6 Under The Final Moon

by Hannah Jayne

  I filled Alex in on our attack, first giving a brief overview of my run-in with the three-headed dog. Alex opened his mouth to respond, but Nurse Frown stuck her head in a second time. “Say good night. He’s discharging tomorrow so y’all can come get him then and talk all you want. But visiting hours are over,” she said, punctuating the word “over” with a scowl.

  “We’re leaving.”

  Alex followed Nurse Frown out the door, but I paused, looking down at Will. Though he was shirtless, his shoulder muscles and biceps slim but bulging, he looked so vulnerable. The tears started again, and Will lolled his head to the side, then back again.

  “Oh, Sophie, geez.”

  “I’m sorry, Will,” I said, snatching a tissue from the box on his nightstand. “This is all my fault.”

  He huffed. “This is my job. And if you’re going to sit here and pine for me for the rest of your life, well”—a smile cracked across his face—“that’s okay. But not right now.” He waved toward the door. “You need to get a move on. Even if you have to do it with angel boy over there.”

  I stood, silent, until Will’s eyes narrowed.

  “Go! I’ll be fine.”

  I said a hasty good-bye, then joined Alex in the hall. Once the door closed behind me, I looked over at Alex. He was staring at the doors, jaw set hard.

  “So you know about the Grigori, too?” I asked him.

  He nodded slowly, chewing the inside of his cheek. “We’ve met.”

  “Did you know they were coming after me?”

  “I knew they would eventually.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat, feeling the first white-hot flames of anger. I don’t know why, but Alex’s admission was like a betrayal. “How come you never said anything to me?”

  He turned to me, his blue eyes clouded, his lips held in a tight expression I didn’t understand. “Because I never believed it would come to this.”

  “This?” I asked with a shrug.

  I watched Alex’s Adam’s apple as he swallowed. “Armageddon.”

  I pranced to keep up with Alex as he made a beeline through the parking lot. “Armageddon? What are you talking about? Things like this—things like this happen all the time. I mean, Ophelia came back and she brought an army of fallen angels after me and that wasn’t Armageddon, that was, well, that was just a really shitty week. Why is this any different?”

  Alex stopped and sucked in a sharp breath. “The man who was burnt to death.”

  “Lance Armentrout?” I asked, confused.

  “Have you been following the news?”

  I wanted to say that I had, wanted to sound like I did something other than tune in to marathons on HGTV and Lifetime. But Alex knew me better than that.

  “There have been three suspicious fires in the last two days.”

  “Well, yeah, I know that.” I gestured back toward the hospital. “Will told us. He even showed us a crazy video where a homeless guy was screaming.”

  Alex straightened. “What was he screaming?”

  I took a deep breath, knowing that I was proving Alex’s point—whatever it was—for him.

  “He was screaming in Latin. He was—” I stared down at my sneakers on the mist-dusted concrete. “He was calling on Satan.”

  Alex nodded. “Strength of the flame.”

  A stripe of fear shot up the back of my neck. “How did you know that?”

  “Because that’s what happened at both of the other fires, too.”

  My breath caught. “What does it mean?”

  “Fires, Cerberus, the Grigori?”

  “Yeah. What—what’s happening?”

  “Look, Lawson, we’re no longer dealing with someone trying to summon the devil. We’re not dealing with someone fiddling around with spells or potions, trying to open the gates of Hell.”

  “How do you know that?”

  His eyes were fierce and they pinned mine. “Because the gates of Hell have been blown wide open.”

  I blinked. “I—I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “First of all, do you still have the sword?”

  I patted my shoulder bag. “Uh-huh.”

  “They let you bring that into the hospital?”

  “Yeah, security is not what it used to be. Why does it matter?”

  “We need to get rid of it. He’s going to come back for it and if he doesn’t, another member of the Grigori will.”

  “Okay.” I nodded, gripping the straps of my shoulder bag more tightly. “We should go to the wharf. We can drop it into the bay. Or maybe we can burn it? You know, melt it down?”

  Alex shook his head. “It’s not that easy. The Grigori swords aren’t made from standard materials.”

  “Okay, well, what are they made from? I’m sure we could burn or bury or drown just about any kind of metal.”

  “It’s not of this world.”

  I cocked a brow and then blew out a defeated sigh. “Of course it’s not. Because that would be too easy.” I yanked the thing out of my bag. “So what the hell are we supposed to do with you?”

  “Jesus, Lawson, put that thing away!” Alex was on me in a flash, stuffing the sword back into my bag, looking around like we’d just done an illicit drug deal.

  “Geez, sorry, I didn’t know. Does it have a tracker on it or something? GPS?” I shrugged the bag off my shoulder and held it at arm’s length. “Because if that’s the case I’m not carrying—”

  “Relax, okay?” Again Alex’s eyes darted from side to side. “There is no GPS on the thing, but first of all, it’s a weapon—a dangerous weapon. You shouldn’t just be whipping it out and flaunting it.”

  I frowned, then narrowed my eyes. “I didn’t whip or flaunt.”

  Alex went on, ignoring me completely. “Second of all, it is a mythical sword and it has powers.”

  “Powers?” I could feel my eyebrows go up, could feel a little zing of intrigue shoot through my nervous system. I immediately imagined myself in slick black leather, my shoulder-length hair suddenly long and flowy, my A-cup boobs a solid C. I was wielding the Grigori sword over my head and people—jerks from high school and people who cut me off in traffic, mostly—were cowering in front of me.

  “Lawson?”

  I snapped back to attention. “So you were saying something about powers?”

  “Just keep the thing hidden until I can figure something out, okay? Actually, you know what? Give it to me.” He held out his palm.

  “I can keep it. I can stash a sword. I’m not a complete idiot.”

  He cocked his head. It wasn’t entirely an admission of doubt, but it wasn’t a glowing expression of support, either. I sighed.

  “Carefully,” Alex said as I opened my purse.

  I dug out the sword, finding it blade first. “Crap!”

  I stuck my now-bleeding finger into my mouth, and Alex reached into my bag, yanked the sword out by the handle, and shook off the wad of Kleenex that was stuck to it. He popped his trunk and buried the thing inside.

  “That should be okay for a while.”

  I put my hands on my hips and we stared at each other for a beat. “So, now what?”

  He clapped a hand against the back of his neck and sighed. “I’m not exactly sure. I don’t think we should go hunting for the Grigori without more information.”

  “So we research?”

  Alex nodded, and I worried my bottom lip, my feet rooted to my spot on the concrete.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You said the Grigori and Cerberus and the fires—you said that meant the gates of Hell were blown open.”

  Alex nodded.

  “Why? Who would do that?”

  “I don’t know, Lawson.”

  I nodded then, looking over Alex’s shoulder at the twinkling lights of the city beyond. The view almost made me forget that we were standing in a hospital parking lot—and that we were talking about Hell.

  Alex put an index finger under my chin and guided me to face him. “What d
o you really want to ask me?”

  I edged my chin front him. “Nothing. That was it.”

  He crossed his arms in front of his chest, and a smile played on his lips. It was a grin I had seen for years—that I had grown to love and despise and love again and now it was stuck somewhere in between.

  “We’ve known each other for a long time, Lawson.”

  I sucked in a breath, feeling the cool air rush over my lips, then down my throat, itching at the giant lump that had grown there. “Do you think my father could have opened the gates? Do you think it’s him—do you think he wants to start a war?”

  Alex’s eyes were a deep, glistening blue with a clarity—and an uncertainty—I’d never seen before. “For you, Lawson, for the whole of humanity, I hope to God not.”

  A tremor went through me and the world around me looked bleak—and fragile. Behind Alex, a hunched woman pulled a cart filled with groceries behind her. A Muni bus huffed to a stop and three girls in private-school uniforms got out, giggling and shrieking over their cell phones. A cop came out of the police department, eyes heavy, desperation etched into his face.

  Alex took a step closer to me, and it was the first time his fingers brushed over mine all over again. Sparks shot through my body and everything about it—about him—felt wrong but necessary, like his energy charged mine. He cupped my cheek with one palm and I closed my eyes, leaning into his touch, wondering what it would have been like if we were regular people, just two people falling for each other—not on the eve of Armageddon, not in the face of perilous doom, not with full knowledge that our time together, because of what he was and what I am, was finite.

  “I—I don’t know if I can do this, Alex. I don’t know if I can take much more.”

  His arms slid around me, encircling my waist and pulling me toward him. I breathed in his familiar, cut-grass and cocoa scent, felt the warmth emanate from the crook of his neck where I settled my head. His palms were flat at the small of my back and I felt safe and comfortable and home.

  “You don’t have to, Lawson. You don’t have to do this—anything—alone. I’m here.”

  The Underworld Detection Agency is thirty-five floors underground. I’ve never actually stopped at any of the interim floors between the police station and the Agency, but I’ve been told it’s nothing but old files, crap, and mole people. Anyway, the point I’m trying to get at is that we are underground—deep underground. So when I heard the telltale growl of tectonic plates shifting, the sound that every native Californian recognizes immediately, it was deafening where I was standing and I immediately crouched, gripping the two arms of a waiting room chair while all manner of demon and other scattered. The ground underneath me undulated in large waves while the carpet seemed to vibrate, shooting itchy little shock waves through the soles of my shoes.

  “It’s just an earthquake, people,” Nina said, filing her nails while perched on a stool. The rattling of the earth stopped for a few seconds—long enough for Nina to glare as if daring the earth to continue to shake and possibly interrupt her manicure a second time—before it set to rattling again.

  A couple of trolls stepped under the coffee table, little troll hands gripping the pressboard edges of our cheap IKEA furniture. A zombie started to systematically fall apart as his stiff limbs refused to roll with the earth. Nina continued filing, but I noticed she had hooked her Via Spiga peep-toe booties behind the legs of her stool, her thigh muscles tight as she held on. I instinctively heard my second-grade teacher’s voice ring through my head: Duck and cover! I dropped to my knees, crawling across the waiting room, looking for someplace to cover. I went for the coffee table, but the trolls growled at me. I could have fit under one of the waiting room chairs if I hadn’t eaten those last five or six dozen boxes of chocolate marshmallow Pinwheels. I made my way to a doorframe and stood there triumphantly as magazines jiggled off tables and the spider plant I had been forced to repot due to similar—though vampire, not natural—disasters fell and broke.

  And just as quickly as the growl started and the shaking tore through the place, it stopped. Everything was plunged into an immediate, eerie silence for a beat before we heard the car alarms, the barking dogs, and the sirens.

  “Wow,” Nina said, popping off her stool. “That was a good one. Kind of like 1906.” She grinned, a wide, toothy smile, ultra-white fangs gleaming. “You can’t take your eyes off them, can you?”

  She was talking about her teeth and I had to agree. “Yeah. The pulsing blue is mesmerizing.” I turned. “Everyone okay in here?”

  Everyone was creeping out of their duck-and-cover spaces, and I considered laying into them about letting the only person who could die—whose life could actually end should she be clobbered by a falling desk or grandfather clock—fend for herself in the duck-but un-coverable open space of the waiting room. But one look at the pale, nervous faces of the trolls and the sad zombie, shoulder stumps reaching uselessly for arms that were flopping on the industrial-grade carpet, and I decided against it.

  “That was quite the shaker,” Vlad said, coming down the hallway. He was grinning too, though his fangs had not gone through the Crest 3D White treatment (probably against VERM policy) and weren’t quite as blinding. He waggled his brows. “Someone’s awake down there.”

  Sampson came down the hall next, a few other employees trailing him, everyone looking in on everyone else to make sure there were no (more) lost limbs or lives.

  “Are you okay, Sophie?” It was Lorraine, our resident Gestalt witch and Kale’s mentor. Her honey-colored hair was pushed back, over her forehead. Her eyebrows were drawn and her blue-green eyes looked concerned. It warmed me.

  “I’m okay, Lorraine, thanks.”

  She nodded curtly, and I noticed everyone else was staring at me, wide-eyed, studiously. “I-I’m okay ever yone,” I said, self-consciousness washing over me in pink-tinged waves.

  “Oh, good.”

  “That’s good.”

  I heard the murmuring and a few stepped forward to pat me on the back or touch my arm gingerly, and I was basking in the warmth of this weird, horned, extended family that cared, that gave a damn whether I lived or died.

  And then, the elevator dinged.

  Alex was standing there and it was like the first time I’d ever seen him: his shoulders were thrown back, chin hitched, one lock of wavy hair impishly falling over his forehead. His chest looked impossibly broad, Greek-God like, and when his badge winked from his hip, I felt my mouth water.

  Once again, I was: Sophie Lawson, turned on in the face of disaster.

  Alex’s icy eyes cut across the waiting room until he saw me. I saw him suck in a breath, and I was ready to shimmy out of my panties—all the demons cared and Alex, too—when the other elevator dinged.

  We all waited, no one breathing, until the doors slid open.

  Then I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

  Will was in the second elevator, leaning against the back wall and looking relaxed and comfortably cool, as though he were in an Abercrombie adjust awaiting his scantily clad co-model. His hazel eyes were slightly hooded in that “hey, baby, I’m holding a kitten” kind of way that made my heart bloom and ignited something low in my belly. Between the two of them I was a pile of supercharged horny goo while the whole of the world trembled on the precipice of holy hell.

  As I clamped my knees together and gritted my teeth, I was fairly certain that my inappropriate sex drive was half the reason the city was vaulting toward our brimstony demise.

  Both Alex and Will stepped out at the same time, each with a set of eyes fixed on me for a brief second before they glanced at each other. Then each seemed to get an inch taller. Suddenly, chests were puffed out and, I’m not entirely sure, but I’m fairly certain that arms were flexed. I would have paused to scrutinize further, but both made a beeline for me, talking at the same time.

  “Wanted to make sure—”

  “—you were okay down here.”

  They stopped ta
lking at the same time, too, glared at each other, then swung to face me and my army of Underworld associates.

  “We’re all okay here,” I said, feeling suddenly overwhelmed with domestic love and nearly throwing my arms around the armless zombie and the troll who had kicked me out from under the coffee table.

  “Things aren’t okay up there,” Alex said, jaw tense, eyes fierce.

  “I’m going to suit up. It’s chaos out there,” Will agreed.

  “Will, you’re injured. You can’t go to work.”

  He shrugged and I felt a wave of respect for his dedication and annoyance for his stupid hardheadedness. I glanced behind me and saw everyone rapt.

  “Well, guys”—I was so appreciating the plural there—“I really appreciate you coming down to check on me, but I’m safe and—”

  “I wasn’t coming to check on you,” Alex said, then paused. “I mean, I’m glad you’re okay but—”

  “I think what angel boy is trying to say is that this isn’t about you.” Will’s eyes coasted over me and to the group formed around me. “It’s about them.”

  “Don’t call me Angel Boy,” Alex growled.

  I frowned. “Hey, wait. What do you mean it’s about them?”

  “Something’s coming, Lawson.” The muscle along Alex’s jaw jumped, and I knew he was tense, clenching his teeth against saying what he really wanted—or needed—to say.

  Will gave Alex a cursory glance and then looked back at me. “I think it’s already here.”

  “I know. We all know. Will was stabbed. It’s the Grigori. And the gates of Hell.”

  For a group of demons that barely shared a breath between them, the collective air that got sucked in behind me was deafening. I turned to look, and every eye was wide and terror stricken. Mouths hung open.

  “Figure of speech?” I said hopefully, trying to wipe the abject fear from the faces of those who usually terrified. No one moved, and I turned back to Alex and Will.

  The guys exchanged a glance and a heavy black stone sunk in my gut. There was more. I opened my mouth and then shut it, completely unsure of what this entire encounter meant, but expert enough to know it was bad. Really, really bad.