Marcus - Precinct 12

by Chloe Vincent

  She heard something, she thought, but it was weird, like she was underwater and someone was yelling at her. Sounded like a man. She caught only a snippet or two. "You son of a bitch! Don't you do this to me, you—" "It's me, Adina! Gregory! Listen to my voice!" "You're going to be okay! Just hang on!"

  Gregory.

  What a fuckin' liar.

  Her vision faded out.

  6

  The Dream

  Death looked a hell of a lot like a nightmare.

  Dark. Mysterious. Murky. She felt like she was traveling through time and yet experiencing just a ferocious fever dream. She was intently aware of tingles all over herself, but when she tried to locate a single place, she came up empty and dead inside. It was like being everywhere and nowhere at once, pushing against the fabric of reality without having any idea what was on the other side but getting mere mumbles and indications of what was there. Sights. Dreams. Memories long forgotten. Ideas and hopes that she'd achieved or seen break from the reality of the world crushing down on her.

  The Warlock.

  Abruptly, without warning, he was her reality. She was back at the night when he'd been murdered, back at the time where she'd been a little too late and she hadn't been able to help him. She could still see his face, aged with time, staring up at her in pain. She remembered as clearly as if it had been yesterday how the blood had felt, gushing beneath her fingers as she desperately tried to will life back into him. Life had never been her gift, and they both knew it, but through tears and blubbering, she'd tried anyway. She couldn't breathe life back into a fly, but she had to try. It hadn't been enough. If she'd had even the slightest bit of talent at healing, she could've saved him. Remembering him clutching onto her, trying to speak but being choked up by his injuries, brought back all the horror of that night. She'd tried. She'd tried with everything she could. She couldn't. She just simply couldn't. Her last memory of him was failing him, watching him waste away. She was strong enough to tear through steel and smart enough to compete with the very best, but when something as fragile as the Warlock's life was in her hands, she did what she always did: broke it. She wasn't a delicate creature. She was a demon, literally infused with demonic energy that gave her her abilities. She was powerful and spirited, but with such delicate things, she broke them. Such gifts were reserved for those of angelic descent. Demons could only cause pain and torment.

  It was her fault that the Warlock had died.

  It hurt her to her core to even admit it, but she'd known that he might have been in danger after he stole her away from the cult and tried to protect her. Her unspoken job was to protect him from anything that came after him, but she'd gotten cocky. Arrogant. Thought she could take on the world, and although the cult had never been able to bring her back, they'd taken what mattered most from her: her parent, if not by blood, then by caring and love. He'd known what she was—a machine of destruction, crafted to be perfect and deadly, incapable of real emotional connection, and he'd been vulnerable with her. He'd cared for her when everyone else saw her as a freak. She had nothing left to remember him by. She couldn't even remember his voice anymore, a fact that haunted her. She'd never considered that he could be gone so quickly. One night, he was alive and well. The next, he was drowning in a pool of blood from an assailant she was never able to find or even identify. For years she'd tried. Nothing. Whoever it was, they'd left no trail other than a calling card—a pristine, sharp card with a jagged crimson line making a smiley face on the front, taunting her with its amusement. She tore into the cult members but was never able to find out anything. Nobody seemed to know about the face. Nobody seemed to know about the assassin. It was her greatest case, the one she was never able to solve. It was her ghost in her closet, the one that was there every time she got close to someone, whispering in her ear, “You'll fail them, too”. She didn't need anyone and, more importantly, people who got close to her tended to end up dead. She might have been close to immortal, but not them. Nobody ever was. She was destined to be alone. That was okay. She knew her place. She probably deserved to be alone.

  Over and over she saw the death. Over and over she felt the crushing knowledge that it was her fault. Over and over she felt the excruciating pain of that night and had to face that the assassin still walked free. Whoever they were, they were still out there. They'd gotten away with it. Nobody ever got away with it. Nearly eight years later, she was no closer to finding them. She still had the card, just to remind her to never fall in love, never trust anyone, never let someone get hurt for caring for her.

  She awoke.

  The first indication that she was awake was the bizarre, borderline numb feeling in her body. As badly as she'd been sliced up and minced, she should have been in agony. Her body put itself back together remarkably well, but it would take a while. Something simple like a stab wound to the shoulder might take a few hours to heal. If she lost an eye, a few days. She should be dead. Even her regenerative abilities should not have been able to cope with that much damage. Even the sheer blood loss should've put her out, so the fact that she was even remotely alive was a shock.

  She opened her eyes and winced at the glaring light of the sun shining through her living room windows directly onto her face. She was still in her apartment, startlingly enough, lying on her couch, stretched out with pale, freshly healed wounds all over her body and the remainder of the cuts slowly mending. The rough fabric of the couch was stained crimson from her blood, which had even created a small pool on the ground and gotten all over her floor. She saw the remainder of the bat that she'd busted across the werewolf's face, the devastated furniture, and the deep claw rents in the floor that had sliced clean through the hardwood. The dust had long settled, and the golden morning light of the rising sun gave her a relatively good indication of how long she'd been there, apparently recovering.

  What.

  The.

  Fuck.

  She blinked hard, trying to ignore the thunderous headache that felt like it was splitting her head in two. She should be dead. According to all rules and regulations of life, even she should be singing in the choir invisible right about then. She'd been torn halfway to shreds. She'd lost dangerous, incredible amounts of blood. She'd been violently ripped apart. Internal organs had been punctured. Serious stuff. She should've at least choked to death from the blood in her lungs. But no, here she was, still going on.

  Gregory.

  The name flew into her head like it'd been shot from a bow. Gregory. She couldn't remember much about what had happened there at the end, but somewhere amidst the getting murdered, she seemed to recall something about Gregory appearing. Had he fought off the werewolf? He certainly could've. The Grigori could probably take on a pack if he got warmed up enough. There were few people in the world that she'd met whom she would be a little worried about fighting. Not a lot of people could, in a fair fight, best her. Gregory might not be able to, but he'd give her a hell of a run for her money at least. He had healing abilities. Maybe... he'd been able to keep her alive? It was possible. The bond that the Warlock had put on them demanded he do everything he could to keep her safe. But, if she was a betting woman, he still shouldn't have been able to do jack squat about what had happened to her. He was a healer, sure, but regular healing in her condition was like sticking a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The idea was nice, but she shouldn't have pulled through anyway.

  She glanced around to see if he was nearby, but saw nothing. She thought about calling out to see if he was there, but she remained skeptical. Just because she'd somehow survived didn't mean that she wasn't in danger still. She very well might still be in serious danger and maybe the werewolf was just waiting for her to wake up. Was it likely? No, not terribly. Was she planning to risk it? No, not terribly. Ignoring her body ordering her to sit still and recuperate, she pulled her arm off her chest and forced herself to ease up slowly, using it as leverage against the couch. All the parts that had been healed up gave her a warning sensation. The parts
that hadn't been healed were a bit more... vigorous in their warning system. Shooting pain exploded from her chest from all the lacerations, making her produce a little whimper and causing her vision to go a little blurry for a second.

  She had to get up. Sitting around hoping that everything was fine was not an option. She forced herself up a little more, trying and failing to ignore the pain screaming at all parts of her body. She made it a few more inches before she couldn't deal with it anymore and gave up, returning to a prone position. She groaned in pain, fighting the urge to move. The pain would subside. At this point, she wouldn't make it more than a couple feet before her body just gave up and she'd collapse. She was better off staying there for the moment. Whatever injuries she'd sustained had been deep and serious, more than she'd anticipated. She felt like puking, but resisted it as best as she could, blinking hard to clear the stars in her vision. Being a demon provided a lot of benefits, but she could hurt like everyone else. She let out a low whimper again as an overwhelming wave of pain flooded her from moving too much. She wasn't healed up yet. Not even close. She was alive, and within a few hours or a day, she'd probably be able to walk, but right then, she'd do more damage than the benefits she might gain for getting away. She just had to hope and pray that Gregory was there to help protect her until she was able to defend herself again. She opened her mouth to call out and ask if he was there, but a part of her was scared he wouldn't answer and she'd be left with that knowledge. Maybe, if she told herself that he was there to keep her safe, she could rest even if it wasn't true. What was plan B? If she was alone, she couldn't very well leave. She'd just have to sit there and recuperate.

  "Rest." Gregory's voice pierced the morning air from somewhere over the couch, bringing a wave of relief to the incapacitated Adina. "I put entirely too much effort into keeping you alive for you to go off and get yourself killed now."

  Adina laughed in raw relief that she was protected and safe, only to regret it a moment later when her body reminded her that she was very much still injured. She winced and rolled her head back. Gregory was there. Thank God. There were very few people she'd trust herself with in a condition like that. Well, actually, nobody except him. He was incredibly powerful and smart, and he was more than enough to keep anything bad from happening to her. He was the closest thing to family that she had. "Ouch..." she groaned, reminding herself to stay still but turning her head to see if she could spot him. "Did you save me?"

  "No," he replied in his rich, royal-sounding voice. "I watched you die."

  A weak smile formed on Adina's face. "Thank you." She meant it. "You're my guardian angel," she told him, half-jokingly.

  "Don't make me regret saving you," came the serious-sounding response, but it coaxed a soft laugh from her. He was as much of a loner as she was. He had a nasty habit of saying things that people didn't realize were jokes. He'd say the cruelest things to someone's face but mean it as a joke, but ninety-five percent of the time it ended up in disaster. For years they'd argued about it until she finally gave up trying to convince him to play nice. "That's two that you owe me now," he told her. "From Cairo."

  The Grigori angel wandered around the side of the couch and broke into her field of view. Tall, imposing, strong, hauntingly beautiful in a way only an angel could be, he stopped in front of her. She'd known him a great many years and she'd never seen him as tired as he was now. Dark circles hid under his cold, orange eyes—the only indication that the human form in front of her was his fake appearance and that under the fake exterior he was a being of nearly pure energy. She could see it, of course. It was one of her gifts. She could see straight through his human appearance if she wanted to, almost like a regular person who could put on 3D glasses and suddenly see the effects hidden to the naked eye. She didn't want to. Just for a little while, she wanted to pretend that he was a normal human and that she didn't live this absurd life full of monsters, angels, and demons. It was a nice fantasy, and she could use a little fantasy. His intelligent, cold eyes focused on her with surprising intensity, scanning her body in a distant way, like there was no chemistry between them and no history and he was merely a doctor surveying his patient. "You're healing up quickly."

  She cast her gaze down on her tattered clothes and the stains on all of them, complete with the pale, freshly healing skin beneath them, knowing very well that the rest of her was quite unhealed under the surface of her skin. She gave a quiet little snort of amusement. "Doesn't feel that way."

  "You should be dead," he informed her in a matter-of-fact way, using the knife in his hands to cut a slice of the apple he was holding which he must have stolen from her kitchen.

  "I know. Thank you. I owe you." The one part of him that still irritated the hell out of her was that he was incapable of not being arrogant. Sure, he was supposedly perfection and an angel and all that, but the man just couldn't live without being endlessly reminded that he was the greatest. It was most of why their fling had ended so quickly, that and the fact that if an angel was caught feeling lust and tenderness towards a demon, he'd be doomed to Earth and forbidden to go back to heaven as he so desperately wished.

  He turned up his perfect lip with a distant shrug, which for him was the equivalent of bursting into tears and holding her and begging her to never be hurt again. "Had to. I'm bound to you, remember? It isn't up to me." His tone was borderline grumpy. Her near-death experience was an inconvenience, like having his credit card default or running into especially bad traffic on the way to work.

  "What happened to the werewolf?" she asked him, trying to stay as still as possible. "Did it get away?"

  He popped a slice of apple in his mouth and chomped down on it. "Yes."

  Ah, well, that was concerning. "Did you... recognize it?"

  He stared at her long enough for her to shut her mouth and realize that the answer was clearly no. "Why was it after you? Not that I care."

  "Naturally," she grumbled under her breath. Why was he so damn incapable of just showing some emotion? This was coming from her, the legendarily locked-emotion one. "I'm no genius, but I'm going to take a leap and say it's related to the Pierce case." Jesus, was she really that cliché? All she needed was to look stupidly towards a camera, give a hostile squint, speak in a gravelly tone, and just like that, she'd be as derivative as Pierce's detective character. It was almost like her voice lines were written by a semi-talented, but mostly absurd, writer with no idea what they were doing. It was moments like this that made her sit back and think.

  Thinking would have to wait. The look that Gregory gave her told her right away that he wasn't okay with this. As she started to lean up, he caught her shoulder and kept her from getting up. She strained for a moment before she decided to stop trying to push. Without him moving his arm, she wasn't going to get up. "Gregory..." She stayed still, trying to hide the sweat that was starting to form on her brow from the effort of getting up. "You can't stop me from doing my job."

  Gregory's dark blond eyebrow shot up in amusement. "Oh?" he smirked, confident in the knowledge that she was quite wrong about it. "Then go ahead and get up."

  She was tempted hard to try, but logic kicked in. Their strength was comparable enough to start with and they'd already had plenty of arguments about who was the stronger one. Well, "arguments" in the sense that he refused to acknowledge the possibility that she was even close to him. In her condition, beat most of the way to death, having just crawled her way back to life from death's door, more than a little worried about ripping something that had just healed if she strained too much, she wouldn't stand a chance. He'd maul her. Not wanting to back down, but smart enough to know that she wouldn't win if she kept pushing, she stayed exactly where she was. "Why don't you move your hand and I will."

  Gregory's eyes flashed to the sweat forming on her forehead. "How about you just do it anyway? I'm sure that the mighty Adina won't have any problem getting past this. At least she wouldn't if she was healthy..." Right he may have been, but the way he said it ma
de her not want to give him the satisfaction of being right. She narrowed her eyes, strongly considering the possibility of injuring herself just to not give in and let him win.

  "Gregory," she hissed with a tone that suggested he needed to take his hand away, "I have places to be."

  "You need rest," he replied casually. "I found part of your lung over there. As long as I'm bound to you to keep you safe..." he leaned down and put a bit of his weight on her shoulder, making her lower with a wince and a pained groan. "You're. Not. Leaving."

  She went down a few inches so she wouldn't hurt herself any more by trying to push against his muscular arm, which seemed a hell of a lot more imposing in her current situation than normal. What he was saying might have been realistic and she appreciated the fact that he was trying to keep her safe, but that didn't mean that she had to agree with him. Her best bet, the most logical choice, was to sit there and recover with him watching over her. She wasn't great at being reasonable. She'd learned a long time ago that she had zero patience. It was a vice, sure, but not one that she was fixing anytime soon. "You don't own me," she growled. "I'm leaving, and there's nothing you can do to stop me."

  He chomped through another apple slice. "Really? Because, this is somewhat awkward, but—" he glanced at his hand and looked back at her with an infuriatingly obvious expression of confidence, "it looks like it's working so far."

  She glared up at him. Sometimes, she hated him. He was one of the only people that she could wake up with, see that he had saved her life, and be frustrated with him only a few minutes later. It wasn't so much his actions, it was the way he did them. Trying to keep her from leaving was probably smart and at the very least, it was understandable. The irritating part was how damn cocky he was about the whole thing. She could ask him what 2+2 was, and if he answered 4 with that insufferable attitude, she'd want to argue with him about it. They'd had a brief, very fleeting fling before a whole army of reasons made it come to an end. They were opposites in every way, and opposites were supposed to attract, but even without the convenient excuse of him having to avoid showing passion towards a demon if he wanted to get to heaven, there was a whole list of other reasons that it wouldn't have worked out anyway. She was bold and brash. He was distant and aloof. She was the demon version of a pair of brightly colored tennis shoes—exciting, fun, compact, effective. He was a $7,000 pair of designer dress shoes that could get the job done, but you’d better not scratch 'em. Part of it was that he was admittedly quite good-looking, smart as a whip, and otherwise was quite a package. The only reason more women weren't throwing themselves at him was that despite his sex appeal, he had the personality of a high-end record collection—sure, you wanted to touch it, but what if you damaged it accidentally? He was the only person she'd ever met who put off "I'll kill you" vibes, "I'll fuck you hard all night" vibes, and "If you wrinkle my shirt, I'll kick you out of my expensive car" vibes all at once. That's why it was so annoying: more often than not, he got his way even though nobody wanted to give him the satisfaction.