As he returned to the archives, that picture of the girl was a raw wound on his brain. Dead bodies were nothing new to him, and yet that one had burrowed into his brain stem and set up shop in the heart of his CPU.
He wished he could have at least given her a proper burial. But when he’d entered the room, he’d broken the spell that had protected Devina’s sacred mirror so they’d had to leave. After that, the remains of the girl had disappeared.
Which was what brought Jim to the newspaper. Somebody would be looking for their daughter, and the body—or at least pieces of it—would eventually be found: Adrian maintained that Devina usually just dumped what was left as opposed to destroying it because that would cause more pain to the family and friends.
Such a peach that female was.
And it made him wonder whether permanently missing was better than defiled and destroyed. Hell of a choice.
In the search box, he entered things like “blond woman found dead” and “blond woman homicide” and “blond female killed.” Nothing—well, a lot of somethings, just none that fit what he was looking for. The results were too old either in age, because his victim had looked to be only about eighteen/nineteen, or the articles were from six months to a year ago whereas his girl had been killed very recently: The blood had been fresh, and her body, though mutilated, had appeared to be in relatively good health, which made him assume she hadn’t been tortured or starved for a period of time prior to her death.
When the CCJ didn’t give him what he wanted, his next stop on the information superhighway was the national database of missing persons. He searched the state of New York.
Oh . . . man. So many.
So much damn suffering out there in the world: nights that were filled with parents or husbands or wives or sisters and brothers wondering if the one who had been taken from them was dead or alive or in agony caused by another.
“Christ,” he whispered.
And he had been part of this, hadn’t he. On a worldwide scale, he had perpetrated crimes that had created holes in other people’s lives. Yes, the vast majority of his targets had been evil men, but he knew for a fact that many had had families, and now he wondered what he’d left behind. Even if the paterfamilias had deserved to die, what kind of trickle-down chaos had he created? He knew that a couple of his targets had been renowned for loving their kids: They might have been enemies with dangerous resources on a political calculus, but they hadn’t been bastards at home.
“Shit, Dog . . .” There was a snuffle and then a cold wet nose bumped against his hand. “Yeah, let’s start wading through all this.”
Dog raised his scruffy head and yawned so wide he let out a sound like a hinge squeaking. Then with another snuffle, the mutt rearranged himself in Jim’s lap, curling his little paws in and relaxing.
Jim tried to smooth the fur that had been messed up by the repositioning, but Dog’s wiry coat made that wasted effort. Silly animal always looked like he’d been blown dry by a set of box fans and then hit with four cans of Aqua Net.
Faces . . . names . . . stories . . .
As a moan percolated up from next door, he thought of the last time he’d had sex and got nauseated. The idea that’d he’d come inside his enemy was enough to give his cock a case of the never-again shrivels.
To think the other two had done her as well—
At first, the sensation was hard to place. Something was . . . just off. And then the vague huh-what? coalesced to the back of his neck until he was convinced cold air was being exhaled on his nape.
He wrenched around, but nobody was there. And the chills persisted, flickering down his spine, turning into a fleet of ants that teemed over his back.
Jim got to his feet and set Dog on the carpet.
Isaac, he thought. Isaac and Grier . . .
That house . . .
The spell at the house.
He was out of the hotel and back to Beacon Hill in the work of a moment, landing in the rear garden. The incantation he’d thrown remained in place, the outside of the town house still glowing, and now that he was in range, he knew he’d been right to come.
Devina was here. He could sense her evil, parasitic presence.
And yet everything appeared quiet: Through the plate-glass windows in the back, the kitchen was dark, with nothing but a distant hall light throwing illumination. No shadows moving, no alarm screeching, no guns going off, no screaming.
With a great beat of his wings, he levitated up to the third-floor terrace and landed in silence. Walking over to the French doors, he kept himself invisible to the human eye and peered in. The blond attorney was in her bed, lying on her side facing a little TV, apparently sleeping.
She seemed just fine.
Matter of fact, everything appeared just fine. Yeah, sure, he could sense that ghost hovering around—but it wasn’t a threat to her or Isaac. . . .
The vibrating alarm in his spinal cord was still going strong, however, and he was inclined to listen to it rather than go with this illusion of A-OK. On a blink, he walked through the glass door and stood in the center of her room, braced for action.
Which appeared to be a waste of muscle tension.
Again, there was nothing out of place, no sounds. . . .
Frowning, he walked past the bed and through the closed door across the way. On the landing at the head of the stairs, he paused, and the ant farm on his back went crazy, the tickle so intense it turned his whole body into a tuning fork. Jogging downward, he knew he was headed in the right direction as the sensation got even worse—and then he ghosted into the room Isaac was using.
And there was the disturbance.
His fellow soldier was on the bed, twisting and turning in the sheets, his body contorting, his face screwed up tight in a mask of agony. As his big hands gripped the duvet, his arms strained, and that heavy chest of his pumped air hard.
Devina was here, all right, but she was in the man, not around him: The demon had sucked Isaac into a nightmare and trapped him in some kind of torture. And the result was a torment all the more real for its unreality, Jim imagined, because the bitch could custom-fit the abuse to Isaac’s weaknesses, whatever they were.
At least there was a simple solution: Wake the poor bastard up.
Jim rushed forward—
Nigel, his new boss, appeared in the corner of the room and held his hand up like a crossing guard. “If you rouse him, she’ll get into more than just his mind.”
Jim pulled out of the lunge, yanking his weight back onto his heels and confronting the English lordship-type who was his CO Tonight, the archangel was dressed in a 1920s-era tuxedo, and sporting a cigarette in a holder in his right hand and a martini glass in the other. But this wasn’t a party to him: In spite of his Gatsby duds and his 007 drink, his face and his voice were death’s-door grim.
Jim pointed to the bed. “So I was right. Isaac is my next assignment.”
Nigel took a draw on his coffin nail and exhaled—which made Jim realize they actually had something in common. Although given that they were both immortal, guess it wasn’t a bad habit anymore.
“Indeed, saving his life is the answer,” was the eventual reply.
“But I can’t leave him like this,” Jim said as Isaac let out a groan. “Even if he’ll live through it, it’s cruel.”
“You cannot wake him, however. You relate to humans through their souls. That is your conduit—the way you touch them when you interact with them. Right now, his mind is contaminated by her—if you open the door by disturbing him, she shall waltz right on your heels.”
Hardly the kind of assist he was looking to provide the enemy.