by Julie Kenner
“What he’s always talked about,” I said. “That there’s still one key out there. One key that can lock the Ninth Gate shut tight and prevent the demons from coming across.”
She licked her lips, then shifted on the ground, wincing as she did so. I frowned, leaning in to look at the nasty cut on her leg. “Do you think he’s right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Hold still.” I’d sheathed my knife in the holster on my thigh, so I pulled it out and sliced the tip of my finger. Rose’s eyes went wide.
“A gift from Zane,” I said, referring to my former trainer. A long story, but because of him, my blood had the power to heal. At least, I assumed it did. I hadn’t yet successfully taken that particular skill for a test-drive on someone else.
I traced my bloody finger along the slash in Rose’s thigh, then breathed a sigh of relief when the flesh started to knit in its wake.
“Wow,” Rose said, and I had to agree. “But the key. You really think Deacon’s right?”
I didn’t know. My fear was that he had been right—but that the mysterious missing key had been found: me.
That would suck, because the idea of a third key was something that had my heart dancing in an excited little rumba rhythm. Because if there was a key, that meant that if I found it, I could pick door number three: Use the key, stop the Apocalypse. Forget sacrificing myself or putting on the black crown of demonic royalty. I’d have an easy out.
And honestly, as crazy as my life had been since I’d died, easy sounded pretty damned appealing.
“So how do we find out?”
I stood up, dusting off my jeans. “Deacon,” I said.
Her brows rose. “The same Deacon who looked like he wanted to bite off our heads?”
“That’s the one. The convergence is coming. Whatever progress he’s made looking for the key saves us time.” And besides, I wanted to see him again. Wanted to tell him I understood what he had done for me, and that the sacrifice meant more to me than I could ever possibly express. And, yeah, I wanted to try to get back the Deacon I knew. The Deacon who’d slipped inside my heart and given me the courage to keep fighting the dark.
“So, what?” Rose said. “We go to his house? Do you even know where his house is?”
“No,” I said. “But you were there. And so was—oh, shit! Rachel!”
“Huh? What about Rachel?”
“We left her at Deacon’s.”
Rachel was my sister. Or, rather, Rachel was Alice’s sister. And since the demons had sacrificed Alice so that they could shove my soul into her body and fulfill some fucked-up prophecy, that meant that I was now Alice. Or some sort of Alice-Lily hybrid.
Honestly, it’s all very confusing.
The bottom line is that before Rose, Deacon, and I had headed off to fight the big, bad demon, Deacon had tucked Rachel away safe and sound in his house. At the time, it had made sense—he’d been one of the good guys.
Now, though . . .
Now Rachel was hanging out in a house owned by a demon who’d returned to his demonic form and had hellfire for breath.
“Rachel’s in his house,” I said, spelling it out for my little sister. “She doesn’t know Deacon’s changed.”
Rose’s eyes went wide as the import of my words registered. “Oh, no.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely an oh, no situation.”
I knew there was still humanity left inside Deacon—he’d told us to run, right? But I had no idea how hard the demonic part of him was struggling to prevail. Probably pretty damn hard. After all, before he betrayed his fellow demons in an attempt to earn his way into heaven, Deacon had been among the worst of the worst. A Tri-Jal demon, tortured in the deepest, darkest depths of hell until any vestige of self had slipped away.
But he’d managed to fight. Managed to shove down the demonic part of himself. And that’s not an easy task. Believe me, I know.
Every time I kill a demon with my own blade, I not only absorb the demon’s strength; I also absorb some of its essence.
Which meant that I knew how Deacon felt with a demonic presence rising inside him, begging to get out, seizing on any opportunity to gain a toehold in the real world.
Once the demon’s out, it’s hard to shove him back into the bottle, and I was desperately afraid that was a battle that Deacon would lose. Worse, I feared that Rachel was about to come face-to-face with a Deacon-demon.
“What should we do?” Rose asked.
“Don’t you know where Deacon’s house is?” Like Rachel, Rose had once hidden in Deacon’s home, safely ensconced while he and I fought the threat on the street.
I, however, hadn’t thought to tag along when he had taken them home. I hadn’t even scribbled down a street address.
“No idea,” Rose said. “But it wasn’t too far away. And it was big. And old. Like in one of those fancy neighborhoods.”
“Would you recognize it if you saw it again?”
She shrugged, looking fourteen despite the twenty-something body. “Dunno.”
I frowned, frustrated. What was I supposed to do? Drive down every street in every nice neighborhood in the Greater Boston area? At the moment, my fantabulous Rand McNally arm was seeming like a big, useless nothing. “We need to find someone who can find people.” My arm could locate objects, but people—and demons—were beyond its capabilities.
“Like a private detective?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a psychic.”
Her brows lifted. “A psychic? Puh-lease.”
I couldn’t help it—I laughed. “We’re both running around in new bodies,” I said, counting my comments off on my fingers. “We just escaped from a demon the size of a small house. My arm can create a mystical map, then send me all the way to other side of the world in the blink of an eye. And I can steal the thoughts from your head simply by touching you and looking into your eyes. But you’re leery about a psychic?”
“Well, you know,” she said with a casual lift of her shoulder. “It just sounds so whoo-woo.”
I shook my head. Unbelievable.
“Besides,” she added. “Do you even know any psychics?”
“Remember your tattoo?” When she’d first come to stay with me, I’d wanted to mark her as Rose, primarily because at the time there was a hideous, horrible, vile demon camped out inside her body. I’d taken her to see a tattoo artist I knew, and while he did his work on Rose, I chatted up the psychic who had space in his front parlor. Madame Parrish. A woman with a lot more going on than met the eye.
Rose squinted at me, clearly confused.
“Trust me,” I said, then tilted my head toward the street. “Come on.”
“We’re walking?” Her voice rose with incredulity. “To the flats?”
I didn’t even bother looking at her. Instead, I was checking out the cars parked along the road. What I really wanted was my motorcycle, but I’d left my vintage Tiger back at my apartment.
“Oh,” Rose said, catching on. She pointed at a stylish convertible parked on the far side of the road in front of a row of high-priced condos. “How about that one?”
Tempting, but I went for an old Buick instead. Less conspicuous. Easier, more accessible wiring.
In my previous life (the one I lived as Lily Carlyle in Lily Carlyle’s body), I’d done some not-so-aboveboard things. Like, oh, stealing a few cars. And even though I’d always returned them, I’d also always felt slightly guilty about my lapses into such felonious activity. Now, though, I was grateful I’d had such a wide range of experiences.
I wasn’t wearing a watch, so I didn’t know what time it was, but no one was on the streets. Rose found a heavy rock, and I forced myself not to insist that she look the other way as I broke in and hot-wired the car. This was her life now, too. For better or for worse.
So far, I have to say, my little sister was definitely experiencing the “worse” side of the equation.
The clock on our stolen ride’s dash said that it was just af
ter 2:00 A.M., but I wasn’t worried about the late hour, as I’d caught up with Madame Parrish in the wee hours several times before. I guess it made sense, really. Psychics probably did their best business after the bars closed and everyone who hadn’t gotten lucky wanted to know when their turn was coming.
The ride to the flats was uneventful, which was great, as the possibility for havoc was endless: angry demons, pissed-off angels, the cops trying to nail me for Grand Theft Auto.
I left the Buick on a side street, then the two of us started walking the six blocks to the tattoo parlor.
“Hey,” Rose said as we passed a twenty-four-hour convenience store. “Did you see this?”
She’d come to a halt in front of a battered blue newspaper machine, and I backtracked to her side. EARTHQUAKE, blared the headline, which went on to announce that hundreds were dead and thousands injured after a 7.6 earthquake hit Shanghai.
“Holy crap,” I said. “Seven-point-six is huge.”
“I know,” Rose said, her face pale as she tilted her head to look at me. “But did you see the date?”
“Of the earthquake?” I turned back to skim the lead paragraph.
“Of the paper.”
I glanced up at the masthead, then took an involuntary step backward. “That’s not possible.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know. But either someone is pulling a really huge joke, or we skipped over a huge chunk of time when we went into the portal.”
She spoke reasonably, as if she were discussing a math proof with her geometry teacher. Apparently the idea of losing days and days didn’t bother her in the same way that going to visit a psychic did.
It bothered me, though. It bothered me a lot. Not only because it’s just downright freaky to lose time like that, but also because the convergence was coming with the next full moon. And unless I was very mistaken, that was now coming in less than a week.
“Fuck,” I said, then rummaged in the pockets of my once-pristine but now-battered red duster for some change. Naturally, I had nothing. “Quarters?”
Rose checked the pockets of her denim jacket, then checked her jeans. “Nope.” I frowned, then jerked hard on the pull-down door of the machine. The metal protested, then snapped, and the door fell open. I reached in, snagged the paper, and started walking fast down the street, Rose right beside me. “What are you looking for?”
“Weather,” I said, passing her the sections that didn’t interest me. “Sunrise, sunset, moon phases. That stuff.” I flipped pages, then finally found what I was looking for. I stopped walking long enough to skim the text, then cursed when what I read confirmed my fears. “Five days,” I said. “The next full moon is in exactly five days.”
“Five days?” Her voice rose with incredulity. “But—but—we’re supposed to have almost two weeks.”
“Not anymore,” I said grimly.
“Holy crap,” she said, and I shared the sentiment. “So, like, when exactly? Dawn? Sunset? The middle of rush hour?”
That, I thought, was a really good question. And right then, I really wished Deacon was around to help me figure out the answer.
“Clarence said the portal between us and the hell dimension is opening over Boston, and he said it would happen at the next full moon.”
“Right. I know. Do you still trust him?”
Considering that Clarence had been my frog-faced demonic handler—Penemue’s right-hand man, the demon who’d lied to me about pretty much every little thing—it was a legitimate question. “About this, yes. He didn’t have any reason to lie about time and place.”
“So? That still doesn’t tell us exactly when. Or exactly where.”
“I’m guessing moonrise,” I said. I skimmed the paper. “That’s 12:04 in the afternoon. Practically shaves a whole day off the time frame.”
“The afternoon?” Rose said, her voice rising. “How can the moon rise in the afternoon?”
“It just . . .” I waved a hand, trying to remember high school astronomy. “It just can.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “And I’ll figure out a way to double-check.”
“And where?” she asked, hurrying to catch up as I started walking again.
“Give it a rest, Rose,” I snapped, because I needed answers right then, and I didn’t have them, and that pretty much sucked. “We’ll figure it out.”
Thank goodness I no longer needed sleep. I sure as hell no longer had time for it.
Despite the late hour, the street was bright, the fluorescent and neon signs of the bodegas, cafés, porn stores, and tattoo parlors casting a synthetic glow over the grimy street. We were only about two blocks away from our destination, and I picked up the pace, anxious to arrive. I had no particular fear or concern, yet I wanted off the street. I felt edgy and anxious, like a heroin addict jonesing for a hit, and I peered into the shadows as we moved, my gaze searching for creatures that didn’t belong. Demons. Beasties I could kill to satisfy the death lust that was welling so forcefully within me.
I tried to shake off the urge, focusing instead on Madame Parrish. We were almost there, and I stepped up my pace in anticipation of sitting and talking with her. She was an odd creature who had managed to pluck some of my secrets right out of my head, yet it had never occurred to me not to trust her. That probably made me naïve, but there was something about her that reminded me of my mother. Or, at least, of a mother. It was a feeling I liked, and one that could only survive on a diet of trust and faith. Analyze the emotion, and I would find no basis, and in that fleeting moment, that sense of safety I felt in her presence would disappear forever.
I wasn’t sure what that said about her or about me. But I was certain that I needed to see her. If for no other reason than that I needed to feel the blanket of comfort settle once again around my shoulders.
As we crossed the street for the final block’s walk, a squat man in faded army fatigues fell in step beside us. “It’s coming,” he said, his soft voice contrasting his grizzled appearance.
I stopped and peered at him more closely. Rose stopped, too, and her hand pressed into my shoulder as she stood behind me. I could feel her breath on my neck and knew that she was also peering suspiciously at this stranger.
“What’s coming?” I asked, sliding my hand down to grasp the hilt of my knife. The motion pushed my duster back, revealing the thigh holster and the blade, but I didn’t care. Right then, I was more than happy to advertise the fact that I was armed, and then some.
His mouth stretched into a wide, mirthless grin. “The end,” he said, tapping my paper. “Earthquakes. Hunger. Devastation. It begins,” he said. “It has begun.” I started walking again, but he fell into step beside us. “Are you ready?” he asked. “Are you ready for the end times? Repent,” he said, finally stopping as we picked up speed. “Repent, repent, repent.”
I don’t know why he creeped me out so much—after all, he was right. But he did, and by the time we reached the middle of the block, my heart was pounding in my chest, and Rose’s hand was clutched tight in mine.
“He’s right, isn’t he?” Rose said. “It’s coming.”
I tilted my head to the side, cracking my neck. “Not if I can help it.”
She stayed silent, and I turned sideways, surprised to find her eyes welling with tears. “If we don’t find the third key . . .” she said, then trailed off, and I knew she was remembering what the archangel Gabriel said about how my blood and my body could stop this nightmare from happening. For everyone, that is, except me.
“Rose?”
She sniffed, then spoke to the sidewalk as she tugged me to a stop beside her. “I don’t want you to leave me.”
“I don’t either,” I said. “We’ll find it.”
She lifted her head, and I saw that her eyes were rimmed in red. “What if we don’t?”
I closed my eyes and drew in a breath. She hadn’t asked, but I heard the underlying questio
n: Will you do it? Will you die to save us?
I didn’t answer. How could I when I didn’t know what to say? I’d done all this stuff to save my sister, and unless I found that third key or plunked on the demon-queen hat, she wouldn’t be truly safe unless I burned in hell forever. I’d come so far, and yet I wasn’t sure I could take that final step. Because I knew what it meant—I’d seen it through Penemue’s eyes. I’d felt it. And that reality had been a billion times worse than even my most vivid nightmares of hell.
“I’m scared, Lily,” she said, voicing my thoughts.
“Me, too.” I reached out and squeezed her hand. I’d sacrificed so much already to keep Rose safe, and I’d done it without fear or remorse. I’d even gone out to kill a man, knowing I was committing a most grievous sin and might not survive the effort.
I’d been prepared to burn in hell for my actions, but to be truly honest, I’m not so sure I’d believed in either heaven or hell back then. Just living and dead. And if I was dead, then it was over. Blackness. Nothingness. And although the idea of the dark had terrified me as a child, when you got right down to it, how scary could nothing be?
But I finally understood. Hell existed, all right. It was pain and torment and maddening torture. It was childhood nightmares on crack and torture porn movies come to life. It was horror beyond imagining.
Even for Rose, I wasn’t sure I could make the sacrifice. Not after what I’d seen, what I’d felt.
I didn’t want to have to acknowledge my own weakness, much less try to conquer it, yet time was counting down. I had five days left. Five days to find another way.
Five measly days to find Deacon and the key that he’d so firmly believed existed.
The door to the tattoo parlor stood propped open by an old-fashioned canister-style ashtray that had either been used a lot that night or never emptied. The handwritten Madame Parrish, Psychic sign was propped in the window, and I released a small sigh of relief. Finally, something was going right.
We stepped through the door to find the place going strong, despite the late hour. At least a half dozen people were hanging out in the lobby paging through John’s sample books, looking for the perfect logo with which to annotate their bodies.