Brynna scowled and bent over him, but it was a useless gesture. He’d been gone and sent to glory in the millisecond between when the bullet had touched his left temple and slammed against the inside of his skull on the right. If she touched him, she might be able to see at least a hint of the duty his destiny had demanded, but why bother? Whatever task had been assigned to this gentle and generous nephilim soul would never be completed. Now he was just an empty husk ready to be returned to the dust of the earth. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” she murmured.
Brynna straightened, then realized someone was screaming. It was an older man in a white coat behind the counter at the end of the aisle, and the only reason she even noticed was because it was so odd to her senses that there was just one man screaming instead of thousands. He was frozen in place, his sight locked on her as his mouth gaped and howled, and he gave no sign of stopping anytime soon. She sent him a puzzled look, then it hit her that this must be a terrible shock—most humans simply weren’t used to blood and death on the same scale she was.
As if to underscore that, something red and moist dribbled down Brynna’s forehead and slid across the bridge of her nose. When she reached to flick at it, her fingers came away washed in the familiar hue of scarlet. Her hair and face were splattered with Toby’s blood. Nothing new historically, but it was really kind of admirable, the way humans had come up with so many deadly methods of killing one another. Twenty thousand years ago she never would have thought them capable of much more than desperate hunting with rudimentary tools, yet look at them now.
Brynna sighed and automatically tuned out the old man’s screeching as she turned away from the nephilim’s corpse. There was nothing to be done for Toby now, and she didn’t have currency or anything else that seemed likely to be accepted in trade for the medicine the dead EMT had recommended. She had an idea that Toby’s death was going to throw off the normal rhythm of things, anyway. From where she stood, Brynna could see the front window of the drugstore, or what had been the window before it, too, had been shattered by the same bullet that had killed her nephilim. Glass fragments sparkled in the sun where they weren’t shadowed by the flapping remains of the advertising posters that had been taped to the inside surface. She glanced back at Toby one more time before starting toward the door. As she did, her gaze skimmed across the people gathering on the sidewalk; she stopped short as her eyes locked with those of a single young man.
Brown hair cut very short, hazel eyes. Tall and overly thin, all arms and legs underneath a hip-length denim jacket that was too heavy for the hot afternoon and bulky along one side—
The escalating sound of a siren cut through the jabber of conversation outside. The man jerked his gaze away from Brynna’s, then backed up and disappeared behind the gawkers crowding up to the broken window.
Brynna stared at the space where he’d been, considering, before she quickly left the drugstore. There was no reason to stay here, and she certainly didn’t want to be involved in any police investigation. The man outside, though, he was another story; there was something about him that intrigued her. Was he also a nephilim? Nephilim weren’t common but they also weren’t rare; still, to see one at the moment of another’s death … that was certainly on the side of odd.
The people standing on the sidewalk stepped aside to let her pass, and it took Brynna a couple of seconds to figure out why—she was bloody, her face and shoulders splattered with the last moments of Toby’s earthly life. With her history, it was ridiculously easy for her not to notice something like this; the sensation, the sticky, heavy copper scent, the warmth—it was all just one more part of a bigger normalcy. But that had to change if she was going to blend into this world. Judging from the appalled expressions of the onlookers and the way they backstepped, she really needed to work harder on remembering her surroundings. It was damned ironic—all the mayhem, murder, and devastation that mankind had wrought throughout the ages, yet now people in some of the most densely populated areas on the globe couldn’t seem to stomach the sight of blood. How had the human race ever gotten through the Dark Ages? The Inquisition? The countless, never-ending wars they waged upon one another?
There wasn’t any place she could wash as she had in the park, so the best Brynna could do was stay close to the buildings and duck her head when someone came toward her on the sidewalk. She didn’t miss that she was essentially skulking in broad daylight, and she hated having to do that. Skulking reminded her of the alley demons from Below, hideously filthy creatures that looked like a cross between hyenas and Komodo dragons. They prowled the blood-soaked passageways of the undercities and preyed on fleeing souls, darting forward to snap and drag a fugitive into the darkest shadows. There they chewed on the screaming victim until nothing remained but ragged, twitching puddles of ripped and half-digested soul-flesh. When the soul finally died, they moved onto the next and left the ruined spirit to disintegrate and re-form back at the original location it had so stupidly thought it had escaped. Hell was nothing if not repetitious.
Finally Brynna found a service station with outside restrooms. She waited, and when an older man came out of one door, she ducked inside; the sarcastic comment he started to utter died in his throat at the sight of her blood-smeared cheeks.
With her face and hands cleaned a few minutes later, Brynna came out and studied her surroundings. There was a big yellow Shell symbol above her, and on the corner was a dual street sign that read HALSTED on one side and WRIGHTWOOD on the other. The air was heavy with the smell of gasoline, but Brynna barely noticed. She’d smelled a lot worse.
The slight breeze tingled the places on her face that were still wet and Brynna let herself soak in the feeling for a few seconds. But only that—she wasn’t here, standing on this particular corner in the city, by happenstance; even as she’d tried to make herself as invisible as possible, she’d been tracking the man she’d seen staring at her through the drugstore’s broken window. There wasn’t much to go on but the slightest hint of his body odor; by itself it wouldn’t have been enough—there were too many other scents in the city that smothered it. But there was something unnatural mixed with it, something much stronger and heavier and impossible to miss.
Gunpowder.
Feeling less conspicuous now that she’d been able to clean up, Brynna lifted her head to the sunshine as she turned onto Wrightwood and followed the acrid scent west. She’d only gone two blocks before her sharp sense of smell made her turn north onto a heavily tree-lined street called Mildred Avenue.
The thick canopy of leaves from hundred-year-old oaks made the air cooler and dimmer; instead of heavy summer sunshine, the sidewalks and buildings were mottled with thousands of sunlit circles that moved and danced as the breeze cut through the leaf-laden branches. It gave the old apartment buildings a softer, more appealing look than they would have normally had. On an overcast day, Brynna knew they would appear as they really were: worn and overused brick and crumbling mortar fronted by cracked sidewalks and lawns dotted with weeds. Here and there were halfhearted splashes of color, geraniums, petunias, and marigolds planted along borders that weren’t particularly straight. Right now there wasn’t much going on and the street was devoid of people. That made it easy for Brynna to follow the stink of gunpowder down a shadowed walkway to where it ended at the glass-fronted door of an apartment building.
Brynna stood there for a moment, then tried the door. It was locked, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Humans always thought they could keep out their version of the Big Bad with things like flimsy metal fastenings. It was a useless effort, but she wasn’t here to be the evil anymore, was she?
She was pretty sure her target was a nephilim—he’d paused at the door and she was almost positive an ocean scent lingered beneath the caustic smell of gunpowder. There were names and doorbells along one side, but unless he made a habit of pushing his own bell, she had no way of sensing which one belonged to him. It was a big building, at least thirty-six units, bu
t once she was inside, it would be easy to find the door to his apartment.
Brynna tried the door again. The handle was nothing but decoration; the lock mechanism above was what kept it closed. To force it, she’d only have to break the jamb on the side.
“What are you doing down there?”
A sudden gravelly voice somewhere above her head made Brynna jump. She backed away from the door and looked up to where a wrinkled old woman with fuzzy, iron-colored hair was glaring down at her from two stories above. “This is a Neighborhood Watch area, missy, and you’d better believe I watch it all the time.” The woman’s voice climbed higher and took on a threatening tone as she squinted at Brynna. “Never seen you here before.”
“I was looking for a friend of mine,” Brynna explained.
“Then ring the damned doorbell instead of hanging around like a hoodlum!”
“I don’t know his last name,” Brynna said without thinking.
“Then you’re not much of a friend,” the woman snapped back. “You get out of here or I’m calling the police. This is a Neighborhood Watch area!”
“I heard you the first time,” Brynna said. She gave the door a final look, then shrugged. If the murderer who’d gone into this building really was a nephilim, he’d been corrupted, led astray from the path God had set out for him. It was unlikely Brynna would do herself any good by finding him anyway. Let the humans deal with the killer in their midst. She wanted nothing more than to forget he existed.
“I’m warning you!” the elderly woman screeched.
Brynna turned to follow the sidewalk back to the street. “You have a nice day, ma’am,” she said as sweetly as she could. The woman muttered something cantankerous in return as Brynna touched her forehead in a gesture of farewell. A moment later the crone gasped and backed away from her concrete windowsill.
Brynna grinned darkly. Stone was always so good at soaking up heat. Maybe that would keep the old bat away from her Neighborhood Watch area for a while so her fellow tenants could go in and out in peace.
Two
Spending her first night in human form was definitely a learning experience for Brynna. It might have gone better except for the burn on her arm; the wound was healing rapidly, more so than any normal person’s would have, but it still hurt. The swift healing process also had a downside: the growing skin itched ferociously, yet if Brynna gave it the smallest rub, the itch morphed into a deep, savage sting.
She didn’t notice the summer night’s cooler temperatures; her heat came from within, stored from millennia spent in Hell. Had it been winter, Brynna could have slept in the snow and her body temperature would have melted a circle around her. But the weather wasn’t the problem—she had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep, nowhere safe to be. Still out there somewhere was the Hunter that had tried to capture her earlier, and although she might have a demon’s soul, this was a human body, more or less, and it had human requirements. It screamed for things like food, rest, and bodily comfort.
Tomorrow, she decided, she would figure out how to get some money and go back to that drugstore for some of the ointment the dead nephilim had recommended. She could ignore the feeling of hunger in her belly, but this body had been injured and overtaxed. It required rest to heal, so she couldn’t put off the need to sleep. When Brynna thought back, today’s events didn’t seem all that taxing; on the other hand, it wasn’t every day that a high-level demon escaped from Lucifer’s Kingdom and re-formed herself on earth as a human woman.
She was tired.
Brynna had endured a lot in Hell, and although a soft bed with silk sheets would have been nice, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the dark niche she found between a Dumpster and the back wall of a dinky neighborhood restaurant. She settled herself beneath the dubious cover of a torn, dirty cardboard box and thought wearily about Toby, the dead nephilim. She didn’t know if it had been the sight of the horror on the faces of the onlookers outside the drugstore’s broken window or the memory of his blood trickling down her sun-warmed cheeks, but as her eyelids fluttered closed, all Brynna could think about was that it was a shame Toby’s already short human life had been cut even shorter.
When she finally slept, Brynna dreamed of scarlet lakes of fire beneath the coolness of a glowing and maddeningly out-of-reach blue sky.
BRYNNA HAD BEEN HALF expecting to find the Walgreens closed the next morning, but although the window was boarded up, it was open by the time she wandered over at a little past nine o’clock. She still didn’t have any money, but that didn’t stop her from going inside and heading to the aisle where the burn medicine was. The floor had been cleaned but her overly sensitive nose could still pick up the scent of blood, and she could see it, too. Nothing man-made would erase the blood shadow where Toby’s life had leaked onto the floor. Humans couldn’t see it, but her kind could pick it up in an instant.
Brynna glanced over at the prescription counter and saw the same old man who’d been there yesterday; he recognized her and his eyes widened, but she paid no attention to him as he turned and pressed a telephone against his ear. What was it Toby had recommended? Gauze and burn salve. Her gaze skimmed the shelves until she found the stuff he’d pointed to, but she was no longer sure she wanted it. Her arm stung, yes, but the pain had diminished to the point where it was bearable and would probably be gone by tomorrow … well, provided that damned Hunter didn’t find her and toss another fireball or ten her way.
She wasted another twenty minutes browsing around the aisles, fascinated at the variety of goods, the things humans had come up with. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d physically been on earth—perhaps it had been in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Medicine, electricity, flying … so many things had grown out of what she and her angelic brethren had believed were little more than dull-minded creatures who might look like their Creator but would never accomplish more than warfare-based survival. They—
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
Brynna looked up from her study of something called a giant bone sponge in the auto accessory department. It looked nothing like a bone and it certainly wasn’t a giant anything, so she was trying to wrap her brain around why it was called that.
“Ma’am,” the man standing in front of her said again.
“Yes?” He was a nice enough looking man but ordinary, not nephilim. At six feet tall, with blue eyes, pale skin, and slightly shaggy brown hair, he reminded her vaguely—very vaguely—of the ancient images of an angel. Well, except for the round glasses (another incredible thing man had invented) and the scruff growing on his cheeks and chin—angels never had to shave.
He took something out of his jacket pocket and offered it to her, but when Brynna went to take it, he pulled it just out of reach. All she could do was look at it. It was a piece of metal in the shape of a star, with numbers on it and the words CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT and DETECTIVE. Ah, a policeman.
“I’m Detective Redmond. I need to ask you a few questions.” Brynna lifted one eyebrow, but he didn’t wait for permission. “Yesterday a man named Tobias Gallagher was shot and killed in this store.” His unwavering gaze was fixed on her. “You were talking to him when he died.”
Tobias Gallagher—Toby. Of course. “Yes.”
“What were you talking about?”
“Burn medicine,” she replied without hesitation. She nodded toward her arm.
“Uh-huh.” He stared at her and frowned slightly. “And when he was shot right in front of you, what did you do?”
“I left.” Despite an instant effort to hide it, she still caught his expression of surprise. She added, “Other than that conversation, I didn’t know him. So …”
“So you just left.” He pulled a small notebook out of another pocket. “Did it ever occur to you, Miss—”
“Brynna,” she said.
“Okay, Brynna. Did it ever occur to you that you were just leaving a crime scene?”
Crime scene? She hadn’t thought about that. She’d seen and
grown used to countless instances of death in her existence, so Toby’s death was just that to her: a death. But to these humans, having one of their own die like that was something else entirely. It was a murder. And for that they had police, and laws, and repercussions. Well, none of that concerned her—she hadn’t killed the nephilim. But he was waiting for her to answer his question. “No,” she said. “It didn’t.”
“Right.” He ran a hand over his hair. “I’m going to need you to come down to the station with me.”
“The station?”
“Yes, ma’am. The police station.”
Brynna considered this, then shook her head. No, she didn’t want to go anyplace with this man. It was too dangerous—if a Hunter caught up with her, she might not be able to escape in time. “No, I don’t want to do that.”
Standing not far from the police detective was another man. This one was shorter and darker-skinned. His skin tone and dark eyes made Brynna think of the exotic men in ancient Persia, back when Alexander the Great had defeated the Persian Empire. He stepped behind Brynna and stopped, then turned to look at Redmond.
“It’s not a request,” Detective Redmond replied. He put a hand on her wrist and she slapped it away instinctively. He yelped in surprise and stumbled backward—she’d forgotten her more-than-human strength. Even so, she raised her hand to strike him again if he dared to touch her once more. Suddenly there was an ominous, metallic-sounding click behind her right ear.
“Please do not move,” said a soft, thickly accented voice, “or I will be forced to shoot you. You are under arrest.”
Brynna opened her mouth to argue, then shut it. There were too many people around for a Hunter to take advantage of her unfortunate situation, and while her demon essence might go a long way toward strengthening this human female form, it was still little beyond a fragile shell. The gun at her head also brought back the unpleasant memory of the way Toby’s skull had pushed outward when the killer’s bullet had gone into his brain.
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