“It all started with the woman of smoke.”
Megan paled. She’d met the Naye’i, or woman of smoke, a Navajo evil spirit witch and former leader of the darkness. She was also Sawyer’s mother, which had explained a lot about Sawyer.
The Naye’i had been jockeying for the position of Antichrist. She would have gotten it, too, if I hadn’t killed her. As it was, she opened the gates of hell and all the fallen angels that had become demons flew free. They’d had a field day repopulating the earth with Nephilim before I’d managed to put them back again. Now we were seriously outnumbered.
“I thought you killed that bitch,” Megan said.
“I did. But in order to be strong enough, I had to—” I took a breath. “—become as evil as she was.”
“Hence the banging of the vampire.”
“Yes and no,” I repeated. I had slept with a vampire, but that wasn’t how I’d gained an inner demon. “Jimmy is a dhampir.”
“Part vampire, part human,” Megan said. I couldn’t remember if I’d told her that or if she’d found it out for herself. It didn’t really matter. “Stronger. Faster. Better.”
Sounded like she was advertising The Six Million Dollar Man.
“Why couldn’t he kill the Naye’i?” She frowned. “For that matter, why couldn’t you? Considering what you’ve told me about you and Jimmy, you’ve gotta be a dhampir, too, by now.”
“I am.” Megan knew me so well. “But dhampirs, as powerful as they are, aren’t quite powerful enough. They’re only part demon.”
“Ticky-tac,” she muttered. “You should have just nuked her.”
“Wouldn’t have worked. There’s usually one way to kill these things and one way only. For the Naye’i, I had to toss evil to the four winds.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Tore her into four pieces and sent them express air”—I flung my arms to the sky, releasing my fingers as if I were throwing something away—“to the farthest corners of the world.”
Silence settled between us. Finally Megan broke it. “I wish I could have seen that.”
“No, you don’t.”
I’d been a vampire at the time—mad with fury, lusting for the kill, bathed in the blood.
“If you didn’t sleep with a vampire then how did you become one?”
“Dhampirs can become vampires by sharing blood with other vampires.”
Jimmy’s daddy had made him a chip off the old block just a few months back.
“Ew.” Megan wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah.” I peered up at the blazingly blue sky, remembering when it had been dark, with a full moon shining down, as I became a monster for the sake of the world.
“Sanducci was okay with this?”
“Not really. He refused to cooperate. So I . . . seduced him.” He still hadn’t forgiven me. I wasn’t sure he ever would, could, or even should.
Jimmy had begged me not to become like him. He’d said it was damnation—for both of us. But that was a risk I’d been willing to take.
“Liz,” Megan said quietly, and I looked up. Her gaze was sympathetic. She’d always been able to hear what I was unable to say.
I’d been forced to choose between Jimmy’s “soul” and the lives of millions of people, which wasn’t really a choice at all. Jimmy had wound up broken inside. He could barely stand to look at me. I had to live with what I’d done, as well as the knowledge that if given a second chance, I’d do it all over again.
“You still love him,” she said. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t bother to answer.
I hadn’t talked about Jimmy much, but Megan knew the truth. No matter what he did, no matter what I did, no matter how many others we might love, too, I’d feel the same way about Jimmy Sanducci until the day I died as I’d felt about him when I was seventeen. I couldn’t help myself.
Jimmy and I had shared similar childhoods, even before I’d come to Ruthie’s at twelve, straight from another foster home that didn’t want me. I’d also spent time on the streets, preferred it in fact to the parade of homes I’d been through. The streets might be rough, but they were honest.
Jimmy was the boss at Ruthie’s, and he didn’t much like having to move in with some of the other boys so I could have his bedroom. To welcome me, he’d left a grass snake between the sheets. I’d put the snake in a cage, named him James, then loosened a few of Sanducci’s teeth.
What followed was five years of living in the same house, pretending to loathe each other, while what we felt in truth was developing into something much different. Not long after the lust erupted, we fell in love. Jimmy would have done anything for me. It wasn’t until years later that I’d found out he had.
“Doesn’t matter.” I spread my hands. “Every time he sees me he remembers things he’d rather forget.”
“Which explains why you’re working with Luther instead of Sanducci these days.”
That actually wasn’t the reason. Jimmy and I had worked together after the Naye’i. What had separated us had been something else entirely.
“Someone’s gotta train the kid,” I said, and with Sawyer dead, that someone was me.
“Explain why you haven’t bloodsucked your way through Milwaukee and started on Chicago.”
Faith’s eyes had gotten heavy. She was nearly asleep in Megan’s lap.
“I have a control.” I tapped the dog collar. “Be-spelled. When this is in place, I’m me. The demon is contained.”
Megan nodded as if she heard tales of magical necklaces every day. “And the tattoo?”
I really wished my hair was longer. I was going to have to stop hacking at it with any sharp implement I could grab whenever it grew half an inch. At least let it spill past my shoulders and cover up the image of a phoenix inked onto the back of my neck.
“That’s a long story,” I said.
Megan checked her watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. Talk fast.”
“My mother—”
“Whoa! Thought she was dead.”
“She rose.” Then she’d gone around lifting others out of the grave, too. They’d been called revenants, and they’d all been eager to do her bidding.
“From your expression, that wasn’t a good thing.”
“It rarely is.” Really, how many times had the raising of the dead been good beyond the one time? “To make this long story short, she was evil, had to kill her.” Along with her zombie-like friends.
“That seems to happen to you a lot.”
“And it’s probably going to keep happening,” I muttered. “Right now I’m a dhampir, a vampire, and a skinwalker.” I tapped my tattoo with one ginger finger. “I can shape-shift.”
Understanding flashed in Megan’s blue eyes. “Like the baby?” I nodded. “But she isn’t yours?” I shook my head. “Yet you slept with her father.”
I spread my hands and didn’t answer.
“The tattoo allows you to become a bird,” Megan said. “Handy.”
“So far.”
In the distance, a doorbell rang. Megan stood and handed me a sleeping Faith. “Showtime,” she said.
“I have to leave early and head west, talk to Faith’s dad.”
“Why don’t you just call him?”
“He’s dead.”
Megan rubbed a thumb between her eyes. “That doesn’t even surprise me.”
CHAPTER 5
Megan left to answer the front door. Faith curled into me like the kitten she could become. Her soft breath brushed my arm; the dark sweep of her lashes and the sharp slope of her cheek reminded me so much of her father, my heart contracted. No one would ever hurt her while I was around.
Minutes later Anna, Aaron, and Ben spilled into the backyard. Eight, six, and five respectively—or maybe I should say nine, six, and five, as it was Anna’s birthday.
“Aunt Liz.” Anna gently stroked Faith’s knee. “Where’d you get a baby?”
Her voice was soft, the expression on her face rapt. Did all little girls stare
at babies as if they were the best dolls on the shelf? Not me, but then I hadn’t been much of a little girl.
“What’s her name?” Ben shouted. Shouting was Ben’s normal volume.
“Shut up, dummy!” That was Aaron, who hadn’t spoken any more quietly than Ben. “You’ll wake her.”
Anna smacked both of them in the back of the head. Right hand. Left hand. Whack. Whack. They turned on her, mutiny in their eyes, and Megan came out the back door.
“Stop,” she ordered, then pointed at the football in the grass. “Go.”
The boys shuffled off, though they threw glares at their sister over their shoulder. She didn’t seem worried.
“What is her name?” Anna asked.
“Faith.”
“Pretty.” I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the name or the baby. “Where’d you get her?” Anna repeated, as if I might have ordered Faith off the Internet and she wanted to know how.
At least Anna wasn’t looking at me as if she thought Faith were mine. Megan’s daughter might only be nine, but she knew how the whole baby thing worked and that it took humans a bit longer than a month to have one. What she didn’t know was that Aunt Liz wasn’t quite human. I planned to keep it that way.
“I’m babysitting for a friend,” I said.
She continued to stroke Faith’s knee. The baby sighed and smiled in her sleep. I barely stopped myself from saying, Aw.
“Why don’t you take her upstairs?” Megan asked as she came up behind my chair. “Put her down for her nap.”
I wasn’t sure if the kid should take a nap or not. Wouldn’t she then stay awake all night? I would. I also wasn’t sure if I should let her out of my sight. Who knew what Faith could do besides shape-shift.
“Come on.” Megan took my elbow and drew me into the house. “I’ve got a playpen left from when the kids were small. She can sleep in there. She won’t get out.”
I snorted.
“Oh.” Megan paused. “I also have a baby monitor. You’ll be able to hear her as soon as she wakes up.”
“I don’t know—”
“She has to sleep. Then she’ll need to eat.” Megan eyed Faith. “She’s probably still on formula. What have you fed her?”
“Tuna.” Megan’s face took on such an expression of horror, I muttered, “She didn’t eat it.”
“What on earth possessed you—?”
“She was a kitten!” I glanced furtively over my shoulder at the kids. The boys were playing, but Anna stared at me with curiosity, so I lowered my voice. “What was I supposed to feed her? Mice?”
“Hell if I know.” Megan opened the back door and stepped into the kitchen, where she pulled a can out of a cabinet. “Powdered formula. My cousin left this behind when she visited with her new baby. You can take it, along with some bottles.” Megan eyed the diaper-clad Faith. “I’ve also got a bag of diapers, and I’ll find some of Anna’s old clothes.”
“You kept all that crap?”
Megan shrugged, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. In a burst of clarity, I understood that she couldn’t bear to part with anything that reminded her of the life she’d shared with Max.
I didn’t think that was healthy, but I also wasn’t the one to say so. As far as I was concerned, Megan could do whatever she needed to do to survive without him. I did.
Megan yanked the playpen out of a closet in the boys’ room, and I placed Faith on the padded bottom, taking the blanket Megan provided. I leaned over to cover the baby, but jerked back at the last second.
“Whoa!” Blue elephants marched right to left across the cotton. I threw the thing far, far away.
“Hey!” Megan said. “What the heck?”
I grabbed her arm before she could retrieve it. “You can’t cover her with anything but plain material.” At Megan’s continued blank expression, I said, “Kitten blanket, kitten Faith.”
“Oh.” Megan smacked herself in the forehead with the heel of her hand. “Duh.”
“Even a baby elephant would have put a crimp in your playpen.”
“And a hole in my ceiling.”
I hadn’t thought of that. I was going to have to watch this kid and everything around her.
“Maybe you should leave Faith here,” Megan murmured.
“What? No!”
“You don’t think I can take care of her?”
“No. I mean yes. No.” I ran my hand through my shaggy dark brown hair. “She’s not a regular baby, Meg.”
“I want to help. You’ve got enough on your plate, and face it, Liz, you aren’t Mary Poppins.”
“Really? You think?” I sighed and jerked my head toward the hall. This conversation might get heated, and I did not want to wake Faith. Megan and I stepped out of the room and closed the door.
“Luther is good with her,” I began.
“What if something attacks you? One of you gonna hold Faith while the other fights?”
“If we have to.” I didn’t plan on getting attacked. I planned on hauling ass all the way to the Badlands. “Listen, I appreciate the offer, but who knows what she might turn into. Who knows what she can do. Her dad was a skinwalker, but her mom . . . not a clue.”
Megan frowned. “I can handle it.”
“I’m sure you can, but you’ll have to work.”
“Not much more cost for four kids with the sitter than three.”
“How you gonna explain a baby that turns into a giraffe?” Megan’s frown deepened. “What if she wakes up ravenous and gets her hands on a tiger T-shirt? I couldn’t live with myself if your kids were hurt, Meg.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Neither could I.”
“I appreciate the offer, but she’s my responsibility.” The doorbell rang again. “Go on,” I said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Megan left; I stepped into the bedroom, glanced into the playpen—still asleep—then snatched the receiver for the monitor and made sure the base was on. Back in the hall, I sensed I wasn’t alone.
Since I couldn’t very well wear my knife in a sheath at my waist during a kid’s birthday party, I’d strapped it to my calf beneath my jeans. I went down on one knee as if to tie my shoe, my fingers creeping beneath the cuff toward the weapon.
“You’re wearin’ sandals, love.”
The instant I heard the voice, I blew out a relieved breath and stood. “Quinn.”
A man stepped free of the shadows at the far end of the hall. “Mistress.”
Quinn Fitzpatrick was tall and sleek with shiny black hair and eerie yellow-green eyes. He was also a gargoyle, though you couldn’t tell it by looking at him. He was handsome to the point of stunning, warm and solid and alive. Yet not long after bar time he would be curled up in Megan’s garden as still as a statue, literally.
When God tossed the Grigori into the pit, he slammed shut the pearly gates. However, while some had broken the rules, others had not. Those angels too good to go to hell, but too corrupt for heaven, became fairies.
Left behind on the earth, they were lost. Suddenly human with no idea how to be, they would never have survived without help. They got it from the beasts. As a reward, those animals that offered aid were given the gifts of flight and shape-shifting. They could sprout wings; they could turn to stone.
Once the fairies could manage on their own, the gargoyles began to protect the weak and unwary from demon attack. The more humans they saved, the more human they became.
With the grace of the black panther he could become, Quinn moved forward.
“I told you to call me Liz,” I reminded him.
I was the leader of the light but I didn’t much care to be called mistress or any other form of similar address. Many of my people were ancient, however, and such titles came naturally to them.
Quinn’s gaze had strayed to the stairs Megan had so recently trotted down. I heard the low murmur of her voice as she welcomed her guests.
“She would like a baby in the house again,” he murmured, with a slight cant of the Irish. He’d
been on this side of the Atlantic long enough—centuries perhaps—to lose most of his accent.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?” He continued to stare toward the sound of Megan’s voice.
“You’re here to protect her, not impregnate her,” I whispered furiously.
A soft growl rumbled from his chest. “I would never hurt her.”
“If it hurts,” I said, “you aren’t doing it right.”
“Mistress—” At my glare he began again. “Liz. I know my place. I know my job.”
I’d had him sent to watch over Megan after a seer was murdered on my doorstep. Who knew when another Nephilim might show up looking for me. Who knew what they might decide to do if they couldn’t find me, but found Megan instead. I wasn’t going to take that chance—hence the arrival of Quinn.
That he appeared to have fallen in love with Megan was a bonus. He would die to keep her safe. If I couldn’t be here, the next best thing was Quinn Fitzpatrick.
“She still thinks you’re nothing more than the slightly lame day-shift bartender?” I asked. In an attempt to seem more human, Quinn dropped things a lot.
His shoulders slumped. “Yes.”
Megan hadn’t a clue who or what Quinn was, or that he loved her. With three kids and a thriving business, Megan was lucky she could figure out her own name most days.
“Have you caught any more Nephilim slithering around?” I asked.
Quinn’s head came up. “Half a dozen since the last time you were here, Mis—Liz.” He puffed out his chest. “They are ashes.”
The more Nephilim Quinn dusted, the more human he became. As it was, he had to spend a certain number of hours in every twenty-four as a panther—statue or flesh and blood, didn’t matter. But those hours dwindled every time he protected the innocent. Soon he’d be completely human. Or so he said.
“You could leave the child with Megan. Nothing would hurt her while I’m here.”
“I’m sure nothing would. And you’d get double points, right?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Protect a baby, big-time innocent, wouldn’t you get more tickets in the soon-to-be-human sweepstakes.”
Quinn stiffened. “I wouldn’t protect her for my own gain.”
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