by J. R. Ward
“The bitch can bring it on, how about that.”
Colin grinned. “It is a bit of a shock we two don’t get along better.”
Byron cleared his throat. “I think we should all just take a moment to support Jim as opposed to challenging him more. He has done a wonderful, brave thing, and I for one am quite proud.”
As Bertie started chiming in and Tarquin’s tail wagged, Jim held out his palms. “I’m cool—Oh God, no hugging, no—”
Too late. Byron wrapped surprisingly strong arms around Jim and embraced him, and then Bertie was next, with Tarquin rising up and putting his paws on Jim’s shoulders. The angels smelled good; he had to give them that—just like that smoke that had come from the cigars Eddie had lit up.
Fortunately, though, Nigel and Colin weren’t the brothers-inside-arms types.
Sometimes you lucked out.
Funny, Jim was a little touched, though it wasn’t like he’d admit it. And abruptly, he was also ready to go back into battle. That flag, that tangible symbol of success, was a serious motivator for some reason—maybe because in his old life headstones were how he measured whether he was getting the job done, and that waving banner was far more attractive and uplifting.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said to the group. “I’ve got something I need to do before my next case. I need to find a man before he gets killed for the wrong reasons. It’s part of my old life and not the kind of thing I can walk away from.”
Nigel smiled, his strangely beautiful eyes locking onto Jim’s as if they saw everything. “Of course, you must do as you wish.”
“So do I come back here after I’m done or…?”
More of that all-knowing smile. “Simply take care of things.”
“How do I get in touch with you?”
“Don’t call upon us. We shall call upon you.”
Jim cursed under his breath. “You sure you don’t know Matthias?”
Colin spoke up. “You do realize that Devina can be anything and anybody. Men, women, children, certain animals. She is pervasive in her numerous forms.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Trust no one.”
Jim nodded at the angel. “Not a problem, I got plenty of experience with that shit. One thing, though…do you guys actually communicate with me through the TV or did I lose my damn mind?”
“Godspeed, James Heron,” Nigel said, raising his palm. “You have proven yourself worthy against our enemy. Now do it again, you tough bastard.”
Jim got one last look at the castle walls, and imagined his mother safely and happily on the far side of them. Then a blast of energy blew out of the angel’s hand and he was scrambled down to his molecules and sent flying.
Hard. Cold.
Fuckin’ ow.
Those were Jim’s first thoughts when he woke up again, and opening his eyes, he got another load of milky, diffused light that seemed to come from no particular source. Which made him wonder if Nigel’s flashy palm crap hadn’t fucked up and landed him right back where he’d been.
Except the air wasn’t fresh. And instead of a bed of springy grass, he felt like he was lying on a stretch of pavement—
As a sheet was whipped off his face, Jim nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Hey,” Eddie said. “Ready to go?”
“Fuck!” He clutched his chest. “You want to scare me to death?”
“Little late for that.”
Jim looked around. The room they were in had pale green tiles on the floor, walls, and ceiling and an entire bank of three-by-two-foot stainless-steel doors with meat-locker handles on them. Empty stainless-steel tables with hanging scales and rolling tables were arranged in orderly rows, and the sinks in the far corner were the size of bathtubs.
“I’m in the fucking morgue?”
“Well, yeah.” The duh was implied.
“Jesus Christ…”
Jim sat up, and sure enough there was a body bag with an occupant two tables down, and a sheet-covered corpse with its feet sticking out from the end next door. “So they really do put toe tags on them, huh.”
Eddie shrugged. “It’s not like they can give their name or some shit.”
With a curse, Jim swung his legs off the table he was on, and that was when he saw Adrian. The angel was standing just inside the room by the double doors and he was unusually self-contained: Typically a sprawler, he had his arms linked tightly across his chest and his feet were set right together. With his mouth nothing but a slash, and his skin the color of Kleenex, the guy stared at the tile floor, brows down, lashes dark against his pale cheeks.
He was hurting. Inside and out.
“I brought you some clothes,” Eddie said. “And yes, I went back and got Dog. He’s in our truck, happy as a little clam.”
“So I’m dead?”
“As a doornail. That’s the way it works.”
“But I still get to keep Dog even though I’m…” A stiff?
God, was there a politically correct word for the dead? he wondered. Or was it a case of, if you’d bit the big one, you didn’t have to worry about politics?
“Yup, he’s yours. Wherever you are, he’ll be.”
This was a momentous relief for some reason.
“So you want these threads?”
Jim looked at what was in Eddie’s arms and then down at himself. His body seemed the same, big and muscular and solid. Eyes, nose and ears seemed to function just fine.
How the hell was this going to work?
“There’ll be a better time and place to explain shit,” Eddie said, holding out the clothes.
“No doubt.” Jim took the jeans and the AC/DC T-shirt and the leather jacket. The boots were shitkickers. Socks were thick and white. And everything fit.
As he dressed, he kept glancing back at Adrian every now and again.
“Is he going to be all right?” Jim asked quietly.
“In a couple of days.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Yup. Don’t ask him about it.”
“Roger that.” After he did up the buckles on the boots, Jim pulled the jacket on over his shoulders. “Listen, how are we going to explain that I’m back from the dead? I mean, there’s going to be a body missing—”
“No, there won’t.” Eddie pointed to the table Jim had been on and…holy shit. It was his body. Lying there like a slab of beef, with gray skin and a bullet hole right in the center of the chest.
“Your probationary period is over,” Eddie said as he tugged the sheet in place over the face. “There’s no going back now.”
Jim stared down at the peaks and valleys that contoured the shroud and decided he was really glad his mother wasn’t alive to “mourn” him. Made shit much easier.
And now Matthias was off his back.
This made him smile briefly. “There are advantages to being dead and gone, aren’t there.”
“Sometimes, sometimes not. It just is what it is. Come on, let’s blow this place.”
Still staring down at his corpse, he said, “I’m going to go up to Boston for a little while. Not sure how long. The boys upstairs were cool with it.”
“And we’re going with you. Teams stick together.”
“Even if it’s not your fight?”
“Yup.”
The idea of having his own backup was attractive. Three could definitely cover more ground than one, and God only knew how long it was going to take to find Matthias’s target.
“Okay, cool.”
At that moment, two white coats came in, both with coffee mugs in their hands and mouths that were flapping. Jim got ready to bolt behind something, anything—and then realized that whereas he could see the pair, and smell what they were drinking, and hear their Crocs across the tile floor, they were utterly unaware that there were three other people in the room with them.
Or not people, he supposed.
“You want to do the paperwork on that one?” the guy on the right said, nodding to Jim’
s body.
“Yup. And I have a name to call if no one claims him. It’s…Vincent diPietro.”
“Hey, he built my house.”
“Oh?” The two put their mugs down on a desk and picked up clipboards with forms on them.
“Yeah, me and my wife are in that subdivision down by the river.” The man walked over, lifted the sheet up off Jim’s feet, and read the tag tied to his big toe.
“Must be nice.”
“It is.” He started to fill out the squares one by one. “But it was expensive. I’ll be lucky if I can retire at the age of eighty.”
Jim took a moment to say good-bye to himself—which was fucking weird, but also a relief: He’d been looking for a fresh start when he’d come to Caldwell, and man, had he gotten one. Everything was different now—who he was, what he was doing, who he was working for.
It was as if he had been reborn and the world was fresh once more.
As Jim left the morgue with his wingmen, he was curiously uplifted…and totally ready to fight again. And he had a feeling that for the next couple of years, Bring it on, bitch was going to be his goddamn theme song.
And then he remembered.
“I need to go back to that warehouse,” he told them out in the hall. “Now. I want the body of that girl.”
Adrian’s voice was little but a rasp. “It’s gone. All of what was in there is gone.”
Jim stopped in the middle of the corridor. As an orderly pushing a cartload full of sheets went through the three of them, literally, Jim felt nothing more than a shiver in his body—and maybe he would have done a hey-check-this-shit-out under different circumstances, but he was instantly obsessed and cared only about one thing.
“Where did Devina take her?” he demanded.
Adrian just shrugged, his eyes still locked on the floor, his piercings glowing darkly in the corridor’s fluorescent lighting. “Wherever she wants. When I woke up on the floor in the middle of that place, it was empty.”
“How’d she move the shit so fast? There was a lot of it.”
“She has help. The kind that she can mobilize quick enough. I was chained or I would have—” The guy stopped himself. “It took ’em about two hours, I think. Maybe longer. I was kind of in and out at that point.”
“And they removed the girl’s body?”
Adrian nodded his head. “For disposal.”
“How do they get rid of it?”
The angel started walking again, like he was finished with the conversating business for a while. “Same way anybody ditches one. They’ll cut it up in pieces and bury it.”
As Jim followed, the need for vengeance choked him up and his focus sharpened to the point of pain. He was going to need to find out more about the girl, her family, where her body ended up. And sooner or later he was going to take that innocent’s death right out of Devina’s hide.
Oh, yeah, things were gonna get personal, all right.
Real, bloody and personal.
Jim had a job to do.
Read on for a sneak peek of
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This was not his house.
As the taxi pulled over in front of a ranch in a modest neighborhood, Matthias knew he didn’t live under its roof. Hadn’t. Wouldn’t.
“You gettin’ out or not?”
Matthias met the driver’s eyes in the rearview. “Gimme a minute.”
“Meter’s running.”
Nodding, he got out and relied on his cane as he went up the front walk, swinging his bad leg in a wide circle so he didn’t have to bend his knee. Things were hardly Home Sweet Home: There was a branch down in the scrubby hedge that ran under the bay window. The lawn was scruffy. Weeds had sprouted in the gutters, reaching for the sun so high above.
The front door was locked, so he cupped his hands and looked into the windows on either side. Dust bunnies. Mismatched furniture. Sagging drapes.
There was a cheapo tin mailbox screwed into the bricks, and he opened the top. Circulars. A coupon book addressed to “Occupant.” No bills, credit card applications, letters. The only other piece of mail was an AARP magazine that had the same name as that of the driver’s license he’d been given.
Matthias rolled the mag up, shoved it into his windbreaker, and headed back to the cab. Not only was this not his residence, nobody lived here. Best guess was that the person had died within, say, four to six weeks—long enough so that the family had cleaned up the accounts payable issues, but before they emptied the place out to put it on the market.
Getting into the cab, he stared straight ahead.
“Where to now?”
With a groan, Matthias shifted over and got out his wallet. Sliding Mels Carmichael’s business card free, he was struck by an overriding conviction that he shouldn’t involve the woman.
Too dangerous.
“What’ll it be, pal?”
But shit, he had to start somewhere. And his brain was like an Internet connection gone bad.
“Trade Street,” he gritted.
As they headed for the downtown area and got caught in a net of traffic, he stared into the other cars and saw people drinking coffee, talking to passengers, stopping at red lights, going on green. Totally foreign to him, he thought. The kind of life where you nine-to-five’d your way into a grave at the age of seventy-two was not how he’d lived.
So what was, he asked his dumb-ass gray matter. What the fuck was?
All he got back was a headache while he strained for an answer.
As the Caldwell Courier Journal facility came into view, he took out one of the ten twenties in the wallet. “Keep the change.”
The cabdriver seemed more than happy to get rid of him.
Taking up res on the periphery of the front doors, Matthias loitered in the sunshine, being careful not to meet any stares—and there were a lot of them: For some reason, he tended to attract attention, usually from women—then again, the Florence Nightingale stuff was something the fairer sex was known for, and he did have scars on his face.
Ooooooh, romantic.
Eventually, he took cover across the street at the bus stop, parking it on the hard plastic bench and breathing in the secondhand smoke from people impatient for their public trans to arrive. The waiting didn’t bother him. It was as if he were used to lurking, and to pass the time he played a game, memorizing the faces of the people who came and went out of the CCJ offices.
He was extremely good at it. One look was all it took, and he had the person in his database.
At least his short-term memory was working—
The double doors pushed wide, and there she was.
Matthias sat up straighter as the sunlight hit her hair and all kinds of copper showed. Mels Carmichael, associate reporter, was with a heavyset guy who had to hitch his khakis up higher around his hips before they hit the steps. The two appeared to be arguing back and forth about something in the way friends did, and when Mels smiled, it appeared as if she had won whatever debate—
Like she knew he was watching, she glanced across the street, and stopped dead. Touching her buddy on the sleeve, she said something, and then parted ways with the man, cutting through the traffic, coming over.
Matthias plugged his cane into the pavement, and tugged his rags into place as he stood. He had no idea why he wanted to look better for her, but he did—then again, hard to look worse. His clothes weren’t his, his cologne was Eau d’Hospital Soap, and he’d washed his hair with the antibacterial stuff because that was all he’d had.
Naturally, his bad eye, that ugly, ruined thing, was what she looked at first. How could she not?
“Hi,” she said.
Man, she loo
ked great in her normal everyday clothes, those slacks and that wool jacket and the cream scarf she wore loose around her neck looking runway fine, as far as he was concerned.
Still no wedding ring.
Good, he thought for no apparent reason.
Shifting his gaze to the right, so maybe his defect wouldn’t be so obvious, he returned the “Hi.”
Well, shit, now what. “I’m not stalking you, I swear.” Liar. “And I would have called, but I’ve got no phone.”
“It’s okay. Do you need something? The police called me this morning with a follow-up, and I think they were still planning on speaking with you?”
“Yeah.” He let that one stand where it was. “Listen, I . . .”
The fact that he was leaving a sentence hanging seemed very unnatural, but his brain just wasn’t producing.
“Let’s sit down,” she said, gesturing to the seat. “I can’t believe they let you out.”
At that moment, a bus showed up, rumbling to a halt and blocking the sun, its hot diesel breath making him cough. As the pair of them settled on the bench, they kept quiet while the kibitzers filed on their ride.
When the bus kept going, the sunlight reappeared, bathing her in a yellow light.
For some stupid reason, his eyes started blinking hard.
“What can I do for you?” she asked softly. “Are you in pain?”
Yes. But it wasn’t physical. And it got worse whenever he looked at her. “How do you know I need help?”
“I’m guessing your memory didn’t magically come back.”
“No, it hasn’t. But that’s not your fault.”
“Well, I hit you. So I owe you.”
He made a motion to his lower body. “I was like this before.”
“Can you remember anything? Prior to the accident, I mean.” As he shook his head, she murmured, “A lot of servicemen have come back in your condition.”
Ah . . . as in Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, he thought. And part of that fit. The government . . . yes, he’d had something to do with the Department of Defense, or national security . . . or . . .
But he wasn’t a Wounded Warrior. Because he hadn’t been a hero.
