Any Given Doomsday

by Lori Handeland

  I should have known where he’d run. If I hadn’t been off my game—between the coma and the cops, the visions and the berserker, being off was kind of understandable—I’d have figured it out on my own. Jimmy had gone to his safe place.

  I jumped in my car and took the grand tour of the town to make certain I hadn’t picked up a tail. Sliding slowly past City High, I noted several unmarked cars. Even if Jimmy was dumb enough to show up, he’d never be blind enough to miss the stakeout.

  I waved at the detectives, earning a scowl, and in one case a rude hand gesture, before I headed west.

  While at Ruthie’s, each of us had spent a month every summer between the ages of thirteen and eighteen working for someone or learning something. Ruthie believed in that almost as much as she believed in reading the Bible before bedtime.

  I’d been sent to New Mexico, to the edge of the Navajo Reservation, to learn more about what I was and how to use it.

  Jimmy had been sent only an hour away, to a dairy farm between Milwaukee and Madison. He had loved it.

  Not so much the milking, the plowing, the planting, but the place, the people and the animals. The photos he’d taken at that farm had been some of his best, and had led to his receiving a scholarship in photojournalism from Western Kentucky.

  Not that he’d ever used it. When he’d left, I don’t know where he’d gone, but it hadn’t been to college. The lack of a degree didn’t seem to have hurt him any.

  He’d always had an unbelievable way of looking at things, and when he’d looked at me, I’d wanted to give him everything I had. Back then all I’d had was me.

  Shaking off those memories, I accelerated around a semi and set my cruise control at seventy. I wanted to get there fast, but I wanted to get there in one piece, without a ticket that would broadcast to every last cop in the land where I was.

  Though I hated to, I called Megan and left a message. “I won’t be able to come back to work right away.” I paused, unwilling to ask for a favor, but I had to. “Would you get me a copy of Ruthie’s autopsy report?”

  If anyone could do it, Megan could. Max had been a highly decorated officer, a stunning loss to the community and the force. I didn’t think there was a cop in the city who’d deny Megan anything that she asked.

  I reached the farm just after noon. No one was there. I hadn’t realized the Muellers had packed up their cows and sold the place.

  I got out of the car. “Hello?” I shouted, though I really didn’t expect anyone to answer.

  The house was locked, the windows unbroken. Such would never have been the case any closer to town.

  Everything was gone. Not a stick of furniture or even a stray newspaper had been left behind.

  The barn wasn’t much different. No hay. No straw. No manure. These people were freakishly clean.

  Until I reached what had once been the tack room but had morphed into a hired hand’s apartment. The hired hand appeared to be in residence, if the bedding and the duffel bag were any indication.

  “Hello?” I tried again. Still nothing, so I checked in the bag. I didn’t need my sixth sense to know whose it was. The scent of cinnamon and soap wafted up as soon as I tugged on the zipper.

  Nothing but clothes inside—no ID, no camera equipment, no knife, no gun, nada.

  I stepped to the back door of the barn and let my gaze wander over the rolling pastures just beginning to sprout with green and gold, wildflowers tangling with the weeds, a patch of snow here and there on a hill. No sign of Jimmy. I’d just have to wait.

  I sat on the mattress. An hour later I rested my head on his pillow. The last thing I remembered was the sun beginning its fall toward the end of the earth.

  Whir-whir, kaching-kaching-kaching.

  My eyes opened. The room had gone gold with fading sunlight, illuminating a hundred million dust motes invisible at any other time of the day.

  I lay on the cot. Jimmy stood in the doorway, camera attached to his face. A quick glance revealed I still had on all my clothes. Maybe he had learned something after I’d slugged him the last time.

  “You know, most women might call a cop if they found some guy taking pictures of them while they slept.”

  He didn’t even lower the camera. “You’re not most women, and I’m not some guy.”

  Kaching.

  I sat up. His eyes appeared above the lens. “Come on, Lizzy, I’m almost done.”

  “You are done.” He sighed and set the camera aside. “Where are the Muellers?”

  “They sold out a while back.”

  I had a sudden bad feeling. “Sold out to who?”

  His lips curved.

  I leaped to my feet. “Dammit, Jimmy. You think cops are stupid? I’m surprised they didn’t get here ahead of me.”

  “I didn’t buy it outright. You nuts? No one will find me, at least not yet.”

  “What are you doing here? If you mean to run, then run. If not, then turn yourself in, get this settled and go back to your life.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  Something in his voice made me pause. He sounded old. Tired. Sad. Defeated. Jimmy was a lot of things, but none of those things.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, taking a better look at him. He was thinner than normal, pale too. I hadn’t noticed until now because the usual shade of his skin was so much darker than most.

  He glanced away, hesitating just long enough that I knew whatever he said next was not what he’d planned to say first. “I’ve been sick.”

  “You?” Jimmy didn’t get sick. Probably because he’d been exposed to every germ on the planet before he turned ten.

  Concern flickered, but I refused to let it show. He did not need me. He never had.

  “You’re better now?”

  “Yeah. I was pretty out of it for a few days—worst I’ve ever been—but a little rest, a lot of fluids, good as new.”

  He didn’t sound good as new; he sounded ancient as Methuselah, one of those Old Testament patriarchs who’d checked out at the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine.

  “What’s the matter?” I repeated softly.

  He remained silent for so long, when he finally answered, I no longer expected him to.

  “Ruthie’s dead. Isn’t that enough?”

  I hadn’t forgotten. But I didn’t feel as though Ruthie were really gone, perhaps because I’d talked to her in my dreams.

  However, the woman who’d raised us had been murdered—horribly—and Jimmy was accused of it.

  Though in light of recent events, I knew the accusation wasn’t true.

  “What did you see at Ruthie’s?” I asked.

  He gave me a sharp glance. “Why? Had a newsflash?”

  “You might say that.”

  Jimmy inched into the room and closed the door. I frowned. There was no one here, so why close the door?

  I’d left my gun in the safe—not that I’d use it on Jimmy. Maybe. But I’d brought along the knife, concealed it in a fanny pack I’d had around my waist until I’d decided to lie down. The thing was tangled in the sheets, too far away for me to retrieve without making an issue of it. Did I want to make an issue of it?

  Jimmy stopped several feet from me. Not yet.

  “What did you see?” he asked.

  “Why did you leave a silver knife on my nightstand?”

  His eyes widened. He didn’t bother to deny he’d left the weapon. “Did you need it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What came for you?”

  “Berserker.”

  “Wolf or bear?”

  My mouth fell open at his knowledge of the word. Jimmy hadn’t exactly been a brainiac in school.

  “Bear,” I said. “And how did you know that?”

  He shoved a hand through his hair. “I didn’t want you involved. I told Ruthie you weren’t ready.”

  “For what?”

  He hesitated, face set, mouth tight, then threw up his hands. “It’s too late now. She gave you the power. You’r
e going to have to deal.”

  “With what?”

  “Ruthie was special.”

  “You’re just figuring that out now, Sanducci?”

  He ignored my sarcasm. “She had a gift.”

  I stilled. “She said she’d given me a gift.”

  “You talked to her before she died?”

  I had, but not about this.

  “Not exactly,” I murmured.

  He moved closer, the tense way he held himself making me move back. “What, exactly?”

  “After.”

  His brows lifted. “You talk to dead people now?”

  “Just Ruthie.”

  Over the years I’d done a bit of research on psychic phenomena. According to the “experts” I was psychometric, which meant I could pick up information and images from touching objects—inanimate and animate. Considering my sudden ability to see, hear, and talk to a dead woman, I appeared to have latent channeling abilities too.

  Jimmy had gone silent, thinking. “The gift is different for everyone. Ruthie said she got her tips from God.” He shook his head. “Hell, she probably did.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Jimmy lifted his gaze to mine. “The world is full of monsters, Lizzy, and someone has to kill them. That someone is me, and the someone who tells me what they are, where they are, and who they are was Ruthie, but now…” He spread his hands. “Baby, it’s you.”

  Chapter 7

  I didn’t bother to chastise him for calling me “baby.” I had bigger problems than that.

  I hadn’t ever wanted to see Jimmy Sanducci again, and now I was supposed to work with him to save the world from monsters? Talk about a bad day in supernatural fantasyland.

  “What if I don’t want this power?” Hell, I didn’t want the one I’d been born with.

  “Only death releases you from it.”

  My fingers curled into fists. Jimmy took several steps back. “Don’t be mad at me; I was against it. Ruthie called me to town. She wanted us to tell you together.”

  “Oh, that would have gone well,” I muttered. At the first sight of Jimmy, I’d have been out of there.

  “There wasn’t time to prepare you. If she’d died before she passed on her power it would have been lost.”

  I could understand Ruthie’s desperation, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled to be infected against my will.

  “She’d been waiting years for you to accept who you are.”

  My chest went tight. Ruthie had always encouraged me to be happy with my gift and use it to help others. I’d become a cop so I could fulfill the latter without using the former. My psychometry had always creeped me out nearly as much as it had creeped out everyone who’d ever witnessed it. Except for Ruthie.

  “She thought it would be easier for you to accept this” —he made a gesture with his hands to encompass the fine mess I was already in—”if you’d accepted that.”

  I had to say, the odds didn’t look good.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You and Ruthie were arguing before she was… hurt. How could she have been planning to give me her power, when only death releases it? Makes no sense.”

  “She knew her time was near. Seers have to be aware of the end or risk taking their powers with them to the grave.”

  “What if I hadn’t shown up when I did?”

  “You didn’t just show up accidentally. When I said Ruthie called me to town, I didn’t mean by phone. Didn’t you often feel sudden, irresistible compulsions to see her?”

  My eyes narrowed and he shrugged. “Ruthie had skills of her own, even before she became ‘the one.’“ Jimmy made quotation marks in the air around the last two words.

  “I’m going to smash your Matrix DVD into itty-bitty pieces.”

  “I’m not kidding, Lizzy.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “She said she dreamed of me. Maybe that’s how she sent out those vibes; I don’t know. But I came, and so did you.”

  I understood now the urgency of the need that had overcome me at Murphy’s. When Ruthie had sent out whatever vibes she had, she must have already been dying.

  I tried to focus. There was so much I needed to know. “Ruthie was the only one?”

  “Figure of speech. There are dozens like her, hundreds like me. You don’t think two people could counteract all the supernatural evil in the world, do you?”

  “Until last night I didn’t know there was any supernatural evil.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t suspect it. Not with your gift.”

  I’d known there was evil—hell, everyone did—but supernatural? Hadn’t seen that coming.

  “Ruthie raised you for this. Me too.”

  “What?” My voice was so loud I startled a few doves out of the rafters.

  “She chose us for what we were, raised us to be what we were meant to be. Ruthie was a general in a war that’s been raging for aeons.”

  If I thought my mind had been spinning after the berserker’s visit, that was nothing compared to now.

  “Ever since the angels fell,” Jimmy continued, “there’ve been monsters on this earth. It was part of the plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “The big plan.” Jimmy spread his arms. “Good versus evil. We need to win for the human race to survive.”

  I sat on the cot and put my head in my hands. Jimmy just kept on talking.

  “Ruthie’s duty was to make certain the fight continued after she was gone. She had to find people like us to do that.”

  “She chose us because she loved us,” I whispered.

  Jimmy snorted. “We were delinquents. Foulmouthed, smelly little rats.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “She came to love us. But we found a home with her because she needed us. The whole world does.”

  “How can there be monsters everywhere and no one knows about it?”

  “I wouldn’t say no one. There’s always the odd truth in every other National Enquirer.”

  I shot him a glare but, once again, he was serious.

  “The problem is, they look just like you and me unless they decide to change—and then they’re hell to kill— and some of them always look like you and me. Without Ruthie, without you now, they’ll own this world, and the humans will just be—” He broke off.

  “Be what?”

  “Food, amusement, slaves. Nothing good.”

  “What did Ruthie do? How did she know?”

  “She would have a vision, which would reveal the type of demon along with its human face.”

  “Demon.” I seemed doomed to repeat most of what he said.

  “For lack of a better word. How familiar are you with the story of the fallen angels?”

  “Satan?”

  “He got the kingdom he coveted.” Jimmy pointed to the floor. “But the rest…” He swirled his finger in the air.

  “You’re telling me the fallen angels are still on earth in the form of demons?”

  “In a way. Ever heard of the Grigori and the Nephilim?” I shook my head. “The Grigori were known as the watchers. They were sent to earth to keep an eye on the humans. They lusted after them instead and were banished by God to Tartarus, the fiery pit where all divine enemies are thrown.” He shrugged. “Basically the lowest, locked level of hell.”

  “I don’t remember this story in the Bible.”

  “Book of Enoch.”

  “Once again—”

  “Not in the Bible,” Jimmy finished. “But it was. You’re aware that over the centuries, several books and gospels were removed?” I nodded. “Enoch was beloved by Jews and Christians alike until it was pronounced heresy and banned. The text disappeared for nearly a thousand years until a copy was discovered in Ethiopia.”

  “So why isn’t it part of the Bible now?”

  “People don’t like change.”

  “Or maybe Enoch is just a fairy tale.”

  “Then why are there over a hundred phrases in the New Testament that ar
e also found in the Book of Enoch? Considering that Enoch was written two centuries before the birth of Christ, to me that means it was studied as carefully as Genesis. I highly doubt Jesus would have bothered to quote a book he didn’t believe told the truth.”

  I kind of doubted it too.

  “The offspring of the watchers and the daughters of men were known as the Nephilim. They became every type of supernatural being you can imagine.”

  “Like vampires and werewolves and berserkers?”

  “To name a few. God destroyed ninety percent of the Nephilim in the flood, but allowed ten percent to remain on earth to challenge mankind.”

  “By challenge you mean kill, enslave, and eat?”

  “Life wasn’t supposed to be easy.”

  I had so many questions, but uppermost in my mind was—”Why didn’t they ever come for Ruthie before?”

  “They didn’t know who she was. The identities of the seers are known only to their DKs, or demon killers.”

  My eyebrows lifted. “I can see why you use an acronym. Running around using the term demon killer just might buy you an all-expenses-paid trip to a little white room.”

  He rubbed a hand over his face. “Someone broke the number-one rule—protect the seer. I mean to find out who, then make certain they never do it again.”

  From his expression, that person would never be doing anything again once Jimmy finished with him, which was fine by me.

  “Gonna start with Springboard,” he muttered. “Although he idolized Ruthie.”

  “Springboard Jones is a—”

  “Yeah. A lot of DKs have jobs that take us from city to city. Good cover.”

  As was the fact that their kills turned to ashes. Not much evidence that way.

  “I plan to personally dust every single Nephilim who crossed Ruthie’s threshold,” Jimmy continued. “And you’re going to help me.”

  “You say that as if I mean to argue.” I wanted them dead too.

  His face softened. “I know this has been tough. It’s hard enough coming into our world prepared. This isn’t like anything you’ve ever faced before.”

  “I figured that out when the big blond guy turned into a bear.”

  Jimmy shifted his shoulders, rolled his neck. He had something else to tell me.

  “There’s a little more to this than you know,” he said slowly. “Ruthie was the leader of all the seers and DKs.”