Mary sat on a stool in a pair of pink panties and matching bra. Lilith was nowhere to be seen. The apartment appeared intact, as did Mary. Had the angel lied? Or, more likely, had Lilith deceived the angel?
“Jace.” Mary ran to me, stopping a foot away, as if unsure. “I’m so glad to see you.”
I considered Mary’s sweet face. Tiny lines creased her smile, and wrinkles crinkled at the corner of her eyes. Her hair, once a glowing yellow, appeared almost dull.
If I hadn’t known better, I’d thought she was one of those soccer moms that filled Central Park on Saturday’s to watch their overly developed offspring kick at a ball. Dead-eyed and high on prescription pills, they smiled without emotion.
Mary took my face in her hands, and I suddenly remembered all the reasons I’d fallen under her spell in the first place. With Mary, I could be another man, one of wealth and taste. She made me want to be a better man.
Maybe not marriage and twenty kids better, but better than average.
“Look what I found after the fire.” She gestured to my gray skullcap in her hands. “I washed it for you.”
“Thanks.” I put it on, and smiled down at her. God, she looked hot.
Her tiny flaws flew out of my head, and I relaxed against her.
“You’re welcome. I tried to save more, but…” She shrugged, failing to add that I didn’t own shit worth saving.
I kissed her, caressing unclothed skin with my calloused palms.
“How did I get lucky enough to move next-door to you?”
“You must have been good in a past life.” Her violet eyes sparkled.
“Do you want to...” She nodded toward her bedroom.
More than anything, I thought, taking her hand. The twerp of a cell phone stopped me just outside her bedroom door.
“I think it’s you.” Frowning, Mary gestured at my ringing jeans.
Shit. I pulled out Lilith’s cell phone. She must’ve put it in my pocket while I slept. I checked the caller ID and flipped the phone open. “Yeah?”
“I wondered if her pet would answer,” Samuel hissed through the phone. “She keeps you on a short leash.”
“If you’re done flirting with me, what do you want?” I tried to keep my voice calm, but it was hard to do with my heart racing a mile a minute. I admit it; the Son of Satan scared the shit out of me. So did the Son of God for that matter.
“What is she worth to you?” he asked.
“Who?” But I already knew.
“The demon whore who lies bleeding at my feet,” he growled. “What will you sacrifice to save her?”
I swallowed hard, dread turning my skin to ice. I had nothing to offer, barter, or steal, even my life wasn’t my own to sell. The kid took propriety.
Last night, Lilith had made me promise that. Now that promise made sense. The blond one the angel referred to was Samuel, not Mary. Lilith had ventured into hell.
“What do you want?” I clutched the phone tighter.
“I want what the whore refuses me.”
“And what’s that?”
Satan’s son laughed. “You, twirling on a spit.”
“As great as that sounds, I’m going to pass,” I stalled, trying to formulate a plan. Nothing came to me. Shit.
“The joke is on Lilith then. She protects a man unworthy of her love,” Samuel said before hanging up.
Pain-filled cries ricocheted inside my head. Lilith’s cries. I dropped to my knees, and clawed at my ears to stop the devastating sounds, but they wouldn’t cease. Blood dripped from my fingers. Images of Lilith flashed behind my eyelids. Burned, bloodied, beaten, her cat-yellow eyes faded as the cries took control of my mind.
After a few minutes, the screams turned to mews and my sanity returned, as did murderous rage.
Twenty Seven
As soon as Lilith’s terror faded from my head, I grabbed her cell phone and dialed Hades. “I need your help,” I said when he answered.
“I cannot help you this time, my friend.” He coughed. “Let her sacrifice stand, and do what needs to be done to find the child.”
“I can’t. She went to hell to protect me. To keep Samuel away from me, so I can find the kid.” I held the phone closer, my voice cracking. “You didn’t hear her cries, Hades. No one should suffer like that.”
“Better her than you. Remember that.” Hades hung up. In a rage, I threw the phone at Mary’s wall. It bounced off, knocking a can of oil based paint onto the floor, and over my boots. Blood red paint seeped through the soles.
“Mary, I’m sorry.” I stared at her terrified face feeling more and more like an asshole.
She sniffed once, but straightened and the haunted look left her eyes.
“It’s okay. Let me grab a towel.” She ran to her kitchen and came back with a black towel. I stuck my hand out, but she waved me away. On her knees, she dabbed at the paint staining my boots and the floor. From under her lashes, Mary glanced at me.
The stroke of Mary’s hand against my boots helped heal the sickness Lilith’s pain had caused inside my brain. My fear of madness eased and when she finished, I helped her to her feet. “I will be back, and we will finish this,” I gestured between us. “I promise.” I sealed my vow with a kiss.
“I’ll hold you to that.” She touched my cheek. “But next time, it’s just you and me. You will forget all about her.”
“Fair enough.” Kissing Mary one last time, I headed for the door and the hellish world beyond it.
~ * ~
Outside Mary’s door, I wondered how the hell I could save Lilith.
There were only two ways into Hell, and dying wasn’t high on my ”to do” list. That left me with option number two: locate Hell’s Gate and bribe my way in.
I headed down the hall keeping far from the Hobbit’s door in case he held a grudge. Sid stood at the top of the stairwell, an ice cream cone melting in his hand. Drips of white and brown dairy product puddled on the floor at his feet.
“Hey, Sid.” I waved and tried to slip past.
“We shape ice cream into a cone, but it is the emptiness inside for which we truly long.” A pallid droplet splashed onto the concrete and Sid smiled.
“Umm, yeah. Nice chatting with you.”
When I was halfway down the steps, Sid called, “Carry the water, bathe in the water, and seek the water. The babe is in the water.”
I stopped. Saving Lilith would have to wait. “What babe? Are you talking about the kid?”
“The answer you seek is neither mine to give nor yours to desire.”
“Fuck this.” I charged back up the stairs, knocked the cone from Sid’s hand, and slammed his fat ass against the wall. “If you know where the kid is you better fucking tell me. Now.” I clenched my fist, ready to beat the doughboy out of him.
He glared down at the broken ice cream cone. “A flower in Brooklyn blooms with water, roses grow with fertilizer, and enlightenment turns to dust if not tended in a community garden.”
My fist caught him in the stomach, oozing into his pudgy flesh, and pin balling off an organ or two. He let out a harsh wheeze before collapsing in a puddle much like his busted ice cream cone.
Oh shit. Community garden. Water. Brooklyn. The kid was at the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn. Yanking Sid to his feet, I apologized with a wave and ran down the steps.
“You suck,” Sid yelled down the empty stairwell. “I hope you get your ass kicked.”
Hmmm. That didn’t sound Zen-like at all.
Twenty Eight
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden wasn’t really all about community as its name implied, since it cost eight bucks to get in and smelled like the dead.
I had an idea where they held the kid. The Steinhardt Conservatory: Trail of Evolution. Why? Because that’s where I would keep the Son of God.
Before taking the Q train to the Prospect Park Station, I stopped at Lilith’s apartment to pick up Tyrfing, and the angel. I found Tyrfing embedded in a picture of Alex Trebek, which was odd enough. I s
hook my head and wrestled the blade, wondering why Lilith had a picture of Trebek in the first place.
The angel watched me with bored eyes. “I do not like that show. It is too hard, and no one is in peril, so what is with that name?” He shook his feathers. “Plus, they never mention me. It’s always Michael this, Gabriel that. I am sick of—”
“Shut the fuck up and help me,” I yelled, twisting the sword. It moved a millimeter at the most.
The angel hrumped but did as I asked. He waved his winged arm and the sword came free. Not prepared, I jerked the hilt at the same time, which sent me toppling over Lilith’s white couch and face first onto her fat white cat. Bodhi hissed and jabbed a claw into my right eye.
“Ow!” I jumped up, and ran in a circle around the living room holding my punctured eye socket. “Evil cat incarnate. I’m going to have you stuffed.”
“What did I do?” The angel looked offended.
“Not you. That fucking devil cat.” I pointed at one of the two cats clouding my vision. Shit. I rubbed my eye until only one hairball remained and gestured to the door. “Let’s go. I know where the kid is being held.”
The angel raised his wings in question. “Why do you want to take the cat to save the babe?”
I took a deep breath and counted to ten. “Forget it. You stay here. If I don’t come back, tell God I deserve a fluffier cloud.”
“We don’t sleep on clo—”
I closed the door on his lie.
~ * ~
At the gate of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I passed a ten dollar bill to a bored attendant, and in return received a map folded into a swan. It must be loads of fun working at a garden in February.
I dissected the swan and followed the map to the Trail of Evolution. I sniffed the air. Nothing but the rot of dirt, and dying flowers. No new baby Jesus smell. No brimstone. I inhaled again, this time catching a whiff of something familiar and indefinable.
Opening the door to the conservatory, I dragged Tyrfing in my wake and wiped away a drip of sweat hanging above my lip. A couple of tourist, wide-eyed at the sight of a deranged guy with a sword, ran out of the exhibit, slipping in pools of condensation. I smiled, and nodded as they passed. Why not? Tourism paid the city’s bills.
I stepped into the foliage. A rainforest of exotic hothouse plants hid my presence. The air felt heavy and much too warm, even for a greenhouse.
Sweaty hot evil. I could almost taste it. It crept through the conservatory, tainting everything.
A child’s laugh broke the malevolent vibe surrounding me. I smiled at the sound. The kid. He was here. I waded my way through the fauna, pausing every few seconds to listen. Nothing. Shit.
Stepping through a ring of trees, I found myself in the middle of a watery oasis. Water beat against an outcropping of rocks, and a heated spray soaked my skin.
Water. Damn, I owed Sid an apology.
I ducked behind a bush when the shout of voices ahead reached me.
Unfortunately, the bush was poison sumac. My skin instantly began to itch, a psychosomatic reaction I’m sure, but a pain in the ass just the same.
I peeked over the bush and saw the kid, all two-feet of him dressed in a light blue sailor suit. A tiny sailor’s cap sat atop his blond head. Those evil bastards. What had they done to him?
Nevertheless, the kid was amusing himself by reviving an ice-age fossil of a shellfish before smiting it, again and again. Alive. Dead. Alive. Dead. The fish finally stopped returning from the great beyond, and the kid started to snivel, ready to let loose a wail of biblical proportions.
Good. A scene would be the distraction I needed.
The kid’s bottom lip quivered, and my heart jumped a beat.
Showtime. But before he burst into a full-blown tempter tantrum, a feminine arm picked him up. Straining to see the kidnapper’s face or at least her breasts, a sick feeling pooled in my lower intestine. It couldn’t be.
“Mine,” the kid screeched, and did that kid-claw-fingered-pinchy-thing with his hands.
Shit. He spotted me. Time to move. I jumped from the bush, my sword poised for battle. Bring it on, I thought seconds before the aroma of sulfur fumed around me and ten pounds of metal smashed into the back of my skull.
I fell to the damp ground. My final thought: Good thing the kid had practiced raising the dead.
Twenty Nine
“Jace, hold still.” Lilith’s pale face slowly came into focus. She stood above me, tears sliding down her cheeks. “You’ll be all right. Just let Angel do his job.”
“Y B tch,” I mouthed and kicked a leg up to strangle her.
Lilith smacked the angel. “I think you put something in wrong. He’s trying to strangle me with his foot, and can’t say vowels. Fix him.”
“It isn’t as easy as it looks, you know.” The angel searched the ground for more smashed gray matter. “Ah, there it is.” He pressed a piece of my brain in place, and an electrical current shot down my spine.
I blinked a few times. “You bitch.” Whew. This time my arms reached out to choke the life out of her.
“What is your problem?” Her fist met my jaw. “I save your life and this is the thanks I get.”
“I actually did the life saving.” The angel glared at Lilith. “You merely drove us here.”
She tucked her arms across her chest, and tapped her booted foot. “If I hadn’t gone looking for him, you’d still be buying bath salts on the Home Shopping Network. And Jace would be dead.”
“He was dead.” The angel lifted me from the ground. “And I brought his soul back.”
“Enough.” I stumbled toward Lilith like Frankenstein’s monster.
“How’d you get away from Samuel?” Suspicion curled in my stomach. Was it her with the kid? Had she killed me? Or had the womanly arm belonged to another? Samuel’s current succubus?
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is, did you find J.C.?”
“Yeah.”
“So where is he?” She gazed around the plant-filled room.
“Not here, apparently.” I took a step closer to her. “After my brains got bashed in, I lost him.”
“Oh, okay.” She gave me a pacifying smile, all pretty white teeth.
“At least we know he’s okay.”
“Was okay,” I mumbled. Who knew what his kidnappers had done after my murder. “How’d you find me?”
“I tried the GPS signal on my cell phone first, but I couldn’t pick up the signal.” She scratched her head.
Oops. I pictured the bits of busted cell phone on Mary’s floor. Faking a search through my jean pockets, I said, “I must’ve dropped it.”
Her head tilted, but she didn’t call me on it. “When I… got back to my apartment, he—” she flicked a wrist at the angel, “—told me you’d found the kid, but not where. So I started looking for you.”
“And?”
“We called God,” the angel sneered. “But Michael answered. Now he’s going to Lord this over my head for the next eon.”
“I said I’d make it up to you.” Lilith rolled her eyes. “I don’t know how you put up with him for the last eight months.”
The angel frowned. “And I don’t know why he needs you. A woman’s place is in the kitchen.”
I laughed as Lilith lunged at him, but I pulled her up short before she could do any damage. “As much as I’d love to see you kick his angelic ass, we should go.” Something crept through me, a warning of danger, a feeling of impeding disaster, but that might have been a result of a head full of soupy brain.
Lilith nodded, and touched the side of my dented head. “Can you walk?”
Even if I couldn’t there was no way in hell I’d let her carry me. “I’m fine. Nothing more than a headache.” The size of Texas.
Lilith nodded, keeping her arm wrapped around my waist as we followed the yellow brick road down the Evolutionary path.
Halfway down the trail, I stopped. “Where’s the sword?” Shit. I turned around and headed back
toward the watery alcove.
Lilith’s eyes flashed. “You lost Tyrfing?”
“I didn’t lose it.”
“Well, it wasn’t by your corpse. So I’m guessing you lost it.” She shook her head, looking disgusted.
Bitch. “Sorry for dying and all. Next time I’ll let you have the honor.”
“Won’t happen.” She winked. “I’m much harder to kill. Hell, one little smack in the head with a tire iron and you’re down for the count.”
“She has a point.” The angel looked up long enough from his manicured nails to nod.
A humming echoed from the rainforest on my right. Suddenly Tyrfing shot across the sky and embedded itself in the angel’s midsection. He let out an annoyed squeak, and fell to the ground.
Oops.
“Damn it, can’t you control yourself? You’re like a kid with A.D.D.”
She kicked at the unmoving angel. “Shit, we’re going to have to carry him to the car.”
Guilt rose inside me, but only a little bit. He was annoying, vain, and for the most part unhelpful. Really more of a pain in the ass than anything else.
Lilith struggled with his feet. “A little help here.”
“Why? I thought you were tough. Could do everything for yourself?”
At this point, I was just being a dick, exhaustion overriding my common sense.
“I apologize for my earlier comment. It was uncalled for and mean. I guess you could say—” She winked at me. “—The devil made me do it.”
I laughed, and begrudgingly wrapped my arms around the angel’s torso. We half dragged his body along the Evolutionary Trail and to the Gremlin’s hatchback. Intelligent design, my ass.
Thirty
Lilith drove slowly across the Brooklyn Bridge, careful not to draw attention to the fact we had a kabobed angel stuffed in our hatchback.
“Will he be okay?” I glanced into the backseat, noting the angel’s pale face and the slight blue tint around his lips.
Lilith swung into the fast lane to avoid a slow moving truck. Its bumper sticker read: “Don’t follow me, follow Jesus!” She shook her head and stabbed the gas pedal. “Angel will be fine. I have some bandages at home that will fix him right up.”
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