Mandy M. Roth - Magic Under Fire (Over a Dozen Tales of Urban Fantasy)

by Unknown

  He shifted his weight slightly, then breathed in. Her loft smelled of oiled wood and warm brick and the slight, subtle tang of the paints she used. It was a better resting place than many he had found over the millennia.

  And the woman beside him…

  As he’d thought, her hair looked glorious spread across the white pillowcase. He saw well enough in the dark that he didn’t need the faint illumination from the street lights outside to pick out the shadings of warm copper and deep russet in those curls, or to admire the half-hidden curve of her breasts beneath the sheets. A woman of some contradictions — so proper in public, yet so passionate once he got her alone.

  It somehow felt right to be here next to her in her bed. Samael didn’t follow Abigor’s modus vivendi of high-tailing it the second coitus was over, but he had to admit he tended to go home after sex when he could. Too many nights in a row of pretending to sleep inevitably got on his nerves. But for some reason, he didn’t think he’d mind as much if he were pretending next to Felicia.

  He closed his eyes again and lowered his arms to his sides, taking care not to shake the bed. Felicia stirred, but didn’t wake; her eyes remained shut, flickering with dreams behind the closed lids. It would take so very little effort to lean over and kiss her, to feel her lips come to life beneath his.

  He’d just begun to bend toward her when Abigor’s voice roared into his mind.

  Samael! Get here now! Shit just got real!

  At once Samael sat upright. He and Abigor tended to avoid nonverbal communication when they could — centuries of working together had led them to protect what privacy they could — but emergencies were an entirely different matter.

  What is it?

  Some lowlifes thought they’d spice up their Saturday night by shooting up a quinceañera. A fucking kid’s party, man! Got two definitely down and more on the way. Get your ass here now!

  He didn’t bother to curse. Instead, he eased himself out of Felicia’s bed. No point in gathering up his discarded clothing — the fastest way to be at Abigor’s side was in his true form.

  Assuming a demonic shape after a lengthy sojourn in his human body always felt like pulling on a heavy, ill-fitting suit of clothes. Cloven feet slipped a little on Felicia’s polished wood floor as he made his way to the balcony. He opened the French doors, unfurled his wings, and jumped.

  The night air caught him, updrafts from the streets below speeding his progress eastward. He didn’t question the instinct that led him to the shabby little street in Highland Park. Demons were always drawn to lost souls, like metal filings to a magnet.

  Hysterical screams met his ears, a staccato wail of human agony that beat against the sensitive membranes in his head. He came to earth outside a fence with a coating of faded white paint. On the sidewalk before him lay a young man, bright arterial blood splashing his neck and upper torso. His arms were covered in gang tattoos. A pistol was still clutched in his right hand.

  Close to death, but not yet all the way there. Samael knelt next to the stranger, feeling the pulses of agony and hatred and fear radiating out from him. Samael didn’t worry about the others on the street or clustered in the front yard; he knew no one could see him.

  No one except the man whose soul he’d come to claim.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  The young man’s dark eyes bulged. “No way, man,” he muttered. “Shit can’t be happening.”

  “Unfortunately, shit is happening. More to the point, it’s happening to you.”

  Samael had never enjoyed what came next; millions of repetitions over the years had never made the process palatable. Still, a job was a job.

  He laid a clawed hand against the dying man’s temple. At once the man began to thrash. Unknowing onlookers would only think he was suffering some sort of seizure as the life drained from his body. They couldn’t know it was the last struggle of a soul that had suddenly realized its destiny lay in a dark, unwanted place.

  Souls came in all colors, from pale gold to utter black. The dying gangbanger’s soul was a rusty brownish-black, the color of spent motor oil. It writhed in the darkness, unable to escape Samael’s grip.

  The demon didn’t bother to say anything else. This one needed to be dispatched quickly so Samael could return topside to provide additional backup if needed.

  An eternity, and a blink of an eye. That was how the trip to Hell had always felt…a return to darkness at once interminable and yet precipitous. In the gloom, sullen winds fanned flames that never spent themselves.

  One pool of blood was as good as another. Samael released his captive and watched the dark, vaguely man-shaped form plummet downward into an expanse of the viscous liquid. A scream rose from the soul just before its head was buried forever.

  At once Samael lifted his face, intent on his return to that shabby suburb of Los Angeles. Powerful wings drove him upward through Hell’s roiling clouds, through unending darkness. And then he was back topside. The faded streetlights on the rundown L.A. street almost blinded his dark-adapted eyes. He blinked.

  “It’s done,” Abigor said. He’d kept his human form; dark blood glistened on the sleeve of his windbreaker. He scowled. “That last little fucker bled all over my limited-edition Jordan jacket. Asswipe.”

  “What happened?”

  Abigor fished what looked like a leftover fast food napkin from his pocket and began wiping at the blood on his sleeve. “Told you what happened. Guess the girl whose party it was had a brother in a gang. Rival gangbangers thought it’d be a great idea to shoot the shit out of the place. I could’ve handled the first two, but then they started shooting back, and the body count started to go up. They only hit one more, though. I probably could’ve taken care of the situation after all, but thanks for getting my back.”

  “No problem,” Samael said automatically, then wondered if he really meant it. Sure, it had been a dicey situation, but, as he said, Abigor probably could have taken care of things on his own. And now Samael had to try to slip back into Felicia’s apartment, crawl into bed next to her, and hope she was a heavy sleeper. A really, really heavy sleeper.

  “Bad timing, huh?”

  “The worst.”

  Abigor’s teeth flashed in the half-hearted light from the street lamps. “So you did nail the redhead. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” Samael saw no reason to deny the fact, but he also didn’t see why he should go into any details.

  Sirens began to howl from a few streets over. It figured. Do a re-enactment of the OK Corral in a dumpy neighborhood in known gang territory, and the LAPD took its sweet time getting there. Have someone’s purse snatched outside the Beverly Center, and the whole damn department would be down there like a plague of locusts.

  Some things never changed.

  “Any collateral?” he asked.

  “Nope.” Abigor wadded up the bloody napkin and tossed it on the ground. No worries about the police collecting it for evidence; the only DNA residue they’d find would be from the man who’d bled to death on the demon’s jacket. “A couple of the bystanders got winged, but nothing critical. We’re done here.”

  With any luck, that would be it for the rest of the evening. Most likely several more people in L.A. would be earning themselves a one-way ticket to Hell later that night, but one-offs were no big deal. It was the mass killings that caused the real headaches.

  “I’ll be back at eight,” Samael said, referring to the hour when he went on duty. Usually the two of them met for coffee and a brief convo before Abigor went off to do whatever he did to fill the day. He was never terribly specific, but Samael knew Lakers games tended to figure prominently in his leisure activities.

  At least Sunday mornings tended to be quiet. Not a lot of drug deals gone bad or gang shoot-outs at eight a.m. on a Sunday.

  “Maybe the redhead will be up for round two when you get back,” Abigor offered, with a flash of teeth.

  Samael hoped so. Another blissful hour in Felicia’s arms might
help to get Hell’s stink out of his nostrils. But he only nodded, then launched himself into the hard black sky. Miles away, a sleeping woman waited for him, and now all he wanted was to lie at her side once more.

  FELICIA FROZE. That had definitely been some sort of unwelcome noise — not the constant background murmur of traffic, or even the low, harsh beat of a police helicopter’s rotors. No, this sounded almost like someone bumping into her coffee table.

  Her first instinct was to remain where she lay and hope the burglar or prowler or whoever it was out there would grab whatever valuable he sought and then get out without ever realizing a woman lay sleeping in the alcove behind the rice paper screens. But then she felt the empty spot in the bed next to her and realized it must have been Sam who’d made the noise. He probably had to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water or something else equally prosaic.

  She gave a little sigh of relief, then eased herself out of bed. Her foot met her abandoned underpants, and she paused to pull them on. In the bottom drawer of her bedside table she kept a collection of ratty tank tops reserved for sleepwear, and she grabbed one of those as well. Sure, she’d just had the best sex of her life with the guy, but that didn’t mean she felt comfortable enough to be parading around naked in front of him.

  After pulling the tank top over her head, she stepped out past the screen. Then she stopped short, breath strangling in her throat and adrenaline exploding through her veins like napalm.

  She had to be dreaming. She just thought she’d woken up. She must still be asleep.

  For what she saw could only have come from a nightmare.

  The sole source of illumination in the loft was from the lights of the city outside, and so she could see nothing in detail. Only the vague outlines of enormous leathery wings. Blurred points on the top of his head that might have been horns. And a sudden gleam of red eyes, a crimson glare that met her shocked gaze and was immediately extinguished.

  Felicia opened her mouth — to what? Gasp? Scream? She wasn’t even sure. She didn’t know what she saw, because even as her mind tried to put a word to the horrific vision in front of her, it melted away. Sam stood there, holding a pair of black underpants.

  “Sorry,” he said, his tone casual, as if an escapee from a Bosch painting hadn’t just been standing in the middle of the loft. “I tried not to wake you up. Just wanted some water.”

  “What — ” The word came out as a sort of strangled gasp, and she swallowed. “Didn’t you see that?”

  “See what?”

  She supposed there was always the possibility that she’d somehow gone stark raving mad between the time she fell asleep and the time she heard the noise out in the loft. Then again, she didn’t feel crazy. Shaken, yes. Weak from the aftermath of that acid bath of adrenaline, absolutely. Wondering if she should get her eyes checked? Very likely.

  Then Sam turned toward her, and once again she saw that flicker of red in his eyes, just as she had on the street outside the restaurant. The same baleful glow she’d spotted in the nightmare form that had been standing next to her couch seconds before.

  Skittering fingers of dread worked their way down her spine. Her eyes were just fine. And she was pretty sure her brain was doing okay, too.

  “Who are you?” she whispered. Her throat felt like sandpaper.

  “What?”

  “I saw — ” She paused. What exactly had she seen? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

  What she did know was that it couldn’t have been human. Still, directly confronting him now sounded like a pretty terrible idea. And the thought of letting him back into her bed was even worse. But she knew with sudden, sickening certainty that she mustn’t speak a word of what she’d just seen.

  She swallowed, then said, “That is, I’m not sure I want you to stay the rest of the night. If you don’t mind.”

  “If I don’t mind?” He sounded incredulous, and a bit angry, too. “Look, I’m sorry I woke you up, but — ”

  Such a normal, human reaction. Why did she get the sudden feeling that it was all an act, that he was merely saying the things he expected a regular man might say in a similar situation?

  “That’s not it,” she said quickly. “It’s just — I guess I’m used to sleeping alone.”

  Even in the dim light she could see the bitter twist to his mouth. “I can see why.”

  Once he’d delivered that remark, he moved past her and went to gather up his clothes. Funny how she’d barely noticed his naked form. Well, she supposed there was nothing like spotting a huge demonic shape in your living room to kill off the old libido.

  She didn’t bother to respond to his comment — not that she had enough functioning brain cells to come up with anything remotely clever. At least it looked as if he meant to leave without causing any trouble.

  In silence he pulled on his clothes, then draped his leather jacket over his arm. She couldn’t help noticing that he hadn’t bothered to turn on a light. Maybe he didn’t have any trouble seeing in the dark.

  She held her breath, wondering if he had seen her unease, whether he’d been able to read the terror she thought must surely have revealed itself on her face. But he only looked down at her for a few seconds, his expression inscrutable. “I’ll let myself out.”

  And he brushed past her, heading straight for the front door. He didn’t slam it, but he might as well have. The silence that descended after it closed behind him seemed to press against her ears, heavy as the air that preceded a thunderstorm.

  For a long moment Felicia stood where she was, rooted in the opening between the two Japanese screens that hid the sleeping area. Belatedly, she realized her hands were shaking. She clenched them into fists and shut her eyes. At least he was gone. She wouldn’t think about what she had seen, or the fact that she’d let him touch her, had taken him into her body.

  Slowly she uncurled her fingers, then went to the kitchen and switched on the lights. She didn’t know how much a cup of tea was going to help, but at the moment she couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  She set the kettle on the burner, and turned on the gas.

  SLOPPY, Samael berated himself. Not just sloppy. Fucking sloppy.

  He maneuvered the Silverado out of the parking garage and pointed it west, toward his condo. What else could he do? Sometimes he’d join Abigor on the night shift if he didn’t have anything else going on, but his fellow soul-catcher thought he was safely snugged down with Felicia. Exactly where he should have been, except for that one error in judgment.

  Never let them see you. It was one of the most basic tenets of topside existence. Demons had all sorts of ways of tricking the eye, of making humans see everything except the truth. He’d used a variation of that manipulation to maneuver himself into the lineup at the speed-dating event where he’d met Felicia.

  These human bodies he and Abigor and all the others with topside duty wore were the first line of defense, but sometimes a demon form was necessary. And in those cases, darkness and glamour were his tools. He just hadn’t thought he’d need them in Felicia’s loft.

  It had only been for a moment, after all. Just that one moment after he’d alighted on her balcony, then made his way inside. He’d been just about to shield himself in his human body when she appeared. And he’d switched over quickly.

  Just not quickly enough.

  He took some comfort in the fact that she had seemed somewhat hesitant. Oh, she’d been fast enough about ordering him from her loft, no doubt about that. But he wondered if she were already trying to second-guess herself, to tell herself she hadn’t really seen what she thought she saw. The human mind didn’t like to acknowledge things outside its existence. It would try to rationalize, to explain it away.

  He’d give her time to do that. Time he had plenty of. Then again, she was an artist. Artists tended to see the world with different eyes. Perhaps those artist eyes of hers had seen the truth and wouldn’t abandon it quite so easily.

  For both their sakes, h
e hoped not.

  ALL SORTS of random types inhabited the IHOP on Sunset Boulevard, which was the main reason Abigor and Samael had made it their unofficial Sunday morning base of operations. Under normal circumstances, they made a noteworthy enough pair. Here, surrounded by club-goers grabbing breakfast before going to bed for the rest of the day, drag queens, junkies nursing a single cup of coffee for hours, and the rest of Hollywood’s flotsam and jetsam, they were barely worthy of a second glance.

  Abigor had ordered the same thing he always did: a rare steak accompanied by scrambled eggs and an overflowing plate of biscuits and gravy. Samael wondered once again how he could eat the same thing week after week and never get tired of it.

  “You look like shit,” the demon said, gesturing toward Samael’s face with a forkful of drippy biscuit.

  Well, he couldn’t argue with that. He knew he felt like shit.

  His own plate of bacon, eggs over easy, and hash browns was barely touched. For some reason he didn’t have much appetite this morning.

  “Girlfriend didn’t wait up for you?”

  Quite the contrary. Samael knew he’d be having a much better morning if Felicia had just stayed safely asleep. He swallowed a mouthful of harsh black coffee, then said, “She saw me.”

  For a second the words didn’t seem to register. Abigor plowed through another mouthful of biscuit and gravy before he stopped cold, fork halfway back down to his plate. “Say what?”

  “When I went back to her place, I waited too long to switch back. I think she saw me.”

  Abigor’s dark eyes narrowed. He set down his fork. “That’s not good.”

  “I know.”

  “You might have to take care of it.”

  Nice use of euphemism there. They had orders never to be seen. They couldn’t risk humanity discovering there really was a Hell. Sure, there had been slip-ups over the centuries, slip-ups that usually culminated in the unfortunate mortal who’d seen a demon in his full glory getting a quick one-way trip to the afterlife. Most of the time, the unlucky onlookers went to Heaven. Samael guessed that was small consolation for a life cut unexpectedly short.