by Debra Dunbar
Gregory’s eyes narrowed. He might love me, but that love didn’t blind him to my sneaky demon ways. “Those demons still need to abide by the behavior restrictions of their immunity. Those demons in your household, or those who have been specifically chosen by an angel to do this work are eligible. Irix is the only exception.”
“Those angels who choose a demon are responsible for their demon partner’s behavior.” There was no way I was going to be on the hook for all those four-nine-five reports. No stinking way.
That got a brief smile from the angel. “You know, Cockroach, this means their angel partners will be in charge of delivering justice if the demon violates the terms of their immunity.”
Shit. I quickly weighed the appeal of potentially fucking an angel over the significant chance that one would lop off a demon’s head for jaywalking. We liked to live dangerously, and I didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count the demons that would jump at this opportunity, even with the risks. “Done.”
Gregory nodded. “We’ll need demons with the ability to sense these gateways from as far away as possible. This is going to take long enough to resolve without us having to resort to a grid search pattern all over the planet.”
I nodded, thinking. “And demons with aquatic forms as well as those with the ability to manifest wings. I’m doubting these gateways are all on land if it turns out these are the old passages and not ones Orias has opened.”
“True. And if that’s the case, demons who are comfortable with underground work will also be needed.”
It all hit me. I felt like an iceberg flew out of the ocean and crushed me. Elves joining forces and plotting. Starving humans in Hel. Amber’s bargain. Nyalla’s suicidal career choice. This damned gem of Gareth’s. Nephilim and werewolves. Humans with shitty credit. And now I needed to find appropriately skilled demons to help close gateways. I wanted to run away, to blindly transport myself to some podunk town in a backwater country and hide. Fuck this. I wasn’t even a thousand years old. I should be running around without a care in the world, not shouldering the whole damned thing. Fuck this. Fuck the sword, the title, the feathery wings. Fuck it all.
Arms tightened around me, and my nose crushed against a soft polo shirt on a hard chest. “How do you do this?” I mumbled into the shirt. “Billions of years with everybody wanting a piece of you right here, right now. How do you manage?”
Because I needed to manage. I couldn’t run away. The things I’d be leaving behind included those who made my life worth living. Escape was a pleasant fantasy, but I knew it was only a fantasy. This was my life. It wasn’t the sword’s fault. I had these responsibilities because with each choice I’d made, my feet led me down this path. There was no going back now.
“There is a certain satisfaction to facing difficult challenges. Even when I fail, recovering from that failure and correcting my missteps is cause for pride.” I heard the smile in his voice. “You remember pride, little Cockroach? The most important sin of all? The pinnacle of achievement for every demon?”
I laughed and pulled back to see his face. He had such a long view on situations. Failure could always be corrected when one had billions of years to turn the tide.
“Get that angel of yours to sweet talk Dar into this job. He’s good. Then as soon as I can get back to Hel, I’ll scrounge up some more demons.”
“I’ll do that. It’s going to take me a while to get some angel volunteers for this.”
“Yeah, well, Gabe is just going to have to suck it up and deal.” I looked down at the dead drop bear. “This guy doesn’t have an insulating layer of fat below the skin like polar bears. With nowhere to shelter, I’m guessing this thing came through a gate within a mile of here.”
I reached out my awareness, searching for any sign of a wild gate. It had to be large enough for this thing to get through, yet small enough that it couldn’t find its way back. And fairly close. The drop bear looked just like a koala. They did walk on the ground but weren’t known for the ability to make long treks.
There. About three-hundred yards to the west was a rift that seemed to pulse in the air. I headed toward it, ignoring the swirling snow and bitter cold. Gregory followed, stopping beside me as I stared at the wild gate. No wonder the drop bear hadn’t returned. The gate was six feet in the air. With no tree to climb and a crappy vertical jump, he hadn’t been able to reach it.
“How do we do this?” I wasn’t sure how to communicate to Gregory where the gate was for him to close it. And I really didn’t want to touch the thing.
“You touch it.”
Damn it all to hell. Figures. I had no idea where drop bears normally lived and honestly didn’t want to find out. Cuddly beasts that launched on their prey from out of trees then shredded them with fangs sounded like a whole lot of fun as long as I could guarantee I wasn’t the prey.
“Then you activate it, as you would any other gate,” he continued.
Huh. Wild gates didn’t need activation. They were doorways without doors, so easy to walk, or fall, through. I had no idea what sort of gateways the Veil created. Maybe that was one way we could determine what was causing these passageways to appear.
“When you do that, I’ll be able to see your energy in the outline of the gate, and I can close it.”
I shrugged. Sounded easy enough. Walking over, I stretched up and rested my hand against the bottom portion of the gate, hoping to hell nothing tried to bite my fingers off. Energy snaked through my skin and crawled up around the edges of the gate. The whole thing lit up like a Christmas display.
“Well done.” Gregory walked over and put his hands on the sides of the gate. He was about a foot taller than me. The bottom outlines were about the height of his shoulders.
“Can you see in?” I was dying to know what the other side looked like. Well, dying as long as someone else was sticking their nose in there.
“Hush. I need to concentrate.”
That gave me pause. When a six-billion-year-old angel needs to concentrate to do something, it’s not the sort of thing your run-of-the-mill angel can do. These special projects were going to be limited not only by the skills of the demons I could scrounge up, but by the ability and level of the angels in Aaru. If this was more than just Orias running around with his stolen item, then six to ten pairs would probably be responsible for hundreds of gates. Hopefully both partners could manage to not kill each other before their tasks were complete.
Gregory’s red-purple energy shot around the perimeter of the gate, tugging the edges inward as if he were stitching closed a wound. The moment his energy touched, a wind sprang up, blowing my hair against the gate opening.
“Don’t close my hair in it,” I squealed, taking one hand off to pull the strands from where they were crossing into drop-bear land.
“Both hands on the gate,” Gregory shouted with barely masked panic.
I slammed my hand back. The wind picked up speed. I felt the air pressure change around us. Snow swirled in a vortex, sucked in through the gate, along with the ends of my hair.
“Hurry it up.” I was pushing on the gate now, bracing my weight against the edges to keep from being sucked in. Losing the bottom three inches of my hair was preferable to losing my head.
Red-purple energy collided with blue-orange. There was a flash of white right before I tumbled forward and face-planted onto the ice. When it became clear my beloved angel wasn’t going to help me up, I got to my feet and brushed the snow off numb cheeks. Gregory was staring with narrowed eyes at the spot where the gate had been, pushing at it with his hands.
“You’d make a great mime. Can you do the guy in the box one?”
He ignored the joke. “Seems sealed. Can you see any holes? Even one the size of a pinpoint can rupture in an instant.”
I didn’t see anything but extended my awareness out, just to make sure. All I felt was the burn of Gregory’s energy circling around him like a ring of fire. “Gone. Excellent work, doctor. The patient will live.”
>
“We make a good pair, Cockroach.” His praise warmed me. “I’ll speak to Asta and enlist her aid and then speak to Gabriel about which angels would be best suited to help close any others—”
A flash appeared to our right, and I saw Eloa, paler than usual and not even bothering to change to a female form. “Tsith. We have found the elf, and unfortunately he is dead. Another angel is standing guard. I thought you would want to know immediately.”
Chapter 14
Dead? My heart sank. It was a long shot that he’d still have the gem. Even if a human conveyance had mowed him down, the demon accompanying him would have gone through his pockets before fleeing the scene.
Gregory grabbed my arm. “Take us there,” he commanded.
Eloa raised his hands. The world tilted around me, and I staggered, trying to stay on my feet as we appeared in a forest of evergreens. An angel wrung his hands as he stood over a dead body. Besides Gregory and his siblings, I’d always thought angels looked pretty much the same—androgynous features, hair in shades of blond, skin like white marble. This angel had a hint of tan to his skin. Under a top layer of white-blond, his hair was black. With his head bent forward, the colors fell into alternating strands, like zebra stripes, across his head.
“Oh, eldest one,” zebra angel choked out. “An elf. The first elf I’ve seen in nearly three-million years, and someone has murdered him.”
“Could have been public transportation.” I went to examine the body. “I swear elves are worse than groundhogs when it comes to avoiding moving vehicles. Someone has got to teach them the importance of looking both ways before crossing the street.”
The dead elf was off the country road by quite a bit, but I wasn’t ruling out death by head-on collision. I’d seen humans thrown farther than this when hit by vehicles. He was at the bottom of an embankment, sprawled across damp grass. Arms and legs were twisted at unnatural angles. His head and torso had clearly experienced some impact. Height was right. Coloring was right. I picked up his hand to look for the telltale scar and frowned to see fingers that looked like they’d been put through a chipper shredder.
It had to be Swiftethian. It’s not like there were elves running all over the place. Hoping for the best, I yanked the body over and searched the elf’s pockets.
A handful of coin, an elf-button, and a carved figurine that sent a jolt of electricity through my fingers when I touched it. The second pocket didn’t hold the gem, but what I found had me completely perplexed. Several hundred dollars in neatly folded bills, a credit card, and a driver’s license. An elf stared at me from the license photo, a stiff smile on his face. His eyes in the picture were wary, as if he suspected the person behind the camera at the DMV was a malicious sorcerer.
What the hell did an elf need with a license? Did he drive? There hadn’t been elves in this realm for millions of years. This couldn’t have been Swifty’s first time here if he had identification and credit in the name of Daniel Jones. Had the demon accompanying him provided Swifty with ID? This blew the whole sell-the-gem-and-get-back-to-Hel theory. If the elf went to the bother of acquiring a license and a Visa, then he intended to stay here, or at least return on a regular basis.
I transferred the contents of the elf’s pockets to my own, wishing once again that I could call Wyatt and ask him to help. He’d know if the license was fake or not. Taking the card out again, I held it up to the sunlight and squinted. Didn’t look like it had been altered and re-laminated. The whole thing was flat and smooth, the holographic writing and images intact. I chuckled to think the elf and demon had made a pit stop at the New Jersey DMV after a cross-country flight.
“Where are we?” I interrupted Gregory as he spoke with the other angels.
He looked around. “Intercourse, Pennsylvania.”
I snorted—he said “intercourse”. What a great name for a town. I needed to move to Intercourse, Pennsylvania. I wondered if there was a Climax, Pennsylvania?
Gregory’s lips twitched. “Yes, there’s a Climax, Pennsylvania. It takes about four hours to get there by car from Intercourse.”
I didn’t know what was more funny, the fact that Climax was four hours from Intercourse or that the two angels standing beside Gregory had expressions of horror on their faces. An archangel, the archangel, had just made a sex joke. Damn, I loved him.
“I can get there faster,” I choked out between laughter that nearly brought me to my knees. “Because four hours from intercourse to climax is cause for immediate medical attention.”
He waved a hand. “For paltry humans, maybe. Four hours for an angel is a quickie.”
Those other two angels looked as if they were ready to sink through the ground.
“Oh, please, can we have a quickie? I’ve got four hours to spare, and we are in Intercourse. It’s fate.”
“Ancient Revered One,” zebra angel interrupted. “What shall we do? An elf has been murdered.”
Gregory’s smile vanished along with our light-hearted banter. “Blunt force trauma. Internal injuries. I can’t tell if this was due to impact with an automobile, but whatever killed him was large.”
“No demon energy,” the other angel added.
There wasn’t, but that didn’t mean a demon wasn’t behind this death. We’d learned to keep to the physical while visiting the humans. I’d gone years without using my energy so as to avoid detection by angels. I sometimes forgot that my displays of demon-ness weren’t something other demons would feel comfortable doing. Few enjoyed my immunity, and even with immunity, none of us could kill without repercussions. I might be able to squeak by with a four-nine-five report, but I enjoyed special privileges as the Iblis.
But if Swiftethian’s demon companion had killed him, why leave the money behind? Most demons would have stripped a corpse practically naked.
Zebra angel sighed. I swear I saw a glistening of tears in his eyes. “Perhaps he wandered in front of a fast-moving truck and—”
There was a thud, and the angel flew backwards. It wasn’t a fast moving truck that plowed into him but a log. A huge timber-company tree-sized log, the end of which impacted the angel’s midsection, sending him across the roadway and into the median where he bounced and rolled as traffic swerved.
No demon energy. No angel energy. I’d seen humans toss a caber, but never with that level of strength. Whatever just tried to drive a tree through zebra angel was big. And strong. And might have been what bashed the elf to death.
Eloa stared openmouthed at the happenings. Even Gregory seemed perplexed, and he was semi-omnipotent.
I shrugged. “Frost giant? Sasquatch? Ogre? Cyclops? Really big-ass human on a shit-ton of steroids?”
“Troll.” Gregory stared into the forest, but it wasn’t what he could see that made his guess spot-on, it was what we all could suddenly smell. Trolls stank, and when their adrenaline got going, they smelled even worse. It was as if someone had eaten a dozen spicy bean burritos then taken an entire box of laxatives. Trolls lived everywhere—in Hel as well as in five other realms that I was aware of. There were even a few stragglers here with the humans, but none in Intercourse, Pennsylvania—at least none as of this morning. I held my breath, not just because of the stench but because this was another case of drop bear. Or drop troll. Whatever. That was four gateways by my counting. I had a bad feeling about this whole thing.
There was a deafening crash. I watched as trees swayed and toppled. An agonizing roar practically blistered my skin. Eloa readied a ball of white energy, but Gregory put out a hand to stop him. The troll blundered into the clearing, all ten feet of height and five-hundred pounds of him. He was a young one, tufts of hair still sprouting from cheeks and chin. I saw the reason for Gregory’s stay. The troll was terrified, his rheumy eyes wide as his gaze darted from angel, to angel, to me.
Correction, her gaze. I’d missed the series of moles along her cheeks that differentiated male trolls from female. Yes, she was naked. No, they don’t exhibit external genitals unless they a
re aroused. Don’t ask how I knew this. It isn’t a pretty story.
“Where is the gate?” Gregory thundered, throwing an arm across my midsection as if to protect me from the troll. I appreciated the archangel machismo, but I was a demon, and trolls had been part of my life for as long as I could remember.
“I don’t fucking know.” I couldn’t sense a gate anywhere. Not that this surprised me. Trolls could travel fast and far, and my sensory abilities when it came to gateways were moderate at best. Any distance beyond a mile or so was beyond me.
“Troll,” he called, like some medieval herald announcing a tournament contestant. “Go back to your home and cease attacking others with large trees.”
Angels. I loved this guy, but I swear that sometimes he had no clue. The troll bellowed, shaking the ground beneath our feet. Then she ran toward us, ripping a section of Jersey wall from the roadside and pitching it with a throw that would have done a major league baseball pitcher proud. The cement plowed into Eloa, clocking over ninety.
I pushed Gregory’s arm aside and launched myself at the troll, tackling her at the weakest point, her knees. The troll lurched to the side, catching her balance on an oak and shaking the right leg that I clung to. I felt the burn of Gregory’s power and shouted for him to hold as I clung to the troll’s knobby knee and rode out her panic.
“I. Know. You. Are. Scared.” My teeth slammed together with each word as the troll tried to shake me off. “We want to get you home.”
“Bwahawana.” It was a moan that struck me straight to the heart. I was a fucking demon, yet this monster’s fear made me feel fiercely protective of her. Home. This poor stinky thing only wanted to go home, and in her panic, she hardly knew her own strength.