by Stacy Gail
“Wow, that sounds permanent.”
Kyle glanced at him. “You sound surprised.”
“To be honest, you just never struck me as the permanent type. Are you guys going to get married?”
“That’s...premature.” Especially since she was still unable to say the word Nephilim without looking like it left a bad taste in her mouth. “I’m hoping once we put all this demon crap behind us, we can go back to...”
“Back to what?”
“I was going to say normal.” His interest veered back to Nikita when he heard the low, sleepy hum of her laugh. “Do you think we can go back to normal after this?”
“I suppose I could lie to you and tell you yes, that nothing’s going to be different between you now that she knows you’re not as human as she always assumed you were. But lies are the last thing you need.”
Kyle grimaced. He’d figured as much. “Yeah. Not to mention she’s pretty much had it with all things that are less than true. Like me, for instance.”
“Ouch.”
“I can’t focus on that now, though. What matters is keeping her on the sidelines while we hunt Dantalion. She might not look it, but Nikita’s as reckless as they come, and if she has an ax to grind she goes off the rails. Dantalion attacked not just her, but the sacred memory of her mother. When she works her way through the worst of the shock that demons and Nephilim exist, she’ll want to bring down the heat of a thousand burning suns onto Dantalion’s head, preferably all by her lonesome.”
“You’ve explained that she can’t go near him? That, like every other normal human on the planet, she’d be nothing more than an energy source to him?”
“I explained. But just in case it didn’t sink in I kept her up all night with...” He paused, then for once listened to the cautionary voice in his head. “I kept her up all night, so I’m hoping she sleeps while we do what we have to.”
Menlo stared at him for so long Kyle began to wonder if the other man was doing a detailed read-through of his soul. “You’re the descendant of Barakiel, so I always figured you’d have some fried circuits going on, but...seriously, you really think a lame ploy like that’s going to do anything other than land you in the doghouse?”
“I’m not going to lose her to her own crazy antics as we track this demon down. If she’s not in play, the chances of losing her diminish.”
“So...you’re scared you’re going to lose her.”
Something cold gripped Kyle’s insides just to hear it spoken aloud. “I will not lose her to Dantalion.”
“That’s not what I meant. She found out about your Nephilim side, and suddenly you go into frantic, screw-her-brains-out mode in the hope of wooing her in the most basic way there is. Is that how the order of events went?”
“No. Maybe.” He outright refused to say yes. “Damn it, it sounds bad when you say it like that.”
“What it sounds like is reality, hiding behind whatever bullshit you’re trying to believe. The fact is, man, you’re scared right out of your shorts she’s going to vanish on you now that she knows what you are.”
Kyle’s mouth flattened while something gnawed away at the edge of his smarting conscience. Something that felt uncomfortably like...the truth. “This is about Dantalion, not me. Yes, I love Nikita, but I’m not about to cling to someone who doesn’t want to be in my life. My strung-out pops taught me a hard truth—it’s pointless to hold on to people you love if they don’t love you back. The one thing I’m not, is needy.”
“In any event, I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about.” Menlo waved this away, clearly not believing a word he said. The asshole. “The lady’s here with you now. If she was going to disappear on you, she would have done it already, so relax. She’s still yours.”
Kyle didn’t reply, but the frigid grip on his insides worsened. Because he knew the only reason Nikita was still around was that he’d made damn sure she hadn’t had an opportunity to get away. If he had, she no doubt would have run for the horizon and never looked back.
* * *
With her feet no longer a throbbing mess now that they’d been rewrapped and over-the-counter painkillers had been provided, Nikita’s mood was bouncing back in a big way. The man who’d tended to her feet, Gideon, was a doctor with a great bedside manner, and he had her talking before she even realized what she was doing. When she found herself confessing the last twenty-four hours felt like a dream that might possibly be a nightmare, his answering chuckle was wry.
“Yeah, welcome to the club. But don’t worry—it’s definitely not a nightmare, except for Dantalion. Ever since Sara lowered her defenses and trusted me enough to share her greatest secret, life with her has been my personal definition of a dream come true.”
That was peachy for Sara and Gideon, but her situation with Kyle was about as different as night was from day. While there was obviously a foundation of trust between the good doctor and his Seraph-descendant wife, Kyle hadn’t told her a damn thing, not even when Dantalion had shown up wearing her mother’s face. If she hadn’t overheard him talking about the reality of his existence, she had a feeling he never would have told her the truth, even though she’d been attacked. Even though that attack had made her suffer in a way she couldn’t forget.
That hurt. No matter how hard she tried to not care, it hurt her all the way to the core of her soul.
Half an hour after they arrived, a sleepy-eyed and yawning couple wandered into the main room that appeared to be the de facto headquarters for the ragtag group. Even if Nikita hadn’t known that Zeke, an angel of death descendant, was part of the Nephilim, she still would have been able to spot him a mile away. With broad shoulders almost as large as Nate’s and as tall as Kyle, he had human-angel hybrid written all over him, whereas his wife Kendall was a petite auburn-haired woman as pale as the moon and in possession of a thousand-watt smile. They were obviously still on California time and struggling to get their eyes open, but as Kendall grabbed a cup of coffee and settled under a laptop, she came to life before Nikita’s eyes.
“I’ve got an update on Paul Hardy’s death.” Kendall shot a glance of pure mischief at Macbeth from across the room. “Have you gotten it yet, slowpoke?”
“Arghh, I was just about to share with the rest of the class, nosy.”
“Cute,” Nikita murmured to Kyle as he came to perch on the arm of her chair. “I take it there’s a friendly rivalry going on here?”
“Friendly, or not-so-friendly, depending on how you look at it. They’d trample all over each other to get the latest scoop. Separately Kendall and Macbeth are great at what they do. Together, they’re invincible.”
“Aw, you give me the warm fuzzies when you appreciate us like that, Kyle.” Kendall toasted him with her coffee while keeping her eyes trained on her computer screen. “Coroner’s report is official—death by strangulation. But the deceased also had a pharmacy’s worth of prescription drugs in his system. If he hadn’t put a rope around his neck, the drugs would have done him in.”
“I find it amazing Dantalion allowed his proxy to take his own life.” Sara, seated on a footrest next to her husband, shook her head hard enough to make her high ebony ponytail swing. “We know Dantalion requires a human to feed off of—not just for negative energy, but also to maintain a consistent guise. Wearing the face of a forceful politician with a televangelical fan base numbering in the tens of thousands would have been the perfect camouflage for him. But now that Paul is dead, the source of Floyd’s image—an image pulled directly from his son—is lost. Didn’t that hell spawn see the idea of suicide appear in his proxy’s mind?”
“That makes me wonder if Nikita’s idea isn’t on the money,” Kyle said, frowning. “She asked if it were possible for Dantalion to juggle two proxies at once—Paul and Bambi both. Is that possible?”
The room went momentarily silent before
Macbeth starting feverishly typing. “I don’t think I’ve seen any historical precedent on that, but let me double-check just to be sure.”
“It’s an interesting idea, though.” Menlo tilted his head as if to view the possibility from another angle. “Damn, that’s a very interesting idea. Why didn’t we come up with that?”
“Let’s think it through before jumping the gun.” Nate held up his hand like he was in class. “Why would he go for two proxies, when using Paul Hardy was such an obviously perfect fit for the likes of a power-hungry demon? Like Sara said, Dantalion was sitting pretty while wearing the guise of Senator Hardy.”
Zeke shook his head. “In the long run, piddling little human politics would mean nothing to a Great Duke of hell. It might have been a great position to be in while semi-manifested. But remember Dantalion’s long-term goal is to become fully manifested and in control of every human on the planet. Who cares what appearance he adopts, should he ever attain that?”
“He won’t.” Sara’s jaw knotted, and Nikita could have sworn the temperature inched up a few degrees. “Until a few minutes ago, I was thinking it was a blessing in disguise that Paul was dead. After all, it seems to take Dantalion time to find someone willing to sell their soul and become his proxy, so I was hoping we had some breathing space to nail him down before the tenth and final murder of an innocent. But if he’s got a second, less obvious proxy in play, that might not be the case.”
“We’re taught in journalism that assumptions are dangerous, so I’m personally not yet ready to think Bambi Dominguez is Dantalion’s second proxy.” Kendall glanced up from her screen. “The only thing I’m willing to guess about your missing bail jumper—if she isn’t dead—is that she’s probably one thin hair away from total insanity. She might already be there, since losing one’s mind seems to be the main side effect of being BFFs with this Great Duke of hell.”
As everyone sifted through the information Macbeth and Kendall culled from the internet, Nikita’s brain snagged on the observation Sara had made. Even if this telepathic monster was currently weaker than water, surely he would have been able to sense Paul’s intentions. All too well she could remember how easily the demon had mimicked every detail about her mother’s appearance. With the exception of speaking Spanish, which no longer lived in her memory, Dantalion had drawn that image of her mother from the depths of her consciousness where all her hidden pain resided. And the way she’d been able to feel him slithering around in her head...
Nikita stifled a shiver, not wanting to catch Kyle’s attention. It was hard to believe thoughts of suicide would ever go unnoticed by that demon, so maybe the drugs screwing up Paul’s brain masked his intention. Or maybe he was so messed up he took his kinky play too far...
A light went on. With barely a wince she pushed to her feet and moved to where Macbeth sat behind his wall of monitors. “Hi. Are you done with my phone, by any chance?”
“You mean the syncing and downloads? Yeah, I just finished networking everyone’s phone and downloaded a tracking app so we can keep track of each other. It’s still charging, though, and with the storm getting worse who knows how long we’re going to have cell signal out here.”
“I’d like it back, please.” She held out her hand and gave her best smile. “Thanks, Macbeth.”
He handed it over in a heartbeat. “Is everything okay?”
“Of course. Thanks again.” With another smile she headed for the nearest doorway, flicking through her contacts while her mind churned away.
“It’s a little early for phone calls, isn’t it?”
Her head snapped up to find Kyle standing in the open archway she’d been aiming for, arms crossed and looking like he’d been there for a while. That damned blurring speed. If he ever tried it around her again—and she saw it coming—she’d stick a foot right out in front of him and laugh when he went splat.
“This is private. Go away.”
“You’re up to something. I can see it in your eyes.”
For crying out loud. “I’m not up to anything, and you’re paranoid. I just had an idea I need to follow up on. It might be nothing.”
“Whatever you’re doing, we do it together.”
“Kyle—”
“You promised you wouldn’t leave me.”
“I never had the chance to promise you a thing.” When his dangerous expression became that of a man who had the end of his rope in sight, she put her free hand on his crossed arms before she thought to check the move. Pitiful, how she had no strength to tell this man no. “When I visited Paul Hardy, I noticed he had some marks around his neck. After spending only a few minutes in his company, I was convinced he was the kind of guy who had a taste for dangerous kink.”
“Autoerotic asphyxia?”
“Considering the marks I noted on his neck, I don’t know how auto his asphyxia interests were. I think he had others do it. And that made me think of...” She tapped the screen and showed him.
For a second he looked blank. “Lynette? The attendant at Lady Jayne’s?”
“Of course.” She couldn’t help but grace him with a pitying look. “And still, you can’t admit that I’m the best bounty hunter in Miami. Sad.”
“How about I admit I have no clue where you’re going with this?”
“Kendall’s right. We shouldn’t assume Bambi’s a proxy, because if she isn’t that could mean Dantalion has already left the area in search of another person who will sell their soul to him, while we sit here on our hands. So, I think I have an idea of how to learn just what exactly Bambi is to Dantalion. The only problem...if she is Dantalion’s proxy, she may have killed Paul. Conceivably, that could be the tenth and final death.”
Chapter Twenty
One conversation with a sleepy Lynette confirmed that the hands on her neck had belonged to Bambi, not Paul, and that was all it took to make the collective mood nosedive. Not even a group-effort breakfast of blueberry pancakes, center-cut bacon and enough syrup to float a fleet of tugboats was enough to lift their spirits. The weather seemed to reflect this. The outer bands of the storm, now officially named Oscar, darkened the skies while the lights and cell phone signal took turns going on and off. Outside the large bay window in the breakfast area, the wind whipped the palm trees around until they shook like pompoms at a pep rally.
There was nothing to cheer about as far as Nikita could see. Any minute now she and all the other normal humans on the face of the planet were going to slip into madness and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. Maybe if Kyle had told her about his secret life sooner... But that wasn’t fair. As much as she would have liked to believe otherwise, she couldn’t say she would have been clever enough to understand just how important Bambi’s disappearance was when she’d danced in Bambi’s place at The Toy Box.
The Toy Box. She couldn’t help but shake her head as she and Kyle cleared the table while Nate and Ella wrestled with the intricacies of an unfamiliar dishwasher. It seemed like the hunt for Man-Baby had happened in another life, to someone else. Everything was different now, especially her. In that other lifetime, she’d tried her damnedest to not be tied to anyone or anything. She did whatever she wanted, when she wanted. And she’d thought she’d been happy.
In some ways she had been. But as calm and safe as that existence had been, there wasn’t one day that stuck in her brain the way the memory of kissing Kyle for the first time did. It was almost as if every day prior to that kiss had been a vast emptiness of wasted time, because nothing significant had happened.
Kyle was significant. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but there was no doubt he was the biggest catalyst her life had experienced since she’d left Cuba.
“I’m still of the opinion that Paul’s death doesn’t count.” The man with the scarred face, Menlo, returned to the massive open-plan kitchen dominated by a granite-topped is
land, tucking his phone into his pocket as he went. “Dantalion would already have this world plunged into madness if he’d gained full strength. Hardy’s death was either an accident or suicide. Dantalion feeds on the act of a human killing in cold blood. If no evil intent was present in Paul’s demise, we still have one death to go.”
Macbeth, seated at the island, shook his head. “He’s way too close to completion for comfort. I wish we’d known what was really going on when Dantalion was in our neck of the woods. He racked up the biggest body count on our watch, and now he’s in the perfect position to mess up the world before the next Chapter in the Halo series has a chance to be released. Man, I was looking forward to getting that game.”
“We’re not dead yet.” Gideon gave the back of Macbeth’s head a big-brother-like smack. “Do me a favor and don’t push the human race into the grave while we’ve still got a pulse.”
“Gideon’s right,” Kyle said, placing the last of the glasses into the sink. “If Dantalion had what he needed to fully manifest, he’d have done it already.”
“After seeing Dantalion in action firsthand, I’d have to agree. He’s not the type who would wait to stake his claim on this world once he had full control.” Ella touched Nate’s back as he loaded the glasses into the dishwasher. “Have you been able to get anything?”
“Blue.” Leaning against the counter, Nate closed his eyes as if he could nod off right where he stood. “It’s the same thing I get every time I try to see where I need to look for Dantalion. I just get...blue.”
“Cheer up, Nate,” Macbeth said, though his dark tone sounded like he needed a good shot of his own advice. “No need to be blue.”
Nikita’s head snapped up at the worn-out—and familiar—pun. “What did you just say?”
Macbeth shot her a surprised glance. “Uh, blue. As in, no need to be. Nate’s getting visions of blue, so—”
