by L. A. Banks
“Oh, my!” the reporter gushed pointing at Paloma’s stomach. “Is that what I think it is?”
Paloma covered her middle with her hand. “Yes, I guess this is my official announcement. This is a baby bump.”
Keith dropped his head in his hands. A baby! Fucking bitch havin’ another man’s baby.
He lifted his head just in time to see Paloma staring into the camera. His eyes caught hers. It was as if she was staring right at him. The cackling of an old woman’s laughter ran through his head. And Paloma’s eyes glowed. Her beautiful lips curved into a satisfied smile. The laughter grew louder. Chilled to the bone, his body started to shake. She’d won. He was nothing and he knew that was all he would ever be.
By day, Miriam Pace and Jacqueline Hamilton are two mild-mannered, Inland Empire book ladies running a book store for book lovers searching for their favorite novels. But at night, they become the dynamic writing duo known in the publishing world as author J. M. Jeffries.
“It’s the local community’s ardent appetite for funny, fast-paced books that makes the writing especially fun,” says Miriam Pace. And Jackie Hamilton, the other half of J. M. Jeffries, quickly adds, “Few authors have more constant contact with readers than we do. We are lucky to have such a fabulous book-reading community! We owe much of our literary success to our community’s strong base of readers…their love for humor…and their vocal demands for more action and romantic suspense.”
Miriam Pace began writing in grade school when she started making up stories about her favorite storybook characters and television heroes. Her passion continued through high school where she sat in the back of the class room writing furiously while all her teachers were thinking she was a terrific, conscientious student. All the while she lived in another world dreaming up stories and filling up notebook after notebook. By the time she finished her MFA in creative writing, Miriam was a full-time writer with five published novels under her own name.
Jackie Hamilton came late to writing. Even though she always had stories running around in her head and characters demanding to be heard, she ignored them during the first part of her life while she was running around Europe in her early twenties. An Air Force brat, Jackie has lived all over the world. Her best trait is observation and the ability to immerse herself in her characters. Not until she graduated college with a bachelor’s degree in sociology did she decide to try her hand at writing the stories that wouldn’t leave her alone.
Miriam and Jackie met in a critique group. Before the group met, they would walk around the neighborhood brainstorming and eventually decided that they needed to collaborate. They sold their first books, Road-Tested and A Bride to Treasure, to an electronic publisher and then sold their first romantic comedy to ImaJinn Books. After three romantic comedies with ImaJinn, they sold their first suspense thriller, A Dangerous Love, to Genesis Press. Since then, they have published six books with Genesis with two more being released in 2006. Recently, their romantic comedies, featuring Cupid and Venus as matchmakers to modern day lovers, have been optioned by Tivoli Productions as a possible TV series.
Miriam and Jackie love to write and have a ton of stories still seeking the light of day. They figure they have enough story material to last until the next millennium.
Avenging Angel
by Janice Sims
When men began to increase on the earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them. The Lord said, “My breath will not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years.” It was then, and later, too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth—when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
—Genesis 6:1-4
Thank you, Monica Jackson, for phoning and asking me to write a story for this anthology. It’s a real pleasure to share a book with you, L. A. Banks, Donna Hill and J. M. Jeffries. I couldn’t ask for more talented company.
This story is for DRK who could have told me to bug off sixteen years ago when I wrote him to tell him I’d chosen him as my literary mentor. Instead, he shared his work and his wisdom with me. For that I will be forever grateful.
Chapter One
* * *
3:00 a.m.
Trailing him was a nauseating experience for Sarai. To her sensitive olfactory senses his soul smelled like road kill left to marinate in the sun on an Arizona highway.
He led her through side streets and back alleys of a rundown South Side neighborhood. He couldn’t have known he was being watched. Even the beating of Sarai’s wings against the cold Chicago air currents was nearly silent. Yet, he kept looking behind him.
Just paranoid, she guessed.
Finally, he arrived at a tenement house whose heyday must have dated back to the 1920s, four stories of brick and mortar. The paint had worn off the woodwork years ago. All of the windows were boarded up, and the doors had padlocks on them.
Sarai sensed the building was empty except for his prey. She could hear the girl’s heartbeat somewhere in the labyrinth—the lair of “road kill”. In contrast, the girl’s soul smelled like vanilla-mocha coffee.
Lauren Taylor was under the age of twelve. Humans lost their sweet scent after twelve. If their souls remained innately good, they started smelling like freshly cut grass or pine needles. Any clean, pleasing scent found in the natural world. They only started smelling rotten when they allowed evil to make a home in their hearts.
Old road kill had been evil for a long time. He took one more look behind him before quickly shoving a key into a padlock on the back door, unlocking it and going inside. He shut the door behind him.
Sarai touched down in the shadows, waited a few seconds for her wings to recede. She waited until the only indication that she’d ever had wings was a dark-hued tattoo of a wing below each shoulder blade. Otherwise the golden-brown skin of her back was unmarred.
She walked heedlessly into the dark building, following his scent. She didn’t care if he heard her. She had no need to be stealthy any longer. In fact, she hoped he would hear her and try something foolish, like attacking her.
Her acute hearing picked up his footfalls directly ahead of her. He was running. Good, he had heard her. She didn’t hurry. Haste led to mistakes. She would be as cool and calculating as this child-killing pedophile was. He’d killed four other little girls that the police knew of. He had choked the life out of them, molested them, and then had taken his sweet time mutilating their pitiful bodies. Sarai was going to be just as methodical with him.
It was pitch-black in the building, but she didn’t need a flashlight. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness within seconds of entering the building. He was using a miniature flashlight to help him find his way. Still, he stumbled and fell as he took a corner too quickly.
Breathing like the fox in a foxhunt, he scrambled to his feet, staggered a bit, got his bearings and took off running again, this time toward the stairs. Sarai could have had him in a split second but was curious to see where he was going. Surely not to Lauren Taylor. No, he would lead her away from the girl. Perhaps he had a weapon stashed somewhere in the tenement house. Cornered now, he might try to fight his way out.
She hoped he would. It would give her great pleasure to hurt him.
John Michael Young’s heart was beating so fast he thought he’d pass out. He knew he’d been careful coming here. No one could have followed him. Tonight was the night he had planned to finish her. With anticipation, he had planned his time for killing her and carving intricate designs all over her lovely, fresh body. She would be his masterpiece.
He’d devoted the last two months to hunting and trapping Lauren Taylor. He first saw her as she walked home from school with three of her girlfriends. She’d outshone all of them with her vivacity, her spirit, her essence. One look and it was love.
He loved all
of his girls. He treated them tenderly up until they took center stage in his three-act play of death. First, he strangled them. Then, he made love to them. Then, he left his personal signature on their bodies. He immortalized them. He was sure they would thank him if only they weren’t dead.
Now, there was a wrinkle in his plans—an interloper. He would just have to deal with him. Hand-to-hand combat was out. He was slightly built, five-seven and well under a hundred and fifty pounds. His stalker appeared to be at least five-ten and must have weighed at least a hundred and fifty. No, things would go better for him if he could reach the gun before the stalker pounced on him.
He didn’t for one second assume the person who was following him was a policeman. A policeman would identify himself. He would tell him to halt, and try to arrest him.
This person had a sinister air about him. It was as if he’d come here specifically to do him bodily harm. The thought made his bowels quiver.
For possibly the first time in his life, John Michael Young was afraid. He ran faster, hoping to reach the apartment on the third floor where he kept his instruments of torture.
It was not the same apartment where he’d held Lauren Taylor captive for the past eight days. That was on the fourth floor.
Lauren thought she heard someone in the building. Her bladder, overly full, burned painfully. No one ever came except that man. And he only came once a day to bring her food and drinks, to let her use the bathroom, and to say terrible things to her. He hadn’t shown up today. She wondered if that meant something bad was going to happen now.
In the sparsely furnished room there was only the bed to which she was handcuffed, a table with a single lamp on it, and a broken down chest of drawers. She was lying on her back with both wrists pulled over her head and handcuffed to the iron headboard.
Her arms were numb from having been in an uncomfortable position all day. She could move her legs to keep them from going to sleep, and she did so at regular intervals.
The man left a radio on low all the time. The lamp was left on all the time, too. She didn’t know where she was. All she remembered was being snatched into a car several days ago by a man with dark hair and dark glasses covering his eyes. He’d been prepared because in a matter of seconds he’d taped her mouth shut, tied her hands behind her back, tied her ankles together, and thrown a dark pillowcase over her head. She’d never been so scared in her life. And nobody heard her muffled screams.
Her mouth was not taped shut now. There was no need for it. The first night she had screamed until her throat was raw, and no one had come. On the second day, she knew that there was no one else in the house, or wherever she was being kept. There were no nosy neighbors like Mrs. Dempsey back home who noticed strange people in the neighborhood and was always calling the police. What she wouldn’t give for somebody like Mrs. Dempsey now.
She was eleven, but small for her age. Much too scrawny. No matter how much her mother tried to feed her, she wouldn’t gain weight. The mean kids called her Shrimp. Her friends called her Tiny. She had dusky brown skin and dark eyes, usually sad eyes, because she was a deep thinker for an eleven-year-old and life’s vicissitudes hadn’t escaped her notice. Her father had died in Iraq. Her mother worked two jobs, and it was her job to take care of her baby brother, Jamie, after school.
She worried most about her mother and Jamie. They must think she was dead. They had already grieved for her daddy. Now, they were probably grieving for her.
As she lay there, looking at the ceiling and fighting the urge to pee, she wished she had super powers and could beat up that man when he finally got here because she knew he was coming. Whenever she heard somebody in the house, it was nobody but him.
John Michael Young burst into the apartment and tried to lock the door behind him but the person following him prevented his doing so by throwing his full weight against the door like a battering ram.
John Michael was thrown ten feet across the room and landed hard on the floor. He dropped the flashlight when he fell and, now, he picked it up and pointed it at his assailant, his hand trembling so badly the beam danced.
His heart lurched when he saw that it was a woman, a beautiful black woman with long dark hair and dark eyes that had hit him so hard. And she was angry. Her eyes blazed, and her white teeth were bared in a feral snarl. She was looking at him as if she thought he was the filthiest human being ever to draw breath. And she wished him dead.
He was too afraid to breathe, let alone attempt to get up. She ordered him to get up, nonetheless.
He stood on wobbly legs. “Who are you?” he asked, sounding pitiful even to his own ears. “What do you want?”
He knew he’d made a mistake by speaking when she grabbed him by the collar and lifted him off the floor with one hand. Legs dangling, he wet his pants. She held him away from her so that the urine wouldn’t get on her shoes. “I want you to rot in prison, you evil bastard.” Her voice was deep and commanding. He felt the timbre of it in the pit of his stomach. It felt like an indictment of all his sins. It felt like the voice of God.
His bowels let loose.
She dropped him, turned him over, handcuffed him, removed his belt and used it to bind his ankles together, then read him his rights. “I’ll be back for you.”
She shut the door behind her.
John Michael Young lay on the floor writhing in his own filth.
Sarai got on the radio as soon as she left the third floor apartment. “This is Detective Sarai Wingate. I need backup.” She went on to give the dispatcher her location as she ran up the flight of stairs to the fourth floor. She didn’t need Young to show her where Lauren Taylor was. She could hear her breathing. As she got closer to the apartment door, she could hear the poor girl’s heart racing in panic. She undoubtedly thought John Michael Young was coming to torment her again.
The door was locked.
Sarai kicked it in.
Upon entering, she smelled urine and feces. The living room was not furnished. The windows were boarded up so that no one could see inside. The tiny kitchen could be seen in its entirety from the living room. The garbage can was overflowing with empty food and drink containers.
Sarai walked further into the apartment. “Lauren!”
In the bedroom, Lauren listened carefully. The man didn’t like it when she spoke.
He wanted her to be quiet. He’d slapped her once when he’d come into the house and she’d thought it might be someone else, and had begun yelling for help. She had to be sure he wasn’t disguising his voice this time and trying to test her. Therefore, she didn’t immediately respond to that feminine-sounding voice.
Sarai followed the sound of Lauren’s beating heart.
The bedroom door was locked as well. She leaned close. “Lauren, if you’re anywhere near the door, try your best to cover your eyes. I’m going to have to break in.”
She kicked the door in, and the lock popped open. She pushed her way inside.
Lauren immediately started crying in relief when she saw that it was not the scary man after all, but a woman. Sarai rushed to her side, removed the standard-issue handcuffs with a key on her key ring and tossed them aside, then pulled Lauren into her arms. “It’s all right, now, honey. I’m with the police. More are on the way. We’re going to have you back in your mama’s arms soon.”
Lauren cried harder. “Where is he?” she asked, sniffling.
Sarai rocked her in her arms. “He’s been dealt with. He won’t hurt you anymore.”
“Oh, God, oh, God,” Lauren suddenly cried.
“What is it?” Sarai asked, bending close, concerned.
“Let me up before I pee all over both of us,” Lauren explained, laughing through her tears.
Sarai sprang up and Lauren went to the adjacent bathroom, moving a bit slower than she would have liked due to her limbs being lethargic from lack of use.
Sarai shook her head at the resilience of youth. Lauren was laughing already even after going through a harrowing ordeal
of this magnitude.
Half an hour later, Lauren was being treated on the scene by a very sympathetic paramedic. She sat in the back of the ambulance with a blanket wrapped around her thin shoulders, behaving with the serene dignity of someone much older than she was.
A few minutes later she saw a patrol car pull up. Her mother and brother spilled out of it and she behaved like the eleven-year-old she was by running into her mother’s open arms and receiving all the love she’d been missing.
Sarai watched with a warm feeling suffusing her.
But when she turned her gaze on John Michael Young who was being driven away in a squad car, her eyes turned as cold as ice. There was one less pedophile roaming free.
Twenty minutes later, the Captain tore her a new one.
“Wingate, have you lost your damn mind?” he ground out, pacing his office. “Going in there without calling for back-up first?”
“He could have grabbed Lauren and gotten away before back-up arrived,” was Sarai’s explanation. “I had to go in and catch him with the girl.”
“He says you didn’t identify yourself,” Captain Holden stated. He paused to level a censorious stare at her. That stare usually made his subordinates tremble with fear.
Sarai simply smiled at him. “I didn’t at first. I scared the shit out of him, literally,” she told him. “But I did read him his rights. I did everything by the book.”
Captain Holden sucked in the gut that lapped over his belt and looked her straight in her big brown eyes. Wingate was one of his best detectives. She always got her man, even if she sometimes used unorthodox methods. Hell, she hadn’t killed the son-of-a-bitch. That was good enough for him.
