The Demon Hunters (32 page)

“
What about
Vance?”

I watched her in the rearview mirror,
her face immobile, her lips so tight I wondered she could speak
through them. “It’s taken care of. We should go now.”

“
We saw his men go
in.”

“
I told him to call them. I
want them there when the police arrive.”

“
But what did you do to -
?”

Sudden, she leaned on the back of my
seat with her mouth almost in my hair. Her voice seemed to
penetrate my skull. “The police will be here soon. Go!”

We went.

Royal drove the back road
from the Megaplex slowly and cautiously, because people in and
about the big complex think they own the road, and most don’t look
for traffic before stepping off the sidewalk. I often think to
myself,
sure you have right-of-way, but if
a drunk comes bombing along here he won’t care about
that.

We pulled up at the stop sign. “Which
way?” Royal asked Gia.

“
East Monroe.”

I eyed her in the rearview mirror. “Is
Jacob there?”

“
Yes.”

Was this it, then? We would find Jacob
and discover what induced him to sacrifice his people? Gia’s eyes
gleamed behind her huge dark glasses. Did I see the light of
battle, or tears? I didn’t dare ask after Rio.

***

The house sat in a row of virtually
identical houses: two floors, an attached two car garage,
brick facing and partial wood siding. Unlike the others, this one
had an abandoned air. Curtains framed the windows, but the lawn
looked scraggly, the edges untrimmed.

I let down the truck window. “Is he in
there?”

Gia didn’t reply. Wound tight as a
coiled spring, she stood in the street, looking along it at the
house.

Royal opened his door. "I don’t think
Vance would leave him there alone.”

“
He is there, he and a
human male, but he is not. . . .” Gia lifted her clenched hands to
her breasts.

Royal and I exchanged puzzled looks.
“Not what?” I asked.

Her voice whispered out.
“Rio.”

She dropped her hands. Her face had
lost all color. “He told me Rio is here, but that man is not
Rio.”

Royal stepped out the truck. “How
could he lie to you?”

Her mouth was set in a thin line now,
her eyes enormous dark craters. “I asked, where is Rio Borrego? I
did not ask if he still lived.”

She started off a second after I got
out the truck, and we hurried to keep up with her. I felt awful.
All this time looking for her Rio, and now this. We were too
late.

No windows faced us as we walked along
the street, so we would not be seen by someone within unless they
came outside, or we got in front of the house. We walked across the
side lawn as if we had every right to be there, and stopped at the
corner.

Gia kept her voice low, although it
vibrated a little. "He is upstairs.”

I didn’t know how she kept herself
together. If I were her, I could see myself doing one of two
things: falling shrieking to the pavement, or heading back to the
Emerson to kill Vance.

“
She’s right,” Royal
agreed. “Two people in there. But let us check out the ground floor
first.”

Thank God one of us used a little
logic.

We crept around back. Naturally, the
patio doors were locked, but Royal fished a little doodad out his
jeans pocket and picked the lock. I looked out over a backyard of
baked dirt, the shoulder-high wood fence listing drunkenly inward.
A quiet neighborhood of older homes, the only sound came from birds
and the barking of a dog the next block over.

Gia stood close to the house as her
gaze swept back and forth across the yard. I knew she looked for
disturbed soil, a hastily dug grave. A tiny red pearl beaded her
lower lip where she bit into it. She saw me watching and looked
away.

The doors let us into a living room
sparsely furnished with a brown vinyl couch, three matching
armchairs, a battered oak coffee table and a telephone on the
floor. Dark stains patterned the worn old brown carpet. An alcove
led to a small kitchen where fast-food containers, dirty paper
plates and plastic utensils littered yellow Formica countertops.
The place smelled of cigarette smoke, sweat and decaying food. We
eased through a tiny hall to the half-bathroom which, I judged, was
the sole territory of men. The one other room was empty. I pulled
my gun, saw Royal already had his drawn. We moved
upstairs.

I’ve never seen anyone could move as
silently as Royal and Gia. I crept behind them, worried I’d step on
a creaking board and give the game away.

Four closed doors, probably three
bedrooms and a bathroom. Gia pointed at the west bedroom. Royal
nodded, but gestured exaggeratedly at the other doors. I took it to
mean Jacob was in the west bedroom, but Royal wanted to check out
the other rooms first. He operated in cop mode, he had to see what
there was to see.

Gia wasn’t having any of it. She went
west, and after a tiny hesitation, Royal followed, with me at his
heels. She hit the door with the flat of her hand; it burst open
and she burst into the room. Royal and I crowded in behind her,
then split, he to the left, me to the right.

Aluminum foil covered the two windows,
making the room dim, but that didn’t present a problem; we could
still see the interior. This room contained two single cots with
rumpled blankets. A young blond-haired man in blue jeans and black
T-shirt sat on the edge of a mattress. I recognized Mick Taylor
from the files on Vance’s computer.

He reacted immediately, jumping to his
feet and charging us. My gun tracked him, but I didn’t fire. He was
unarmed. Gia blurred across in front of me and Royal, and before I
could blink had her hand on the fellow's throat. She hoisted him
off the ground with unnatural strength, swung him and pinned him to
the wall by his neck. The man gagged and tore at her hands, kicking
spastically several inches off the floor.

“
Tiff! Behind you!” Royal
yelled.

Holding my gun two-handed, I turned in
a half crouch, but the whirlwind of arms and nails and teeth
avoided me and latched onto Gia’s shoulder, moving so fast I was
left crouched near the doorway with my mouth open. For a moment, I
couldn’t understand what I saw, as it shifted to bite and gouge and
flail at Gia’s back.

I squinted in the dim light. A boy. He
had to be Jacob.

With Taylor still dangling from one
hand, Gia tore the kid loose. She kind of flicked her wrist and he
flew the full width of the room, crashed into the wall, then slid
down it to fold into a heap against the baseboard.

I recalled how that felt.

Taylor gagged and fought for breath. I
was afraid Gia would kill him. He tried to say something. Gia eased
up a little.

“
Don't . . . hurt him.
Trying . . . protect me,” he gurgled out.

Jacob glared up at Gia. I remembered
he was mute.

“
Don’t hurt him,” Taylor
gasped.

Gia opened her hand and he dropped to
the floor, caught himself, went down on one knee. He put one hand
to his throat and rubbed it as he looked up at Gia. But Gia no
longer took any notice of him.

Jacob and Gia were having a staring
match, and neither wavered at first. Then the lad kind of whimpered
and his narrow shoulders loosened.

He crawled across the room on hands
and knees, hesitating every couple of feet, then stopped
altogether, crouching there, staring up at Gia with his head cocked
on one side as if listening to something I couldn’t hear. Gia
nodded her head. He came on again, faster this time, covering the
last few feet in a scuttle. He wrapped himself around Gia’s legs
like a fawning puppy. She bent over and laid one palm on his head.
He stilled. His eyelids drooped.

I stared at him. He looked like a waif
who finally found a home, drowsing with a tiny smile coming and
going on his mouth. I moved closer and he opened his eyes and
looked at me, then sighed and closed them again.

I crept right up to him and knelt,
with Royal at my back, trusting him to protect me should the kid
attack. But I didn’t think he would.

A truly beautiful child with skin the
color of almonds and clear, dark emerald eyes, his yellow hair in
thick, coarse ropes past his shoulders.

Gia shot upright, her eyes widening.
As if straining to hear, she cocked her head slightly, turned it to
look back at the door. Her face contorted and she wailed—I have
never heard a sound as piercing, as eerie, as bereft. She whirled,
leaving Jacob with his arms clutching at something no longer there,
a blur in the air, then nothing.

***

We found Rio Borrego stuffed in the
bloody bathtub, Gia standing over him. Gia was right: he was a
beautiful young man. Was. I saw little resemblance to her
description of a youth with dusky skin, dark slashing brows and
gleaming black hair.

He lived, but barely, so weak, neither
Gia nor Royal sensed the flutter of his heart beneath the strong
pounding of mine and Taylor’s. His grotesquely angled limbs
indicated both his arms were broken in two places, his ankles were
broken, his kneecaps shattered. At least one rib strained to poke
through his chest. Shallow incisions, burns and severe bruising
patterned his naked body.

Rio had been left to die. Tortured,
dehydrated, starved, suffering from blood loss; I don’t know how he
hung onto the little life left in him. Yet when Gia threw herself
down beside the tub, moaning and whispering his name, he opened his
swollen eyes to slits and murmured, “I didn’t tell them nothin’,
Gia,” before he passed out again.

I stepped into the hall and dialed
9-1-1. I gave emergency services the location and cut the call,
knowing none of us should be here when they arrived. They would
come even though the call could be a prank; they had to.

When I returned to the bathroom to
clear everyone out, I stepped into a confrontation.

Gia faced Taylor, Jacob squatting
between them. Her eyes looked true black as she stared at Taylor,
her face blank, expressionless. Royal stood off to one side, alert,
his gun still in his hand.

“
You did not hurt Rio,” Gia
said in a gelid voice. “But neither did you interfere when your
friends tortured him.” She took one step nearer.

Taylor flattened his back to the wall.
He swallowed hard, but he didn’t try to run. He knew that would be
futile.

“
No!”Jacob said.

He could talk. He fooled old
Stadelmann all along.

He rose up and stood with his back to
Taylor. His emerald eyes glared at Gia. He had a low voice, an
accent I couldn’t identity, and he spoke slowly, aggressively. “I
did not help your paramour - am I also guilty?”

Gia cocked her head on one side. She
sighed. “Very well. Your logic is flawed, but I will not harm this
man who means so much to you.” She swept her palm over her
forehead, a weary gesture. “We must hold true to those we love;
they are with us so briefly.”

Then she briskly turned back to the
bathtub, just as the paramedics, two squad cars and a fire engine
roared to a stop in front of the house.

“
We have to leave, now,”
Royal said, holstering his Glock as he stepped to the
window.

Gia turned on me. “You called
them?”

I looked down at Rio. “Well,
yeah.”

She knelt beside the tub and laid her
palm on his brow. “Yes. We must let them take him. The police will
know this house belongs to Vance. It will be another nail in his
coffin.” She bent over; her lips lingered on his damaged cheek. “We
will be together again soon,” she said softly.

“
Gia, we must go,” Royal
said.

In a blur, he scooped me up in his
arms, and I don’t remember much more till we were back in his
apartment. I don’t know where Gia, Jacob and Taylor went. I was
thankful to be alone with Royal.

Chapter
Twenty-Seven

Three days later we watched the TV
rerun of Lieutenant Mike Warren, head of Clarion PD Homicide
Division, standing shoulder to shoulder with Clarion’s Chief
MacFarland as they gave a press conference. Flash bulbs popped all
around them and two FBI agents. The FBI was supposed to be the star
performers, but Mike stole the show. I could see he was pretty
happy, having the gang who killed four people handed him on a
platter, and pleased as punch Clarion PD nailed them.

We missed the live broadcast. We were
kind of . . . busy. You know how it goes: sex, eat, sex, shower,
sleep, shower-sex, eat. . . .

People throughout the States wanted a
reason, a motive for the murders, but Mike didn’t have one. He said
Vance and his hit squad would spend the rest of their lives in an
institution for the criminally insane, and let them make what they
would of that.

The TV station aired pictures of Vance
and each of his men. Mick Taylor wasn’t one of those
arrested.