by J. R. Ward
Her mother being thoughtful, of course. And she no doubt came for visits not just on special days but on a regular basis.
Getting out, Mels crossed over the pale green lawn, the young grass springing back into place and covering her tracks.
Other headstones had debris on them, little bits and pieces of trees or patches of lichen or moss dotting the tops or the bases. Not her father’s. His was clean to a polish, no evidence of the passing of three sets of seasons.
When Mels finally knelt down, it was to trace the cross that had been inscribed deeply into the gray granite.
Matthias’s deep voice came back to her as he had talked about Hell with the kind of conviction she might have used to discuss working at the paper, or living in Caldwell, or losing a father.
Personal experience had marked his words.
Mels went over the crucifix again with her fingertips. Funny, she’d never paid much attention to the religious stuff people put on grave markers, whether it was the angels with their wings upraised, or the Virgin Mary with her head tilted down, or the Stars of David—whatever the religion, she’d seen them as decoration, not serving any kind of divine purpose.
That didn’t feel true at the moment.
She was glad her father’s patch of earth was marked with the symbol of faith, and she was glad he’d always gone to church on Sundays—even though, growing up, she’d hated that she missed a day of sleeping in.
Abruptly, she prayed with a kind of burning fear that made no sense that he was in Heaven.
To have a loved one in Hell would be…unthinkable.
Jim was losing his godforsaken, ever-loving mind.
As Matthias’s lax body slumped into the sofa, his mouth moved like he was trying to speak…but nothing came out. Like there was a traffic jam on his cognitive byway.
“Talk to me,” Jim barked, trying to get through to the guy. “Did you know her? Did you see her? Is she okay?”
That mouth worked up and down, especially when Jim shook the guy again. “Matthias—”
“The girl—she’s in there.” Matthias pawed the sunglasses off his face and stared straight into Jim’s eyes—yet seemed not to focus on what was actually in front of him. “In Hell. The blond girl is there—I was with her.”
“Is she okay—” Dumb-ass question. Of course Sissy wasn’t. “What…”
“I was really there,” the man said as he tried to push himself up, like maybe some vertical would help clear his head. “And I was brought back to…why was I brought back? What am I supposed to do?”
Even though a big part of his mind was stuck on Sissy, Jim forced himself to get back in the game: this was the moment he’d been waiting for. This was his opening, the way in.
But shit…Sissy…
Jim cleared his throat. Twice. “Ah, you’re back because we need you to make the right choice this time.”
“Choice?”
“At the crossroads.” Jim prayed he was going to make some sense. “You’re, ah, you’re going to come to a moment where you need to choose, and if you don’t want to go back where you were, you have to pick the righteous path, not…what you’re used to.”
“So it’s true? About Heaven and Hell?”
“And you’ve got a second chance.”
“Why?”
“The devil cheats.”
Matthias suddenly focused on him. “You were there. Down below…oh my God, you were there—and that woman, thing—whatever—shit, the nurse!”
“I’m sorry?”
“The nurse who took care of me at the hospital after I was hit—who ran into me at the hotel!”
For a moment, Jim wanted to punch his own head. “Let me guess. A brunette?”
“It was her down below. And you were with her…she had you strapped down on—” The guy stopped abruptly. “Um, yeah…you were there.”
Great. Fucking wonderful.
Matthias had seen the fun and games?
And then it dawned on him. If Matthias had, Sissy must have as well— Christ, and he’d thought her catching him in the aftermath had been bad enough?
The urge to kill curled his hands into fists.
“Just how are you involved in all this?” Matthias demanded, eyes narrowing—
A dull thwack cut off whatever Jim might have replied, the sound something he was way too familiar with to misconstrue. And yet he couldn’t have heard it right, could he?
No, he thought as he reached for his forty, that had been a bullet going into wood: The confirmation was Adrian’s sudden appearance in the apartment. The angel was outing his gun, and looking like he was frustrated as shit.
“We’ve got company,” he barked.
“Not Devina.” Jim would sense her, and as much as he would have loved to see the bitch and give her a piece of his goddamn mind he wasn’t picking up on any vibrations.
“No, the other kind of visitor.”
Fuck. XOps must have staked out the Marriott and seen them leaving. Not a surprise—just really sucky timing what with Matthias still looking like someone had unplugged him from his power source: The guy was better, but not fully back online.
“Let me go out there,” Jim said in a bored voice. “I know how they’re trained—”
“What’s happening?” Matthias said as he pushed himself upright.
“Nothing—”
“Nothing—”
Matthias grabbed the gun he’d been feeding lead into, the surge of energy a surprise. “Let me—”
“You stay here with Adrian—”
“Fuck that—”
“FYI you’re the target.”
“And you think that makes my aim bad?” Matthias focused on Ad. “What did you see out there?”
“Not much. I heard a stick crack off to the side and caught a flash of black that wasn’t a shadow. Next thing I knew I was hit—annoying, really.”
There was a heartbeat of frozen silence as Ad realized what he’d said—and so did Matthias.
“Do you need a doctor?” Matthias asked.
“No, I’m good.”
As the angel turned away, there was a hole in his jacket the size of a pea—and it was precisely in the center of his back, execution style. Clearly, XOps was still teaching its recruits how to be good little marksmen: If Adrian had been alive in the conventional sense, he would have been dead within seconds, the integrity of his heart muscle reduced to hamburger in his rib cage.
Bet that operative out there had been surprised when his target merely looked over and glared like someone had been snapping gum in a movie…then disappeared into thin air.
“Hell of a vest you must be wearing,” Matthias muttered.
“You stay put,” Jim commanded. “Ad, you—”
And that was when the wind came up from out of nowhere, the howling signifying so much more than a change in weather, the light draining from the sky not because a storm had arrived in the Jim Cantore sense, but because the demon’s minions had showed up.
Shit, one look at Adrian and Jim knew they were in trouble. The angel’s face had that nasty cast it took on when his mood meant you couldn’t deal with him. And what do you know: Outing his crystal dagger, he dematerialized right in front of Matthias, heading into the fray alone, obviously prepared to die out there.
“Did I see that right?” Matthias said calmly.
Jim glanced over and went for his own dagger. “You stay here. We’ll take care of this.”
Matthias didn’t seem all that bothered about the poof. Then again, he’d just gotten part of his backstory right, so he was clear that demons existed—and reality was pretty fungible when it came down to brass tacks.
He was, however, checking that gun like he was going to use it.
“Don’t even think about it,” Jim snapped. “I need you safe.”
Jogging to the door, he glanced back to see if the guy was paying attention, but the status of Matthias was not what caught his eye. Dog had gone over to the crawl space where Eddie was an
d had curled into a sit right against the door…as if he were guarding the angel’s sacred remains.
Which was good.
At this point, he’d take any help he could get.
As Matthias parted the drapes a little and looked out, Jim dematerialized, and prayed he could get things under control before his old boss acted on any bright ides.
Last thing he needed was a pair of wild cards.
As Matthias searched the pebbled drive, he smelled something bad—and not in the conventional, three-week-old-leftover sense. This stench was in more than just his nose; it penetrated the very pores of his skin and twisted his gut…and he knew what it was.
This was the Hell that he had been in made manifest. This was the horrid infection that had festered in his flesh.
It was back.
It was coming to get him.
A paralyzing fear took over his limbs, freezing him in place, rendering him incapable of thought or action. The torture and the helplessness, the goddamn eternity of what he’d found in Hell was a misery he couldn’t bear again—
Fuck. That.
The fighter in him surged to the fore and cut off the emotions, the cold logic that had for so long defined him taking over and reestablishing control, shutting the door on anything and everything but the fact that they were not taking him. No fucking way was he going back there.
He didn’t care what he had to sacrifice or who he had to kill—he was not going down again.
Gun was loaded. Body was willing. Mind was sharp.
That was what he knew for sure. The rest he was going to have to figure the fuck out.
A quick check for exits other than that side door yielded a big fat zero: Looked like that was the only ingress/egress—unless, of course, he considered windows.
In the bathroom, he found just what he was looking for: a three-foot-across, four-foot-high set of panes that opened out to the rear woods. Quick check and he thought, Shit, the sky had grown dim as the gloaming, the sun not just covered up, but consumed by the thick cloud cover that had blown in from wherever. But a sudden rainstorm was not what he was worried about: down on the ground, in and among the pines, shadows were moving, and not because someone was working a flashlight around the forest.
Fury threw open the center of his chest. Crossroads? Fuck that—try payback. In this moment, he had a chance to get back at those bastards, and he was damn sure going to take a pound or two out of them on the way to the exit.
As he popped the latch on the window, he was suddenly feeling like Mr. Popular and was so ready to return the love to whoever got in his path—XOps, cops, demons, whatever the fuck.
The window pushed all the way up like a dream, nice and quiet and smooth, but it let in the gale that was blowing outside, the cold wind hitting him in the face. Hefting himself off the floor and through the relatively small opening, he was grateful for two things: one, that he didn’t have his old body—because his formerly broad shoulders and big barrel chest would have been a tight squeeze; and two, that it was dark as the inside of a hat even though it was afternoon.
Good for him: Cover was his friend—at the moment, he was a sitting fucking duck.
The window was set about five feet up from a six-inch ledge that ran around the garage, and with a messy series of arm and leg rearrangements, he turned himself around, planted the toes of his Nikes on it, and closed the window. If he went to the right, he had to go around the corner that led to the stairwell. To the left? There was a sloping roof that would cut the distance to the ground and increase the likelihood that he wouldn’t shatter his bad leg like a piece of glass when he landed.
Louie it was.
Shuffling along the ledge, he hung on to the sill for as long as he could; then he had to dig into the siding with his fingernails, clawing a hold to keep that center of gravity in his ass from peeling him off the side of the building.
The wind didn’t help.
But he made it to the half roof.
Wasting no time, he scrambled to the far edge and dropped off. The second he landed on the packed leaves and soft earth, he ducked into a crouch and put up his gun. All around, there were sounds of movement, suggesting there were a lot of people, things, whatever the hell, in the forest behind the garage.
He didn’t move anything but his eyes.
The lack of depth perception made long-distance shooting tricky, so that, coupled with his compromised mobility, made it a sit-and-wait situation.
Spider to the fly, and all that shit—
Someone heavy was coming ’round t’ mountain from the left, fast and hard, the ground vibrating from the force.
Matthias trained his forty on whoever/whatever it was.
A three-dimensional shadow shot out from the lee of the garage, the faceless, formless creature ambulating like a sprinter on some version of two legs. But all wasn’t well in its seedy little world: The thing appeared to be wounded, a smoking trail left in its wake as it seemed to be running for its unholy life.
What followed in its path blurred the distinction between good and evil.
Jim’s roommate was like an avenging angel or some shit as he pursued what was clearly his prey. With a crystal knife up over his shoulder, and a warrior’s wrath distorting his face, Adrian was hell-bent on killing that demon.
And that was exactly what he did, right in front of Matthias.
The man leaped up into the air, the lunge closing the distance between the two even as the demon ran his heartless chest out. Shit wasn’t going to go well, though—the point of that flimsy glass knife was in the lead, and there was no way that was a good idea: That “weapon” didn’t look strong enough to cut paper.
Wrong.
As the tip penetrated the nape of that creature, the shadow let out a screech that was like metal streaking across metal—exactly what Matthias had heard for the centuries he’d been in Hell. And then the demon crumpled under the impact, Adrian’s weight trapping it on the ground.
What happened next was kind of like IMAX-3D, with some kind of splatter technology thrown in. Jim’s roommate incapacitated the thing by hacking pieces off of it—an arm here, a leg there—and that was when the blood went flying. Acid was more like it. One drop on the back of Matthias’s hand, and he cursed at the sting, grinding it off on the dirt—
A second shadowy form jumped out from behind a tree, as if its appearance had been spawned by the trunk. Adrian was ready, however, spinning around, meeting it head-on as the first writhed on the forest floor.
This one he didn’t waste time with. Right through the head, and that seemed to be the knockout drop that was required to kill the fuckers: another earsplitting screech and then that shadow was no more, gone in a blink—
Just as Adrian turned back to the demon on the ground, two more came out from the trunk that had birthed the other one, like the conifer was just coughing the fuckers up.
Matthias didn’t hesitate. Pent-up hatred gave him superstrength as he jumped out and opened his clip, alternating between the pair, that acidic blood going flying as the demons faced off at him.
“Come and get it!” he yelled.
Adrian started cursing, but fuck that. Matthias was unleashed as he went for hand-to-hand, still pulling that trigger in a controlled manner as he rushed at his enemy.
“Take a dagger!”
The other man’s command registered through his fury, and he spared a half second to glance over his shoulder. The instant he did, one of those glass weapons came end-over-end at him, flying through the air with perfect trajectory.
Matthias snatched it midflight with his free hand, and then he was immediately in business: His instincts took over, his body responding in a coordinated rush that had the forty up and pumping to hold off the one on the left as he buried that dagger into the temple of the shadow on the right.
Good-bye, sucker.
Without losing a beat, he turned on the other and did the same, even though that acid was going everywhere, and he had a lot of s
kin exposed—and the shit hurt.
More shadows came.
An impossible-to-beat deluge—and he was out of bullets.
Matthias tossed the useless gun over his shoulder and sank down, ready for anything. Crossroads, huh? Guess this was it—and if the right decision Jim Heron had referred to was the urge to fight?
Got it.
As the nearest shadow zeroed in on him and attacked, he had a fleeting sadness that he wouldn’t see Mels again, that this was it, that he knew he wasn’t walking away from this battle.
But…if there was an afterlife in a bad way, maybe there was a Heaven, too. Maybe he was going up this time instead of down.
Maybe he could somehow get back to Mels and let her know angels existed.
Because he knew that for sure now.
She was one of them.
Out in front of the garage, Jim was invisi and waiting for the operative to show himself. The second the bastard did, he was going to swoop in and feed a gun muzzle to the motherfucker—he wasn’t taking any chances with Matthias, and shit knew he didn’t want Devina appearing from out of nowhere and “saving” his ass again.
There was enough of her in the woods, fuck them all very much.
Man, he hoped Ad was keeping it together back there.
And P.S., the fact that the minions showed up at exactly the same time the operative did didn’t bode well—and it made him worry about that reporter. Usually Devina’s good timing was bad news for him, and he didn’t think this was going to be an exception.
Where are you, he thought as he traced the tree line, watching for the inevitable peekaboo. That bullet hadn’t been discharged by a shadow; he knew that much—and no one else had a clue they were here, or had cause to show up with a lead-based welcome wagon.
Back behind the garage, the sound of screeching made him twitchy, his body ready, willing, and panting to join the fray out in the forest. But Matthias was up in that studio, and Jim wasn’t going to give this operative a chance to infiltrate and pop the bastard.
In Hell. The blond girl is there—I was with her….
Jim cracked his knuckles. His vengeance was getting harder and harder to suck up, that fault line of fury threatening to break him in ways Devina’s physical torture couldn’t get close to. The bitch was smart—killing those other women. It kept Sissy right in the forefront, loud as a fire alarm, bright as a goddamn neon sign.