Shadow Blade (14 page)

“Crap.” She reached for him,
then
hesitated. Nothing might happen if he casually touched her, but what if touching his wound ignited some sort of extrasense chain reaction? With the seeker demon’s poison worming its way into his bloodstream, her touch could just hasten it along.

“My house is close. Can you make it?”

He pushed his back along the wall, getting his feet solidly beneath him. “I can.”

She had her doubts. Thankful that she’d worn the padded bike jacket, she quickly pulled out her gloves and jerked them on, then thrust her shoulder beneath his, helping him along a couple of feet. “So did you lie to me about the whole immortal thing?”

“No lies, just not the whole truth. Besides, being immortal doesn’t make me Superman.” He winced. “Bullets don’t bounce off and they hurt. I’d rather be run down by a rhino than take on another seeker.
Nansee.”

The old man just materialized out of the darkness. Rather quickly too, Kira noted. “Where were you during the fight? Thanks—
not
—for having our backs. I for one really would have appreciated the help.”

“He can’t directly interfere,” Khefar gasped, handing her Lightblade back. The power enveloping the blade immediately winked out. “It’s against the rules.”

Rules?
“Well, can he help you into my house or is that against the rules too?”

The old man thrust his shoulder beneath Khefar’s, all but lifting the warrior off his feet. “You will have to release or ease your wards enough to allow me entry.”

That brought a cold dose of reality back. “This isn’t some sort of trick to get me to lower my guard so you can get the dagger, is it? Even if I remove the wards, there are other protections in place.”

“We’re not your enemy, Kira,” Nansee said. “Surely we’ve proven that by now?”

“I don’t profess to know how one of the Fallen or their Avatars would think,” she replied, wiping her Lightblade against her pants leg. The pants were ruined
anyway,
a little demon blood wouldn’t make it worse. “If it would serve your purpose or trick me into trusting you, then I believe you would do whatever it takes, even destroying one of your brethren. There’s little love among the Fallen.”

“True.” The warrior caught her gaze, held it. “I am a servant of the Light, Kira, a warrior like
yourself
. It is a duty I have performed for the last four thousand years.”

“I don’t know of any Shadowchasers who are immortal, with or without complications, despite the array of beings serving the Light.”

Khefar gave her a small smile. “And how many Chasers do you know?”

“Personally?
A few.
It’s not like Gilead holds conventions.”

“True.” He grimaced. “I give you my word that I will not try any funny business while I’m bleeding to death.”

“Right.”
She quickly hobbled over to her bike, got it moving. The front fender scraped against the tire, the seat all but hanging off. If it was just a regular bike, she’d have scrapped it and bought another. “Nansee, can you tell if the seeker’s controller is anywhere nearby?”

“He is not.”

“Well, that’s something, at least.” She led them a couple of doors down to her converted home, disarmed the alarm, then ushered them quickly through the roll-up door then, as the metal door rolled back down, opened the door to her living area. “You can put him on the couch in the living room,” she told the old man as she propped her bike up, then went back to re-engage the alarm. “I’ve got some medical supplies in the pantry.”

Nansee stopped just inside the doorway to the main room. “There are no windows that face east in this room.”

“Is that a problem?”

“If you want to damn his soul, then no.”

She wanted to ask, needed to ask, but forced the questions back. Khefar didn’t look good at all. The questions could be saved for later. He needed to be saved now.

She grabbed her general purpose first aid kit, then led Nansee and Khefar to the elevator she seldom used except for moving artifacts or heavy objects. There was no way they could use the stairs to get to her loft bedroom while nearly carrying Khefar.

The space had originally been two offices and a bathroom before she’d turned it into a large bedroom with a walk-in closet and spa bathroom with separate shower and soaking tub. Her bedroom had a king-size low-profile bed and oversized windows that faced east. The only other furniture in the room was a mahogany nightstand beside the bed and a matching six-drawer chest with a statue of winged Ma’at atop it, unless you counted the punching bag and yoga balls.

“This will work well.” The old man helped Khefar sit on the edge of the bed. Kira could easily see the rips in the white T-shirt, and knew they didn’t bode well. A seeker demon’s claws were just as dangerous as their jaws, the talons loaded with a virulent and fast-acting poison. A Normal would die in less than five minutes.
Would be dead by now.

“You mind telling me why this works? What the importance of east is?”

“Kira.”
Khefar’s voice had thinned with pain. “This might freak you out.”

“I’m a Shadowchaser. I don’t freak out.” But that was before she had two not-quite-human men in her house, touching her stuff.

“Good.” He managed to pull the remnants of his T-shirt over his head, then lay back, grimacing in pain. The bullet, still lodged inside him, had made a slightly ragged quarter-sized hole in his shoulder. Furrows were etched deep into his right side, along his rib cage. Blood welled up from them, dark and thick and tinged with yellow.

Kira knew what that meant—demon poison mixing with his blood—but still decided to go through the motions with the first aid kit. She forced brightness into her tone. “You might be good, but that wound’s not.”

She handed one of Zoo’s extrastrength charms to Nansee. “It’s a healing charm. It might help.”

The old man silently pressed the charm against Khefar’s chest just above the demon wound. Kira tried not to stare at the amount of his skin displayed. The charm wouldn’t counteract the poison but it would make him feel better. “The seeker’s poison got into your system. It’s corrosive and burns through your red blood cells, destroying them.”

“I know.” His breathing roughened. “I’m going to die in the next minute or two. But don’t worry. I’ll awaken as soon as the morning sunlight hits my body.”

“What?” She looked to Nansee, who nodded. “What the hell kind of screwed-up immortality has you dying like some sort of
Highlander
rip-off?”

“It’s part of the rules.
Told you it was complicated.”

“Your rules suck, big-time.”

Khefar started to laugh, but it faded to a groan. She concentrated on pulling supplies out of her enhanced emergency kit so she could avoid staring at the wide expanse of skin showing above his dark denims. So much skin, skin she could touch. Except now he was dying, and while he and Nansee were sure that he’d come back to life, she had her doubts.

“I will take care of this,” Nansee said as he took the box from her, his voice and eyes kind. “You took a nasty tumble. Perhaps you should refresh yourself, get off that ankle.”

“I’m all right.” That was a lie. Two days, two people dying on her watch.

“Kira.”
Khefar opened his eyes with effort, and focused on her. “I know you have more questions. So do
I
. I promise we’ll both have our answers when the morning comes.”

She gave him a jerky nod.
Questions, yes, thousands of those.
They’ll have to wait until after he dies and, I hope, lives again.

“I need to go clean my Lightblade.”

Chapter 11

K
ira grabbed a change of clothes from her dresser,
then
used the elevator to escape to the ground floor. Her ankle would have made her limp down the stairs and shown she did need more attention than she was admitting. Already her body was protesting the simple demands she made of it, but she couldn’t stop. If she stopped moving, she’d start thinking and she wasn’t ready for that.

She quickly cleaned up in the half bath on the main floor, changing into soft cotton pants and a T-shirt and wrapping her ankle in a flexible bandage. After dumping her ruined clothes in the kitchen garbage, she began gathering the supplies to clean and purify her Lightblade and sheath.

The mundane chore of finding cleaning supplies couldn’t keep her mind from whirling. Why was this happening, and why hadn’t the Universe given her a head’s up about it? Balm’s extrasense was prescience; Kira couldn’t understand why the head of Gilead didn’t warn her about Comstock, the seeker demon, or the not-really-immortal warrior dying upstairs. Was it possible that Balm didn’t know?

That didn’t make sense to Kira. Balm always knew. She knew everything. But what if she hadn’t known about this? What in the Universe did it mean for the head of the Gilead Commission to not know?

The Universe was a vast and mysterious place, impossible for any one person to know and understand. People spent entire lifetimes trying to understand earth religions. Those who knew about the Universal Balance, how the cosmos was aligned between Order and Chaos, Light and Shadow, and how every god, every thing, came from that source, could spend several lifetimes studying and not begin to scratch the surface.

Kira certainly couldn’t begin to understand those she ultimately served, the Guardians of Light. Just as she doubted that even those Fallen into Shadow knew the full depth of the source of Chaos.

Of course, it was impossible to predict random coincidences, but believing the past few days were just a burp of fate would take the sort of mental gymnastics she knew she wasn’t capable of.

Her mentor and handler had just happened to come upon an ancient Egyptian dagger. Egyptian weaponry was one of Bernie and Kira’s special areas of expertise. He knew the artifact to be magical and therefore brought it to America—where Kira had the facilities to deal with it—instead of asking her to travel to London, which would have been easier for him if it had been merely a priceless object. A seeker demon and one of the Fallen had followed the dagger’s trail. That trail had also led the dagger’s original owner—the only being she’d ever encountered who was unaffected by her touch—straight to Kira.

That was the part she didn’t understand at all. As far as she could remember, she could tell things about people by simply touching them, their lives replaying across her mind’s eye like a disjointed movie of the week. She could pick up similar, if
fainter,
traces of people’s lives from objects they had touched. The talent had grown as she’d matured. When she’d reached puberty, her “gift” had turned into a curse that had sent her adoptive sister to the hospital and her to Gilead. How could she have known that her ability to read people caused her to drain their energy, especially since she’d never met another being with her gift? She hadn’t been able to safely touch another human being—except once, with Nico, under very special circumstances—since.

Until the Nubian touched her.

She gripped the edge of the counter. Now the Nubian and his—what, guide?—were in her home, upstairs in her bedroom. Not even Wynne or Zoo had been on the upper level, and now she had a man dying in her bed because he needed to be awakened by the morning sun. Kira liked to be awakened by the morning sun too, but the sun brought her to life metaphorically, not literally.

Kira grabbed a cold gel pack from the freezer, took it and her cleaning materials into the living area and sat down on the sofa. She put everything but the blue pack on the coffee table. Propping her bandaged ankle up on a sofa pillow, she placed the cold-pack on it. Kira looked at her hands as she adjusted the icy compress: they were shaking—and not from the cold. Her bare hands hadn’t been that close to another person’s skin since Nico had died in her arms, died because he’d wanted to please her. Now the Nubian prepared to face Anubis because he’d tried to save her.

“Ma’at, goddess of justice and order, is there a lesson here?
Something that I’m supposed to learn?
I have to believe there is. I have to think something more is at work. I have to believe these deaths mean something.”

She knew the deaths meant something. She just had to find out what that something was.
Which meant she had to find the Avatar of the Fallen who’d controlled the seeker demon.

At least they’d taken the seeker demon off the street. That was the only good thing that had come from the last two days. The downside was that if the Fallen’s Avatar hadn’t been taken out when the seeker demon imploded, it could possibly conjure up another one.

Nansee came down the stairs just as she began to polish her blade with a combination of metal polish and extrasense. She looked up. “So it’s done? He’s gone?”

“Yes.” He ambled over to the chair and slowly folded his lanky frame into it. “You managed to clean your Lightblade, then?”

She held it up, sighting along the blade. “I normally let it sit overnight on a clear quartz crystal cluster on my nightstand too, but my bedroom’s now off limits, seeing as how it was unexpectedly transformed into a morgue.”

“This cluster?”
He extended his hands to her. The quartz cluster, about six inches long, lay on a handkerchief in his hands. It looked like the one on her nightstand but she knew he hadn’t had anything in his hands when he’d come downstairs.

“How did
you .
 . . ?” She shook her head. “I’ll just say thanks and, please, put it on the table.”

Nansee placed the cluster within her reach,
then
eased back. “If it makes you feel better, think of Khefar as falling unconscious from his injuries and needing rest to recover.”

“Sure, let’s give that a shot.” She’d either have to believe him or call Sanchez to help her dispose of the body. Either way, at sunrise she’d know for sure.

Nansee ran a hand over his thick white hair. “I know this is not what you intended. Believe me when I say it isn’t what he intended either.”