CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You’re sure you’re
okay?” Sam asked no more than an hour later as Jace helped her from
the back of the cab and hooked her arm through his. The apartment
where her ex lived was only a few hundred yards from the outer rim
of the ruins. Normally, no big deal, but today … it made his skin
crawl.
Sam’s madness was
catching. Calling his uncle and having him confirm that there had
been flowers on the floor of the Choes’ apartment and that Stephen
Quinn had nothing to do with any gang activity going down in
Southie had killed his theory that Stephen was responsible for
putting his sister in danger. It was looking more and more like
invisible demons were really out to get Sam … and a few other
people while they were at it. Maybe even him.
No matter how many
times he told himself Sam seeing him didn’t necessarily mean he was
next on her demons’ hit list, he wasn’t quite buying it. He felt
hunted … watched … and not only by the woman who couldn’t seem to
take her eyes off of him for a second.
But then, could he
blame her? He was one of the first things she’d seen in two
decades, and she’d nearly had to give him mouth-to-mouth—the kind
that had nothing to do with her tongue down his throat—not forty
minutes ago.
“Jace, are
you—”
“I’m fine,” he said,
his voice rough with embarrassment. “I’m fine now. I was just
hungry.” And nearly sexed out of his own skin. He’d never felt like
that. Ever. He’d never felt as if his soul were leaving his body,
never come so hard he stopped breathing, stopped thinking, stopped
feeling anything but a pleasure so intense he wasn’t sure he could
physically contain it.
For about twenty
seconds he’d seriously considered the fact that sex with Sam might
be what was going to kill him, and foul play would have nothing to
do with it.
“Are you sure?” Her
fingers plucked softly at the clean sweater he’d ordered from the
shop downstairs. It was blue, a color he never wore. Sam had
requested it. She wanted to see as many colors as she could before
he faded from sight again.
And she was sure he
would fade away. She was certain his
impending death was the reason she was seeing him, and that she
would stop as soon as they took action to keep him safe. Hence
their presence at her ex-boyfriend’s apartment. Ezra had said he’d
found something interesting, something he and Sam should talk about
in person. He hadn’t seemed to mind that Sam was bringing Jace
along, but that didn’t make Jace feel any better about walking into
an apartment where another man used to fuck Sam.
He didn’t want to
think about anyone else fucking Sam. Ever. Not now, not yesterday,
and surely not anytime in the near or distant future.
“I mean, I told Ezra
and Sunny we’d be here as soon as possible,” Sam said. “But if you
need to get some sleep, I can—”
“I’m fine, Sammy,” he
said, as she placed her finger on the print reader and let them
into the front door of the building. So she was still in the print
reader. He tried not to let that bother him. But it
did.
He suddenly wished he
hadn’t been on the phone to Francis earlier when she went into the
hall to call her ex. He would have liked to hear her voice when she
talked to this Ezra character, to hear if it got all soft around
the edges, the way it did when she was speaking to the people she
cared about.
“Right, sorry. I just
wanted to—” She tripped on an uneven place in the tile in the lobby
and would have gone sprawling if Jace hadn’t grabbed her around the
waist. His heart pounded in his chest as she thanked him and tapped
her way over to the elevator. Just the thought of Sam getting hurt
made him jumpy.
He was the one who
had nearly passed out and drowned in the bathtub—orgasms with Sam
were best reserved for beds and other places where breathing when
you lost control of your body could be taken for granted—but it had
made him even more anxious for Sam. What would happen to her if he
died? Would the killer and his demons come after her
next?
Those worries were
enough to keep his mind off his other concerns. Like how could he
ever sleep with Sam again if he lost control so completely when
they were together? Sure, this time he’d been the one to suffer,
but what about next time? What if he blacked out and did something
more dangerous than swallow a few mouthfuls of tub water? What if
he did something to hurt Sam?
It just went to prove
that he should never have let down his guard in the first
place.
But he hadn’t been
able to resist. When she’d stripped off her sweater and stood naked
before him, smiling that crooked little grin, he’d lost the will to
fight. Hell, remembering the moment was enough to make him hard, to
make his cock strain the close of his new jeans, to make him lose
focus on what he should be doing….
Fortunately, this
time he caught the “off” feeling before it was too late, before
someone or something caught him and Sam unawares.
“Hold up,” he
whispered, his hands on Sam’s elbows, pulling her back behind him
as soon as they got off the elevator. “I smell something. Do
you?”
Sam sniffed the air,
growing pale as she did so. “Yes. But it’s not the demon…. It’s
something else. Something … bad.”
Something bad,
indeed, something like the scent of freshly spilled blood. Jace
could tell from the look on Sam’s face that she recognized the
smell, but didn’t want to name it. Stephen had told him once that
his other sister had been killed the night that Sam was blinded,
that her blood had been all over the place. After something like
that, he imagined it would be impossible to ever forget the bright,
sweet, and salty smell. Just like it was impossible for him to
forget the smell of his mother’s blood.
He and Sam were a
pair, all right. It was amazing that neither one of them was more
messed up than they were.
“It’s coming from
that way,” Sam whispered, pointing to the left. “Ezra’s apartment
is at the end of the hall down there, number four hundred and
eight.”
“That last door at
the end?” Jace asked, stomach sinking as he saw the light seeping
into the darkness of the hall. The door at the end was cracked
open.
“Yes. Can you see
anything? What’s—”
“The door’s
open.”
“Oh, no.” They both
knew that couldn’t be anything but bad news. People who lived close
to the ruins didn’t leave their doors open, not even on a beautiful
spring day like this one.
“Stay here, and run
when I tell you to,” Jace said, pulling his stun gun from its
holster.
“No, I’m coming with
you.”
“You’re staying
here,” Jace hissed. “You can’t see anything except me. How are
you—”
“Exactly, so I’ll be
able to see you react if anyone gets close enough to attack you.”
She flipped a switch on her cane, turning the end deadly. “And I’ll
be able to help.”
“You ever killed
someone with that knife?”
“Not yet, but I
wouldn’t mind starting,” she said, chin in the air, making that
stubborn face he was coming to love as much as the woman
herself.
Love. He was falling
in love. It probably would have made a normal man insist the woman
he cared for stay behind, but then, he wasn’t normal. He’d known
that for years, and he also knew Sam needed someone in her life to
treat her with respect, like she was the force to be reckoned with
that she truly was.
“Okay, but stay near
the door and out of the way unless there’s no other choice,” Jace
said. “If you get in my way, you could do a lot more harm than
good.”
“Fine.” Sam nodded,
falling in behind him as he crept down the hall.
The closer they got
to the end, the stronger the smell: sharp and metallic, with an
undercurrent of horrible sweetness. He heard Sam swallow and
wondered if she was fighting the same urge to gag that clutched at
his throat. He’d been a death dealer to demons and humans alike at
different times in his past, but the smell of blood never got any
easier to stomach.
Sam’s fingers reached
out to tangle in his sleeve. “Wait. I think … I think I … There’s
something coming. I can feel it. I—”
Her words were cut
off by a woman’s scream. Seconds later the door at the end of the
hall flew fully open and a living nightmare rushed out. Jace
couldn’t even guess exactly what he was looking at. God knew it
wasn’t a man—though it was shaped like one—but it wasn’t an animal
or a demon either. It was something … unlike anything he’d ever
seen, a monster with glowing red eyes set in a featureless humanoid
face whose entire body was covered in some kind of yellow mucus. It
smelled like death and sounded like a banshee come to collect a
soul, emitting a shriek so high-pitched it made him fall to his
knees before he could aim his stun gun.
Sam fell beside him,
clutching at her head, crying out in agony. With her sensitive
hearing, the sound had to be even harder to bear. Not that she
would have to hear it for long. The creature—whatever it was—was
nearly upon them, wielding a thin knife as long as Jace’s
forearm.
“Run, Sam! Back to
the elevator, and don’t come out,” Jace yelled as he threw himself
into the monster’s path, knocking it to the ground. He was on his
knees a second later, leveling his gun at the thing, but it was
already up and running, moving with preternatural speed down the
hallway.
Jace fired once,
twice, and was sure at least one of his shots hit his target, but a
stun gun set on its highest setting didn’t faze the creature. It
just kept running, then leaped at the window at the end of the hall
without pausing to throw it open first.
The sound of
shattering glass and breaking wood filled the air as the monster
crashed through the window and began the free fall toward the
ground four stories below. After a quick look back toward the door
to make sure nothing else was coming out to play, Jace pushed to
his feet and ran after the creature. It seemed to take an eternity
for him to close the fifty feet when compared to the speed of
whatever it was he’d just seen. The bastard was fast, deadly
fast.
And apparently pretty
damned invincible as well. The stun gun hadn’t done jack shit to
slow it down, and neither had a fall from a five-story
building.
Jace reached the
window just in time to see it racing toward the ruins a few blocks
away, leaving a trail of mucus as it went. In another life, Jace
would have hurried to the elevator and down to the ground and done
his best to follow the creature—a previously undiscovered
demon-human hybrid of some sort would fetch a hell of a bounty—but
now he just ran back to where he’d last seen Sammy, heart racing
when he found she’d continued on to her ex’s apartment without
him.
Quickly he exchanged
his stun gun for his automatic, glad he’d taken the risk of wearing
it out in the open without his jacket to cover the illegal firearm.
But then, cops patrolling the ruins tended to turn a blind eye when
a bounty hunter was packing forbidden heat. Police didn’t like the
hunters, but they performed a vital service for New York, a service
that sometimes required something a little more serious than a stun
gun.
Hopefully, real
bullets would do some damage if he encountered another one of those
creatures. If not …
Jace burst through
the open door at the end of the hall, lifting his gun and scanning
the room. “Sam, where are you? Sam—”
“I’m in here, in the
bedroom,” she said. A sob followed her words, but it wasn’t hers.
There was someone in the room with her. “Whatever that thing was,
there aren’t any more of them. I could see it, but I can’t
see—”
She broke off,
talking softly to someone else.
“Sam?”
“Jace, we’re going to
need an ambulance.”
“Are you
hurt?”
“No, not
me.”
Thank God. The relief that washed through him made
his knees weak for a second.
“But it’s bad.”
Another sob, followed by the muffled sound of Sam whispering some
sort of meaningless comfort before she raised her voice to call out
to him again. “I’ve already contacted the paramedics. They should
be on their way.”
Jace hurried toward
the sound of her voice, keeping his gun in hand, checking a small
bathroom and the rest of the apartment as he went. It wasn’t a
large space, and there weren’t many places to hide. If there was
anything lying in wait, it would have to be in the bedroom.
Fortunately, he was pretty sure that area was secure.
Not that Sam wouldn’t
have rushed into a danger zone if she thought someone needed help,
but if she said nothing was there, he believed her. She might be
blind, but her other four senses and whatever sixth sense she had
kept her pretty damned informed. After all, she’d known something
bad was coming before he had.
He’d never dreamed of
having a partner, and if he had, he would have thought Sam was the
least likely candidate for the job, but he couldn’t deny she had
the makings of a good bounty hunter. She was brave, levelheaded in
a crisis, and had amazing instincts.
And he trusted her.
Completely. So completely that he didn’t question her when she met
him at the door to the bedroom with a certifiably crazy
request.
“That thing was what
I heard screaming in the ruins the other day.”
“You’re
sure?”
“I’m sure. We have to
find out where it went. You have to kiss me. Really kiss me,” she
said, pulling his lips down to hers.
Jace had time to take
in the man lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood and the
pretty blond girl in tears kneeling next to him, but then Sam’s
lips were on his. His eyes closed, a part of him thrilling to feel
her tongue slipping into his mouth, to hear her moan of pleasure as
he slid his free hand around her waist and tugged her closer,
lifting her feet off the ground as he strove to give her exactly
what she’d asked him for.
The other part of him
said this was absolutely fucking nuts.
“More,” Sam murmured,
rubbing against him, as if sensing he was about to pull away. She
wrapped her leg around his hips and ground shamelessly against the
thigh he slid between her legs.
Jace hesitated again,
highly conscious of the two strangers a few feet away, but didn’t
break off the kiss. There had to be a good reason Sam was doing
this, though for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what it
was.
“Now relax the back
of your neck,” the woman across the room said, not sounding shocked
to see two people making out while her boyfriend bled out on the
floor. It was insane. Unless … Sam had said she’d never had these
visions before, not until last night, after the first time they’d
nearly … If she’d given her ex and his new girlfriend that
information, then maybe—
The suspicion wasn’t
fully formed before Sam’s back arched and she cried out, tearing
her lips away from his. Jace caught her before she fell, guiding
her to the ground the way he had in the hotel room when the vision
had taken her over.
Shit. Crazy as it
sounded, it seemed like the heat between them was somehow
triggering her visions. And she knew that was what was happening,
but she hadn’t told him. Maybe that was the only reason she’d
agreed to go up to that hotel room with him: She was hoping for
another psychic event.
It might not have
bothered him if she’d told him up front, but now…
He hadn’t trusted
many people in his life, and this was a damned fine example of why.
Trusting inevitably led to playing the fool. It made him angry
enough that he was tempted to leave Sam and her friends to figure
this out on their own. But he couldn’t, not when she’d turned so
pale that even her lips had lost all color.
She was gone again,
vacant in that haunting way that made his mouth run dry and his
tongue feel too big for his throat. It was as if she were dead.
Breathing, even blinking occasionally, but completely empty on the
inside, her soul absent from the Sam shell it normally
inhabited.
“Sam? Where … are …”
The man on the ground—Ezra, he was assuming—took a liquid breath.
Good thing Sam had called an ambulance. The man was going to need
it if he hoped to survive.
“Where are you?” the
blond woman asked, taking up where her boyfriend had left off.
“Look around. See if you can—”
Sam jolted back into
her body, her soul animating her eyes the way fingers did a glove.
“He’s somewhere in the ruins, but he’s changed. It’s the same man I
saw with the box—the hands are the same. I’m sure of it. He was
that monster. Somehow he and that thing in the hall, they’re the
same.”
“He’s … working with
the aura demons,” Ezra wheezed. “It’s affected his appearance.
He’s—”
“Ezra found a mention
in one of his books about aura demons who enter the world through
an ancient box,” the blonde said, interrupting Ezra when it became
difficult for him to speak. “The demons are so strong that they’re
capable of hurting humans once they’ve been summoned into the
earthly plane. They can feed on that pain and grow stronger, but
not strong enough to take over a human body and take the physical
form they crave.”
“Then what the hell
was that thing we just saw?” Jace asked.
“To take over a human
body completely they need someone they’ve possessed to fill the box
with the proper offering,” the woman said, ignoring Jace’s
question.
Sam gasped. “Sunny,
is it the same box that my father—”
“Ezra said the box
the authorities took from your father went missing from its museum
collection a couple of months ago.”
“Someone’s trying to
make the demons flesh.” Sam shivered.
“It looks like it,”
Sunny said. “And it looks like whoever it was did their homework.
Ezra said your parents’ cult translated the symbols on the box
incorrectly. They thought the ritual required three children to be
sacrificed. The words for child and
eye are almost the same in the demons’
lexicon.”
The eyes. And whoever
had killed the Choes and that thug in the alley already had three
pairs.
“But how did it find
you? I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here, Sunshine, except
Jace,” Sam said.
Apparently the
girlfriend’s full name was Sunshine. Great. They were getting advice from some wannabe
hippie.
The resurgence of the
free-love movement was great and all, but Jace didn’t trust people
who took flower-child names as far as he could throw them. And
something was off about this chick … something he couldn’t quite
put his finger on, but that left him cold and wary. Maybe it was
just the fact that she’d known Sam was using the sexual heat
between them to facilitate her visions when he hadn’t. Or maybe it
was something more. Either way, he was going to take everything the
woman said with a large grain of salt.
“After we hung up,”
Sam continued, “Jace and I came straight over.”
“You didn’t tell
anyone where you were going?” Sunshine asked, nailing him with an
accusing look.
“He called his uncle,
but—”
“I didn’t tell anyone
where we were going, and I certainly didn’t mention any names,”
Jace said, trying not to take the accusing look personally or let
it fuel his instant dislike of the woman. The girl’s boyfriend had
just been stabbed, and she couldn’t know that Jace had been raised
to choose every word carefully and assume he was being overheard at
all times. Hackers could eavesdrop on just about any earbud in the
city and had always taken a special interest in his uncle’s
activities.
“Then I don’t know
how the demons found out Ezra was helping you, but—”
“The box, Sunny
…
“Ezra, please, don’t
try to—”
“I spoke the words …
on the box…. I—”
“Ezra, please, you’ll
hurt yourself.” Sunny’s voice rose hysterically as more blood
gushed from the wound at the center of Ezra’s chest.
“Don’t speak … the
words … don’t …”
“Don’t speak the
words on the box,” Sunny said, as understanding lit up her face.
“He was looking at some pictures of the box in one of the books and
read the words out loud maybe half an hour ago. He was working on
the translation. Maybe that’s how—”
Sirens sounded
outside, growing louder as the police cars made their way down the
block.
“Go …
find—”
“Don’t say another
word. I mean it,” Sunny said, bringing a shaking finger to Ezra’s
lips before turning to look at Jace and Sam. “You need to find that
thing before it kills again or, God forbid, completes that ritual.
Those demons are nasty enough without physical forms. Take the
books on the table and go. I’ll call you as soon as we get to the
hospital.”
“But shouldn’t
we—”
“Go. If you’re here
when the police arrive, you’ll never catch up with it in
time.”
So they were going
hunting after all. Though for what kind of creature, he had no
idea. But he would find out. Before he and Sam took a step closer
to the ruins, they were going to have a little talk about
everything she’d seen and how she’d seen it.
“Come on. Let’s
go.”
“Should we head down
the stairs?” Sam asked as he pulled her to her feet. “Do you think
the paramedics will be in the elevator or—”
“Come on. Follow me,”
Jace said, tugging Sam along behind him as he strode through the
apartment, grabbing the two open books on the coffee table, then
hurrying out into the hall, where the rank smell of the creature
still lingered. They ducked into the stairwell just as the elevator
dinged open.
Good. Jace didn’t want anyone to see them and start
asking questions. Considering that a man was bleeding in the
apartment behind him, it didn’t seem like a good idea to get caught
with an automatic still clenched in his fist. The fact that Ezra
was suffering from stab wounds, not bullet holes, probably wouldn’t
matter to anyone. Jace would still be a person of interest. The
kind of interest that ended in a night spent answering questions
down at the Southie precinct.
“Jace, where are we
going?” Sam whispered behind him. “This isn’t the way down to the
street. We’re—”
“We’re not going
down. We’re going up.”
“What? But the man
went—”
“I saw exactly where
it went, and how fast it went there,” Jace said, still unwilling to
call what they’d seen a man. It had looked demon and smelled demon,
no matter that it wasn’t a species he was familiar with. “It’s so
far ahead, a few more minutes isn’t going to make a
difference.”
“But—”
“And we’re going to
need backup.”
“But—”
“And I’m going to
need you to answer a few questions. If you can be straight with me,
then we’ll continue to work together. If not …”
“You’ll throw me off
the roof?” Sam asked.
Jace didn’t say a
word, just gritted his teeth and pulled her along a little faster.
If Sam knew about the angry thing that lurked inside of him, she
wouldn’t give him any ideas.