The Innocents

by Riley LaShea

  “Something I can do for you?” he asked, though he knew it was futile. Attempting to hold off her wrath was like trying to stem the flow of a raging river with a wall of toothpicks.

  Lilith wasn’t just any deraph. She wasn’t just any demon. She was the demon, the woman who launched a thousand cautionary adages. Red-headed temper. Woman scorned. If a person could warn it, Cain could trace its origins back to Lilith.

  “Oh, I think you have done more than your share,” Lilith said, and Cain knew the final play had come. For as long as he could, he had blitzed and rucked for both sides. Eventually, he was going to have to walk off the field with someone.

  “So, what’s this?” He shrugged against his invisible straitjacket as Lilith got up and stepped to the edge of the candle’s light. Cain was sure, to her, he smelled like he’d been sweating in interrogation for a week. “Some sort of new age spell?”

  “Cain,” Lilith scolded. “You don’t even recognize a shadow when you feel one?”

  “Shadow?” Even in the gloom, he could see the satisfaction shining in blue eyes. Trying to break free, to prove it was all his imagination, some sort of psychotic fever dream, from Lilith’s unwelcome appearance in his shop to the invisible entities that held him confined, the darkness tightened around him like a tourniquet. “That’s impossible.”

  “Just because you didn’t know they were here?” Lilith returned. “Face it, Cain. You don’t know everything.”

  Finger running down his nose, Lilith’s cold hand came to rest against his cheek, and Cain was just grateful there was nothing that hand could do to him without reciprocal damage. Haydn might have lost restraint while bound to a sylph, but Lilith wouldn’t dare. It would do far too much damage to that which she most adored - herself.

  “You have been such a help to me,” Lilith said. “Leading me to the mercenaries, any assignment for the right price. They were almost good enough too. Telling me about the righteous brigade, and how willing they would be to kill innocent people. Honestly, in a way, it was you who sent three of Haydn’s coven to their ends.”

  “No.” Cain refused to accept responsibility for that. “That was you, Lilith. It was you. I was swept up in your plot as always, but it was your hands pushing it along. And it is a terrible betrayal.”

  “A betrayal?” At the rage that twisted Lilith’s face, Cain doubted his certainty that she wouldn’t risk her own body to bring damage to his. “I betrayed her? She betrayed me when she ran.”

  “No,” Cain said. “Haydn was never trying to hurt you. She was only trying to save herself, and, perhaps, you from yourself.”

  “I’m a demon,” Lilith declared.

  “Yes,” Cain acknowledged. “Made to do exactly what you do. But you have overstepped your bounds again and again. You are doing it as we speak.”

  “You betrayed me too, Cain,” Lilith said. “You told Haydn it was me, that I was the one who wanted her clan dead. You knew better. She will never forgive me now.”

  About to argue that he didn’t betray her either, that he did everything he did to give Haydn a fighting chance, Cain knew it wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t true, what Lilith accused, the relegators would never see it as such, but Lilith did, and that was plenty to instill terror.

  “And Delaney? This Delaney? She’s Haydn’s innocent, isn’t she? If she’s Haydn’s innocent, Cain, who did you give me? Just some common person? Oh, the tortures that person will suffer tonight because of you.”

  “If you ever leave this world, Lilith.” Nothing left to argue, Cain could only appeal to her fear. There were no frights big enough for her in the world. Only the afterlife had any chance of restraining her.

  “Luckily, I don’t plan to.” Lilith ripped the rug out from under his threat. “And, as for those horrific punishments, I think it’s a myth. Not for you, though. For you, Cain, betrayal is about to get very real.”

  “Lilith.” Cain couldn’t stop the hitch in his voice.

  “All I need is your help,” Lilith returned. “Tell me where Haydn is, and all will be forgotten.”

  “I can’t,” Cain bit out.

  “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Cain.”

  “Lilith,” Cain tried again, but he knew there was no talking to her. Not on behalf of himself. “You know you can’t hurt me. You commit to this body, the sylph keeps your soul, and you will never get Haydn back.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” Lilith responded. “And while it is a bit of a disappointment I won’t get to play with all your squishy bits myself, there’s no need. Because no matter what parents tell their young children to alleviate their fears, we both know it’s not always just a shadow.”

  “Lilith, wait…”

  “Hold your breath, Cain.” Lilith plucked the candle from his desk. Tipping it onto its side, she watched the wax drip into the cup of tea still sitting at its corner. “You’re about to take a great fall.”

  Room plunged into darkness as she dropped the candle into the cup, Cain screamed as an impossibly strong, intangible grip wrapped around his thumb and ripped it from his hand.

  “What does she want?”

  It was only in hearing the question that Haydn realized it had never actually come up. In all her curiosity, after being abducted, imprisoned and nearly killed, Delaney had never asked the ultimate reason. She didn’t even know, before that night, that Lilith was to blame.

  “She wants me.” After everything they had seen and endured over the past weeks, it sounded completely disproportionate.

  “For what?" Delaney asked, and, trying, once again, to wrap her mind around Lilith and her covetous intentions, Haydn’s hand paused in its survey of Delaney’s skin as she realized she actually could. A few months ago, she couldn’t. A few weeks ago, she couldn’t. Perhaps, even a few days ago, she would have struggled to grasp Lilith’s insanity. The feel of Delaney, addictively soft beneath her fingertips, the sweet smell of the breath against her cheek, the warmth that spread through her at Delaney nestled against her side, Haydn felt on the verge of empathy.

  “Oh.” The silence proved long enough for Delaney to figure it out for herself.

  “It isn’t about affection.” Haydn didn’t know why she felt the need to explain. Even with the confusing signals being sent to her brain and body, she was sure it couldn’t possibly be. Lilith was Lilith. It was always about her. It was always about power. It was about proving to Haydn she controlled her destiny. Lilith simply didn’t abide by goodbyes she didn’t inflict herself.

  “Of course, it isn’t,” Delaney uttered. Hair tumbling around her shoulders as she lifted her head, her thoughts were obscured as she looked to Haydn. “Because deraphs don’t feel affection. Anything that feels like affection, or acts like affection, it must be something else.”

  Fingers running through the softness of Delaney’s hair, Haydn didn’t need more. She wanted Delaney, she couldn’t imagine not wanting her, but the sensation was subdued, floating through her consciousness for a later time. Nothing in Haydn warped the moment. Beast out of its cage and free to roam, it simply found a place to lie down and rest.

  “It must be,” Haydn said.

  34

  Dick stirring before his brain, it was like the entirety of Slade’s adolescence. Taking him a moment to interpret the rest of the sensations - pinned down against the mattress, arms trapped to his sides - he realized he was overpowered, and remembered, in the company of convicts used to getting in and out fast, a moment was all it took.

  Eyes flashing wide, Slade was ready to beat the shit out of the sorely mistaken cocksucker trying to overtake him in his sleep, only to find himself quite willing to be taken.

  Smoky eyes gazing down at him, he had no idea what color they were in the darkness of the cell. Not that he would notice anyway, with the creamy tits stacked like a two-dollar pancake special in his face.

  The woman grinding against him, the friction was too damn good, and Slade realized he’d been deprived too long when, with a groan of surprise, he
finished before he started. Front of his pants gumming against his groin as the paralyzing hold released him, it was lackluster compared to what he’d wanted to do to that body, but he wasn’t going to object to spontaneously getting off in the middle of the night either.

  “Three seconds? How pathetic.”

  Why not? Silent laughter rumbled Slade’s chest as he raised his arm back over his eyes, trying to block out the light from the cell block. If he was going to have a fantasy come fuck him in the night, it made sense that she would insult him on her way out.

  “You’re not asleep, Slade.”

  Ice encrusting his body, Slade’s eyes opened again. Staring at his prison-issue sleeve, he listened to the small sounds that said he, at the very least, wasn’t the only one in the cell awake, and, forcing himself to look, he found the fantasy still present and irritated next to the tiny desk against the opposite wall, all of two meters away, as far as anyone could get in the tight space.

  “Neither is he.” Eyes flicking to the bottom bunk, the woman smoothed her red hair at the sides.

  Eyes reluctant to leave her, Slade dipped over the edge of his mattress and saw the blood first, so much it turned the entire pillow red beneath Crue’s shiny head, before his gaze moved to the wide, dead eyes staring up at the bottom of his bunk.

  “What the fuck?” He was off the bed in an instant. Tripping away from the scene, he rammed into the desk, skidding it across the floor, and the redhead moved before him, finger pressing to his lips.

  “Shh shh shh shh,” she whispered. “Wouldn’t want the guards to come before you and I have a chance to talk. How do you think this will look for you?”

  The guards, nothing - Fuck - Slade looked to his cellmate again. He was going to be in prison until his dying day anyway. This might strip him of a few privileges. Or, he revised, watching the blood drip from the pillow down the side of the mattress, earn him a few years in solitary.

  It was the other inmates he had to worry about. Everybody liked Crue. In the beginning, most of those who liked Slade liked him because Crue decided he was worth liking. Crue was a leader on the inside, a go-to kind of guy. Slade could only imagine what his fellow prisoners would do to him if they thought he did this.

  Looking around the cell - door locked, window bars in place, ceiling and floor intact - he didn’t know what else anyone could possibly think. And, realizing there was no way for her to have gotten in, Slade looked to the redhead with greater foreboding.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  “I hope a psychotic fuckin’ delusion,” he said, but, though he didn’t know who, he did know what the woman was. If he had been more awake, more in his mind instead of his prick, he might have known sooner. Not that he could say with any honesty he would have cared while she was riding him like a fuckin’ cowgirl.

  “Hope is a beautiful thing.” She smiled, clearly gratified by his burgeoning panic.

  “What do you want?” Slade asked.

  “I need to re-employ you.”

  Declaration almost as surprising as her appearance in his cell, Slade tried to imagine when he might have ever worked for this woman. Or woman-like thing. All the jobs he’d done, people he’d passed through, he was still pretty fuckin’ sure he would remember her. Parts of her, at least.

  “One of a dozen doesn’t seem all that impressive,” she filled in the blank for him. “But we both know it’s not an easy thing to kill a deraph.”

  “Aren’t you a…?” Slade felt his grip on reality start to slip.

  “Why do you act so surprised?” the redhead responded. “Hasn’t every other job you’ve ever done been human against human? Aren’t you in here for shooting a man in the head? Stop focusing so much on our differences. We all like to meddle in the life and death of our own kind. Now, I need you to take care of a job for me.”

  Hysterical laughter the only conceivable response to that, to all of it really, Slade looked to the cell door. “Well, as you can see, I’m a little tied up here.”

  Tied. Caged. Rendered inoperable. And, as soon as light fell on Crue’s dead body, toe-tagged and body-bagged, Slade was almost guaranteed.

  “Semantics.” The woman waved her hand at the bars as if they were little more than illusion. Her standing there in front of him, boasting way too many curves to have squeezed between them, maybe they were.

  “Why me?” Slade said. “There are plenty of people like me out there.”

  “Not with your particular skill set.”

  “Other hunters too.” Slade caught on.

  “Yes, I know that.” The woman proved exceedingly easy to irritate. “They were highly agreeable to the new way, tripled your success rate. Unfortunately, I’ve been told they are out of commission.”

  “The new way.” Recalling the same description from another mouth, after he watched a young boy die with fear in his eyes for no reason that made sense, Slade wondered how Garcia would feel knowing he’d been taking orders from a deraph. “Killing an innocent kid, you mean?”

  “My God, prison does make you righteous,” the redhead returned. “You’re not one of those born-agains, are you? Just think of them as, what do you soldier boys call it? Collateral damage?”

  “I’m not a soldier,” Slade said. “And collateral damage is when a bomb hits a target dead on, but shrapnel kills a man unlucky enough to be passing by. It’s not dropping a bomb on France when you’re trying to take out Spain.”

  “And what if France is in Spain?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, it seems the synjuments have taken up with the deraphs, like one big happy family. They’ve chosen their side, and if they’ve willingly joined the war, there’s nothing we can do about that but put a bullet through them as well, now is there?”

  Fairly certain he didn’t believe her, Slade tried to figure out why it even mattered to him. Weeks in prison to think about it, and he still didn’t know, hadn’t been able to look back with any clarity on the path that brought him there.

  Shite, maybe he had been born again. If he was, though, it didn’t happen in prison. It had to be before that, sometime before he put the gun on the floor and sat to wait for judgment when he had ample time to run.

  It wasn’t Fiona either. At least, not just Fiona. That mess with her and Sean only fucked him up more. If being born again was a flash, a sudden shift in perception that rocked one’s entire existence, Slade could think of only one - that instant before Garcia put a bullet in the boy when the deraph woman took his hand and looked more human than any of them.

  “Slade?”

  Not at all like this bitch. From mindfuck to cockbait, she was everything he’d ever heard a deraph would be.

  “What do you want me to do?” he questioned, ignoring, for a moment, the utter impossibility.

  “It’s simple really,” she said, and Slade had been in the business too long not to know that meant it absolutely wasn’t. “Just a basic extraction. One deraph. One human. I need you to get them out and bring them to me.”

  “Basic?” Slade dropped back against the desk, averting his eyes when they focused automatically on the blood dripping from Crue’s bunk onto the floor. “And the deraphs are still together?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “I can’t kill a dozen deraphs,” he said. With a team of eight - six combatants, two prodigies - a barrel full of tranquilizer, and a million revelers to serve as distraction, he could scarcely bring one deraph down on her own.

  “Eight,” the redhead responded. “There are only eight now. Garcia cleared the way for you, remember?”

  “Well, I can’t even kill eight deraphs,” Slade assured her.

  “You’ll have help.” She interrupted his acceptance of the fact that he was going to have to pay the price for this. He couldn’t do what she wanted, and he couldn’t undo what she had done. Morning was going to come, and it would be full of consequence for him. “I’ve got plenty of muscle. It just doesn’t have a lo
t of brain attached to it. They do know how to follow orders, though. I just need you to tell them what to do. You’re good at this sort of thing, right?”

  “You’re talking about a team of deraphs?” Slade uttered.

  “Now, don’t be speciest,” the redhead scolded, which was pretty rich coming from someone who literally ate his species for lunch.

  “Why?” Slade didn’t know what possessed him to ask. It was not his to question why. It was but his to do and… well, fuck up others. “What do you want with them, the deraph and the human?”

  “I want to keep them safe.”

  Oddly enough, it was the first thing the redhead said Slade unequivocally believed. Though, it made the opposite of sense. This woman had given him the tools to kill, Garcia the method, but now she wanted one of the deraphs pulled from the others like it was some rescue mission? Didn’t fuckin’ add up.

  “Well,” the redhead said as Slade was about to call bullshit. “Sounds like someone’s making his rounds early.”

  Glancing to the cage door when she did, Slade didn’t hear anything, but he didn’t doubt it either. Rumblings from the inmates the past few days had the guards on edge, and there’d been plenty of surprise inspections to try to catch those with contraband or fantasies of starting a riot, not an easy task when those things were the main amusements of pretty much every cell they walked by.

  “This really is a no-brainer, Slade.” The woman was obviously bored with his lagging thought process. “You get out of jail, I get what I want, or I leave now and you wait for the shit to hit the proverbial fan. If you do choose that option, I am going to need to know where you stashed my equipment. Because I sent some members of my coven to retrieve it, and it is no longer in the warehouse.”

  Which meant Fiona took it. Like Slade wanted her to. Trying not to react, Slade realized that also meant, when the deraph bitch went looking for it, and he got a real feeling she would, she would find Fiona too. If Fiona was out there to find. She said Garcia’s crew was out of commission, and, inside, Slade had no way of knowing exactly what that meant.