Too late to worry about it now.
Malphael poured on the speed, moving faster and more nimbly than anyone his size had a right to. Suddenly I found myself on the defensive, hard-pressed to keep up with the scything arcs of his oversized blade. He got my back to the windows before I had time to think about which direction I’d planned to lure him into next.
He drew a breath, and roared at me.
Blood and smoke, fury and flame all reverberated in that inhuman sound, underscored by the deep, throbbing notes of his Name. My brain raced, but the mortal part of me froze like food before a predator. Adrenaline made my pulse pound so hard, lights chewed at the edges of my vision.
My body yelled, Run! but the sound scrambled something in my nervous system so all I could do was gape. With a taunting grin, he prepared for a final, punishing strike.
He roared again as he raised his sword, and my legs buckled, all my strength run to water. I was down on one knee, trying to get my blades up to protect my head. Intoning my own Name, I shook off enough of the paralytic effect to move, but it was going to be too late.
Malphael’s flame-kissed steel loomed like the judgment of Armageddon, and then my left hand flickered forward, Nephilim-quick. My dagger on that side dispersed, and I caught him by the wrist. My elbow locked, holding back his strike. As he strained against me, I sought out the burning thread of power that forged his blade and I ate it. His weapon faded in a swirl of smoke and ash.
I was conscious enough of the action—and what I tapped into to accomplish it—so I stole only the energy he expended to sustain the blade in that moment, not the knowledge or essence of the blade itself. That would’ve revealed the cheat.
All six eyes stared at me in shock and horror. Still holding his wrist, I swept my other hand up toward his belly, cutting a wide slash with my remaining blade. The weapon didn’t touch the cloth or the skin. No matter how solid the energy, it couldn’t make a physical cut, but Garrett still cried out, and behind him, Malphael reared back, bellowing in pain.
I shoved him away, finally relinquishing my hold on his wrist. I curled my left hand against me, not entirely trusting it—the scar on my palm felt like it was chewing its way out of my skin. I shook out the power of my remaining blade while Malphael staggered back, gaping. He might not be able to prove what I’d just done, but he suspected.
I looked up from where I crouched on the floor, blowing the hair back from my eyes.
“I play to win.”
40
Malphael lurked at the other end of the dining room, glowering at his hand as if the meaty digits had risen up in a profoundly personal betrayal.
“You’re guilty,” I said. “You’re going to get the hell out of my city, and take that bastard Terhuziel with you.”
“You consumed my power,” he growled. “What treachery have you learned?”
“Consumed it?” I laughed. “I just waited until you ran out.”
It wasn’t true, but I sold it like my life depended on it—because it probably did. Malphael struck me as a sore loser, and tapping the Nephilim icon was a hell of a cheat. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with myself for using it again, but there’d been no other way to win.
Maybe that was an easy excuse to feed my conscience.
I rose slowly to my feet, wincing as I jostled the wounded wing. I stretched, testing it, and there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage, but it stung like a sonofabitch. I probably should have felt winded from that fight, but aside from the twinge along my wing, I felt great. There were definitely upsides to devouring the power of the enemy.
I swore not to get used to it.
The Gibburim eyed me warily, absently rubbing his wrist. I eyed him right back.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’ve spun yourself pretty thin,” I observed. “You just misjudged your strength in that last assault.”
“I did not misjudge my strength,” he objected sullenly.
“Yeah?” I chided. “Is that what you told yourself when you lost to Terhuziel? I saw that fight in the front hallway—you left imprints all over this house.” At that, Malphael snarled something that wasn’t exactly English. It sounded wrong coming out of Garrett’s mouth.
“My vessel failed to notice that the physician carried a firearm,” he countered.
“You have a funny way of saying you fucked up.”
“The error was the vessel’s,” the Gibburim insisted, “and then he let weakness claim him before we could get the old seal back in place.”
“Saw that, too,” I said. “If, by ‘weakness,’ you mean death. Good thing ol’ Garrett came along when he did, otherwise you’d still be gnashing your teeth uselessly in the front room.”
“He is convenient, but irritating.” Malphael scowled, and it took Garrett’s features half a second to follow suit. “He bucks like a spirited horse and complains that this is not what he signed up for.”
That was interesting.
“Does he get a vote?” I pursued.
“Why should he?” Malphael replied. “He made his choice.” As he said it, though, his voice and Garrett’s lips were jarringly out of sync. The detective’s human eyes sought my own, pleading and full of fear. Malphael’s double set of burning orbs narrowed to slits, and I could feel the Gibburim reasserting his dominance in an acrid wave of heat.
Garrett fell away from his own face like a drowning man.
Sickened fury rose bitter in the back of my throat. Malphael saw my expression and simply laughed.
“I felt his rage when he entered this space,” the Gibburim mused, and the mortal and immortal aspects aligned smoothly once again. “This David Garrett is a righteous soul, and the futile war of justice ate holes in his warrior’s heart. I promised that we would hunt the beast that destroyed this family. He leapt at the offer of power he knew he lacked.”
Garrett’s hand clenched into a fist at his side, and it was unclear which one of them was using the meat-suit for the gesture.
“You didn’t bother to tell him that you were the one who killed two of the girls, though, did you?” The words tore low and ragged from my throat.
Malphael only glowered in response.
“I hate to interrupt your charming family reunion,” Lil chimed in, “but we need to leave.” She stood at the mouth of the hallway, holding aloft the battered remains of Halley’s ceramic rosary.
“What is that?” Malphael demanded—though from his expression, it looked like he had a clue. He took a step toward her, ready to pluck it from her hand. Nimbly, Lil kept it out of his reach. Her gray eyes danced with wicked delight.
Lucy Van-fucking-Pelt.
“Oh, it’s a token scribed in the Name of Terhuziel.” For once, she gave the Name its proper pronunciation. “I broke it, but I guess they can track it anyway.”
“Dammit, Lil,” I hissed. I didn’t know what she was playing at, but it might end with Halley getting killed. If anything alerted Malphael to the girl’s existence, he would hunt her down and “cleanse” her, just as he had the Kramer children.
If he so much as dared, I’d do a lot more than “best” him.
“Who has tracked the token?” he demanded, taking another step toward the Lady of Beasts. She dodged again, making no effort at all to hide her grin.
“I counted two creeping up in the bushes out in the yard, but I’m sure there’s more,” she replied.
“Fuck,” I complained. “Does this asshole ever run out of minions?”
“He licks the crap from the bottom of the barrel,” Lil said. “There’s plenty of that to go around.”
“You will give me that,” Malphael commanded. He looked back and forth between us, his expression darkening by degrees.
“I don’t take orders from anyone,” she replied in a voice like velvet draped over the cold edge of a scalpel. “Especially not assholes like you.”
Malphael lunged. With a defiant lift to her chin, Lil flicked the rosary beads in an arc behind her. They clattere
d somewhere in the shadowed depths of the Kramers’ rec room.
“Bitch,” Malphael spat.
He dove after the token. Lil neatly sidestepped as he charged past her down the hall. She stuck out one foot, tangling his ankles. Malphael stumbled, but recovered, spewing long-dead curses in his subsonic, rumbling tone. He didn’t let his fury distract him, however.
With a nasty laugh, Lil dashed toward me and snagged my wrist.
“Front door,” she hissed in the lowest of whispers.
“If he’s got people out back, there has to be—”
She didn’t let me argue, just yanked me down the hall.
Malphael had already cut the police tape and left the door unlocked. We burst into the chill morning and pelted through the drifts toward the car. The way she’d been talking, I expected to encounter lurching ranks of the hobo army, but the street was empty. Ours and Garrett’s were the only tracks anywhere to be seen.
“Mind telling me why you handed the fucking token over like that?” I demanded.
“Just get to the car,” she hissed, breath pluming. “You’ll thank me.”
We slogged through drifts of snow, skidding as we ran. Lil managed to make it look graceful. I was just happy not to land on my ass. The street still hadn’t been plowed, and probably another two inches had come down while we searched the house.
The thunder was silent now, but the wind angrily scoured the landscape, dragging sheets of snow from the existing drifts.
“There aren’t any minions out here,” I said.
“Your powers of observation astound me,” she called. Her hair streamed in a red tangle behind her as she pulled farther ahead.
My foot found a canted chunk of sidewalk and I nearly launched myself onto my face. I tried to compensate with my wings. Stupid reflex—and it hurt like hell.
“What’s the rush?” I demanded, venting all my anger in the words.
Lil didn’t stop. We were almost to the Hellcat. At least the cross-street had been plowed.
“I found a picture of Kramer,” she said.
“And we’re running,” I panted. “Why are we running?”
Lil skidded to a stop by the driver’s side of the car. Her eyes caught the weak light of the streetlamps. “We’ve seen him before.”
“What?”
“The guy chatting up the woman at the nurses’ station,” she said.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I roared.
“Quit yelling.” She opened the driver’s-side door, the bottom scraping noisily against the built-up snow. “I want to be gone before your meat-head of a brother thinks to follow us.”
“The token was a distraction.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she hissed.
I tried to get past her into the car. “You’re on the wrong side. It’s my fucking car.”
She shoved me so hard, I skidded back in the snow.
“You gave me the keys. I drive.”
41
Lil taught me what it felt like to run the Olympic slalom strapped into three thousand pounds of streamlined fiberglass and steel.
I had no idea it was possible to use a car like a snowboard, but she managed it, urging the souped-up Dodge again and again into controlled slides, then harnessing the momentum to skate us through the icy streets at record speeds.
She skidded into the parking lot of University Hospital, sliding the car sideways into an open space—a maneuver made ten times ballsier by the fact that the lot was crawling with police. Most of them were on the far end near the parking garage—surprise, surprise.
One lone straggler—a lean, sour-faced fellow—was pacing and smoking while he talked on a cellphone, away from the rest. He watched Lil’s grand entrance, nearly dropping his cigarette in a grip gone slack with shock. When she and I poured from the car, he took one look at our forbidding expressions and decided the overtime wasn’t worth it.
We raced into the lobby. Despite the hour—it was somewhere in the neighborhood of three in the morning—people were clustered against the front windows, gawking at the fleet of black-and-whites out in the lot. Towering near the back of the crowd was the steely-haired figure of Father Frank. I elbowed my way through till I made it to him.
“Is Halley all right?” I asked.
“She was a little bit ago,” he answered. “The night doc came through and gave her a sedative to help her sleep. Woke her up to do it, too. You know how stupid they can be about that.”
“And you left her?” I demanded.
Anxiety deepened the furrows exhaustion had already etched into his brow. With practiced discretion, he steered our conversation to a more isolated corner.
“They didn’t give me much choice in the matter,” he said. “Ordered me out to get some sleep of my own. I’ve been cooling my heels till I can sneak back up there.” His dark eyes flickered toward the front windows. Blue and red lights stuttered against the glass. “What’s wrong? Does it have something to do with what happened out there?”
“We have to get to Halley,” I said, dragging him toward the elevators. He was too stunned to resist. The carriage was stopped half a dozen floors up. I stabbed the call button repeatedly, snarling, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.”
“I’ll cover the stairs,” Lil said. She took off down the hall at a jog.
Father Frank looked searchingly between us. “Tell me what’s going on.”
The elevator dinged and I shoved my fingers between the doors the instant they slid apart, trying to drag them open faster through sheer force. Inside, the orderly waiting with a gurney stared at me like he was mentally calculating the measurements of an appropriately fitted straitjacket.
I shouldered past him.
“What floor was she on?” I asked the padre.
Father Frank stumbled in after me, pressing the button. His patrician features wavered between bewildered and annoyed. The orderly vacated as quickly as he could.
“I wouldn’t have left if I thought something would happen to her. That doctor—”
“Tall guy, kind of looked like Denzel Washington?”
“Well, now that you mention it,” he allowed. I jammed my thumb against the CLOSE DOORS button.
“Works for the bad guy,” I snarled.
Father Frank’s eyes flew wide. “But, Zack, he was lucid. He was joking—”
“I know,” I shouted, smashing my fist into the burnished metal wall of the elevator, pulling the punch at the last instant. “I couldn’t tell either.”
“I thought he only went after weakened minds,” the priest objected hollowly.
“Those are the easiest for him, but Terhuziel’s been working Kramer over since the guy was in Syria. I don’t know how long.” I curled my fingers into a tighter fist and thought about hitting the wall again. I focused instead on the sharp bite of my nails against my palm.
The elevator crawled through a slow succession of floors.
“I’m supposed to be able to see this shit, padre, and I had no fucking clue!”
“You’ll make it right, Zaquiel,” he insisted.
I turned away from the pain in his expression—and the hope.
42
I swept from the elevator as soon as I could shoulder my way through the door. The rubber heels of my engineer boots thudded against the tiles as I pelted down the hall. The night nurse from before looked up sharply, yelling the instant she caught sight of me.
“Hey! Where you going? You can’t run like that in here.” She was a big woman, boxy in her scrubs. She slammed her hand on the counter, ready to leap over and wrestle me to the ground if necessary. She had an appropriately intimidating presence, but I just didn’t care. I’d faced off with vampires and cacodaimons. One angry desk attendant wasn’t going to convince me to stop.
I whipped past her station, heedless of her objections.
“I’ll call security!” she threatened, jumping to her feet.
“Call them,” I yelled over my shoulder. “Probably going to need them.” I hit th
e turn at the end of the hallway, boots squealing against the flooring. Halley’s room was the last one on the left. The door was open—and both beds were unoccupied.
“Fuck!”
I paced futilely outside the empty room, muttering the same word over again in a percussive expression of frustration. The night nurse came charging around the corner, her face like perdition itself.
“There are kids on this ward,” she hissed, not in the least intimidated by either my appearance or my height. “They don’t need to hear garbage like that.” Tipping her head back to glare into my eyes, she said in a low and heated voice, “You need to turn your skinny butt around and get off of my floor this instant.”
Lil burst from the door at the end of the hall, red hair wild from racing up all those flights of steps.
“He didn’t go that way,” she said. She wasn’t even out of breath.
“You, too, now?” the nurse demanded. She planted her hands on her ample hips, angling her head so she could glare at the padre. He stood quietly at the bend in the hall. “Father Mazetti, do you mind telling me what’s going on?”
Father Frank looked to me.
I shook my head. “She’s not here.”
The nurse shifted her gaze from Father Frank to me, then to Lil. “Well, somebody better start talking, fast,” she huffed.
The padre stepped forward, laying a hand on the nurse’s shoulder. “Halley Davis,” he said, meeting her belligerence with a look of practiced patience. “What happened to the girl? I haven’t been gone ten minutes, and now she’s not in her room.”
The night nurse—her name tag declared her as “Hildy”—relaxed a little, though she still side-eyed me.
“You folks are getting yourselves worked up over nothing,” she declared. “The doctor was worried about some of her levels. He just took her downstairs to run a couple of tests.”
Father Frank and I exchanged worried glances.
“Is this the same doctor you were flirting with earlier?” I asked.
Harsh Gods Page 26
