Envy

CHAPTER 22

Adrian and Eddie wasted more of the night in that booth at the Iron Mask, drinking Buds out of longnecks and turning down the women who trolled by.

Neither of them said much. It was like what had happened in the bathroom had sucked the conversation right out of their voice boxes. And another round of sex was out of the question.

As he sat beside his partner, Ad waited for something inside of him to kick in and get him back into hisoove.

Annnnnnnnnd . . . nothing was coming to him.

The thing was, you could fight the enemy with your knives and your fists, but your own soul was nothing to wage war against, because there was no chance of winning that one. You also couldn’t square off in the ring against reality, either—no target to hit. Unless it was a proverbial brick wall with your head.

So he just sat in the club, watching the crowd, drinking but no longer getting drunk.

“Do we go back to the hotel?” he finally asked.

As he waited for an answer, he was acutely aware of how much he relied on the other angel to be the voice of reason, to make the right decisions, to get them headed in the correct direction.

What the fuck did the guy get from him?

Apart from sex, that was—and tonight Eddie had proved he didn’t need that service, either.

Waah, waah, waah, Ad thought. He kept this up and he was going to get his panty card stamped.

“What I really want is an audience with Nigel,” Eddie muttered, “but he’s blowing me off.”

Ad looked over. “Have we been fired again? ’Cause no shit, this is not our fault. Jim’s the one with the problem, not us. He gave us the boot.”

And all because of that damn virgin of his.

Man, if he could do one thing over since he’d met the savior, it would be to have kept the guy out of Devina’s lair. Yeah, sure, the Sissy issue was a tragedy. But what it was doing to Jim was worse. One girl, one family, versus the whole of the souls in the hereafter? Cruel math for the Bartens, but it was what it was.

Ad ran a hand through his hair and felt like screaming. “Listen, I can’t stay here anymore.”

The grunt that came out of Eddie was either agreement, hunger, or beer that hadn’t settled well.

“Come on,” Ad declared, getting to his feet.

For once, Eddie was the one who followed him, and together, they weaved in and out of the crowd, zeroing in on the door. On the other side of the exit? Rain. Cool air. Nighttime in a city that was no different from any other on the planet on an evening that was no different from so many they had passed together.

Shit, maybe they needed to get with Jim and . . . chill this out. Nothing good was going to come of the savior fighting on his own.

Walking off from the club, they went in no direction in particular. Sooner or later, they were going to have to find a place to crash for the night: Unless they were welcomed up in Nigel’s territory—and it looked like that wasn’t happening anytime soon—they needed to rest. Immortal was immortal only up to a point when they were down here. Yeah, they didn’t age, but they were vulnerable in some ways and very much subject to the eat, sleep, bathe rules—

The attack happened so fast, he didn’t see it coming. And neither did Eddie.

His partner just let out a curse, grabbed his side, and went down like a tree, falling sideways onto the wet pavement of the alley.

“Eddie? What the fuck?”

The other angel moaned and curled into a ball . . . leaving behind a shimmering smudge of fresh blood on the dirty asphalt.

“Eddie!” he screamed.

Before he could drop to his knees, maniacal laughter echoed up into the cold, wet darkness.

Adrian’s response was delayed by nothing but a breath. He wheeled around and unsheathed his knife, expecting to face Devina. Backed up by a minion. Or twelve.

All he got . . . was a human. A fucking piece-of-shit human. With a switchblade in his hand and the wild eyes of a junkie staring out of his shrunken-head skull.

More laughter leaped out of the man’s gaping mouth. “The devil made me do it! The devil made me do it!”

The homeless man lifted his knife over his shoulder and lunged forward, gunning for Adrian with the kind of superhuman strength that only the crazy had.

Ad sank down into his thighs. His normal move would be to tuck and roll, and come up from underneath, but not with Eddie on the ground: He needed to keep his fallen friend in the corner of his eye . . . because the guy was not moving, not going for a weapon, not . . . oh, shit, not moving . . .

“Come on, Eddie—shake it off!” Switching his crystal dagger to his left hand, Ad focused on the forearm of the possessed harpy, waiting for the right moment—

He caught the flailing limb on the downstroke, at the perfect second to change the switchblade’s trajectory and redirect it back at the bastard. And the course correction should have been easy as pie, with the weapon making an arc that avoided contact with Ad’s major organs and terminated in the gut of the attacker.

No. Go.

The wiry body controlled by the haywire mind slipped from his grip like Ad was trying to hold on to a gust of wind.

And that was when he realized that Eddie wasn’t going to get up on his feet.

Like the harpy could read his mind, laughter bubbled out of the lost soul, sounding like piano keys hit randomly with a heavy hand, nothing but sharp, discordant noise.

The fucker was practically flying over the ground as it came at Adrian again, knife over his shoulder, skin peeling back from that face that was more skull than flesh.

Ad had no choice but to focus on his attacker and protect himself. Eddie was as good as dead on the pavement if Ad didn’t survive this and get him to safety. There was no losing this one.

Crouching down at the last moment, he tackled the piece of shit, pile-driving the harpy back against a building. As impact was made, a blazing pain above his kidneys told him that that knife had broken skin and gone in a hell of a lot deeper, but there was no time to worry about a leak. He reached up, caught that wild-card arm, and nailed it to the wet brick. Locking the limb in place, he stabbed upward with his dagger once.

All that maniacal laugher got replaced by the high-pitched scream of pain.

He stabbed again. And a third time . . . a fourth, a fifth.

Somewhere along the line, it dawned on him that he’d become just as unleashed as the harpy, but he didn’t stop. With vicious, jabbing power, he drove that crystal blade into the man’s torso over and over until he stopped hitting ribs because he’d broken them all, and instead penetrated nothing but a wet sponge of desecrated tissue.

And still he kept going. No longer pinning the man to get control, instead, he held the bastard the loo he could continue stabbing.

The fun and games finally stopped when his blade hit the brick wall, the crystal carving its way into whatever building he had killed against.

Ad was breathing hard as he let his weapon fall to his side. Blood was everywhere, and so was the harpy’s intestinal tract—matter of fact, the bastard was nearly cut in two, his spine the only thing that was linking his hips to the top half of his body.

From out of slack, flappy lips, gagging noises interrupted the steady stream of plasma that blocked the air the man was still trying to get down his throat.

That was going to stop soon, though.

“The devil . . . made me . . . do it. . . .”

“And she can keep you,” Ad growled—before he stabbed the harpy right between the eyes.

There was a terrible screech as Devina’s essence exploded out of the eye sockets of what had once been a street-lost addict, the black smoke coalescing, coming together, preparing an assault of its own.

“Fuck!” With a great leap, Adrian threw his body into the air and went sailing. Eddie’s prone, injured figure was his landing pad, and he covered the angel’s body with his own, becoming the shield that was all that could keep Devina out of his partner’s flesh.

Bracing for impact, he thought to himself, Well, I hadn’t expected to be this right, this soon.

About the death thing, that was.

At least Eddie was going to pull through. It was going to take more than a poke to down him for good. Wounds, after all, could be fixed—they had to be.

As Jim stood with Dog on the sidewalk outside of Veck’s house, he was aware that he was taking a backseat approach to the soul in question, just following the guy from place to place and biding his time until Devina made the next move.

It was fucking painful as shit.

He was much more comfortable assuming an aggressive stance, but wait and see was sometimes the name of the game. Although, damn, the weather could be better. The rain was continuing to fall and he sure as hell could do without the windchill.

Could do without having to studiously ignore what was going on inside the house, as well.

Of course the pair of them were having sex.

Duh.

He’d caught the start of the fun and games just before they’d gone inside, so it was obvious what the next move was: Their chemistry was off the chain, and generally speaking, that was not the kind of stuff you walked away from.

Jim crossed his arms over his chest and hunkered in, all the hot-’n’-heavy making him think about the women he’d been with. Huh. Did Devina count as one? Only if she was in the brunette flesh costume, he supposed. Without it, he probably had to start an “animal” category.

But whatever. Regardless of species, he’d never once been with someone he gave two shits about. The fucking had been a participatory kind of masturbation for him—and maybe, if he was honest, a head game with the chippies. He’d enjoyed getting them off, the sense of control over them being better than anything they’d made him feel in return.

His sex life was over now, though, wasn’t it. What he had with that demon couldn’t possibly count. That was fighting in the war, just with a different set of fists and elbows. And it wasn’t like his lifestyle encouraged frickin’ dating. Although . . .

An abrupt image of Adrian and Eddie hooking up with that redhead in the hotel room in Framingham, Massachusetts, filtered down like it had rained into his head. He saw Eddie stretching over her while Adrian had looked dead behind the eyes as he went to join them.

Devina had done that to the angel. Put that emptiness in his stare.

Fucking bitch.

Taking out a Marlboro, Jim lit the thing and inhaled.

Veck was a lucky man to be with the woman he wanted. Jim was never going to have that. Even if he got Sissy free of—

“Fuck me,” he muttered on the exhale.

Had the shit with that girl gone so far that in some ridiculous part of his brain, he was actually thinking of her as not just “his” as in a responsibility kind of way? But really “his”?

Had he lost his frickin’ mind? She was like nineteen, and he was a hundred and forty thousand years old at this point.

Okay, maybe Adrian and Eddie were right. What was doing with that girl was a distraction. Yeah, he’d tried to package it to himself in all sorts of this-is-cool verbiage, but he’d so been lying. And naturally, when his partners had forced him to look at his head-in-the-sand, he’d thrown it back at them and huffed off like a little bitch.

A scratching at his leg brought his head down. Dog had curled into a sit at his feet and was pawing at his calf, looking worried.

“What is it—”

Jim’s phone went off, and even before he grabbed it and checked the screen, he had a premonition of tragedy.

Accepting the call, all he heard was labored breathing. Then Eddie’s voice, weak and broken. “Trade . . . and Thirteenth. Help—”

The pealing laughter in the background was all kinds of bad news, and Jim didn’t waste a moment. He left Dog on the sidewalk and whisked away to downtown, praying that blink-of-an-eye would get him there in time.

The address was irrelevant; all he had to do was zero in on the essence of his boys . . . and he got there just as Adrian took his crystal dagger and nailed some crazy-ass, bleeding bastard right between the eyes.

Devina.

Jim didn’t need the screech to know that something evil was coming out of that bag of flesh, and there was nothing on hand to stop it from getting into Eddie: The angel was down and then some, tucked into a tight ball, cell phone in what was now a lax hand.

Without stopping to think, Jim threw himself in the direction of the defenseless angel, hurling his body through the air—at the same time Adrian did.

Ad landed first.

And then Jim covered them all, without much hope of protecting anyone—

The strangest thing happened: His body dissolved into light, the same way it had when he’d been furious with Devina during the last round. One moment he was in his corporeal form . . . the next he was pure energy.

Blanketing the angels beneath him. Keeping them safe.

The minion, demon, whatever the hell it was, hit with all the impact of a golf ball on a car hood, boinking off, leaving not even a dent behind. Immediately, it came again, to the same effect. Annnnnd a third time.

There was a long pause that Jim didn’t buy a moment of. He could sense the presence circling them, searching for a way in.

All the while, it was clear Eddie was bleeding. The smell of copper was too bold to be from the body over by the alley’s brick sidewall. Hell, maybe both of the angels were injured.

Time to end this bullshit.

Jim retracted himself, rising up into a column of brilliant light that nonetheless illuminated nothing of the grungy environs and threw no shadows. Squaring off at the evil, he focused everything he had on the smoky stain in the air—

And blew the fucker apart.

The explosion had no flash, but the screech was as loud as an SUV braking on dry pavement, and then there was a strange, pattering follow-up on the ground, as if sand were being poured out of a satchel.

Jim resumed his corporeal form and knelt over his boys. “Who’s hurt?”

Adrian groaned and rolled off his best friend, his hand clasping his side. “Him. Stabbed in the stomach.”

Ad had clearly been nailed as well, but Eddie was the one who wasn’t moving. Although at least when Jim touched the angel’s shoulder, the guy flinched.

“How you doing?”

When there was a whole lot of no-answer, Jim glanced around. They needed to get off the streets. This was a busy area of the city at night, and the last thing he wanted was for some well-intentioned kibitzer to 911 the sitch. Or worse, for a mugger to come by. Or a policeman on patrol.

“How about you?” he asked Adrian as he measured the other end of the alley.

“I’m fine.”

“Oh, really.” Office buildings. Warehouse next to them. “Why are you wincing like that?”

“Constipation.”

“Yeah. Right.”

There was no chance they could go back to the hotel. They needed more privacy than what they’d get there, and anyway, there was no way he could carry Eddie through the frickin’ lobby: Even though he could camo them both, the guy would still leave a trail of blood.

Then again, it was all a moot point because there was no flying with that kind of weight. He needed to find them shelter close by.

“You mobile?” he asked Adrian.

“Depends. Walking? Yeah. Flying? Don’t think so.” Jim scooped his arms under Eddie’s prone body. “Brace yourself, big boy. This is gonna hurt.”

With a surge, Jim threw the muscles of his thighs into service and hefted the angel’s weight off the damp pavement. In response, Eddie groaned and tightened up, which was a bene, as it made the guy easier to hold on to.

Also meant the bastard was still with them.

Before Jim could start walking, Eddie’s cell phone hit the ground and skittered away, knocking into Adrian’s combat boot.

The angel bent down and picked it up. The screen was glowing and the transparent wash of blood across it made the thing throw off red light. Pushing his wet hair back, Ad said, “So he called you.”

“Yeah.” Jim nodded at the bank across the street from the alley’s opening. “We’re going in there.”

“How.”

“Through the front door.” As Jim began striding forward, he muttered to Eddie, “Damn, son, you weigh as much as a fucking car.”

The shuffling behind told him that Ad was along for the ride. Likewise with the hoarse commentary: “A bank? That place is going to be more than locked. So short of—”

As they came up to the entrance of the glass-enclosed lobby, the interior lights went off, the security system disengaged, and the front door . . .

Opened. Wide.

As soon as they were inside, everything righted itself except for the lights and the motion sensors.

“How did you pull that off?” Adrian breathed.

Jim glanced over his shoulder. The angel behind him looked like a train wreck: face too pale, eyes too wide, blood on his hands and dripping down his wet muscle shirt.

“I don’t know,” Jim said softly. “I just did it. And you need to sit down. Right now.”

“Fuck that—we have to treat Eddie.”

True enough. The trouble was, in this situation . . . Eddie was the guy he’d go to to ask what the hell to do.

Time to start praying for a miracle, Jim thought.