And then the spectral hand crushed his heart like a grape.
Murder, cold and sudden and utterly merciless.
Lee Antonelli swayed on his knees, and as long as I live I’ll see his face, see that terrible, sad, confused expression and those lovely brown eyes begging me to explain why I’d let this happen. You could say that he deserved it; he’d been willing to kill me.
But you’d be wrong. Nobody deserved that.
David whirled, turning into a blur of light, and was gone. I caught Antonelli as his corpse pitched forward. Blood burst out of his mouth and nose, and I realized it hadn’t been only his heart the hand had gone after; it had been his lungs, too, and probably any other organ of note. His murderer had systematically pulped him from the inside, like a kid squashing tomatoes in a bowl.
I cursed breathlessly, well aware it was too late. David had darted off in pursuit, but I could tell there was little to no trace on the aetheric of who’d delivered the death blow. Someone horribly powerful, though. Someone not afraid to break every rule.
I’d forgotten to worry about conservation of energy, in those few seconds, and as I eased Lee to the pavement, the imbalance went critical. First, the windows on the van blew out in a shrapnel-spray of glass. One second later, the windows in my car followed. Then the diner’s plate glass windows. The concussive effect rippled out, losing strength until it was only cracking glass and denting metal, and then it faded away.
I didn’t care about that. Someone had murdered a Warden right in front of me, and I hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it.
Some hero I was.
I heard a confused babble, and then the patrons and staff of the diner boiled out into the parking lot, yelling questions, momentarily more upset about their auto damage than anything else. Someone caught sight of me on my knees, with Lee’s body cradled in my arms, and the tenor of the babble changed and grew louder as people converged around me in a forest of heads and shadows.
“What happened?” one of them asked. “Is he okay?”
“No,” I said. I sounded calm. That was odd. “I think he had a heart attack.” Stupid thing to say; there was blood on his shirt, on me, still dripping from his gaping mouth. “Maybe a hemorrhage.”
“That’s sad; he’s so young,” someone else murmured. I heard a cell phone being dialed, and a voice asking for an ambulance. After a pause, they also asked for the police. Well, I couldn’t blame them. Big dude dead on the ground, with a burn mark in his shirt and blood all over his face.
And me, with blood on my hands.
I couldn’t explain, so I didn’t try. I just sat next to Lee’s body, and by the time I realized that I was uncontrollably trembling, it was too late to claim I was too badass to care about what had just happened.
I was crying by the time the sirens approached.
I should have realized that where the police went, the scavengers would follow. In this case, it was the local news crews, two different species by the plumage of their satellite trucks. The reporters had a certain sleek, predatory look to them that identified them clearly from the casually dressed videographers and sloppy, Earth-shoe-wearing boom guys.
I watched them approach as I was giving my story to the police, and it was like a flock of vultures circling, waiting for my last breath.
“Ma’am?”
I blinked. The police officer facing me was tall, beefy, ginger-haired, and excruciatingly polite. Despite that, he wasn’t the kind to take any crap, and I heard the warning in his oh-so-polite question.
“Sorry, sir. I was just coming out of the diner with my—my fiancé, and we saw this gentleman get out of his van. He looked like he was in some trouble. I think he might have been having some kind of seizure.”
“Seizure,” the cop said, and noted it down. “Uhhuh. Was his shirt like that when he got out?”
Oh. The burns. “I didn’t notice right away. I didn’t see him with a cigarette or anything,” I said, which was the absolute truth. “Is it important?”
“Probably not. He damn sure didn’t burn to death. So, you didn’t know him, ma’am?”
I was lucky that nobody appeared to have noticed our little confrontation in the parking lot—then again, it probably wasn’t luck so much as David, taking care of business. Everybody remembered me and David inside the diner, but nobody appeared to have been paying attention when we left and went out to the car. The glamour had held until the windows blew out.
“No, I didn’t know him,” I said. It was my first real lie, and I had to make sure he bought it. I tried not to hold myself too still or keep his gaze too long. A good Earth Warden could have exerted some mental pressure to make him overlook anything that tripped his suspicions, but I’d never been that good, and I wasn’t about to try something like that at my current level of emotional trauma. “Sorry. I think he didn’t really know what was going on. Maybe he was high . . . ?” Slandering the dead, Joanne. Good one. I felt an uncomfortable roll of guilt, but then again, Antonelli had been willing to abduct and murder me. A little slander might have been appropriate.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” the cop asked.
“Fiancé,” I automatically corrected him, and smiled nervously. “I think he went to the bathroom. It was— this was awful. Really awful.”
The cop nodded, probably thinking of all the much more awful things he’d no doubt seen in his career. Probably thinking I was a lightweight ditz. That was fine, because in some senses I was, and besides, I didn’t want him to take me too seriously. That would be a very bad thing.
“Okay,” he said. “If you’ll wait over there, Ms. Baldwin, it’ll be a little while. You said you were on your way to New York?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have a business meeting. Look, can I call—?”
“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t go anywhere.”
I walked away, not in the direction of the reporters, and headed for the pay phone. How long had it been since I’d had to use a public phone? Years. I missed my crispy-fried cell phone, especially when I saw the grime and dried spit on the telephone receiver. You’re an Earth Warden, I reminded myself. You laugh at public phone germs.
Still, I fished a tissue out of my purse and wiped the plastic down before I started dialing.
Lewis answered on the third ring. “Somebody tried to kill me,” I said. “No, don’t interrupt, and don’t joke. It was Lee Antonelli. I had things under control, but somebody took him out at a distance. He said something about the Sentinels putting out a contract on my life.”
There was a silence on the other end that stretched on for longer than I would have liked. “How’d they kill him?” Lewis asked.
“Some kind of aetheric attack, nothing I’ve ever seen before. Lewis, they just reached out and destroyed him. What the hell is going on?”
“Just get here,” he said. “The faster the better.” He hesitated for a second, and then his voice softened. “You okay?”
“Yeah. No damage.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You mean, am I okay with the concept that somebody’scapable of hiring marginally loyal Wardens as hit men to take me out, and killing them if they fail? No, not really.”
I went cold inside when Lewis said, “If it makes you feel better, you’re not the only target.”
“You?”
“Among others.” He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t think it was a good time to ask. “Watch your back. If they can kill Antonelli from a distance—”
“I’ve got David,” I said. “And we’ll both be watching for it now. You be careful.”
“Always. Call when you get back on the road.”