Zeke didn’t let my psychoanalysis ruin his love affair with his new gun. He brought it that night, concealed in a holster under his jacket. I was surprised the weight of it didn’t have him leaning to one side, since it was as heavy as the anchor on the Titanic, but it didn’t.
Dressed in all black with his hair pulled back into a ponytail, Zeke looked like what he was . . . dangerous. Damn dangerous. He lounged against the wall opposite the emergency door with arms crossed. Bait or the hunter. Zeke loved being both.
Griff and I were dressed the same as Zeke and both of us were carrying shotguns as we crouched in the dark alcove between two Dumpsters near the mouth of the alley—keeping Zeke in sight. The only light in the place was directly opposite him and was a dim bulb mounted over the door, but demons didn’t need a lot of light to see. They didn’t need a lot of light to kill either. I was guessing that Hell was a dark, dark place.
“Do you ever wonder why they do it?” Griffin murmured. “Sell their souls? Do they really think a few years of all they could want here could be worth going to Hell? How do they let someone talk them into that?”
“People are stupid, shortsighted, and sometimes just desperate for something more.” I had heard there were souls, besides immature ones, that demons wouldn’t take. They wouldn’t take a soul for a selfless act. Wouldn’t or couldn’t. No trading your soul for your dying husband or wife, child or brother. No trading it for the cure to cancer. No doing evil to accomplish good. The road to Hell wasn’t paved with good intentions after all. “Besides, who’s to say Heaven’s any better? No shellfish, no pork, no hot guy-on-guy Westerns. No sex at all. Think about that. No sex and no barbecued shrimp. How could Hell be much worse?”
“Is there really no sex in Heaven?” Zeke said aloud, sounding worried. He was listening in to Griffin’s thoughts again and being about as stealth conscious as a marching band. We both ignored him.
“Put you one-on-one with a demon and I’ll bet you could have him selling his soul to you,” Griffin snorted at my ear, then added,“If demons had souls.”
“Sweet talker.” I jabbed him with my elbow, then tensed as the door opened and a demon walked out, followed by a girl. She was pretty, but not beautiful. Her breasts were small, a B cup, but so were mine. The last thing you needed when running down a demon was a double D smacking you in the face, but that probably wasn’t her opinion. She was twenty pounds heavier than the magazines told you she should be with an ass a tad bigger than an anorexic starlet’s. In other words, she was normal—which was most likely the worst possible thing to be in her eyes.
And then there was the demon. . . . Picture a male model with empty eyes and a smile as bright as a thousand diamonds—or as predatory as the flashing teeth of a personal injury lawyer. Not all lawyers were demons, but let’s say there was a fairly high turnover among the Vegas ones, thanks to Eden House and an endless supply of shotgun slugs.
“Hurry up and run so I can start killing,” Zeke told the girl impatiently. He’d pulled out the Colt and pointed it at our prey.
The girl stood frozen. Even in the low light I could see the beat of her pulse, rapid against the pale skin of her throat . . . the beat of her starving heart. She wanted, so badly, all the wrong damn things. I stood, braced the stock of the shotgun against my shoulder, and said, “Listen to him, girl. Try helping others instead of helping yourself. Take your shallow dreams and run to something better, because there is better. Go!” She didn’t move. “Run!” There was a flutter of green silk, fake, and the glitter of diamonds, also fake, and she was gone . . . running past us, out of the alley, and disappearing around the corner. I hoped she believed me. It was true. There was better. She only had to open her eyes and see it.
The demon’s smile didn’t waver. “Eden House dogs. You . . .”
Zeke shot him between the eyes with three consecutive shots that came so fast, they almost sounded like one. “They always want to talk.” He lowered the gun. “Eat your still-beating heart. Skin you alive. Strangle you with your own intestines. Blah-blah. Boring.”
The head of the human demon had gone misshapen. Hollow point rounds for maximum damage. Zeke liked his toys to do the job first time around. This time he’d nailed the demon before it even had time to change back to its true form. Scales rippled across its slack face, but it poured downward into a black puddle before it could change any further. No brain, no demon.
Easy. It hadn’t been worth taking off my boots and putting on my sneakers. Hell, it wasn’t even worth putting on deodorant in case I had to run and sweat.
But that’s when we found out why the demon hadn’t lost its smile.
I spotted them first . . . on the roof. Five of them and they weren’t bothering with human disguises. Bat wings thrashed and they dived at us, transparent teeth bared. Three of them were black, with ebony scales that sucked in the light. You didn’t see that color often, and it was never a good time when you did. The other two were a sickening, swamp green-brown, more of what I was used to. They weren’t armed with weapons. With their teeth, speed, and claws seven inches long, they were already equipped. And all those teeth, all those talons, they had one target.
“Zeke!” I shouted it and ran, but Griffin was ahead of me. Nothing against Griffin, but I was one fast runner, damn fast. It didn’t matter—he was motivated. Unfortunately, that motivation didn’t stop Zeke from going down. Not that he didn’t take some down with him, because he did—popped two in their heads as they fell from the sky on top of him. It was damn good shooting and from the surprised flare in their red and yellow eyes, unexpected from a human.
Cool, precise, without a hint of nerves. That was Zeke. I doubted he felt his nerves dance with anything other than annoyance when the claws of the third black demon sank into his upper chest and arm, pinning him to the ground and keeping him from reloading.
Griffin stumbled.
Shit. Zeke might not get nerves, but he felt something other than annoyance, all right. He felt pain. And thanks to being an empath, Griffin was feeling it too. Everything his partner felt, he was feeling right along with him. And that was sweet in a bonding, “I feel your pain . . . no, really, I feel your pain” kind of way, but it wasn’t any use to us now. I grabbed the back of his jacket and kept him upright as we ran. I also gave him a shake. “You have to have some control over your empathy,” I snapped. “Use it! You’re no help to him like this.”
Zeke had his good hand wrapped around the neck of the demon and was holding those haunted-house, shattered-window teeth away from his own throat. I couldn’t see the blood on his chest, black was good at hiding that, but I could see a trickle of it run from the corner of his mouth, the red of it on his bared teeth. I didn’t need to hear the accompanying wheeze from Griffin to know the demon’s claws had at least nicked Zeke’s lung.
I stopped running and fired at the black one squatting on top of Zeke. I missed as the head darted forward with uncanny speed—physics-defying speed. Demons were like people. They were all different. Some were fast; some were slow. Some were smart, some not so much, and some beyond idiotic. It was our bad luck to get a smart, fast one; our worse luck that I underestimated him.
But the chest is a bigger target and I was smart and fast myself. I fired the second barrel of the shotgun and hit him dead-on. He was thrown off Zeke into the back of the alley. The talons must not have felt any better coming out than they had going in, because Zeke arched up off the asphalt and this time Griffin did fall. I used one hand and the support of a knee to reload the shotgun, and I used the other hand to slap Griffin’s face hard enough to leave an instant hot, red hand-print. Then I took a handful of his shirt, pulled him to his feet, and pushed him against the alley wall. The push was as hard as the slap and I saw his eyes focus on me. “Griff, you don’t turn it off now and Zeke dies. He dies. Turn it off!”