By definition Doomsday is the period of chaos that leads up to the Apocalypse. I’d really been hoping to avoid that ticking clock. Sure, it was going to happen eventually. The end of days was inevitable. But why couldn’t it happen on someone else’s watch?
“What do you mean, people believed that it was?”
“Every generation thinks it’s living in the end times. The events of Revelation—Doomsday, chaos, tribulation, the beast, 666—could have played out at any point in history. But we’ve always stopped them.”
“We. The federation?”
“Yes. The list of historical figures that could have turned out to be the Antichrist without us around is pretty long. Nero, Caligula, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, to name just a few.”
“Those guys were Nephilim?”
“Did you seriously think they were human?”
Not really.
“You’re saying that any demonic nut bag can become the Antichrist?” I asked.
“If he manages to fulfill all the requirements before one of us kills him.”
“Requirements. Like killing me?”
“For starters, then killing all the DKs and seers.”
The last nut bag had made pretty good headway on that.
“Then?”
“Charismatic leader of the world, rebuilding the temple, abolition of paper money, rising from the dead.”
“Whoa. What was the last one?”
“Eventually, one of them is going to heal a head shot and then .. . what’s that expression?” She tapped her pink nail against her pink lips. “All hell will break loose. Literally.”
“Healing a head shot isn’t much of a chore for most Nephilim.”
“I know.”
“Then we move forward on the assumption that we’ve been granted a reprieve.”
“We move forward as we always do,” Summer said. “Kill them, kill them, kill them.”
“At this rate,” I said, rubbing my forehead, “the cycle might never end. Kill the leader of the light—Doomsday; kill the leader of the darkness—not. Doomsday, not, Doomsday, not.” I was getting dizzy.
I lowered my hand as something occurred to me. “Ruthie told me the final battle is now.”
“Maybe.” Summer’s deceptively innocent blue eyes met mine. “There’s never been anyone like you before.”
“So according to the rumor”—which should be a legend by next week—“by killing the leader of the darkness, I thwarted Doomsday. To start up another, they’d have to kill me. But I’m not going to be as easy to take out as Ruthie.”
“Then there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Except psycho evil spirit bitch—”
“Witch,” Summer corrected.
“No, I had it right.” We shared a smile, then realized what we were doing and stopped. “She’s—uh—after me,” I finished. “And I don’t know how to kill her.”
“First things first,” Summer said. “We get Jimmy, then we find Sawyer.”
“Does it have to be ‘we’?” I asked.
Me and Summer on a road trip. Hunting down Jimmy Sanducci and confronting him together.
Talk about a nightmare.
CHAPTER 4
A ‘57 Chevy Impala was parked in front of my building, light blue and so gorgeous it brought tears to my eyes. Summer walked to the driver’s side and got in.
“This is yours?”
She shot me a duh look.
Summer the fairy couldn’t fly—at least on a plane.
She messed up the controls, and when dealing with several tons of airborne metal and fuel … extremely bad idea. She could hit the skies without wings, a trick I’d yet to see, but cloud-dancing people tend to get noticed. So, unless there was a dire emergency that required her immediate presence—and there were quite a few— Summer stuck to cars.
“I meant, what happened to your pickup?”
“That’s for New Mexico. This”—she smoothed her hand over the dash—“is for the road.”
Yes, it was.
I wasn’t a classic car nut. I drove a Jetta, for crying out loud. But I’d always admired old automobiles, the ones that really sucked the gas. Those cars had balls, guts, chutzpah—real staying power. It had always made perfect sense to me that Christine, Stephen King’s car that never died, had been a 1958 Plymouth Fury.
Summer pulled away from the curb and pointed the Impala southwest. “What’s in your pocket?” she asked.
My hand stilled in the act of rubbing the amulet. I hesitated, then realized that two heads were better than one, even when one of them was Summer’s. She’d been around as long as the woman of smoke. That had to be good for something.
I drew out the necklace. “I tore this off the Naye’i.”
Summer glanced at the copper circlet and frowned. “That’s a pentacle.”
“Never heard of it.”
Which wasn’t surprising. Ask me how to clean a gun or mix a martini and I was a damn genius, but ask me about secret Satanic things and you could color me worthless.
“Pentacles are amulets used in magical rites,” Summer said. “The star is a pentagram—five points. If the symbol is drawn with one point up, we’re talking good magic.”
“And if there are two points up and one point down, like this?”
“Black magic.”
I wasn’t surprised. “Until I tore the amulet off the Naye’i, I didn’t know what she was. I think it blocked my sight.”
“Fantastic,” Summer muttered. “What if there are more of them out there?”
I hadn’t thought of that. I’d just been concerned that there was one.
“How do you know all this stuff?” I asked.
Since I’d been thrust into my role as leader of the federation, along with my destiny as a seer, with virtually no preparation, I didn’t know all I was supposed to about the Nephilim. In truth, I didn’t know anything.
DKs were trained in killing tactics. Seers were just supposed to see, but I was both. However, I hadn’t had the time to study the ancient texts, the legends of every country and people. The way things were going, I doubted I ever would.
Thus far I’d made do with consulting any available DK and that friend to seekers of knowledge everywhere, the Internet.
“I’ve been doing this a while,” Summer answered. “There’s also a Web site where DKs and seers have begun to enter into a database what they know about a particular Nephilim or breed. Cuts down on research time.”
“Why don’t I know about this?”
“Just went live in the past few weeks.” She rattled off an address, then told me how to access the files with a code. “It’s not comprehensive since DKs are better at killing than typing, and a lot of knowledge was lost when three-quarters of the federation was wiped out.”
I cursed.
“Live with it,” Summer said. “And move on.”
I didn’t have much choice.
“Have you ever seen anything similar to this?” I held up the amulet.
Summer took it, and I tensed, half afraid she might go up in flames when she touched it. Who knew what that thing could do? But she didn’t.
“The woman of smoke probably made it,” Summer said. “Cast a spell. Sacrificed a goat.”
I stilled. “Why would you say that?”
“There’s always a sacrificial goat.” She glanced sideways, then back at the dark road. “You do know that a goat isn’t always a goat?”
“Huh?”
“The goat without horns. It means human sacrifice.” I must have made an involuntary movement because she lifted her brow. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised? We’re talking pure evil. For demons, humans are prey. Cattle. Meat. Goats, if you will.”
I’d known that, had seen it practiced by the leader of the darkness, who’d kept a harem of women snacks. I was so glad that guy was dead.
Summer laid the amulet on the seat between us. “Something else is bothering you besides this.”
Her intuitiv
eness was nearly as annoying as her manicure.
“I’ve seen the Naye’i before,” I admitted.
“And you didn’t kill her?”
“I was a kid.” I’d had no idea what I was seeing. One glance into the demon’s eyes, and I’d hidden under the covers for the rest of the night.
“What happened?”
“Sawyer. He—” I searched for the words to explain what I’d observed. “He … conjured her. By killing a goat.”
The car swerved as Summer’s hands jerked on the wheel. “A goat, goat or—”
“A goat.” It had still been quite a shock.
“And then?” Summer asked.
I closed my eyes and saw again what had happened so many years ago.
Ruthie had sent me to Sawyer the summer I was fifteen to discover all that I could about the psychometric talent I’d been born with. I’d needed to learn how to live with it, and Sawyer had helped.
Sure, it was weird to send a fifteen-year-old girl to an isolated part of New Mexico to stay with what appeared to be a thirty-year-old man.
However, Sawyer wasn’t thirty. Hell, he wasn’t even a man. And I was no ordinary fifteen-year-old girl.
I don’t think Ruthie had been wild about the idea of sending me there, but I also don’t think she’d had much choice. I was special in a way she’d never dealt with before, just as Sawyer was special in ways no one else could understand. As much as he’d scared me—as much as he still did—he’d also thrilled me, tempted me, and taught me.
On that long-ago night, I’d woken in the dark, heard a voice, peeked out the window just in time to witness the death of the goat and a whole lot more.
The blood had poured over Sawyer’s hands and into the ground. Smoke had risen wherever the blood struck as he’d chanted in another language—Navajo, no doubt— and lifted his gory palms in supplication to the night. The smoke had twined with the bonfire at the edge of the yard before racing around and around as if trying to break free. Sawyer had snapped an order, and the dancing flame paused, lengthened, and became the woman of smoke.
When she’d stared at me with her bottomless black eyes, I’d tried to hide, but it was too late. She’d seen me, and I knew deep down in my trembling soul that she would come for me one day. How right I had been.
“Why would he do that?” Summer murmured when I finished my tale.
“I never asked him.”
“Why not?”
“He scared the everloving crap out of me back then.”
Summer nodded in agreement. Sawyer scared her, too. Which meant she was smarter than she looked. She just had to be.
“He probably wouldn’t have told you the truth,” she said.
“Does he ever?”
Sawyer had a lot in the way of power and very little in the way of conscience. The last time I’d seen him he’d drugged me and fucked me—and that wasn’t a euphemism, either.
Sawyer did a lot of training for the federation—both DKs and seers—for a price. Regardless of his lack of ethics and his annoying habit of doing whatever and whoever the hell he wanted, the fact remained that he knew things. When you lived for centuries upon centuries you couldn’t help but know.
“What are the powers of a Naye’l?” I asked.
“Traveling on the wind. Turning to smoke.”
“She dropped my friend Megan unconscious with a glance.”
Summer nodded slowly. “Add it to the list. Although that could be a power she learned through witchcraft. Hard to say.”
“Why didn’t she drop me?”
“She likes to get her hands bloody? Who knows? Maybe that talent only works on humans.”
“I’m human.”
Summer snorted. “Sure you are.”
“What the hell does that mean?” She’d once told me that I’d meet my mother someday and that I wouldn’t like it.
“Relax. I was just…” Her voice trailed off.
“Messing with me?”
“Yeah. You do ask for it on occasion.”
I asked for it constantly.
“My parents,” I began.
“Are unknown to us. For now. That’s a worry for another time. Don’t you have enough to deal with?”
“Yeah.” I sat back in my seat and watched the road roll by.
Since I’d discovered that the world was inhabited by demons with human faces, I’d begun to wonder what had lurked beneath the faces of my parents. No one seemed to know, or if they did they weren’t telling, but for me to have the talents I had, I figured either one or both of them had possessed special talents, too.
“I still wonder why Sawyer had to conjure his mother,” Summer mused a few minutes later.
“Considering that he goes on an annual ‘Kill my mother’ hunt, I don’t think they bonded well.”
“He never did get over her murdering his father.”
“Yeah, he’s funny that way,” I said.
Summer cast me an exasperated glance. “What I’m getting at is, why conjure her? She’s flesh and blood, not a spirit.”
“Was she always? Flesh and blood, I mean? A Naye’i is an evil spirit.”
“The Nephilim were called evil spirits down through the ages, but it doesn’t mean ‘spirit,’ like a ghost. Just…” Summer lifted one hand from the steering wheel and turned it palm up. “Spirit of evil.”
“And we’re right back to why he conjured her.”
I guessed I’d just have to break down and ask him.
———
We traveled all night. Fairies didn’t appear to need any sleep. Since I did, I conked out well before St. Louis.
Dawn over the Ozark Mountains is a beautiful thing. The mist hangs heavy on the hills, causing the streaks of sunlight creeping across the peaks to turn every shade of crimson and gold.
The sight made me want to save the world all over again. After viewing a sunrise like that, who wouldn’t want to go out and kick some half-demon ass?
Except we were here to find Jimmy, learn the names of the remaining seers, do whatever it was that needed doing to get him back on the job. I wasn’t certain I was up to that. I’d never been much of a psychologist. And Jimmy definitely needed his head shrunk, or a nice padded cell.
Or a hug. I wasn’t sure which.
We reached Barnaby’s Gap in the afternoon, much later than I’d planned. Despite Summer’s fairytude, we’d gotten lost, floundered around, backtracked, wasted time.
The town was old, had probably been there since long before the Civil War. In the past, the Ozarks had been a hotbed for mining, but as is the case with most mines, the ore ran out. The towns that had sprung up to meet the needs of the industry either died or found a new livelihood.
Most of the Ozark settlements had recently begun to court the boom of tourism brought about by the success of Branson. Barnaby’s Gap had not. Couldn’t say that I blamed them. Why mar the spectacular view with a bevy of condos, complete with swimming pools, tennis courts, workout facilities, and spa? Why commercialize the main street with shops full of candles, holiday decorations, antiques, crafts, and candy?
They’d no doubt survived without catering to the masses because of the impressive sawmill we’d passed on the way in. I was certain the majority of the citizenry worked there while the minority made their living on the sidewalk-lined streets where family-owned businesses catered to kith and kin. We rolled past a grocer, doctor, pharmacy, and—yippee and yahoo!—a coffee shop.
“Coffee,” I croaked, pointing.
My croak must have tipped Summer off to the necessity of said coffee because the Impala coasted to a stop at the curb, and she followed me inside without argument.
The place was nearly empty this late in the day. We didn’t have to contend with tourists sipping their four-dollar brews and reading the most recent New York Times bestseller or the romance novel they wouldn’t be caught dead opening back home.
I ordered a large Mountain Roast from an overly pale young woman who seemed extremely j
umpy. She started when I ordered, as if I’d spoken too loud, then dropped my change, flinching when the coins pinged against the countertop. She’d had way too much Breakfast Blend.
I slugged several sips in quick succession before I turned away from the register.
Summer eyed me with interest. “Do you have asbestos mouth?”
“Excuse me?”
“Most humans would burn their mouths.”
I wasn’t most humans, wasn’t even sure just how human I was. But I’d been able to drink really hot coffee without burning my mouth even before I’d become superpsychic hero girl.
I shrugged. “I’m used to it.”
Summer strolled to an empty table. Her outfit seemed less conspicuous here, or maybe I was just getting used to that, too.
“Now what?” I asked. “We wait around until Jimmy shows up for the parade?”
“I don’t think so.” Her gaze was fixed on the wide front window that overlooked the main drag of Barnaby’s Gap.
The street was deserted. I started to get uneasy. Sure, this place wasn’t a tourist trap, but there should be someone moving around.
“Come on,” she said.
We walked along the sidewalk, peeking into each storefront. All the places were open, the employees doing their jobs, but everyone was twitchy. When we appeared in the window, they’d start, glance up with wide eyes, then just as quickly look away. I didn’t like it one bit.
Up ahead an elderly man shuffled toward us—tall and thin, with snow-white hair. He was dressed well, not a street person, though the way he hunched his shoulders and mumbled to himself reminded me of many I’d seen. As he neared, his words drifted to us on the sultry afternoon breeze.
“Red eyes,” he intoned. “Teeth and blood. Demon in the hills. Demon in the caves.”
I guess that explained the overcaffeinated conduct of the populace.
I immediately crossed in front of Summer and set my hand on the man’s shoulder.
For the most part, strong emotions—fear, love, hate—transmitted, giving me a view of the situations surrounding them. Since the guy was nearly scared witless, I got smacked with so many images I staggered.
Night. Dark. Trees. Water. The acrid scent of terror, the heated brush of danger. Running. Falling. Pain. Blood. Then merciful, blessed oblivion.
Doomsday Can Wait Page 3