“We’ve gotta go,” I said, after allowing myself a moment to wallow.
“Where?”
“I’m not sure yet, but we need to get everybody together and get ready to roll. If Lucky’s known about this for any length of time, then we can’t be sure what parts of what has happened have been our idea and what’s been his.” I dropped a five on the table for a tip and headed back to the poker room.
When we got there, Emily had taken her seat in the back corner, and her stacks were smaller than when we had left. There were more green chips, though, so that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I stayed on the periphery of her vision for a minute while she played a hand, then tapped my wrist where a watch would be if I wore one. She looked at me and Cain, nodded, and picked up a couple of racks for her chips. We met her at the cashier’s cage as she was folding a nice little stack of hundred dollar bills into her front pocket.
“You boys are back early. What’s up?”
Cain and I were both looking around as though our heads were on swivels, sure we’d see Lucky leaning on a slot machine somewhere. It was useless, of course. Nobody saw Lucky unless he wanted to be seen, and then you usually didn’t want to see Lucky.
“Time to go, sweetheart. Did you have fun?” I kept my tone light as we headed for the doors. I didn’t need any interference from casino security if they thought we were trying to muscle the girl.
She picked up that something was wrong and put her arm through Cain’s as we walked. We looked for all the world like a father and a couple of young lovebirds. I put that disturbing thought out of my head, and before anyone took notice of us, we were back out on the street headed toward Cain’s place.
Chapter 23
We’d gone about half a block when Emily pulled up short. “Okay, boys, out with it. What’s going on? Why did you come back early, and why were you in such a hurry to get me out of there?”
I could see she wasn’t interested in waiting for an explanation, and checked off impatience as another attribute that she had inherited from Eve.
Yes, I know I credit Eve with all the character traits I find annoying, and that I take credit for all the traits I like. She does exactly the same thing. She blames every hot-tempered moment in human history on me, from the start of wars to hockey fights. It’s a thing we do, so just leave me alone, okay?
“Well, Em, Dad and I had a little conversation, and we realized that your friend Luke is someone we both know, only I knew him as Lucien, and the last time I saw him was in the nineteenth century,” Cain started.
“I usually call him Lucky, and the last time I saw him was just a few days ago, when I left Las Vegas and started this whole trek,” I continued.
Her eyes got big, and her mouth opened in a round “O” as she sat down on the stoop of the house where we had stopped. I thought for a minute that it was because she had made the leap as to whom we were really talking about, and I guessed that was probably part of it. But the rest of it was the fact that the son of a bitch was standing right behind me.
I saw him out of the corner of my eye and spun to throw a punch. Lucky wasn’t the pacifist Michael was, though, and he caught my fist in his left hand without so much as a blink.
“Peace, Adam. I’m just here to talk,” he purred in my ear as he slowly forced my fist down to my side. We tended to forget exactly how powerful the Seraphim were when we didn’t see them do anything out of the ordinary, but Lucky was strong. “Good evening, Cain. Emily.” He inclined his head to each of them in turn.
“Morningstar,” Cain replied with a nod.
“Um, Luke? What’s going on? And why did he just call you… oh.” Emily put it all together pretty quickly, then her hand flashed to the outside of her pocket where the money was, as if to touch it to see if it would burn her or something.
Lucky chuckled a little at her discomfort. He let go of my hand and took a step back, holding his hands outstretched, palms out to keep me from charging him. I had no doubt that he could do plenty of unpleasant things to me, maybe even kill me, but I wasn’t in a place to care just then.
“Relax, Big A. I’m just here to talk. And just for a minute. We wouldn’t want your little poof friend Michael to smell sulfur on you, after all.”
“All right then, talk,” I muttered, moving slightly in front of Emily.
“That’s sweet, Adam. But really, if I wanted to hurt the child, I would have done it long before you ever knew she existed. Anyway, I’m here about the Choice. There are things you should know.”
“And we should believe you why?” I asked with no small hint of sarcasm.
“You probably shouldn’t, but you shouldn’t believe everything your mealy-mouthed sword-swinging nancy-boy tells you, either. Just like me, Michael has his own agenda. And he might not have your best interests at heart.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I trust him at least as much as I trust you, pal,” I spat.
“And when, in all the years we’ve known each other, have I ever lied to you?” If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was actually hurt at the notion. I had to take a minute and think it through, then I looked over at Cain, whose expression mirrored my own.
“Never,” I admitted in a quiet voice.
“Exactly. I have never lied to you, Adam. And I haven’t spent the better part of seventy-five thousand years telling you the truth, not always the whole truth, mind you, but the truth nonetheless, just to build up equity so that I can lie to you on a muggy early morning in Louisiana. So will you at least give me a chance to say my piece?”
“Go ahead.” I was actually listening, although I wouldn’t for a second have put it past him to be honest for a few thousand years just to set up one huge lie for the future. After all, he invented the long con, as it were.
“So far, Michael has been telling you the truth as well. There is a Choice coming, and it’s another major Choice. But just like me, he hasn’t told you the whole truth. He hasn’t told you what’s at stake, and he won’t. Neither will I.”
“So why bring it up?” Emily asked. “If you’re not going to explain yourself and tell us the consequences of this Choice, why bring it up in the first place?”
“My dear girl, I am the Devil, remember? Torment is kinda right in my wheelhouse.”
“Ass,” she muttered as she leaned back on the stoop.
“Adam, you always did breed the most potty-mouthed children. Where was I? Oh, yes, the point. The Choice Michael is leading you to isn’t the only one coming up soon, and it might not even be the most important one.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I get the whole tormenting obtuse thing, but shit, Lucky, I have no idea what you’re babbling about,” I interjected.
“Your Choice, Adam,” he replied calmly.
“Huh?” My natural eloquence sometimes amazed even me.
“Your. Choice,” he said very slowly and distinctly, as though speaking to a particularly slow first-grader. Eve did that, too, and I could bet I knew where she had learned it. “Haven’t you wondered why Eve made the Choice in the Garden instead of you? Haven’t you wondered why for all these years, you’ve never had to make a major decision? You know, something that might affect someone other than yourself?”
“Not really, no. I figured not everybody makes the big decisions. And after this long, I just kinda figured that I wasn’t going to have to.” It sounded lame even to my ears, but it was how I’d muddled through for so long.
“Sorry, pal. The father of the human race has a Choice to make, too. And yours is coming up soon. It’s part of this whole trip, and it might be even more important than the one little Mikey told you about.”
“Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he tell me I had a Choice coming? And why won’t you tell me what it is?” I was starting to get agitated, and Cain put a hand on my shoulder to keep me from going completely apeshit.
“He won’t tell you for the same reason that I won’t tell you more. We don’t want to influence your decision too s
oon. We both want the same thing, for you to choose our side, but we don’t want to make our case until the last possible moment, so our arguments stay fresh.”
“Yeah, like there’s any chance I’d take your side in any argument.” I glared at the fallen angel.
“Of course, there’s a chance. After all, Eve did, didn’t she? And by telling you a little bit now, while Michael is still keeping you in the dark, I undermine his argument before he ever makes it. Quite brilliant, if I do say so myself.” He smirked, and it was all I could do not to punch him square in the face. It helped that I knew he wouldn’t let me, and I didn’t want to end up with a sore jaw.
“So what do you want with us tonight, Lucypher?” I drew myself up to my full height and addressed him with all the weight I could put in my words.
“So formal, Adam? That was all. I’ve just been waiting for you to find my connection to dear little Emmy here, as I thought that would be the most apropos moment for a chat. But now, I think you probably want to be on your way, and since Eve got to Cain’s apartment about twenty minutes ago, you should go see if your first love and your last one have started the Jell-O wrestling yet, don’t you think?” I glanced over at Cain, a little alarmed for his furniture, and when I looked back, Lucky was gone.
“Dad?” Emily asked.
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
“I’m a little scared.” Her voice was very small, and when I looked back at her, she could have as easily been fifteen as twenty-four.
I held out my hand to help her up and put my arm around her shoulder. We started walking through the night toward Cain’s place. Our feet splashed through things probably better left undescribed as we made our way down the suddenly too-empty streets.
“I am too, baby girl. I am too."
Chapter 24
Eve was sitting on the bed of a pickup truck when we got to Cain’s. Yes, I know it makes more sense to say she was sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck, but she wasn’t. The truck, a late-70s model Ford with an impressive green-and-rust-patterned paint job, didn’t have a tailgate anymore. It had a rope across the bed where the tailgate used to be, and Eve was leaning against that with her hands twined through the frayed rope like a bad Delta S&M flick. She’d changed out of her stripper chic and was sporting more restrained brown cowboy boots, Daisy Duke cut-offs, and a faded Faster Pussycat t-shirt with a hole under one arm big enough to show her ribcage tattoo.
“How’d you get that to stick, anyway? I’ve always had a hell of a time with ink fading after a few days.” I pointed to the cherry blossoms that lined her left side and armpit.
“It does. I get it touched up about once a week. Let’s go up; I gotta pee.” My Eve, mother of humanity, but a few steps removed from Anne Landers.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Emily asked.
“Like a bitch.” Eve followed Cain up the stairs without a backwards glance for the girl and me.
Emily looked up at me. “Why would she keep getting it fixed if it’s just going to fade? Why hurt yourself over and over again?”
“That, my dear, may very well be the essence of what makes Eve, Eve. No one’s ever accused her of taking the easy road, or the painless one, or the logical one. But once she commits to something, it’s not a good idea to get in her way. Let’s go on up. We need to grab our bags and get moving.”
We followed the others upstairs and found Cain standing in the small living room looking around confused.
“What’s up, son? Mom peeing with the door open again?” I slid past him to go into the kitchen and grabbed a Red Bull out of the fridge. Immortal or not, I still wanted a little extra boost if I was going to be driving half the night.
“Where are they?” Emily asked as she looked around the room.
I realized that we were alone in the apartment. Myra and Michael weren’t where we had left them, which would be on the sofa. As a matter of fact, they weren’t anywhere in the apartment.
Buttoning her shorts, Eve came out of the bathroom, and said, “What’s the holdup? Where’s the floozy and the fucknugget angel?” Her snarky grin faded when she saw the look in Emily’s eyes. “What’s going on?”
“They’re not here,” I said.
“What do you mean, they’re not here?” Eve asked. Finally, somebody else’s turn to give the stupid response.
“Small words, Eve. Was there one in particular you didn’t understand, or was it just a general denseness that you needed help with?” I was worried about Myra, but I couldn’t pass up one of my few opportunities to be snide. When most of the people you associated with were sharper of wit than you, it was important to take your shots whenever they came along.
“I get that they’re not here, asshole, but where are they?” Eve shot a concerned glance over at Emily, who looked a little frantic at her mom’s absence.
“Saint Patrick’s.” Cain’s voice came from the kitchenette.
“Huh?” I lapsed immediately from witty to my typical eloquence as I wandered into the sitting area. He handed me a note in Myra’s handwriting.
“Don’t worry about me, Michael is showing me St. Patrick’s Church. We’ll wait for you in Lafayette Square until dawn. If you haven’t shown up by then, we’ll watch the sunrise in the park, go to the early Mass, and meet you back here. We’ll pick up some beignets for the road. Love, M.” I showed the note to Emily, who had started to show early signs of freak-out.
“It’s her handwriting, and she loves old churches, so it makes sense. Not sure why she’d go off with Michael, though. He’s a bit of a douche.” Emily looked around as Eve barked out a laugh at that last bit.
I stifled my own laugh, but Cain didn’t bother. Between chuckles, he said, “She probably went out with him because we were gone all friggin’ day. Remember, we left around eleven thirty in the morning to bail out Mom. Then we went to the casino, and what happens in casinos happened, which is to say, we lost track of more than a few hours. Then, we had our little encounter with the Prince of Fucking Darkness and meandered on back here, and now it’s well after midnight. So I’m not surprised that your mom got tired of waiting on us and decided to go off and do something on her own.”
“Prince of Darkness? This would be a really good time for you to tell me that vampires are real and Lestat really does wander the Quarter,” Eve said in a voice more concerned than any I’d ever heard her use. She actually looked frightened, an emotion of which I hadn’t thought her capable.
Cain went over to Eve and guided her down to a diner-style kitchen chair when it looked like her legs suddenly wouldn’t hold her weight. “No, Mom. It was Him. He found us outside the casino and made his presence known.”
“What did he want?” She looked haunted, as though everything since the Garden was flashing through her mind.
“He wanted to warn Dad.”
“Warn Adam? About what?”
“His Choice.” Cain sat next to her in another chair that looked like it belonged to a four-top in Mel’s Diner, but also looked just about perfect against his ultra-modern kitchen appliances. The fifties-style vinyl chairs and flecked table stood in stark relief against the iPod white of all his various blenders, dicers, juicers, and other implements of destruction that would surely baffle Paula Deen.
Eve stared at him for a minute before she looked up at me. “I’m sorry.” It was almost a whisper, and I couldn’t see her lips move, but I knew she had said it.
“Sorry? Sorry for what? My Choice hasn’t even happened yet. What do you have to be sorry for?” I kneeled on the floor in front of her and tried to look her in the face, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“It wasn’t supposed to ever come. The whole point was so that you wouldn’t have to choose. That was the deal. Now, the bastard goes back on his word after all these years. I should have known he was just saving it up for when it really mattered.”
“Okay, I’m confused. Cain, do you have any idea what she’s talking about?” I stood and set my Red Bull on the counter.
&nb
sp; “Yeah. I do,” he murmured.
“Well, would you like to explain things, since your mother obviously isn’t capable of it right this second?” I was getting a little loud, so I took a deep breath to try and control my volume. Things wouldn’t improve for us if we were reintroduced to New Orleans’s finest.
“No.”
“Excuse me? What did you say?” I lapsed into the incredulous parent voice.
You know the one. The one where the middle name is unstated, but understood. The one where the recipient immediately understands that he or she is grounded for the next century if their next answer isn’t completely satisfactory. For the record, the grounding voice loses a great deal of its impact after your child passes his fiftieth millennium.
The Chosen Page 11
