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

by Unknown

  In this case, however, Samael refused to admit that was the only solution. The glimpse Felicia had gotten had been briefer than brief. And it wasn’t as if she’d walked into her living room area armed with a camera phone or something. She had no evidence to prove she’d seen anything out of the ordinary. In this day and age, people who claimed to see demons usually ended up in County under a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold. Fortunately for him, visions of demons were taken a lot more seriously a thousand years ago.

  “I have it under control,” he told Abigor.

  The other demon raised an eyebrow and reached for his coffee. “Yeah? Then why do you look like you’ve had a bunch of pit fiends do ten rounds on your ass?”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

  Abigor made a sound that was half-laugh, half-growl. “You know I don’t really care one way or another. But if the brass hears about this….”

  “They won’t.”

  At least, he was pretty sure they wouldn't find out, unless Felicia decided to sell her story to the Weekly World News or posted a lurid status update on her Facebook page. If she even had a Facebook page.

  There was only One who was omniscient, and He wasn’t the one ruling Hell. Lucifer left his lieutenants severely alone as long as they continued to do their jobs with minimal fuss. And if not…well, there were plenty of other demons in the Pit who’d be more than happy to take over his topside duties.

  Samael trusted Abigor to keep his mouth shut; the two of them had been stationed here together since the days when L.A. was a sleepy little mission town. No way he would want to break in another partner unless absolutely necessary.

  Another slit-eyed glance from Abigor, but the demon didn’t say anything. Instead, he reached for the coffee pot so he could pour himself another cup. After a heavy pause, he said, “So how about those Dodgers?”

  Samael repressed a smile. Demons — and Abigor in particular — weren’t big on showing their emotions. The off-hand reference to the post-season hopes of the local team was his way of letting Samael know that whatever happened, he trusted his partner to do the right thing.

  Now Samael just had to figure out what that was.

  AT LEAST, Felicia reflected, it was Sunday, and she had other things to do besides sit around the house and brood over what she had…or hadn’t…seen the night before. Sundays were reserved for visiting her mother, for taking her out on a walk around the grounds and letting her get some fresh air.

  Not that the air was terribly fresh today. Felicia locked the Volvo and cast a jaundiced eye at the yellow skies overhead. Smoke from the fires above Glendale had spread out to blanket most of the San Gabriel Valley, reaching all the way to the retirement community in Hacienda Heights where her mother now lived.

  “Retirement community.” That was a nice way to put it. Nursing home, if one wanted to be perfectly honest. The very nicest nursing home money could buy, but it was still a home, with nurses and wheelchairs and a crushing sense of inevitability.

  The automatic doors whooshed open, letting Felicia into the lobby. Without thinking, she paused to sign in at the visitor’s ledger. She’d done the same thing so many times before that it had become automatic, like putting on her seatbelt or taking her birth control pill each evening.

  She spotted Eduardo, the head nurse on duty. He must have seen her almost at the same moment because he smiled and called out, “Constitutional time?”

  It was their little joke. She tried to avoid saying she was taking her mother out for a walk — it made her sound a little bit too much like the family dog. “Do you think the air’s okay?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s a little chunky, but we can get her a mask if you’re worried about it. I know she’s been itching to get outside.”

  The facility had some lovely manicured walkways. Too bad she seemed to be the only person to utilize them with any regularity. “A mask would be great. Thanks, Eduardo.”

  “No prob.”

  He disappeared, apparently in search of the proffered surgical mask. Felicia headed down the hall to her mother’s room. She paused outside and took a deep breath, then squared her shoulders and went in.

  Even at the prices they were paying, they hadn’t been able to afford a private room. But, as usual, her mother’s roommate was already down the hall in the common room they used for movie-watching and bingo and other group activities.

  Alice McGovern’s hair was still flamboyantly red; the nursing home had a beautician who visited twice a week and made sure the residents were always well-coiffed. Felicia sometimes wondered what her mother would look like if they let her hair go gray, but was secretly glad they didn’t. She’d already seen enough alterations in Alice to last her a lifetime.

  The older woman waited in her wheelchair. She stared out of the window; at what, Felicia couldn’t be sure. Maybe nothing at all.

  “I’m here, Mom,” she said, in the usual over-loud and cheery tones she tended to employ whenever making one of these visits. As far as anyone could tell, her mother’s hearing was still in decent shape. Too bad the same couldn’t be said for her mind.

  Alice glanced away from the window and nodded vaguely. “It’s Mary,” she announced to no one in particular.

  Felicia tried not to wince. Her mother only recognized her about half the time; otherwise, she seemed to think her daughter was her younger sister. She didn’t bother to correct her. “It’s a nice warm day outside. How about a walk?”

  Alice nodded again, and Felicia went to install the footrests on her wheelchair so the promised constitutional could take place without her mother’s feet dragging against the sidewalk the whole way. As they exited the room, Eduardo offered a smile and a wave, along with the mask he had promised. From somewhere Felicia dragged up an answering smile as she took the mask from him and carefully placed it over her mother’s mouth. Then she pushed the wheelchair down the hallway and out onto the sidewalk.

  It was warm, almost uncomfortably so. California autumn, Felicia thought, somewhat ruefully. Hard to believe that Halloween was only two weeks away. It felt like early June. Well, except for the smoke-tinged air. Although the experts had been saying for some time that fire season was now year-round in Southern California, she always associated the smell of ash and the odd yellowish tint in the sky with fall.

  Thoughts of Halloween and costumed trick-or-treaters — not that she got many in her building — brought her around to Sam. She’d tried very hard not to think about him all morning, not as she stood in the shower and let the hot water run over her for twice as long as necessary, and not as she bundled the sheets from the bed and shoved them into her washing machine. So what if she was trying to erase all physical evidence of their encounter? She certainly wouldn’t be the first woman who’d done whatever she could to remove all traces of a disastrous one-night stand from her bedroom. It figured that the one time she decided to even have a one-night stand, the guy in question turned out to be a demon.

  Maybe.

  “Carrie couldn’t make it today,” she said, pushing the image of Sam’s dark, demonic form to the back of her mind. “They keep scheduling her to work on Sundays even though she’s told them over and over again that she needs the day off.”

  “She left her bicycle in the driveway again,” Alice replied, her tone petulant even beneath the surgical mask. At least she hadn’t tried to remove it. “I keep telling her not to do that. It makes Pat angry.”

  A few years ago, this non sequitur would have taken Felicia completely off her stride. Now she gave a mental shrug and said, “I’ll remind her.”

  The bicycle incident had happened when Carrie was ten and Felicia sixteen. Their father hadn’t seen the bike in the driveway until it was too late. The bike had been crushed, and the family car ended up needing a new bumper. Apparently the episode had been traumatic enough for her mother that it was one of the memories which seemed to float to the surface with unnerving regularity.

  They made their way down
the flower-lined path. Roses still bloomed on either side, although the dry, warm air held little of their scent.

  It would have been easier if Carrie had come. Her sister always managed to keep a lively conversation going, even though she had to know that most of what she said went right over their mother’s head. Now Felicia found herself stumbling to come up with anything to say. It didn’t help that, no matter what she did, she couldn’t quite seem to rid her mind of thoughts of Sam — the sound of his voice, the feel of his hands on her. The heat of his body against hers.

  She shook her head, as if the motion could somehow knock those memories clean out of her mind. Maybe it was some weird demon mumbo-jumbo that made them keep resurfacing. “Guess what, Mom? I’m painting the governor!”

  Alice stared fixedly ahead. “If you go to the movies, make sure you’re home by ten, or you know your father will ground you.”

  This was how it always went — synapses making the wrong connections, comments jumping around so that a rational conversation was almost impossible.

  Lauren kept telling her that she didn’t need to go every week. “You’re a mess afterward,” she’d said once. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t visit your mother, but maybe just every other week?”

  “She’ll know if I don’t come,” Felicia had said, but now she wondered whether that was even true. How could her mother miss her, when half the time she didn’t even recognize her own daughter?

  She tightened her fingers around the handles of the wheelchair and kept going. Her mother had lost weight over the past few years; it almost felt as if Felicia were pushing a child instead of a grown woman in her sixties.

  Pale flakes of ash drifted down from the sky, touching the backs of her hands, her mother’s shoulders. A little dandruff, courtesy of Mother Nature.

  Fitting weather for the morning after you’d slept with a demon. If that’s what she’d even seen. It had been dark, and she’d awoken from a deep sleep. Sometimes a person’s mind could play all sorts of nasty tricks.

  She wanted to believe that. Maybe it was only weakness, weariness of being alone, but she wanted to be wrong. She wanted Sam to be nothing more than a man she liked very, very much.

  Not that that would do her much good, after the way she’d thrown him out of her loft. Even a normal man probably wouldn’t be in a forgiving mood following a stunt like that.

  And if he wasn’t a normal man?

  She wouldn’t think about that now. She squared her shoulders, and continued to push the wheelchair down the carefully swept sidewalk.

  SAMAEL WATCHED Felicia’s Volvo disappear into the parking garage. Good. The neighbor lady had been right.

  After breakfast, he’d had to hurry over to Pacific Palisades to escort an insurance company executive who’d suffered a fatal heart attack to the underworld. This one didn’t land head-down in a lake of boiling blood, however. No, the man who had spent his days on earth maximizing profit at the expense of minimizing care instead got to spend eternity having his limbs slowly pulled from their sockets. His screams still rang in Samael’s ears.

  Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Funny how some people seemed to think they could spend their whole lives doing horrible things and never have to pay the price for their misdeeds. Their mistake.

  After that pleasant interlude, he decided he should try to speak to Felicia. He went to her loft, but she was nowhere to be found. Disappointed, he began to turn toward the stairwell and saw a bright-eyed Hispanic woman in her late fifties watching him.

  “Just missed her,” she said. “She always goes to visit her mother on Sundays. But she’s usually back by two.”

  “Thanks,” he replied, then went back down to the street, where he’d seen a newspaper dispenser outside a coffee house. At least he could loiter there until Felicia returned without looking too conspicuous.

  Now she was back, and even though he’d had almost two hours in which to prepare, he still didn’t quite know what to say to her. Countless millennia on this planet, and he couldn’t even formulate a strategy to deal with one human female.

  Not just any human female, though. Felicia.

  Who’d managed to reduce him to stalking in less than forty-eight hours. Quite an accomplishment, really. Logically, he knew he should get up, retrieve his truck from its parking place across the street, and head home. In a few days he’d probably forget how her mouth tasted, or the sound of her laugh, or the heat of her flesh beneath his fingertips, or the way she had wrapped her legs around him and — Crap.

  He tossed a couple of dollar bills on the tabletop and stood. No doubt Abigor would laugh if he discovered the predicament his partner had gotten himself into. Emotional connections were foolish, after all. What kind of a future could he have with this woman? Demons didn’t exactly get to settle down in the suburbs with a wife and a mortgage and a couple of kids and a dog. If they were lucky and did their jobs, they got to stay topside and harvest souls. In exchange they could have the odd steak or bottle of cabernet or even a few good lays as long as things didn’t get complicated.

  Mouth hardening, he waited for a break in traffic, then crossed the street. Maybe he didn’t have a future with Felicia, but he was damned if he was going to leave things the way they stood now.

  SOMEONE KNOCKED AT THE DOOR, and for a few seconds Felicia contemplated not getting up to answer it. She’d been in no mood to do any painting after she returned from Sunset Villas, but she didn’t want to prove Lauren right by brooding over her visit with her mother instead of getting some work done. So she’d spent the last ten minutes seated in front of the unfinished portrait, brush dangling from her hand. Getting up from the easel before she’d painted a single stroke felt a little too much like defeat.

  But it could be Rosa, who sometimes required assistance with opening jars when her fibromyalgia got the better of her. It wouldn’t be very neighborly to leave the poor woman standing out in the hallway. So Felicia set down her brush and went to answer the door.

  Black eyes stared down into hers. Definitely not Rosa.

  “Oh,” she said flatly, “it’s you.”

  Sam didn’t blink, even though most men would have been taken aback by such a lackluster reception. “Do you have a minute?”

  She was tempted to answer, Not really, and shut the door in his face, but she knew she couldn’t quite bring herself to be that rude. Also, he looked reassuringly human standing there, hair a bit tousled from the warm, dry winds outside, the toes of his boots scuffed and a faint whiff of espresso hanging around him. She found it hard to believe that a demon could get all those details quite so right.

  “All right,” she replied, then stepped aside so he could come in.

  He took a few steps into the loft and paused, his gaze resting on her abandoned brush and easel. The scent of paint was sharp in the air.

  “You’re working.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, and lifted her shoulders. “I hadn’t gotten very far. I was half tempted to just leave it and go outside to paint for a while. I like the hills this time of year.” She realized he probably couldn’t care less what she did or didn’t like to paint, and stopped herself from going any further.

  But she watched his gaze slide past her, to the grouping of landscapes she had hung on the far wall of the loft. “I thought you did portraits.”

  “To pay the rent, yes. The landscapes are just for me.”

  “They’re good.”

  “Thank you.”

  He moved away from her, going closer to the landscape paintings. She’d hung them rough, canvas against the brick. She hadn’t seen the point in spending money on frames, and besides, she rather liked the contrast of the sharp corners of the canvases against the unpainted brick wall. He surprised her by asking, “Griffith Park, right?”

  “Yes. It’s close enough that I don’t feel as if I’ve wasted a whole day driving somewhere just to get a good view.” She shoved her hands in her jeans pockets. She was pretty sure he hadn’
t come here to discuss her paintings with her. “Look, about last night — ”

  “About that.”

  He still wore a pleasant expression, but once more she thought she saw that odd reddish glint in his eyes. And it was the middle of the afternoon, on a sunny day. She couldn’t blame that crimson spark on a trick of the street lighting or even her imagination. Despite the warm breeze that blew in through her open windows, a chill inched its way down her spine. Somehow she managed to stay where she was, though every instinct told her to run.

  “I guess I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” he went on. He sounded rueful, and more than a little confused. “It seemed like we were having a pretty good evening. Then it all changed.”

  That’s for sure. Discovering that the guy you just banged might be a demon can do that to a girl. She didn’t reply right away, though. This whole situation was so far outside her frame of reference she didn’t quite know what she should do. She had a feeling if Sam really were some sort of supernatural being, he wouldn’t be all that thrilled to learn his cover was blown.

  He obviously expected some sort of answer, though, and she knew she’d better sound convincing even if she couldn’t tell him the truth. “I guess I got a little freaked out,” she said, reassured that at least her voice sounded relatively normal. “It had been a while for me, and I hadn’t really ever done something like that before — you know, with someone I’d just met. I suppose I was thrown a little off balance. I needed some time alone to think.”

  His expression didn’t change. “And now that you’ve had time to think?”

  What was the usual response in situations like this? “Look, Sam, you seem to be a nice guy, but — ”

  He held up a hand. “Don’t. Spare me the ‘nice guy’ speech, all right? Because I have a feeling that’s not it.”