Take this human, for instance.
Lahash had used a human for several months, playing with him until a cop had taken him permanently out of the picture. What had he called the man? A puppet. Jashire circled the guy on the chair again, studying him. “Puppet” didn’t fit this one; he was more of a pawn. No, that wasn’t quite it, either . . .
A knight. That might be it—silent and unobserved, her stealthy, unwilling warrior in a tricky little game of human chess. Jashire moved him two steps forward and one to the side, and then all sorts of marvelously twisted shit happened.
She buried one hand in his hair and pulled his head back so she could see his face. Not a bad-looking man, and given a shower and a shave—she’d always preferred the male face to be hair-free—he was probably handsome by human standards. His hair was dark and thick, and his eyes—before the infection in his fragile human body had raised his temperature and turned them into swollen slits—had been a warm beguiling brown. She could see why women would find him attractive. His wife was certainly enamored of him, but Jashire would never understand the monogamous thing that so much of mankind had going on. Even so, it had certainly worked to her advantage over many thousands of years. Through no fault of his own, monogamy and its nasty little by-product, guilt, had played this one, her little silent knight, right into her hands.
The man moaned and Jashire pulled his head back farther and let her gaze go up and down his form. She’d had him here for a week and he was a mess. He smelled of vomit and waste—maybe she should clean him up, untie him and throw him in the shower. Humans used to be so fragile but she thought they’d gotten pretty hardy over the centuries; still, this one did have that little problem with his left hand, something which had turned out to be more of an issue than she’d thought it would be. She probably should have held him still and seared his wound shut before he’d writhed around on the filthy floor, but she’d been so delighted with the smell of blood and with his screams that she hadn’t thought about it. Now his hand and wrist had red lines of infection spiraling up from where she’d cut off his finger, and the blackened perforation was oozing smelly green pus. She thought the streaks under his skin were pretty, but from a medical standpoint, she knew they were bad news. Ah, hindsight. Demons wished for it as much as humans.
“Okay, Vance,” she said. “How would you like to get cleaned up? Maybe even indulge in some food and water. What do you say?” He didn’t respond and she scowled. Ungrateful human. Maybe she ought to leave him right here, let him just tough it out. But . . . no. He just didn’t look very strong and Jashire thought he still had plenty of potential left, provided he stuck around. “Poor baby.” She tried to make her tone sympathetic, but knew it probably wasn’t working. No matter how hard she’d tried to understand God’s plan, she’d just never been able to think of these creatures as much more than primates with overdeveloped brains. Yeah, they might’ve been made in the Creator’s image, but they had no powers, they were short-lived, and they broke too easily.
“I’m not overly endowed in the patience department,” she finally told him. “So let’s just get this over with.”
“Water,” he suddenly croaked. “Please . . .”
Jashire tried to recall the last time she’d given the guy something to drink and couldn’t. Had it been the day before yesterday? She wasn’t sure. Aw, maybe she did feel a little twinge of pity for him.
“Absolutely,” she said cheerfully. “Ask and you shall receive and all that happy crappy.” Without wasting any more words, she tilted the chair over and dragged it across the floor toward the bathroom. The chair legs dug furrows in the ratty carpeting but she didn’t care. This building was a shit hole, with more apartments empty than rented while some, like this one, were nothing but a haven for crack addicts. A little insistence on her part a week previous had made those sorry excuses for humanity take off damned quickly, and she and Vance had been living here in harmony every since. The water in the bathroom sink worked okay; now it was time to check the shower above the crusty bathtub.
He was heavier than he looked but it still didn’t take much effort for her to hoist him, chair and all, over the rim of the tub. He ended up facing the wall with the faucet, which she thought was a good thing—that way he’d get a solid, hefty drink at the same time some o
f the smut got washed off. In fact, maybe she’d just leave him in here. It would be a waste of effort and energy to drag him back and forth from the other room.
She twisted the faucet on the right side to ON, pulled the knob for the shower feed, then went off to find monkey boy something to eat.
Eight
When his cell phone rang, Charlie Hogue knew without looking at the screen that Brenda was calling him again. He pulled it out of his pocket and scowled at it, wishing to Christ that she would just leave him alone for a little while, let him have some peace and quiet. After that thought, right on cue and as predictable as the one-hour intervals in which she left him messages, came guilt: she was his wife, she cared about him, she was anxious to find out how his meeting with his birth father had gone. He should want to talk to her, fill her in on every detail of this long-awaited excursion into the unknown.
He sighed and pressed the silence button on the side of the phone. He just didn’t feel like explaining the whole, sorry situation. Her questions would be endless, his answers vague because he simply didn’t have all the information he knew she would want, the normal, everyday information like the names of his newly discovered relatives, theddresses, all the family birth dates. All the data that would fit tidily into her address books and computer reminder programs so that her picture-perfect American life could reorganize itself around the new additions and continue without interruption.
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