He moans, opens his eyes, and, seeing me, curses. “Get out,” he manages. “Take her and run.”
“In hell,” I say, and use my knife to yank out the first nail.
Jimmy draws in a sharp breath. “Baby, where do you think we are?”
“Not hell. Not yet.” Though you wouldn’t know it by looking around. “Where’s the kid?”
“I don’t know.”
Fear flickers. “She all right?”
“I think so. Saw her when I got here. Heard her crying since.” He gentles his voice at my flinch. “They wouldn’t hurt her. Permanently. But I don’t think they ever plan to let her go. They need her dead almost as much as they need—”
“Me dead,” I finish.
“You shouldn’t be here. If they kill you, Doomsday’s back. Is that what you want?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why did you come?”
“For Faith. But I’ll take you, too.”
“Idiot.”
“You’re welcome,” I say, and yank out another nail.
Jimmy’s mouth tightens, and his face pales. But he doesn’t pass out. It would take a lot more than this to kill a dhampir. “I had it covered, Lizzy. Me for her. That was the agreement.”
I lift my gaze. “Same one I made.”
“Double-dealing assholes,” he says without heat.
I have his feet free and reach up to work on his right hand, sliding in the blood on the floor. My stomach lurches. The scent is nauseating.
Odd. Lately, the scent of blood has been anything but.
Suddenly I realize that my collar is gone.
I jerked in my sleep, bumped my head against the side of the plane, my elbow against the arm of my chair, and the image shimmied, almost fading. What did the absence of that collar mean?
Was this only a dream, not a prediction of the future? Because in any true future, if I wasn’t wearing that collar I’d be licking Jimmy’s blood not only from his wounds but the wall.
Was it a vision of loss or the hope for a future without a demon inside me? I had no idea, so I fought my way back into my head.
“You can’t save me,” Jimmy says.
“Of course I can. Saving people is what I do.”
“You won’t be able to save us both. You’ll have to choose.”
I hate choosing who lives and who dies. But the Nephilim seem to get their jollies out of making me do just that.
“I’m the most powerful being on this earth,” I whisper.
Jimmy’s eyes meet mine, and in them I recognize good-bye. “Won’t be enough this time. You’d need two beings just like you if you wanted any kind of chance at all.”
Two beings like me. Two.
I stifle a sob as I realize that the only way out of this is Sawyer, and Sawyer is dead.
CHAPTER 23
I came awake with a start, gasping, trembling.
“You okay?” A flight attendant leaned over me, the concern in her voice belied by the watchfulness in her eyes. If I so much as blinked funny, she was going to signal the nearest air marshal.
The woman next to me and the man next to her were leaning as far away from me as they could get with their seat belts on. Everyone else in the vicinity was staring.
“Fine.” I wiped my face. My hand came away drenched with sweat. A bead ran down my cheek. The air from the vent couldn’t stir my hair because every strand was plastered to my head.
“We’re on our descent,” the flight attendant said. “I’ll get you a cup of water, but you’ll have to hurry.”
I nodded and glanced out the window. Lights reflected off pools of black water—swamps with gators, Lake Pontchartrain—and in the distance ships cruised down the winding Mississippi, which spilled into the sea. New Orleans was surrounded on three sides by water, which was both beautiful and foolish.
“I don’t much care for flying, either,” the woman to my right murmured, her voice so full of the South I could see Spanish moss on the trees and smell the magnolias in bloom. She patted my hand, withdrawing with a mew of distaste when her fingers slid on my slick skin.
“Sorry,” I said.
She gave me a tight smile and went back to her book.
We landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport, and I retrieved my bag then rented a Jetta. I figured I might as well drive something I was familiar with, and I doubted they had any vintage Impalas around.
The instant I walked out of the terminal New Orleans hit me in the face. August in the Crescent City, not the best idea in the world.
The humidity swirled around my head, clogging my nose and throat, making my limbs lethargic and my eyelids heavy. I practically dived into the car and cranked the air-conditioning to ice.
Though the sun was still up, it was falling steadily toward night. I checked into a hotel in the French Quarter. Certainly I could have stayed near the airport, but why? I was in New Orleans.
The last time I’d been here, I’d attended a bartenders’ seminar. After spending the mornings inside a banquet room, we’d spent the both the afternoons and the evenings on the town. I had fond memories of New Orleans. Memories I hoped I didn’t tarnish too badly on this journey through.
I had no trouble getting a room in a tall, narrow hotel several streets from Bourbon. At this time of year, I could have gotten a room with a balcony that opened onto the legendary street itself, but I wanted to be far from the lights and the music.
I did have a balcony, but it gave me a view of a less traveled side street, just what I’d asked for. I wanted as few eyes as possible—preferably no eyes at all—to witness what I had planned for when the sun went down.
After a long, tepid shower and a change of clothes, I hustled to Bourbon Street and found a bar—ha, I couldn’t not find a bar—that was showing a baseball game on a mammoth plasma TV, then I ordered a Sazerac—a traditional New Orleans cocktail with rye whiskey—and fried alligator, followed by a muffuletta. If I were still alive in the morning, I’d walk down to the river and buy beignets with strong, black chicory coffee.
What was it about this town that made me so hungry? Probably the food.
I strolled back to my hotel as the sun gave its last gasp. A few times I could have sworn I felt someone following me, but even though the tourist trade was nearly nonexistent at this time of year, there were still plenty of people on Bourbon Street, so people were following me. They couldn’t help it. I was in front of them.
I ducked into a T-shirt shop, chose a few new shirts since I’d had to toss so many lately, and kept my eyes open for suspicious characters. An exercise in futility. Everyone seemed suspicious around here.
Like the guy dressed as a jester playing a saxophone on one corner, or the girl who appeared pale enough to be empress of the undead selling ice cream from a cart across the street. Several soon-to-be senior citizens in full black leather chaps and vests strolled into a strip club. A drag queen in a sundress, black chest hair curling over the yellow bodice, strutted down the sidewalk walking a cat on a leash. The cat wore a Mardi Gras mask that matched the guy’s dress. God, I loved this place.
It took me a while to find a shirt that wasn’t pornographic. I could have walked over to the French Market and found something more appropriate, but now that the sun was down, I didn’t have the time.
I ignored everything with variations of drink, drank, or drunk, boobs, party—you get the drift—and made do with three different colors of I FLEUR-DE-LIS NOLA. I also couldn’t resist a tiny pink T-shirt that read: MARDI GRAS PRINCESS. I stuffed that one deep in the bottom of the bag.
As I walked out a young girl walked in. Her T-shirt proclaimed: THROW ME BEADS IF YOU WANT A LOOK AT THESE! I could barely read the words past all the multi-colored coils around her neck—and it wasn’t even Mardi Gras.
I headed away from the lights and the music, down a quieter side road. It wasn’t long before footsteps echoed mine. When I glanced over my shoulder, however, I was alone.
As I continued
, so did the footsteps. Closer and closer they came. My knife rested inside the fanny pack around my waist. Un-cool yes, but I couldn’t exactly wear a knife on my belt on Bourbon Street. Better loser-ish than dead—that was my motto.
I walked a little faster, trying to give myself time to slide open the zipper and slip a hand within. My fingers closed around the hilt and I spun, grabbing the person behind me by the neck and slamming them against the nearest wall.
It was the Goth girl who’d been selling ice cream and the instant I touched her, I knew she was human. She’d been thinking about school. She was a student at Tulane. The vamp costume was just for show, for the tourists, to make a buck and pay her bills.
“Sorry.” I let her go immediately, allowing the knife to drop out of sight within the pack. “You—uh—” I ran my hand through my hair, embarrassed.
“I scared you,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
I knew better than anyone that if they looked like a vamp, they weren’t. A little girl skipping rope in the sunshine was more likely to be hiding fangs than this one.
She rubbed her throat, eyes dark in her overly powdered face. “Can’t be too careful around here.”
My ears pricked up. “Something strange happen lately?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s New Orleans.”
“Right.” Something strange happened every day. “Sorry,” I repeated.
“Forget it.” She ducked into a courtyard. The gate clanged shut, then it locked behind her, and I was alone once more.
In my room, I turned off the A/C and opened the terrace doors. A breeze had risen along with a thick curved band of a moon and both spilled into my room, one languid and hot, the other cool, liquid silver. I lost my clothes, touched my neck, and changed.
Bright light, cold and heat, my body contorted, becoming something else. I experienced both the pain of the change and the pleasure at bursting forth. In an instant, I could fly.
I doubted anyone would notice a huge, multicolored bird banking over Bourbon Street. They had better things to discover on the ground. Even if they happened to glance up and see me, they’d blame the bourbon.
I sailed out of New Orleans, easily following the scent of brackish water, cypress and rot. The Honey Island Swamp is over seventy thousand acres huge, with more than half of that a government-protected wildlife refuge. There was no way I could check the place for an abandoned church at a crossroads on foot.
Even with wings it took me most of the night, flying back and forth from one corner to the next in a tight grid pattern so as not to miss anything. Broken-down buildings abounded—not just in the swamp but everywhere across New Orleans—and upon landing I discovered that a lot of them were still occupied, and none of them was a church.
I was near to giving up, the sun just beginning to lighten the eastern horizon, turning the blue-black night a hazy purple, when I caught sight of a listing belfry and dived like the phoenix I was into the trees.
The instant I came within ten yards of the place, a screeching began, so loud and horrific I became disoriented and flew into the dripping Spanish moss of a cypress tree. Similar to a spider’s web, but damp and musty, the tendrils clung to my brightly colored wings like a net.
Trapped and panicked fire shot from my beak, and the moss dissolved into nothing an instant before I would have tumbled toward the earth.
But I wasn’t safe yet. The screaming continued as dark, prehistorically huge bat-like creatures sailed out of the belfry. They were large enough to be pterodactyls, if pterodactyls weren’t extinct. Of course extinct was just a word these days.
My breath was a flame, rolling over their darkly ethereal bodies, making them appear like Halloween decorations studded with tiny orange lights. Then the fire went out with a puff, and they kept coming.
I braced for impact, and one flew right through me. I’d have thought it was a ghost-bird, except I felt its talons scrape my bowels, its beak peck at my liver. The pain was like being torn apart from the inside out. Two skimmed either side of me and wherever they touched, agony flared, as though their feathers were tipped with razor blades.
Tumbling toward the earth, I picked up speed as I fell, and the horrible winged creatures followed, shrieking so that my eardrums seemed to rupture and bleed. I hit the ground with a solid thump, and at last blessed silence was mine.
I awoke as a woman, the sun blaring into my eyes. I moaned, laying my arm across my face. I hurt all over.
“What the fuck was that?” I muttered.
“Night demons.”
I sat up in a hurry, wincing as my head spun. I put my palm to my forehead to keep it from falling off.
A man leaned in the crumbling doorway of the church. Tall and muscular, his chest was bare, his sienna skin shining in the sun. At first I thought his ebony hair had been cropped brutally close to his scalp, but when he moved, straightening away from the doorjamb, the skin between the teenie-tiny braids that had been woven into his hair flashed. There appeared to be a design to their swirl, but from where I sat, I couldn’t tell what it was.
The church did stand at a crossroads, but not the kind I’d been looking for. To me crossroads meant a street of some kind—paved or at least covered in gravel. In this case the “road” was a waterway in two directions, with the church perched on a small plot of land between a dirt trail and a creek so narrow, only a canoe could pass.
“You are here for de book,” the man said, his accent a melodic combination of France and Jamaica.
“I—uh—” Should I lie or shouldn’t I? I was never quite sure.
“De night demons know. They attack only those who are up to no good.”
“And who would that be?”
“Nephilim, for de most part.”
“The Nephilim are trying to steal the Book of Samyaza?” Why pretend I had no idea what he meant when I did, and he knew it?
He inclined his head. “To possess de book is to rule this world as well as de next.”
“Then why aren’t you?”
“I protect de book until our Prince comes.”
“From what I hear, all the demons got sent back to hell.”
He shrugged. “There will come another chance.”
Unfortunately he was right. Doomsday, Armageddon, Apocalypse, they were inevitable. The only thing we could do was attempt to put them off until we were better prepared to win.
He tilted his head. “Why would you be happy to see de Grigori sent back? You’re as Nephilim as I am.”
I would have known even without his confession. I felt a buzz in the air, the hum that made my teeth ache and screamed that evil was near. There was a darkness about him, so abysmal I could almost see it hovering like smoke.
Since I wasn’t about to explain myself—to him or anyone else—I ignored his question to reiterate my own. “Why are you protecting a book for someone else when you could become the Prince of All You Survey?”
“We each have our parts to play. One of de reasons we haven’t won yet is that we fight one another as much as we fight de light. I promised long ago to keep our Book of Samyaza safe for when de Prince would come.”
A Nephilim that kept his word. The world really was coming to an end.
“What do you get if you do?”
He smiled, a brilliant white flash in his handsome, dark face. “Anything I desire.”
His gaze wandered from my no doubt tousled head to my—eek!—bare feet. I was all-over bare, and from the expression on his face, he didn’t have a problem with that.
“Come closer,” he murmured, his voice a mesmerizing melody that compelled me to obey.
I took a single step before I managed to stop myself. “What are you?”
“Mait. Commander of de night demons.”
“Which explains why they don’t peck the crap out of you whenever you get near the book.”
“I am their god.”
I didn’t like that one bit. Commander and god. I needed to get that book out of his
clutches and fast. No matter what Mait said, it was only a matter of time until he got sick of waiting for the Prince to come and decided the Prince was here and it was him.
His tongue swept his lips; his emerald gaze refused to leave my breasts. I crossed my arms, and he smirked. “Come here,” he said again.
This time I was prepared and held my ground. “No, thanks.” He might be beautiful to behold, but if I got too close I’d be sorry.
“I want to touch you.”
“And I don’t want to be touched.”
He lifted his face, breathed in the dawn. “Your scent is enticing; you are so many things. Strong and dangerous, soft and smooth and round. You’ll be so warm inside.” His head fell back, his chest muscles tightened and flexed. From the bulge in his khaki cotton pants, he was having a great time without me. “First I will satisfy my lust and then my hunger.”
“Hunger,” I repeated.
“I thirst for fear, terror, for de darkness only I can bring.”
“You ‘eat’ fear?”
“Mmmm,” he murmured. “I doubt I’ll sleep again until I’ve had you.”
I tensed, prepared for a fight. I wasn’t going to let this guy “have” anything. But he stayed where he was, and I began to wonder.
“If you want me so bad why don’t you—” I bit my lip, considering. “You stuck in there?”
His head came up; his eyes flashed fury, darkening to evergreen, and I laughed. “No wonder you aren’t marching at the head of the army of doom. You can’t leave.”
“Yet,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
He merely smiled and didn’t answer.
“Where are your night demons now?” I lifted my face to the sky.
“At night they protect this place. In de daylight, I do.”
“How long have you been here?”
His gaze lowered to my breasts again. “A long, long time.”
Oh, brother.
“Would you like to see de Book of Samyaza?” he asked.
“Sure.”
Once again, it couldn’t be this easy.
“All you need do is fuck me.”
And it wasn’t.
There was no way I could sleep with this guy for the book. He was a Nephilim. I’d been warned. I could absorb his evil along with his strengths—whatever they were. For all I knew, I might even be trapped in this place with him forever.
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