Conspiracy of Angels (9 page)

“There you are,” he muttered triumphantly, withdrawing a security swipe-card fixed to a small set of keys. He slid the card through the mounted security unit and punched in a code.

“So this is it,” I said over his shoulder. “Nothing useful. Just fend for myself?”

Holding the door slightly open, Remy turned to me and sighed. His features were a mixture of irritation and regret—or at least something that I interpreted as regret.

“I’ll make it quick, so pay attention.”

“You say that like I normally don’t,” I responded.

Remy glared.

“OK, OK,” I said, holding up my hands. “I’m all ears.”

He nodded, then said, “You’re Anakim. That’s your tribe, like mine is Nephilim. You can walk between the realms of flesh and spirit—the Shadowside. Otherwise we’re essentially the same thing.”

“I’m not a fucking vampire,” I said out of reflex.

He actually slapped me across the face. I was too stunned to do anything but gape.

“I know you’re not this stupid,” he said testily. “And you have to do something about those wings. With everything spilling out like that, things on the Shadowside are going to home in on you like a beacon. Moths to a flame.”

He couldn’t have stunned me more with another slap. Instinctively, I flexed muscles that could not possibly exist, feeling that familiar burn down either side of my spine.

“Wings?” I gasped.

Sirens rose and fell in the distance, drawing nearer to the club. Remy made an impatient sound.

“Pull them tight to your body. Then hide them with a cowl. It’s like a veil of energy, meant to obscure. Think about it and I suspect you’ll do it naturally. If not…” He shrugged.

“Do you have any idea how crazy this sounds?”

Remy fixed me with another piercing glare. “You asked me to help you. Don’t turn around and argue about it. Now,” he added, opening the door a little wider and pointing, “the front of the club is that way. Don’t go that way.”

“I’m amnesiac, not an idiot,” I responded bitterly.

“An improvement, then.”

It was my turn to glare. “Funny,” I growled. “Now what else can you tell me?”

He shook his head. “I’ve wasted enough time already. Saliriel will be missing me. But,” he added, an odd expression flickering across his features. He clamped down on it pretty quickly, but it left me with conflicted feelings of guilt and nostalgia. He fished in his pockets. “Here,” he said, holding out his hand.

When I extended my own hand, he dropped two things into my open palm. The first was a set of keys. The second was a fat roll of cash. I examined the keys curiously. They had a small clear plastic fob, like the kind that comes on the keys to a rental car, but instead of make, model, and year, the little slip of paper inside the fob had a Lakewood address written in neat, tiny lettering, along with a random string of numbers.

I arched a brow quizzically.

“One of my safe houses,” he explained. “I think there’s about three hundred cash in that roll. You may not remember the circumstances, but I hold fast to my oath.”

“Oath?”

He chewed his lip, practically vibrating with some unspoken inner conflict. “If I were smart, I would turn your loss of memory to my advantage and ask that you release me right now… but that wouldn’t be fair.” He said it in a rush, more to himself than to me.

“What are you even talking about?” I demanded. The wail of sirens grew closer.

“I gave my word, and such things are binding. Good luck, Zaquiel.” It was a dismissal. He practically shoved me onto the empty street.

I stared at the keys and cash in my open palm.

He started to close the door. I shoved my foot in the way.

“Gave your word for what?”

Remy paused, his face half lost in the shadows of the nearly lightless stairwell. “To help save you the way you saved me,” he said, voice barely a whisper. “Now get out of here, before you get yourself killed again.”

He toed my foot out of the way and pulled the door shut with a metallic
click
. It didn’t even have a handle on this side. Standing alone in the darkened alley behind the club, I could just make out the chatter of police radios and walkies drifting on the air from the front of the building. Cleveland’s blue brigade had arrived in force. I
definitely
wasn’t going that way.

Closing my fist around the keys and wad of cash, I stared at the boarded-up windows and graffitied walls of the warehouses across the street, feeling more lost than I had waking up on the edge of Lake Erie.

T
aking the long way back to where I’d parked the stolen Harley, I made certain there were several blocks of buildings between the police and me. This part of the Flats was a desolate testament to urban decay. Sagging chain link edged condemned lots filled with rusted husks of metal, and the sidewalk jutted at weird angles, exposing old bricks beneath.

The scenery matched my mood. I couldn’t stop brooding over all of the dead—Alice, the officers, the naked slave, Vikram the bouncer. There were others gunned down inside the club, and all of it because of me. For a moment, I considered turning myself in to the police, but I had a feeling that wouldn’t be safe.

For them.

I passed beneath a derelict bridge crusted almost completely white with pigeon droppings and finally turned toward the street that, with luck, still hosted my ride. I thrust my fists deep into the pockets of my jacket as I went, trying to concentrate on what Remy described as a “cowl.” I wasn’t even certain I believed in the parts the cowl was supposedly masking.

“Hey, flyboy,” a throaty female voice called from the sidewalk. “Why won’t you return my calls?”

I was so wound up in my thoughts that I probably would have walked right past her, had she not spoken. As it was, her words stopped me dead. I gawked for several moments, uncertain how to respond.

She stood next to a teal Sebring convertible with Illinois plates. Despite the chill of the weather, the ragtop was down. She had her arms crossed beneath ample breasts, while one curvaceous hip rested jauntily against the passenger side door. She was perhaps five and a half feet tall with her boots on, wearing a pantsuit of midnight blue. Her dark red hair was long and loose, falling in wild waves around her face to tumble halfway down her back. She wore no jewelry that I could see, and her olive skin was clear and softly tanned.

Even in the jaundiced light of the streetlamps she was stunningly beautiful, but her storm-gray eyes glittered with fury as she regarded me.

I glanced nervously around the street. Red and blue police lights stuttered between the empty buildings on the left, flashing against the windows of the parked cars as more cruisers sped toward Club Heaven. The stolen Harley sat half a dozen spaces beyond the Sebring, and for a moment I debated running for it. Not that I could reliably start it.

“Um… do I know you?” I asked.

“Dammit, Zack.” She stamped her foot, the heel of her sleek leather boot loud against the pavement. “Don’t play dumb with me. You know I hate your stupid games.”

“You and everyone else,” I muttered. With her waves of dark red hair and thunderhead gray eyes, she was fiercely beautiful. Glowering at me in that moment, however, she just seemed fierce. I couldn’t tell if she was a good guy, a bad guy, or an angry ex-girlfriend. With my luck, it was the latter. They were usually the worst.

She shifted her hip on the door of the car, readjusting her arms—and everything above them. From the thin camisole and breezy pantsuit she was wearing, she should have been cold, but she didn’t look it. Not that I was looking.

Well, I was trying not to look.

“I drove all the way from Joliet the minute I got your voice mail,” she complained. “Then I spent the rest of the day looking for your sorry ass. The least you could’ve done was answer my calls, Anakim—or did you kill your phone again?”

Anakim.
So she knew about that.

Angry ex-girlfriend was probably off the list.

“Seriously, lady. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She made a disgusted noise, then pulled out her cell phone. Setting it to speaker, she held it up in my direction. My own voice spoke urgently at me.

“Hope this is still your number, Lil. They have your sister. Not sure what’s going on, but the Nephilim are involved. I’m going to try to get her back. Hope I don’t disappear like the others… Gotta go.”

“Lailah,” I breathed. The name came to me on a sudden tidal wave of emotion—fury, urgency, a cutting sense of loss. She was the one with the pleading eyes and the flowing, midnight hair. The trapped one. “She’s in trouble,” I said and felt it thunderously.

“Of course she’s in trouble,” the woman spat. “She got tangled up with you.”

I wanted to argue her point, but a lingering sense of guilt rose from the muddied depths of my memory. The meaning behind the sensation tantalized just beyond my reach. I ground my teeth in frustration, overwhelmed with the urge to hit something.

“Can I hear that again?” I asked, making a grab for the phone.

She slapped my hand away. I half-expected a barrage of psychic images from the contact, but my mind’s eye seemed blind to her. Not that I was complaining.

“You don’t touch my phone,” she snarled. “Now where is she? Where’s Lailah?”

I struggled to catch anything else that crashed to the surface along with the name, but it was like trying to pluck fish from the ocean. It was all too slippery. I held my hands out a little helplessly.

“I don’t know.”

The woman’s gray eyes flashed. “You better start talking, Anarch. Anything happens to her, I hold you responsible.”

“Anarch? What?” I said. That was a new one.

More sirens wailed in the distance.

“I really need to get out of here,” I said, taking a few steps away from her shiny green convertible. “I can’t help anyone if I’m in jail.”

She put her hands on her hips and maneuvered in front of me.

“You’re not skating away that easily,” she declared. “Not till I get some answers. What were you doing with the Voluptuous Ones just now? Is she in there? If she’s in there, cops or no cops, I’ll go in and tear the place apart.”

“Lady, have you been paying attention? I don’t know you, and I don’t remember your sister.” I glanced back in the direction of Club Heaven as someone shouted orders through a loudspeaker. “Dammit. Could we discuss this somewhere that won’t be crawling with cops in the next five minutes?”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “With your friends on the force, what are you so worried about?”

“Friends?” I scoffed. “That’s not likely.”

“What kind of shit-pot did you stir? Sal doesn’t normally call the police. It’s bad for business.” With undisguised satisfaction, she added, “I’d pay good money to see the look on the old bastard’s face about now.”

“People died.”

She gave me a weird look. “So?”

“What the hell is
wrong
with you?” I demanded. Exasperated, I said, “Look, I woke up half in the lake. I don’t remember shit, and I’ve got cops and cocademons trying to track me down. I don’t have time to argue with you.”

“Cacodaimons? You can’t be serious.”

I tried to step around her again to make a break for the motorcycle, but she just matched me movement for movement. Her little chin jutted.

“Explanations,” she snarled. “Now.”

I threw my hands up. “That’s what Remy called them. I don’t know what the fuck they were aside from hella-creepy,” I said with a shudder. “Nothing should crawl into dead things and make them get up and walk around again.”

She studied me, frowning. The full weight of her gray-eyed gaze bore down.

“Those things don’t come out of the deep places where they live,” she murmured.

“Tell that to all the dead people in the club,” I replied.

She considered a few moments more, then gave a dismissive toss of her wild hair.

“It can’t have been cacodaimons,” she said. “Besides, whatever they were, they can’t have you until you help me find my sister. Get in the car.”

“Just a damned minute,” I said. “How do I know I can trust you?”

She was halfway around to the driver’s side, keys in hand.

“You don’t,” she replied curtly. “Now get in.”

S
he slipped behind the wheel and keyed the ignition, leaving the top down. The engine came to life, purring like a happy little tiger cub after a bloody meal. She smiled at the sound, actually patting the dashboard like someone from a different era might stroke the neck of a favored steed.

Despite her claim of having road-tripped from Joliet, the car was pristinely clean—there wasn’t even a stray travel mug in the cup holder. The only thing that struck me as messy was a curious profusion of beaded and pewter charms dangling from the rear-view mirror. They looked like they had been dug out of the bargain bin of a New Age shop, and were wholly at odds with the sleek elegance of both the woman and her vehicle. Maybe she’d slaughtered a wild gang of hippies on her way out to Cleveland, and these were her trophies. I couldn’t figure it, but something about the pendants with their frayed hemp and leather cords kept drawing my eye.

Before putting the Sebring into gear, she fussed with her cell phone, fixing it to a hands-free cradle on the dash between us. I adjusted the seat to give myself more legroom.

“I don’t even know your name,” I said awkwardly.

“Lillee,” she replied without looking up from the glowing screen of the smartphone. She set it to a map function, backtracking to a previously entered address.

“So… Lil,” I said. “Like in the message.”

“That’s what you call me, genius,” she said. “You still at the old address?” she asked, glancing up briefly from the smartphone. “Down near Coventry?”

I blinked stupidly at her.

She made an irritated noise. “Just give me your wallet.”

Too stunned to argue, I complied. She flipped it open, glanced at my driver’s license, then handed it wordlessly back to me. I shifted on the leather seat enough to slip it back into my pocket.

“I’m not sure we should go to my place,” I objected. “There’s a police bulletin out for me.”