Addictive Paranormal Reads Halloween Box Set

by Nana Malone

  ‘Let me go!!!’ she screamed as tentacles of consciousness lifted her out of the fiery hell. “I won’t let you take him from me!!!”

  ‘You must find him,’ Ki whispered into her mind. ‘He needs you.’

  “Azrael,” Elisabeth cried.

  “Elisabeth?” Susan, one of the other nurses said, gently shaking her awake. “Elisabeth … you’re having a nightmare.”

  ‘He needs you. You have to find him.’

  Elisabeth shot straight up, banging her head on the bunk above as she hyperventilated in a cold sweat. Standing around her were three of her barracks-mates, bleary-eyed and grouchy at having been awoken by her shouting in her sleep.

  “And I thought –I- had bad dreams,” Mary said, the nurse who slept in the bunk above her.

  “Musta been the chili they served for supper,” Lucy said, another barracks mate. “Talk about your acid reflux!”

  “We don’t need to invade Iraq to steal their gas,” Mary said with her southern drawl. “This platoon here’s got enough of its own after that chili!”

  The other nurses giggled at the joke.

  Dream. It was just a dream. This was reality…

  “Green mossy skeletons,” Susan said, the engineering specialist who’d shaken her awake. “That’s what –I- always dream of after eating five-alarm chili. Nasty bony hands clawing up through the earth to pull me into their graves.” She reached towards Elizabeth with clawed hands. “RARGH!!!”

  Elisabeth shuddered. It felt a little too close to what she’d just been dreaming of.

  ‘He needs you,’ the voice echoed again.

  “Huh?"

  “I ain’t said nothing,” Mary drawled. “Gal … you been burning the candle at both ends too long. You been having nightmares every night this week, talking in some strange language I ain’t never heard before.”

  “German?” Opa had taught her German, but she was not fluent. More like … tourist German.

  “Will you guys shut up?!!” someone shouted from further down the portable housing unit. “Some of us need to get some sleep!”

  The nurses had lucked out by being assigned a portable housing unit, which had air conditioning and slept sixteen, instead of a tent, which didn’t have air conditioning and slept fifty. Chatter after-hours was cause to be banished back to the sweltering, bug-infested tents.

  “No,” Lucy whispered low enough so the ones complaining wouldn’t hear. “I did two tours of duty at Ramstein Air Force Base. It wasn’t German.”

  “Who cares?” Susan said with a shrug, yawning loudly in everyone’s faces. “You heard the girl! Let’s get back to bed.”

  “You!” Mary chastised her. “Next time! No chili before bed! Ya hear?”

  The other nurses crawled back into their bunks. Elisabeth lay awake, unable to sleep. One by one, her barracks-mates breathing became rhythmic and shallow. The dream stayed with her long after her racing heart began to slow.

  She hadn’t seen him for six days. It was unlike him not to check in on her, especially now that he’d shown himself and she had started to coax him out of his shell. The first day she hadn’t thought too much of it. She'd been busy herself packing up and moving the medevac unit forward at the rear of the advancing troops and it was entirely possible he’d only been able to flit in so briefly that she’d failed to recognize his proximity. Azrael had his own war to wage and it wasn’t the first time something had come up.

  By the second day, she’d begun to worry. It wasn’t like him not to pop in for a few seconds … just long enough for her to sense his presence. But she was busy and, anyway, who would she call? 1-800-Dial-a-Death?

  By day three she’d started looking over her shoulder, hoping every sand-flea and bead of sweat crawling down her back was really her nerves sensing he was there. Either he was really busy reaping his own bad guys, or something was wrong. Azrael was conscientious to a fault. He wouldn’t simply abandon her. Especially after she’d told him how empty she’d felt when he’d vanished after Nancy had died.

  Day four they’d pulled up the base in Kuwait and moved forward to stay close to the advancing front lines. She’d wandered the outskirts of the base, calling into the shadows and frequenting the few secluded places on the teeming Forward Operating Base she could find, hoping he would materialize.

  He hadn’t.

  Yesterday she’d asked Harold to discreetly put out feelers as to whether there’d been any incidents involving unexplained enemy deaths with aces of spades tucked into their breast pocket. As far as he knew, there hadn’t been. The dream was most likely her subconscious spewing forth her own insecurities. It was foolish to worry about him. He was the Angel of Death, for chrissakes! What could possibly happen to him?

  More likely, she’d said something to offend him…

  Elisabeth lay in the bunk, the gentle whir of the air conditioner humming as she ran over everything in her mind they’d said to one another the last time he’d visited. She’d been exhausted and grumpy from having to suddenly rip up roots in Afghanistan and plop them down again at the border of Iraq, but Azrael had been in a good mood. She’d teased him about his appearance, insinuating without actually saying the words that she found him attractive. He’d fluttered his wings like a puppy waiting for his master to throw him a bone. It was cute, the way the most feared angel in the universe followed her around.

  ‘He needs you,’ the voice came back in her mind.

  “Aw … crap,” Elisabeth groaned. Obviously, she wasn’t going to get back to sleep! She pulled on her combat boots, even though she was technically supposed to always be far enough back from the front line that she wouldn’t have to see combat, and took off her sweatshirt before shuffling out the door into the sweltering night.

  Dust. And she’d thought Afghanistan had been bad! The moon had an eerie orange tint, lingering effects of a rainy sand-storm which had passed through, dropping orange sludge on everything. She’d always thought rain in the desert would be a blessing until she’d actually gotten it.

  “Azrael?” Elisabeth called softly into the night. Something bit her bare legs. Sand fleas? She should have pulled on her pants instead of wandering out in the boxer shorts she wore off duty. She sat down on a crate, the whine of overloaded supply trucks coming back from points forward to be reloaded and shipped right back out again cutting through the silence.

  Nothing.

  In the dream, the voice had called her a different name. Not Elisabeth. Nor Elissar, the name of the child Azrael had tried to save. She’d finally been able to coax bits and pieces of the story out of him. He’d looked like he would break down and cry when he’d finally spoken about the loss of his young friend. So sensitive... Why couldn’t he have been born a normal guy and sat next to her in chemistry class in high school? They’d have been the happiest dweeb-couple to walk the halls of Lincoln Park High School since Romeo and Juliet!

  Was her subconscious trying to tell her something her conscious mind had missed the last time she’d seen him? Perhaps... Oma had possessed the second-sight. Mama disapproved of Oma’s talk of the gift, but Oma had taught her anyway.

  She closed her eyes and tried to sense where he might be. She had a small picture he’d drawn of her bandaging up the leg of a GI tucked into her T-shirt pocket. Oma had taught to use a personal belonging to focus on another person. Azrael was not on the base, but he wasn’t far. To get off-base, she would need authorization.

  “Kadima!!!” Elisabeth pounded on the door to the tiny private room of a portable unit her friend shared with her commander husband. “Kadima!!! I need your help.”

  Kadima shuffled to the door and opened it, not pleased.

  “It’s three a.m.,” Kadima groused.

  “I need Harold to pull some strings to let me use a jeep,” Elisabeth said. “Alone.”

  “We’re in the middle of an active war zone,” Kadima grumbled. “Harold’s a bear when he’s woken up.”

  “I think Azrael is in some sort of trouble,” Eli
sabeth whispered. “Please … he needs me. I can feel it.”

  Kadima’s mouth opened, and then shut again. Her own dealings with the Angel of Death had taught her he was not the invulnerable purveyor of death legend painted him to be. Kadima jokingly referred to Azrael as ‘marshmallow angel.’

  “Give me a few minutes,” Kadima grumbled. “This will take some convincing.”

  Forty minutes later, Elisabeth had her jeep and sped down a pock-marked road following nothing but a feeling. She didn’t need to go far. A farm. Floodlights were everywhere. Jeeps crawled all over the compound, men going through the buildings with plastic baggies and tweezers. Spooky sorts of men wearing long black trench coats, the kind who reported directly to the CIA. Looking for something.

  “Probably searching for something to save their ass for fucking up at al-Dura,” Elisabeth muttered, remembering the opening volley of bombings to behead the snake five days ago. Why randomly bomb an ordinary house in a crowded Baghdad suburb even before the invasion had begun without at least verifying the target was there?

  Elisabeth smelled a cover up...

  World-wide live broadcasts of B-1 bombers delivering ‘shock and awe’ to kill Saddam Hussein and his two sons at some compound outside the city had turned into a debacle about how gullible the superpowers were when given bad intelligence. Elisabeth, herself, had been forced to learn damned quickly in Afghanistan to be wary when a local announced they had intelligence about some bad guy holed up someplace and offered to show you where they were. More often than not, such ‘invitations’ turned out to be live beheadings on YouTube.

  But they were still weeks out from Baghdad. Nasiriyah had just been declared ‘secure,’ with only sporadic resistance. What was going on? She parked the jeep and killed the lights, fishing for her military ID so they wouldn’t shoot her on sight as a spy. If they found her here, it would take quite a bit of explaining. But whatever had happened, it had involved Azrael. She could feel it. In fact, she could feel him.

  Elisabeth froze at the sound of the safety being slipped off an M-16.

  “Stop!” an American accent shouted in Arabic. “Or I’ll shoot!”

  Elisabeth didn’t speak much Arabic, but that was the first phrase they’d made sure everyone knew how to say as they’d flown them here.

  “I’m an American,” Elisabeth took care to hiss her ‘s’ and elongate her ‘ah’ sounds to accentuate her Chicago accent. “I’m … looking for somebody.”

  “You’re out of uniform, soldier!” the man said in English this time.

  “I’m a nurse,” Elisabeth said carefully. “I’m going to turn around, okay? And then you can check my ID. I have permission from Major Harold Steiner to come off the Forward Operating Base in Nasiriyah to look for an … um … an informant.”

  “What informant?”

  She guessed he was a CIA operative by the long black trench coat and fedora he had pulled over his eyes. And tinted glasses even though it was nighttime. Spooks. That’s what they called the CIA guys. Spooks.

  “It's top secret,” she said glibly. “I could tell you. But then I’d have to kill you.”

  “I’m not amused, Lieutenant Kaiser,” the operative read her name off her military ID. “Spit it out or face court martial.”

  “Um … either you know what this is and so I’m not spilling the beans,” Elisabeth reached back into her pocket. “Or you don’t know, in which case good luck getting a disciplinary action to stick against me.”

  She was bluffing. She knew she was bluffing. But he didn’t. The last thing she wanted was Harold to get in trouble for finagling things so she could slither off the base in the middle of a not-very-secure ‘secure’ zone.

  She pulled out the Ace of Spades.

  “Shit,” the operative said. He touched a button attached to a communications device stuck into his ear and spoke into a tiny microphone. “Deputy-Director Adams? This is Agent Washington. I got something here that might interest you.”

  “What?” a voice crackled from the tiny earpiece in the operatives' ear.

  “Some American gal just walked right in,” Agent Washington said, “and gave me your friend's calling card.”

  Elisabeth heard the earpiece crackle, but couldn’t make out the words.

  “It’s dark but …” Agent Washington said, “yes … I think so. Blonde.”

  More unintelligible crackling.

  “Roger,” Agent Washington said, then turned his attention back to Elisabeth. “Come with me. The Deputy-Director wants to see you.”

  Elisabeth obediently followed the CIA operative. There was no point in running. They’d seen her ID and discovered the Jeep. They walked past a half-dozen agents with guns guarding the simple mud-brick farmhouse. The agent led her inside the modest shelter. Carpets adorned the rammed-dirt floor, cushions largely sufficing for chairs. Around the room, a fearful elderly woman, several children ranging from infancy to just barely teenagers, and a second woman who had to be their mother eyed her warily. One of the CIA operatives took blood samples and DNA swabs.

  “Salam alaikam,” Elisabeth murmured in greeting, trying to put the homeowners at ease.

  The homeowners stared at her long blonde hair trailing down her back and bare legs exposed by the man’s boxer shorts she’d worn to bed. Agent Washington led her to a back room in the farmhouse and gestured for her to go inside.

  “Elisabeth,” a voice greeted warmly in a perfect Midwestern accent. “We meet again.”

  “Sergeant … Adams?” Elisabeth recognized the tall African-American man who’d recruited her into the nursing corps and pulled all kinds of strings to get her accepted in spite of the physical limitation posed by her leg. “You’re in charge here?”

  “For now,” Samuel Adams said. “And please … it’s Sam. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m … um …” Elisabeth hedged.

  “Looking for Azrael?”

  “H-h-how did you know?” Elisabeth stammered. “I mean … how do you know … Az?”

  “Azrael and I have been working together a long time,” Sam said. “But I don’t suppose he’s told you about us. He’s not supposed to, you know. Actually … he’s not supposed to talk to you at all. But who’s going to tell him no? I mean … it’s not like we can do anything to him for disobeying!”

  “I … um … you have me at a bit of a disadvantage,” Elisabeth said. “Is he … um … here?”

  “He is.” Concern etched Sam's brow. “But I’m not sure he’s in any condition to talk to anybody right now. He … um … we had a mission head south on us and he’s … well … you know how Az is. He’s beside himself.”

  “Is he okay?” Fear gnawed a hole in the pit of her stomach.

  “Physically?” Sam said. “Who knows? Nobody knows how he even exists on this plain. Much less what he is or is not supposed to be like on any given day. But I think he’s okay. Emotionally, on the other hand…”

  Sam trailed off, his implication clear. Something had happened during a mission to upset him. Elisabeth had treated enough soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress that she knew what Sam referred to.

  “Bring me to him right away,” Elisabeth said. “He needs me.” If Sam really was a Sergeant, which she doubted, she now outranked him. If he was some sort of Deputy-Director of the CIA, then he outranked her, but Sam didn’t appear to be stonewalling her. In fact … he seemed as concerned about Azrael as she was.

  “C’mon,” Sam said. “I can’t promise he’ll even let you in. But I’ll give it a try. Maybe you can talk some sense into him.”

  “What happened?” Elisabeth asked.

  “He killed somebody he didn’t mean to kill,” Sam said. “Or at least I think that’s what happened.”

  “A friendly fire type incident?” Elisabeth asked. “Who died?”

  “All he’ll tell me is someone died,” Sam said. “Although … with him … dead usually doesn’t mean dead as in like … dead. As in when you and me are dead. Technically
… Azrael’s dead, too. But as you know … he’s not … really … dead. He’s just …”

  “The Angel of Death,” Elisabeth said. “Neither here nor there.”

  “Yeah … well …” Sam brought her to a tiny mud-brick shed with a ramshackle roof. “I don’t know what the hell to call any of them. They’re not like regular angels, Azrael and his kin. Though he’s pretty far out on left field, even for an Archangel. But … I’m rambling. He’s the one you should be asking questions.”

  Elisabeth stared at the tiny shed, barely large enough to fit a couple of goats, much less the tall, slender Azrael. He was hiding in there? How could he fit those big wings of his?

  “Hey … Az,” Sam called. “You got a visitor.”

  “Go away,” Azrael called from behind the door. “Before I kill you, too!”

  A threat? Elisabeth looked with surprise at Sam, whose facial expression was one of concern, not worry or anger. Not a threat.

  “Oh…” Elisabeth's mouth dropped into an ‘O’ as she realized what had probably happened. Azrael was adamant he only reap the souls of those who were either evil and slated for hell, a place he called Gehenna, or escort the spirits of good people to heaven. He must have jumped the gun on somebody.

  “Azrael,” Elisabeth made her voice as warm and welcoming as possible. “It’s me. Elisabeth. I was worried about you.”

  “Sam shouldn’t have called you,” Azrael said, a catch in his voice. “I’m too dangerous to be around you anymore.”

  “Sam isn’t the one who called me,” Elisabeth said. “I found you on my own. I was worried about you.”

  “Did you hear what happened?” Azrael said, his voice hoarse.

  “Not exactly,” Elisabeth said. “You … um … you took somebody you didn’t mean to take?”

  “I’m not fit to be around living creatures,” Azrael choked from behind the door, obviously crying. “I’m too deadly!”

  Sam gave her an ‘I told you so’ look.

  “Azrael,” Elisabeth coaxed. “I’m not leaving until you come out and talk to me. And I’m definitely not going in there. It’s too small and it reeks of goat shit! So you’re just going to have to come out.”