03 Before The Devil Knows You're Dead-Speak Of The Devil

by Eimer, Patricia

  “Lisa.” Matt’s deep baritone had a jagged, painful edge to it. His face was drawn like a man who’d gone two days without sleep. His eyes were filled with misery. “She could accidentally destroy your mortal form. Alpha knows what she could do to the baby. I know you want to help, but you’ve got to stay away from her.”

  “How can I—” Lisa swallowed and I knew that her self-preservation instincts were warring with her nurses training. I was in pain and that meant she was supposed to help me except helping me would kill her.

  “None of us can touch her. Not her father, or the Alpha. Not even me.” Matt’s voice was rough and his hands were trembling. He bit his lower lip and kept his eyes focused on the floor, not looking at me.

  “Matt…” I looked at my family. There wasn’t anything left to say. There wasn’t anything I could do. I was toxic.

  I started up the stairs and there was the clatter of footsteps as Lisa followed behind, quietly questioning Malachi, but I was too tired to listen to them. All I wanted to do was find somewhere quiet to sleep and let someone else figure out what to do for a change.

  Hope was waiting for us at the landing in front of my apartment. Her face was tight, and she was gnawing on a thumbnail. She moved silently to the door, opened it, and then stepped aside, her thumbnail going back into her mouth like a security blanket.

  “I don’t understand,” Lisa said and I grimaced at the grating sound of her voice I stumbled into the apartment and started toward my couch.

  “It’s true then?” Hope asked. “She’s the angel of death?”

  “How did you know?” My voice sounded thick and phlegmy as I flopped down onto the sofa Matt and I had picked out after we’d started dating. A couch that had been bought because it met all of Matt’s cuddle requirements—smooshy cushions, leg room, double width for comfy sleeping, fire resistant, and it had cup holders so that we didn’t lose the remote during commercial break inspired tickle fights.

  Matt dropped to the floor next to me, keeping the barest trace of distance between us. I scrunched farther into the back of the couch to keep from touching him as Lisa and Malachi sat down on my love seat, both of them staring at me.

  Hope shrugged. “I was listening at the window. Tolliver is out there panicking. He’s having a bit of a crisis.”

  “I’ll pay to fix his car,” I said.

  “Nah,” she said, her voice high and tense, while waves of garlicky worry rolled off of her. “The car is fully insured. Plus he plans on suing the manufacturer for breach of contract and false advertising. Those things are supposed to be able to stop a tank and the front bumper crumpled during one measly hit-and-run?”

  “I’ll have you know I stopped, I did not run. And if it’s not the car, then why is Tolliver going crazy?”

  “I dunno, maybe because his baby sister became her own version of the walking plague? Some people might consider that a bad thing. Me, I say it keeps the door-to-door salesmen and those pesky Boy Scouts out of your business, so bring it on.” The couch dipped as she sat at the far end, carefully perching at the edge.

  “You wanna trade?” I gave what was probably a slightly hysterical chuckle. “Because I have to tell you you’ll get no complaint from me. I feel like I was the one hit by a truck.”

  There was a rip and then the smell of burned reality hit my nose, making my stomach churn, as my uncle stepped through the door between heaven and earth he’d just torn open. “Faith.” His deep voice was like warm chocolate sauce poured over vanilla ice cream and his eyes were warm.

  “Hey.” I struggled to sit up but it felt like there was an entire legion of imps sitting on my chest. “I sort of killed the angel of death.”

  “I’m aware.” His lips tilted upward. “Valentin said it was a traffic accident. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I’ve done ten rounds with Godzilla.”

  “It’s part of the change. You’re going to be sore for a few days. Taking over someone else’s life isn’t a walk in the park, you know.” My uncle stepped aside, letting my cousin follow him through the portal before it stitched itself closed again.

  “Well he can have it back.” I huffed as I shifted my weight and tried to sit up again.

  “Just take a second,” Matt said, his voice soft. “Don’t move too fast. Relax and let me get you a cup of tea.”

  “I don’t like tea.”

  “I don’t care. It’s good for you, and you need to drink it.”

  “Coffee’s good for me, too. It has caffeine and can perk me back up.”

  “The last thing you need is caffeine.” Matt scowled at me. “Lay here and relax and let me take care of you for once.”

  “I don’t need—”

  He brought his hands up to my face and froze, an inch from my cheeks, and his eyes filled with regret. The churning in my stomach grew and black power crackled against the skin of my arms. My horns tugged upward and all I could think was closer. Come closer. Don’t let go of me. You’re so full of warm, yummy life, just give me a little.

  “You could have died today,” Matt said. “I could have lost you.”

  “You have lost me,” I said, shaken by the thoughts that had been going through my mind. “I can kill you with a single touch now. Remember?”

  “You’re alive, and even if I can’t touch you it’s better than the alternative.”

  “He’s right,” the Alpha said, causing me to pull back and remember that we had an audience. “If Valentin would have desired to keep his form, he could have killed you. Drained you of your life force and prolonged his time here on Earth indefinitely.”

  “He didn’t, though,” I said, my chest clenching at the thought that I might have died today. “Why didn’t he?”

  “Simply put?” The Alpha raised one elegant, feathery white eyebrow questioningly. “He was sick of the job. He hated it. One of my more creative punishments now that I think about it, giving a cherub the role of Angel of Death.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “A creature that craves touch above all things, and I took it from him. I’m surprised he didn’t step in front of a car earlier. I’d honestly expected him to come begging for a relief in duties after five years. Who knew he’d make it twenty?” the Alpha asked.

  Matt looked over at him, his eyes wide. “He was the Angel of Death for twenty years? You mean he spent twenty years without touching another person?”

  “Of course not.” The Alpha sat in the recliner next to the couch, his elbows on his knees. He ran one shaking hand up through his closely cropped white curls.

  “He touched people every day. It was a necessary part of the job. Not everyone, of course. That’s too much work for anyone—even an angel—but Valentin always took the time to personally collect certain souls instead of delegating all of the work to his subordinates.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked as Matt stood, and I instinctively threw out a hand to reach for him, not wanting to leave me alone to face this craziness.

  “I’ll be right back,” he stepped back, his hands behind him so that we didn’t actually touch. “I’m not leaving. I won’t leave. I’m just going to get you something to drink. It’ll help keep you from going into shock.”

  I nodded once, then turned back to my uncle. “You’re telling me that Valentin was what?”

  “He was the Angel of Death and he passed his powers on to you. I thought that much would have been obvious.”

  Matt set a cup of something down on the side table next to me and scooted it toward me with a pointed look. “So you’re saying that Faith is now what? The head of the reapers? The Angel of Death? Or, in her case, the Demon of Death?”

  “We keep the name the same no matter what.” Dad slunk across the room like a kicked hellhound and sat next to Lisa and Malachi on the love seat. “But yes, in short, Faith has now been promoted to the head of our Death Services department.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” I gaped at him, my jaw hanging open as my heart began to do a s
amba in my chest, its backbeat pounding in my ears. “I can’t be in charge of Death. I’m not even a reaper. Never have been. Never wanted to be.”

  “Someone has to manage the whole operation,” Dad said, his voice almost sheepish. “Someone had to keep the angels from spending their day playing poker and the reapers from working up even more elaborate pranks. They’re like children. Without constant supervision they fall into chaos. Then they try to cover it up by going on work sprees.”

  “Work sprees?” Matt asked.

  “The Black Plague was one of them,” Tolliver said, coming into the room, skirting around me like I was the one covered in boils and rotting flesh. “J and I were both interning with them at the time. Ugh. The AOD on duty took a short vacation and the next thing you know it’s the end of the world and half of Europe is doing the mortal-coil shuffle slide. Very messy affair.”

  “Oh Christ.” Matt rubbed his hands over his eyes.

  “Got himself excused from cleanup detail,” Tolliver said. “Claimed that he had a weak stomach.”

  “I do have a weak stomach,” J said.

  “That’s when we decided that vacations weren’t a real possibility for the Angel of Death,” the Alpha said. “We’d thought one guy, immortal job security, but apparently the task is too draining. Death barely made it one millennium before he was asking to be relieved from duty. Now he’s living in California, Malibu of all places.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked, my voice high and panicky. “Who’s next in line for a promotion and how soon till we can get them here so we can do a power swap? They can be here soon, right? You’ve called them?”

  “Faith.” Matt curled his fingers into fists and pressed them against his legs and I knew he was trying to keep from touching me, trying to fight against his instincts to comfort me even though it would lead to his destruction.

  “What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Valentin didn’t take the time to train a replacement from among the reapers,” Dad said. “He’d only been in the job a short amount of time. Twenty years. That’s nothing. He figured he had another eighty years to go.”

  “Wait, you’re telling me the job has term limits? It’s, what, like an elected office or something? I know you said it was one mortal body and then you’re done but there’s actually a set amount of time you’re supposed to serve?”

  My father and the Alpha both looked away from me. Malachi crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t meet my eyes. Suddenly I knew. What’s the ultimate punishment for an angel who craved touch? Or for the person who accidentally ran you over with a car?

  “It’s a punishment, isn’t it?” I asked. “A prison sentence. One hundred years without the ability to touch anyone. It’s meant to be a form of torture.”

  “Faith…” Regret wafted off my father in a thick cloud of burned toffee and chocolate.

  “Isn’t it?” I asked, my voice a panicky scream and then I threw my cup of tea at him. The bastard didn’t even have the courtesy not to duck as it flew over his head and crashed into my radiator.

  “Yes,” Tolliver said, his voice quiet, “the worst torture that they could think of. It’s the ultimate punishment, trapping an angel or a demon in the mortal plain and preventing them from ever touching. The Angel of Death is trapped, watching the world around them live and forced to stay apart because the briefest touch will kill everything that they could ever find to love.”

  “What did Valentin do?” I asked. “What did he do to deserve one hundred years without touch?”

  “He caused a mortal’s death. Several mortals in fact. He lusted after the power of touch so much that others died. So in return I took that power from him,” the Alpha answered.

  “What about me? What did I do? An accident? I tried to take responsibility for it. I wanted to call for help.”

  “This was never supposed to happen to you,” Dad said. “Originally, I’d thought it would be a suitable punishment for your former brother-in-law before I put him in a bubble in Purgatory but I couldn’t trust him to work among the reapers until Valentin was ready to retire.”

  “You’d have trusted Boris to be the Angel of Death?” Hope laughed bitterly at the mention of her ex-husband. “Obviously you must not think it’s a position of too much responsibility if you were going to entrust it to him.”

  “It is a position of responsibility,” the Alpha said, “but for a former incubus it would be an unimaginable torment. He’d have lived one hundred years unable to touch, unable to feed, hungry, miserable, and alone. It would have been a torture like you couldn’t imagine.”

  “When you put it like that, can I wholeheartedly endorse this idea?” Hope asked her voice harsh.

  “Great. Wonderful. I second the motion.” I clapped my hands together and looked at my father. “Let’s get on it then. Go get Boris, we’ll do a power switch, and that will be that.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Dad said. “The Angel of Death position rotates between angels and demons. You’ve already taken the position so it has to go to an angel next—Boris is ineligible. Besides, a power transfer is tricky. If it’s not done right there can be…complications.”

  “Complications…” I looked over at my best friend, sitting on the couch between her husband and my dread demon, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m supposed to be Lisa’s Lamaze coach.”

  “You will be,” she said. “We’ll find a way so that you can touch people. I’ll get Harold on it and between all of us we’ll think of something. What about surgical gloves? They should keep a virus out. That’s what they were made for, after all.”

  “Maybe.” I nodded my head weakly.

  Malachi stood and walked over to me, his eyes a brilliant, flaming red. “I will find a way to fix this, my princess.”

  “What if it can’t be fixed?”

  “We’ll fix it even if I have to go and hunt down Death itself and make him come back up here to take the job,” Matt said.

  “I know where he lives,” Malachi said. “I’ll open a phase portal, you get some rope and a baseball bat, and we can have him back here within the hour.”

  “No,” I said before they could continue planning felony kidnapping against an unsuspecting angel. “I’ll go. I can talk to him.”

  “You can’t,” Tolliver said. “What if you accidentally touched him? His mortal body would be destroyed before you ever got him back here.”

  “That means it’s up to me and Mal,” Matt said and then stood. He started toward the door, his shoulders tense. Mal followed along behind him, his hands clenched into tight fists at his side, as they stalked out of the apartment and Mal slammed the door closed behind them.

  “Where do you think he’s going?” Lisa asked as we all sat there, staring at the door.

  “If I had to guess?” Dad asked. “The Angel Formerly Known As Death is about to get unexpected visitors in his beachfront home. One of whom may be carrying a baseball bat.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Come on, you.” Hope leaned over my bed later that afternoon, doing her very best not to touch me, her long, perfectly straight blond hair hanging less than an inch from my nose as she jabbed at my foot with something pointy. “Up and at ’em. Rise and shine and all that good crap.”

  “Up and at what?” I flopped over and buried my face in the pillows. Couldn’t she see I was in the middle of an epic sulk? Less than six hours ago, my whole life had gone down the toilet and her response was “Up and at ’em?” Hello? Wasn’t I allowed at least a small hysterical cry?

  “We’re going to start finding a way to get you past this.” Hope poked me in the ass with the pointy thing and I briefly considered poking her right back. “Now get up. The pity party is over.”

  “It was just getting good.” I burrowed my head farther into the pillows.

  “Get up.” I felt a swift jab in my side and my head jolted up. Whatever she had I was going to take it from her and get my first soul as the Angel of
Death—by beating my older sister’s skull in with a… A mop? Damn it, there was nothing even remotely stylish to be salvaged from this.

  “Or what?”

  Hope, holding the mop by its head, tapped me in the ribs with the end again. “Or I’m going to go dunk this in the toilet and come back in here and hit you with the sponge end and, FYI, your dread demon doesn’t always flush.”

  “Eww.” I sat up then and swatted at the end of the mop. “Why do you want me to get up so bad?”

  “Because we can’t solve this if you’re lying in bed sulking like some sort of angsty damn teenager. Matt and Malachi are off abducting the original Angel of Death. Jesus and Tolliver are questioning everyone they know, and everyone that everyone they know knows, to try to find some way to solve this.”

  She poked me again, this time in the kidneys and I rolled over, trying to get further away from her and the pointy mop end of pain.

  “Look, Lisa is on the Internet scouring medical journals for ideas to neutralize your killer touch in case the guys can’t find anything. Dad has Mom at home with him so she’s out of our hair while he and the Alpha strategize about how to break their own rules without somehow bending reality in a way that shoves its head up its own ass. We’re all working to fix this, so you need to get up and help us.”

  “I’m in quarantine. So I am doing something. Something very important if you think about it.”

  “What? Sulking?”

  “No.” I shook my head and tears welled up in my eyes. I wanted to claim they were from frustration, but I knew it was because it had just hit me that the only way that my sister and I would ever touch again was when she poked me with a household cleaning object. Hopefully one she hadn’t dunked in a toilet.

  “Then what?”

  “I’m keeping all of you alive by not accidentally touching you.”

  “You can do that in the living room—where the rest of us are actually working.”

  “I can’t. I’m too big of a risk. What if I brush up against someone? What if I kill someone without meaning to?”