Doomsday Can Wait (3 page)

"Weren't you supposed to be his keeper?"

"He goes missing every year. He always comes back."

I suddenly remembered—once a year Sawyer went hunting.

For his mother.

That she'd showed up at my place was becoming more and more interesting.

"If he always goes off, why run across the country to tell me about it?"

"I'm not here because of Sawyer," she said. "I'm here because of Jimmy."

I forced my fingers to uncurl from the fists they'd automatically made at her words. Stupid to be angry and jealous over his leaving me and choosing her. We'd been eighteen. Grade A idiots, both of us. But mostly Jimmy, since he had to have known the next time I touched him I'd see her.

I'd been born psychometric. Basically when I touched people, I saw things. I'd seen way more than I ever wanted to of Jimmy and Summer.

Imagine—your first love, your first time, all rolled into one. Alone and lonely, a street kid who'd found a home, found him. Thinking he loved you, believing you'd be together forever, then "seeing" him in the arms of someone else. I'd reacted badly—for the past seven years.

"What about Jimmy?" I asked.

Something in my voice must have tipped Summer off to my mood because she inched back.

"What are you afraid of?" I moved forward. "You're a fairy. You've got powers, too."

"You know damn well I can't use them on you."

I smiled and Summer stepped back again. If she kept it up she'd fall down the stairs. Not that it would hurt her any.

"I do love the fairy rules," I continued. "Can't use your magic against anyone on an errand of mercy. And since my whole life is one long errand of mercy ..." My smile widened. "Sucks to be you."

"You have no idea," she murmured. Before I could ask what that meant, she went on. "Getting back to Jimmy."

My smile faded. "I don't know where he is."

She glanced down, the brim of her hat shading her too beautiful face. Fairies could practice glamour, a type of shape-shifting that made them more attractive than the average human. However, since fairy magic didn't work on seers, I had to think that Summer was truly gorgeous. So how much
could
it suck to be her?

"I do," she said reluctantly.

"You do?" For a second I forgot the question. Then I stiffened. "You know where he is? He called you? Came to you?"

"I saw him." She waggled her fingers—manicured and painted pale pink—toward her head.

"I thought you could only see the future."

"Right."

"What good does that do me today?"

Summer's gaze lifted. "There was a Fourth of July parade, right down the center of town."

"The Fourth is in two days."

"Which makes it the future."

"What town?"

"Barnaby's Gap, Arkansas."

"And you think Jimmy's there why?"

"I saw him watching the parade." Her lips, the same shade as her fingernails—who does that?—tightened. "He didn't look good."

My heart took a sharp leap, then fell with a heavy thud. Jimmy hadn't exactly been himself the last time I'd seen him.

"You could have just gone and gotten him. Why come to me?"

"You two have a connection."

"Seems to me that you two have the same connection."

"No." She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, the movement perking up her already too perky breasts. "What we had—" She broke off at my glare. "He loves you."

I had a hard time believing Jimmy Sanducci had ever loved anyone—except for Ruthie. She'd taken him off the streets same as me, but Ruthie was dead.

"Even if he did love me once, what difference does that make in dragging him back from Arizona?"

"Arkansas."

"Whatever."

"There's going to be trouble."

The hair on the back of my neck tingled. "You've said that before."

The day after I'd killed the leader of the darkness— a.k.a. Jimmy's father.

"It's here."

"Here?" I moved toward my duffel and the knife inside it.

"Not right this second here, but soon. It's coming."

"What's coming?" I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. The woman of smoke was going to be the next big pain in my ass.

"I'm not sure," Summer said.

"Then what good are you?"

"I found Jimmy." She lifted her just-pointed-enough-to-be-cute chin. "You didn't."

"Fine, you give me a ring when you've got him in hand."

"No."

"No?" I raised my eyebrows. "You seem to have forgotten who's the boss of you."

"You have to come with me. You're—" She paused and bit her lip.

I narrowed my eyes. "I'm what?"

I was a lot of things—some of them good, some of them kind of creepy. I still wasn't used to it myself.

"The leader of the light. You're stronger than any of us."

I wasn't sure about that, though I knew that I could be. Unfortunately, what I had to do to increase my powers was slightly more than I was willing to, unless absolutely necessary.

"Jimmy's going to need help," Summer finished.

Panic flared. Had the woman of smoke gone after him?

"How do we kill her?" I blurted.

"Her who?"

"You aren't talking about the
Naye'i?"

"Naye'i,"
she murmured. "Dreadful One. The only time I ever heard that was—" Her eyes widened. "Sawyer's mother?"

"Yeah."

"That bitch has been a nightmare since she was born," Summer said.

Hearing the word
bitch
come out of Summer's sweet mouth gave me a nearly irrepressible urge to giggle. The only way I was able to stop it was by remembering that I did
not
giggle. Ever.

"Haven't all the Nephilim been a nightmare?" I asked. "I think it's part of the definition."

"She's different."

"Why?"

"She's more than a Navajo evil spirit, she's a witch, too."

"I know. She gained her power by killing Sawyer's father." Who'd been a powerful medicine man in his own right.

I'd said Sawyer was hard to explain. That was one of the reasons. Being raised by a murdering-evil spirit-witch-demon would give anyone issues. We were lucky the guy hadn't been gibbering in a corner for the last few centuries.

"She's the reason I was headed to New Mexico to talk to Sawyer," I continued. "She showed up tonight and tried to kill me."

"You'd better get used to it," Summer muttered.

"Ruthie didn't have to deal with constant assassination attempts."

"None of the Nephilim knew Ruthie's identity."

"True." Everyone and Satan's sister knew who I was.

" 'Leader of the darkness kills leader of the light and sets in motion Doomsday,'" Summer recited. "But when you reverse that, you reverse everything. Or at least that's the rumor."

"Say what?"

"Haven't you noticed there hasn't been a whole lot of chaos going on?"

"Well, yeah."

"The scuttlebutt on the streets is that by having the head good guy—you—kill the head bad guy, we get a rewind. At least until—"

"Some other bozo with a god complex kills me."

Summer shrugged. I guess I knew now why the woman of smoke wanted me dead.

"Are you sure this is good intel?"

She nodded. "As soon as I heard the whispers, I nabbed a few Nephilim, beat the truth out of them."

When she said things like that I was never quite certain whether she was serious or not.

"They all spilled the same story." She twirled her finger. "We get a do-over."

"Why didn't we know this?" I asked. "Why didn't Jimmy or Ruthie or even Sawyer tell me?"

"I'm not sure
they
knew. The prophesies about the end times are confusing to say the least. Everyone interprets them differently."

"You'd think that Ruthie, having died and gone to her version of heaven, would have a pretty good handle on the truth."

"You'd think," Summer agreed. "But what is truth?"

I groaned. I hated existential questions. Give me black or white, good or evil, truth or lies. Please.

"We have free will," Summer continued. "So, we choose one path instead of another and the whole prophesy shifts."

"Swell."

"Ruthie's the first leader of the light to be killed by a leader of the darkness. They've tried, but they've never succeeded. Doomsday hasn't been set in motion before, though many believed that it was."

By definition Doomsday is the period of chaos that leads up to the Apocalypse. I'd really been hoping to avoid that ticking clock. Sure, it was going to happen eventually. The end of days was inevitable. But why couldn't it happen on someone else's watch?

"What do you mean, people believed that it was?"

"Every generation thinks it's living in the end times. The events of Revelation—Doomsday, chaos, tribulation, the beast, 666—could have played out at any point in history. But we've always stopped them."

"We. The federation?"

"Yes. The list of historical figures that could have turned out to be the Antichrist without us around is pretty long. Nero, Caligula, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, to name just a few."

"Those guys were Nephilim?"

"Did you seriously think they were human?"

Not really.

“You're saying that any demonic nut bag can become the Antichrist?" I asked.

"If he manages to fulfill all the requirements before one of us kills him."

"Requirements. Like killing me?"

"For starters, then killing all the DKs and seers."

The last nut bag had made pretty good headway on that.

"Then?"

"Charismatic leader of the world, rebuilding the temple, abolition of paper money, rising from the dead."

"Whoa. What was the last one?"

"Eventually, one of them is going to heal a head shot and then .. . what's that expression?" She tapped her pink nail against her pink lips. "All hell will break loose. Literally."

"Healing a head shot isn't much of a chore for most Nephilim."

"I know."

"Then we move forward on the assumption that we've been granted a reprieve."

"We move forward as we always do," Summer said. "Kill them, kill them, kill them."

"At this rate," I said, rubbing my forehead, "the cycle might never end. Kill the leader of the light—Doomsday; kill the leader of the darkness—not. Doomsday, not, Doomsday, not." I was getting dizzy.

I lowered my hand as something occurred to me. Ruthie told me the final battle is now."

"Maybe." Summer's deceptively innocent blue eyes met mine. "There's never been anyone like you before."

"So according to the rumor"—which should be a legend by next week—"by killing the leader of the darkness, I thwarted Doomsday. To start up another, they'd have to kill me. But I'm not going to be as easy to take out as Ruthie."

"Then there's nothing to worry about."

"Except psycho evil spirit bitch—"

"Witch," Summer corrected.

"No, I had it right." We shared a smile, then realized what we were doing and stopped. "She's—uh—after me," I finished. "And I don't know how to kill her."

"First things first," Summer said. "We get Jimmy, then we find Sawyer."

"Does it have to be 'we'?" I asked.

Me and Summer on a road trip. Hunting down Jimmy Sanducci and confronting him together.

Talk about a nightmare.

CHAPTER 4

A '57 Chevy Impala was parked in front of my building, light blue and so gorgeous it brought tears to my eyes. Summer walked to the driver's side and got in.

"This is yours?"

She shot me a
duh
look.

Summer the fairy couldn't fly—at least on a plane.

She messed up the controls, and when dealing with several tons of airborne metal and fuel . . . extremely bad idea. She could hit the skies without wings, a trick I'd yet to see, but cloud-dancing people tend to get noticed. So, unless there was a dire emergency that required her immediate presence—and there were quite a few— Summer stuck to cars.

"I meant, what happened to your pickup?"

"That's for New Mexico. This"—she smoothed her hand over the dash—"is for the road."

Yes, it was.

I wasn't a classic car nut. I drove a Jetta, for crying out loud. But I'd always admired old automobiles, the ones that really sucked the gas. Those cars had balls, guts, chutzpah—real staying power. It had always made perfect sense to me that Christine, Stephen King's car that never died, had been a 1958 Plymouth Fury.

Summer pulled away from the curb and pointed the Impala southwest. "What's in your pocket?" she asked.

My hand stilled in the act of rubbing the amulet. I hesitated, then realized that two heads were better than one, even when one of them was Summer's. She'd been around as long as the woman of smoke. That had to be good for something.

I drew out the necklace. "I tore this off the
Naye'i."

Summer glanced at the copper circlet and frowned. "That's a pentacle."

"Never heard of it."

Which wasn't surprising. Ask me how to clean a gun or mix a martini and I was a damn genius, but ask me about secret Satanic things and you could color me worthless.

“Pentacles are amulets used in magical rites," Summer said. "The star is a pentagram—five points. If the symbol is drawn with one point up, we're talking good magic."

"And if there are two points up and one point down, like this?"

"Black magic."

I wasn't surprised. "Until I tore the amulet off the
Naye'i,
I didn't know what she was. I think it blocked my sight."

"Fantastic," Summer muttered. "What if there are more of them out there?"

I hadn't thought of that. I'd just been concerned that there was one.

"How do you know all this stuff?" I asked.

Since I'd been thrust into my role as leader of the federation, along with my destiny as a seer, with virtually no preparation, I didn't know all I was supposed to about the Nephilim. In truth, I didn't know anything.

DKs were trained in killing tactics. Seers were just supposed to see, but I was both. However, I hadn't had the time to study the ancient texts, the legends of every country and people. The way things were going, I doubted I ever would.