Wicked Creatures

by Jessica Meigs

  “Probably not,” she replied. She was putting her long hair up in a twisted knot on the back of her head that looked way too intricate. She had her back to him, and she made no move to face him.

  “We should if it’s going to interfere with us working together.”

  “We’re not working together,” she said. She finally turned to face him, though she wouldn’t look directly at him. “We’re surviving together. There’s a difference.”

  Scott didn’t respond, because it was the truth. They were just surviving together; “working together” implied they were employed by someone and being paid, and he was pretty sure both of them were officially off the Agency’s payroll. It wasn’t like he was broke, though, despite his presumed unemployment; he’d spent most of his time at the Agency squirreling away money, spending very little in the event he got the chance to retire.

  “Well, there’s another reason I think we need to talk about it,” he said, sliding on his other shoe. “We didn’t use anything.”

  He didn’t need to elaborate, thankfully. Riley knew what he was talking about. “That’s not a concern,” she said, fluttering a hand at him dismissively.

  “It’s not? Because last I checked, it’s always a concern when you have sex without at least using a condom.”

  Riley sighed and shook her head. “You’re clean, right? I’m sure you are, because if you weren’t, it’d have shown up on your last physical, and they wouldn’t have let you out in the field until you were. And I know I’m clean.” She averted her eyes from him and added, “And I can’t get pregnant, so that’s not an issue, either.”

  “Why not?” he asked, blurting the question out before thinking twice about it.

  Riley scowled. “Because Brandon is an asshole.” She sat on the edge of the bed. “You know those assignments where seduction is a requirement?” He nodded. “Well, I was one of the ladies that got sent in for those aspects of the job. That’s because Brandon thought it was cute to classify me as one of those agents. And, because it’s a requirement for that agent classification—which is why being one of them is supposed to be on a volunteer basis—I had to get a tubectomy. I wasn’t fully on board with it, but Brandon represented it to me like I didn’t have a choice.” She shrugged like she didn’t care, though Scott could tell she did. “What’s done is done. You don’t have to worry about getting saddled with a kid from me.”

  Scott reached across the gap between them, grasping her shoulder and squeezing it reassuringly. He didn’t say anything; he wasn’t sure he needed to. She pressed a hand on his, resting it there. Then she let go, squared her shoulders, and stood.

  “We need to go,” she said. “We’ve taken advantage of Marie’s hospitality long enough. We should stake out the square and decide how to set up the meet with Ashton and Zachariah.”

  “Oh God, not this again,” Ashton said as he found himself standing in the middle of the same damn park he ended up in every time he fell asleep lately. This time, though, the park was dramatically different than it had been last time he’d slept.

  The park, once a beautiful place where families played and had picnics and created lovely, picturesque sights, now could only be described as a blasted wasteland. All of the lush green grass had been baked to a crispy, mostly dead brownness that crunched when he stepped on it; the sidewalks were cracked and ruined; and the once-beautiful trees were bared of their leaves and obviously diseased and dead or dying. Most disturbing of all, there were suspicious glimpses of white among the dead grass that, on closer inspection, were revealed to be bones. And perhaps most disconcerting of all, the sky was a deep blood red, coloring the whole scene in a haunting light.

  “Sweet Lord, what in the world happened here?” he asked out loud, though there was no one around to hear him.

  Or so he thought. As he looked around, trying to decide what to do, a familiar voice spoke up behind him. “The end,” Sera said, her footsteps crunching over the grass as she approached him.

  “The end?” he repeated. “The end of what?”

  “The end of the world,” Sera clarified. “Or, at least, the beginning of the end.”

  “Jesus,” he breathed. “Is this real?”

  “As real as things get in dreams,” she said. “Which is to say, this isn’t real, but it could be real. It’s one of a variety of ways that this could all end.” She took his hand—the first time that he recalled her ever touching him—and pulled him to their bench, which was still in one piece. She motioned for him to sit and joined him, looking at the landscape with a sad expression on her face. “This is where everything could end up if you and your friends don’t stop it.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” Ashton asked. “Nobody seems to know. All we’ve been doing is running and fighting and running some more. Zach got turned into a fucking vampire, and I was possessed by a damned fallen angel. This is just…it’s too damn much. And it’s probably only going to get worse from here, if it follows the way my luck holds. If that’s the case, I can’t do it. I can’t risk Zach getting killed.”

  The smile that Sera gave him was small and a little crooked but gentle. “You really do love him, don’t you?” she said quietly.

  “You have no idea,” he confessed. “I can honestly say he’s the best thing to ever happen to me. I don’t have to remember my past to be sure of that.”

  They fell silent. A hot breeze blew across the dead grass, stirring up dust and debris and gusting it in their direction. Most of it bunched up against his boots, but a few random bits, including a couple of pristine white feathers, landed on his lap. He picked one up and examined it, remembering how the clouds had opened up and rained feathers just like this one onto him in his last dream.

  Sera plucked the feather from his fingers and studied it with a thoughtful expression on her face. “It never ended, you know,” she said quietly. At his questioning look, she elaborated, “The war between Heaven and Hell. There was a truce, mainly because Lucifer was thrown into Hell, but the war never truly ended. It was only postponed. And now, Lucifer is trying to restart the war, by any means necessary, and this time, he has every intention of winning.”

  “How do you know all this?” he asked.

  Sera gave him a cool, assessing look. “What do you think I am, Ashton?” she asked. “And where exactly do you think I’m from?”

  Zachariah’s head ached by the time they entered Louisiana after ten that night, and his eyes felt like they were going to tumble out of their sockets when he pulled the SUV into the very fringes of New Orleans. He hadn’t gotten nearly as much sleep as he’d needed—or planned for—because Ashton had at least been wrong about one thing: he hadn’t fallen directly asleep the moment his back had touched a mattress. He didn’t regret it, not by a long shot. It was probably going to be the last chance he and Ashton would have to spend some time together before all of this was over, and he needed to take that when he could get it.

  Despite his promise to stay awake, Ashton had fallen asleep in the passenger seat, his head resting against the window. Zachariah didn’t mind too much. He’d let him sleep through most of Mississippi and Louisiana, and it wasn’t until they’d reached the outskirts of New Orleans that he grasped Ashton’s knee and gently shook him.

  “Hey, Ash,” he said, just loudly enough to cut through the man’s sleep. “Hey, babe, we’re here.”

  Ashton looked like he was trying to drag himself out of molasses as he woke up, slowly, rubbing his hand over his eye. “Where?” he mumbled, fighting back a yawn.

  “Just pulling into New Orleans,” he said. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Passably fair,” Ashton said, still mumbling. He stretched, and Zachariah glanced over in time to see his t-shirt’s collar pull over enough to reveal the red, angry-looking wound he’d left on Ashton’s shoulder. He hadn’t meant to bite Ashton, not exactly. It had just happened, a total heat of the moment type thing, an excuse he hated to use because it was such total bullshit. He didn’t really regre
t it, though; it seemed to serve to reinforce that weird connection that had developed between them when Zachariah had bitten him while still a vampire. Besides, as an added plus, it made the sex intense. He reached across the gap between them and brushed his fingers against the wound with a small frown, causing Ashton to flinch away reflexively.

  “We need to do something about this,” Zachariah commented.

  Ashton shrugged and tugged his shirt collar back up. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. Zachariah could have argued otherwise but opted to keep his mouth shut. Ashton scrubbed his face again and asked, “What do I need to do?”

  “Call Riley,” Zachariah decided. “We’ve got to schedule when and where to meet up with them.”

  Ashton nodded, scooped the cell phone out of the console between them, and keyed up Riley’s number. He put the phone on speaker, and they listened as it rang and rang until it clicked over to voicemail. As the mechanical, operator-style voice rattled off Riley’s number, Zachariah’s stomach churched with anxiety.

  “Try again,” he demanded. “She should’ve answered. If she didn’t, she and Scott might be in trouble.”

  “Riley is always in trouble,” Ashton commented, redialing.

  “Yeah, but she’s got Scott with her,” he said. “And she doesn’t seem to get in quite as deep when Scott’s there to mitigate her excesses.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, since you’ve worked with her more than I have,” Ashton said.

  The phone went straight to voicemail without ringing.

  Zachariah’s stomach stopped churning and instead dropped like a stone. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “It has to be. I can feel it.”

  “How?”

  “My gut,” he said. “I don’t know how. I just know.” He realized he was pressing his foot harder on the gas pedal, and he eased off before he got pulled over. “Shit, shit, shit,” he swore, banging his palm against the steering wheel. His brain was in a whirl, spinning in a crazy mishmash of worry and fear over the well being of his sister, and it took almost everything in him to force himself to focus. His mind was racing so fast, he couldn’t get a grasp on what to do.

  It was weird how quickly he’d gotten so fixated on this idea of having a sibling—and not only that but coping with sudden feelings of vague overprotectiveness toward her. It appeared instinctual, almost out of his control. And now that knee-jerk need to watch her back warred with the training he’d been through that counseled patience and calculation prior to any move he made.

  Ashton watched him expectantly, waiting to see what he wanted to do. Why is he looking to me? Zachariah wondered. Ashton outranked him in the grand hierarchy of both the Agency and The Unnaturals; he should have been the one making the decisions and giving the orders. Assuming, of course, that they were still considered in the employ of either organization. For all he knew, they’d quietly been labeled rogue through Brandon’s machinations. Which meant there was a decent chance they had additional targets on their backs.

  “I think it’s time we called Damon,” he decided. “We need to know what’s been happening in D.C., and we need to see if he has any ideas for the best course of action for us to take.”

  Ashton made a funny little gesture of salute and selected the man’s name from Zachariah’s contact list. The phone rang…and rang…and rang before it clicked over to voicemail. Zachariah scowled, and Ashton hung up with a muttered, “Son of a bitch.”

  “I guess it’s Ignore Zach and Ash Day,” Zachariah quipped, though his stomach had begun to churn even more furiously. He lifted a hand off the steering wheel to push his hair back from his face and realized it was shaking. There was definitely something wrong, and it seemed to have sucked his entire family—save for Ashton—into whatever it was.

  His scowl deepening, Zachariah grasped the steering wheel more tightly with both hands and pressed his foot more firmly on the gas pedal. If his family was in trouble, then he needed to get to at least one of them before it was too late.

  Nine

  Angelique didn’t get her first look at Damon until she’d pulled her car into a parking spot at a low-budget motel off the interstate and rented a room. Keys and medical kit in hand, she circled to the rear of the vehicle and pressed the button on her key fob to open the cargo door.

  Damon had dozed off at some point during the drive, and he was now slumped over against the back seat, his head drooping over into what looked like an incredibly uncomfortable position. At least, Angelique hoped he was just asleep. She didn’t know how she’d begin to handle having this specific dead body in the trunk of her car. What the hell would she do with it? His entire right lower leg was soaked with blood from the knee down to the cuff, and she could see the faint outline of blood staining the black trunk liner. Cautiously, she stretched her upper body into the back of the SUV to reach his shoulder and nudged it.

  Damon startled awake, sucking in a sharp breath. His left hand darted out and locked around Angelique’s arm in a bruising grip. She jerked her arm away with effort and said, “Director Hartley, it’s me. Angelique.”

  He looked at her wildly, and she saw the moment comprehension dawned on him. He didn’t say anything, though, beyond a simple, “I’m not the director anymore,” before starting the arduous task of climbing out of the back of the SUV. Angelique almost attempted to help him but refrained; he didn’t seem like the type to willingly accept help.

  He looked terrible, though, so she couldn’t be blamed for her initial reflex. He was covered in a fine layer of dirt and chalky dust, probably from the sheetrock walls in his house, coupled with the blood soaking his pant leg; in addition, there was a thin line of blood coming from his hairline. She wondered if he’d noticed he had a head injury. Obviously, he knew about the leg; he was favoring it, limping as she led him to their motel room. She unlocked the door and let him inside then closed and bolted it behind them.

  “You need to get cleaned up,” she said. “And you should probably deal with whatever injuries you’ve got.” She paused then added, “Is anything broken?”

  Damon sank onto the end of one of the double beds with a loud groan. “I don’t think so,” he answered. “My leg hurts the most, but it’s not broken; it has a bullet hole in it. I think I got off lucky, considering I had a house dropped on me.”

  Angelique gave him a tight smile, but inside, she was worried. Damon was a pretty tough guy, sure—he’d had to be to become Director—but he wasn’t exactly young, and he didn’t go out into the field much anymore; to say he looked exhausted and pale was an understatement. “Sit back,” she ordered, taking a knee at his feet, “and I’ll look at your leg.”

  “No, I’ll look at it later,” Damon said, but Angelique whipped out a large knife from the sheath at the small of her back, brandishing it, and he actually flinched, which was a good indicator of how damn tired he was. She ignored his protest and used her knife to get a slice started in his pant leg; then she grasped the two halves and pulled, ripping it up all the way to his knee. She pushed the two halves aside and sucked in a slow breath.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “This is one ugly wound,” she said, “and it’s still bleeding.” She grabbed the medical kit and flipped it open. Pulling on a pair of latex gloves, she started taking out the supplies she’d need to get the bleeding to stop, numb the wound, stitch it up, and bandage it.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Damon asked.

  Angelique raised an eyebrow. “Zachariah taught me. What do you think?” she replied, getting to work on the wound. She’d stopped the bleeding and placed two stitches before she bothered to look up from her work to check on Damon. He was leaning back on his elbows, his eyes closed, breathing slowly and shallowly. “You okay?” she asked. “Do I need to give you more of the local?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Just keep going.” She nodded and began the third stitch, and he added, “Have you heard from Zachariah?”

  “Not since I saw him at the crime s
cene in Meridian Hill,” she answered. She tied off the stitch and moved to the next one. “Is something wrong?”

  “He and Ashton had to get out of town,” he explained. “Someone showed up at Zachariah’s apartment and tried to kill them.”

  “Are they okay?” she asked.

  “As far as I know.” He sighed and sank back flat on the bed, covering his face with his hands for a moment before scrubbing at his eyes. “I need to call Henry,” he added. “I’m sure he thinks I’m dead.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Angelique started. She tied off the fourth stitch, examined what was left, and decided a fifth stitch would be needed. “Maybe it would be a good idea if we…let people think you’re dead,” she suggested, sliding the needle into his flesh. “Even any allies you have. It will be easier to get things done if people aren’t looking for you.”

  “Are you suggesting that I wouldn’t be able to get things done if I let people know I’m still alive?” he asked.

  “No, just that it would be better,” she said. “People don’t look for a threat they don’t realize is even there.” She finished the stitch and looked at him. He was staring at the ceiling with a blank, exhausted look on his face. “I think you should let everyone believe you’re dead. And by everyone, I mean everyone. You can’t tell Henry, Zachariah, Ashton, Riley, or Scott that you’re still breathing.”

  For the first time that she could ever remember in the years she’d been moderately acquainted with him, she saw Damon Hartley smile.

  There was a slight nip in the air, despite the earlier heat of the day, and Riley wished she had a light jacket as she and Scott entered Jackson Square around ten that night. It wasn’t as humid as the day had been, though, much to her relief, and as she casually strode into the square, Scott at her side, she scanned the mess of people there. There were more people out at night than she’d thought there would be, but it was New Orleans, and Bourbon Street was nearby, if memory served her right.