I made a pouty face, and she laughed. “Okay, fine. I’ll sit here while you get cleaned up.”
“You just wanted to see me naked, Detective,” I said, standing up and peeling off the hospital gown.
“Not like that,” Flynn said with a wince at my destroyed body. The gown stuck to me in places and pulled off chunks of burned flesh. I didn’t mind since I had nice, new skin underneath it, and I took great glee in yanking off the bandages and the skin attached to them.
Then I hopped in the shower, and immediately almost went down. I caught myself with the grab bar and sat down on the fold-out seat. I typically shrug off the effects of drugs and alcohol quickly, but I expended a lot of energy fighting the elemental, then even more healing, so I was staying intoxicated a lot longer than normal.
I turned on the water to a medium warm and started scrubbing off my skin. I sloughed off an entire suit of charred and destroyed epidermis, then made another pass to make sure I got everything I could reach. “Hey, Becks?” I called.
“Yeah, Harker? You need me?”
“Yeah, actually, I do.”
“What’s up?”
“Umm…this is gonna sound like I’m putting the moves on you, and on any other day, I would be, but…there are some places I can’t reach.”
Her voice sounded amused. “So you want me to come in there and wash your back?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, opening the shower curtain. Rebecca Gail Flynn stood there, already naked with her hair tied back. Her clothes were folded in a neat pile in the far corner of the bathroom, and she looked at my fresh man-suit and smiled. “Nice. The hairless look kinda suits you, Harker. Definitely shows off some muscle definition.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking her up and down. “Looks good on you, too.”
She stepped into the shower and pulled the curtain behind her. I stood up, kicking the seat so it folded flat to the wall.
Flynn wrapped her arms around me and pressed her head into my chest. “I thought I was going to lose you.”
“I’m a lot harder to get rid of than that, Becks. You’re stuck with me, for a long time to come.”
“I can live with that,” she said, turning her face up to mine.
I bent down, kissed those lips I’d stared at for months, and we clung to each other under the pounding water. Eventually we got around to washing my back.
Chapter 9
At least Luke gave us a little alone time before he got impatient and knocked on the door. We were almost dressed, or at least Flynn was, since my clothes were still in a bag on the dresser.
“Yeah, Luke, what’s up?” I called through the door.
“Are you two quite finished?”
“Yeah, I suppose. I feel pretty clean.” I grinned at Becks, who was even prettier when she blushed.
“Good,” Luke responded through the door. “I’ve hypnotized three nurses into ignoring the sounds coming from the bathroom, and Detective Flynn’s phone has been ringing almost constantly. It’s almost as if you were in the middle of an important investigation.”
“You act like it’s the end of the world, Luke.”
“It may well be, Quincy.”
“Oh yeah. Good point.” I opened the door and walked out into the main room wearing a towel and a slight grin.
“You look better,” Luke said. “Refreshed.”
“Growing a brand-new skin will do that to you,” I replied, stepping into my underwear and jeans.
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Oh, leave him alone, Luke,” Flynn said, stepping out of the bathroom and sitting on the bed to put her shoes on. She picked up her phone. “It’s Smith, checking on you. I’ll text him.”
“Tell him I got burned to a crisp, but I’m all better now,” I said. I laced up my Docs and clipped the holster to my belt. I threw a light jacket on to hide my gun and looked over at Becks. “We ready to roll?”
“Where are we going? What’s our next move?”
“You’re going to call someone in the permits department and find out what eco-friendly bunch had a protest permit for today, then I’m going to go see how they’re connected to the murder of a bunch of half-angels, or if they’re part of some other angle Orobas is working.”
“And what am I doing in this plan?” Flynn asked.
“Making sure I don’t get burned up again?”
“That could be a full-time job, the way you handle investigations.”
“It’s kept me busy for the better part of a century,” Luke said. “Since you seem to be feeling better, I shall take my leave. I have a bit of blood to replenish, and not that many hours until sunrise to find a suitable donor. Then I shall have Renfield look into the reports your crime lab has logged and see if anything leaps out at him.”
“How is he going to get our crime lab reports?” Flynn asked.
“I think it is better for all involved if you know nothing about that,” Luke replied, then turned and moved quickly out of the room.
I chuckled a little. “He can’t help it. He hasn’t worn a cape in over eighty years, but he still kinda swoops when he walks.”
“Is Renfield hacking the police department computer system?” Flynn asked.
“I don’t think he’s currently hacking anything. By now, I think he’s got his backdoors built into anything we need access to.” Somehow, that didn’t seem to reassure her.
We walked out into the hall and turned toward the elevators. I froze.
“What’s wrong?” Flynn asked.
“The nurses aren’t going to let me leave. I need a disguise or something.” I started looking around for a lab coat or a baseball cap. That always worked on TV.
“You’re wearing a disguise, you big idiot,” Becks said with a smile.
“What are you talking about?”
“You look a little different from anything they saw in that hospital bed, remember? Hell, you look different from any time I’ve ever seen you, what with the whole bald look you’ve got going on.”
Oh yeah, new skin. I forgot about that. We walked past the nurses’ station like we were just ordinary visitors, turned into the lobby, and pushed the down button on the elevator. We rode in silence down to the basement parking lot, got in Flynn’s car, and pulled out onto the street.
“Where to, Harker?”
“Let’s start at the scene. There’s something I need to check on.”
Becks pointed to the car toward Freedom Park and flipped on her lights. Then she glanced sideways at me. “Are we going to talk about this?”
“What’s there to talk about?” I asked. “I told you I love you, and I’m guessing that you like me a little bit, too.”
“Just because I had sex in a hospital shower with you? Maybe that’s just something I’m into.” She didn’t look at me, but I could see a little smile.
“Oh, you were into it, alright. But don’t forget, Becks, I can feel what you feel. I try not to read your thoughts, but I can’t shut out strong emotions. Just like you can’t shut mine out. I know you can sense what I’m feeling for you, just like I sense all the confusion running around inside you. But I can feel what’s underneath all that confusion, too. And that’s love, or as close to it as I know anything about. So we love each other, and we can’t hide from each other, and we just had amazing sex in a hospital shower. So what else do we need to know?”
A wave of sadness and fear poured over me, and I looked over to see tears streaming down her face. “I need to know you’re not going to leave me. I need to know that you’re not going to get yourself killed fighting some goddamn demon, or monster, or fucking plant monster!” She pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned to me.
“Harker, you need to understand this. When my dad died, I was crushed. I was just a little girl, and my hero was gone. But I pulled my shit together because my mom needed me. She fell apart, crawled inside a bottle of Xanax, and never crawled back out. She drank and drugged he
rself to death before I graduated high school. I moved in with my boyfriend and his parents to finish out the year, then he got in a car wreck the week after graduation coming home from a party I didn’t go to. He wrapped his truck around a tree, and his parents couldn’t stand to look at me after that, so I moved out. I lived in my car for a couple months until I went to college and moved into the dorms. I didn’t have a real boyfriend after that. For fifteen years.
“So this is a little scary for me, Harker. I haven’t lived for a hundred years. I haven’t watched world wars and industrial revolutions. I’m just a normal girl who’s watched everyone she ever loved die, no matter how young and no matter how much I loved them. So this…thing we’re doing. This scares the fuck out of me. Not monsters, not demons, not even the fact that I just hung out with fucking Dracula. But you scare me, Quincy Harker. Because if you die, if you leave me, I don’t know if there’ll be enough left of me to put back together again.”
“Then I’ll just have to keep my century-long streak of staying alive in spite of myself, right?” I tried to lighten the mood, but she was having none of it. “Look, Becks, I know you’ve had it rough. I’ve been there, remember?”
“Yeah?” she said, letting a little bitter flavor creep into her voice. “Where were you when I was sleeping in my car?”
“Sitting in my own car fifty yards away pissing into a coffee cup keeping an eye on you,” I replied. Her eyes went wide, but I kept going. “You were safe, and it was warm. The only time you almost had trouble was one time a couple of MS-13 ‘bangers wandered by looking for trouble. They saw a little hot chick curled up in the hatchback of her Geo Metro and decided they should bash in the back window and have a little fun with her. I convinced them that was a bad idea.”
“I never knew.”
“You weren’t supposed to. Look, Becks, I know you’re scared. I am, too. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this whole sharing a mind thing, but it is the first time I’ve fallen for somebody this hard, this fast. And it almost killed me when I lost Anna. So I know what it’s like to lose your heart and soul. I can’t promise you I’m not going to be in danger, but I will promise you that I will never leave you.”
“That’s my guy, the herpes of relationships.” But she smiled when she said it, so I felt like my little pep talk had served some purpose.
“There aren’t even shots for me,” I quipped back. “Now let’s go to the park.”
Chapter 10
Freedom Park was lit up like Christmas when we pulled into the parking lot. Firefighters still stalked hot spots and sprayed water once in a while on a smoldering chunk of elemental, and cop cars stood sentry, their blue lights strobing through the normally quiet neighborhoods around the park. We walked through a crowd of onlookers as Flynn badged us under the cordon of crime scene tape. We walked straight to the center of the activity, a cluster of cops in cheap suits standing together near where I’d knocked off the plant monster.
“Hey look, it’s Mulder and Scully,” a fat detective I recognized as Emrack called out as we approached.
“What happened to your hair, Harker?” another detective, whose name I didn’t know, jeered.
“I got the shampoo and your wife’s Nair confused when I took a shower this morning. By the way, that’s a cute birthmark on her butt,” I shot back. He took a step in my direction, but Emrack put a hand on his chest, holding him in place.
“Don’t let those guys bother you,” Flynn whispered.
“It’s been a long time since a fat fuckwit like Emrack has gotten to me,” I said. I knelt by the ashes of the tree-critter, bringing handfuls of the ash to my nose and sniffing deeply. I put my nose to the ground and breathed deep. “There’s something here, but I can’t remember where I’ve smelled it before.”
“Would you recognize it if you smelled it again?”
“I’m pretty sure, but it’s not a hundred percent,” I admitted. I opened my Sight and scanned the area for any hints of magical energy. There was still a little green energy in the remains of the creature, but that was to be expected. I looked around and finally spotted something out of place. Just a glimmer over a hill, but the same green energy pulsed in the distance.
I stood up. “Come with me, and cover me,” I said to Flynn.
“Cover you from what?”
“Anything that tries to kill me,” I replied. I took off at a fast walk toward the glow, ignoring sidewalks, police tape, and anything that wasn’t the pulsing verdant light in front of me. I crested the hill and had to shield my eyes from the glare. What I thought was one source was actually a circle of seven individual green lights all coming together, weaving together to make one big undulating mass of energy. I dropped to my belly at the top of the hill and motioned for Flynn to hit the deck with me.
“There’s something down there calling up a shit ton of the same magic that animated the elemental,” I whispered.
She got up on her elbows for a better look. “It looks like a bunch of hippies in a drum circle. Can’t you hear them?”
I dropped my Sight and listened. “Yeah, I hear them. They’re not very good. Enthusiastic, but not good.”
“But they’re calling magic with it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t take much if the area is predisposed to it, and there are a fuckton of ley lines running through this park. I can’t tell what they’re doing from here, but we need to stop them before they get ambitious and call up another monster. I’d really rather not burn myself half to death twice in one day. Hang back and shoot anybody that looks more threatening than me.”
I stood up and walked over the hill. The drummers ignored me, and I pretended not to notice the unmistakable smell of marijuana floating my way. Great, because stoned wizards make the best decisions. Still twenty yards or more from the circle, I held my right hand out to my side, palm up, and whispered, “Flambé.”
A ball of fire appeared floating above my hand, and I snapped my wrist forward. The fireball shot toward the stoner magicians and exploded into sparks right in the center of their circle. The drumming stopped instantly, all but one scrawny white kid with dreadlocks and no shirt, who was wailing away on a djembe with his eyes closed. He was lost in the music, his kokopelli tattoo glistening with sweat, and he pounded on the drum.
I muttered “infernum!” and summoned up another fireball. This one I flung right at the kid, and he jumped as the ball of magical fire hit him right in the drumhead and exploded with an impressive boom for a ball the size of a grapefruit.
He quickly switched from beating on the drum to beating out the sparks, then took the drum off his neck and shouted up at me. “Hey man, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I think I’m giving you stupid fucktards a taste of what I went through earlier today, thanks to you and your fucking hippie bullshit magic,” I yelled back, even though I was only five yards or so away from him now.
Shirtless Hippie came at me, flailing his fists before he ever got going. He looked like a psychotic Don Quixote who thought he was both knight and windmill, his skinny arms waving everywhere as he ran at me. I stood right in front of him and kicked him in the gut when he got close enough. It was more like I just held my foot up and let him run onto it, but it had the same effect. He went down like a pile of smelly, hairy straws, and I stepped on him a little on my way to interrogate the rest of the circle of dumbasses.
“Who’s in charge here?” I asked when I got to the center of their circle. Against experienced magic-users, there’s no way I would ever put myself in the middle of a circle, but these guys couldn’t lock me down in Alcatraz, much less a half-invoked summoning circle.
“Dude, nobody’s in charge, man. That’s like a totally patriarchal monotheistic way of looking at the world, and we aren’t about that, man.” The idiot in front of me was wearing the official uniform of the southern stoner. He had on a tie-dyed music festival t-shirt, ripped khaki shorts one size too big held up with a braided belt, and flip-flops
that cost more than my jeans. I did the only logical thing anyone could do when confronted with such obvious poseur douchebaggery—I slapped the piss out of him.
I didn’t hit him because that really might have killed him. I drew back my right hand and laid an open-handed slap across his face that spun him around and sat him down on the grass holding his jaw. His eyes were a little crossed, and there were four lines on his face where my fingers struck.
“You don’t even know what half those words mean, you ignorant little shit. Now keep your goddamned mouth shut unless you’ve got something worthwhile to say.” I looked up at the rest of the circle of morons. “Now who had the bright idea to summon a plant elemental and have it go on a rampage through the park? Because if that’s how you’re protesting, I think you need to go back to hippie school.”
“I brought the spell. I bought it from some guy I met at a concert,” a waif girl with long honey-blonde hair in pigtails said. Good move, she probably figured I was less likely to punch her. She was mostly right. I was less likely to punch a girl, but I would if I needed to.
“So are you evil or stupid?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes at me, a look that probably intimidated men that wanted to sleep with her. But since I had recently consummated a relationship with a woman who didn’t use crystals for deodorant or smell like patchouli, I had a better standing offer. That, and I’m notoriously hard to intimidate. Something about my upbringing, probably.
“Answer the question, or I slap Dipshit again,” I said, raising my hand to the cowering idiot on the ground. I didn’t take my eyes off the girl, but directed my next remark to the boy directly behind me. “And if you even think of pulling that knife on me, I will take it away from you and break both your arms. Do you have anyone willing to wipe your ass for you for the next six weeks? Because that’s the shit you need to think about right now.”
I heard the him thump back down on the grass and looked back at the girl. “Well, which is it? Evil? Or stupid?”
Heaven's Door (Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Book 6) Page 6
