“Aw, too bad! I was having such a good time. I had this whole little thing going on—”
“Yeah,” Brynna interrupted. “I know all about it, and it’s over.”
Jashire gave a wise nod. “Right. So you’ve probably been talking to that nephilim, too. Such a stupid young boy.”
“He’ll come to his senses once you’re out of the picture.”
Jashire licked her lips and began ticking off points on her fingers. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got Vance. I’m talking to Georgina—”
“Not anymore.”
“You really think you’re going to put a stop to it, don’t you?”
“I already have.” Brynna leaned against one wall. “Speaking of coming to her senses, Gina has, too. She’s not going to talk to you anymore. She’s finally realized that being your little puppet—or toy, as you like to say—isn’t going to get her anywhere.”
“Too bad,” Jashire said again. “Not that it matters anyway.”
Brynna stared at her. “I was afraid of that.”
Jashire shrugged. “It’s just a human. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to Gina,” Brynna said hotly. “It mattered to him.”
Jashire flicked her hand in the air. “Well, it didn’t matter to me.”
“Maybe if your life was as short-lived, it would.”
“Come on, Astarte.” Jashire’s voice was filled with disdain. “What do you think I’m going to do here, feel sorry for them? It’s not in my makeup, remember? I’m a demon, just like you. It’s not in your makeup, either.”
“It is now.”
“Your problem, not mine.”
“Where is he?” Brynna asked. She suddenly felt tired—tired of all the bullshit, tired of all the struggling back and forth between this world and Hell. On the heels of that thought came another: if she thought she was tired now, maybe she should ask herself that same question again in a thousand years, when she would probably still be seeking redemption.
“Find him yourself,” Jashire told her.
Sudden anger made Brynna’s face fill with heat, and before Jashire could get out of the way, Brynna was across the room and yanking her off that nasty piece of furniture. “Tell me,” she demanded. “I’m tired of fucking around!”
Just as quickly, Jashire shoved Brynna back hard enough to make her stumble a good ten feet and fall against the opposite wall. “You overstep your boundaries. You’re not nearly as powerful here as you are in Hell. Don’t you dare lay a hand on me again!”
Brynna regained her balance instantly. “I’ll yank that information out of you even if I have to pull it through your teeth.”
Jashire’s laugh was loud and shrill. “Don’t confuse me with Lahash. He may not want to get his fingernails dirty, but I’m always up for a good fight. Is finding that stinking, puny human so important that you’d end up losing your life over him?”
“I’m not going to do any such thing,” Brynna snapped. “But you’re damned sure going to lose a few pounds of flesh.”
Before Jashire could retort, Brynna leaped across the floor and slammed into her. They went down in a snarl of arms and legs and it was only mere seconds before it seemed like there were too many limbs—Jashire had morphed into her demon form and Brynna had no choice but to do the same. She could never defend herself as a human against Jashire’s true self. The human body was too soft, too malleable, too delicate. It bled too easily . . . it died too easily.
Brynna’s change was automatic and she went into the form best matched against the female she was facing. The shape Eran had seen before was quite different. This version had no wings—they would have been useless in this enclosed space. As before, Brynna’s skin was rough and cracked, hard as coal and able to withstand both heat and the vicious claws that Jashire would have raked across her face and throat. Jashire’s skin was tough but it couldn’t withstand the tips of Brynna’s fingernails. Even so, Brynna held back. For some odd reason, the mercy she felt toward humans now seemed to extend to those she would someday like to call her former kind. A long time ago Jashire had been not only her friend but her lover. Perhaps Jashire could throw those things away, but in the human world Brynna was learning to appreciate and receive those emotions. Apparently when they were genuine, they were nondiscriminatory. And that was as it should be; only a hypocrite could pick and choose those to whom she would show mercy.
Brynna waited, hoping the female demon would give up. No such luck; Jashire hauled herself to her feet and hissed at Brynna like a wild cat, then started toward her. She’d moved forward only a couple of feet when there was a scream from the doorway of the apartment. Both their heads turned to see one of the resident drug addicts standing there and gaping at them in the watery early morning light. It was a young man with the deep shadows of illness below his eyes, coulin that every indentation in the planes of his cheekbones could be seen beneath the stretched skin of his face. He smelled of illness and impending death, and his flesh was gray and moist. Need throbbed off him with a nearly physical persistence. Even so, he knew that what he was seeing was not at all right.
Jashire hissed again, the points of her teeth showing between her black-red lips. Her body turned away from Brynna and toward the young man, then they heard sounds from the hallway. More people—drug addicts, reluctant tenants, dealers—coming to see what was interesting enough to elicit a scream from one of the hard-core druggies. There was a limit to how much a demon could allow itself to be seen, and they had both just hit theirs.
Brynna spun and headed into the disgusting kitchen area, ducking around a wall and slipping back into her human form. An instant later, Jashire did the same and the two now-human women stared at each other hatefully.
“This isn’t over, Astarte,” Jashire said. Her voice was filled with venom.
“It should be,” Brynna told her. She felt calm and accepting. She wanted it to be over—she had no desire to fight. “Let it go. I just want to know—”
“Fuck you,” Jashire spat. “Find what’s left of the little toy on your own.” Before Brynna could say anything further, Jashire had gone back into the living room. Her movements were so fast that the drug addict and the other people clustered around the doorway could barely catch them. She shoved them aside and was gone, leaving them to wonder what the hell had happened. Brynna had no choice but to do the same. For now, it would be best to leave this place behind and let these addle-minded souls wonder if they had hallucinated. She would have to return at another time with Eran and hope they could find Vance Hinshaw on their own.
It was a heartbreaking thing, but the only way Georgina Whitfield would get closure was if she had a body to bury.
DANIELLE HADN’T FELT RIGHT since they let her out of the hospital. She didn’t remember much about what had happened beyond falling off the bridge—not why she had been up there or anything like that. Everyone kept asking her if she was scared, kept telling her it was okay, she would be all right, and it all just made her mad. She just wished they’d leave her alone. She didn’t want to talk to anyone and she didn’t want her mom hovering over her like she’d been doing. She didn’t even want to go to school, which she’d been liking less and less lately. She just wanted to sit at home and watch cartoons.
Mom had gotten her a box of Chocolate Cheerios after she’d come home from her last doctor’s appointment, but so far she’d only allowed Danielle to have one bowl every morning. Danielle thought she should be able to have those Cheerios any time she wanted. If she was a big girl like Miss Anthony said, she should be able to do that, and she shouldn’t have to go to school. But here it was Monday and her mom had gotten her up and made her get dressed, and even though she’d argued, had told Danielle she had no choice.
“I have to go to work, Danielle,” Mom said. All the niceness she’d shown when Danielle was in the hospital was gone, and she was back to her usual self. Danielle could tell by the tone of her voice that her mother was getting angry. “Things in this worl
d aren’t free, you know.”
“I want more Cheerios.”
“No.”
“I want more Cheerios.”
“What part of no don’t you understand?” her mother snapped. “Now get dressed—get your shoes on right now.” Her voice had that finality to it that old people got when they just weren’t going to listen. When Danielle still stood there and looked at the pantry door, her mother grabbed her and gave her shoulder a firm shake. “I’m not talking to a wall, young lady. Get your shoes on or I’ll wake your father up and have him do it for you.”
That finally got Danielle moving. Dad was a big man who had less patience with her than she had with anyone else. He didn’t like her much, and she didn’t like him. It didn’t matter—there were a lot of people in the world she didn’t like.
As if he’d been able to hear her, her dad opened the bedroom door and came into the kitchen. “You heard your mother. Go get your damned shoes on.”
Danielle lowered her head and shuffled to the door of her own tiny bedroom. It was dark and dirty, like everything else in the apartment, and like her school. That was something else that bothered her a lot. All the things she saw on the television shows and in her cartoons were bright and shiny. She wanted her life to be like that. She didn’t want to wear dirty socks with holes in them and the worn-out blue jeans and T-shirts that she put on every day to wear to school. She wanted to wear glossy red high heels and miniskirts like the girls on television. She wanted to carry pink sparkly purses and have ribbons and bows in her hair, and wear makeup. But her mom wouldn’t buy her any of those things and Danielle had no money of her own.
The girls on TV always had money. Why couldn’t she be like them? Mom and Dad went out every day and they came back each evening, and they had money, but she never did. She went out and came back just like them, but she couldn’t figure out how they got money but she didn’t. They were always saying they didn’t have the cash to buy her things she wanted, but they always had it to buy what they wanted for themselves. Her dad always had beer, her mother always had wine coolers, and they were always bringing home new car magazines and romance books. Like everything else, it just made her really mad. It wasn’t fair that she was always put last—she should have money, too. She should have the things that she wanted. She should get to go first.
Her father’s deep voice thrummed through the doorway from the kitchen. “We don’t have all day, Danielle!”
She took her time even though she was a little afraid of her dad. Predictably, after another minute or two, he started complaining to her mom. “Why is that stupid kid like this every damned day? Can’t you teach her to get her ass out here?”
“Don’t start on me. She is what she is, okay?”
“Yeah, thanks to you. Good job drinking while you were knocked up.”
“You know what? Shut up. You had no idea, either. It’s not like I did it on purpose or knew this would happen.”
“Well, now we’re stuck with her. Brain’s all fucked up from . . . what do they call it? Fetal alcohol syndrome. And we’ve got her for the rest of her life.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do. She’s still our daughter.”
“Not exactly the family life I was planning on.”
“Like you had some grand plan when you were seventeen and trying to get in my pants,” Danielle heard her mother say in a sarcastic voice.
“What, you never heard of birth control?”
“And you never heard of condoms?”
Danielle stood by the door as they fell silent. She finally had her shoes on but she never liked to go out there while they were arguing. The words were almost the same every day. She didn’t know what they all meant, but the undertone was there. Her parents didn’t like her. So what? She didn’t like them, either. She didn’t like anybody—especially today. If she was such the big girl, why couldn’t she just stay home by herself? Why did she have to go to school with all those other stupid little kids? The girls on television got to stop going to school when they got to be her size. They got to go to work. Danielle wanted to go to work, too.
Suddenly her dad appeared at the door to her room. “Let’s go, Danielle.” He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her out. “God, I feel like a broken record repeating myself every morning. Don’t you get it?”
She just looked at him. There was no sense answering. She didn’t know what to say anyway, because she didn’t know what a record was. She did understand the inference that she was broken.
She felt like that a lot.
“BHERU CAME UP WITH more detailed info on the girl Casey Anlon rescued from the river,” Eran told Brynna when he picked her up. “Beyond what we already know—her name is Danielle Teruko Myers, she’s nineteen and mentally disabled—she goes to the Lesperniza Community Services School on Grant Avenue. Her parents work during the day. He did a drive-by of their apartment but no one’s around so they must’ve sent Danielle off to school.”
“High school?” Brynna asked.
“No,” he answered as he pushed the accelerator. The car leaped into a break in the traffic and someone honked a horn. “The school is for the mentally challenged,” he continued. “She’s been going there most of her life and still has two years to go before her time runs out and her parents have to figure out something else to do with her. She’ll never be able to live on her own, so the school has been trying to train her to be a teaching assistant in the same kind of environment. There’s no sense in me calling the office at the school. They won’t give me anything over the telephone since I’m not on the files as an authorized person to receive information, but I think if we go over there under the guise of checking to see how she’s doing after her escapade in the river, we’ll be able to get a better sense of things, see if she poses some kind of threat or if this is finally Casey’s three times the charm.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know, the basis for Casey to keep saying that he has to help in case they’re a good person—the one he’s been waiting for to prove that.”
“Okay,” Brynna said. “And what about the guy from the museum?”
“Bheru stayed with him until he headed out to an old beater parked in one of the lots. Bheru got the license number and ran the plate. Just like Casey said, the guy’s name is Tate Wernick. He works at Home Depot on Lincoln Avenue. On him, there’s some not-so-good information.”
“Such as?”
“He’s an extremist, lots of radical ideas on politics and how the local and federal governments are screwing the ‘little people.’ He lives with his grandmother out by O’Hare Airport. As a matter of fact, the grandmother is part of a legal proceeding where they’re fighting with the city because the airport is expanding and they want to invoke eminent domain over part of the neighborhood that borders the airport. Right where the Wernicks live, of course.”
Brynna grimaced. “That’s enough to make anyone angry.”
Eran nodded. “No kidding. Because of this, we’re keeping a real close eye on him.”
She glanced at him. “Maybe we should go talk to him ourselves.”
“That’s probably not a good idea. I told you I’ve been walking a thin line with a lot of what we’re doing. I’ve got a feeling this guy is a sewer just waiting to overflow. He’s probably already harboring a persecution complex regarding his grandmother’s place, so I don’t think he would take our interest as lightly as Casey did.”
“Casey wasn’t light about it at all,” Brynna said. “Not to me, anyway.”
“Exactly. If Casey reacted that way, how do you think Wernick’s going to respond? It wouldn’t be pretty.”
“Other than this thing with his grandmother’s property, what precisely is it about Tate Wernick that makes him such a potential problem?”
“By itself that wouldn’t be a red flag, but Wernick has a long history of fanatical convictions, problems in school with minorities, misdemeanor arrests for going overboard at demonstrations,
stuff like that. There’s also an illegal handgun charge.”
“I thought they just passed a law that anyone can own one of those in Chicago.”
“They did. But Wernick’s thing goes back to before that, and even if that law had been in effect at the time, he would’ve still fallen on the wrong side of the regulations. He had no FOID card.”
“FOID?”
“Firearm Owner’s Identification Card,” Eran explained. “The crazy thing is that although he was previously charged with possessing a weapon illegally, he could still get a FOID card. Even so, he hasn’t bothered. He’s got a definite authority problem—doesn’t like to be told what to do, doesn’t like rules. This has landed him in the overnight a couple of times, but nothing stuck. His job history shows issues, too. I don’t think he’s ever worked anywhere longer than six months.”
“So now he’s at Home Depot. What does he do there?”
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