“None were recovered.”
“Interesting. Thanks, Paul.” I waved him off, and he went back to taking pictures. “The other bodies were all fully clothed,” I said to Flynn.
“You think this woman is special somehow?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. If this is Orobas working through an intermediary, he could be doing this just to fuck with me, to throw me off the scent. If the minion is going off the reservation, then she might be important. Who is she?”
Flynn looked at me, and I would have felt the sarcasm even if we weren’t tied together mentally. “I don’t know yet, Harker. Let me whip out my cell phone and run her through the instant worldwide facial recognition program that all cops have in their back pockets, just like they do on TV. I have no goddamn idea who she is. There’s no ID, and it’ll take hours to run her prints. And if she’s not in the system, we have to go wider. It could be days before we get a result. We’ll have a better chance just sitting at the station waiting for someone to come in and fill out a missing person’s report.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said. “I’d alert all the departments in nearby counties to the murder and make sure they know you want to be notified of any new missing adult female reports immediately.”
“You think? Gee, Mr. Harker, is there anything else you think I should do in my murder investigation? The one I called you in on?” Some of the old fire was back in Becks’ eyes, and she was obviously flashing back to the time when she didn’t like me very much. Okay, not at all. And it wasn’t really that long ago, either.
“Sorry.” And I was, really. “I didn’t mean to step on your dick.”
She laughed at that. “You asshole. If I couldn’t feel your emotions and know you were sincere, I’d think you were trying to make me laugh just so I wouldn’t be as pissed at you anymore.”
“I can be sincere and still want you to not be so pissed at me, can’t I?”
She laughed again, then turned serious. “Have you looked at her yet?”
“Yeah, I’m looking at her right now.”
“No, asshat. I mean looked at her.”
“Oh. Yeah, not yet. Hang on.” I closed my eyes and focused my energy. When I opened my eyes again, my Sight was overlaid on the image of the mundane world. People glowed with their personal auras, Flynn with the gold and blue mix that I had learned to associate with guardians or protectors. Paul, the crime scene guy, was surrounded by a light green aura, of a type that I usually saw with scientists or researchers. Most of the cops were surrounded by blue with varying levels of gold, but one working the perimeter had a cold blue light shining from within him, shot through with grey and black. He was dangerous, the kind of guy who shot first and kept a cheap pistol in his glove compartment to throw down beside the body later. They were rare, particularly in the Charlotte PD, but I tried to keep an eye on them whenever I saw them.
I turned my attention to the body and took a step back. The ethereal golden wings I expected to see in the woman’s aura were there, but so was something else. I stared at her long enough for Flynn to notice something was wrong and touch my shoulder. I gave a violent shake and snapped my vision back to the “normal” world.
“What was it?” she asked.
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t speak yet. I stared off into space, still processing what I’d seen.
“Harker.” Flynn shook me this time, and I focused on her at last. “What did you see?”
“Let’s go get some coffee,” I said, then turned and walked out of the tent. I had to put some distance between me and the dead woman in the parking lot before I threw up or destroyed something. I walked into a CupABucks coffee shop and cut in front of a soccer mom hemming and hawing over her latte choices.
“Hey!” the blonde woman in yoga pants squeaked.
I turned to her and held up my badge. “Homeland security, ma’am. We’re investigating a possible terrorist attack in this parking lot. Now if your goddamn coffee is more important than the safety of every single American man, woman, or child, then you feel free to stand here with your thumb up your twat debating choices when we all know you’re just fucking around until the National Drink of the White Girl, the Pumpkin Spice Latte, comes back in style. So go do some crunches and shut the fuck up or I’ll ship your husband off to Gitmo.”
I turned back to the stunned clerk, who probably called himself a barista, but was really a pimply-faced kid working his way through his first year of college. “Give me two large black coffees, no bullshit.”
“Excuse me?” The kid, Bruce, if I was to believe his nametag, looked honestly confused.
I leaned forward. “Bruce, right?” He nodded. “Good. Let me be clear, Bruce. I need two cups of coffee. The strongest, blackest shit you can find. Blacker than my shriveled little heart. Blacker than the girl you picked up from your economics class last week. Blacker than…fuck it, I’m out of metaphors. Just take two of the biggest cups you have, fill them full of the strongest coffee you have, and fucking sell them to me. No lattes, no cappuccinos, no foam, no whip, no bullshit. Just give me a couple of goddamn coffees. You with me?”
“Yes, sir.” A terrified Bruce turned away and started fixing my coffee.
I felt a tug on my sleeve. I turned around, and Soccer Mom had her pepper spray out and pointed at my face. In the other hand, she held a cell phone.
“I’m calling the cops. If you move, I’ll spray your ass into oblivion.”
I smiled at her. She turned pale at my smile, which was the intended result. I whispered “reversari” under my breath and released my will. The top of her sprayer glowed for an instant, then everything went back to normal. Except that, for the next three minutes, her pepper spray worked backwards. I snatched her cell phone with my right hand, then held it up in front of her face. A little squeeze, and the aluminum body crumpled, the screen shattered to dust, and the circuit board experienced what I believe the experts refer to as a “catastrophic failure.” I dropped the devastated scraps of phone to the floor and just kept on smiling.
“Go for it,” I said in my coldest “yes, I eat babies raw” voice. I first used that tone on a mugger in London around 1919, not long after my father died. I was walking along and he stepped out of the shadows with a knife. I used that exact inflection on the mugger, and he ran screaming back into the shadows. Shortly after that, rumors surfaced of a return of Jack the Ripper, claiming that the Ripper attacked an independent businessman who managed to escape with his life. Soccer Mom didn’t assume I was the Ripper, at least I didn’t think so, but she did back away until she was out of arm’s reach then turned and bolted for the door.
She ran right into Becks, who had to talk to the other cops on the scene before following me. The tiny tornado in stretchy pants and a sports bra almost bowled Flynn over as she bolted, but Rebecca regained her footing just in time. Flynn walked over to the counter just as Bruce put two big-ass cups of coffee on the counter. I dropped a twenty in the tip jar and handed Flynn her coffee.
I led her to a corner of the shop where I had a clear line of sight on the entrance and everyone in the room. We sat down, and Becks leaned in to me. “Okay, Harker. Spill it.”
I took a deep breath. “She was a Nephilim, but that’s no surprise.”
“Yeah, we expected that.”
“But I didn’t expect a personal message on the body,” I said.
“What?” Flynn exclaimed, then lowered her voice and leaned in again. “What are you talking about?”
“The killer didn’t just leave my name spelled out in her guts, although that was a nice touch.”
“A nice touch? Are you fucking high?”
“God, I wish,” I replied honestly. “Yeah, it made sure that I would find out about this killing even if you weren’t involved with the case. It was effective. And so was the other message.” I took a big sip of coffee, stalling.
“What was the other message.”
“It was twofold. First was the message itself, which was wr
itten on her torso. It says, ‘I’m coming for you.’”
“That’s direct enough,” Flynn said.
“Yeah, but that’s not the part that worries me.”
“Go on.”
“It’s what he wrote it in. He used her soul, Becks.”
“I don’t understand. How can you use a soul to write a message?”
“A soul is a person’s essence. It’s everything that makes them who they are, and when you die, it either goes to Heaven or Hell. In some rare cases, it’s left to walk the earth. That’s how we get ghosts.”
“Okay, that makes sense so far. What about the writing?”
“In the Otherworld, the part of the universe that I peek into when I look at things with my Sight, souls are corporeal. They have mass and substance. Someone who knows how to step into that world can literally touch souls. This guy didn’t just touch her soul, he ripped it to shreds and painted her corpse with it.”
“So that means…”
“Yeah, that means she didn’t go to Heaven. She didn’t go to Hell. She isn’t a ghost. When she died, instead of following the natural order of things, she was torn apart at an almost elemental level. She was destroyed, Becks. Destroyed more completely than anything I’ve ever seen. And now the thing that did that is coming for me.”
“Fuck. I’d be scared, too.”
I shook my head and drank more coffee. “That’s not it. I’m not scared for me. I mean, seriously, I’ve seen the century flip twice. I know my warranty’s up, and whenever somebody or something punches my ticket, so be it. But there are people I give a shit about, and I don’t want them to get hurt. Luke can take care of himself, but…”
“If you say it, I might shoot you right here in the CupABucks,” Flynn warned.
I didn’t care. I said it anyway. “I want you to get off this case, Flynn. This one’s too much for you. Too much for any human.”
“Let me use small words and short sentences so you’ll understand me. Fuck. You.”
“Dammit, Becks, you don’t—”
“No, motherfucker, you don’t understand. I know you feel guilty because you didn’t save my dad. I get it. I feel shitty that my dad died when I was a little kid, too. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m a cop, Harker. I stand between the bad things in this world and the innocent people in it. That’s not just my job, it’s a goddamn calling. And I’m not going to stop doing my job because things get scary any more than you would.”
“But this thing is out of your league,” I protested.
“Yeah, well, it’s out of your league, too,” Flynn countered. “And you don’t see me asking you to sit on the sidelines, do you?”
I had to admit, she was right on all counts there. “No, you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. I’m always right. Look, Harker, I get it. It’s dangerous. It’s a big bad, and we have barely any chance of getting out of this alive. But that’s the fucking job, isn’t it? You said it yourself—there are things that go bump in the night. We’re the ones that bump back. So put on your fucking big boy pants and let’s find this thing. And when we do, we’ll bump it right back to the Hell it came from.”
I’m pretty sure that was the moment I realized I was in love with Rebecca Gail Flynn. Then everything got really fucked up.
Chapter 5
“I love you.”
“What?” Not exactly the reaction a man hopes for when he professes his love for someone. But I suppose a woman doesn’t usually think that a horrific demonic murder scene is the kind of thing that inspires professions of love, either.
“I said, I—”
“I heard you.” Becks stared at me. I didn’t look away. I looked into her brown eyes and let the walls inside me fall down. I let her feel everything I felt about her, everything I’d felt about her for years but kept bottled up and renamed and wrongly filed in the card catalog of my brain. I let it all out, let her feel the love, the joy, the abject fucking terror rolling through my every cell.
Then I felt our mental connection blink out, severed like it was cut with a machete. My eyes widened, and I stared at Flynn. “Becks…” I started, but she just stood up and stalked out of the café.
I followed her, easily keeping up with her fast walk, and grabbed her elbow. Not my best move.
She whirled around and drew her pistol in one smooth motion. She jammed the barrel of her Smith & Wesson under my chin and got almost nose-to-nose with me. “You listen to me, you sick son of a bitch. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but you come near me again and I swear to God I will blow your fucking brains out.”
“Rebecca…”
“No. You don’t get to talk now. I get to talk now, and you get to listen, or I’m going to ventilate the top of your goddamn head. I don’t care who your uncle is. I don’t care how old you are. I don’t care that you can throw magic around like we’re in a fucking Dungeons & Dragons game, you don’t get to fuck with me that way. You don’t get to tell me to back off on a case because you love me. What kind of candy-ass bullshit is that? You don’t love me. You barely know me. We’ve worked together for what, a year? A year and a half? Jesus fucking Christ, you think that gives you the right to—”
I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in my life. Some of them have gotten good people hurt, even killed. Many of them have caused immense property damage, and one was responsible for the extinction of an entire species of South American monkey. But I have never really expected to die from one of my bad decisions.
Until I kissed Becks right in the middle of her rant. That one I thought had a better than fifty-fifty shot of getting me killed on the spot. So I made sure it was worth every drop of blood that she was about to spill. I wrapped one arm around her waist, the other around the back of her head, and I crushed her to me. I planted my lips on hers in mid-sentence, cutting off her speech by putting my mouth on hers. I held her tight to me, tangled my fingers in her hair, and kissed her like there was no tomorrow. Because if she thought there was an ounce of deception in me right then, there wouldn’t be.
She struggled for a second, and I thought I was done. Then she relaxed into it and kissed me back like we were teenagers under the bleachers at a football game. She held me tight, and I poured everything I’d ever felt about Rebecca Gail Flynn into that kiss. After well over a minute, I pulled back. She looked at me, hair coming loose a little from her ponytail and her lipstick smeared, and holstered her pistol.
“So you’re not going to shoot me?” I asked.
“Not right this second.” Then she hauled off and slapped the fucking taste out of my mouth. She swung from the heels and laid an open-handed slap on my face that spun my head around and made my eyes water. Not to mention made my lip bleed.
I wiped the blood off my lip with the back of my hand. “I suppose I deserve that?”
“You suppose? I could charge you with assault, you dick. Contrary to what you’ve seen in shitty Nicholas Sparks movies, kissing a woman is not an acceptable method to get her to stop yelling at you.”
“Apparently not, since you’re still yelling at me. But you did put your gun away, so I’ll call that a win.”
“Yeah, take ‘em where you can get ‘em, Harker, because you’re not going to get many in the ‘W’ column with me around.”
“So that means you’re planning on sticking around?”
“Yeah, I’m not going anywhere.” She gave me a lopsided little smile, shook her hair loose, then pulled it back into a neat ponytail again.
“Now do you see why I don’t want you on this case?”
“Oh, I understood it before you owned up to loving me. Which was only a surprise because of the location. I mean, goddammit, Harker, you’ve been alive for over a hundred years. I thought you’d know something about romance by now.”
“I spent at least fifty of those years traipsing all over the world with my vampire uncle who traded his humanity for the power to avenge his wife’s murder. My views on romance might be a
little skewed.”
She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, that’s a valid point. But still, a CupABucks? Right beside a murder scene? You have the heart of a fucking poet.”
“I do, actually. It’s in a jar in my closet. He wrote a limerick in the 1930s that Luke didn’t approve of.” I held it for a moment, then gave her a grin. She laughed, and I felt the wall between us come down. I could feel her presence again, and it was like water in the desert. I didn’t know how much I missed that connection until it was gone. Shit, this whole love thing was going to make fighting big nasties really complicated.
“So…now what?” she asked.
“You mean about the case, or about us?”
“For now, let’s focus on now what about the case. At least while we’re less than a hundred yards away from a murdered woman. We should talk about us later.”
“Tonight? My place?”
“I’m good with that. I’ll bring sushi from that place on Sardis.”
“Deal. You know I love their firecracker rolls.”
“Now that dinner twelve hours from now is sorted, what about the woman with her guts strewn all over the parking lot?”
“Okay, fair enough. I’ve already spoken to Mort this morning, and he’s not being terribly forthcoming with the assistance, so probably not a ton of help coming there. How about you go back to the station and ride herd on Paul while I go talk to Renfield and maybe avail myself of his computer savvy while Uncle Luke sleeps.”
We turned to head back to our cars, and of course that’s when a pair of black Suburbans and a black Sprinter van pulled into the parking lot. The van backed up right to the side of the tent, and Agent John Smith hopped out of the passenger side of the lead Suburban, his coffee cup from the high-rent joint next to police HQ in one hand and his badge in the other.
Smith marched over to us. Smith marched everywhere, his military background evident in every step. Not to mention his close-cropped haircut. His steel-gray hair stuck up like bristles on a brush, and his neat goatee matched the silver atop his head. Smith walked right up to Becks, his stocky frame blocking our escape.
Heaven's Door (Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Book 6) Page 3
