by SM Reine
“Shame.” She patted her knee. “Wanna sit with me, cutie?”
I only managed two steps before Krista caught me with her good hand. “Bad idea. Overlord.”
Oh yeah.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“I brought him so we could take care of that thing,” Malcolm said. “The thing you asked for.”
Neuma’s eyes brightened. “Ooh. Great. Lemme get my jeans on.”
She hopped off of the throne, and the motion almost made her hop right out of that skeleton bikini. All her parts bounced in all the right ways within the cage of phalanges. I had to be messed up from demon powers to find a woman dressed in the dead sexy.
I didn’t stop looking back until she’d leaped over the bar and vanished down a back hallway.
“That’s an overlord?” I managed to say.
“She’s new at the job,” Malcolm said. “Not even a proper demon, to be honest. She’s half-succubus Gray.” Gray were the half-human, half-demon offspring of trysts by men much braver than I.
“I’ve never heard of a Gray overlord.” But it did explain why she wasn’t scary.
“There’s never been one on record,” Krista said. “I don’t want to question you, sir, but what do you have planned for Agent Hawke and the Night Hag?”
“Agent Hawke, the Night Hag, and you, Krista.” Malcolm shuffled up to the throne and grabbed the forgotten bottle of rum. “Neuma needs an escort up to Sun Valley. Check in on some people up north. I told her we’d send her in a Union transport so she wouldn’t get stopped at the check point, and you two will take her.”
I wasn’t sure if I should be flattered that he trusted me enough to escort his demon contacts around, or horrified that Malcolm was doing favors for demon contacts. “How did you end up tangled with Reno’s overlord?”
“Let’s just say we have a mutual friend. And mutual hobbies.” He waved the bottle of rum around, then started drinking.
Krista didn’t look like she understood any more than I did. She gave me an attractively blank look.
I tried to keep myself looking blank, too.
It wasn’t unusual to have demon contacts. I had one or two myself. It was hard to do the job without splashing around in the mud sometimes. But I didn’t think it was normal to go drinking with them, nor was it normal to do favors for them that involved circumventing Union protocol. There was no way it was legal for Malcolm to smuggle demons across Union checkpoints.
“Think we should drag him back to the warehouse?” I asked Krista out the corner of my mouth.
“No,” she said, as though appalled by the suggestion. “He’s a commander.” A commander so honored that even his aspis talked shit about him behind his back.
Malcolm wrapped an arm around Krista’s shoulder. “Krista here’s a lot like you, Hawke. Loyal as hell! Unlike you, she understands chain of command. You’re escorting Neuma out to Sun Valley. All right?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I don’t understand why, but yes sir.”
“Because I want you to get through the investigation, Cèsar,” Malcolm said.
It might have struck me that he was saying something important if Neuma hadn’t emerged at that moment.
She’d put on jeans all right. She was wearing a pair of jeans so snug that it was more like denim painted on the curves of her hips. And she was still wearing a bikini top that looked like bone and left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
Damn, but the thrall of a half-succubus Gray was strong.
“Ready to go, cutie?” she asked, trailing a finger along my chest.
“Take the BearCat,” Malcolm said. “Have fun, kids. Don’t stay out too late. Remember to pick me up before dark.”
Krista’s eyes got wider. “You’re staying here?”
“Insurance,” he said.
“Remember, once we’re out of booze, that’s it,” Neuma said. She poked Malcolm hard in the sternum. “Don’t drink us dry.”
“I’ll try not to,” Malcolm said in a way that made it clear that was exactly what he planned to do.
“Lead the way, my gorgeous guardians,” Neuma said.
“Ladies first,” I said.
She winked. “Like to watch, huh?” She swayed away from me, heading up toward the street again.
Yeah, I liked to watch.
It was a reminder of how much I’d been enjoying watching Isobel earlier. You know, Isobel. The woman I’d been going all telenovela over for the last few months.
Neuma might have been a demon, but at least she was probably single.
“Damn,” I muttered to Krista as we followed Neuma upstairs, leaving Malcolm behind us. “The succubus thrall is strong with this one, huh?” She would know as well as I did—stupid things like sexual orientation didn’t matter where incubi and succubi were concerned. No matter how you swung, you wouldn’t be able to resist them.
She gave me a flat look. “You have a kopis, Agent Hawke,” Krista said.
“Yeah? So?”
“So you’re immune to most of the sex powers of a half-succubus.” She gave a disdainful snort. “You’re just that pathetic.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
SUN VALLEY WAS A suburb north of Reno, hidden over the hill in some barren little valley. OPA records said that it was part of unincorporated Washoe County and an area of high poverty, but I didn’t really need to check the database to know that second part. The whole town was a trailer park, from the moment I passed the gas station at its entrance all the way back past the ramshackle strip malls.
We had to pass a Union checkpoint to get into Sun Valley—or out of Reno, as the case may have been. The street called Clear Acre had been blasted like the freeways aside from a path just wide enough for a single vehicle, and everything else was wrapped in barbed-wire fence.
Krista and I skipped the line of cars, busted bicycles, and bedraggled humans on foot. When you’ve got a big black BearCat, it’s easy to get waved through security. They didn’t even look inside to see that we were escorting the region’s so-called overlord.
“Turn right here,” Neuma said, pointing out the window.
Krista turned, using her bad hand to operate the wheel. Her good hand was resting on her gun. It didn’t seem like she enjoyed having Neuma in close quarters.
The BearCat rolled over the sidewalk as if the bump didn’t exist.
I’d sat myself at the window, where I’d be able to operate the mounted machine gun if we got attacked. I didn’t know how to operate the cannon, mind you, but I wasn’t gonna miss out on the opportunity to try. The artillery shells blasting downtown Reno apart had been the stuff of my feverish childhood dreams. I might not have had a tank, but I wanted a piece of that.
Sun Valley wasn’t a battleground, though. Mostly it was just sad. The OPA had set up food lines, and people were waiting for miles to get a few loaves of bread. There were more tents than mobile homes at this point, though lots of people were clustered around half-collapsed trailers that should have been condemned.
Didn’t see any demons, either. There wasn’t anyone in sight except for humans, poor and suffering and lonely in barren Nevada.
At least there were no demons except the one sitting next to me, eyeballing me like I was Thanksgiving dinner.
The devastation diminished the further we got from Reno, but it was still pretty bad—the kind of bad that had never been good in the first place. There wasn’t any ichor in Sun Valley. Just a lot of ash and people wandering around dirt roads like they had nowhere to be.
Neuma stopped us on Lupin Drive.
“Wait here while I go in.” She grabbed her purse, which was a monstrosity of sparkling sequins and fake brass clasps. “I’m gonna need an escort back to Craven’s. Where you gonna be?”
“The commander ordered us to wait for you,” Krista said flatly. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to ditch the succubus, I’d bet. She was that loyal to Malcolm, drunkenness aside.
Neuma nodded, accepting Krista’s implicit promise.
I opened the door. Neuma climbed out, and I watched her slither across the seats. It was hard not to. The woman was sex poured into jeans, and she knew it.
Krista made an irritated huffing noise when I plopped back into my seat again. The noise was obviously aimed at me.
“Am I going to have to tolerate your disparaging female attitude on this whole field trip?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t succumb to demon powers. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You shouldn’t underestimate my ability to think with my dick,” I said. I wasn’t much smarter around human women than I was around succubus women. It was an advantage if you thought about it.
I was rewarded with a dry chuckle from Krista. She still had a hand curled over her gun, though. It made the laugh sound kinda menacing. Like she might shoot me.
I’d try not to give her a reason.
Neuma entered the trailer. She talked to someone in the open doorway—some old lady all hunched over, wearing soiled clothes that didn’t fit.
They hugged like they were family. Neuma kissed the old lady’s forehead.
The door swung shut, but I could still watch them through the windows. There were a couple people in there. All kinda old, all kinda weak looking. I’d have been stupid if I didn’t notice the resemblance between Neuma and those humans. I’d thought she looked ethnic. Turned out that ethnicity was black.
Krista had said Neuma was Gray, which meant that she had as much human blood in her as she did demon. Apparently Neuma’s human family lived out in beautiful Sun Valley, Nevada.
I pulled the Steno pad out of my jacket. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“It depends on the nature of the questions and whose authority you’re operating under,” Krista said.
“If I told you I was working for Lucrezia de Angelis, what would you think of that?”
She tensed all over. “I’ll answer your questions.” Any hint of friendliness had left her tone. Krista was loyal enough to respond to a line of questioning that would lead back to Lucrezia, but she wasn’t happy about it.
I liked her for that.
“Where were you during the MOAD incident?” I asked.
“Italy HQ. I was being retrained.”
“I thought Union had its headquarters in Montana.”
“That’s the American HQ,” Krista said.
Fritz hadn’t been joking about the Union being more than just an OPA department. “Why did you need to be retrained?”
“Whatever you’re investigating for the vice president, that’s not relevant. Trust me.”
“I’ll decide that,” I said.
Krista glared at her gun, stroking a finger along the barrel. “I had to do physical therapy due to poor performance in the field.”
That sounded like something I shouldn’t bug her about. “How long have you known Commander Gallagher?”
“We enlisted at the same time and went to training together.”
“Does that mean you trained with Fritz Friederling, too? He’s my aspis.”
She tilted her head and scanned me up and down, as though trying to evaluate me. “Yes. We were in training together. How in the world are you friends with both Director Friederling and Lucrezia de Angelis?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say I’m friends with Lucrezia.” Not unless “future murder victim” counted as friendship these days. “Just working for her.”
“Well, I wasn’t here for the MOAD incident, so I can’t help you with details about that. I arrived two weeks later.”
It did mean, however, that she couldn’t be responsible for what had happened to Reno.
I’d been compiling a list of people I wanted to investigate further on the first page, back where I’d drawn the pendant of St. Benedict. Everyone I’d met at the base, from Bellamy to Allyson, was listed there. I wrote down Krista’s name and then crossed it off.
“What do you know about Malcolm’s condition lately?” I asked.
Her eyes softened. “It’s not good. He lost people in the apocalypse.”
“I gathered that. You know who?”
“We don’t talk about our personal lives anymore,” Krista said.
“Do you think he’d file false reports deliberately?”
Her answer was immediate. “No. Malcolm doesn’t play by the book, but he does respect the book. He does his job to the best of his capabilities.”
Which didn’t mean he did his job well.
“Do you trust his judgment?”
“I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but we’re escorting a half-demon overlord on a personal errand,” Krista said.
“That’s a no,” I said.
Her eyebrows lifted. “To the contrary, that’s a yes. I wouldn’t do this for anyone else. I trust Malcolm completely. He’s a good man, Agent Hawke. He might not seem like it, but he’s also a softie.”
I didn’t think Malcolm was such a softie that he wanted to make sure some random demon—even an overlord—got to visit home safely with an OPA escort.
Malcolm had wanted me to go to Sun Valley for a reason. He’d wanted me to see this demon stripper overlord thing with her family—these fragile people she was taking care of in a neighborhood that society had started neglecting long before the apocalypse.
He’d wanted me to hang out with Krista, too.
This was all for a reason.
Drunk as he might have been, I didn’t think Malcolm was stupid. This had to do with my investigation. It was important.
“So what got someone like you working for the Union?” I asked, drumming my fingers impatiently on my knee.
“Someone disabled?” Krista asked.
“A woman kopis,” I said. “You’re rare enough, I’d think you’d have a lot of other fun things you could be doing. Funner and more profitable to boot.”
She scoffed. “Like what?”
If she needed to ask, then she wasn’t real imaginative. “There are rich people who pay to have rare arm candy, especially arm candy that can kick ass.”
“Is that what you do, Agent Hawke?” she asked. “Are you Director Friederling’s rare, ass-kicking arm candy?”
“I’m more like an arm steak.” I flexed a bicep. “Agent Cèsar Hawke is a low-carb treat. Nothing but meat here, baby.”
That earned more rolling eyes. “I want to fight. I believe in the Union’s cause. I believe that kopides and aspides are stronger together than they are apart, and that rogues do far more damage than the demons they fight. Do you know how many kopides will leap at the chance to fight alongside rare arm candy like me, though?” She gestured with her palsied arm, showing good mobility, but a strong tremor, and her curled fingers. “The Union takes me as I am and doesn’t relegate me to desk duty.”
“The Union takes you as you are, or Malcolm does?”
“I’m not here for him.”
“Was he here in Reno for someone? Girlfriend? Wife? Third cousin twice removed?”
“I told you that we don’t talk about our personal lives.”
“You know him, though,” I said. “He trusts you more than his aspis right now. You must know something.”
Krista sighed. “My understanding is that he was friends with the territory’s kopis.”
The “was” rang out flat in the tank.
“Did that happen before or after the Union assigned him here?” I asked.
“As far as I know, it was before. Haven’t you wondered why someone like Malcolm ended up with a command? His contacts in a sensitive region put him ahead of more qualified people for promotion when Gary Zettel bombed the semi-centennial summit.”
Krista sure knew a lot for someone the Union had only recruited because she was a girl. She might not have been able to keep up with a lot of kopides physically, but she kept her eyes and ears open.
Yeah, Malcolm had sent me off with Krista for good reason. Reasons that had nothing to do with her great ass.
Although her ass was great.
The door on t
he trailer opened again. Neuma wasn’t carrying the ugly purse anymore. She blew kisses at the people inside the trailer and came bouncing back toward us.
Neuma crawled into the tank. “We’re good.”
She sure was.
“Let’s get back to Eloquent Blood before dark.” Krista was already moving. The BearCat lurched onto the street.
Daylight was fading faster than it should have been. The tank had to cross through too many shadowy places to get back to Sun Valley Boulevard, and I found myself resting my hands on the mounted machine gun again.
Even with my nerves on edge, I couldn’t help but watch Neuma out the corner of my eye. Sure, being an aspis meant I should have been partially immune, but not completely immune. And she was still hot as hell. I’d have had to have no eyeballs to miss how she looked.
She and Malcolm had a mutual friend.
He’d come to town because he was friends with the local kopis.
Was there overlap?
“How’d you meet Malcolm?” I asked Neuma. One eye on her legs, one eye on the view through the window.
Neuma leaned toward me. “Is that really what you want to talk about, cutie?”
“Mostly I want to talk about the kopis you guys were friends with,” I said.
That made her flirtatiousness vanish in a heartbeat. She drew back. Her eyes narrowed. “What do you know about Elise?”
After all the woman kopis action going around, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me to hear a woman’s name there. But it did. I’d gone my whole professional life believing only men could be born as kopides, and in one day I’d been smacked in the face with two of them.
It all fit together, and I didn’t like the picture it was forming.
Isobel Stonecrow wanted me to blame the apocalypse on the mutual friend of a high-ranking Union commander and the region’s demonic overlord.
Christ. I needed to find Ann Friedman like…yesterday.
“I’m just trying to get a big picture of what happened in Reno,” I said. “See if there’s anything I can fix.”
Neuma drew herself up tall. The demon radiated from her suddenly—not the sexy bits, but the scary ones. Her black hair streamed behind her as though melting into shadow. Her eyes turned to pits. “Are you trying to blame Reno on Elise?”
