Now might be the time to make a break for it.
"Hey, freak! Where do you think you're going?”
The question, issued in a sneering shout, was definitely as unattractive as the new mood of the crowd, but what concerned Abby was that it sounded as if it had come from right next to her hidey-hole.
Mouthing another prayer and wishing she'd worn her rosary to work that morning, she braced the palms of her hands against the gritty pavement and peeked into the street.
She craned her head to the side until she could see the designer sneakers and baggy, beat-up blue jeans of the young man who had just spoken. Her gaze traveled up the jeans and over the muscular, tattooed arms that looked as if they'd been drawn on by a three-year-old with ADD and a morbid imagination. The hoodlum wore a basketball jersey at least three sizes too big, and if she hadn't seen the patchy stubble covering his acne-marked face, she would have pegged him as too young to grow a beard. Revising her estimate of his chronological age upward and his emotional age downward, she pegged him as old enough to know better but clearly too stupid to care.
He had been leaning against the car to Abby's left, but he and his two identically aggressive yet empty-headed companions pushed away from it. Like a wall of muscle and menace, they shifted their stances to loom over a slim teenager with wide brown eyes and two stubby little horns peeking out from among his mud-colored curls.
Sweet Lord.
Abby's stomach twisted in time with her conscience. The kid wasn't human. You'd think an Other would know better than to go wandering through this neighborhood tonight. Just because Terry hadn't gotten a chance to file a story about the demonstrations before he ran screaming into the night didn't mean the news outlets wouldn't have mentioned them. And that meant walking into the middle of one of those riots without even trying to blend in with the human crowd came close to suicidal—not to mention idiotic. What, the kid didn't own a baseball cap?
"I-I'm sorry?" the Other stammered, looking confused.
"You should be." Hoodlum number one's friends snickered at his witticism and egged him on. "Little unnatural freak like you ought to apologize for breathing the same air as us humans.”
The three thugs took a menacing step forward, and Abby winced. The Other just stood there, wide-eyed and vulnerable, like a brain-damaged gazelle in a pack of hyenas. Why didn't he run or turn into a werewildebeest or cast a spell or something? If he wasn't going to be human, shouldn't he at least know how to defend himself against them? Or against, you know, anything? It's not like Abby would have taken a stroll through a gathering of werewolves without a silver bullet or two on hand.
"Pardon me?”
"Yeah, you should apologize." The ringleader bared his teeth and flexed his tattoos as he turned to sneer at his friends. "I think Goat Boy is starting to get the idea.”
The other two stooges began to sidle around the sides of the Other, penning him between them and the line of parked cars.
"I wonder what else we could teach him?" thug number two said.
"How 'bout a lesson?" thug number three growled, just before he took the first swing.
Stifling a surprisingly girlish squeak, Abby fumbled with her pockets, searching for her cell phone. She wasn't quite sure what she was going to tell the emergency services operator—"Yes, I know the police are already on the scene, but could you just send them two blocks down, please? Tell them to look for a beige Dodge Dart and an orange Chevelle with an idiot on a cell phone hunkered down between them"?—but she couldn't just sit there and watch three jerks kick the crap out of someone half their size.
The kid might not be human, but he was still a person, right? That's what all the press conferences and news releases and public-service announcements the Others had been airing for the past few weeks had been saying anyway, and Abby liked to think she kept an open mind.
She patted herself down, searching from pocket to pocket, until her stomach took a sharp dive straight into her tennis shoes.
She'd left her cell phone in the van.
She remembered now. Terry had borrowed it to call the station and beg Gus one more time for a real cameraman, not that it had done him any good. Then, instead of handing it back to her, he'd set it down on the center console while he gave her a crash course in operating the clunky old video cam. She should have dropped the darned thing on his head and caught the first subway back to her apartment. As it was, she'd dropped it anyway when Terry had taken off, and she'd been too busy looking for a place to hide to worry what happened to it.
Torn between Good Samaritanism and self-preservation, Abby eyed the distance between her and the van, then looked back at the violence blocking her way, tempted to write this whole thing off as a clear example of the principle of every man for himself.
She'd almost done it, too, when she saw the third hoodlum land a punch to the Other's kidney that had the kid staggering backward with a pained cry. That's when her conscience kicked into overdrive and her common sense went on a three-week cruise to Bimini. Maybe her brother had been right when he told her she'd spent too many weekends in Sunday school....
Her legs protested as she slowly rose from her concealing crouch into a slightly more upright crouch that she hoped would not gain her any unwanted attention. She had no plans to stick her face in the way of any of those flying fists, but if she could sneak past them, she could make a run for the van, call 911, and be back in her apartment without a pit stop in jail or the hospital.
Keeping her head down and her back against the Chevelle, Abby crossed her fingers and slowly, an inch at a time, began to ease past the commotion. She made it about three and a half feet before another wolf's howl—this one sounding a lot closer than last time—sliced through the air and had all four brawlers turning toward the source of the sound.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the source was a couple dozen yards behind Abby.
She froze like a deer in headlights. She probably looked like one, too, halted in midstep with her eyes wide open and focused on the danger barreling toward her at top speed. While she watched, the hoodlums saw her, shouted something foul, and looked fully intent on making her rethink that trip to the emergency room.
They didn't even manage a step forward. Something rumbled, deep and threatening, behind Abby, something that had the three hoodlums raising their gazes above her head and turning whiter than bedsheets.
The Other, though, never got past staring at Abby. His brown eyes locked with her mismatched ones and widened. She saw his lips move, but a third howl made it impossible to hear what he said. By the time the cry had faded, all she could hear was more of that low, menacing growl and the disgusting, if unoriginal, epithets spat out by the thugs.
"They're freakin' werewolves!" thug three screamed, his voice suddenly high-pitched and girlish.
"Dude, run!" yelled number one, leaving the last remaining attacker to half-throw, half-shove the Other in Abby's direction before taking off like Satan and all the hounds of hell were following close behind.
Abby saw the whole thing happen, almost like a frame-by-frame analysis. She saw when the hoodlum grabbed the Other by his shirt collar, half-lifted him off the ground, and started to pitch him toward her, but she couldn't move fast enough. The startled Other went airborne and slammed into her, knocking her back to the pavement and driving the air out of her lungs. Just before her head bounced twice on the unforgiving asphalt, the Other caught her eyes again and—for some disturbing reason— smiled.
Great, Abby thought. I just risked my neck for a horny lunatic.
CHAPTER TWO
Whoever had coined the phrase "hell on earth" had known whereof he spoke. As far as Rule could see, the situation here made the Below look like a summer vacation spot.
Tahiti, the French Riviera, the Underworld. Package deals available.
Dark eyes narrowed, Rule scanned the crowded Manhattan street, trying to sense the presence of anything unusual. He could feel the fragile pulse of humanity, the eart
hy richness of shape-shifters, the sparking energy of magic users, and beneath it all he scented just the faintest whiff of fiend.
If anyone was to recognize that particular odor, it would be Rule. Fiends and demons had lived side by side in the Below for millennia now, evolving into separate races the denizens of the world Above neither recognized nor understood.
While humans used the term "demon" to refer to the warped and twisted beings of evil they depicted in their stories and films, in reality the demons were simply supernatural beings who had once upon a time served as the messengers for all living races.
What the humans called demons the demons themselves more properly classified as "fiends," creatures of pure and voracious evil.
Since the end of the Fae-Demon Wars when the defeated had been banished to live in the Below, demons and fiends had struggled to master that world for their own ends. While the demons' ends involved an orderly and organized society, the fiends focused more on gaining and hoarding power until they could use it as a springboard to grant them permanent entrance into the human world. It had been this way for so long that no one could remember the first demon who had placed himself in the path of the fiends who wanted the freedom to come and go from the earthly plane as they wished, snacking on the human hearts that grew there in abundance. Rule only knew that he and the others like him descended from a long line of demon warriors whose job it was to keep the fiends in line and stop them from wreaking havoc on the vulnerable humans.
A week ago, that had seemed a hell of a lot easier.
Of course, a week ago, Rule had been leading a Watch troop of warriors like himself in an elaborate and highly effective surveillance operation. For months they had monitored a small but ambitious fiend lord who seemed to be making plans to start a war in the Below. Unhappy with the restraints against murder, mayhem, and torture placed on him by his demonic rulers, Uzkiel had gathered to him an army of like-minded and violent fiends who believed that by destroying the ruling parliament of demons, they would be free to take over the Below and turn the Underworld into a true vision of hell. Rule intended to keep that from happening, and his surveillance team, with the help of a minor fiend-turned-snitch, had been doing a damned fine job meeting that goal.
But that was last week, before one of Rule's lieutenants had been killed, Uzkiel and his ringleaders had gone into hiding, and Rule's snitch had disappeared. Now Rule didn't even need a handbasket to get to hell; he'd already arrived and unpacked.
Ironically, hell looked a lot like the Garment District.
Judging by the signs on the cross streets and the tour of Manhattan that the Council of Others had given him the last time he'd been here, this was the Garment District. This time, however, the streets he vaguely remembered overflowed with loud, unruly human demonstrators and frustrated, angry Other counter-protesters.
Rule had advised the Others from the beginning that revealing themselves to the humans was a bad idea. He'd foreseen a future a lot like this, although in his imagination there had been more weapons and a lot more blood. As far as he could tell, the Others were getting off lightly for rocking the boat of the world in which they lived. From what he remembered of humans, they tended to react first by killing anything they didn't understand.
Sometimes he wondered why folk like him went so far out of their way to protect the contrary things.
Impatient, Rule glanced once more through the crowd, his gaze skimming past the humans and Others around him.
The human world was not his favorite vacation spot, but then, he wasn't currently on vacation. He had come Above because he'd gotten a lead that told him his missing snitch might be hiding out up here. It wasn't a bad plan for the informant, considering that few fiends managed to make their way to the surface without being stopped by Rule or one of the other demon hunters like him. The only way for fiends to get into the human world was to be invited, which usually meant answering the call of a summoner and exchanging services to him for the chance to see things Above. That naturally tended to limit the number of fiends or demons in the Above at any given time. On the surface, the snitch would have to spend a lot less time looking over his shoulder for the minions of the fiends he had betrayed.
The trouble materialized when Rule looked below the surface. Those limits on the travel of fiends into the human plane should have kept his snitch out of it, especially, Rule imagined, since a summoner would not have any reason to call on that particular and extremely minor entity. The fiend had to have found another way into the Above, which was something Rule intended to ask it about just as soon as he got his hands on it.
Rule just hoped the snitch was counting on the limits to keep away both its pursuers and a demon hunter determined to bring it back Below.
Not many on their home plane realized that Rule had been issued a standing invitation to the human world in thanks for his assistance with a problem the Others had been having last year before their Unveiling. As long as the snitch didn't know about it, it wouldn't be expecting Rule to have followed it to Manhattan. That might be the only advantage the demon got.
Stifling a growl, Rule started forward again, keeping to the shadows of the buildings lining the street and walking deeper into the crowd of anti-Other protesters. He knew there was a fiend here and hoped like hell it was his snitch. Rule needed to find the little shit before one of the fiend assassins who'd been sent after it did. The information the snitch provided had kept the Below out of a war for months now, and Rule wasn't inclined to let one break out now.
The problem was finding the fiend in the sea of bodies around him. The fire currently burning in a vacant building down the street filled the air with the scent of flame and ash, obscuring the fiend's natural charred aroma. It wouldn't be impossible to track it by scent, but Rule didn't want to rely on just one sense.
His gaze scanned the crowd, looking for anything unusual. He had no idea what the fiend looked like at the moment, which wasn't helping, but if it was in this crowd, then it would be blending in. It had probably hitched a ride in some unsuspecting human's body, taking possession of a portable hiding place as it moved through the crowd. That meant Rule would have to use a more refined sense than his usual five to locate the snitch.
Or maybe not.
Feeling his spine stiffen, Rule honed in on a small knot of humans standing in the street a little more than a block away. The humans themselves didn't interest the demon, but the figure that walked briskly past them, hands shoved in pockets and chin tucked to chest, did. On top of the young man's curly head, two small, blunted horns poked out from a mess of brown curls, and around him Rule picked up a thin haze of smoke and magic.
Score.
Shrugging his shoulders under the long coat he wore to conceal the armament he carried, Rule locked his gaze on the young Other and strode forward. Time to catch a fiend.
CHAPTER THREE
Something was seriously wrong.
Rule saw the young, horned Other surrounded by the three human thugs and stepped up his pace. Only his demonically keen vision let him see the group standing nearly three blocks away from him, but the distance didn't affect his instincts. Those were on high alert. The itch on the back of his neck and the faint whiff of sulfur in his nostrils told him that the Other was someone he didn't want to lose track of, and that included seeing him beaten to death on a darkened street corner.
If this was Rule's lucky night, the kid was currently playing flophouse to his missing demon; and if not, then the Other had at least bumped into someone with a bad attitude and ties to the Below. At this point, even that slim lead made Rule's nipples hard. There were times when a demon had to take his thrills where he found them.
The small group stood too far away for Rule to hear what they were saying, but judging by the look on the kid's face and the flexing of the thugs' muscles, whatever the topic of conversation, it wasn't making anyone very happy. Not Rule, not when he saw thugs number two and three start to ease their way around the Other's sid
es, circling him like a buffet table. And especially not when a small, tentative stir of movement between two parked cars next to the brewing altercation caught Rule's eye.
He couldn't put his finger on why he noticed the tiny shift of light and shadow; there definitely wasn't anything about the figure who had caused the movement that should have drawn his attention. It was a human woman, and he didn't think he'd ever seen one that looked less interested in drawing anyone's attention.
She had hidden herself in the narrow space between two cars, and even from a distance, her small stature forced Rule to scan his gaze down toward her toes in order to determine whether or not she was anything more than a child. The curves visible beneath her faded sweatshirt and grungy jeans made that call for him. Still, she shouldn't have stood out.
Her hiding place pretty much sucked, but she looked like the type who didn't need to hide, since she already blended into the scenery. She had ash-brown hair and medium-fair skin and an average body that never should have held Rule's attention, but for some reason, he couldn't look away.
He had lived close to a thousand years and seen the sort of women who made the battle over Helen of Troy look like a schoolyard scuffle not worth the effort. He'd seen female shifters with the sort of feline grace that made being in heat a permanent state for any male, and witches who could steal a man's breath without ever casting a spell.
He couldn't even see this human woman's face, but he suspected if he had, it would have been as ordinary as the rest of her. The most interesting thing about her seemed to be the fact that she had gotten caught up in the middle of a riot in a city going mad. But when Rule looked at her, the itch on his neck intensified and crawled down his spine like an army of stinging insects.
Something about this situation was very not right.
The Others 03: The Demon You Know Page 2
