Hell. There was definitely something out there.
The poor guy stared at me as if he expected me to turn into a monster. I couldn’t blame him. Regular people aren’t programmed to accept the arrival of a horror movie in their hometown. Usually the Nephilim didn’t leave anyone alive, so we didn’t have to deal with the zombielike behavior of a survivor. Which only made me wonder all the more about what kind of beastie we were dealing with.
The old man wasn’t as old as I’d first believed. The way he walked, the mumbling, the white hair hinted at seven or eight decades on this earth. But his face appeared more like forty-five, and I realized that what he’d seen had aged him, perhaps overnight.
“Anything?” Summer asked.
I nodded, then jerked my head at the guy, and she flicked her fingers, shooting fairy dust from the tips.
I’d wished on several occasions that I possessed the talent to dispense magical sparkles and make people obey my every unvoiced command, but I couldn’t.
As soon as the twinkling particles—invisible to anyone but us—hit the guy’s face, his eyes cleared, his back straightened, and he walked off with the gait of a much younger man.
“He won’t remember?” I asked.
Summer’s answer was a withering stare. Of course he wouldn’t remember.
“What are we dealing with?” Summer pressed.
“I don’t know.”
She frowned. “No whispers? Not a flash?”
“No.”
“Huh,” she said.
“Yeah.” I thought of the amulet still sitting on the seat of the car.
Did whatever was stalking this town have an amulet of its own? Otherwise why hadn’t I seen the monster in a vision, or heard Ruthie’s whisper as soon as we rolled past the city limits?
Loud voices drew our attention to the other end of the street where several people carried on a heated conversation. Lots of hand gestures in the direction of the distant mountains, the pantomime of picking up a rifle, sighting and shooting. It appeared that more than one citizen had met up with the thing in the hills.
Another man, and a woman wearing a bright green, sleeveless sundress, joined the crowd. I admired the high neckline, and the interesting heart-shaped cutout that revealed her chest and just a hint of cleavage. The man continued the argument with more gesticulating and extensive miming of weaponry. The woman remained silent; she looked a little drugged.
“What do you think?” Summer asked.
“I think you’d better zap them, too.” If they went into the mountains with conventional weapons, they were going to get killed.
“I don’t understand this,” I muttered as we headed for the crowd. “I haven’t heard anything; I haven’t seen anything. And if Jimmy’s in town, the demon in the caves should be dead by now.”
Before he’d had his mini-breakdown, Jimmy had been the best hunter in the federation. He wouldn’t have needed me to tell him that something wicked had come to Barnaby’s Gap.
“You’re sure he’s here?” I asked.
Summer flicked a huge cloud of fairy dust over the assembled throng. Instead of walking away with a very bad case of short-term memory loss, the group stilled as if they were the best cadre of freeze-tag players in the country.
“Am I sure Jimmy’s here?” Summer repeated, and approached the woman in the green dress. She tugged down the mock turtleneck to reveal familiar puncture wounds before her gaze met mine.
“I’m sure,” she said.
CHAPTER 5
Summer clapped her hands, and the people wandered off without ever looking in our direction.
I felt as frozen as the townsfolk had been. Jimmy was the demon in the mountains. Now what was I going to do?
Kill him, most likely.
“We need to get the names of the seers out of him before—” I paused at Summer’s gasp.
“You can’t kill him!”
“Oh, yeah, I can.”
“You love him.”
“What’s love got to do with it?”
Maybe I did still love Jimmy. Probably. But I hated him, too. He’d hurt me so many times in so many ways. Not more than a month ago, he’d kept me as his sex slave; he’d nearly killed me. That he’d been possessed by a medieval vampire witch—a strega—who just happened to be his dear old dad was beside the point.
Jimmy was a dhampir—part vampire, part human— a breed. He had many vampire characteristics—blinding speed, incredible strength, and the ability to heal just about anything—combined with a dhampir’s talent at identifying creatures of the night. However, once he’d shared blood with Daddy, his vampire nature had been aroused. He’d gone off to try and put it back. From the appearance of Barnaby’s Gap, he hadn’t had much luck.
I turned, headed for my duffel, where I’d not only stowed the silver knife, but also, since we were traveling by car, the gun I’d retrieved from the safe.
I knew how to kill a dhampir. Strike twice in the same way. Last time, I’d only managed to stake the bastard once. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“He hasn’t killed anyone,” Summer hurried along at my side.
“We don’t know that.”
She stopped dead, and I did, too, though I have no idea why. Her fairy dust didn’t work on me.
“He wouldn’t,” Summer said, “and I’ll prove it.” She spun on her boot heels and clippety-clopped back down the sidewalk.
Pausing a few storefronts away, she glanced at the sign, barnaby’s gap medical clinic.
Ah, hell. What was she up to?
Before I could ask, she yanked a wallet out of the back pocket of her jeans—how she could have squeezed a wallet in there along with her ass, I wasn’t quite sure, had to be magic—and opened the door.
I joined her as she flipped the thing open and snapped, “FBI. Have there been any unexplained deaths?”
I probably gaped as badly as the young man at the reception desk. Except he was gaping at her face, I was gaping at the ID. It seemed pretty real to me.
“I—uh, well. Hmm. I don’t rightly know. You’d better talk to the doctor, Agent—” He leaned over, squinting at the ID. “Tink.” He disappeared into the back.
“Agent Tink?” I asked. “You think that’s funny?”
“Hilarious,” Summer said, though her lips were tight and her eyes weren’t laughing, either.
I lowered my voice to just above a whisper. “Where did you get that ID?”
“Where do you think?”
I opened my mouth to demand an answer, then shut it again. What did it matter where she’d gotten it—if it was real or if it was magic?
“You think DKs can just wander around killing people?” she continued.
I hadn’t really thought about it at all. And I didn’t think Nephilim were people. Not anymore.
Except they looked human, led human lives in order to blend in, cause the most havoc. When they disappeared, questions would be asked, even though, for the most part, Nephilim disintegrated into ashes if you killed them the right way. No body solved a lot of problems, but not all of the problems, and in a lot of cases, no body probably only served to create a different set of problems.
“Sometimes, even with the seers’ visions to guide us,” Summer continued, “we have to hunt these things down. It helps to have a free pass.” She wiggled her wallet.
“Why don’t you just hit everyone with glitter dust and make them spill everything in their heads?”
“Compelling people to tell me information gets me just the information.”
“And that’s bad why?”
“I don’t get impressions, thoughts, feelings, which, when dealing with the supernatural, are important. For instance, if someone saw something bizarre and rationalized it away as most people do, they wouldn’t tell me about it if I hit them with the truth dust.”
“But they’ll tell the FBI about the demon in the mountains?”
“You’d be surprised what people will tell the FBI.”
> Somehow, I doubted that.
“What happens if a person checks with the bureau about the unbelievably pretty agent who was asking some very strange questions?”
Summer cast me another withering glance and I understood.
“You hit them with a dose of ‘forget me now’ as soon as you’re done.”
She winked and turned to greet the doctor.
Dr. Gray personified the Hollywood version of a small-mountain-town physician. Tall and thin, his hair matched his name. His eyes, also gray, were bright and avid behind round wire-rimmed glasses.
“Never had the FBI knock on my door before,” he said with the slight accent common to the border states.
“We won’t take much of your time,” Summer said. “Have there been any unexplained deaths in the area over the past month?”
“None.”
Summer cast me a triumphant glance.
“Is there a hospital nearby?” I asked. Seemed to me that a hospital would be the place to ask questions about unexplained deaths, not the local physician.
“Not for a good sixty miles.”
“So.” Summer continued, “any death certificates would be signed by . .. ?”
“Me,” Dr. Gray answered. “I’m the only game in town, doctorwise, so I act as the medical examiner. Bodies go right from here to the funeral home.”
“No morgue?”
“No need.” The doctor contemplated Summer for several seconds. “Though I doubt this would concern you, we have had a strange rash of animal attacks. People are so traumatized they can’t remember anything but red eyes. Descriptions sound like a bear. Which has started people whispering about the Ozark Black Howler.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Legendary creature that wanders the hills.”
I glanced at Summer; she no longer looked so cheery. In our world, legendary being meant “Nephilim,” and they were real. We’d have to be on the lookout for a howler, too. Just in case.
“They’re bear-sized,” the doctor continued, “with black shaggy hair and horns. Cry is somewhere between a wolf’s howl and an elk’s call. But I’ve never heard of the howler biting anyone.”
“People have been bitten?” My question was nothing but a lead; I’d already seen the evidence.
“Yes. Which is strange since howlers usually drop people dead in their tracks just by glancing at them.”
“The wounds, Doctor?” I prompted.
“Oh, yes. The wounds are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Animals rip and tear. People … well, people would leave a recognizable upper and lower demarcation in the flesh. What we have are puncture wounds. Like someone’s trying to make us think there’s a vampire on the loose.”
I laughed, so did Summer. Dr. Gray did not.
“What’s the FBI’s interest in Barnaby’s Gap?” he asked. “No one’s been killed, so we aren’t talking psycho or serial.”
Summer’s fingers twitched. She wanted to blast him, but she needed more information first. “Can you tell us where this creature has been sighted?”
“The caves.” He walked to the window, pointed at the nearest, tree-covered peak. “West side of the ridge. Folks have been talking about going up, shooting anything that moves. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I didn’t, either, since shooting would probably just piss him off.
Jimmy could heal any wound, unless someone just happened to hit him with two bullets in the exact same place—and that place had to be a kill shot.
The only way for that to happen would be to get close enough to put a gun to his head or his chest and pop him twice. Jimmy might not be himself, but that didn’t mean he would let anyone with a gun come near him, even me.
“Legends say that to kill a howler you have to remove the head while it’s still alive.” The doctor let out a short, sharp laugh. “I’ve been trying to figure out how—”
Jazzy floating sparkles shot past my face and rained down on Dr. Gray, stopping him mid-conjecture. He continued to stare at the distant mountains as if we were no longer there. To him, we probably weren’t.
The inner door opened, and Summer flipped a hand over her shoulder, catching the assistant full in the face as he came into the room.
We slipped out without saying good-bye. I didn’t think we’d be considered rude since they’d both already forgotten who we were or that they’d ever spoken to us in the first place. We made our way back to the Impala.
“You drive,” Summer said.
She didn’t have to tell me twice. I leaped behind the wheel, fired her up, and drove away. Summer lifted her hands over her head. Fairy dust streamed down the center of town, swirling into doorways, dancing down the chimneys and through the open windows.
“That power is very handy,” I murmured.
“Forget it.” Summer placed her hands in her lap, kneading her fingers as if they ached. “I don’t swing that way.”
For a second I didn’t know what she meant. When it became clear, my face heated.
Not only was I psychometric with latent channeling abilities—I saw dead people, or at least Ruthie—I was also an empath. The common-variety empath feels what another person feels; they empathize. Of course I was not the common-variety anything. Instead I absorbed supernatural abilities through sex.
Yeah, I hadn’t been too happy about it, either.
“If you want the power so badly,” Summer continued, “and I can see why you might, I know someone who could help you.”
“Someone…” I began.
“Male.”
“A male fairy?”
“You think fairies are only female?” Summer reached for her cell phone. “I’ll call him. He wouldn’t mind.”
“I would.” I stayed her hand. She peered at me, confused. “Just because I can absorb powers doesn’t mean I should.”
“Then why have the talent?”
“It’s the only way we can win.”
I was going to need to be stronger than what I was to keep the Nephilim from overpowering the earth. Just being psychic wasn’t good enough. It certainly hadn’t been for Ruthie.
Nevertheless, I balked at blatantly screwing every breed I could find. And I’d been warned never to have sex with a Nephilim. I might absorb their evil as well as their strength. No one really knew how my empathy worked, and I wasn’t willing to take the chance and wind up batting for the other side.
I’d made a vow to myself that I’d only absorb powers that were absolutely necessary. I’d kind of hoped I wouldn’t need any more. Sure, that hope was far-fetched, but what hope wasn’t?
The highway curved upward, and we began the ascent to the top of the ridge where I assumed there’d be a sign: this way to the creepy caverns.
“I imagine everyone in Barnaby’s Gap is going to forget we ever rolled through?”
Summer nodded, still kneading her hands. “Along with anything spooky in the hills.”
“What if someone was out of town for the day? On vacation? Just couldn’t take Hicksville one more second?”
“If no one else remembers, they’ll forget eventually, too. It’s the nature of the human mind to rationalize.”
“What happens in the places you don’t go?” I wondered. “Jimmy doesn’t have forget-me talents.”
Because if he did, I’d have them, too.
“Like I said, people rationalize. Once the threat is gone, the memories fade, especially when those memories are so hard to believe in the first place. They’ll start to think they had a nightmare, a fever.”
“An entire town will rationalize away mass murder by monster?”
“Mass murder doesn’t happen.” I flinched, and she corrected herself. “Much.”
I’d seen mass murder, been too late to prevent it, and was still haunted by the images nearly every time I closed my eyes.
“DKs are sent at the first hint of a problem,” Summer continued, “if not earlier. The federation’s goal is to stop the Nephilim before they cause deat
h and destruction. Why else would all our seers be psychics?”
“Then what happened in Barnaby’s Gap?”
“Jimmy’s one of us.”
“So we weren’t warned that he’s snacking on the little people? Sounds like a breakdown in communication to me.”
“I saw him,” Summer said quietly.
My eyes narrowed, and my mouth tightened. I didn’t need reminding. “Why was that?” I asked. “You aren’t a seer.”
“And Jimmy’s not a Nephilim.”
“I’m not following.”
“If the powers that be had sent a flash of Jimmy to any of the seers, a DK would have been dispatched and he’d be dead. Obviously they don’t want him dead, hence the message to me.”
“Conveniently minus the intel that he’s gone off the deep end and started sucking on townspeople like a hungry six-month-old.”
“That was left out for a reason. We’re supposed to find him; we’re supposed to help him. We are not supposed to kill him.”
“The jury’s still out on that,” I said.
“Seems a little unfair since you’re the judge, the jury, and—” She broke off, biting her lip.
“The executioner?” I finished. “Got that right.”
“You want to punish him for something you don’t know all the facts on.”
“I know the facts, Summer. Jimmy shared blood with the strega; he became just like him. He started to kill people in that chrome tower in Manhattan. I know this because I was there. He kept me captive. He drank from me until I was too weak to fight back.”
And the only reason I’d survived was because Jimmy hadn’t known I had the power of empathy. He’d made me his sex slave in an attempt to take away first my will and then my life.
But the joke was on him, because in trying to hurt me, debase me, subjugate me, he’d actually made me stronger. When he’d taken my body, he’d given me his supernatural abilities. Those powers had allowed me to destroy the leader of the darkness.
“That wasn’t him,” she whispered.
“Walked like him, talked like him, looked like him.” I didn’t mention that it had fucked like him, too.
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