Brynna shook her head and lowered herself back onto the chair. “The witch doctor was nothing but an evil human. It would take a whole lot more than a little fire to get rid of Lahash. He’s a demon. A Searcher.”
Redmond drummed his fingers on the table. “A Searcher, like Gavino. So if I’ve got this right, you’re telling me that Cho Kim is a nephilim.”
“No,” Brynna said. “She’s not. Which is why I didn’t mention him—I couldn’t figure out why he was there in the first place, what he would want with a nobody human girl. Oh, and there’s the small fact that he’s unbelievably dangerous.”
The detective squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “So this Lahash demon is somehow tied to this list, which then ties him to the serial murderer and to Mireva—”
“And to Gavino,” Brynna finished for him. “Don’t you see? They’re working together.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Yes, it would,” Brynna insisted. “This isn’t human business, Eran. Demons don’t collaborate. They do for themselves and that’s all. This is absolutely unheard-of, and I can’t think of anything short of the actual apocalypse that could be worse. If I were you, I’d be terrified.”
“If you say so,” Eran said. “But right now I’m still trying to figure out how Lahash got out of the basement without anyone but you knowing he was there.”
Brynna sighed impatiently. “He just did, that’s all. You couldn’t see him because he didn’t want to be seen.” She paused. “Had there not been so much going on—all the noise and people running around—I really think you would have felt him, though. He’s pure, perfect evil.”
“Unlike you.”
Brynna looked away, trying not to be stung by the sarcasm. “I don’t know what I am,” she said. “I’m just … trying to change.”
“Right.” Redmond looked around the room, but she didn’t think he was really seeing anything. “And how exactly is it that he can not be seen? Last I heard, invisibility wasn’t an option.”
“He’s a demon, Eran. He has demon abilities.”
“As do you … supposedly.”
“We each can do what we can do. That’s the only way to explain it. Lahash may look human but that’s just a façade at best, a game that he likes playing because he thinks human clothes are amusing. Beneath the surface, he’s absolute demon and he has full access to his demon abilities.” Brynna had slipped into a pair of denim jeans before going up to the roof to water Mireva’s plants, and now she ran her hands lightly across the tight fabric encasing her thighs. “For him, the human form is just a sort of lightweight cloak. He can toss it off at any time. For me, it’s fully shifting my form that enables me to hide from my own kind, at least until they get up close. But this shape limits me. In my real one … well, let’s just say there’s a lot about me that you’d find really surprising.”
“Can you get in touch with this Lahash?” Redmond said, changing the topic. “Maybe he knows where the killer is.”
“Lahash will never cooperate,” Brynna said. “But it doesn’t matter. I know where the killer lives.”
“You know where he lives?” Redmond’s voice was incredulous. His face went white with shock and he looked like he was going to fall off his chair. “Good God, Brynna—all this time and you didn’t tell me? People have died!”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it. Brynna spread her hands, trying to find a way to make him understand. “Don’t you see? I’ve never had to think about stuff like this before. About people and how they feel, about how short your lives are. I’m still … I don’t know. Learning, I guess.”
“Whatever you want to call it,” Redmond growled as he dragged a notebook out of his back pocket. “I call it withholding evidence.” His movements were jerky, his expression furious. “What’s the address?”
Brynna’s eyes widened. “I don’t have any idea.” She stood. “But I can take you right to his door.”
Fifteen
He felt calmer now.
Klesowitch had been driving all day. Not going anywhere in particular, just kind of wandering around. He’d been scheduled to start work at three o’clock, but he’d called and said he was going to be late. He’d made up an excuse—he couldn’t remember what—and the day manager had accepted it. It was the second time this week he’d called in late, but at least he hadn’t told his manager that he wasn’t coming in at all. He’d taken sick days once early last week and once the week before that, both times that he’d had to do the Holy Man’s assignments. Did he even have any medical time left? He’d been saying he had a medical issue, knowing that the manager wouldn’t feel comfortable questioning on it—privacy laws and all that. Besides, the woman really didn’t want to know; she didn’t care about Michael Klesowitch other than trying to make the personnel schedule work.
Klesowitch gritted his teeth. He needed to be tougher, damn it, and not think about these problems. He needed to do his duty and walk away proud. A righteous rock in the hand of the Lord.
But he wasn’t, oh no. He was weak, and he was uncertain. Instead of getting stronger as time went by, he was getting more and more hesitant, cowardly. He had to stop his wavering right now, pull himself up by the proverbial bootstraps, and get the damned job done. Not many people were chosen for this kind of thing, so he couldn’t take the chance of failing. It just wasn’t an option.
And see—here was the proof. All this time that he’d thought he was just driving aimlessly while thinking, and yet his car, an aging Toyota Corolla, had ended up right in front of that high school girl’s building again. Yeah, there was still that … feeling about it, but it wasn’t so bad now. He had beat it. Maybe it had never been there in the first place, a case of the “vapors,” as his mother would have called it. Nervousness for no reason, or she’d sometimes claimed it was “sad memories.” She used to have those sad memories every now and then and dose herself up good with Librium. He’d always wondered if it had something to do with the father he’d never known, a man his mother had confessed had come into her life and seduced her, then disappeared without so much as leaving behind a photograph, much less a last name. Had he inherited his mother’s anxiety problems? It wasn’t impossible.
Nothing was impossible.
Klesowitch pushed the thoughts of his mother from his mind and worked his car into a parking spot at the end of the main walkway to the door of the girl’s building. It was tight, and he would have preferred something bigger, like a bus stop, but it was the only thing with a solid line of sight, an absolute necessity. He’d have to stay in the car and wait it out—he couldn’t very well just stand in front of the building on the empty sidewalk with his pistol hidden under his coat. He’d look like some kind of pedophile.
What time was it? God, it was like a blast furnace in the car, with the sun searing through the windshield. Klesowitch had no choice but to roll down the windows—it was that or suffocate. He pulled a hand across his forehead and eyes and his fingers came away dripping with sweat. It crawled into the corners of his eyes and stung, making him squint. Did people really leave animals and kids locked inside their cars in the summer? It was unthinkable. He struggled out of his soaked denim jacket and threw it on the passenger floor. For a few minutes he felt a bit cooler, then the sauna effect began to build again. He couldn’t do this, the heat was killing him. He’d have to come back in the morning, try again in the tolerable morning hours before the temperatures rose—
There.
Klesowitch jerked upright, the summer heat forgotten as he watched a city bus swerve to the curb. The vehicle’s air brakes hissed as it stopped, and when it pulled away, the girl was standing on the sidewalk. Despite the oversized backpack she was hauling around, the teen stood tall and beautiful. What a difference from what Klesowitch had been expecting—the crappy printed image the Holy Man had given him might as well have been a line drawing on newsprint. Everything was incongruous. The Holy Man had insisted that no matter how young she
was, she was evil and despicable, just like the others, and that horrible things would happen if Klesowitch didn’t eliminate her. But in the here and now … it was so off. It was seeming more and more wrong every time he had to do one of these tasks. The sun was shining, it was a hot summer day—even the birds were singing. How was he supposed to believe that this sparkling young woman, this kid, was malevolent?
“Faith,” Michael mumbled. “That’s how.”
He set his jaw and tried to bring the pistol up, but the barrel caught beneath the steering wheel in the cramped area of the driver’s seat. He yanked it free so brutally that he smacked the muzzle against the rearview mirror hard enough to actually crack it. It made a loud enough sound so that the girl glanced in his direction as she walked past his car and turned down the sidewalk toward her building. His grip was slick with sweat and the gun slid out of his flailing fingers and thunked to the dirty floormat. Klesowitch grabbed for it and accidentally kicked it halfway under the driver’s seat.
“Wait—hey, girl!” Michael called out. He was panicking now, overreacting in his effort to keep her in his sights until he could get the gun up and get off a good shot. Damn it all, he couldn’t quite get hold of the weapon. “I want to talk to you!”
The teenager was halfway to the door now, moving with quick, long-legged strides. She paused and looked back, then frowned. For an instant, Klesowitch imagined what she saw—a crazed-looking older guy with a sweating red face making frantic, jerky movements out of sight in his car. He felt suddenly deeply ashamed at what she must think, and that in itself made him think he was going utterly insane. How could he be afraid she might think he was some kind of pedophile but still believe it was all right to murder her in cold blood?
For a second his gaze locked with hers, then his hand brushed against the barrel of his pistol.
She ran.
“Damn it!” Klesowitch screamed. His fingers spasmed, and instead of closing around the pistol’s handle he accidentally pushed it away. He twisted and forced his body sideways under the steering wheel, slapping his hand wildly beneath the seat. There—finally, he had it.
When he clawed his way upright, the girl was already shoving her key into the lock; like his, her movements were frantic and clumsy. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him as he lunged across the driver’s seat; she tried again, bending over as she struggled to get the key to go in.
Klesowitch grinned. It was a statistical fact that people under high stress lost motor control—they fell when they ran, they couldn’t remember PIN numbers when a kidnapper wanted money, they dropped keys or, like the panicking girl in his sights, just couldn’t get the key in the lock. Hadn’t he just done the same thing with his pistol?
He took a deep, calming breath, then raised the Type 64 and fired.
REDMOND STILL WASN’T SPEAKING to her as they pushed through the hallway door and stepped into the foyer where the mailboxes were. His anger was almost palpable in the hot air, unseen but unpleasant; there was little she could do about it, but at least she could atone, to a point, by taking him to the nephilim killer’s apartment. In her ongoing quest to find acceptance as a twenty-first-century woman, perhaps she should stop thinking of the man like that and put it more in human terms: humans did not believe in nephilim, hence the shooter was a serial killer. If she referred to him as Redmond did, it might make conversations between them go a little smoother. It was worth a try, anyway.
There was a shadow on the other side of the full-length frosted panel on the outside door, and Brynna instantly recognized it as Mireva’s. The girl was hunched over and doing something to the lock, or the door handle … something. It sounded like she was clawing at it.
Something was wrong. In the short time it took Brynna to cross the foyer, the teenager’s shadow half turned away from the door, then came back to it. Brynna’s hand was on the handle when for no apparent reason, Mireva suddenly slammed into the glass face-first.
“What the hell?” she heard Redmond shout, but she was already pulling on the handle. It was stuck—Mireva had managed to get her key in the old-fashioned lock but she hadn’t had time to turn it; now the tumblers were locked in place around her key.
Mireva cried out and started to slide down the glass, and Brynna could see her trying to pull herself upright. She had no idea what was happening, but the teenager was trapped. “Screw this,” Brynna snarled. At the far right corner of the thick window, an inch-long crack had appeared; the glass had cracked when Mireva smacked into it. At least it’s away from her face, Brynna thought, and rammed her fist against it.
Redmond shouted something but Brynna couldn’t hear him over the sound of shattering glass. Mireva tilted inward, flailing her arms as her shins caught on the bottom sill; Brynna reached out with both hands and grabbed the backpack straps running over Mireva’s shoulders, then hauled her bodily through the window. Mireva gasped as the jagged edges of glass bit into her skin but she didn’t fight. A sound cut through the air, strangely soft but compelling, and Mireva was thrust forward into Brynna’s arms. Brynna held her balance—just barely—as the wheels of her memory spun and gave her information. Yes, she had heard that noise before, a split second before Tobias Gallagher had been shot in the head right in front of her.
The nephilim killer!
Redmond was already shoving his way past Brynna and Mireva. The killer wasn’t finished—he had to be right outside, taking aim, and as long as he could see Mireva and there was a chance he could shoot her, he would keep trying. The three of them were crammed into this tiny foyer and the detective was headed right into the line of fire.
Brynna shoved Mireva against the back wall and lunged in front of Redmond.
“Brynna, get out of my way!” He tried to untangle himself from her, but she had him by the upper arms and wouldn’t let go. “What are you doing?”
That sound again, twice, and each time like a knife splitting the air with cosmic speed. The second one Brynna felt at the same time she heard it, and she understood why Mireva had been tossed against the door like a child’s ball. The impact spun her at the same time it knocked her backward. She fell against Mireva and the two of them went down at the same time Brynna heard Redmond shout, “Shooter! Shooter!” This time she couldn’t stop him as he charged outside, scrambling through the remains of the window with his own gun drawn. Brynna registered a new sound—
crack
—as Redmond fired, then she heard a revving engine and a series of fast noises, metal crashing against metal. Redmond bellowed from outside and the metallic sound came again, followed by tires squealing and a straining engine. Another three seconds and even that was gone, and the only thing left was the ringing in her ears, echoes of the shot Redmond had fired.
“Brynna!” Redmond was back, climbing through the window opening. She heard shouts from the hallway, tenants yelling about gunshots and demanding to know what was going on. Mireva was trapped beneath Brynna’s weight, shaking and crying silently. “Are you all right? Crap, you’re hit!”
Again? This was really getting old. Brynna shook her head to clear it, then pushed herself up. Pain, like someone had pressed a hot branding iron against her skin, went through her left arm, just above the elbow. When she looked at it, blood welled from a single hole with a dark, scarlet center.
“Just grazed,” she said, ignoring Redmond’s knowing gaze. “Come on, Mireva. He’s gone now. Let’s get you inside.”
Before Brynna had finished her sentence, the inside foyer door burst open, revealing a crowd of tenants beyond. Mireva’s mother pushed to the front, her face rigid with shock and fear. Brynna wanted to go after the nephilim killer, but she had to make herself wait and let things play out. Everyone was talking at once, with Redmond on his cell phone and Abrienda gathering up her daughter while half a dozen others swarmed around the four of them like ants taking care of their hill. Someone pressed a towel against Brynna’s arm and she accepted it, then shook her head when Redmond mouthed, “Ambulance?�
�� It hurt—this third time wasn’t any easier than the first two—but at least this time she could take care of it in the privacy of her apartment. After that, she was going to the nephilim killer’s building.
And with or without Redmond’s approval, she was going to kill him.
Sixteen
“You shouldn’t be out,” Redmond said for the second time as he braked for a stoplight. “You need time to heal.” He sent Brynna a sideways glance when she didn’t answer, but he couldn’t tell if she was focused on the street signs or ignoring him. He wanted to repeat himself, but he knew it would do no good; she’d just say she’d spent the morning doing just that and now she was ready to go. She was such a strange and independent woman. If she was a woman at all.
I’m not human …
He wanted to say that her words came back to him at odd times, but that wasn’t true. They came back at just the right times, like late yesterday afternoon, after all the chaos had died down and the beat cops and the neighbors and the relatives had finally gone away and he and Brynna could retreat to her apartment.
They’d come back when, for the third time, he’d watched Brynna gouge a bullet out of her own flesh. At least this time she’d used a clean knife, even if she had taken it from a kitchen drawer and pushed it into her arm before he could do something as silly and human as sterilize the damned thing. She’d waved away his protests, and what could he say when, twelve hours later, her wound was clean and closed, if a little on the side of raw?
“Earth to Brynna. Anyone home?” She hadn’t said anything for almost the entire trip. They were on Halsted and getting close to Wrightwood; a left turn, then a quick right onto Mildred, and she’d finally have to start talking because she didn’t know the street number of the serial killer’s apartment building. “Come on,” he said. He knew he sounded exasperated, but he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t over his fury about her not telling him about Klesowitch, and this was just making him more frustrated. “What’s going on in your head?”
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