“How did that happen?” he asked, regarding me as though I’d grown another head.
I was so not going there. He’d lived without the facts of life thus far – so to speak – he could live without knowing about the birds and the bees a little longer. I sorted through a pile of trash in one corner, lifting items between my thumb and index finger as though they’d bite me, hoping to find a name or other identifying information, but all I found were old McDonald’s receipts, tissues, and cigarette butts. “Are you ready for the names?”
He leaned over me to study my every move. “Ready, set, go.”
“Okay. Fabiana Marie Luna. Born in Belen.”
He straightened and lowered his lids, his lashes fluttering as he searched his files, and I wondered what it would be like to have all those names, billions and billions of names, floating around in my head. I could barely remember my sister’s name at times.
He bounced back to me and refocused. “Dead.”
“Damn,” I said, stepping to a piece of paper I’d seen wedged between the wood slats in the floor.
“No breaking rules, Miss Charlotte.”
“Sorry, Rocket Man,” I said, lifting the paper out of the crack. Cursing was breaking the rules, and Rocket was all about rules. “How about Anna Michelle Gallegos.”
“Forty-eight dead. Twelve alive.”
“She would have passed recently. She was born in Houston but raised here in New Mexico.”
He responded faster this time. “Dead. I can show you.”
He started to pull me out of the freezer, but I held my ground with a pat on his hand. He was going to show me where he’d written the name in one of his walls. “I believe you, hon. It just makes me sad. I was hoping they were still alive. One more: Theodore James Chandler from Albuquerque.”
I had high hopes for this guy. His wife had just found the suicide note that morning. Maybe, just maybe, he was still alive.
“Not dead,” he said, and as my hopes soared, he counted on his fingers.
“So, he’s still alive? Do you know where he is?” I asked him.
“Not where. Not how,” he said, still counting down slowly on his fingers, each pudgy digit folding down one at a time. “Only if.”
I started to fish my phone out of my front pocket when he’d counted down to zero and said, “Dead.”
“Wait, what? Ted Chandler is dead? He was alive two seconds ago.”
“No, no, no. Not anymore.”
I blinked at him, waiting for an explanation.
“He probably didn’t pay his electric bill,” Rocket said, arching his brows and nodding as though issuing a caveat.
The impact of Ted’s death hit me hard. While I was busy playing detective – not that I wasn’t one, but still – poking around old receipts and porn magazines with the pages stuck together, a man had been dying.
I texted Uncle Bob, my message somber and pensive at once:
They’re dead. All three.
Son of a bitch. Are they with you?
No. Probably crossed over already.
Uncle Bob didn’t know exactly how it all worked, but he knew enough to believe anything I said, no matter how… unusual it sounded. One day I’d tell him who – no, what – I really was. For now, he took anything I had to say as gospel.
Going to talk to some of the relatives of these victims.
Let me know what you find out.
Will do.
With a heavy sigh and a heavier heart, I turned back to the task at hand: homeless perv living in the freezer. I didn’t really know if the pages of the porn magazines were stuck together, and I was not about to find out. I totally needed to start carrying plastic gloves, but that was all I needed, to launder gloves along with my license and car keys. I went through more fobs that way.
“Has he been here today?” I asked Rocket, trying to gauge whether there was anything in the area to identify the man. When I received no answer, I turned around.
Everyone was gone. Jessica. Strawberry. Rocket.
I walked slowly back into the kitchen, shining my light into the darkest corners, but saw nothing. I did, however, feel something. The cold hand of an attacker as it slammed roughly over my mouth.
6
My life is just like a soap opera
filmed in a psychiatric ward.
— T-SHIRT
I was pulled back against a skeletal body as a sharp piece of metal jabbed the skin at my neck. Not a knife, but something long and sharp. A screwdriver perhaps, which could do a lot of damage in the right hands. The man held it there as a warning while he got a better hold, tightening the opposite arm around my ribs just under Danger and Will Robinson, my breasts. He pulled me close.
I wasn’t fighting terribly hard just yet. No need to cause a ruckus when I had no idea what he wanted. Maybe he just wanted me to leave, which I’d oblige willingly. Homeless people, for the most part, were harmless unless you invaded what they considered their turf. I wasn’t using that freezer space anyway. It was all his.
“You sure talk a lot when ain’t nobody else in the room,” he said, his voice full of sand and gravel.
I glanced down to assess what I could: a grimy hand, Caucasian, mid-thirties. He was much stronger than he felt because all I could feel were bones. I caught a glimpse of the end of a tool in his other hand. Definitely a screwdriver. Long bony fingers curled around it until their knuckles shone white.
I’d dropped my flashlight, but I would have been able to see the others, no matter how dark it was. I couldn’t fathom why they’d left. A mere mortal wouldn’t have sent them packing. I had to wonder what had made them turn tail. At the same moment, I realized my order to hide my emotions from Reyes must have worked. Otherwise, the second my adrenaline spiked, he would have been there. Materialized right in front of me, and after severing the spine of my attacker as he was wont to do, he would have glared at me, given me a scolding for leaving without him.
Instead, nothing. I stood there parked against a homeless guy with a rusty screwdriver at my throat, and I had to wonder how I got into these situations so often. It wasn’t like I went in search of crazy people. They just seemed to find me.
“Look,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender, “it’s yours, okay? I never liked that freezer much anyway.”
He waited a long moment, his breath raspy as his lungs filled with air. Then he leaned forward and did the strangest thing. He bit the tip of my ear. Rather hard. As though he enjoyed inflicting pain on others.
I jerked in his grip, but he only tightened it more.
“You think I’m living in this shithole because I want to?” he asked, the smell of stale cigarettes on his breath suffocating me. “This is the only place you go without that pretty boyfriend of yours.”
Dread began to fill me, and I was on the verge of summoning Reyes when the man continued, his words convincing me to suspend the summons.
“I’ll kill him quick. He won’t know what hit him, I swear. And you get to walk away. If you can.” He brushed a thumb over Will Robinson to demonstrate his meaning. “You’re going to call him and get him over here, but if you tip him off, I’ll make it slow for him and even slower for you.” He buried his face in my hair and inhaled.
“Why?” I asked, searching the area frantically for a weapon. I could still have summoned Reyes. It wasn’t as though the man could hurt him in his incorporeal form, but I really wanted to know why he was after my affianced. Why he wanted to kill him quick. Why he wanted to kill him at all. Reyes charging in here and maiming the man before we got answers would do neither of us any good. “What did he ever to do you?”
The man barked a humorless laugh. “Ain’t never done anything to me. Just the price of being who he is, I guess.”
What the hell? Was this guy possessed? Was he sent to kill Reyes? And why lie in wait for me? From the look of things, he’d been waiting for at least a week.
“Who sent you?” I asked, relaxing against him in the hopes he’d re
spond by loosening his grip. I’d spotted a grungy wooden spoon half hidden under the brushed aluminum prep table. It wasn’t much, but if I dropped to the floor, letting my weight jerk me out of his grip, I might could get to it, break the handle, and use it to defend myself before he had a chance to sink the screwdriver into my back. Which would suck on several levels.
Did I dare risk summoning Reyes? He would be so angry with me. The dread of that scenario was almost more than the dread I felt toward screwdriver man.
“Call him. Get him over here. And make it good or you get a shiv in your throat before you can cry uncle.”
That seemed horridly unpleasant. When I reached into my front pocket, his grip tightened.
“I’m just getting my phone. But you must not know Reyes very well if you think you’re going to take him on with a screwdriver.”
“I’ve taken on bigger with less,” he assured me.
“Right. Like I said, you must not know him.”
I took out my phone, but he stopped me with a thoughtful, “What do you mean?”
“I mean that on Reyes’s first day in gen pop, three of the biggest, baddest members of the South Side gang were sent to take him out. Less than thirty seconds later, they all lay dead on the cafeteria floor while Reyes remained completely unscathed. Winded, but unscathed. They’d had weapons, too.”
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered to himself. “I fucking knew it. Dollar, that fucking piece of shit.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, trying to reason with an addict. An impossible feat on my best day. And clearly today was not my best day.
He twisted a hand into my hair and jerked my head back. His emotions gushed out as though a dam had broken. The drugs he was on, most likely meth, were making him unpredictable and even more dangerous. His emotions went from a sadistic joy to an absolute rage within the span of a heartbeat. He’d been duped by someone, but I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. Did someone named Dollar send him? Was that even a real name?
“Only thing you got to understand is now I got myself a predicament,” he said, pulling the tip of my ear between his teeth again, his teeth sinking lightly into the cartilage before moving to the lobe.
I tried to jerk away, but his fingers entangled in my hair would have none of it.
“Do I shove this flathead into your skull or —?”
I locked my focus on to the spoon and waited for him to give me option B, hoping it would prove to be far more appealing than option A. If I didn’t survive this day, Beep wouldn’t survive this day, and that was not an option at all. So I gave him a moment to evaluate his choices, to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse, but after a pause that seemed to stretch for several minutes, I heard a sound like a tear or a rip, then a gurgling sound. His grip didn’t ease, even when I felt a warmth saturate the back of my neck to trickle down my shirt.
Startled, I pushed out of his grip, but he tried to hold on to me when I turned to face him. His lids were saucerlike, shock and fear radiating out of him in hot waves as blood gushed out of his throat, his esophagus and surrounding tendons laid open as though a lion had taken a swipe at him. I shoved to break his hold, but he kept a grip on my shirt. Warm, sticky blood sprayed out of him and onto me in pulsating bursts, his mouth open in horror as his life drained from his body. As his expression faded.
I fell back and he lurched forward, still clinging to me. We fell to the ground, his blood soaking my shirt and my hair in seconds.
My mind instantly jumped to Reyes, but he had never done anything like this before. He worked much cleaner, causing internal destruction with no external trauma whatsoever. Without an MRI, there was no way of knowing exactly how much damage he’d done to someone on the inside.
The man’s head lolled onto my shoulder, the deluge slowing as his weight pinned me to the filthy, now blood-soaked floor. Before I could come up with another theory, a sound raked over me, low and vicious, the deep, raw undertones reverberating through to my bones. I paused a solid five seconds as absolute terror took hold of me.
Before I lost control of my faculties altogether, I squirmed beneath the deadweight of my attacker. I felt a sharp tug on my left arm followed by a raging sting as I scrambled out from under him and ran for my life. Literally. I didn’t look back. I didn’t dare. I scaled the stairs, the adrenaline pumping through me like rocket fuel, and ran down the hall to the front doors, heedless of the trash and debris in my path. Hitting the door like a nuclear missile, I stumbled into the blinding daylight and sprinted to the gate, where my mind couldn’t quite latch on to the code. My gaze darted around wildly, trying to spot the beast before it ripped my throat out as well. Somewhere in the frantic recesses of my mind, I registered a blistering pain in my left arm and the thundering beats of my heart. I backed against the gate, laced my fingers through the chain link, and stared at the front door like a sentry. Waiting. Dreading.
They can’t come into the daylight.
They can’t come into the daylight.
They can’t come into the daylight.
I repeated that mantra, my chest heaving, my lungs burning, having no idea if it was true or not. No one, not even Reyes, really knew about the hellhounds. What their vulnerabilities were here on earth. Their strengths. They were not demons, but a product of hell. Created there by Lucifer himself. So while demons could not come into the light without some kind of protection, like a human once possessed, hellhounds were a different breed entirely. They might be just as comfortable in daylight as I was.
With that thought, I turned back to the lock on the gate, forced myself to calm down, and punched the date into the number pad. The second it unlocked, I pushed through it and jumped into Misery. I took out my phone while turning over the engine. I had to get to someone who had answers, who might know what to do.
There were only two people on this plane that I knew of who might have some answers. Reyes, naturally, and the Dealer, a Daeva, a slave who had escaped from hell centuries ago and now lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, running illicit card games and tricking humans out of their souls. We’d come to an agreement on the soul thing. He could sup only on very bad people. But he seemed to know a lot more about all of this than anyone else. In fact, he was the one who’d told us about the Twelve and the fact that they’d escaped from their prison in hell and made it onto this plane. He’d wanted to help protect me from them, but Reyes refused his assistance. I was beginning to think he’d made a grave mistake.
So, I could run either to Reyes or to the Dealer, and only one of the two would become enraged with the fact that I’d left without him.
The Dealer it was.
Only after I brought up his name in my contacts did it occur to me that I’d torn out of a building, soaked in someone else’s blood, and raced away as though I’d committed murder. I could only hope no one had seen me. No one called the police. I’d do that myself.
My lashes clung together, the blood coagulating and creating a thick, sticky residue, and I dared a quick glance at my reflection in the rearview as the phone rang. I regretted it instantly. I looked like the second-to-last victim of an axe murderer in a B-grade horror movie. If I was going to look like the second-to-last victim of an axe murderer in a horror movie, it’d damned well better be grade A.
The Dealer picked up the line. “This must be important for you to call me, the dreg of society.”
“You home?”
“Maybe.”
“Be there in two. Have your door open.”
“Pregnant women are so demanding. Anything I can do in the interim?”
“Unless you can dematerialize and rematerialize in my Jeep while I’m going ninety-three in a twenty-five, then probably not.” I hung up to concentrate on the road before he could say anything else.
That had to have been one of the twelve beasts of hell. Who else – no what else – could have done that? And if Reyes had materialized, could they have killed him? Was his incorporeal spirit at risk? He would have fough
t it, tried to kill it, just to get it out of the way. Picking them off one by one was a tactic he’d taught me: Weaken the pack slowly. Methodically. He’d never been one to sit around and wait to be attacked. He preferred the hunt. Craved it. I’d felt his hunger, his voracious appetite the last time we took on a horde of demons.
Still, I couldn’t believe my binding spell, for lack of a better phrase, had worked. I couldn’t believe Reyes hadn’t materialized.
I sped around anything that got in my way. Getting pulled over for speeding while covered in blood wasn’t suspicious at all, but I just couldn’t seem to slow down. I whizzed around a delivery truck and screeched to a stop in the Dealer’s driveway. He had a nice adobe in a decent neighborhood. Hopefully none of his neighbors were out.
I charged out of Misery and ran for his front door, which stood wide open with a kid leaning against the frame, arms crossed, top hat sitting at a flirtatious slant. Though he looked nineteen, he was centuries old. From what I could piece together, he’d actually been on earth for over a millennium. Tall and wide-shouldered, he had black hair – the tips of which brushed his collarbone – the most incredible bronze-colored eyes I’d ever seen, and a persistent smirk that could be charming one minute and deadly the next. I still didn’t know the Daeva’s name, but Reyes did. The first time we met the kid, Reyes had recognized him from their days back in hell, said he was a champion of some kind. His description of the Dealer had made me think of a gladiator, a slave fighting for the entertainment of his owners.
If the kid was surprised by my ravaged appearance, he didn’t show it.
I hurried past him and went straight for his bathroom. But because I didn’t know which room it was in, I had to try a few doors first.