by Lizzy Ford
She waited for the bullet that would end her life. Her last thoughts were of the stones and how – ironically – they were probably safer with a bunch of thugs who had no idea what they were than they’d ever be with her, since she was being actively hunted.
Something hard smashed into the head of the man behind her. He and the firearm he held fell away.
“What the –” one of the others started. He scrambled forward. The sound of a fist hitting flesh, of two more blows, of kicks and an elbow to someone’s nose.
The distinct sounds played out on the opposite side of the car, whose presence blocked some of the energy. She couldn’t make out who was attacking her attackers, or who was winning.
Silence fell, except for the loud breathing of whoever was left standing.
Shanti rose. Warmth dripped from her nose to her lips. She touched her bloodied nose and then wiped it on her sleeve. Her midsection was burning from a punch, and one of her knees stung. It had absorbed her full weight when she was forced into an execution position. She’d be sore in a couple of hours and in need of an Epsom bath in the morning.
“You stole my fucking wallet,” Todd said and then spit what she guessed was blood. “You’re damn lucky I came back when I did.”
“I had it under control.”
She hadn’t. It was the closest she’d ever been to dying. She shook from exertion and fear. If Todd had been two seconds later, the stones would have fallen into the wrong hands. She would have left her fellow gatekeepers exposed and failed in her sacred duty to protect the gate to Hell.
Unsettled by her close call, Shanti tapped the area around her with her guide stick. She ignored the body of the man who wanted to shoot her and bent when she heard the thump of metal on her leather purse.
“Under control?” Todd retorted. “You’re only alive because I came back for my wallet! I couldn’t buy my energy drinks without it.”
“It’s in the car, asshole.” Hopefully, he didn’t notice the fear in her trembling voice. She’d been trained in martial arts and boxing but never had to put her knowledge and skills to use in real life. It was far more frightening than she had expected.
Shanti tapped the road. She found the curb and then the sidewalk. She began walking in the direction the stone pulled her.
“Wait,” Todd called reluctantly.
She ignored him.
“Wait!” he shouted.
She braced herself, preparing to fight him off, if he came at her. She was at a disadvantage facing five men, but she’d already proven to Todd what happened if he tried to take her one-on-one.
“You can’t be out here at night.”
“Oh, suddenly you care,” Shanti snapped. “This is your fault for driving us to the ghetto!”
“How the fuck do you know where you are? Are you even blind?”
She began walking again.
He sighed. “Just … get in the car.”
“Why?”
“I’m an asshole, but I’m not going to leave a blind girl in the ghetto.”
“Did you double check your Satanist handbook?” she returned. “I wouldn’t want you not to get into Hell.”
“You caught me off guard at the beach. It won’t happen again.”
Shanti snorted and shook her head before walking away once more.
Todd’s footsteps retreated. The car engine purred to life a moment later. The vehicle sidled up to the curb beside her and stopped. The passenger side door opened.
“You won’t make it two blocks,” Todd said, calmer.
Shanti hesitated. She didn’t look forward to another confrontation, not with her important mission and shaken nerves stemming from her first real fight.
“I wasn’t thinking when I stopped here,” he admitted.
“So you didn’t want me dead?” she challenged.
“You’re annoying as fuck, but I’d rather kill you myself. Fortunate for you, my boss wants you alive.”
He was honest. She had to give him that much.
“You’ll take me where I want to go?” she asked cautiously.
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” he snapped.
Once she reached her destination, she could handcuff him again and leave him wherever she had to. She had already taken him down once. Shanti compressed her guide stick and got back in the car. Closing the door, she assessed the interior for new scents.
“You stole one of their guns,” she said. “You plan to use it on me?”
“If I did, I would have already.”
As the car left the curb, she began to think Todd wasn’t the meathead she originally considered him to be. He hadn’t resorted to violence or threats with her. Judging by his size and how he moved, he was a thug, or enforcer, the kind of person sent on a mission when his bosses didn’t want survivors. He wasn’t an independent thinker, but he wasn’t a complete idiot, if he understood it was better to work with her than try to toss her into the trunk.
“You weren’t just surveilling me, were you?” she asked. “You’re a hitman.”
“When needed. I was sent to protect you from your own people.”
When we stop again, I’m outta here, she decided. The Satanist movement likely wasn’t going to let her go easily. She’d have to escape before Todd could contact his friends for support.
“That was the plan,” he added, frustration in his tone. “Your people are more convincing than I expected.”
“You’re working for them?” she asked, surprised.
“Oh, so you didn’t use your Sherlock senses to figure that part out?” he retorted.
“I read energy not your mind.” She sighed. “Do you know who I am?”
“Not really. Just some bitch I was told to pick up who has my people and yours worried.”
To her surprise, this statement read as true. “When you say my people, what do you mean?” she asked.
He was silent for a long moment, his energy agitated. “3G,” he replied. “Spirit guides who broke from their kind. They somehow knew I’d been assigned to find you and hired me before I left DC.”
“And you just agreed out of the kindness of your heart?”
“I agreed because they wired me fifty thousand dollars and promised me another fifty when I deliver you, dead or alive,” he snapped.
“You chose alive,” she said, amused. “Regretting that decision?”
“Every fucking second,” he admitted. “My people want you alive, and a hundred grand won’t pay off what I owe to shady people. I might be able to sell you off to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, I need you alive for that.”
“Good to know where I stand,” she stated. “As long as we go where I want first, I don’t care who you sell me to.”
“Where am I going?” he asked tersely.
“North.”
“North where? Interstate ninety five north or route fifty north?”
She hesitated. “Tell me when we reach one, and I’ll let you know.”
Discreetly, she reached into her purse and held the rock guiding her north. Of the four stones representing people, the dual stone, the one that left her skin crawling, was the one talking to her. It made more sense to find the other gatekeepers first. One of them could know what the dual stone meant and about the dark threat it radiated.
The dual stone, however, was insistent. For reasons she didn’t yet understand, she had to go where it bid her first.
Unable to identify which route they took, Shanti began to suspect she never should’ve accepted Todd’s offer to drive her north. She was confident she could subdue him and escape, unless he delivered her to his people or hers. She wasn’t going to take down a dozen Todds or a dozen guides.
She gripped her purse tight, senses alert for any change in Todd’s energy that might warn her in time for her to act.
Ten
Kaylee awoke feeling worse than when she lay down. She had failed to sleep off the sense of heaviness and
fatigue. How long would the side effects of being dead stick with her?
Their hiding place remained pitch black, and Eddy’s breathing was ragged. She groped around in the darkness until she found the candle and lighter and brought some light into their bleak circumstances. She crawled to the food and plucked out an MRE and a bottle of water. She set them beside Eddy before fetching her own.
Eddy stirred and lifted his head from the wall. He’d fallen asleep sitting up.
“You okay?” she asked, studying his pale features.
“Been better.” He smiled. “You?”
“Good. Anything I can do?”
“Nah.” He glanced down at his body. One of the bandages had bled through. With effort, Eddy went through the motions of changing it. “Have they left yet?”
“I hear sounds every once in a while,” she replied with a glance at the ceiling. “We’re safe, right?”
“Our only concern is running out of food and water,” he replied. “No one else can find this place.”
“Because you used magic to open the door.”
“I guess it looks that way,” he said. “I manipulated energy to hide the entrance. No one can find it.”
“Even Nathan?”
Eddy looked up at her. His hesitation was enough to tell her he didn’t really know. “I assume if he hasn’t found his way down here, he hasn’t or won’t.”
“He’s special, isn’t he?” she asked, puzzled. “He’s not a normal guide.”
“No, he’s not,” Eddy agreed. “He’s the most powerful guide there’s ever been.”
Kaylee didn’t fully understand what that meant, except that even the Satanist assassin across from her was unusually wary of Nathan.
“How long …” She drifted off, eyes returning to Eddy.
He had sagged. His chin rested against his chest.
How much blood had he lost? Too much for them to escape when 3G left? Definitely too much for him to protect her. She crossed their ten by ten cellar to his side and checked his bandages delicately, not wanting to disturb him when he needed the rest. The shoulder she’d helped pop into place was swollen and bruised. Blood had already seeped through the bandage he replaced on the worst of his wounds. He was pale, his breathing shallow, his skin clammy.
Worried, she returned to her side of the cellar. Her medical knowledge didn’t extend past basic first aid. She didn’t know how to help him or even if she could without real medical supplies. Kaylee pushed her food aside, no longer hungry when she considered what happened if she were truly on her own to face 3G and everyone else who wanted her dead.
Whether or not she should have, she liked him. Eddy made her feel a little less alone facing the mess she was involved in, and he’d been a buffer between her and the worst of it for several weeks.
She was also left with the frustration of having no control over where the river that was her life swept her. She wanted to take charge – but didn’t know where to begin.
Kaylee pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them, praying for Eddy to recover soon and wishing she could do more to help him along.
Unable to tell what time it was in the dark cellar, she fell into a restless doze and snapped awake a short time later, alerted by the sudden sense she wasn’t alone.
Nathan sat in front of Eddy, gently checking his bandages. “I’m not here to hurt you, Kaylee,” he said without turning to see her. “3G doesn’t know about this place.”
Kaylee froze, hating how she felt both relieved he had survived being shot and furious he’d found them.
Shadowman stirred deep within her.
“Eddy’s in bad shape,” Nathan said quietly.
Kaylee moved toward him, concerned gaze on Eddy. She ignored Nathan’s direct look, uncertain she could handle her inner turmoil when he was this close. Nathan’s familiar scent – spice, man, and sweat – left her insides doing somersaults. He smelled like home. He tasted like home. He held her like she was home.
He betrayed me like I was nothing.
Eddy didn’t awaken by their voices or their proximity.
“Can you help him?” she asked Nathan. “The way you healed my arm in the elevator.”
“Do you want him healed?”
Kaylee looked at the man Eddy claimed was her soul mate. “Of course I do.”
A flicker of something she couldn’t identify went through Nathan’s gaze. But she felt it, along with the familiar taut tension determined to compel them towards one another, whether or not they wanted to be together.
“Seriously?” she asked. “You’re screwing your ex, and you’re jealous?”
“You’re not?” he countered. “I can play this game better than you, babe. You think I don’t know what you feel whenever we meet? Half-fury, half-hunger and a whole lot of confusion?”
She stared at him, fighting to suppress the emotions he had already identified.
“Not to mention how much you’re hurting.” This was softer, spoken with his normal candidness.
“Fuck you, Nathan,” she whispered. “The difference between you and Eddy is Eddy has never pretended to be anything he wasn’t. And he definitely didn’t murder me or make me feel like just another case to be solved and thrown into a filing cabinet.”
“You’re right. I’m a dick.”
She waited for Nathan to say more, to retort with his normal arrogance or stinging wit.
Nathan shifted closer to Eddy. He placed one hand on the assassin’s chest and the other on the assassin’s arm.
Kaylee watched him. Whenever they met, she always wanted more from him than he was willing to give her. The knowledge he wasn’t ever going to meet her halfway was the worst feeling.
Nathan began to radiate heat, the way he had after she shot him. She withstood it as long as she could before moving away from the furnace.
Shadowman’s cold trickled through her. The archdemon was paying attention. Kaylee’s thoughts went to his claim that Nathan had something to do with them becoming stronger. She wasn’t in the right mindset to ask.
Nathan finished and dropped his hands. Rolling his shoulders back, he released a breath. Candlelight danced across his features, the aquiline nose representative of his Roman heritage, high cheekbones and chiseled jaw. Even knowing all he’d done, her heart raced when he was close, and she leaned closer to smell him again.
How could this soul mate business be real? Shouldn’t Nathan feel something for her?
“Thank you,” she managed to say in an attempt to focus her whirling thoughts.
“I did it for you, not him.”
Kaylee’s cheeks warmed. He gave her enough to throw her into profound confusion but withheld so much more.
“We do have one thing in common,” Nathan continued. “Eddy and I will both do whatever it takes to keep you safe. None of us gets to decide what form that takes.”
Nathan rose and went to the ladder.
Kaylee watched him. Desperation crept through her. She wanted to say something but couldn’t imagine there was anything safe enough, or worthy of being said.
“All you had to do was tell me I wasn’t just another case,” she whispered at last, raw emotion in her voice. “Just a few words, Nathan.”
He paused at the ladder. Her emotions were too volatile for her to determine what his were.
“If I say it, would you believe me after all I’ve put you through?” he challenged softly. His low voice, velvety and quiet, was a teasing caress to her desperate mind.
She swallowed hard. He knew her answer before she did.
“I know what you want me to say, and I know what you need to hear,” Nathan said. “I can’t give you either of those right now.”
Her heart felt as if it plummeted to her feet.
“I’ll come back when I figure out a safe time for you to leave.” Nathan climbed the ladder, opened the trap door, and left.
He’d done what she asked but refused what she longed to hear. Eddy had claimed Nathan felt what she did, that it
was the nature of their bond. Kaylee couldn’t reconcile her despair and hope.
Shadowman’s shift within her was stronger than before.
Aware of her trembling hands, Kaylee sat back against the dirt wall and hugged her knees once more. Her thoughts made less sense than before.
Nathan’s lingering heat dissipated, and Shadowman became distant once more. Being around Nathan definitely made the archdemon feel more present. Kaylee wasn’t certain that was a good thing.
When she’d calmed, she crawled on her knees to Eddy. He radiated with heat to a lesser extent than Nathan, as if he had absorbed the guide’s energy. She checked Eddy’s wounds carefully. Knowing Nathan’s healing power did nothing to dispel her wonder at what he had done. The smaller wounds were healed, while Eddy’s worst injury had grown smaller.
Kaylee cut through the gauze. Eddy remained unconscious, and she sat back, hoping he had the strength to move, once Nathan returned.
She refused to allow her thoughts to slide to the spirit guide who had disrupted her life. It was easier to hate him, to write him off, if she knew he hadn’t been affected by their short time together.
“What the hell?” Eddy mumbled.
Kaylee wiped the tears she hadn’t felt gather in her eyes.
Eddy was looking down at his healed wounds in confusion.
“Nathan found us,” she said in a hushed tone. “He healed you.”
“Nathan healed me?” Eddy asked skeptically.
“I told him to.”
He smiled with a grunt. “Good girl.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Healing me? Or asking him for anything?” Eddy said.
“I don’t even know.” Kaylee handed him an MRE. “He said he’d return when he’s sure we can leave safely.”
“I better be ready.” Eddy straightened and accepted the food.
Kaylee didn’t reveal her doubt aloud. The assassin looked like shit and didn’t seem to be in much better shape. With any luck, Nathan wouldn’t find a window for them to escape for a couple days, when Eddy was stronger.
“He made you cry,” Eddy said.
“He was nice,” she replied. “Which was worse. He’s never been nice.”
“You’ll change one another. It’s the nature of having a soul mate.”
