Grim Tidings (10 page)

A boom shattered the air around us, cracking the grimy windows of Owen's office into spiderwebs. Leo flew across the room, slamming into the concrete wall and tumbling like he was a GI Joe somebody had gotten bored with and thrown away.

The Scythe thumped on the carpet, turning the fibers into slag and filling my nose with the thick smell of burning plastic. I pressed my hands over my ears, but the feedback from the explosion just got louder, the pressure building inside my skull until I was sure blood was pouring out between my fingers. I watched Owen pick up the Scythe with the most delicate touch and place it back in the case, once he'd retrieved it from the floor. Things were going blurry, and I knew from experience I was a few seconds from passing out.

Leo pulled himself up the wall, singed and wincing but alive. He saw me, and stumbled over, lifting me without any apparent effort. He kicked the office door open and we retreated, the screaming in my head growing a little softer with every step.

By the time we got to the emergency exit I could see, although opening it kicked off a whole new set of alarms and lights. We got down to the lobby and out onto the sidewalk, into Viv's smelly car and away before I finally managed to move. When I did, I tipped my head forward and vomited onto the floorboards.

“Keep it together,” Leo rasped at me. “I need you to drive.”

“I can't . . .” I croaked, acid squeezing my throat. “I can't . . .”

“You have to,” Leo told me. “My arm is useless. I can't move it.” He reached for me with his good arm. “Ava—”

“I don't think I can,” I squeaked.

“He can't hear you.”

I jolted up and away from Uriel, who looked at me from Leo's former seat. “What the fuck now!” I snapped, whipping my head around. We were moving, Leo in the driver's seat, but the snowy city was gone, replaced by the flat blue sky of open fields and endless flat blacktop.

“What did you do?” I said. “You can't just drop in on me! You said Leo would never know and doing this in front of him is so fucking uncool . . .”

“You're not in front of anyone,” Uriel said. “You passed out right after you upchucked everything you've ever eaten. Right now your boyfriend is trying to drive with one arm and losing his mind with concern.”

He rested one arm on the open window, and I saw us passing serene fields, still pale yellow-green with the first growth after planting. Sweet air filled the car and for the first time in months I wasn't freezing cold. “Demons and psychics aren't the only ones who can drop in while you're dead to the world,” he said. “We just tend to show off less.”

“This is really not a good time,” I said. “Leo tried to use the Grim Reaper's Scythe, and something happened. This sound . . .” I shivered, the pain flooding back into my skull. “Ever had a flashbang go off in your face? Or been in an air raid? Like that, all happening inside my head.”

“In case my subtle hint about the psychics didn't clue you in to why I'm here,” Uriel said, “you need to be in Kansas City. The Walking Man isn't something I was kidding about, Ava. He escaped Tartarus, and I want him back, and if you're reluctant to
help just imagine how unpleasant an
actual
conversation with Leo about me would be.”

“Leo's the reason I can't help you!” I said. “He's
not
the Grim Reaper, and we're in deep shit and we have to get out of Minneapolis fast.” I jiggled the door handle, trying to unstick the lock. “Much as I'd love to play monster cops with you, Uriel, I have my own problems and since Leo's not the Grim Reaper, I'm not some special edition hellhound. I'm just a normal hellhound whose life is fucked, and therefore I'm off the hook.”

“So your solution is to bail out of a car going sixty?” Uriel said. I glared at him, still yanking the handle.

“If I die in my dreams I wake up, right?”

“Would it interest you to know that isn't a reaper's Scythe Owen keeps locked up in his office?” Uriel said. The wind had ruffled his hair, and he smoothed it back.

I let go of the door handle, slumping. “I hate you.”

“I know,” he said. “Give me your word that when you wake up you'll go to Kansas City.”

“Tell me what Owen's doing and I'll consider it,” I retorted. Uriel massaged his forehead.

“I've fought legions of demons from Hell and you are still the biggest pain in my ass,” he said. “There's six thousand other things I should be doing besides chatting with you in dreamland, so here it is: where have you heard and felt what you did in Owen's office before?”

That stopped me for a second. The pain, the bright intensity that was like holding a high-tension wire in my teeth, feeling like the air was vibrating off my skin, hitting me like a rain of gravel.

I'd met someone before, somebody Lilith had tricked me into
thinking was a soul to collect. Gary's last soul, after I'd killed Gary in Las Vegas. Except the man she forced me to find didn't have a soul, and when I sank my blade into him—

“An angel?” I squeaked at Uriel, surprise stealing the part of my voice that made me not sound like a cartoon character. “A fallen angel,” I amended.

“That is your primary job, in case it slipped your mind,” Uriel said. “First Tartarus, then the Fallen.”

“And then you leave me alone forever,” I said wistfully. “What a great day. I'm going to celebrate with a whole pitcher of margaritas.”

“You love me,” Uriel said, never altering his Perfect Angel mask. “And before you get nostalgic, your little buddy Azrael isn't the one who's giving Owen these toys. Azrael couldn't power a lightbulb, never mind an actual weapon wielded by a soldier of the Kingdom.”

I sighed. Azrael wasn't a bad guy. Sure, he was a liar and a disgraced angel who'd been kicked out of the club for consorting with demons, but he'd always treated me fine, and I
had
shown up trying to steal his nonexistent soul. “Not Azrael. Who then?”

“Somebody with the brains to hang on to their smiting stick when they fell,” Uriel said. “That's what it is, you know—it's a blade that can only be held by us. If Owen can handle it, one of the Fallen has imbued him with some powerful protection magic. Otherwise he'd fry like a squirrel on a power line.”

“And because he
can
in fact handle it like he's working a hibachi grill?” I said.

“The Grim Reaper can kill anything,” Uriel said. “Including a member of the Fallen. I'd say the more . . . visible . . . among their number would be extremely interested in keeping your boy down
on the farm. You're a bright girl, Ava. I'm sure you can find some way to work that to your advantage.”

The car slowed, gravel crunching under the wheels. “In the meantime, enjoy Kansas City,” Uriel said. “See some modern art. Eat some barbecue. Find the Walking Man.”

“I still hate you,” I said as we rolled to a stop.

“I like to think that someday your hostility and my antipathy might blossom into a beautiful indifference,” said Uriel. “Until then, do as I ask.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled, finally able to open the car door.

“Ava,” Uriel said before my boots touched the dirt. “I am on your side. Or we're on the same side. For what it's worth.”

“Enemy of my enemy,” I said. Uriel nodded.

“Exactly.”

“Sorry, Clarence,” I said, slamming the door. “The way I see it, I've still got an enemy on either side of me.”

“In that case, I'd watch my back,” Uriel said, and the road vanished in a bright flare of sun off the pavement.

L
et me get this straight,” Leo said. We were parked off the side of the highway on a tiny sliver of mud that the signs optimistically called a “Scenic View” and I called a view of the ass-end of wintertime in Minnesota. “Owen's in bed with one of the Fallen, and you're leaving for Kansas City because a psychic came to you in a dream.”

I nodded. Leo tilted his head back and let out the most pained sigh I had ever heard. “Okay, let's get through this fast because I think our welcome here in the Little Hell House on the Prairie is wearing thin.” He patted down his jacket. “Jesus, I wish I could still smoke. Nothing like killing myself slowly to bring things into perspective.”

“Dying sucks,” I agreed.

“Listen,” Leo said. “I'm not a jealous guy. I don't need all your secrets. But a dead serial killer from seventy years ago . . . even if he is one of the souls that took a powder from Tartarus, how is he your problem now?”

I looked out over the snow to the highway, letting the glare disguise the lie on my face. “He's a bad person, he should be in Tartarus with the rest of the dead bad people, and it's my fault he's free to wander the Midwest.
I
let Lilith trick me into opening Tartarus.
I
let her kill you. It's my fault so forgive me if I want to set one tiny part of it right.”

Leo let a long line of cars go by before he spoke. “It's not your fault,” he said. “None of it. But I understand why you have to go.”

I turned back to him and let him pull me into his arms against the wind. “I don't have to go,” I whispered. “We're supposed to stick together. Owen clearly has it out for you.”

“Owen is an ass who thinks that because he's got a badass friend, that makes him an actual badass,” Leo said. “I can handle Owen. Just come back in one piece.” He held me at arm's length and looked me in the eye. “I can be without you, but I need you, Ava. And if you need me, I'll be there.” He dropped my arms and took my hand. “Get back in the car with me. I'm from New York and I'm still freezing my nuts off in this hellhole.”

“I'll be a minute,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze. He would come along if I asked. Of course he would. But I couldn't ask. The Walking Man was mine. My ghost. My sin.

My unfinished business.

Even by my
standards, I was driving to Kansas City based on sketchy information. A dream about a man who'd been dead for
seventy years and the name of a city. I didn't even know if I was going to the Kansas City in Kansas or Missouri.

I drove south, sticking to the speed limit until it got to be around midnight, then started looking for a motel. Getting pulled over would end this adventure quick—I'd lost all my fake driver's licenses when I broke with Gary and besides, Viv had probably stolen this car once already before we took it from her.

It's not impossible to get around without an identity—not as easy as it was in the days before everything was computerized— but it still works if you follow the basic rules of the unseen and undocumented: use cash, don't leave a paper trail, and stay in places where folks are invested in not asking questions.

The motel I found might as well have had
HOOKER HEAVEN
written across the front of it. Half a dozen tractor trailers roosted out front, a few girls darting between the cabs that gleamed under the arthritic neon that glowed from the highway sign. Rooms by the hour, nobody making eye contact, and not a state trooper in sight.

I locked Viv's car, not that anyone would be interested in her piece-of-shit land boat, and paid for a night from a desk clerk whose red beehive was so shellacked it looked like it could deflect bullets. She mumbled around her cigarette at me about how the rooms were no smoking, where the ice machine was located, and that my room had cable TV.

“You working?” she said finally, sliding a key on a sticky plastic fob shaped like a heart across the desk. I just stared at her. Even in the dead of winter, not many girls plied their trade in dirty jeans, muddy boots, and a heavy winter coat they'd bought at an army surplus store. Even the most strung-out tweaker in the lot had combed her hair more recently than I had.

“What then? You a hit man?” She laughed, which turned into hacking, which turned into her spitting something into a tissue tucked into the sleeve of her flowery housecoat.

I looked back at the row of doors to the rooms. A girl spilled out of one, screaming and hitting another girl with her shoe. The second girl, possibly the longest-suffering person on the planet, tried to help her friend's drunk ass back to a rusty SUV where their pimp, a skinny kid with hair even redder than the clerk's, waited. I was never getting any sleep in this place.

“You can help me with something,” I said to the clerk, who was still waiting for me to laugh at her joke.

“Help's not free, missy,” she barked.

“I'm not asking for free,” I said. “That kid out there, the one who looks like Ron Weasley's redneck brother—he holding?”

She exhaled, jamming her cigarette into an ashtray shaped like a big-mouth fish with its gullet hanging open to accept burning butts. “Depends what you need to get right, honey,” she said. “And don't think you're shooting up in the rooms. I ain't cleaning up after another one of you skinny bitches can't get her mix right and OD's on the toilet.”

“I just need something to help me sleep,” I said. “Percocet, oxy, whatever.”

She tossed her head, hair not moving an inch. “Go talk to him. Name's Ronnie.”

Ronnie thrashed when I knocked on his window. I presented two twenties between my fingers and pointed to the motel office. “Lady in there said you could help me.”

“Come on,” Ronnie muttered, clearly not talking to me. He swung out of the truck and screamed in the direction of the office.
“Damn, Mom! You're blowin' up my spot! What if she's a cop or something?”

“She ain't a cop!” the clerk screamed back. “You don't want my help, then move out and do your business somewhere other than my motel, dumb-ass!”

I nodded in agreement with the clerk. “I'm not a cop,” I said to Ronnie. “I just need to sleep.”

Ronnie grumbled, fishing in his pocket for a Ziploc bag of pill bottles. “Forty'll get you four,” he said. “You want a Xanax? House discount kind of a thing.”

“Why not,” I said. Ronnie counted out my pills, grumbling as he did.

“You got a mother?”

I shook my head. “Not anymore.”

“You're lucky,” he said. “Mine is constantly up my ass.”

“Sounds uncomfortable,” I said, and went to my room. I chased the four Percocets with some filmy water from the tap and lay back on the bed, after I put down a few towels. No way was I taking this trip on that bedspread.

After a few minutes everything got soft around the edges and that cotton-wool-cloud feeling wrapped around my brain. I tried to focus on Jacob as I drifted off, hoping that I hadn't just fallen for some sick metaphysical joke, and that I wasn't trapping myself in the sort of dream you don't wake up from.