Loe raamatut: «Kindling The Darkness»

Chapter 1

A timeless monument to spiritual devotion—and a 1950s architectural marvel that somehow managed not to insult the majesty of the burnished sandstone buttes into which it was wedged but to grace them—Sedona’s Chapel of the Holy Cross wasn’t where you might expect the gates of hell to open. But open they did, for a few brief moments on one gorgeous midnight last spring. On Lucy Smok’s twenty-fifth birthday, to be exact. Funny thing, though, about opening the gates of hell to let something in: stuff got out. And it was Lucy’s responsibility to round up the wayward “stuff” that escaped and put it back in. Cleaning up after Lucien. As usual.

Not that it was really his fault this time. It was their father who’d traded her twin’s soul to the devil. And when Edgar Smok died, the bill had come due. Lucien’s transformation into an infernal being had opened the gates until his descent to rule the nether realm closed them. In that brief interim, the path between the nether realm and this one had been a two-way street.

Dozens of hell beasts were now running amok.

The one she’d tracked this evening—or rather, early this morning—wore a female skin suit: a haggard-looking twentysomething waitress at a greasy spoon, dishwater-blond hair slipping out of a limp ponytail and into her eyes as she took Lucy’s order. She was such a cliché that she had to be infernal.

Lucy had tracked the fugitive with a little help from the thousand-year-old Viking who happened to be dating Lucien’s sister-in-law. Leo Ström was the chieftain of the Wild Hunt, and the instincts of the Hunt wraiths under his command functioned like a metaphysical GPS, homing in on any vicious killers in the area. As much as Lucy hated the idea of them, connections among the not-quite-human came in handy for her present mission. And Theia Dawn, Lucien’s wife, had an entire family of not-quite-human connections. The Carlisle sisters, who claimed the demoness Lilith as their ancestor, seemed to attract it.

Lucy had other means of finding infernal fugitives, of course. As the CFO of Smok International and its subsidiaries, Smok Biotech and Smok Consulting—as well as its acting CEO in Lucien’s absence—she had access to the world’s most sophisticated database for tracking and logging unnatural creatures. But the fugitives from hell weren’t in any database, and those that hadn’t made themselves obvious through their sheer audacity in attacking humans right out of the gate, so to speak, were extremely good at blending in with the human population and keeping a low profile.

The stop at the coffeehouse had been serendipitous. After losing the trail, Lucy had taken a break to refuel, and the little downstairs café was the only thing open this early in the morning. She hadn’t been sure until the waitress brought her order. A telltale flick of the woman’s tongue at the corner of her mouth accompanying a rapid eye blink had given her away as a reptilian demon. Anyone else would have missed it. The demon saw Lucy’s recognition in the same instant, eyes widening with alarm.

Before it could make its escape, Lucy grabbed it by the wrist and pinned its hand to the cool wooden tabletop.

“Let go of me.” The eyes narrowed to reptilian slits with an unnerving clicking sound, like a muted camera shutter.

“You’re out of your element.”

The demon bristled, a reptilian reflex beneath the borrowed skin. “And you’re about to discover how far you are out of yours.”

Lucy smiled darkly. “You’d be surprised how far my element extends.” She’d been banking on the fact that the demon wouldn’t want to make a scene in the middle of a brightly lit coffeehouse with a small but decidedly human audience. She hadn’t counted on the demon’s desperation.

A hissing sound provided an instant’s warning before the demon spat, giving Lucy the chance to duck and dodge, narrowly missing a face full of demonic acid. Unfortunately, the evasive action also loosened her grip, and her quarry was off in a flash.

Lucy catapulted over the counter into the short-order kitchen in pursuit of the creature, startling a busboy and a tired cook. The demon flung the busboy across the kitchen as a distraction, but Lucy wasn’t here to pick hapless busboys up off the floor. She was here to stop a hell fugitive.

She leaped over him and followed the demon through the back door into the alley. It had given up its pretense of humanity, shedding its skin and leaving the corpse of the unfortunate woman it had been wearing in a heap among the trash bins as it dropped onto all fours and scuttled through a crack between two buildings.

Lucy spared a glance back up the alley to make sure she wasn’t observed before using the advantage of her own unnatural blood to scale the back of the building and race over the top. Inheriting some of Lucien’s curse came with a few perks. She leaped down onto the unlit street just in time to block the demon’s egress as it crept out. The demon reared up on its hind legs in surprise, poised for an attack, as Lucy drew her gun—she’d brought her favorite, the Nighthawk Custom Browning Hi Power 9 mm—and aimed between the thing’s inhuman eyes. The skin it had shed evidently wasn’t the corpse of a human after all, but a sort of shifter’s shell, as evidenced by the demon wriggling to redon the same form like a translucent skin coat, albeit a slightly fresher version. It was an obvious ploy to appeal to Lucy’s humanity. Always a mistake.

“Please.” The demon held its human-appearing hands in the air. “I have babies at home. I’m a single mom.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Appealing to her womanhood was an even bigger mistake. Lucy palmed the slide to chamber a round. “Hope you kissed them goodbye.”

Before she could pull the trigger, something barreled into her from her left, knocking the gun from her hands and her to the ground. Her Russian martial arts training kicked in automatically, and Lucy flipped over and onto her feet before her attacker could grab her, swiping his leg with a roundhouse kick from a crouch and incapacitating him with a one-two punch to the neck as he fell. When he hit the ground, Lucy leaped on top of him and dug her fist into the hair at his forehead to slam his head back onto the concrete. He managed to block her as she swung at his jaw simultaneously, trapping her arm inside his with an elbow jab toward her throat. They were deadlocked.

Lucy glared down at her attacker, sizing him up. A dark hood framed salt-and-pepper hair and a tightly compressed, disapproving mouth in a tan face offset by a sharp, muscular jaw. For a middle-aged man, he was in damn good shape. Not an ounce of fat on him.

“That was an escaped fugitive whose rescue you just came to, G.I. Joe. Thanks to you, a violent predator is in the wind.”

“From where I’m lying, you seem to be the violent predator.” He let go of her arm, and she let him yank his hair from her fingers. “I’d like to see your badge.”

Lucy snorted with derision and rose to collect her pistol from where it had spun against the corner of one of the buildings. “I don’t have to show you anything.”

“Maybe I’ll just make a citizen’s arrest, then.”

Lucy let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “I’d like to see you try.”

The demon’s rescuer rubbed the back of his head with a grimace as he got to his feet and observed her for a moment with a frown of mistrust. “Exactly what did that one-hundred-pound woman do that’s so dangerous?”

Lucy checked her clip. “Killed at least five people last week, for starters. I tracked her here from Flagstaff, where she left a trail of bodies. Two of them kids. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say she’s got an appetite for skin.”

Midlife G.I. Joe frowned and shook his head. “You’ve got the wrong girl. She’s been working at the Mine Café for a month. Hasn’t strayed beyond a ten-mile radius since she got here.”

“How would you know?”

“I make it my business to know when someone extra-human is in my neighborhood. And this one’s harmless.”

So he’d peeked beyond the veil. Lucy studied him. Seemed human. Didn’t necessarily mean he was. “My sources say you’re wrong.”

“Well, your sources are mistaken. I’m part of a neighborhood watch—of a sort—and I’m telling you this girl can’t be your perp.”

Lucy holstered the gun in her shoulder strap. “You think I’m law enforcement?”

“Not ordinary law enforcement, obviously. But yeah. Aren’t you?”

“Let’s just say I’m a private contractor. I track things that don’t belong in this plane. And I tracked an infernal flesh-eater here.”

His eyes had narrowed in a glower at the words private contractor.

“Maybe you tracked something here, but it wasn’t her.” He pulled up his hood as it began to drizzle, warm skin tone reduced to a craggy monochrome silhouette under the flickering sodium streetlight. “And we don’t need any private contractors stalking our citizens. The town of Jerome takes care of its own.”

“I don’t really care what you ‘need.’ There’s a killer on the loose, and I intend to take it down. Wherever it attempts to hide out.”

He glared down at her, trying to use his height to dominate. “If I see you in Jerome again, I’ll consider you hostile.”

Lucy gave him her best death stare through the now-pouring rain. “Why wait? You can consider me hostile right now.” She turned and strode away before he could form a retort, heading through the downpour back toward Main Street, where she’d parked her car.

As she wound down the two-lane highway, the beat of steady autumn rain against her windshield was already slowing, and the sun had made a dismal appearance through the dull steel of cloud cover in the five minutes it took to reach the bottom of Cleopatra Hill. The town of Clarkdale ahead of her was the first sign of civilization—if you could call it that—in the Verde Valley Basin. After that, the somewhat larger sprawling suburban town of Cottonwood laid claim to the title with a population of twelve thousand. Not that her current base, Sedona, was really any bigger, but it felt like a larger town with its hip vibe and nonstop stream of tourists who came for the metaphysical ambience and stayed for the real magic of sun and stream and stone.

After filling up at the Clarkdale Gas-N-Sip, Lucy headed for the restroom outside the convenience store, unwinding her knotted braid and separating the soaking hair into three dripping plaits as she rounded the building.

She sensed the presence in the bushes before it leaped, but there was only time enough to meet its force with a full frontal attack of her own. The creature snarled and went for her throat as she aimed for its solar plexus. She was taking a guess at where that was, but her left fist landed solidly while she followed up with a right to its jaw. Sharp teeth grazed her knuckles—luckily, she was immunized against lycanthropy—but the blow to its gut had slowed it down.

While its footing wavered for an instant, Lucy drew her Nighthawk Browning and emptied four rounds into it point-blank. It made a sort of furious yelp and snarl and took off so swiftly she couldn’t follow. More angry than wounded, it seemed. Which was impossible. She hadn’t gotten a clear look at what kind of wolf it was, as it had been mostly fur and blur, but the snout was clearly lupine and the upright frame humanoid. Four Soul Reaper bullets should have incapacitated it almost immediately. It should be writhing in its death throes on the ground in front of her right now.

Though it wasn’t the impact of the bullets in Lucy’s gun that killed infernal creatures. It was the poison inside. “Soul Reaper,” Lucien had nicknamed it, because it obliterated anything not human from within the host flesh, and if any remnant of a human soul happened to remain within the infernal, Soul Reaper sent the remnant to hell.

After cleaning up in the restroom, Lucy paid for her gas and hit the road, grateful that no one else had been outside the Gas-N-Slip. She was bone tired—by her count, she’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours—and ready for a hot shower followed by a stiff drink and bed by the time she got home.

She glanced down at her bloody hand as she unlocked the door. It was a little bit more than a graze. Immunization or no immunization, she had to take care of the bite. With a growl of her own, she went inside, gun firmly in both hands while she made a quick survey of the place. It had become a habit. When she was sure the villa was empty, she took off her jacket and slipped the shoulder holster off and tossed it on the couch along with her piece. She’d meant to find something more permanent and less ostentatious than a villa at an exclusive resort once she’d decided to stick around after Lucien’s departure, but apartment hunting took a back seat to rounding up hell beasts.

After cleaning the wound, she decided on a bath instead of a shower. Baths weren’t really her thing, but every muscle ached at this point, and Epsom salt was a thing she believed in.

As the tub filled, Lucy wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her forehead on them, replaying the wolf’s moves and her own, analyzing what she might have done better. Merciless postmortem had been ingrained in her from Edgar’s training since she was a kid. She’d let down her guard because she was tired. Mistake number one. Vigilance was mandatory. But for the most part, she’d followed protocol. It was the creature that was the unpredictable element.

What the hell was that thing? How could it have kept moving with four Soul Reaper bullets in its chest? It was infernal. It had to be. But it moved faster—and it was larger—than any garden-variety werewolf she’d encountered. And it had seemed somehow less...furry.

The tub had filled, and Lucy shut the water off and leaned back against the built-in headrest. It really was a hell of a tub. She hadn’t paid much attention to it when she rented the place, since she’d only intended to use the stand-alone shower. But it was deep enough and wide enough for her to stretch out both arms and legs and let them float in the silky water without touching anything.

Eyes closed, she ran through the encounter in Jerome with the same critical review. The reptilian-demon waitress wasn’t in the Smok registry, so, killer or not, it was definitely a fugitive. But was it possible it wasn’t the killer she was tracking? What were the odds more than one hell fugitive would be hanging out in Jerome, Arizona? The artsy haven carved into the side of Cleopatra Hill in the Arizona Black Hills, a former copper mining boomtown that had turned its colorful history into a touristy cash maker as an active “ghost town,” had a grand total of less than five hundred permanent residents.

The vigilante—which was what G.I. Joe likely was, given his skulking around in a dark hoodie in the middle of the night on his “neighborhood watch of a sort”—had been adamant that the waitress wasn’t Lucy’s killer. Not that Lucy was going to take his word for it, but he hadn’t struck her as a liar, whatever else he was. He genuinely seemed to believe the girl was harmless. And he claimed he’d been watching her for a month.

Maybe he was just a perv who liked watching young women. But he hadn’t given off that vibe. And he hadn’t made any typical masculine overtures toward Lucy, who was just a few years younger than the waitress appeared to be. Honestly, it had kind of annoyed her. She was used to being noticed by guys his age—just hitting their midlife-crisis stride and hyperaware of any younger woman in their vicinity to project their insecurities onto and gauge their own desirability. Not that she wanted middle-aged dudes creeping on her, but it was almost suspect when they didn’t.

So what was this guy’s deal? Middle-aged but in almost-military shape, living in tiny, artsy Jerome in the middle of nowhere keeping tabs on its “extra-human” population? Maybe he was a fugitive. Lucy opened her eyes. Maybe he was her fugitive.

The phone rang from the living room. She’d left it in her pocket when she stripped out of her wet clothes. Lucy sighed and climbed out of the tub.

She got to the phone after the call had rolled to voice mail, and she listened to the message on speaker while toweling off. An older woman spoke a bit hesitantly, as though her request was awkward. She spoke on behalf of “the council,” which wanted to contract Lucy’s services to investigate a werewolf sighting. In Jerome. So much for taking care of its own.