by Chloe Garner
DIANA
Book of Carter, Part Three
Chloe Garner
InstaFreebie Edition eBook
Copyright © 2016 Chloe Garner
All rights reserved.
Published by A Horse Called Alpha
Other work by Chloe Garner
Sam and Sam Series
Rangers
Shaman
Psychic
Warrior
Dragonsword
Portal Jumpers
Kansas: not long from now. The portal program sends men and women across the universe to make contact with other species. Best job on the planet. Cassie's job, before she aged out: too slow, too worn, too 26. Now she's just an analyst, crunching data, writing reports, grounded. She caught Jesse, though, the foreign terrestrial that no one can predict and no one can control. He's got a gleam in his eye that says he's looking for trouble, and Cassie's going to be right in the thick of it.
She’d come to him broken. Her parents were dead, and all she’d wanted was to know why.
He’d taken her in out of some kind of warped curiosity, pressing her until he was certain she would leave - it was just a matter of time - but she’d stayed.
He didn’t know why she’d done that, but she had.
And he’d turned her into one of us.
He didn’t know why he’d done that, either, but he had.
And then.
Oh, and then.
Then Justin had died, and she’d gone on a killing spree the likes of which bards a thousand years ago would have composed poems about and women would have told their children at bedtime. The fearsomeness of a young woman, angel touched, named Samantha, and the host of demons she’d destroyed.
Carter sat on the bar stool at the counter of his kitchen, looking the length of the apartment at where she sat on the single couch. The light had gone out of her in a lot of ways. Spent and empty, she’d stopped killing things two days ago, and now he was bored again.
He played his thumb across his fingers, finding a frown that deepened as he sat. He needed to poke her. To do something to bring back that wonderful spinning fury. The henna was fading on her skin from where she’d drawn angeltongue symbols there, frenzied, first with an inkpen and then a permanent marker and finally, when he’d suggested it, in henna. He’d drawn Lahn across the wide flat of her back, cozied between her shoulderblades, the mark of the epic sword he’d given her, there where she wore the blade. It was poetic in a way he almost resented so much that it came all the way around to appreciating it again.
Almost.
He was angry about Justin, sure. You didn’t go after Carter’s people, and you didn’t go after the people attached to those people, which is exactly what Justin and his family had been, but for Carter it wasn’t personal. He just needed to find the demons who’d cooked up the ill-advised scheme and ash them. Maybe play with them a bit, first, for the principle of the thing.
He’d thought Samantha would take it personally, but she hadn’t.
She’d just gone into that strange, robotic mode, showcasing the skills she’d learned from the angels while she’d been dead. Carter wanted to know what he had to do to get that back.
“Get dressed,” he finally said. Her head swiveled and there might have been the slightest arch to one of her eyebrows, but no more than that. He frowned harder, looking at his fingernails.
“If you aren’t going to be entertaining any more, I’m going to go do something fun.”
“How should I dress?” Samantha asked. The hollowness of it was a warning, but he ignored it. If the first poke didn’t work, poke harder.
“We’re going shopping,” he said, picking something out of the air. He didn’t have anything specific to do, tonight, so he was just wasting time. Shopping, at least, was entertaining and hardly ever a total waste of time. The demonic artisans and traders who populated the night streets of New York had an astonishing variety of goods to pick though, and he never went home without finding something he hadn’t known he was missing.
Samantha stood and walked across the width of the apartment, going into the closet he’d assigned to her as her bedroom when she’d first shown up. She’d never fought him on that. Should have, but hadn’t.
It was a big closet.
He waited, reaching over the bar to get a banana off of the counter, peeling it and eating it in the time it took Samantha to get dressed.
He didn’t need to get dressed. He never wore anything other than the suit he wore now, the only real variant being the epic blade he wore under the suit jacket. Today it was Bastard. He’d been going through the collection in the wall faster, recently. Bastard had a sharp wit to her, a sort of cynicism that Peon and Regent would have found overly-complex, and Carter appreciated her sense of humor, but she was unpredictable. She’d fallen out of her sheath twice, now - once on the sidewalk in front of the apartment complex - and he was about done with her. He thought he might try Valentine tomorrow.
He needed a new sword.
A real one.
One with a tang to her that would suit him, that wasn’t going to try to push him around and make him do things.
He didn’t like it when people tried to make him do things.
Inanimate objects had even less standing to try it, even if they were steeped in magic that matched the character of the demon who’d forged them. Especially if they were steeped in demon magic.
Bastard hummed at him as he thought about it, and he had the urge to draw her and cut a gap in the air around him, just to have done it, and he wrinkled his nose. Bastard. Samantha would have appreciated the pairing, if she hadn’t lost her sense of humor when demons had splashed her fiance.
If you haven’t got humor, what have you got, anyway?
She came back out and he tipped his head to the side, appraising her. Normally, she would have watched his face, trying to read, to anticipate what he would say, to head him off from criticism with having made the right decision, but now her eyes just drifted to the shuttered windows.
Damn.
That willingness to please had been fun. Sad to see it go, even if he’d been beating it out of her since day one.
Black leather, patent, a studded belt and boots that came up to her knees, a black mesh shirt over a leather bra masquerading as a shirt.
“Don’t strain yourself,” he said. “I know you’ve stopped caring what anyone thinks, but you really aren’t trying any more.”
She looked at her hands.
Yup.
She turned and left, coming back with a collection of rings and a collar. He nodded.
There was no joy in picking on her any more, so that would have to do.
They were going out.
Maybe something fun would happen, then.
DIANA
The demonic market was mostly contained in a network of alleys between old buildings, demons who looked like men and women standing in front of booths, some of them actively courting customers and others sitting, coy, smug, bored, waiting for the customers to come to them. As they walked up the alley, Samantha drew more of them out, mostly trying to talk to her, to touch her, to make her blush, shy away.
The virgin.
They all knew.
She sold here, hair, fingernails, spit. Eyelashes, once or twice. Earwax a few times.
She’d finally started dyeing her hair a while back, and she’d had to stop selling that, but Carter had stockpiled a bunch of her undyed hair from her hair brush and was keeping it in case the right price came up.
Gray demons, like most of the ones here, were demons who had accidentally or intentionally drifted away from the sheer black of a real demonic lifestyle. They were still condemned for the rest of eternity, but whi
le the getting was good, they lived like people on the earth plane. The problem was, they knew an awful lot of things they weren’t allowed to tell real live humans.
Freewill.
They weren’t allowed to interfere with freewill.
A real, dyed-in-the-wool dark demon could mess with people all he wanted to, but the gray lived on a sliver of margin out there where they could hardly have a conversation with a fast food cashier without violating the rules, which made buying merchandise from a certified virgin truly difficult. Impossible, for a lot of them, if Samantha decided she didn’t like the look of them.
The power of a virgin, in today’s culture gradient, peaked around twenty-two or twenty-three and then started to really drop off after about twenty-six. A hundred years ago, that window started at eighteen. Two hundred years ago, it was sixteen. It hadn’t gotten much wider, with time, though. That said something, but it wasn’t something Carter cared enough about to consider.
Everyone in the market knew Samantha, though. They had a hundred agendas, but they all knew who she was, knew what she was, and the most practiced ennui tended to evaporate as she went by.
Carter had thought it was fun when she was just naive and shy. He’d had no idea how much fun it would be when she was one of his people, and angel touched, no less. She couldn’t escape, anywhere, and everyone had an angle.
Unsurprisingly, she had no reaction to them today. She went from booth to booth, looking at wares, making one quiet purchase here and another over there, but without any of the normal self-guessing and awkwardness.
When she’d gotten here, unbuttoning the top button on her shirt had been uncomfortable.
He was going to have to work harder.
They got through the market in maybe an hour and Carter looked at his watch.
Abby would be asleep by now.
He took out his phone and called her.
“Carter, I swear, I’m going to put a knitting needle through your eye,” she answered before it rang. Psychics and phones. She couldn’t be around a phone but she would know exactly when it was going to ring and who was calling. He smiled.
“You don’t knit,” he answered, walking back toward the street. Samantha was somewhere behind him, negotiating over a reasonably high grade of beld rust.
“I will pick it up just to stab you,” Abby said.
“Sam isn’t being any fun tonight,” Carter said. “You’re going to come with us.”
“What?” Abby asked. “Why?”
“Because she always gets so touchy and protective of you when I take you out,” Carter said.
Abby sighed.
“I don’t want to play your game.”
“Did I ask what you want?” Carter asked. “Be outside in fifteen minutes.”
He heard her sigh and he hung up. He’d marked Abby the day he’d decided to take her into his protection. It was the only way to even begin to make sure she would be safe, as she came into her psychic powers. A psychic was basically a door to hell, and a demon possessing a psychic didn’t pay a toll to get here. He crossed with all of his hell powers intact, and could use them in all of the tricksy ways demons did, on the earth plane. A psychic as powerful as Abby was a hell of a big door, and any demon anywhere would not hesitate to possess her if they got a sliver of opportunity. Marking her had covered her in Carter’s magic, making any attempt at possessing her a lot harder, and making it so that if someone did try, he’d know about it the instant it happened.
The happy upside to that was that Abby couldn’t actively, intentionally defy him, and anything she did that went against exactly what he would have wanted her to do cost her a lot of energy and focus. She still had free will, but it was leashed to his. Completely one way.
Samantha wouldn’t take his mark.
She didn’t believe in them.
Or so she said, he thought, looking back at the henna tattoos down her arms. The demons at the market felt them, like oil around a bubble of soap, repelled in a way that pointed straight at her, unable to resist the urge to at least try it. Whatever it was, they had to try it.
Samantha finished her transaction and handed the demon a stack of money - Carter’s money, though he cared little about it - and came to stand in front of him.
“We’re going to get Abby,” he said. She blinked.
Damn.
Well, that hadn’t worked.
She was supposed to fight him on that.
He waited, and she sighed, going past him to go retrieve the car.
You don’t do a car in New York unless you’ve got a big company paying for a lot for you to park it in. It was too much of a hassle to keep it in a space when you weren’t using it, and to find a space when you were using it.
Carter had half a dozen, three of them that Samantha had purchased since she’d gotten there.
It was a sign of influence, that he would make her drive him around in this city where everyone took the subway or a taxi - or a car service - and he liked sitting in a seat where he was the only one who had sat there yesterday.
She left him standing at the bottom of the market and walked to the parking structure where she’d parked the car, driving it back to pick him up. He could have gotten a demon to do it - Nuri was always willing to supply a chauffeur in exchange for the little bit of access such a demon would have to Carter’s personal activities - but he liked inconveniencing Samantha.
It was just going to get old if she didn’t at least act a little put-upon to do it.
They went to Abby’s apartment, where she at least had the decency to huff at him for leaving her waiting on the curb for twenty minutes, and then he sat back in his seat.
The night was young, and he didn’t have anything pressing going on just right now.
“I heard there’s a new seller at the corner down from Nuri’s,” he said. Samantha looked back at him as someone honked at her.
“Is that where you want to go?” she asked. He nodded.
Might as well.
She pulled back into traffic and set off.
“You aren’t going to make her mad,” Abby said quietly.
“Doing my level best,” Carter answered without looking at her. The buildings going by were tall enough that he had to lean over to see the sky over top of them, dark and starless. A good night to be out.
“She hasn’t grieved,” Abby said. “It isn’t healthy.”
“She killed a boatload of demons,” Carter said. “That doesn’t count?”
“No,” Abby said, her voice low but sharp.
He hadn’t ever proved that one of them was the one who had splashed Justin’s family, true enough. He balanced it in his head.
It was a lot of work, trying to prove something procedurally in the demonic world. It was a world that thrived on deception, so any expectation that he was going to get help or even a passable truth from anyone that he didn’t already have leverage on… well, that was a lost cause.
“You want me to find him?” he asked finally. “Is that what you want?”
“I want you to be human,” Abby answered, “but I’ll settle for you finding and ashing the bastard.”
The sword at Carter’s back buzzed and he frowned.
“Fine,” he said.
He heard Abby huff again and he pulled down the corners of his mouth with his thumb and finger to keep her from seeing him smiling.
Hard work didn’t necessarily mean not fun.
It really didn’t.
The new guy had set up a huge bank of displays, shelves and boxes and barrels, at the far side of a basketball court, attracting a modest crowd of demons and gray humans who talked quietly, and occasionally not so quietly, while they shopped. Carter left Abby standing next to the car where Samantha parked it in an open spot that just happened to be there - the odds of that happening without serious magic were about nil, and the magic required to hide a parking spot from New Yorkers was potent indeed - and he walke
d down the slight hill with Samantha.
“Abby says I have to kill the demon who splashed Justin and his family,” he said.
“You two think I’m deaf,” Samantha answered.
“I need to get glass for the driver’s seat,” Carter said, twisting to look back at the car as he walked. Samantha snorted.
He very carefully didn’t jerk back to look at her. Maybe she was recovering after all.
When he did look at her, the sheeted blank look was still there, and he kept walking, ignoring it.
The demon who ran the booth came out to greet them.
“You must be Carter,” he said with a sideways grin. “You can always tell when the hawk shows up because all of the little birds run away.”
“Clever,” Carter said flatly. “You’d better have some good stuff to justify coming all the way here.”
“Of course,” the demon said. “You’ve got to earn being special.” He glanced at Samantha. “I’m Marvin.”
“Sam,” Samantha said, the sound emerging from her like someone had firmly squeezed a corpse’s chest. Carter rolled his eyes and started browsing.
Marvin was never far away, but he carried a conversation with other demons, leaving Carter to look at his own leisure, which was something, at least.
“How much?” he heard Samantha ask. He didn’t look, because he frankly didn’t care what she was buying.
“I don’t sell to women,” Marvin answered. Now Carter did look.
Samantha tipped her head.
“Why is that?” she asked. Marvin grinned.
“Because I don’t believe in women demon hunters, and I hear tell that that’s exactly what you are.”
“You’re going to sell to me,” she said. He shook his head.
“I won’t take money from you, so long as I know you’re going to use it to hunt demons.”
“He hunts demons,” Samantha said, indicating Carter. Marvin nodded rigorously.
“Sure. Keeps the peace and everything.”
“And you’ll sell to him.”
