“Fine.” I held up my hands in acceptance. “But the men who sent this guy will send someone to search for him when he doesn’t report back. Soon. The faster and farther I get him away from here, the safer you’ll be.”
“He’s dead. Do they have some sort of GPS thing on his body?”
“Something like that.” I rubbed my hand over my face, not really wanting to get into details right now. “He had a task to do. When he doesn’t come back—”
Her face froze and registered the shock of her understanding. “What was he supposed to do with me?”
I shook my head. “I can’t say for sure.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“I’m not really on the need-to-know list for these people. Trust me, they’re bad news. You probably weren’t meant to survive the meeting.”
“Why would I trust you?” She paused, sucking in an unsteady breath. “You were at the hospital earlier, with the cousin in ICU. Did they do that to him?”
“One of them did.” The specifics of scout vs. sorcerer were something I considered splitting hairs at the moment.
“You stalked me to my home? You’re no better than that thing.” She waved the lamp’s tip at the corpse.
“Really? Have you seen me try to kill you? Or did you see me here helping you? You don’t have to give it all up here, but I think I’ve earned an inch of consideration.”
She raised an eyebrow at me and lowered the lamp a fraction.
I leaned in, picked up the corpse, and then angled my face away from the blossoming foul reek of decomposition. “Open the patio door, please, so I can take him out.”
She let out a breath while deliberating and then walked over and slid the glass door aside. “You may not be any more human than he is. What’s to stop you from coming back and finishing the job on me?”
I walked into the yard with my cargo and turned to her. “I may not be totally human, but neither are you.”
“Right,” she responded in a snorted huff of sarcasm. When I didn’t say more, her mouth pulled into a firm line of disbelief.
“I will come back later. To help you. It’ll be your choice whether you let that knowledge save you or destroy you,” I said. I had made it to the gate and flicked the latch with my free fingers.
“If I’m so much of a danger, why would you want to help me?” she shouted across the sparse lawn, her voice less courageous than her crossed arms and planted feet implied.
I glanced back. “Hell if I know.” Shaking my head, I walked into the rear alleyway and down the street. I could detect the trail from the scout and had maybe twenty minutes to reset his path and get him far enough away that his owners couldn’t track Anne.
A growl from behind warned me I had company seconds before the hot, stinky breath of a lean, muscled boxer mix snaked by my shoulder. I jerked to the side and wedged the corpse between us.
The scout lost a sleeve, and almost an arm, in the encounter. The dog whipped his head back and forth in a happy frenzy. His prize, the sleeve, waved as a victory flag. I reached out to grab the sleeve’s edge and held on to let Brutus play tug-of-war. After a minute, Brutus won and pounded down the alley, cornered around the bush at the end of the street, and headed for parts unknown.
Go Brutus. His travels would only aid my effort.
I stood up with the scout’s waist tucked under my arm and worked my way down the alleyway to my bike. I draped his chest against my back, grabbed his wrists in front of my chest with one hand, and started the bike to retrace his path. It wasn’t graceful by any means, but anyone who bothered to look would probably assume my buddy was drunk.
We meandered along back alleys for a while. Then I left his original trail, broke into high speed, and headed for the rail yard. His legs singed where they rested on the exhaust pipes of the bike. I could smell the burnt flesh despite my helmet, but he was already dead, and I had no other options.
I made my way to the drainage culvert where I’d found Aisha and her brother. Seemed a likely spot for the Consortium portals. I dumped the scout in a heap and opened my hand to char his remains. His creators would be able to detect him, but Anne’s scent would burn off, and this scout wouldn’t be recycled. No threat I would have to see his ugly mug again.
My phone vibrated. I dug it out and listened until Sol’s voice stopped.
“Where are you?” I asked.
I snapped the phone shut and headed the bike out of the culvert. Anne would have to wait.
***
He appeared out of nowhere.
I’d always envied invisibility, but didn’t possess the skill. I was waiting, clearly visible, in the back storage room of Talia’s shelter. Evidently, Sol had done some research since I’d found Jez. Uncertain whether to be concerned for Tally or pleased he’d picked such an obscure location, I opened first. “No shot to the head. No offensive strike?” My sarcasm didn’t even make a dent in the deadpan expression on Sol’s face.
“How did you know?”
I could dicker around with him, but since he’d come this far over the line by requesting to talk to me, I opted for honesty. “I can smell the genetic similarity.” I leaned back against the crates and let out a breath.
“She’s impetuous. Smart, motivated, and too ready to go off half-cocked for her own good.” With a shake of his head, he leaned against the wall opposite me.
“Maybe the truth would buy you time?”
He wasn’t impressed. “The truth would provoke too many questions, create too many other problems.”
“And the Irin?”
“Problems.” He glanced away, his reluctance to let this out reflected in every tense muscle in his face. “Every society has issues. Ours is no different.”
A grab for power and prestige in the group deemed fit to judge everyone else?
“She’s unprepared for what she’ll meet there.” He glanced back. The first frank expression I’d seen crossed his face and aged him. “She needs the protection of her change to safeguard her.”
“Her mother?”
He closed his eyes and sank to a bench opposite me. I felt the odd dismissal I did sometimes with Naberius, another individual who possessed too much age and wisdom to bother communicating with the kid in the room. When he looked up, a gloss of tears shielded his eyes, at odds with the soft curve of joy in his smile. “Such color. Only twenty-two and so vibrant. She provided life in a bleak world where I’d seen only black and white, bad and evil, greed, and the fiercest of betrayal.”
I noticed the comparison had gone downhill fast, and his vehemence accentuated the final statement. Jezrielle’s mother must have been a complication for Sol’s role, but one couldn’t go through an eternity and never touch life. His tone implied unsanctioned joy, a forbidden relationship, but the girl had been of age. Granted he probably had a thousand years on her, but she wasn’t a child. So had the pregnancy been the break of protocol or the relationship with the mother, another immortal? “Jez’s mother, she was Irin as well?”
His shoulders sagged. “So young.” He took a long breath. “I found her by accident. Some of the youngest of our people already had a history of violent infighting, so I hid her. I never really intended—but she—we—”
I let him sit in silence, tried to get a picture in my head of his people and how love and children were a bad thing in anyone’s world.
“When she became pregnant, my entire focus changed. I didn’t just hide her; I was determined to keep her. We moved constantly, lived our lives alone in quiet, distant places.” He bent his head, his palms out in front of him, so lost in misery it looked as if he were seeing his flesh for the first time. I could feel his thick sorrow all the way across the room. “They searched for us. For me. I took risks, pushed our limits to the edge of civilization.”
I could figure out the next part on my own, but I let him go on. The emotions radiated off him in layers of pain, grief, and joy. He had probably never voiced his story, the little he parted with now, to anyone e
lse. Given the degeneration of his body, he might not get another chance.
“She died giving birth to Jezrielle. Only three more months and she would have reached twenty-three. She would have been safe.” His fist clenched in his lap. “And still they looked for me.”
“So you brought Jez back and hid her with another family.”
“It seemed safer.”
“When her family was murdered?”
“You can’t imagine the amount of blood at the scene.” His mouth puckered in remembrance. “Such rage.”
“You suspected your own people.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Are the gains so great that they’d murder innocent people? Children?”
He stiffened, glanced back, and a little arrogance slid back into place. “Like demons have some righteous place to stand in judgment? You’ve all been mankind’s nightmares for millennia.”
“Demon fathers are the caretakers of their children. Offspring are so rare they are cherished and revered before anyone in the clan, including our leaders.” I didn’t bother to add that demon females typically abandoned their young. His holier-than-thou attitude irritated me, and he wasn’t on a need-to-know basis for the practices of demon society.
He held up a hand with a sigh. “It doesn’t matter. I gave up my right to judge a long time ago. My people are, for the most part, decent. Distant, but decent. It is the few who cause the concern.” He rubbed his hand across his face. “I am not here to fight with you.”
“What do you want from me, Sol?”
“To help me save my daughter. To make sure she reaches her twenty-third birthday. To help me ensure someone doesn’t take her from this earth before she is safe.”
“You could have included Decibel in this talk. She’s the reason I found Jez.”
The corner of his mouth turned down. “She’s a demon.”
“So am I. Maybe watered down and definitely neophyte, but I fail to see the difference.”
He shrugged. “I’m aware I may have no choice on the other one. She seems determined to connect herself to you. But she was correct. You are different.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
“Patience and temperance. Two qualities I don’t have, but I know them when I see them.” Sol paused. “I do not believe you would harm my daughter, Kane. I do not believe you would stand by and watch her die.”
The conversation had taken a decidedly uncomfortable turn, and I chose to throw the last elephant in the room between us. “How long do you have?
He met my gaze and shrugged. “You are quite different. What can you tell?”
“Degradation of your major organs, nonexistent cell regeneration, and there’s something off with the scent of your blood.” I’d smelled the encroachment of death from him when I’d stepped off the elevator in my apartment earlier this afternoon.
His eyes flashed wider, and then he took a breath and nodded. “Straightforward. I tried to save Jezrielle’s mother and gave her my blood. My health became suspect a short while later. Some things even we aren’t meant to survive.”
“So this isn’t the normal end for an Irin?”
He shook his head.
“Have you trained Jez in any of the skills she will assume? I gather invisibility is one, but she doesn’t shield herself. Instead, you do that for her.”
“I didn’t tell her of her heritage until very recently. There hasn’t been time to indoctrinate her. I’m not even sure she can access some of these skills before she turns.” He rubbed both hands across his face and looked every bit an overwhelmed and frightened father.
“You should tell her who she is. To you.”
His brown eyes hardened. “Not your call, Kane. You’re not at liberty to divulge any of this information.”
“Ever?” I couldn’t help but push him. He wanted impossible things performed in a vacuum. I’m a firm believer in the more knowledge, the better. “It’s a condition of my help.”
He swallowed hard, the look of heat-laden anger back with a new tension in his face. Pinning Sol into a corner wasn’t something I relished. Not even smart. Because even though I was pretty sure he wouldn’t win the fight, I would have major damage in the battle of wills and bodies. But if Jez was to survive, she needed weapons. The truth would be a good start.
“You’re an asshole.”
Hardly a new observation. “Yeah, well, my psychological makeup can withstand your disdain. All you need to do is tell her she’s your daughter.”
Evidently it was the hardest job Sol had ever contemplated. His jaw clamped together so hard I was surprised I couldn’t hear his teeth grind.
“If I do this, I have your promise?”
“You tell her, and I’ll have a much better shot at convincing her she needs my help.”
“You’ll make sure she reaches her change?” He pushed the words, his volume rising with his insistence, though the end petered off in more desperation than anger. “She has less than four years. Then she’ll be safe. Promise me.”
“Why does my word means something to you?” I crossed my arms over my chest, not really challenging him but curious.
His eyes flared, and he raised his chin to me. “Honor. I can still sense it, sometimes. Promise me.”
When had my moral standards become a thing of public record? It gave me pause. Yet the fact that Sol didn’t expect to be there for most of Jez’s final journey took precedence. “I’ll do everything I can to make sure she survives. Short of self-destruction.”
The growl he gave me wasn’t satisfaction, but he added a curt nod, and his posture deflated with my verbal John Hancock.
The vibration in my pocket grabbed my attention. I gave him a searching look before I checked my phone. His face had paled with his expression shaken. The conversation had sucked the lifeblood from him. I didn’t smell immediate death. He had time. For selfish reasons, I wanted that time to be as long as possible. For more compassionate reasons, I hoped Jez would have enough time with her father. “Is there anything that can be done?”
He closed his eyes, shook his head, and wiped a hand across his face. “Too far gone.”
I glanced at my text message, then slid the phone back and headed for the door, only to turn back. “Don’t overthink it, Sol. Just tell her.”
CHAPTER 11
It took me a good twenty minutes to get from Tally’s place to the Walmart in question.
Timing was always key with sightings, but Chaz’s text had upped the ante with a sighting just before dark and a strange message. Where the F* r u?
I’d responded and queried his location. He’d delayed, not giving an address and instead providing the nearby crossroads, some five streets from the Botanical Gardens as a pinpoint. Not standard notification or procedure. Both worried me. If Chaz had arrived at the location already, given his written scream to me, he was flying solo without backup.
I can’t claim a tight bond, but I’d shielded Chaz more than once in altercations with sorcerers. He’d actually dragged my unconscious body away from a burning building after one battle fallout. Granted, his rough treatment delivered more bruises to my head than the beam that had knocked me unconscious, but I consider all efforts of good faith worthy of merit.
Given his youth, he couldn’t withstand a full-on assault, which had me pushing the speed limit. Three hundred sounds old, but demons aren’t born fully vested, any more than humans. Chaz didn’t have a blink of the firepower Abraxas’s seven thousand years merited, much less Shalim’s. And Shalim had almost fallen to the Consortium when I entered the clan picture over a dozen years ago.
I forced the bike faster; grateful the city’s nightlife traffic didn’t impact my backstreet route, and scanned for incoming vehicles while I judiciously ran red lights. I’d need the freeway soon but, for the time being, I was making more headway without it.
The quick flick of one streetlight to the next blended into one thin stream of white horizontal flame. My mind pushed away images unsuccessfully. The liquid move
ment of the light mimicked too closely to a flicker of flame in my memories.
Fifteen years old, my throat raw from lack of fluids and my bones pressed against the crinkle of my skin, muscle long since atrophied, I had crawled through rock tunnels following a thin stream of water to a final dead end. The water had escaped through a narrow fissure, but I remained huddled in the niche of rock, prepared to die in the darkness. Cold resignation had surpassed fear as my predominant emotion.
No more effort, no more struggle. I was more than willing to release my glimmer of hope for a final resting place. I had pressed my palm against the wall, a brace as I angled my cheek deeper into the spit of water that made the escape I couldn’t.
The rock gave way. My body flailed, and the shock of flame was so bright to my unexposed retinas that it shielded me from witnessing the fall. The impact of debris to my head forced unconsciousness, relieving me from more pain until a sharp poke at my side and a scrape over raw flesh tingled along my nerves.
Water doused my body, but I couldn’t muster a flinch. The roar and cackle of sound, laughter and garbled speech, brutalized my ears, the sounds a pressure in my brain as well as outside my head. Neither invaded my body’s need for peace and retreat. The vibration of the beings that surrounded me, so different from human, only lulled me back to whatever stood in for sleep. Or death.
I had learned later that they’d left me alone to my fate when unable to get a rise out of me.
Eventually, I had worked one eye open to view my final surroundings, the flicker and flare from a fire in the distance, a vision of sunlight and butter. The warmth was so far from my own skin I couldn’t even fantasize about comfort as seizures from the cold moved down my arms and legs. Spasms shook my muscles, tightened my jaw, and pulled a small feral sound from somewhere deep inside my chest.
They had thrown a jacket over me, maybe to strangle me into silence or just to shield my disgusting body from their sight. Whichever goal, the result had covered me in a smell so foul I’d lost what little I held in my stomach.
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