Devil's Thumb

by S. M. Schmitz

  Anna took his hand and tried to look away from the crazed woman who was still watching her, but few humans had ever scared her as much as this woman was scaring her now.

  “She’s crazy, Anna. Crazy people are unpredictable and irrational. We need to get away from her.”

  “But what did I do to her? I only wanted to help.”

  “She’s irrational. Maybe you remind her of someone she knew who betrayed her. Who knows? Or maybe she thinks you’re the demon that possessed her.”

  Anna let Colin lead her out of the tent but cast one last look at the woman as she left. The woman’s narrow green eyes, filled with a fearsome abhorrence, never left Anna as she retreated from the revival at Cane Ridge.

  Chapter 5

  Dylan waited for more, but that was the end of Anna’s story. The woman didn’t follow them out of the tent and they never saw her again. “But if she’d been possessed, you would have sensed it,” Dylan said.

  “That’s what we always thought, too,” Anna responded, “but we didn’t know Jeremy was possessed the night we went to see him about the marking on his side. We know these archdemons are interfering with our abilities somehow now, but we’ve been thinking, maybe she was possessed before coming into that tent and that’s why we didn’t feel any demons there that night.”

  Dylan looked confused and shook his head. “If hiding out in a human’s body could protect them from being detected by hunters, people would get possessed all the time.”

  “Not necessarily,” Colin countered, “possession isn’t easy. It takes permission from the person or something unusual, like with Jeremy.”

  “We still don’t know how Jeremy became possessed,” Dylan insisted.

  Anna grimaced because she was still concerned Jeremy’s possession was partly her fault. The demon he’d been fighting would have killed him if they hadn’t used their telekinesis, but being transformed into this monster was far worse than death.

  Colin suggested they go ahead and leave for Lacey’s apartment so they could pick up Max on their way. As soon as Max climbed into the passenger seat of Dylan’s car, Anna could tell he didn’t harbor the same resentment toward the O’Conners that Dylan did. Max turned around as he buckled his seatbelt and smiled at her. “Where did you both disappear to after your apartment blew up?” he asked.

  Anna smiled back at him. “We went to Tijuana then Ciudad Juárez for a few weeks. Always plenty of work there.”

  Max’s eyes widened at the thought of going to either place. “Guess so. Good thing you’re immortal.”

  Dylan kept his eyes fixed on the road in front of him, but Max chatted with them the rest of the drive. When they got to Lacey’s apartment, Max still seemed to be in a good mood and talked to Colin about the Saints’ chances of making the playoffs this year, which seemed to be annoying Dylan.

  Lacey opened her door, her chestnut hair pulled back in a messy bun, and Anna thought she looked far prettier in her baggy University of Colorado t-shirt and sweatpants than she had in the tight salmon pink blouse she’d worn last night. Colin was just wondering if they could catch one of those football games while they were in town.

  She invited them in and offered them coffee, and Anna flashed a wide smile at Luca as soon as she saw him sprawled lazily on Lacey’s sofa. He arched an eyebrow at her. “What?”

  “Thanks to you, Colin’s taking me to Ireland.”

  Luca’s brow knitted in confusion, but Anna turned away from him and introduced Max and Dylan to Lacey, whose attention stayed mostly on Anna. “How did you do that last night?” she finally asked her.

  Anna shot Luca a you-really-couldn’t-have-explained-any-of-this? glare and he just returned it with an I-was-busy shrug. Anna exhaled angrily in his direction and sat down next to him so she could kick him again if he pissed her off. She loved Luca, but his centuries of immortality were spent mostly alone, and he’d grown used to placing his own needs above others. In that secret way of theirs, Colin suggested she wasn’t being fair to him considering she’d never asked Luca to explain their situation to Lacey. If she’d asked, he would have done it. Anna told Colin to stay out of it.

  “Colin and I have been blessed with certain gifts. We’re faster and stronger than other humans and can sense demons easier. We’re telepathic, but only with each other. Don’t worry, we can’t read your mind. But what you witnessed last night is a new gift, and we don’t know how to control it yet. It’s like a kind of telekinesis, I guess. We can send out these bursts of energy that destroy lesser demons and it does something to archdemons, but unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to kill them. And we haven’t learned how to target it yet, so we only use it in emergencies. People have gotten hurt in the past,” Anna’s voice tripped over that last part and she knew Dylan was watching her, but she wouldn’t look at him.

  “Whoa,” Lacey said, “how did you get all these gifts? They don’t sell those at our local knife store.”

  “An angel,” Anna answered.

  Lacey had the same reaction most people had when talking about angels, which Colin and Anna never understood. They fought demons, yet remained skeptical about the existence of angels. “Ok,” Lacey said slowly, “what you makes you so special that some guardian angel gives you all these gifts but not other hunters?”

  “She’s not a guardian angel,” Colin told her. “She’s just an angel. There’s no such thing as guardian angels. And in our case, we have these gifts because I prayed for a miracle to save my wife’s life, and this was part of the deal we made with her.”

  Anna folded her arms across her chest and scowled at Luca. “You could help here, you know.”

  Luca feigned innocence. “I’m not telepathic or telekinetic either. I’d like to know how I can get those tools, too.”

  Anna thought about kicking him. “I take it back,” Colin told her, “he is just being an ass. Go ahead and kick him.”

  “Funny,” Anna said instead of kicking Luca, “you seem to have remarkable speed and senses as well.”

  “Why, thank you,” Luca smiled.

  Anna kicked him.

  Luca yelped but laughed at the same time and held up his hands in a placating gesture, as if offering Anna a truce. “Alright, I’m sorry! I have some of the same blessings. Hence the physical assault by my sweet Anna.”

  Lacey’s curiosity and maybe even disbelief turned to anger as she glared at Luca. “And you’re just now telling me?”

  “In my defense, it’s not the kind of information people tend to believe unless they’ve seen it. If I’d told you, you would have just thought I was crazy.”

  Colin nodded in agreement. “That’s completely true. We’ve all been accused of being lunatics over the years, even by other hunters. It’s partly why we don’t talk about it unless we have to.”

  Lacey exhaled slowly and turned to Dylan and Max. “What about you two? Any special gifts?”

  “Not for me,” Max answered.

  Dylan averted his gaze, and Anna thought if Dylan’s skin weren’t so dark, she may have actually seen him blushing. “Colin and Anna’s angel gave me the speed and sensory thing to help find Anna after she was abducted by an archdemon last month.”

  “Not only to help find Anna but to fight these archdemons. They’re circumventing rules somehow,” Colin added.

  Dylan just nodded, still studying his fingers folded in his lap. “Oh my God. Let’s go to Ireland now, Colin.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at Dylan. He’s avoiding Lacey’s eyes. He’s embarrassed because he’s attracted to her.”

  “How do you know? Maybe he’s just embarrassed about the gift thing.” But Colin remembered having that same shy look on his face, the same awkward inability to meet Anna’s eyes when he ran into her outside of the butcher’s shop in London. And Anna didn’t need to answer Colin’s question because he’d already answered it for himself.

  “Ireland doesn’t sound so bad anymore,” Colin admitted.

  But Lacey either didn’t notic
e Dylan’s sudden awkwardness or didn’t care. She turned her attention back to Colin and Anna. “So you need space and privacy to try to work out this energy gift, right?”

  “Yeah,” Colin said, “lots of both.”

  “Lucky for you there’s plenty of wide open spaces around here. We’ll stay out of the mountains. Wouldn’t want to trigger a rock slide or anything.”

  Anna’s fingers were already trembling with excitement. “Where can we go? If we could learn how to control this… I don’t know, maybe that’s what it’ll take to actually kill these archdemons. The energy is too scattered right now, but if we can channel it…”

  Colin’s fingers tingled with the same sense of anticipation now, too. “How soon can we leave?”

  Lacey’s coffeemaker made that wooshing sound as it finished brewing and she gestured toward her kitchen. “Um, coffee first?”

  Normally, Anna would have agreed. Wasting coffee was a borderline criminal offense, but she was anxious to start practicing and to find out if this gift was as useful as they’d been hoping it could be. Lacey sighed when she sensed their eagerness and offered to find enough thermoses to take the coffee with them. As soon as she disappeared into the kitchen and Anna heard her rummaging through cabinets, she turned to Luca and whispered, “Does she know how old you are?”

  Luca’s mischievous grin crept over his face and lit up his eyes. “I’m 28.”

  Colin snorted and Anna rolled her eyes. “You’re too old for her,” Anna teased.

  “I’m too old for everyone,” he retorted.

  “Exactly. So don’t screw things up for us here,” Anna chided. “If she can help us by getting us out to secluded areas, we may actually figure out how to destroy these archdemons.”

  Luca clicked his tongue at her. “My sweet girl, I won’t mess up anything for you. She’s completely under my spell now.”

  “Oh good Lord,” Colin muttered. “Luca, I’d only believe that if it were literally true. Were you gifted any sorcery powers?”

  Luca answered him in an old Italian and Anna stood up because Luca was obviously in one of his I’m-a-sex-god moods, and Anna was pretty sure he was no Eros. Or Cupid, considering he was Italian and all.

  Lacey returned with a thermos in each hand and set them down on an end table. “You’d better be willing to drink it black if we’ve gotta leave now,” she warned. Lacey drove them out of the city where barren fields stretched for endless miles; she pulled off the highway and onto a narrower, emptier road with more yellow-orange expanses of empty spaces around them.

  Luca was following her in his car with Dylan and Max, and as Lacey pulled over to the side of the road, Luca parked behind her. “We’ll go on foot for a while now,” she announced. They walked into that vast wasteland and Anna shuddered as the memory of a nightmare from her abduction resurfaced, of being trapped in a blistering desert with a sun that never set and scorching sands that burned her skin and eyes.

  But the air here was cool and dry, and the morning sun was comfortable, not oppressive. But Colin took her hand and brought it to his lips, kissing it gently as the horror of that memory emerged. He tried to replace it with more pleasant images and thought of the first time she’d tried to teach him the foxtrot. They were in New Orleans in 1925 and Anna wanted to go dancing. Colin took her to a club where the bartender introduced her to her new favorite cocktail and as the band played another ragtime tune, Anna tried to drag Colin onto the dance floor. He pulled her back and looked at her warily.

  “What are they dancing?” he asked.

  Anna smiled because it was just like Colin not to pay attention to the crowd when they went out. “It’s the Foxtrot, Colin. They’ve been doing it for a decade now.”

  He watched the dancers skeptically. “It’s like a fast waltz?”

  Anna shrugged. “With an extra beat. And a few more flourishes.”

  Colin still looked skeptical and Anna laughed. “Oh, come on,” she pulled him back toward the dance floor and this time, he let her.

  Anna leaned her head against his arm as he replayed this memory for her, this playful memory as she taught him a dance he’d only learn to appreciate over the years as swing dancing became popular. He’d take the foxtrot over that any day. But he learned every new trend for her over the centuries because she loved to dance, and Colin would have mastered the samba if it made her happy.

  Lacey stopped and looked back toward the road where their cars were parked. “I can’t see the cars from here. We should be far enough away from any passing motorists.”

  “Yeah, but what about us?” Dylan asked. He and Max had been hit by this burst of energy before, and they weren’t immortal like Luca.

  But Lacey just shrugged it off. “We’ll stand back a ways. Luca was right next to Colin last night, and he was fine.”

  Anna shot Luca a this-is-what-you-get-for-lying scowl. “I probably got lucky. We’d better give them plenty of space, just to be safe.”

  “Next time, kick him harder.” Colin scowled at Luca, too. He was pretty sure the only reason he wasn’t telling Lacey the truth was that he figured she’d freak out and refuse to sleep with him again if she knew he was over six hundred years old.

  As the other hunters walked away from them, Colin set several plastic buckets on the ground fifty feet in front of where Anna and he would try to knock only one of them over. He spaced them ten feet apart, and as Anna watched him, she grew more and more nervous.

  “Colin, I don’t even know how to begin. These other gifts just came naturally to us. Why is this one so much different? Maybe we can’t channel it. Maybe this is it.”

  Colin returned to her side, and squeezed her hand again. “If so, then we must have been meant to hunt on our own from now on, and that’s not what The Angel told me. She said we’d need help and we should trust some of those hunters in Baton Rouge.”

  “Right. The one who is now a demon and the one who hates us for not killing that demon.”

  Colin chewed on his lip as he thought about that. “Well, we still have Max.”

  Anna wasn’t sure if that made her want to laugh or cry. In the distance, they heard Luca yelling, “Come on, get on with it!”

  “So,” Anna thought, “thinking of it as a whisper didn’t work. What’s your idea?”

  Colin studied the buckets in front of him. They only wanted to knock down the one in the middle. “Concentration?” he suggested.

  Anna sighed but agreed to try. It’s not like she had a better idea. They focused on the middle bucket, and the tingling warmth spread from their fingers to their chests, a pleasant buzzing inside them. They focused on the bucket for such a long time, Anna’s vision began to blur and she had to blink the white cylinder back into focus. When they released the energy they’d been holding onto, it scattered everywhere, creating a dust storm around them, sending yellow-orange clouds of sand into the air. When it settled to the ground, they were standing in a shallow crater and the buckets were gone.

  Anna and Colin spun around to check on the other hunters, but they had backed far away from them. Luca put his hands to his mouth. “Didn’t work, O’Conners.”

  “I am so kicking him in the balls next time,” Anna growled.

  Colin turned around again to look for the buckets, but there were only fragments of yellow and white plastic scattered among the sand and dirt of this Colorado landscape. “So … holding it in makes it stronger. I guess we should be faster next time.”

  Anna threw her hands up. “Next time? Our targets are destroyed! What the hell are we going to practice on?”

  Luca had jogged over to them and clucked his tongue at Anna again. “You’re giving up too easily, my sweet girl. I’ll go check the cars for something else you can use.”

  Dylan hadn’t been far behind Luca and he shook his head at Luca’s retreating figure. “This is a waste of our time. We could be doing something to find these bastards, and instead we’re out in the middle of nowhere watching you blow up a bunch of shit.”
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  Colin wanted to argue with him, but he had a terrible suspicion Dylan was right. Anna had been watching Luca, and he stopped halfway to the cars and stood frozen. The hunters instinctively reached for their daggers, fearing he’d sensed a demon, but Luca suddenly turned around and ran back to them, calling for Lacey and Max to join the others.

  As he reached them, panting from the exertion, Anna and Colin immediately knew it hadn’t been a demon he’d sensed. Luca’s eyes were glowing as he grinned at the hunters around them. “My angel has finally decided to show up.”

  Chapter 6

  Anna and Colin had only a few seconds to gape at Luca before a man with toffee brown hair and sapphire eyes stood beside him, looking completely at home in the barren landscape between Boulder and Denver in his khaki cargo pants and gray Avengers t-shirt. Colin heard himself asking before he could stop himself.

  “Marvel fan?”

  The angel smiled at Colin and shrugged a shoulder at him. “Who isn’t?”

  “He’s not a lot like our angel, is he?” Anna asked. Except in many ways, he was just like her. He exuded the same kindness, compassion, love, and peace their Angel always had. It was part of being an angel just as the hatred, fear and evilness was part of being a demon. Neither side could change their natures.

  Luca put his hands on his hips and faced his angel. “I’m guessing you didn’t come to give me this cool energy power they have.”

  The angel shook his head. “No. It’s too powerful a gift to bless anyone with unless we’re desperate, and they were in a desperate situation. But it’s also extraordinarily difficult to control, which is why you’re going to help them learn how to use it.”

  Luca threw his hands up. “How? I don’t even know how they’re doing it.”

  “Because you know someone who can help them. You trained him years ago. Find Andrzej and he’ll be able to teach them to control this power.”