He stared at me, and I thought I could feel his eyes on my throat. He still clasped one of my wrists, but the pain of that manacle-like grasp was nothing compared to the rest of my body, so I’d barely noticed.
Then he nodded. “After you.” And with a none-too-gentle shove, he pushed me out the door.
Yes, it was Australia, or he was going to great lengths for a practical joke. The license plates were different, and the ordinary-looking sedan he pushed me into had the steering wheel on the wrong side. He closed the door and moved around to the driver’s side, not even bothering to see whether I was going to try to run for it. He must have known I was past fighting.
We drove in silence, into the dawning of what was presumably going to be the last day of my life. I leaned back in the seat, watching the landscape whiz by with incurious eyes. We’d been in some kind of port city, but by full daylight we were already past the suburbs and into the countryside. Oddly enough, he’d turned on the radio once we got in the car, and quiet music filled in the blank spaces in my mind. It seemed an anomaly—he was much too cold and empty a person to care about music. I figured that was the least of my worries. I listened to plaintive voices, some familiar, some not, and waited to die.
I must have slept. When I awoke, the sun was blazing brightly overhead and we’d stopped outside a restaurant that seemed to have erupted in the middle of nowhere. I glanced at my nameless companion, wondering if this was one of his creations, but it seemed real enough, and as I followed him out of the car I noticed a sign announcing that they had Foster’s. At that point I was grateful for small favors.
“Nice of you to feed me,” I muttered gracelessly after we’d slid into a booth and my captor rattled off an order to a sullen waitress. “But you might have let me order for myself. The condemned woman should get to choose her last meal.” Though a hot lamb sandwich with gravy and chips wasn’t a bad choice, come to think of it.
“Deal with it.” He’d ordered a veggie burger for himself. So he could kill people but not animals. Great. I sat back in the booth, taking a surreptitious glance around me. He hadn’t used the bathroom since I’d been with him, but sooner or later he’d have to, wouldn’t he? Unless he truly wasn’t human, which I took leave to doubt.
I wondered if I could hot-wire a car. Newer ones might be tricky, but there were enough older cars parked outside the restaurant that I might have some luck, if I could just manage to distract my kidnapper for a short while.
I didn’t know his name. I didn’t want to. For some reason, thinking of him as an abstraction made the situation easier to deal with. If he had a name, like Joe or Tom or Harry, that would make it more real, and as long as it stayed a little otherworldly I could handle it.
When he went to the bathroom I could make a run for it, I thought. I could beg for help from some of the rough-looking customers—surely they’d help a lady in distress. There were two burly ones at the counter, another one toward the back—
“No one will help you.”
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what I was thinking. “Why not?”
“Because you cannot get up from that seat. You cannot speak.”
What the hell do you mean? I began, and then realized my mouth hadn’t moved. No words had come out, not even a mute squeak of protest. I tried to move, but my butt might as well have been superglued to the booth. I put all my fury and panic into my eyes, but he simply looked away, bored, as the waitress brought a foaming mug of beer. One. For him.
I reached out, planning to either grab it or dump it in his lap, but my hands couldn’t move past the centerline of the table. It was as if there were a Plexiglas sheet between us, thick and hard and invisible. A diet soda had been left at my place, and I found I could reach it. Couldn’t swipe his beer, but in fact I was happier with the Diet Coke.
I waited for him to lift his voodoo spell, but he simply drank his beer, looking out at the dusty landscape, ignoring me. I went from fury to pleading to tears and back again, and it was a waste of time. When my food came I could reach it, but my appetite was gone and I just stared at it.
“I do not care whether you eat or not,” he said, not looking at me. “You have another ten minutes and then we leave.”
I glared at him, a wasted effort. And then I ate, because if there was a chance I could make a run for it, I’d need my strength.
He must have drugged me. That, or hypnotized me. Some way he’d managed to fuck with my mind, convincing me I couldn’t move or speak.
For a last meal, it wasn’t bad. He’d ordered dessert as well, and when the waitress cleared the dishes and brought me a huge slice of coconut cake, my stomach did another leap. I loved coconut cake. How did he know?
I couldn’t very well ask him. I smiled my thanks at the waitress, then ate every single crumb of that damned cake.
The stranger rose. “Time to go.”
My feet were no longer stuck to the ground, but my enforced silence was still in effect. He took my arm in a fairly brutal grip and led me back to the car, and it wasn’t until he shoved me inside that I could speak.
“I have to pee,” I said in a flat voice. It was a lie, but I figured it was my only chance at getting away.
He shot me a glance. “Then I expect you’ll be uncomfortable for the next few hours.”
I subsided, not bothering to try the door. Even normal people could lock car doors from a distance. He pulled out onto the empty road, his expression the same. Empty. Grim. Purposeful. He really was going to kill me.
“What’s your name?” I hadn’t wanted to know, but the silence was driving me crazy.
“Does it matter?”
“Hell, yes, it matters. I want to know why you’ve been following me all these years.”
“I thought you failed to remember beyond the last year or so.”
“I don’t even remember my own name. But I remember you.”
He looked at me then, the deep black emptiness of his eyes chilling me. “Azazel.”
AZAZEL CONCENTRATED ON THE NARROW, sun-baked road ahead. Her cluelessness was beginning to annoy him, but if that was her main line of defense it was easy enough to deal with. As long as she didn’t shift into her real form, his job would be relatively easy. What he couldn’t understand was why she wasn’t putting up a better fight.
She had weapons she hadn’t begun to use, not the least of which was her ability to shift into Lilitu, the storm demon, the birdlike monster who could claw the entrails from a man, given a moment of inattention. It would be useless against him, but she wouldn’t know that. She never remembered.
It wasn’t the first time he’d battled the Lilith. With the curse of eternity on his head, he’d come face-to-face with her in many demonic forms, and each time he’d vanquished her. But never completely.
He’d destroyed other demons and abominations in the thousands upon thousands of years he’d been on earth. Most obviously the Nephilim, as well as others that Uriel had allowed to run free in an attempt to vanquish the Fallen. But the she-demon Lilith was beyond even his control. And he’d waited long enough.
He hated to think of her as female, but now that he was around her he couldn’t continue putting her in the nongendered group to which most demons belonged. Her destructive power was like that of no other female, and he’d always tried to think of her as it. Particularly given the unacceptably prophecy he was determined to avoid. She was dangerously female, and even now he could feel her seductive power.
She hadn’t reacted to his name, but she should know exactly who he was. It was always possible she was telling the truth, that she didn’t remember anything. He’d been watching her for the last five years, and her behavior had been odd, supporting what she said. By the time he’d finally taken her, she’d already lived under four different names in four different cities. He’d assumed it was an effort to avoid him, but there was the slight chance she really didn’t remember. He could sense very real distress coming from her, and he needed to fight it.