Kingdom of Lies

by Debra Dunbar

  Terrelle grumbled that she shouldn’t have to do this because rock beat scissors, but she bent down into a sprinter’s stance anyway.

  “One, two, three, go!”

  Terrelle took off on three and then paused. I ran past, but her hesitation cost us. The harpy’s attention had abruptly turned away from the angels and zeroed in on us. The other demon and I reached the body simultaneously, each digging hands into the soft, cool mess in an attempt to scoop as much of it up as possible. I grabbed the torso, still somewhat attached to spine, ribs and hip. Terrelle managed a leg, scooping slimy innards into a pouch made from the bottom of her shirt.

  “Damn it all!” That bird was back, chewing on my newly healed shoulder and pulling my hair with a claw. I kicked the dead demon’s head aside then ran while she paused for her snack.

  Terrelle had run for it the moment the harpy had attacked me. I shouted for her to slow down, worried that if we got too far ahead of our pursuer, she’d lose interest and go kill some other poor dude. I shouldn’t have worried. Yeah, it took the harpy a while to crunch through all the bony goodness, but once done, she was after us like a shot.

  I tossed body parts behind me, moving as fast as I could to keep up with Terrelle. She was also losing some of her stash, more to the difficulty of running with guts carried in the front part of her shirt. I heard the snap of the harpy picking up bits and eating as she chased us, heard the heavy thump of her clawed feet and the rush of her wings. I could only assume she was flying after us, because I was hauling ass and she didn’t look all that good at running any distance on those spindly legs. The thought made me even gladder that I’d been dropping tidbits for her along the way. She was turning this into a fast-food experience, but she still had to slow down for each piece I dropped.

  I could feel the gate ahead. Hopefully it was the right one, but at this point, I didn’t really care. All I wanted was to get this fucking thing out of here, wash all the blood and guts off, and put on clean clothing.

  Terrelle sprinted, her long legs getting her to the gate a hundred yards ahead of me. She flung the remaining contents of her shirt-pouch through the glowing rift that extended from the ground to nearly twenty feet in the air. I hoped the harpy would fly ahead to go after Terrelle’s stash, but I don’t have that sort of luck. The damned thing stayed with me, ignoring the chunk of flesh I dropped to latch its claws onto my shoulders.

  Wings beat against my back, and my feet lifted from the ground. If this bitch thought she was going to fly off with another snack, she better think again. I let her pull me about twenty feet up, and my own wings burst into being. They were fifty feet across, so I didn’t have quite enough room to do what I wanted with them fully extended. Still, this was one of the many times that confirmed bigger was most definitely better.

  We had a minor midair tussle as she screamed and tried to remain on top, and again, rock beat scissors. I flipped over then dropped, using our combined weight and the glorious effect of gravity to smash back-first onto the ground with the harpy beneath me.

  She squawked then gasped, her eyes big in an ugly face as I rolled off her and stood. Grabbing one wing, I dragged her toward the gate, still holding a mangled leg and what I assumed was the dead demon’s spine in my other hand. Once she caught her breath enough to try to squirm free in earnest, I extended the leg toward her. She clamped down tight, and I let go of her wing to grip the other end of the leg with both hands and haul her toward the gate with all my strength.

  By the time we reached the rift, the harpy was flailing about, scratching me with the claws at the end of her wings. She was beginning to win the tug of war when Terrelle and the two angels joined in, giving her a mighty push through the gate.

  The only clean hand among us reached forward to close the gateway. Gregory, looking very satisfied with himself, was spotless compared to the rest of us. Even the other angels were blood spattered and dirty. My angel was fresh as a daisy.

  And that kind of pissed me off, until he spoke.

  “I love watching you work, Cockroach.”

  It was his sexy voice. My glare went to something more like a pout. “My house or yours, baby?” I was hoping he’d say mine, because I really hated his house. Aaru was a vacuum of sensory deprivation and full of angels who would like nothing better than to blast me into little tiny bits.

  He gathered me in his arms, blood spatter and all, and rested his chin on the top of my head. “Yours. As soon as we take care of the brownies and unicorns.”

  So, my house next year sometime. Well, at least that was motivation for me to get my ass in gear.

  “I know it’s not supposed to be a priority, but the gate is here, and the body wasn’t too far from it, so Pouchaine had to have been attacked close by. Assuming he was still with Swiftethian at the time, then the elf has to be nearby.”

  I texted Nyalla. Out of all of us, she’d be the best at predicting elf behavior. Elf alone in PA w no English. Where would he run/hide?

  WWSD—what would Swifty do? The phone buzzed her reply, and I looked down at the text.

  “Nyalla says he probably headed for the nearest wooded area to hole up. He’d feel reasonably safe there until he figured out what to do next.”

  Gregory nodded. “We can take some time to search. Since we’re here, we might as well.”

  My angel went to speak to the other two angels, while I pulled up Google Maps on my phone and hit the satellite imagery, looking for a decent-size forest nearby. Two stood out as suitable elven hiding places within several miles of the gate. “Which one do you want?” I asked Terrelle. I figured it would be best if we went solo to search for the guy. I had no idea how this elf, or any elf, would react around an angel. Besides, Swifty had come here with a demon guide. Having a demon searching for him probably wouldn’t be as threatening as an angel, or a demon hanging out with an angel.

  “I’ll take that one.” Terrelle pointed at my screen then looked up, getting her bearings. “But what if Pouchaine stole the gem and the harpy swallowed it when she was eating him?”

  Leave it to another demon to think of the worst-case scenario. We’d just sent that harpy through a gateway to who-knows-where. I’d never find her to get it back and satisfy my debt to Gareth.

  “That’s impossible,” I lied. “Head out and call me if you find the elf. I’m going to let my angel know what’s going on, and then I’m off to search the other woods.”

  She trotted off. I watched her for a moment, once again thrilled with the addition of this demon to my household. Why had I never thought to align myself with a Noodle before? Yeah, we all tended to shun them as ‘weird demons’, but she was smart, talented, and more than willing to jump in and help.

  Gregory was still chatting with the other two angels, who were nodding like a pair of bobble heads at every word that came from his mouth. Kind of funny until I caught a few of his words—specifically ‘gargoyle’ and ‘church’.

  “Another gateway?” I asked once he had finished and the other two angels had vanished to perform their assigned tasks.

  “I’m not sure we have the headcount needed to close these.” He grimaced. “They’re occurring at an alarming rate all over the world. I think we may need to keep track of occurrences as we become aware of them and triage.”

  I nodded. It made sense. Harpies and drop bears top of the list, brownies and unicorns at the bottom. Well, maybe not brownies. Those motherfuckers got pretty hostile when someone accidently stepped on their house or mowed down their lavender patch.

  “Who’s keeping track of everything?”

  He eyed me. It was one of those ‘significant looks’ where I was, no doubt, supposed to know what the fuck he was thinking.

  “You don’t mean me, do you? Because you’ve read my four-nine-five reports. I can’t keep track of who I’ve killed, or where I’ve sent all those credit deadbeats. There’s no way I can be your reference for gateways and supernatural creatures.”

  “Not you.”

&nbs
p; Yeah, that look again. The piercing gaze still wasn’t an effective communication tool.

  “Nyalla?” I was beginning to see where he was going, and it wasn’t where I wanted to go. “She’s been asking for things to do lately. Seems to think her future involves chasing supernatural shit around and beating it with a stick or something.”

  “Not Nyalla. Wyatt.”

  Damn it. Not after the conversation I’d just had with him. Not after the downhill slide our relationship had taken. “How about Terrelle? She’s a Noodle ... I mean an information demon. Classification, maps, cataloging—that’s all her thing. Plus she has a lot of knowledge about unicorns and shit. She’d be perfect.”

  I had no idea if she knew about unicorns, but the rest was totally true.

  “She’s also proven herself to be skilled in locating gateways. We need her to pair with an angel and do that, not sit in in your living room with a map and pushpins.”

  “She can do it on the fly. She’s brilliant. Let her track down gateways and keep all of this in her head, or on her phone. She can call us to coordinate.”

  Gregory raised his eyebrows. Another of those ‘significant looks’ was sent my way, and this one I understood. I really wanted to just lob this back at him and make the angel call Wyatt, but I guess I needed to put on the big-girl panties and act like the nearly one-thousand-year-old demon I was. Wyatt was my friend and neighbor, and making things right with him was what I needed to do. I might be mad and a bit hurt, but I didn’t want him out of my life completely, and I didn’t want us to end the way our last phone call had.

  “Hey,” I jumped in as soon as he picked up. “We, I mean I, seriously need your help. I’m sorry I got pissy earlier. There’s a bad situation that looks like it’s only going to get worse, and I really need you on my team for this one.”

  Silence greeted my words. I let it stretch out between us, resisting the urge to make sure he was still on the phone.

  “What do you need?”

  Finally. I let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. “The unicorn and brownie thing? Well these gateways seem to be opening everywhere. It takes an angel and a demon paired together to find and close them, and then we have to deal with whatever supernatural shit managed to come through. There aren’t enough of us, so we need a way to keep track of all the rifts and evaluate which ones are high priority.”

  “Yeah?”

  Not the enthusiastic response I’d hoped for, but at least he hadn’t hung up on me. Yet. “You knew about the unicorn and the brownie even before the angels did. I’m hoping you can keep track of confirmed gateway locations along with what’s come through, scour the internet for potential occurrences. You know enough about other beings that you can triage the locations as red, yellow, or green, and rank them in terms of importance.”

  “Would there be a central contact, or would each angel/demon pair check in for assignments?”

  Now that was better. I breathed easier. “I’d trust you to assign each pair as they called in, but there will be a central contact that checks regularly and might change priorities based on other criteria.”

  “Who?”

  I looked over at Gregory, who wasn’t helping me at all right now. When I needed that ‘significant look’ I wasn’t getting any. I wanted to make him the central contact, to walk away from any regular phone calls and conversations with Wyatt until all of the new normal became more... normal. He might hate it as much as I would, but maybe being the central contact and being forced into interaction would help that new normal settle in.

  “Me.”

  “Okay.” There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation. That one word response given so rapidly made me wonder if all the awkwardness and angst between us was mostly in my head. I heard Wyatt typing in the background, the rustle of a potato-chip bag, the buzz of a distant television—it sent a wave of nostalgia through me that I quickly tamped down.

  “So there is a unicorn near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and a family of brownies in Richmond, Virginia. What else so far?”

  “A drop bear in Antarctica—dead and the gateway closed. A troll in Intercourse, Pennsylvania—alive and unaccounted for, but the gateway closed. A harpy outside of Philadelphia—returned home and the gateway closed. A gargoyle in…?“ I looked at Gregory.

  “Dallas, Texas.”

  “A gargoyle in Dallas. And sea nymphs off of Lake Superior. We’ve got a pair already assigned to the nymphs.”

  “So right now the open cases are the unicorn, gargoyle and the brownie, and possibly a loose troll?”

  “Yep. I’m also on the hunt for something Gareth had stolen from him. I’ll call you later and let you know where Gregory and I are going next.”

  “Got it.” There was more typing noise. Wyatt sounded focused on the case, as if he was talking with anybody and not me in particular. I hung up, and Gregory nodded.

  “Good job, Cockroach. I’m off to check on Asta and your brother, then to see about this gargoyle. Let me know if you find the elf, and I’ll come to assist.”

  Assist? Assist me because I couldn’t handle an elf, or because he was worried I might beat the elf to a bloody pulp. He had good reason to fear. I had a bit of a reputation for not returning those I’d been sent to retrieve alive and in one piece.

  Chapter 17

  It was a mile walk to the mini-forest, so I had some time to think about whether I wanted to go after brownies or unicorns next.

  Sun filtered through the tree canopy, creating a lacy pattern of light on the forest floor. A nearby pine grove had scattered clumps of needles onto the ground, bringing a contrast of reddish brown to the green of moss and plants. Wild rose reached out thorny arms to scratch my skin and snag my clothes. Vines twisted along tree trunks and across the ground. It was hard going, fighting the thick foliage and spikey plants. I searched in a grid pattern, looking for signs that any other two-legged being had been here. Elves moved like the wind, barely disturbing the ground they walked upon, but I figured Swiftethian might have been careless. Fear, either from being alone in a strange world or from escaping the harpy, might have caused him to leave some sign of his passage.

  There were some deer tracks, and an area where it looked like they had bedded down for the night, but nothing to show something bipedal had passed through. No shoe prints, no bruised leaves or broken branches high up enough for an elf to have made them, and no snagged threads of clothing on any of the bramble bushes that filled the small wooded area.

  My phone rang. I answered, hoping Terrelle had good news. She didn’t. Her patch of forest yielded the same disappointing lack of elfness. We walked back to meet each other and hung around for a few moments. I contemplated attempting to gate us to my house but figured flagging down a car on the nearby roadway and hitching a ride home would be a more time-efficient option. If passersby were reluctant to pick up two women walking along the roadside, we could always pull off a carjack and get home that way. As long as we didn’t kill any humans, I wouldn’t have to worry about filling out those fucking reports. If we were lucky, we’d find someone with shitty credit, and I could claim I was repo-ing their car to encourage improved vibration pattern in the owner.

  We were just making our way to the nearest major roadway when Gregory and another angel appeared. I was fairly used to his unannounced arrivals, but I still jumped. Terrelle just about wet her pants.

  “You.” Gregory pointed to the other demon, causing her to cower with wide, panicked eyes. “Go with Sauriel and help him locate and close a gate. You.” he pointed at me. I didn’t cower. I was too stunned that he was ordering my household member around as if she were one of his angels. “Come with me.”

  I didn’t have time to argue. He grabbed my arm and hauled me off balance just as he transported us. This method of transportation still made me a bit dizzy, even when I did it, but being half pitched forward as he teleported did nothing to improve the experience. When we ‘landed’, the only thing that kept me from face-planting into the
side of a building was Gregory’s arm.

  “What the fuck? You don’t get to order Terrelle to go with your angel then yank me around like I’m some damned flunky.” I was arguing to the building wall since vertigo was making it a bit hard to turn around and face the angel.

  “Later.”

  I staggered after Gregory, kept on track by his hand gripping my bicep. He sounded preoccupied, and that worried me. Irritated, amused, sexy—that I could deal with. Preoccupied meant something else demanded most of his thought process—which, for a six-billion-year-old angel, was considerable. Whatever was in this building he was dragging me through was something I needed to worry about.

  One of the perks of being dragged about by Gregory was that security guards smiled benignly as we went by. We didn’t need to sign in, show ID, or get passes. We took the elevator. It dawned on me about five floors up how strange that was. Normally he would have transported us directly to the floor and room of our destination. Did he not want whoever we were here to see to know we were coming?

  The elevator opened on the top floor. Gregory led me past the double-glass doors of a CPA firm to a heavy gray door behind which was a staircase I assumed led to the roof instead of heaven. We climbed, each metal step clanging along the way. Sunlight nearly blinded me as Gregory pushed the bar and strode onto the black, flat roof.

  I stopped and looked around. This wasn’t the highest building in what I determined by the skyline to be Dallas, but it certainly had an impressive bird’s-eye view across the valley. Other than that, it was a normal roof—HVAC units humming away, fans pumping hot air across my feet, vents like silver-slotted columns rising a few feet from the black floor, another roofed entrance complete with matching gray door, and a gargoyle.

  I blinked. The decorative stone statues were usually just below roof level, lining the building sides and redirecting rain runoff from the roof. This one was on the roof, crouched in the shadow of the other entrance. And the way he edged sideways into the light, his wings unfurling from his sides and his stooped shoulders rolling, made me realize he wasn’t merely a decorative rainspout.