by Hall, Marie
Yet aside from the initial twitch of a reaction she’d had, she was silent.
Unnerved, I dropped some cash on the table and jogged outside, leaning against a pillar of wood for support. It smelled like sewage, droppings, and piss. I didn’t care. I took in long, greedy gulps of air and fought to quiet the sudden trembling of my hands.
What in the hell was wrong with me?
Why should I care that Lust no longer seemed to control my every word and thought? I was more in control and yet—I closed my eyes, aware of the alien presence inside me—I was far from all right.
“Estas bien, gringa?”
“Hmm?” I mumbled, opening my eyes to see a small child, no older than eight or nine, staring up at me with large, wide eyes. He shoved a greasy hank of hair out of his face. He was far too skinny. The pants he wore were a size too small; knobby knees protruded from jagged holes.
I wondered where his parents were, then realized he was probably one of the many orphaned children living in the streets.
He looked genuinely worried, and suddenly I remembered another little face. Brianna. At least there’d been one child saved that night. Maybe it was my memories of her and not him, but a reluctant grin tugged at the corners of my lips. Reaching into my pocket, I grabbed a hundred-peso note, roughly eight American dollars, and handed it to him.
“I’m fine,” I told him in Spanish, but he didn’t look at me. Rather, he stared at the bank note as if he were afraid it might disappear. He swallowed hard, then began to back up slowly.
“Go,” I muttered and flicked my wrist.
He needed no other prompting and quickly disappeared inside the maze of shacks and alleyways.
I took one last steadying breath. It was time to meet Grace.
The sun had long since set, and the night rang with the sounds of locusts and nesting birds. I walked slowly, my hands shoved deep into my pockets, and kept within shadow.
I moved down back alleys for several blocks with nothing but rats and stray dogs for company. I caught a few sets of eyes studying me. Some with curiosity, others with malicious intent. I was a lone, beautiful woman. Clearly not a local. Easy prey.
Or so they thought.
But I walked with a sense of confidence and eventually the hard gazes disappeared.
Many times I have no idea where Grace plans to meet up, but she and I have met in Mexico for many decades now. I hardly paid attention to my surroundings, letting instinct guide me.
Light, glowing a buttery copper color, caught my eye. I snarled as my anger flared to a violent pitch. Not a hundred yards in front of me sat a mud-thatched shack. Inside, Grace waited for me.
Now that I was here, I wasn’t sure I could do this. Pretend she hadn’t betrayed me. Betrayed us.
I stopped walking, staring at the light like a moth trapped in the deadly glow of flame.
I was a veritable weapons cache. There was a razor fan tucked between my boobs, a flip knife down each snakeskin boot. Two nine mils were strapped to my back, and the hairpin that was holding my hair up wasn’t a pin at all, but rather an ice pick.
Was I plotting to destroy Grace? It would seem so. And maybe subconsciously it’s why I’d come down here so loaded, but revenge wasn’t a luxury I had at the moment. The minutes were ticking by, and then a dark silhouette moved behind her closed curtains. Grace was pacing, probably wondering where the hell I was. But I just couldn’t move.
Frozen with indecision, I might have remained there forever if the heavy press of eyes hadn’t just drilled a hole through my consciousness, snapping me out of my trancelike state.
Narrowing my eyes, I turned in the direction of the hot gaze and caught a flash of black that wasn’t shadow.
The sun was so low there was hardly any natural light left in the town, but my heart was thumping like a rabbit on crack because deep down in the darkest corners of my mind, I could swear that build and shape could only belong to one person.
With a growl, I ran toward it. Hurriedly I moved down the narrow alleyways of a shantytown, the shacks stacked one against the other against the other, scraping my knuckles and face raw as I’d take a turn into a rusty nail or roughened termite-riddled wood But the amorphous shape was always just out of reach, leading me on a long and dizzying path so that I’d completely lost my bearing because I was too focused on catching up.
“Hey!” I finally panted at it after what felt like hours. “Stop running.”
Heads poked out their houses, staring at me with quizzically raised brows and worried gleams in their inky eyes. I ignored them.
The blur didn’t listen and a fire like I’d never felt before zipped down my spine, blurring my vision. “I said stop!” I roared. It was mindless and crazy-sounding, but I was mindless and crazy.
I wasn’t thinking straight, that much was obvious. But what I didn’t notice, and I probably should have, was that the second I screamed, frost burned my skin.
A powerful something barreled into me, knocking the air from my lungs and shoving me to the dirt. Otherworldly power ran like a shock of electricity against my flesh before a hand clamped itself over my mouth.
Panic clawed at my throat, turned my blurry vision hazy, made my fangs lengthen and my claws unfurl.
“Shut the hell up,” the voice hissed in my ear. “Get your fucking panic under control or so help me, I’ll cut your head off.”
The voice literally made my brain feel about to short-circuit, and I blinked, breathing heavily, feeling as stupid as I’d ever felt in my life because there was no way in hell that what I was hearing, who I was hearing, was really...
“Billy?” I mumbled around a half sob of surprise. I couldn’t see his face—he was obscured within the voluminous folds of his hoodie sweater—but that voice. That voice would haunt me forever.
And this time Lust didn’t just twitch, she roared.
My body went from hot to molten. My skin was so sensitive that I was unbelievably aware of his form on my body. Anywhere we touched. His pelvis grinding into mine, his knee between my thighs, his breath brushing against my neckline.
“Good,” he rumbled, and damn if I didn’t want to yank the black sweater off him immediately. “I’ve halted time, but it won’t last. When you screamed, your demon came out.”
“Lust?” I couldn’t believe the breathy quality of my voice, because I should want to rip his hands off, gouge his eyes out, and saw his tongue in two for making me believe he’d died. For making me hurt and ache and need and want. But the emotion working through me wasn’t hate, it was desire and more. So much more.
My body tingled, shivered, and my back teeth clacked.
“Look over my shoulder,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear. “You see the boy?”
I looked and spied a small head, four, maybe five years old. He was leaning out of his doorway with eyes grown wide. Hovering before him was a puke-green mist. I nodded.
“You see the miasma in front of him?”
I nodded again, unable to trust my voice not to give me away. Now that Lust was dominating my thoughts, Pestilence wasn’t nearly as loud or powerful as earlier. It felt good, right, to have control of my body, to feel it again the way it once was. I strummed my finger down the length of his muscular back, wanting to weep from the exquisite torture of having him back in my arms.
“That’s Pestilence,” he said. “Before I can release time, you have to suck that demon spawn back inside you. If you don’t, the outbreak will level this village.”
I felt the cold of time stood still, looked at the faces all frozen, all staring down at me. I kept expecting them to blink or breathe, but they didn’t move. Just stared at me with horror in their flat gazes. I should care more than I did. Only a few days ago I would have cared, but I had changed. The only thought drilling away at me was... just how powerful was he? How was Billy doing this?
“Billy?” I said his name like a prayer and then laughed, because absolutely nothing was making sense. I’d seen Billy die in hell,
seen his body shatter into a bolt of white light; he’d been taken from me. My death priest had been violently killed in front of me, funny how I still claimed the bastard, even though he’d tried many times to kill me himself. Stabbing me, punching me in the temple until I’d blacked out, I couldn’t trust the man as far as I could throw him. Even though he was currently covered in a shadowy hoodie, it didn’t matter because I was as attuned to his soul as I was to Lust.
This man was my obsession and possibly even my destruction, but none of that mattered because he was here. With me right now, and I desperately needed answers.
“Suck it back into you, Pandora, I can’t hang on much longer.” He said it through gritted teeth, and it was the thread of annoyed desperation in his scratchy voice that finally brought me to my senses.
I’d not taken the time to learn how to properly use Pestilence; Lust and I had grown together over two millennia. This other demon was new to me, but if the mechanics were the same, then focusing on drawing the power back into me should do it.
Looking back at the fog, I mentally called it back to me. Not because I wanted it back—I wanted it out of me—but I needed to talk with Billy, and not while all his attention was focused on saving those around us.
I was shocked when the fog curled back toward me, moving in a slow helix undulation, mostly because everything was still frozen and a part of me had expected this not to work.
Lust quieted almost the second the fog rolled through my body once more. Nostrils flaring as Pestilence’s oily infection ran through my system once again, I could only nod when the last of it sank like a thorny barb into my brain.
Pestilence hissed, roiling and spitting its displeasure at being contained yet again. For many nights I’d seen visions and nightmares of what the demon had done in its previous form, the utter anarchy it delighted in creating.
There was a shudder in the air, like the snap of a taut rubber band being let go, and I knew without looking that time was back as it should be.
His hand was covering my mouth and again I felt something prickly against my flesh. My body was humming, blood singing with untold masses of energy as power rolled between us. Obscuring us from the prying eyes of witnesses.
I’d felt this level of electrifying power before, and I couldn’t deny my confusion. Things just weren’t adding up.
Billy’s face was masked by deep shadow, but his body was as firm and strong as I remembered it. His smell saturated my senses. I wanted a visual cue that what I was sensing was really him, but he wasn’t giving it to me. Why was he so covered? What in the hell was going on?
“We don’t have much time. You have to make that meeting with Grace.” His hand finally moved, but he made no move to get off me, not that I cared. I wanted him all over me. Lust was in heat again and this was an itch only my death priest could quench.
“How do you know about my meeting? What’s going on here?”
He shook his head. “We don’t have much time. I’ve been watching you, demon.”
I mean, I was all for a little Peeping Tom action, especially when it was Billy watching me, but it hadn’t exactly sounded like he’d been happy to do it. “Jeez, Billy.” I slammed his chest with my fist, wanting to hurt him even a little, because as tough as I sometimes pretended to be, that idiot had just hurt me. “I thought you were dead, you ass. The least you can do is be nicer. And my name is Pandora!” I bit out through clenched teeth.
“Shut up and listen to me,” he growled. “You’re already late, you have no idea what’s going on, and the truth goes much deeper than you think. You got me?”
It sat in my gut like a raging river of bile to have him order me around, but I wouldn’t deny that curiosity more than anything else kept my questions at bay.
For now.
I narrowed my eyes.
“Pandora.” The way he said my name, soft and with a hint of a growl, like he was confused and exasperated all at once, made my heart thump harder.
“What do you know? You sound like you know something. Tell me, Billy.”
My lashes fluttered. I wished I could help the way my body reacted to him, wished I could stop it, make it go away. It would be so much easier. But this man who was created for the express purpose of ending not only my life, but anyone else like me, had a way of getting under my skin and making me want things in a way that bordered on lunacy.
“You need to go,” he finally said.
“Why’d you come to me, Billy?” I gripped his shoulders, digging into them with my nails. My hair was probably coated in mud and other things, my clothes were definitely ripped, and I just didn’t give a damn. I could lay like this, with him, forever.
For the first time in days I felt like me again, like I could think and reason and breathe. The world was still in chaos around me, but my beacon had returned and maybe, just maybe, I could figure things out.
He shook his head, but no words left his lips.
I wanted to toss his hoodie back, wanted to run my fingers through his silver spikes. Wanted to drown in his taste, his essence. Lust purred inside me; she wanted the same things. We’d claimed this man as ours long ago, he was the only thing we’d ever agreed on.
“Are you letting me walk away from you again?” I whispered, leaning up a little so my mouth grazed the corner of his covered cheek.
I knew it wasn’t in my head that his muscles trembled on top of me. That his voice had grown more hoarse as he said, “We have to talk.”
“Then talk to me now.”
“Pandora, we play a dangerous game. One wrong move and it’s over. Do you understand me?”
I nodded but continued to gently rub my body along his; the movements built tension and friction between my thighs and I couldn’t stop the moan that rolled down my tongue. His fingers drove deeper into the muscle of my arms. They’d bruise tonight. I didn’t care.
“I don’t understand anything.” I shook my head and ran my nose along the length of his covered-up neck. Somehow he must have spelled the sweater not to move an inch, because no matter how I moved or touched him, the damn thing didn’t shift. “I don’t understand how you survived. I don’t understand why you keep just letting me walk away; I don’t understand how come there are no eyes watching us anymore. How you froze time. What are you doing to me, Billy? Why do you keep coming to me? Are you going to kill me?”
His fingers curled even harder, making me hiss with pleasure and pain. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have. Many times. You have to know the truth.”
“Then tell me.”
“Not now. We don’t have time. Look in that book.”
I frowned. “What book? You’ve seen my trailer—I have thousands.”
“The one Grace’s assistant gave you about me.” I could almost picture the amusement flickering in his dull brown eyes. I wasn’t even surprised that he knew. Billy had always seemed to be ten steps ahead of me. So rather than pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, I shrugged.
“There’s nothing in that damn thing. A bunch of useless crap. The lines were all blacked out.”
“Not that one. The poems. Read it.”
I felt the pressure of his body shift, sensed he was seconds away from getting up. Panicked, I wrapped my legs around his waist like steel bands.
“You tell me we have to talk and now you’re leaving. Wait for me, talk to me after I’m done with her. What’s so important about those stupid poems? It’s Middle English scribbles. I’ve read the damn thing, none of it makes sense.”
He looked up and then growled. “If I keep us hidden too much longer, whoever’s tailing you will know.”
I shivered because I’d not sensed any eyes on me, not even his.
“Who? The Order?”
“I’m not sure yet, but don’t worry about it. There’s so much”—he paused and I sensed his anger in the words—“so much you don’t know. I’ve got to go.”
“No! Not yet. You’ve got to tell me what’s going on here... You’ve
got to give me something.”
Then his fingers were trailing hot along my cheek, feathering down my neck, and I couldn’t stop myself from trembling, from whispering his name.
“I’ll find you again,” he mumbled vehemently. “Read the book.”
Then just like that, he was gone. My arms were empty and the streets were buzzing with noise again. Previously empty doorways were full of people, and they were all staring down at me lying on my back in the middle of the filthy, flea-infested dirt road, and the eyes that were always watching me were back.
With a snarl, I stood and dusted my backside. But I only smeared the mud worse. I didn’t even bother with my hair.
Knowing the night wouldn’t keep my secrets, I didn’t say his name again. There was something in the way he’d kept us hidden that let me know Billy’s secrets, whatever they were, ran as deep as mine. I wasn’t sure if we’d just formed an uneasy alliance or if he was still plotting to destroy me. But where he was concerned, my personal safety had always been a back-burner issue.
Thanks to Grace’s betrayal, I’d learned to listen to my gut. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t be possessed by Pestilence now, and for damn sure Kemen would still be alive. Something inside me screamed to trust Billy, and it wasn’t because he’d really given me any outward signs that I should. But then again, maybe it was just Lust coloring my better judgment.
With a snarl, I hid inside the deepest slice of shadow and traced to Grace’s, leaving nothing but the scent of sulfur in my wake.
***
Sitting in Grace’s one-bedroom adobe ten minutes later, I had to apply every bit of acting skill I had as I waited for the old bat to come out of the bathroom. Her new assistant had led me to a worn, overstuffed leather chair.
I sometimes wondered what had happened to Mary (Grace’s previous assistant), She’d been so scared of me when I’d first met her, but she was also the one who’d given me that book of Middle English poems that Billy insisted I now read.
I was in the middle of a giant effing conspiracy, and I hated with the heat of a thousand burning fires that I was too stupid to just figure it out. Grace was a rotten seed, the Order was nothing but a bunch of murderous bastards, Billy was still alive, Luc hated my guts I was sure, Kemen was dead...