by Angela Henry
“Yeah, I know her. She calls herself Candy. But why are asking about her when you can have me?” She pulled my jacket off and leaned forward, cupping her breasts and offering them to me like ripe melons.
“God must really hate me,” I mumbled, looking away.
“What’s that, baby?”
“Nothing. Look, you’re beautiful, but I really need to track down Crystal. Her mother’s dying, and I’ve been hired by her family to find her.”
Gisele gave me a pretty pout and pulled my jacket back over her chest. “We both used to work for an escort agency called Magnolia Blossoms until it got shut down.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Couple of weeks ago.”
“You know where she might be working now?”
“No. But I know if Magnolia wouldn’t have gotten shut down, she wouldn’t have been there long anyway.”
“Why?”
“Our handler, Ms. Rosalyn, didn’t mind us doing a little coke or smoking a joint with a client if that’s what they wanted. Hell, most of us even carry Viagra on us to jobs. But she didn’t tolerate hard-core drugs. That chick was into some serious shit.”
“By serious you mean meth, crack, heroin?”
“It could have been any one of those drugs or all of them. That’s why it took me so long to recognize her in that picture. She sure don’t look like that anymore, and all the makeup in the world couldn’t hide it.”
“Know how I can get in touch with Ms. Rosalyn?”
“I doubt Ms. Rosalyn was her real name, and I heard she moved to Vegas, where the real money is.”
“Crystal ever talk about her former pimp?”
“No. I only saw her a few times when we were hired for threesomes. Last time we worked together, it was for a sicko who pretended to be Rhett Butler and wanted to watch Miss Scarlett go down on Cousin Melanie.”
I thanked Gisele for her time and turned away so she could get dressed; she slid the back of her hand up my thigh. The large ring on her finger snagged my trousers.
She whispered hotly in my ear as she tugged at my zipper.
“You sure I can’t make you feel good before I go, sugar?”
“Sorry, kid, I’ve got work to do. But the room’s paid for ’til morning if you want to stay.” I grabbed my suit jacket and walked out the door. But don’t think for a minute that I wasn’t tempted.
****
Minx is always calling me cheap. She’s right. No sense in paying someone a tip for something I’m perfectly able to do for myself. I’ve never had to deal with money before last year, but I’ve learned enough in the meantime to know not to waste it on nonsense. That’s why I parked in the hotel’s parking garage instead of turning my car keys over to the valet. And as luck would have it, the damned thing wouldn’t start. I don’t know jack shit about cars except how to drive them. I could have just walked home with no problem. Instead, I started to pop the hood even though I knew I wouldn’t know what the hell I was looking at. But thick, stinking, green slime had melted my hood, eating through it like acid. I quickly jumped back.
“What the fuck!” I looked up on the roof of my Fleetwood and saw a giant black beetle with large pinchers that could easily snap my leg in half like a pretzel stick. The head was as big as a basketball, with, large, yellow bug eyes and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. It was a scarab demon the size of a St. Bernard. How had it tracked me down when I’d taken Minx’s elixir that morning?
It scuttled down my windshield onto my hood and shot a stream of green slime at my feet. I dove out of the way just in time but not quick enough to avoid the drops that splashed onto my shoes and pants, eating through the leather and fabric, leaving steaming holes behind. Damn! I really liked that suit. Now I was pissed. I hurled my car keys at it and managed to take out one of its eyes, bursting it like a rotten tomato. It let out a high-pitched, ear-piercing screech. Its shell started to bubble and expand, and I could see tortured faces contorted in agony, desperately trying to press through and escape. They were the souls it had already devoured that night. I’d be damned if I was going to be its next meal. Scarab demons are strictly low-level. They don’t turn in the souls they collect to Lucifer. They use them as nourishment. But like bounty hunters, the souls that are most appealing to them are ones like mine.
The scarab demon squealed and leapt off the hood of my car. I managed to catch it but fell backward. The damned thing was on top of me with its claws snapping at my face. It spewed another stream of slime that hit my shoulder just as its pinchers sank into the meat of my left upper arm. I screamed as the slime completely melted away a large section of my suit jacket and shirt. The searing bite of the acid on my skin was agonizing. The beetle was just watching and waiting. Stinking yellow goo from its ruined eye dripped in my face and down my neck. My body started to go numb, and I realized the slime must be some kind of venom that paralyzed its victims. I had to get it off me before I was completely incapacitated and the damned thing sucked my soul out of my body. My soul might not be pristine, but I didn’t have another one.
Suddenly I remembered the pen recorder Minx gave me. I managed to get my right hand into my suit pocket. I’d lost the feeling in my fingertips but could still tell the pen wasn’t in my pocket. Shit! I looked around frantically and saw it on the garage floor about a foot away. When I reached out for it, the beetle tightened its grip on my left arm, squeezing another quarter inch or so into my flesh and reestablishing its hold on me. I couldn’t give up or I’d be a goner. I punched the beetle in the empty eye socket, and it screeched in pain, rearing up a little and loosening the grasp it had on my left arm. I was still pinned beneath it but managed to reach out far enough to grab the pen and drive it with all my might into the beetle’s soft underside. The thing fell off me onto its back, where it spun and squealed and clawed at the pen while its hairy legs flailed. It may have been a demon, but it was also a beetle with a hard shell and soft underbelly. And like any beetle, it also couldn’t flip itself back over.
I heard the sound of a rapidly approaching vehicle and turned to see a bunch of shirtless young guys flying through the parking garage in a big, black, Hummer truck, with rap music blaring so loud it split the air like an ax. There were two guys in the front of the truck, and a half dozen in the truck bed hooping, hollering, and having a good old time. They were flying low, and just as they were about to fly past me, I took a running start and kicked the wounded scarab demon, sending it skittering across the lot and under the heavy wheels of the truck. I dove behind the Fleetwood as the beetle exploded, sending slime, legs, and chunks of shell flying in all directions, breaking out the windshields of several nearby cars and setting off a cacophony of car alarms. The guys in the truck sped off, oblivious to the fact that they’d just saved my life.
When I came out from behind my car, there wasn’t much left of the beetle, unless you counted the dozen or so bright white orbs of the souls it had eaten that had been released and were happily zipping around the parking garage like fireflies on speed. One by one they floated out into the night sky. Some floated upward toward heaven, while others took off for God only knew where. I opened my passenger side door. The scarab demon may have been dead, but its venom was still in my body. My whole right side was numb, and my left arm dangled uselessly down my side. I pulled out the cell phone I kept in the glove box and limped into the nearest stairwell to hide and call Minx to come pick me up. I thought I’d put all this shit behind me. I guess that’s what I get for thinking.
THREE
“You’ve got the worst luck of anyone I know,” groused Minx as she tended to my wounds. I was still partially paralyzed and figured I’d just have to wait for the venom to work its way out of my system.
“I love you, too, kiddo.” I sat on the couch in the living room while she cleaned and stitched up the wound on my left arm. The burn on my right shoulder felt like a really bad sunburn and had already started to blister.
“Hush,” she snapped and helped me of
f the couch into the kitchen, where she made me lean over the sink while she poured half a gallon of cold, whole milk slowly over my shoulder to draw out the burn. She soaked a dish towel in the remainder of the milk and made me use it as a compress.
“It’s not your fault,” I told her. Tears welled up in her big eyes, and I knew exactly what she was thinking, ’cause I was thinking it, too. Why hadn’t the elixir worked?
“I just don’t understand. I made it the same way I’ve been making it for a year. What the hell happened?”
“You think I’m becoming immune to it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She shrugged. “But I really think you should stay in at night until we figure this out.”
“I’m a fucking demon magnet, Minx. I won’t put you in danger. I need to find someplace else to stay. It’s the best thing for both of us, and you know it.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time and wouldn’t look at me. But she knew I was right. “But where will you go?”
“Don’t worry about me. Maybe Father Sims will let me sleep in the church. Demons can’t enter hallowed ground.”
“But you’re hurt. Can’t you at least stay until morning?”
I nodded, squeezing her hand as I limped past her to my bedroom. I took a long hot shower, put on some clean briefs, and climbed into bed. Five minutes later, a small, warm body burrowed under the covers and curled up next to me. I put a protective arm around her, and she rewarded me with a deep purr. A minute later we were both fast asleep.
****
The dream was always the same. I sat in a kitchen chair watching one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen as she prepared dinner. She couldn’t see me, of course; I was simply there to observe and redirect the course of the upcoming evening. Guardians couldn’t prevent shit from happening. All we could do was influence the circumstances surrounding a predetermined event to change its outcome.
Ava Duval was a twenty-eight-year-old artist who shared a house in Metairie with her best friend from high school. She’d been born in the tiny village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, but moved with her parents to New Orleans, where her father was born, when she was thirteen. She graduated from Oberlin College, recently moving back to New Orleans a year ago after a bad breakup with her fiancé, and supported herself as a freelance graphic designer. She was five feet five inches and curvy, with honey-colored skin, big brown eyes, long, curly hair she liked wearing in a messy ponytail, and a small half moon–shaped birthmark on her neck. Her eyes crinkled when she laughed. She loved animals. Her favorite movie was Notting Hill, and that night at exactly 7:22 p.m. she was going to die, but not if I could help it. It wasn’t her time.
Technically I wouldn’t have arrived on the scene until maybe an hour or so before the event. But I’d been watching Ava for weeks. There was something about her I couldn’t get enough of, and that wasn’t a good thing. Guardians are supposed to be detached and unfeeling. We aren’t human and have no business getting attached to our charges. Ava wasn’t one of my regular charges. I’d spied her in the crowd when another charge of mine had collapsed on the street from a heart attack. I’d just caused the car of an ER doctor to stall on his way to work, forcing him to walk the three blocks to the hospital, putting him directly in the path of my fallen charge and enabling him to save his life, when I spotted Ava and was drawn to the glowing beauty of her soul.
My job was done when the ER doctor pushed his way through the crowd to attend to my charge, but instead of leaving, I followed Ava Duval home. I watched her work, walk her dog, and talk to clients on the phone. I watched her eat popcorn in bed and fall asleep curled up on her right side, with her hair falling in her face, and lay down next to her. Against my better judgment, I buried my face in her neck and felt the silkiness of her skin and inhaled the scent of jasmine in her hair. I kissed the nape of her neck and felt her body shudder, and I jerked away from her. Had she felt me kissing her? How could that be possible?
I never touched her again, but I couldn’t stay away from her. And when her name popped up in my Book of Fates, the book used by all guardians that told us who to save, I felt justified in my obsession. That night in her kitchen, I watched her prepare dinner for a blind date I already knew she’d never have. At six thirty her roommate left to teach a night class at a local community college, and I’d made her forget the exams she meant to hand out that night. At six fifty the roommate was halfway to the college when she remembered she’d forgotten the exams and turned around to go back home. At seven nineteen Ava tasted the spaghetti sauce simmering on the stovetop and had an immediate allergic reaction. She’d been in such a hurry at the grocery store earlier that afternoon that she’d neglected to look at the ingredients on the back of the jar of sauce and didn’t know it contained peanuts, which she was deathly allergic to.
I watched helplessly as she sagged against the kitchen counter, hands clutched around her throat and gasping for air as her airway began to close. She had an EpiPen in her purse in her bedroom, and she managed to get to the hallway before she collapsed on the floor at exactly seven twenty. In two minutes she’d be dead. Where the hell was her roommate? I was just about to head to her room to get her EpiPen, something I had no business doing, when suddenly her roommate arrived home and found her on the floor. Two minutes later the EpiPen had been administered, 911 had been called, and the swelling in her throat had gone down by half, enabling air to get to her oxygen-deprived brain. Then something happened. As her roommate ran to the front door to let the EMTs in, Ava opened her eyes, looked directly at me, and spoke.
“Who are you?” She actually reached out to me right before the EMTs got to her and strapped an oxygen mask to her face, obscuring her view. She had seen me.
****
Something smacked me in the face and woke me up the next morning. Thinking it was another demon, I jumped out of bed to see Minx holding up the pants I’d been wearing the night before. There were stains and big burn holes in the legs and they stank.
“What the hell is wrong with you? I thought I told you to burn those things.” I rolled my shoulder and surprisingly found it sore but not painful. But the arm Minx stitched up was stiff and hurt like a mother.
“What exactly were you doing in that hotel last night?”
“Like I told you, interviewing call girls, trying to track down the one who stole Duquesne’s granddaddy’s signet ring.” I got up and headed for the kitchen and some caffeine.
“And these women you talked to, you’re sure they were all human?”
I whirled around. “Am I sure they were . . . of course, they were human!”
“Then how do you account for this?” She pointed to an area on my pants that was higher up on the leg, in the thigh area. I could see nothing.
“What am I looking at, Minx?”
“You can’t see it. And I didn’t notice it until I walked past your pants on the floor this morning while I was transformed and my sense of smell was ten times greater. Smell this.” I sniffed and all I could smell was eau de scarab demon, an odor I’d love to forget.
“I don’t get it. Is there a punch line?”
“Don’t be an ass when I’m trying to tell you the elixir didn’t fail, X. You don’t have to move out!” She started twirling around the living room, swinging my pants around like a lasso.
I gave her a blank stare.
“The scarab demon that attacked you was a male scarab demon. The smell on that one spot on your pants is the scent of a female scarab demon. The male was attracted to the female scent on your pants. It wasn’t trying to kill you and eat your soul. It just wanted to mate with you!” She fell on the couch and dissolved into a fit of giggles, while I tried to decide if being fucked by a demon was better or worse than being killed and having my soul devoured.
“Are you telling me that what that thing did to me last night was just its way of saying I love you?”
“We’re talking about a demon, remember? Were you expecting flowers?”
&
nbsp; “A little tenderness would have been nice,” I countered, which made my roommate laugh even harder. I headed into the kitchen and she followed.
“Mating between scarab demons is pretty brutal and a lot of females don’t survive, which is why there aren’t a lot of scarab demons. I’m surprised there was just one of them last night. Normally there would have been a bunch of males fighting over you.”
“Lucky me.”
“So, how many of those chicks did you talk to?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t exactly keep count. Eight or ten maybe.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t touch one of them?”
“Positive. All I did was talk to them. I—” I stopped midsentence as it hit me that although I hadn’t touched any of those women, one of them had most certainly touched me—Gisele. The last girl I’d spoken to and the only one who’d admitted to knowing Crystal Sneed. She touched my pants, and I’d ended up as a scarab demon’s date for the evening.
“What?” Minx looked concerned.
“Nothing,” I said, putting on a pot of coffee. “Hey, how do you know so much about the mating habits of scarab demons?”
She gave me a stunned look. “The quickest way to end up dead or worse is to not know your enemies. I’d have thought you’d have learned that by now, X.”
If I hadn’t after what had almost happened to me last night, then I deserved to die.
****
The Fleetwood was toast. The slime had eaten its way through my hood, engine, and undercarriage. Getting it fixed would cost more than the car was worth. After breakfast a limo picked Minx up to take her to the airport. She had a shoot in Spain and handed me the keys to her Range Rover as she walked out the door. I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into in taking on this job for Duquesne. And the only one who could tell me was Gisele.