Apocalypse Happens (12 page)

“Nephilim are
born
of demon and human. Being born takes a while. Usually nine months.”

“Only breeds and . . .”—she paused and jerked her chin in Sawyer’s direction, which I took to include those who were “other” as well, “other” being offspring of two Nephilim—“are literally
born
of a woman as children who grow and become something different. Nephilim are created; they spring forth fully grown.”

“Spring forth how?” I asked, imagining all sorts of bad things.

“Many ways.” When Ruthie didn’t elaborate, I knew that most of the bad things in my head were true. They usually were.

“How do we kill the Grigori?” I blurted.

“We can’t kill them,” Sawyer said. “They’re demons.”

“So are the Nephilim. We’ve been killing them since they were invented.”

“Nephilim are half demons. It’s their humanity that allows them to die.”

“You’re saying we’re screwed?” What else was new? “That we just keep killing the demon seed but we can never end the demons themselves?”

“No,” Sawyer murmured. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

He went silent, and I wanted to shriek in frustration.
He was always so calm. I guess living forever, or close enough, could do that. But if there was ever a time to get excited, now was that time.

“What do we
do
?” I managed to keep from shouting, but barely.

“We find the
Key of Solomon
,” he continued in the same calm voice. “Read the instructions for dealing with the Grigori; then we deal with them. Preferably before they repopulate the world with that army and deal with us first.”

“Works for me,” I said. “But how are we going to search for the key
and
keep the steadily multiplying demon horde from overrunning the earth.”

I remembered the varcolacs—how they’d kept coming and coming, how much harder they’d seemed to kill than the average Nephilim and how I’d had to release my beast to do it. The Boudas hadn’t been any easier. Without Luther, Sawyer and I might not be having this conversation.

“The Nephilim I’ve faced lately seem more confident,” I said slowly, “if possible, even more vicious.”

“Imminent victory will give anyone confidence,” Sawyer said.

“They aren’t going to win.”

He lifted a brow and then a bare, laconic shoulder. “If you say so.”

“I do. And so does the Bible.”

His lips curved. “But there’s the
Book of Samyaza
, which tells another story.”

“I choose not to believe in fairy tales.”

“Why not? You believe in fairies.”

Why did I even try to reason with the man? There was no reason in him.

“Children, children,” Ruthie-Luther admonished; the words when formed by that childish mouth almost
made me laugh. “Eventually we’ll need to find the
Book of Samyaza
and destroy it. Without the thing, they have no instructions for winning and no talisman that guarantees invincibility.”

“Just because the book guarantees invincibility doesn’t make it true.”

“What is there about ‘guarantee’ that you don’t understand?” Ruthie asked.

“So it is true?” I asked. “Possess the
Book of Samyaza
and win?”

“We won’t know until—”

“They win,” Sawyer finished.

“If the book is so damn important, then why are they after the
Key of Solomon
?”

“Could be they don’t want us to have it, just like we don’t want them to have the book.”

I remembered what the varcolac had said. “Or one of the little people wants to command the demons.”

Ruthie-Luther’s dark gaze sharpened. “Whoever commands them becomes the Prince.”

“Of Darkness?” I asked.

“Pretty much.”

“I’m confused. When the Grigori flew free, whoever released them should have been possessed by Satan.”

“Theoretically,” Sawyer murmured.

“Explain.”

“My . . .” He paused, unable to utter the word “mother.” “The woman of smoke, if she actually released the Grigori, is dead. So—” He spread his nimble hands.

I blinked, trying to connect the dots. “So he’s floating around looking for a host?”

Sawyer shrugged. Ruthie did too.

“Fan-damn-tastic,” I muttered.

We remained silent for a moment.

“I thought if I killed the leader of the darkness, we’d get a replay.” Or at least that had been the rumor.

“Even if that was true,” Ruthie said, “and we don’t know for sure, the Grigori were released before you killed her.”

“Great. I became a vampire for no reason at all.”

“If you hadn’t killed the woman of smoke when you did, they’d be one step closer to victory. The Naye’i would be the Prince, and I think we’d all be dead.”

Ruthie was right. At least I’d managed to end that bitch before she became the most powerful evil on earth. Point for me.

“How did she release the Grigori?” I asked.

“No idea,” Ruthie said. “Though there might be a clue in the key.”

“If she’d had the
Key of Solomon
, the Nephilim wouldn’t be searching for it now.”

“Regardless of how she released them,” Ruthie said, “she released them. We need to—”

“Find the key, find the book,” I interrupted. “Unfortunately, the guy I put on that task wound up a little dead.”

Ruthie-Luther frowned. “Xander Whitelaw is dead?”

“How can you not know this?” I asked. “I thought you had a hotline to heaven.” On the heels of those thoughts came another, better one. “He’s on the other side. You can ask him what he found out.”

My heart rate sped up. Maybe we weren’t doomed after all. Maybe we could find the key tonight, perform the spell and rid the earth of demons by morning.

“He’s not in heaven,” Ruthie murmured.

My heart stuttered. “He went to hell?” Hadn’t seen
that coming. Not that Xander had been a goody-goody. I hadn’t known him well enough to know what he’d been. But he hadn’t felt evil.

“No,” Ruthie-Luther said slowly. “Not hell.”

“You aren’t making any sense. There’s heaven and hell and here.”

“And then there’s where I am.”

“You said you were in heaven.”

“Not quite.”

“What do you mean, ‘not quite’?”

“I have a place for little ones to get used to the idea. Not heaven yet. More like the waiting room.”

Ruthie’s version of heaven was a house with a white picket fence and kids who’d died too soon. Even in the afterlife, Ruthie was still the mother to every lost soul.

The thought gave me pause. Obviously mothering was in her DNA, and that it was made me think that she
had
loved me for more than my talents.

But thinking and believing, then accepting and forgiving can be pretty far apart, and they can take a lot of time to draw together. Time was one thing I didn’t have much of right now.

“Is there another waiting room for adults?” I asked.

“No. Adults understand death a little better than children.”

“Then what are you saying?” I asked. “Xander’s dead. He has to be somewhere, and it isn’t where the living walk.”

“You’re certain of that?”

There hadn’t been enough left of him to be anything but dead, even before we’d burned the place down.

“Yes.”

Ruthie-Luther lowered her-his chin toward the thin, olive drab–shrouded chest. “If he isn’t in heaven or hell, then his spirit’s still on earth.”

Sawyer drew in a sharp breath, but when I glanced at him, his face remained stoic, and I returned my attention to the woman speaking from the boy’s mouth, resolving to get to the bottom of that later.

“Xander’s a ghost,” I clarified.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Spirits remain on earth for a lot of reasons. Unfinished business, a violent death.”

“Two for two,” I murmured. “We need to ask him what he wanted to tell me, that’ll finish up his business, and he can . . .”—I made a fluttering,
move along
gesture with both hands—“go into the light. Win-win.”

“Not that simple,” Ruthie said.

“Why not? Just ask him.”

“I can’t ask him, Lizbeth. I’m dead.”

“So’s he.”

“Not in the same way.”

“There are degrees of deadness?”

“No. Dead is dead. But for some, not really.”

I smacked myself in the forehead. “Fine. You can’t ask him. The world’s gonna end; we’re all gonna be Satan’s bitch because the guy with the info can’t get his deadness to fit just right.”

“Watch that mouth!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said automatically. I couldn’t help myself. Years of respecting Ruthie, loving her, practically worshiping the ground she walked on, died hard, perhaps never. But anger, hurt and fear died hard too, and I’d always been a sarcastic, snotty pain in the ass when any of those emotions were involved. Sometimes even when they weren’t.

“I didn’t say we couldn’t find out the information,” Ruthie soothed, “just that
I
couldn’t talk to the man.”

“Who can?”

Ruthie-Luther turned her-his head toward Sawyer. “Him.”

CHAPTER 12

Him
.

I should have known.

“You can talk to ghosts?” I asked.

“It’s one of the gifts of a skinwalker.”

“Then I can do it too.”

“No. It’s a talent tied to my magic.”

A skinwalker is both witch and shifter. The shifting comes at birth; the magic comes later.

I could be as gifted as Sawyer. I could toss people across the room with a flick of my hand; I could talk to ghosts; I could heal wounds at the speed of sound. All I’d have to do was kill someone I loved.

I’d decided to pass.

Most days I had a hard time believing Sawyer was capable of loving anyone. Killing yes, loving no. However, I’d seen into his head, into his past. I knew he’d lived as a wolf; he’d had a mate, but he didn’t have her now. Maybe he’d killed her.

Or maybe he’d killed someone else. When I’d touched him and seen the frighteningly long and lonely aeons of his existence, he’d hidden things from me, blocked me in a way that no one else ever had.

“Why are we standing here chatting?” I asked. “Open up the phone lines. Talk to Xander and find out
what he knows.” I frowned. “Knew. Whatever. Just do it.”

“Just?” Sawyer repeated. “It’s not that easy.”

“Do whatever voodoo you do.”

“I’m not a bokur.”

“A what?”

“Voodoo dark priest,” Ruthie-Luther said. “Very dangerous.”

“And he isn’t?”

Sawyer’s lips curved. He loved it when someone called him dangerous. Sometimes I thought he purposely cultivated the fear that surrounded him, fed the legends by doing just enough creepy stuff to keep them circulating. I had a feeling that people being scared of him had kept Sawyer alive on more than one occasion.

“I can’t just talk to Whitelaw,” Sawyer said. “I’ve got to bring him forth.”

“From where?”

“The realm where he walks.”

“You’re talking about raising the dead. That doesn’t sound like a good idea.” I glanced at Ruthie-Luther. “Does it?”

“He won’t actually be raising him to life,” Ruthie said, “just raising his ghost.”

“So that’s okay?”

“What else we gonna do?” Ruthie asked. “We need the key, the book, somethin’.”

“All right,” I said, glancing at Sawyer. “What do you have to do?”

His lips quirked, and suddenly I remembered what Xander Whitelaw had told me about Navajo skinwalkers.

They have sex with the dead.

I made a face. “Uck.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Sawyer pointed out.

“I’ve never been clear on all the powers of a skinwalker.”

“And you never will be,” he returned.

I narrowed my eyes. I wished I could make him tell me, but Sawyer still trumped me in power. Which might be why he refused to let me in on all his secrets. He wanted to keep it that way. He was so damn annoying.

“Whitelaw had a lot of theories,” I began.

Sawyer’s smile died. “So he did.”

“How many of them were true?”

“Hard to say.”

I started ticking off all that I knew. “Shape-shifting. Check. Witchcraft. Bingo. Cannibalism?”

Sawyer didn’t answer.

“Killing from afar by use of ritual?”

The smile returned, but he still didn’t speak.

“Travel on storms?”

That legend probably came about because skinwalkers could move faster than the wind. So, technically true.

“Power from lightning?”

I’d seen his mother throw lightning like Zeus. Never had seen Sawyer do it, but that didn’t meant he couldn’t.

“Associated with death and the dead.”

Obviously, since he planned on raising Xander’s ghost and asking him some questions.

“Incest.”

Sawyer’s face went as still as the dark mountain behind him.

I guess I wouldn’t call the last a power but rather
the source of any weakness. Another curse. The first but not the last Sawyer had received from his mother.

“Sorry,” I murmured.

What had happened to him at the hands of that psychotic evil spirit bitch wasn’t his fault, and I shouldn’t be reminding him of it now. Or ever again.

Sawyer continued to make like a mountain. I glanced at Ruthie-Luther and spread my hands—code for
Do something
.

She sighed. “Sawyer.”

Her voice was gentle, the one that had soothed me when I was sick, strengthened me when I was weak, taught me what I needed to know and told me what I needed to hear. No matter what she’d done for the sake of the world, the fact remained that she’d done a lot for me as well. Regardless of her motives, Ruthie Kane had saved me from the streets and myself. She’d saved a lot of people. I was going to have to cut her some slack.

Eventually.

Sawyer’s dark gaze moved to Luther’s face and softened. I wasn’t sure what lay between Ruthie and Sawyer. She’d sent me to him when I was fifteen to learn how to control what I was. Hadn’t worked completely; I’d had to come back recently and learn some more.

Sure, it had been beyond strange to send a fifteen-year-old girl to spend the summer alone with a grown man in the New Mexico desert. But I wasn’t an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl and Sawyer wasn’t really a man.