Luck of the Devil

by Patricia Eimer

  “I had gathered as much from the explosive devices underneath our cars,” Dad said.

  Malachi materialized beside the Alpha. “And the four the police found in Faith’s apartment building. High-grade stuff, too. They’re calling in the ATF and Homeland Security.”

  “Really?” Tolliver said. “Impressive.”

  “Shit.” Matt’s head fell against the seat cushion. “He’s not going after Faith. There’s only one guy on that list who would have access to explosives.”

  “Okay,” Jesus said, moving from the ledge, his hands raised. “Time-out. We should start at the beginning of this story, leaving out absolutely no details. Starting with, when did Bassano’s son marry Lou’s daughter?”

  “Excuse me?” My father stood up so fast my mother didn’t have time to get her feet underneath her. She landed on the floor with a solid thump as he stalked toward Matt. “You got married?”

  “We did not get married,” I shouted. “He lied so they’d let him into the room with me. Chill out already. And thanks, Jesus. I appreciate that.”

  My father returned to his seat and plopped down, offering his hand to Mom.

  She stood, brushing dirt from her jeans before she smacked him on the shoulder.

  Dad rubbed the spot where she’d hit him. “What was that for?”

  “For not trusting your daughter. And acting like a jerk. Apologize!” Apparently, Mom was on her way back to being loco again.

  “Um,” Jesus interrupted. “Maybe we could get back to the rampaging nephilim stalker? Remember?”

  “Look, Levi’s got a bit of a problem with demons,” Matt said, his eyes dark with what I assumed was guilt.

  “A bit of a problem?” Jesus said.

  “A female demon stole his powers a few years back, and he’s had a grudge ever since. I really hoped it wasn’t him, but he worked in demolition for a few years, trying to find himself, I guess, once he lost his powers. Dad sort of ignored him, anyway, and once he had nothing to offer, the rest of the Angale didn’t care if he was there or not.”

  “Dad?” I blinked a few times. Surely, I hadn’t heard him correctly. “Tell me the two of you aren’t brothers.”

  “Half-brothers,” Matt corrected. “I didn’t really think he was up to this, but the irrational hatred is there.”

  “Brilliant,” my father said, sarcasm lending his voice an extra bite. “Anything else you completely dropped the ball on, Angel Boy?”

  “Dad,” I growled. “I told him to let me handle it. I wasn’t even going to tell him about the first set of pictures.”

  “Pictures?” Jesus asked.

  “Yeah.” Malachi took a large envelope out of his cowl and dropped it onto my father’s lap. “These are most of them. I made sure to take the incriminating ones, but left behind a few human-looking ones for the police so they would know this wasn’t a sudden thing.”

  Dad nodded silently, opened the envelope, and flipped through the photos. He handed them over to the Alpha and turned to face me. “And at what point did you start to think you were out of your league? Or that this lunatic was serious and might actually hurt you?”

  Jesus took a look at the pictures as well. “Did you ever figure out where he got the ability to mask his actions so you didn’t realize he was near you?”

  “We think he stole the powers of another demon, and he’s been using them to get close to Faith, undetected, in an attempt to steal her powers,” Tolliver said.

  “The problem is,” Malachi said, “all demons are accounted for, and none of them have been drained. And for him to both mask himself and phase, he would have needed to draw a huge amount of power from someone. Enough that we would notice.”

  “He’s phasing?” Jesus asked, his eyes widening. “Really?”

  “He followed us to Paris,” I said.

  “You went to Paris?” Jesus cast a blank look at Matt. “Huh.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Jesus said, and turned back to my father. “So, what we know is that this nephilim, Levi, is using demonic powers to stalk Faith. But we have no idea how he’s gotten those powers, or why he’s moved from being Mad but Harmless to Felony Stalking and Explosive Devices.”

  “He’s not after Faith,” Matt said to my father. “He’s after you, sir.”

  “What?” I said. “What do you mean, he’s not going after me? I’m the one he’s been stalking.”

  “Why is he going after me?” my father asked.

  “He’s trying to declare war on you. Think about it—he could have attacked Faith or Hope at any time. Instead, he waited until the only time all of you were together and unguarded. If he wanted them, he’d have made a play days ago. This is about you.”

  “I’ve never even met the twerp. Why is he trying to declare war on me?”

  “Because he’s an Angale?” Hope asked, smirking at him like he was as stupid as Mom. “And they’re crazy? And they sort of have this stated mission of killing you?”

  “Well, they’ve never actually tried it,” Dad said. “I always figured they were like those freaks living on compounds who want to overthrow the U.S. government. They never actually try anything.”

  “Actually—” Matt said.

  My father glared at him, silently daring him to argue.

  “Never mind. That’s not really the point, is it?”

  “No, it’s not,” Dad said. “But I should have paid more attention to the Angale. I discounted them as nothing but talk since they’d never actually done anything.”

  “They are nothing but talk,” Matt said. He took his cell phone out of his pants pocket. “Brenda must’ve given out my number. There are forty messages on my phone from other Angale who are worried sick about me. And only ten of them are from my mother, surprisingly enough.”

  “But they know about it,” Hope said, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.

  “Everyone knows about it,” Tolliver said. He reached for the television remote and clicked on the news, which was running live coverage of the explosion from the Primanti Brothers’ parking lot. “Apparently people were tweeting about it before the ambulances even arrived.”

  “What?” the Alpha said, looking around at the rest of us. “They were tweeting about it while Faith was lying unconscious in the parking lot?”

  “Well,” Jesus said. “Fifteen people did call 911, and twelve of them even managed it before the third car exploded.”

  “Oh, well, that’s good, I guess.”

  “Welcome to the modern age,” Jesus said. “It might help if you tried to keep up with the technology.”

  “Shut up.”

  “So,” my mother said, and cleared her throat awkwardly. “The Angale didn’t know about this until it hit the Internet?”

  “CNN,” Matt corrected. “The first calls I received came after the CNN report.”

  “CNN?” I asked, stunned. “We were on CNN?”

  “Yeah, it was breaking news while they speculated about domestic terrorism.”

  “And now?”

  “Everyone’s holding with the same story,” Tolliver said.

  “They reported that federal agents had been called in when explosives were found in a local Pittsburgh apartment building,” Malachi said.

  “But,” Matt said. “The important thing is the Angale had no idea what was going to happen until it hit the news.”

  “That you know of,” Jesus said.

  “Trust me, if anyone was planning anything, Mom would have known about it,” Matt said. “And they wouldn’t have dared mess with my car.”

  “But… ” Dad glared at him, his eyes full of skepticism.

  “Which one is your mother again?” the Alpha asked.

  “Valerie Andrews,” Matt mumbled and kept his eyes focused on his lap.

  “No, no, I highly doubt they would have tried anything without Valerie knowing about it,” the Alpha said. “She’s a rather formidable woman, you could say. Don’t you agree?”

  “I had he
ard that,” Dad said. “So we know it wasn’t the Angale.”

  “That means Levi has gone rogue,” Matt said. “Whatever he’s doing he’s doing it alone.”

  “Not necessarily,” Lisa said. “What if he didn’t steal someone’s powers, but borrowed them? Like he’s got an accomplice or something?”

  “But what demon is going to willingly share his powers with the Angale?” Jesus asked.

  “One that doesn’t want to be a demon anymore,” I said, and looked at Hope. “Someone who’s fallen up.”

  “I’ll kill him,” Hope growled. “I swear I will murder him, chop him up into little bitty pieces, put him back together, resurrect him, and kill him again.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Mrs. Andrews? Mrs. Dreborsky?” A man in a rumpled black suit knocked on our open doorjamb. “I’m Federal Agent Hahn. How are you two feeling?”

  “Okay, all things considered,” I said. At least everybody had left a couple of hours ago so Hope and I could rest.

  Hope sighed. She should have known there was no way we were going to escape this without at least a little police involvement. “Oh, yeah, everything’s just fine. What with the blowing up and everything.”

  The agent grimaced, stealing a quick glance behind him.

  I craned my next to peek around him and noticed two younger men in black uniforms sitting in the hallway. Great. A mortal police presence. Because they would be so helpful in dealing with an immortal sicko intent on world domination.

  “We’ve added a protective guard to your rooms,” Agent Hahn said. “It’s an extra precaution while we try to work this out. You’re going to be perfectly safe.”

  “I’m sure we will be.” Hope rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “Well.” He sat in the chair my father had been in earlier. “I wanted to stop by and see what the two of you could tell me about what happened today. And I wanted to get your opinions on some other things we’ve found out recently.”

  “Other things?” I asked.

  “We’ll get to that later,” he said with a tense smile. “What I would like now is if the two of you could tell me what happened today?”

  “We were having a family lunch,” I said, and launched into the details of the afternoon.

  He listened without speaking the entire time, sometimes scribbling in his pad, other times crossing his legs and nodding thoughtfully. When I finished, he ticked down his notes and turned to Hope. “Do you have anything to add, Ms. Dreborsky?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then. Let me make sure I have everything straight. Lunch included the two of you, Mrs. Andrews’ husband, Matt—”

  Why bother to correct him?

  “—your father, Louis Morningstar, your mother, Roisin Bettincourt, your brother, Tolliver Morningstar, a Miss Lisa DeMarcos? How is she related to the family?”

  “That’s my roommate and my brother Tolliver’s girlfriend,” I said.

  “Right.” He jotted in his notebook. “And another woman, a Miss Mallory Kai?”

  “She’s a friend of the family,” Hope said.

  “So, you were having a family lunch and you went outside. Tell me again what happened next?”

  “We were walking back to our cars and there was an explosion. Suddenly, it was really loud and hot and there were bits of pavement falling everywhere. And then I passed out,” I said.

  “I remember Dad’s car going up,” Hope added. “I reached my brother’s car first, and when I got there, I heard the explosion and turned to see that Dad’s car was in flames. I heard this tiny click sound and then everything blew up.”

  “I see. So neither of you really remember much else?”

  “Beyond the fact someone tried to kill us?” Hope said. “No, not really, we’ve been a bit fixated on that.”

  “Can you think of any reason that someone would want to put explosives in your cars?”

  “I have a stalker,” I said. A really stupid stalker. “I’m sure you’ve found the pictures.”

  “We have, and I do have to wonder why you haven’t reported this before now. Do you have an idea of who it is?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I just figured it was some sicko trying to scare me, and when he saw I wasn’t giving him any attention, he’d just leave me alone. Sort of like a bully.”

  “Are you suspicious of someone? You filed a complaint against a professional colleague last week. Do you think he might have something to do with this?”

  “Harold?” It was tempting to lay the blame on him and get the police to chase a dead lead while my father and the Alpha handled Levi, but I couldn’t do that to him. Sure, he was annoying, but for a ghost he really wasn’t that bad. Especially since he’d apparently been right—there was a creepy guy stalking me. “Harold is a lot of things, including an ass-grabber, but he’s not a crazy stalker with a penchant for things that go boom.”

  “And you don’t think he could have snapped?”

  “He does surgery on children. I’m pretty sure that at some point along the way, he’s snapped at least once. But no, this isn’t Harold. He’s a creep and a perv, but he isn’t a killer. This wasn’t him.”

  “So, if it’s not him, who is it?”

  “Who knows?” I said. Why couldn’t he just get bored and go find the nearest donut shop already? How many more ways did I need to be unhelpful before he went somewhere else to look for answers?

  “Why would she?” Hope said. “Do you think my sister is really going to understand the mind of a stalker?”

  “No, but it’s rare for someone to escalate from stalking to attempted mass murder within a few days. And most stalkers don’t use explosives.”

  “What? Would you be more comfortable with the situation if he’d shown up and beat her up a few times first? Would it be better for your simple mind if he’d have shown up and shot her instead? Would that fit in with your teeny-tiny world view better?” Hope stunned him with her attack. He’d go with any story she fed him now, if nothing else than to keep her from yelling at him again.

  “Mrs. Dreborsky, I never meant to suggest—”

  “You never meant to do anything. This is what it is. Faith has a crazy stalker who tried to kill her, and you want to dick around to see if there’s some other motive to make you look better on CNN. You need one of us to be an abortion doctor, or a lawyer who defends pedophiles, or even the guy at the bank who signs the foreclosure notices. You need us to be someone who ‘deserves’ to be blown up while we go about our daily lives.”

  “Mrs—”

  “You are not speaking yet,” Hope said and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She stood up and loomed over him, then jabbed her finger into his chest. Uh-oh. He was going to be lucky to get out of here in one piece. “You will speak when I tell you that you are allowed to speak again.”

  “But—”

  “I didn’t give you permission to speak,” she snarled. “Now, we are a nice, quiet, respectable family that hasn’t done anything to anyone. We go to work, we pay our taxes, and we keep to ourselves. Faith’s a pediatric nurse, for fuck’s sake. And until last week, I didn’t even live in Pittsburgh; I was working for a community organization in Idaho. Her roommate is a nurse at a community health center. We are like every other nameless, faceless family in this city. The only difference is today someone tried to blow us up and you’re trying to make us the bad guys in this mess.”

  “I’m not—”

  “That’s right. You’re not a lot of things. One of those is welcome in this room anymore. Get out.”

  “I’m sorry to have upset you,” Agent Hahn said stiffly. He rose and nodded toward me, and then at Hope, before backing quickly toward the door. “There’s a police presence outside.”

  “Get out,” Hope said, her voice cold.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly. Not like he was paying me any attention, anyway.

  “I’ll be in touch if we need anything else,” he said, and hurried through the door.


  Hope followed, and slammed it decisively in the police officers’ faces.

  “Community service group?” I asked.

  “Too much?” she said and stalked back to her bed, throwing herself across it and flinging out her hands.

  “A bit,” I said and smiled, lying against the flat pillows.

  “It got him out of here, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but don’t you think he’s going to be suspicious?”

  “No, he’ll write me off as an irrational and traumatized little woman whose first defense is to get bitchy. And you know he was looking for an angle to spin this. You didn’t have to be able to read his every thought to see that one written on his face.”

  “So, you think Levi thought we’d just write him off as some screwy stalker and let the police handle it?”

  “No,” Hope said thoughtfully, and slipped back into her own bed. “I think he didn’t intend for any of us to survive. I don’t know where he got the idea a car bomb would kill the Devil, but I really think that’s what he intended. He wanted to kill us and bask in the glory of starting a great war between the forces of good and evil. If he’d succeeded he’d have been the nephilim who destroyed the Morningstar bloodline.”

  “But why not just do it in person? Why hide behind a bomb? Why not just raise an army and declare war?”

  “Because what if they wouldn’t rally behind him? What if the Alpha didn’t reward him, but punished him instead? Even worse, what if he failed? With a bomb, he could slink into the background and distance himself from the stench of failure.”

  “That’s… ”

  “Cowardly?”

  “Sort of sad,” I said.

  “Don’t you dare feel sorry for him,” Hope said darkly. “He tried to kill us.”

  “I don’t,” I replied. We both knew I was lying, but it didn’t change anything. “But you heard Matt—his own father didn’t care about him. He’s the runt of the litter.”

  “So?”

  “And some demoness stole his powers. That had to be humiliating. He’s some poor, screwed up kid who thinks we somehow have the ability to give his power back.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact he’s been stalking you. Or that he tried to kill us.”

  “It doesn’t, but what if he was trying to get back what was his?”