"Don't touch me," she spat, shaking off my hand. Her eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere in the middle of the bed, as though she couldn't even look at me.
"Liz, please."
"I want you to leave," she said.
"What?"
"
I SAID LEAVE!
"
At that last, the lights came on. I heard the grumble of patients in nearby beds, angry at the sudden disturbance. I heard a clatter of footfalls from down the hall, and the officious tones of hospital security ringing off the walls. And last, I heard the thudding of my heart, which threatened to burst inside my chest. I looked at Liz, my face a silent plea, but she was having none of it. So, security drawing closer, I fled.
I headed away from the nurses' station and hit the stairwell at a run, tears streaming down my cheeks. Four stories' worth of stairs passed unnoticed beneath my feet, and I spilled out into the biting cold night. I was in a narrow alley, the street beyond hidden behind a heaping mound of trash. Pavement bit the tender flesh of my hands and knees as I collapsed, retching, to the ground, my body racked with sob after painful sob. I didn't know if they were coming for me. At that point, I didn't care. I thought I'd reached the bottom, then. The worst that it could get.
I had no idea how wrong I was.
"Shit, Sam, I always figured you were kinda gutless, but this? Crying like a little bitch in the street?"
At the sound of his voice, my stomach clenched, but there was nothing left to purge. I didn't want to look at him. I knew I couldn't not. Almost without volition, I lifted my head.
Walter Dumas stood beside me, smiling. Black fire raged in his eyes. He was wearing the same suit I'd seen him in this evening, now filthy and blood-soaked. Three jagged holes, redbrown with drying blood and scorched around the edges, graced his shirt in the center of his chest. Beneath them, his skin was knotted and discolored, like a horrible injury decades old. As I stared at him, disbelievingly, Dumas tugged a bloodspattered kerchief from his pocket, and extended it to me. When I didn't take it, he just shrugged and returned it to his pocket.
"So what's the matter, Sammy-boy – lady troubles? Eh, them dames are all the same. Always squeamish when the killing starts."
My head was reeling. This couldn't be happening. "You… I mean, I…"
"Killed me, yeah. Well, tried to, at least. Made a pretty good go of it, too, if you don't mind my saying. Most folks just snap and make for the nearest blunt object, but you had yourself a plan – you even bought yourself a gun and everything. Gotta say, I'm proud o' you, son. Or, rather, I was, till I saw this pathetic little display."
"You… you wanted me to kill you?" I asked.
"Hell, yes, I did" he replied, "that's why your pal Johnnie dragged me into this affair! After all, you can't consummate a contract without blood. It's a common misconception in deals of this kind that the blood you sign with has got to be your own. Truth is, blood taken with malicious intent is always far more binding. I gotta tell you, I was beginnin' to think you'd never seal the deal – I been runnin' you ragged for months now, and you just kept on takin' it."
"'Deals of this kind'? Deals of what kind?"
"You mean you still haven't figured it out? I guess you always were a little dense. We own your soul now, boy. Or, rather, the Boss Man does, though credit goes to Merihem – 'scuse me,
Johnnie
, for puttin' the whole thing together. How's fire and brimstone for all eternity sound, kiddo? Cause that's where you're headed."
"You can't be serious."
Dumas said, "OK, you got me on the fire and brimstone. I mean honestly, I don't know who came up with that shit, but it sure as hell wasn't us. You kids and your books. It's downright cute, really. About the owning your ass, though, I'm afraid I'm quite serious."
"So what, then? You're just gonna whisk me off to hell, now?"
"Aw, come on, Sam, where's the fun in that? Nah, we'd rather let you sweat a bit. Don't you worry, though – your day is coming soon enough."
"I don't believe you," I said.
"You know what? I think you do."
There was no point arguing, I realized. Dumas was right. I did believe. "What do you mean, my day is coming?"
"Oh, you'll find out soon enough. You wanna know the funniest part?"
"What's that?"
"If you had only guessed at what I am, you wouldn't be in this predicament."
"How's that?"
"Ain't no sin to kill a demon. But as far as you knew, it wasn't a demon you were killin'. In this-here game of ours, intent is everything, and your intentions were just as black as can be. Tell me that ain't the bit that's gonna keep you up at night." Dumas laughed. "Anyways, this has been fun and all, but I got places I need to be. See you 'round, Sam."
And just like that, I was alone.
"Do you think they saw us?"
I glanced back through the glass door through which we'd ducked. It was plastered with multicolored sheets of paper – ads for roommates, dog-walking services, and the like, all obscuring my view of the street beyond. "I don't know."
We were standing in the vestibule of a Vietnamese noodle joint, just a tiny patch of threadbare floor mat stacked high with free weeklies and wedged between two doors. The interior door was propped open, giving me a view of the restaurant's spartan dining room and teasing my empty stomach with the aroma of ginger and lime and simmering meats. What few patrons there were made no attempts to hide their puzzled stares, and I couldn't blame them. What a pair we must make: Kate, scraped and filthy beneath her bluestreaked hair and studded choker, looking for all the world like a punk-rock zombie. Me, pallor ashen from loss of blood, much of which had dried red-brown into my tattered clothes. I, too, looked like a dead man walking, which was funny, cause for a change, I wasn't.
"So what do we do?" Kate asked.
It was a fair question. We'd barely made it a couple of blocks from the station before we'd spotted them: a pair of demons, combing the street, the black fire that burned in their eyes belying the impassive expressions that graced their otherwise human faces. I had no doubt that there were more of them – dozens, maybe hundreds by now – fanning outward from the spot we'd last been seen, determined to put a stop to this war, to this
girl
, once and for all. I wasn't about to let that happen, but that meant we needed a plan. From the looks on the diners' faces, we sure couldn't stay there.
I looked into Kate's eyes, so trusting and innocent despite all they'd seen, and I wished I had something to tell her. Truth was, I was out. Out of gas, out of ideas. I had no fucking clue where to go, or what we'd do when we got there. I'd fucked this job up from the get-go, and now, the whole city was on our tail – humans and demons alike. We'd be lucky if we lasted the night.
But of course I didn't say any of that. No, what I said was this: "We've got to get off the streets, and quick. Find a place to hole up while things calm down. If we stay off the radar for a while, there's no way for Bishop or the demons to get a bead on us. That means first we've got to get out of here. It's probably a matter of minutes before someone here calls the cops, if they haven't already. Right now, I'm thinking kitchen."
Kate nodded, and we ducked out of the vestibule, darting through the dining room and pushing open the kitchen's swinging double doors. The kitchen was hot and narrow and cramped, with two apron-clad cooks barely visible behind stainless steel counters stacked high with pots and pans and bins piled high with fresh-cut veggies. They shouted at us in their mother tongue, but we were gone as quickly as we'd come, banging open the heavy metal door that led to the alley behind the place. It slammed shut behind us, and I leaned against it while I got my bearings.
But for a mangy cat asleep atop a dumpster, the alley was empty. The way my heart was pounding, I guess I was surprised. I half-expected the place to be crawling with demons, eager to tear us limb from limb. Guess the damned aren't much for optimism.
I slid the Glock from my waistband and popped out the clip. Empty. I pulled back the slide and checked the chamber, a wave of relief washing over me as I realized there was one round left. We weren't gonna have the option of shooting our way out, if it ever came to that, but at least I could stack the odds a bit, make that one shot count. I dredged the powdered remains of the catshard from my pocket and funneled them as best I could into the barrel of the gun. I had no idea if the damn thing would fire, full of dust like that, much less whether these last sad scraps of cat-shard still had enough juju left to kill a demon, but faint hope was better than no hope at all. I tore a scrap of fabric from my shirt and stuffed it into the barrel to keep the powder in, and then I tucked the gun back into my jeans.
Kate, who had watched the process without a word, gave a slight nod, and then spoke. "All right, now where to?"
"Got me, kid. Seems to me, these are more your stomping grounds than mine. You got any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear 'em."
"Well, there's one place I can think of," she said.
"Yeah? Where?"
"Home."
30.
"You sure you're ready to do this?"
Kate stood looking upward at the building across the street, her hands worrying at the hem of her shirt. "Yeah," she said, the faintest quaver casting doubt on her assertion. "Yeah, I'm sure."
I remember now, having peered into her eyes for any evidence of doubt, and finding none. Of course, now I know it wasn't her I should've worried about. Turns out, I'm the one who wasn't ready.
We stood hand in hand at the crosswalk, waiting for the signal to change, and when it did, we set out across Park Avenue. Kate's building was a stunning pre-war co-op, draped in an elegant limestone façade. Arched transoms framed windows near as tall as I was, and each floor was delineated by an elaborate garland-andwreath cornice. A limestone balustrade sat atop the building like a crown.
As we approached the massive Gothic arch that denoted the main entrance of the building, Kate stopped short, casting glances to either side.
"Something's not right here," she said.
That seemed, to me, an understatement – standing on this block, by this building, covered as I was in blood and filth, I felt like a kid out of class without a hall pass. But I'm guessing that wasn't the something she was talking about. "All right, I'll bite – what's wrong?"
"No Murray."
"No Murray?"
"Murray's our doorman."
"Your doorman," I echoed.
"Yes."
"And he's not here."
"Yes."
"If he were here, you think he'd be inclined to let us in?"
"Of course not. There's a service entrance around back, leads downstairs to the boiler room. It gets hot down there, so most days, the super leaves the door propped open. That's how I figured we'd get in."
"I'm still not seeing the problem here. The doorman pops out to grab a bite, and instead of slinking around in the hot basement, we get to walk in through the front door. Seems win-win to me."
"Sure, except Murray never leaves his post."
"Maybe somebody upstairs needed something? Some luggage carried or whatever?"
She shook her head. "They've all got staff for that."
"What about the bathroom?"
"The man's a freaking camel."
"So no Murray is bad."
"Yeah," Kate said, "no Murray is bad."
"Then we run," I said. "Find somewhere else to go to ground while we come up with a plan."
"I'm tired of running, Sam. Tired of hiding. Besides, what's the use? If they're waiting in there for us, they knew that we would come here before we did. If that's true, then where the hell are we gonna go?"
"So what, then – we just waltz in there and surrender?"
"No. We go in there and face them."
"Kate, that's suicide."
"Is it? Sam, I just saw you throw yourself at the mercy of a
demon
. A demon who could've killed us both, but instead decided to save us. As far as I'm concerned, that means all bets are off. I'm not asking you to die for me. I'm just asking you to have a little faith."
I stared her down. She didn't blink. Finally, I dropped my gaze and nodded.
"OK, then," I said, slipping a hand under my shirt and wrapping it tight around the gun grip. "Let's do this thing."
The elevator was quiet.
There was no attendant, no faint strains of insipid music, just the soft clatter of machinery high above, and the ragged sound of our breathing. The elevator car was paneled with mirrors, trimmed in mahogany and brass and polished to a perfect shine. As we rode upward, I blinked at the stranger that stood before me, watching as he blinked in kind. I wondered if the man whose body I'd borrowed was peering outward too. I wondered if he still recognized the man in the reflection.
The elevator slowed to a stop, a bell chiming to announce our arrival. It may as well have been a cannon report. I pressed myself against the mirrored wall – the gun in one hand, and Kate held fast to the wall beside me with the other. As the doors slid open, I held my breath. A bead of sweat traced its way along my spine.
Kate's apartment was the penthouse, a lush twostory affair with a view of the park. The elevator opened directly into the apartment's vast marble entryway, provided you knew the code. Kate, of course, did.
The entryway was dark, with only the faint illumination of the elevator light splashing across the marble tiles to guide our way. There was no police tape, no seal to break; evidently, the private elevator was deterrent enough. Of course, it also meant we didn't know if we were the first to enter or the fiftieth. I put the thought out of my mind and stepped out of the elevator.