“Hey,” the paramedic yelled when Malachi left the back doors of the ambulance swinging open. I hoped he hadn’t noticed the demon hadn’t touched the ground, or that he was drastically shorter than he had been at the start of our journey.
“Crazy woman,” he grumbled. If only he knew. The driver helped him take my gurney from the back of the ambulance.
I fought to maintain control of my body when they wheeled me through the sliding doors and into the emergency room of Mother of Mercy Hospital. My wings were cramped, trying to unfold, and my tail itched something fierce. I clenched my muscles tight to keep it from descending. I breathed deeply, trying to focus on keeping my human visage intact and terrified I was going to burst into flames at any moment.
The horns were another story, but thankfully, they only stuck out part of the way and I was pretty sure my bangs covered them. At least until someone came in to feel my head and got a handful of horn.
Shit, shit, shit, I was utterly screwed.
If I didn’t get control of myself, they would definitely notice the wings. Just my luck to end up at a hospital run by a religious institution. Especially if I caught fire.
“Faith!” Lisa yelled, followed by the sound of pounding feet.
I wiggled, trying to maneuver myself to see where she was.
“That’s my sister!” Tolliver shouted. They rushed beside my moving gurney.
“I—”
The paramedic eyed my dust-covered brother and roommate before looking at the nurse hurrying beside us.
“Stay out of the way,” the nurse said.
Tolliver hung back, while Lisa grabbed my hand.
“I said—”
“What’s her BP?” Lisa snapped at the paramedic.
“What?”
“Do you need me to find your damn charge nurse, bitch?” Lisa growled.
The nurse gaped at her, dumbfounded. I wasn’t sure if it was Lisa’s Nurse Ratched tone or the fact she was a demoness, but the other woman dropped behind a step.
“One-thirty over seventy-six, pulse is eighty, respirations are twenty-six,” the paramedic said hurriedly. “Pupils are responding to light.”
“Thank you,” Lisa said. “At least someone knows what they’re doing in this place.”
“Well,” the nurse huffed.
Lisa ignored her while they moved me into a triage area and transferred me into the hospital bed. “The doctor will see you in a few minutes.”
They rushed out of the room.
“Tolliver.” I motioned him closer with my hand. My wings strained against the gurney and my tail twitched underneath the sheet. “You have to help me figure out how to get myself under control.”
“Take a deep breath,” said my brother, who looked remarkably composed for a demon lord who’d almost been blown up and now stood in a Catholic hospital. “Focus your energy on staying calm.”
“But my wings—”
“Are completely under your control,” he insisted.
“We’re in a religious hospital.”
“Myth,” he replied, taking my hand. “Now focus on me and make your body do what you want it to.”
I gripped his hand hard and centered my focus on slowing my breathing. After the second breath, my mind cleared and I heard my heart beating. With the third, I focused on appearing human and made my wings and my tail retract into my body. I winced when my horns shrank into my bruised skull.
“Shit.” Lisa rooted through the triage cart next to my bed. “Your head’s bleeding.”
“What?”
“It’s fine,” she said, pressing a piece of gauze to the top of my head. “It looks like you have a tiny gash next to where your horns are. When you pushed them back in, it reopened.”
“Do I look too bad?”
“You look completely ordinary, sis,” Tolliver wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me tightly.
I felt warm dampness on my cheek and noticed his eyes were red. “Are you crying?”
“Of course not,” he sniffed. “Demons don’t cry.”
“Well, then your tear ducts have sprung a leak,” I said as my own eyes welled up.
I heard Matt yell from the hallway. “I’m telling you, my wife is in there.”
“Mr. Andrews. Sir. You have to stop.”
Matt threw back the curtain from my area, and a police officer grabbed his shoulder.
The nurse from before returned with a phlebotomy cart. “And who are you?”
“Her husband.”
Excuse me? What? I knew my head was killing me, but I didn’t think I was suffering any amnesia. It was 2011, Barack Obama was president, my father was still the Devil. Nope, no amnesia so what the Hell?
“Everyone and their brother can’t be in here. We need room for the medical professionals to work.”
“Tolliver,” Lisa said, snapping into full nurse mode. “Go find out what you can about your father and Hope. Matt, sit your scrawny ass down in that chair and stay out of the way.”
Matt took a seat.
“You,” she said and pointed at the police officer, “you go bother someone else right now. She’s not ready to see you yet.”
“But—”
“Move it, mister.”
If he wasn’t careful, she would end him right where he stood and she wouldn’t bother with the whole succubi mating ritual first. He backed out of the triage area while the trauma second nurse chuckled.
“What are we doing?” Lisa asked.
“IV of fluid and vitals,” the nurse said. She slid the electronic vitals cuff onto my arm and dragged a thermometer across my forehead. When the machines beeped, she jotted the numbers on a clipboard and placed it on the top of the cart. “Which arm do you prefer when I do your blood draw?”
“They’re about the same,” I said.
She tied off my arm, wiping my inner elbow with an alcohol swab. I breathed in deeply, and focused on Lisa. It wasn’t that I couldn’t stand the sight of blood or anything—hello, I was a demon and a nurse—but I didn’t want to watch someone shove a needle in my arm, either. Thankfully, it threaded through easily, and I let out my breath when she untied the band around my arm.
“I’ll be back with your admission papers,” the nurse said.
I sank into the pillows.
Lisa slumped against the wall and sighed. “You scared me to death, you know that? If I was still mortal, that would have taken twenty years off my life.”
“Me too,” Matt said, his skin a faint green. He rose from his orange plastic seat and walked around the bed to hold my other hand. His palms were clammy. “I was worried when she said they were going to stick you.”
“Yeah, lucky me, I still have a working bloodstream.”
“How are you doing, really?” Lisa asked quietly. She let go of my hand and sat in the chair Matt had vacated.
“Someone tried to blow me up,” I said, and closed my eyes. “Then I woke up to find out Jesus likes to moonlight as a paramedic, Malachi was acting worried, which is sort of freaky, and apparently, I got married and don’t remember it.”
“They said family only. I was pretty sure they weren’t going to believe I was your brother.”
“But you’re not supposed to be able to lie,” Lisa said.
“Myth.”
“Myth?” I repeated. Why wasn’t I surprised? It seemed like everything was a myth when it came to immortals.
“Myth,” he said and squeezed my hand tighter. “It only makes me want to sneeze.”
“Lying makes you want to sneeze?”
“Are we really worrying about whether or not I can lie to an emergency room nurse and a police officer? Because I have to tell you, even if it had blistered my tongue and caused me to burst into flame, I still would have lied to get in here.”
“Let’s not talk about it right now. Any of it. I’m trying to stay on my little vacation in Egypt a bit longer. This cruise down Denial where we discuss your abilities to defy logic is more amusing than the real world.�
��
“He’s safe,” Matt said. “Your sister, too.”
“Excuse me?” Who said anything about my family? We weren’t talking about them, were we? Of course, they were perfectly all right. Why wouldn’t they be? Someone had just tried to destroy us all. No big deal. Right?
“Your dad was more worried about you than anything else,” Matt said, his voice reassuring, like a parent calming a kid.
Obviously, my outer calm wasn’t quite as effective as I’d hoped.
“When you lost consciousness, he freaked and tried to get to you, but your mother was clinging to him. It gave him time to get his senses back and he started acting more like he was in shock and less like Satan bent on raising Hell to exact vengeance on whoever decided to blow up his car.”
“And Hope?”
“A bump on the head and a broken nail,” Lisa said with a smirk.
“But if they walked away from it perfectly fine, what happened to me?”
“The passenger-side mirror from your dad’s car flew off during the explosion and cracked you in the head,” Matt said.
“You’re telling me someone blew up my father and my sister—who are both fine—but I ended up getting knocked out by a flying side mirror?”
God, my life sucked.
Lisa giggled. “It’s sort of ironic if you think about it.”
“This is so humiliating. And nobody else was hurt?”
“Just a little bit of ringing in the ears,” Matt said.
“Damn it, this sucks.” Just my luck, being the only demon hurt during an explosion. I would never hear the end of it.
“Glad to know you’re happy none of us were seriously hurt,” Lisa said.
“You know what I mean. How much longer are we going to be stuck in here?”
“Not much longer, hopefully,” announced a familiar young resident when he stepped into the triage area. I narrowed my eyes at Jesus and scowled. First, he was a paramedic and now he was a doctor? What next? Santa Claus?
“I don’t know about you but this place gives me the creeps. Why don’t you close your eyes and go to sleep while we get this sorted out?”
“Damn it, J,” I said as my eyes struggled to stay open. “Will you please pick a disguise and stick to it?”
“But what would be in the fun in that?”
Chapter Twenty-five
Two hours later, I woke up in a sterile white room. Matt absently rubbed the back of my hand while Lisa clung to the other one like the last crab leg at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. My mother sat next to Hope, who lay in the hospital bed across the room. Tolliver reclined on a chair between my bed and Hope’s.
“He has to quit doing that,” I said.
Matt looked at me, concerned. “What?”
“The damn persuasion spells,” I said grumpily. “In the ambulance, it was ‘rest.’ In the ER, it was ‘go to sleep.’ And now I have no idea what’s going on.”
“Not much.”
“Absolutely nothing,” Hope snapped on the other side of the curtain.
“I’m just so happy you’re alive.” My mother sniffled from the chair next to Hope’s bed. “That’s something!”
“Where’s Dad?” I asked, focusing on anyone but my mother. You’d swear this was all about her. Why wasn’t I surprised?
“He’s in the next room,” Tolliver said, getting up from his seat to stand by me. He took Lisa’s free hand and kissed it. “They’re doing a ‘procedure’ on him.”
“A procedure?”
“He and the Alpha are conferencing on what the hell happened today,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” my mother said loudly, bringing the attention back to her. “Why would anyone want to blow your poor father up? He’s never done anything to anyone.”
“Except for the whole Satan bit,” Tolliver said casually. “It seems to have made him a few enemies. Apparently not bright enemies, considering they tried to kill an immortal being, but they’re enemies, nonetheless.”
“There’s no proof he’s immortal,” she said.
I flopped my head back on the lifeless, hospital-issued pillow. We weren’t going to get into this again, were we? Here? Now?
“Mom, someone blew up his car. Blew up his car. Boom. Which, when I think about it, how did you survive the explosion?” I said.
“Your dad,” Matt whispered.
“So you survived because some not-immortal being saved your life, huh?” I sat up and looked at her, squinting my eyes and pointing at her befuddled face. “And let’s take into account, Hope. The city’s street crew should be mopping what’s left of her from the parking lot. She walked away with nothing but a broken nail.”
“And apparently shock,” my sister added. “They’re quite sure I’m in shock. You, too. Once Jesus assured them you didn’t have a concussion, they decided to keep us for observation.”
“Okay, so somehow your two daughters and their father survived a bombing with a broken nail, a bruised forehead, and shock. No one else was hurt. Not a single person. And you still want to tell me you don’t believe anything Dad says about immortality? You’re kidding me, right?”
She glanced between us, and I knew she was evaluating her options. “Well.”
“Cut the crap, Ruth Anne,” the Alpha said, wandering into our hospital room decked out in a pair of blue scrubs and a lab coat. His ebony skin glowed, and His halo was disguised as close-cropped white curls. My father and Jesus strolled in behind Him. My cousin smirked, still dressed like a doctor, and my father wore a pair of green scrubs with the hospital logo on them. “You know how much self-delusion annoys me.”
“But—”
His voice came out just as harsh as the stern expression he wore. “Are you really going to try lying to me?”
I swallowed. Just how gutsy, or delusional, was she?
“Lou may put up with it because he’s fond of you, but I don’t tolerate fools lightly.”
“Lou?” Matt murmured.
“Short for Lucifer,” I said, trying not to draw their attention. If the Alpha was in this kind of mood, I definitely did not want to end up on His bad side.
My mother pursed her lips together tightly, wrapped her arms around her torso, and huffed.
My father walked over to her, picked her up easily, and sat down in the chair with her in his lap. “I’m glad you were worried about me.”
She collapsed against his chest, sobbing.
Hope and I looked at each other, and back at them while Tolliver moved to share Lisa’s chair so the Alpha would have a seat of His own. Matt let go of my hand and moved to stand up, and Jesus motioned for him to stay seated. Instead, Jesus walked to the ledge next to the window, on the far side of Hope’s bed.
“I was so scared,” my mother wailed.
What the Hell was going on here?
“I was so scared you were wrong and I was right and you were going to die. And the girls—”
Dad shifted and tightened his grip on her. “Shhh, shhh. We’re fine. Did you really think a couple of car bombs were going to hurt us?”
“But Faith was unconscious, and all I could think was what I would do if I lost one of you.” She wiped at her cheeks and sniffled.
“You didn’t lose any of us,” my father said, and patted her back. “You’re never going to lose any of us. What did I promise you the first time we met?”
“You’d eat my ex-boyfriend if he didn’t stop staring at the two of us?”
“Um.” He shifted again, shaking his head and obviously doing his best not to laugh. “What I meant was, what did I promise you on our second date?”
“We’d be together for eternity?”
“That’s it. And have I ever broken a promise to you?”
“Well… ”
Dad had broken a lot of promises, primarily the I Will Not Go Demonic on Someone and Out Us type of promises.
“When it’s been important,” he clarified. “Have I ever broken the really important promises?”
/> My mother shook her head slowly and buried her face in his shoulder again. “No.”
“Okay,” my father said, and kissed her hair. “So what are you crying for? I promised you eternity, and you’re stuck with me for eternity. No silly car bomb is going to change that.”
“Not that this isn’t fascinating,” the Alpha interrupted, clearing His throat. “But could we talk about those car bombs while my son and I can still keep the police officers in the waiting room at bay?”
“Yeah,” my dad said. “Does anyone have any ideas about who could have put explosives underneath three cars? Specifically, the three cars meant to carry us in them?”
“It’s a rogue nephilim,” Matt said.
Oh, shit. Happy family moment over.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a rogue nephilim and whoever it is, he’s stalking Faith.”
“And you didn’t think it would be a good idea to tell anyone?” my father said. His horns broke the skin. That wasn’t good.
Time for me to take charge of the situation. It was my mess after all. “I told him not to, Dad.”
“Pardon me? You told him not to tell me you were being stalked?”
“I wanted to handle it on my own. You keep telling us we need to step up and start handling these sorts of things ourselves so you can retire and spend the rest of eternity living quietly with Mom. That’s what we were doing—handling it ourselves.”
“I wasn’t suggesting you should handle crazed nephilim on your own,” he roared. “I meant more of the day-to-day administration sorts of things. Maintaining the work schedules for the minor demons, keeping track of who’s on Earth and who’s in my realms. Those sorts of things.”
“Dad,” Hope said. “If you want us to take over, you’ve got to let us take over.”
“And he wonders why I don’t ever talk about retiring,” the Alpha muttered. He raised His eyebrows at His only son and shrugged.
Dad stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “Well, since the whole Taking Over and Handling Problems Yourself thing didn’t work, would someone please fill me in on exactly what happened today?”
“Apparently, there’s a crazy half-nephilim out there who either wants to kill me and steal my powers to take control of Earth, or to start a war. Maybe both,” I said.
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