Harsh Gods (9 page)

At my outburst, the guy bolted, stumbling over his dead companion in his haste to get away. The intruding presence withdrew as well, departing as swiftly as it came.

Tires squealed. The headlights, distant before, veered in my direction. A car lurched onto the curb. Spotted—I’d been spotted. This registered only dimly as I fought to bring order back to my brain. The pale corpse lay five feet from me, eyes fixed and staring.

I looked away.

I’d sucked the life out of her mortal shell. Drained her to heal my own wound. The certainty left me staggered and nauseous. I hadn’t bitten her, but I could still taste her blood.

I thought only Nephilim did that.

“Zack? Zack?”

A hand on my shoulder. I shoved it away.

“Mother’s Tears, Zaquiel. Talk to me. That’s arterial spray.”

I looked up, blinking stupidly. Gradually, she came into focus—warm bronze skin, red hair spilling forward, eyes like twin hurricanes.

“Lil?” I gasped incredulously.

“How much of this is your blood?” she demanded, tugging at me. “Can you stand?”

“I killed her,” I said.

“I can see that,” she replied. “No point in you just laying down and dying, too. Where were you hit?”

“Femoral,” I managed. My mouth was dry. All my muscles felt like water now that the adrenaline was wearing away. “She had a knife. Sharp little fucker.”

Lil’s gray eyes flicked to both my legs. Her full, red lips pressed into a hard line.

“Seems like the blood’s stopped,” she said. “What did you do?”

“I fucked up, Lil. I really fucked up this time.”

“Well, if you’re not bleeding out, you can walk,” she insisted. “Let’s go.” She seized both my wrists, trying to pull me bodily to my feet. I yanked my left hand away from her grasp.

“Don’t touch me,” I said in a panicked rush. “I don’t want to do it to you, too.” Drunkenly, I lurched away. Lil’s eyes narrowed, flickering over me again.

“You can have a breakdown later, flyboy,” she cautioned. “You don’t kill people in the middle of the street and just wait for the cops to come.”

“I fucking
ate
her,” I shouted.

Implacable, Lil stopped trying to grab my wrists and instead seized the front of my leather jacket. I shoved her away with a snarl. She backed off, but didn’t look happy about it. Positioning herself between me and the spill of light coming from the streetlamp across the road, she waited, one boot tapping out an impatient rhythm on the bloodstained sidewalk.

Warily, she glanced from me to the road. Aside from her car, however, Mayfield remained empty. The whole city felt like it was holding its breath.

She was right, though. We needed to disappear. That much made it through my hobbled brain.

Steadying myself with the cemetery wall at my back, I stood in stages. Nausea halted me about halfway up. Gray waves pulsed through my vision. Blood loss—no way to know how much, but my pants were soaked and freezing to my skin. The sidewalk looked like the set of a slasher flick.

Feeling around, I found the tear in my jeans. The skin beneath was smooth and whole. I turned my head and spat into the snow. It came out threaded with crimson. Had I bitten her? No—no, just wrapped my hand around her throat. Seized her pulse with something harsher than teeth.

“Fuck,” I breathed. I swallowed hard, fighting not to vomit.

Lil sighed with exasperation. Waiting wasn’t her style. The wind dragged chill fingers through her wealth of red hair, whipping long strands in every direction.

“I really hope you start making sense soon,” she grumbled. “By the way—the shaggy hipster look? Not the thing for you.”

“Screw you,” I shot back.

She snorted. “Last I checked, you were too chickenshit for that.”

I glared, but didn’t argue. Lil eyed me a moment longer, then turned on her heel and headed back to her car. She produced a silk handkerchief from somewhere on her person and scooped up the bloody knife as she walked past the corpse. “Your DNA on file?” she called over her shoulder.

“Don’t know,” I yelled back. “You know I can’t remember.”

“These are things you should look into, Anakim.” She pushed a button on her key fob and the engine of her Sebring growled to life before she even had the door open. When I was certain my legs would hold me, I took a step in her direction. That meant walking right past the woman whose life I’d snuffed.

I faltered.

“Lil?” I asked.

“What?” Radiating impatience, she pivoted on her heel to fix stormy gray eyes on me.

“How’d you know?”

“About the DNA?”

I shook my head and regretted it—the world swung crazily long after the motion stopped. My stomach hitched, and it was an even bet whether it was tied to the vertigo or to the sight of the dead woman discarded in an ungainly heap outside the cemetery gates. Closing my eyes, I willed the dizziness away, then forced myself to stare at her ghastly pale face. She was dead, but she had a name.
Patty Wolford.
The knowledge clung to the back of my thoughts. I’d taken that along with her life.

It was a power that belonged to the Nephilim.

I clenched my fingers over the scar on my palm. With a terrible certainty, I knew exactly how that power had been passed down to me.

“How’d you know to show up, I mean.” My voice rang hollow in my ears. “You always seem to find me.”

“A little bird told me.” Lil gave me a look that rivaled the Mona Lisa.

“Lailah.” It wasn’t a question, and Lil didn’t offer any confirmation. She was stubbornly close-lipped about herself and her sisters. Lil was the Lady of Beasts. Her sister Lailah was the Lady of Shades. Neither of them were strictly human beings.

Since her death, I’d only seen Lailah once. It was barely a vision, conjured by an old Streghoneri in a psychomanteum. She’d appeared first as a woman, then as a spectral, soot-colored owl. The image had haunted my dreams.

“She’s watching me?” It came out desperate. I shut my mouth and stepped over the corpse, fighting not to stumble as another wave of vertigo spun my internal gyroscope.

“You better hurry it up,” Lil warned, “unless it’s your goal to end up in the prison system.” She said nothing further about her sister. I let it drop.

Once I got to the car, Lil slipped behind the wheel and opened my door from the inside—a kindness which told me I looked way worse than I felt. She stowed the little knife, tidily wrapped in her handkerchief, in the armrest between the seats, and I dropped into the bucket seat, immediately banging my knees on the underside of the dashboard. The passenger side was set all the way forward.

“Who did you have in here last?” I growled as I fumbled for the lever. “Tyrion Lannister?”

Lil pulled her door shut and hit the locks.

“Who?”

“
Game of Thrones
?” I prompted. She gave me a blank look as she put the car into gear. “Never mind,” I mumbled. Lil never watched TV—I wasn’t certain she even owned one.

“Geek babble,” she said. “I guess that means you’re feeling better.” Then she shot me a look out of the corner of her eye. “Try not to get blood on the seat. It’s a bitch to get out of the leather.”

Gunning the motor, she backed the car off the curb, then hit the brakes so abruptly, I nearly kissed the windshield. An instant later, the car lurched forward, slamming my shoulders back against the headrest.

“Holy fuck, Lil.” I flailed for the seatbelt.

“Wimp,” she shot back.

She peeled away from the cemetery, tires squealing, and took the turn onto Coventry at approximately warp speed. Lil’s driving tied my stomach in knots on a good day. In my current state, she was going to have to worry about more than blood on the seats.

“You going to tell me what happened back there?”

I hunched forward as if I could physically hold myself together.

“What are you even doing in Cleveland?” I asked. “It’s a six hour drive from Joliet.”

“So that’s a ‘no,’” she replied.

Given the time, the traffic light at Euclid Heights had switched to a blinking red. Lil didn’t bother to slow, just banked sharply right and headed toward my apartment building. She swung the car into a parking space in a maneuver so swift it made the world spin. Once the engine was off, she stared at me, pecking the steering wheel with her fingernails. For once, they weren’t painted red.

“Are those shamrocks?” I asked, blinking stupidly.

Lil extended her hands like a model in a Palmolive commercial. “One of the girls did them for me. I’m not sure about the rhinestones, though.”

“Now I know I’m delirious,” I mumbled. My brain—which was already limping along thanks to shock and blood loss—felt as if it had just encountered the conversational equivalent of rumble strips.

“It’s for St. Patrick’s Day,” Lil explained. She slid open her sable driving coat to reveal an emerald green blazer over a black, plunging V-neck. Sweeping green palazzo pants completed the outfit. “I had my burlesque troupe perform at Remy’s Lusty Leprechaun event, over at Club Heaven.”

I just gaped at her. Lil hated the Nephilim even more than I did, so for her to do anything at Club Heaven aside from tearing the place up was hard to swallow. Of course, both of us made exceptions for my sibling Remy. As Nephilim went, he was tolerable—even likable. Lil “tolerated” him well enough that she’d married him, once upon a time—somewhere back in the thirties, though it had ended messily.

“Lusty Leprechaun?” I managed. “You dance in a
burlesque
troupe?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Think of me as multi-talented—good at dancing
and
killing things.”

I settled my head against my hands.

“Remy needed dancers, and I hadn’t danced with the girls in a while,” she continued blithely. “I might hate Sal, but I have to admit, he’s always been good at making money for his performers.”

“
She
,” I corrected automatically.

Lil rolled her eyes, but didn’t bother to amend the pronoun.

Saliriel was the head of the Nephilim in Cleveland, ruling under the title of “decimus.” Sal was the actual owner of Club Heaven and, somewhere along the line, had decided that life would be better as a woman. I had plenty of reasons to dislike Sal, but I saw no point in being an ass about her life choices—at least, not the ones that didn’t involve her being an incredibly manipulative sociopath.

Lil didn’t share my magnanimity, and made no pretense at steering the conversation away from the topic. Her storm-gray eyes flickered over the mess on my jeans.

“I’m still waiting to hear what fire I pulled your skinny ass out of this time.”

“How about I get out of these pants first?” I picked at the blood clotting in a seam.

Lil made a decidedly salacious sound at the back of her throat. “Killing makes me frisky, too,” she purred.

“Stuff it, Lil,” I said. “I’m just tired of smelling blood.” Clicking my seatbelt off, I got out of the car. Standing up made my vision tunnel.

“You going to make it all the way up to your apartment?” she asked. All the teasing flirtation was gone, replaced with an expression that almost passed for genuine concern.

Gripping the rag-top, I nodded. I found it oddly comforting that not everything had miraculously fixed itself. That meant I was still somewhere close to human.

I dragged myself up the two flights of stairs without falling over.
Yay me.
Sagging against my front door, I fumbled for my keys. Lil hovered near my elbow, gray eyes fixed on my—no doubt—ashen features.

I pushed the door open and lurched inside. Lil stepped after me, pausing at the threshold.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asked, looking at me sweetly. I’d have made a vampire joke at her expense, but just then it was a little close to home. She wasn’t the one tossing around the powers of the Nephilim. Instead, I waved vaguely.

“Come in,” I muttered. Dropping my keys on the side table, I went straight for my little kitchenette. I needed liquids desperately, and had to have some orange juice or something.

I didn’t remember the last time I’d gone out for groceries, and it showed. While I dug around in my decidedly empty fridge, Lil paced a tight circle in my living room. Her stormy gaze settled on all the empty take-out cartons and abandoned coffee mugs. She pursed her lips, then whistled her disapproval. The only thing that separated my kitchen from the rest of the living space was a little half-wall set up as a kind of breakfast bar. I glared over it.

“Don’t start,” I grumbled.

Striding smartly over to the breakfast bar, she eased her hip onto one of two stools sitting there.

“You always were a champion sulker, when you put your mind to it,” she said. “So how long have you been depressed? Your place didn’t look this bad a month ago.”

I dragged a half-empty bottle of orange juice from the furthest reaches of the fridge. The fluid inside swirled thickly, and it was a week past the expiration date. I lifted the cap to check it anyway, reeling back in disgust. With a string of unhappy expletives, I chucked it into the wastebasket, where it balanced precariously on top of all the other trash.

“I’m not depressed,” I objected, turning to the coffee maker. Coffee was good. Coffee was something I knew I still had. “Just got a lot on my mind.”

“So next you’ll tell me you’re perfectly fine after that fight.” Lil made a skeptical noise, tapping her nails against the counter. “Weren’t you getting out of those pants?”

“Hunh?” I looked up from where I was struggling—and failing—to separate a single coffee filter from all the rest.

“Pants, Zack. You’re still walking around in your bloody pants. Are you going to tell me what has you so rattled—or did they knock you stupid with a blow to the head?”

Still holding the coffee filters, I looked down. “Pants. Right.” Moving past her, I headed back to the apartment’s single bedroom. She plucked the coffee filters from my hands, then trailed after me, halting at the beginning of the hall.

“You drop dead back there and I’m going to do horrible things to your corpse,” she threatened.

I slammed the door. Moving unsteadily, I shucked off my jeans. The process seemed more awkward than it ought to be. The blood had soaked through everything. I had to lose the boxer-briefs, too. I was halfway through this process when I remembered I was still wearing my leather jacket. With my boxers tangled around my ankles, I fumbled with the jacket, everything below dangling in the wind. When I finally unzipped the leather to shrug it off, Halley’s collection of scribbled papers drifted to the floor.