Damn Him to Hell (2 page)

Mostly, the weird ones never gave me any trouble. This one ran straight at me, slashing the air in large strokes as if he carried a sword. What was it with old guys tonight?

Fear robbed me of caution. I kicked high and connected with his wrist.

The knife flew into the street. The bum stopped, blinked in astonishment, then slowly crumpled to the broken pavement, just as Nancy Rose had.

Damn, I hadn’t hit him that hard! The bum’s belly alone was twice my size. Hauling him off the street was out of the question.

I almost panicked, but Bill, the giant who operated the bar and grill down the street, lumbered out and noticed my predicament. “I’ll handle it,” he called. “Get out of here and warn the others.”

I liked Bill for a lot of reasons.

Checking the progress of the gas cloud, I sprinted faster. A street light pole twisted as if watching me run. I’d had some time to grow accustomed to aberrancy, but I still despised being spied on. Swiveling lights were a nasty reminder of the bad old days when I had snoops on my tail every minute.

My apartment was in a Victorian row house a few blocks beyond the Zone on the south end of the harbor, half a mile or more away from Acme’s perch to the north. I could hope the gas didn’t reach this far. The gray flicker of TVs lit some of the windows, but none shone in the darkness of my building. Inside, I pounded on my landlady’s apartment door to wake her up, yelling at her to get to the basement.
Then I ran up the stairs for my tufted-eared miniature bobcat. He’d grown too large to be called a Manx kitty.

Milo raced to greet me, dragging the messenger bag I used as a carryall. He had a bad habit of running toward trouble, so I didn’t see this as a good sign. Before I could scoop him up, he dashed into the second-floor hall and raced up the stairs to the top floor. Shit. Running up into a sky full of gas didn’t seem to be the wisest course of action.

Just as Milo reached the landing, heavy feet lumbered down. Milo turned, jumped past the bottom two steps, sped by me, and threw himself at the door of the apartment across the hall from mine.

I had lived here only a few months. Caught up in study, exams, two jobs, and the tracking of a murderer, I hadn’t had time to make the acquaintance of any of the other tenants.

That was about to change.

“Basement,” a voice rusty from disuse called from above. A pair of shabby brown corduroys appeared on the stairs above me.
Paddy!

I recognized the crazy inventor who occasionally stopped at Chesty’s. The waitresses fed him gratis, and I’d assumed he was homeless. His graying chestnut hair fell lankly to his shoulders, and his lined and bearded face was nearly as wrinkled and faded as his corduroys.

I’d been told that once upon a time, he’d been a renowned research scientist at Acme Chemical, which is owned by the Vanderventers, his wealthy, powerful
family. After the disastrous flood, he’d fallen apart. From the looks of him now, he had deteriorated even more since I’d seen him last. He might not have taken the death of his nephew—my boyfriend Max—in a fiery car crash too well. Especially since Paddy’s son, Dane Vanderventer, had died shortly after, because of little old me.

Well, sort of died. I had sent Dane’s wicked soul to hell for cutting Max’s brake lines, so in a strange twist of fate, Max’s soul now inhabited Senator Dane Vanderventer’s body.

This caused a number of problems, but the point is I was a wee bit hesitant to tell Paddy about the Dane/Max
arrangement
. It didn’t seem like an explanation I could give to a man I barely knew and who wasn’t precisely in his right mind.

Right now didn’t seem an appropriate time to strike up
that
conversation.

“Basement,” Paddy repeated, taking the next flight of stairs. “I’ll get Pearl.”

Pearl Bodine was our elderly landlady. I grabbed Milo before he could take out the door with his scratching, pounded on the old oak panel as hard as I could, and shouted, “Gas attack!”

The heavy panel swung open to reveal a blurry-eyed Lieutenant Schwartz—in his knit boxers and nothing else.

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and I gaped at ripped abdominals and bulging pectorals. This was what the good detective hid behind rumpled suits and uniforms? By all that was holy . . .

Milo leapt from my arms and bolted down the stairs after Paddy.

“Gas?” Schwartz asked, sniffing the air.

“Acme. I think there’s been an explosion. Paddy says to get to the basement.”

“Just a matter of time,” he said fatalistically. “Be right there.”

I rushed after Milo.

Paddy was already assisting a chattering Mrs. Bodine down the cellar stairs. I wasn’t entirely certain following a crazy scientist into the basement was the wisest means of avoiding a gas attack. If the cloud hadn’t spread, we had time to get the hell out of Dodge. My Miata could hold us, barely. Besides, Pearl had cobwebs on her chandeliers. I didn’t want to imagine what her basement was like.

I waited to see what the good detective intended to do.

Milo yowled and flung himself at the front door, disturbing my fuzzy internal debate. The appletinis hadn’t completely dissipated.

“You can’t attack gas, you idiot.” I scooped him up again, but he jumped off my chest to the top of an ornate armoire, putting him in reach of the open transom of the aging town house.

“Milo!” I screamed as my cat disappeared out the opening. Damned cat, if the leap to the porch didn’t kill him, the gas would. He’d pretty much used up half his nine lives already.

Torn between the desire to protect myself and the urge to find my cat, I lingered long enough to hear
Schwartz clattering down the stairs. Clattering? What was he wearing, a suit of armor?

Not waiting to find out, I raced after Milo.

If I died rescuing a cat, maybe I wouldn’t go to hell for all my vigilante justice after all. Although right about now, I was thinking the Zone was pretty close to hell on earth. All we needed was the stench of sulfur. I took a second to sniff the air, but other than the usual fishy odor from the harbor, I only detected a faint whiff of burned ozone. A few freaked-out gargoyles could still be heard.

Milo leaped from the porch rail to the railing of the next town house, skipping stairs and the yellow jacket nest in the bushes. Feeling plucky, I followed suit, but landed with a thud far less graceful than my kitty’s feline pounce.

“Milo, my white-knight cat.” With renewed urgency, I shoved him in my messenger bag before he could run again, then pounded the door knocker. Andre owned this town house and shared it with his father, Julius. He’d also taken in Tim, the invisible kid. If they were all still asleep, they needed to be warned.

When no one answered, I let myself in and shouted, “Julius! Tim! To the basement, now!”

I knew they had one. I’d been in Andre’s underground tunnel that led to an empty warehouse across the road. Should I ever have time to spare, I’d look up the history of these old houses, but I was more concerned about any illegal operations Andre might be running.

“We’re coming down!” Julius’s familiar voice
shouted back. “Open the basement door for us.” Elegant, imperturbable Julius sounded edgy.

Hoping this house was identical to Pearl’s, I ran down the hall toward the kitchen, located a flat painted door almost hidden by an Oriental wall hanging, and tugged. It opened silently on well-oiled hinges. I flipped a light switch and, thinking a grown man and a teenager could make their own way downstairs without my aid, I hurried to get out of their way. I knew Andre’s cellar was a heck of a lot cleaner than Pearl’s would be.

The gargoyles’ cries were lost behind these thick brick-and-plaster walls. Andre didn’t settle for filthy damp coal cellars, no sirree. His cellar had plaster, and wall sconces, and some kind of rugged stair-tread protector over mahogany-stained and polished wood stairs. Hell, his cellar looked better than any place I’d ever had my bedroom.

The bottom step led to some kind of speckled-tile floor like they used to have in banks and city halls. Doors led off to either side of the corridor, but I had no idea which one to take. The only one I knew was at the end and led to the warehouse.

What the devil was taking Julius and Tim so long? The way they were stumbling and staggering and bumping into walls, it sounded as if they were carrying a pirate trunk down with them.

You’d have to understand Andre to get why my mind leapt to pirate trunks and not sixty-four-inch flat-screen TVs, which most normal men would try to take with them to the grave. Andre reminded me
of Jean Lafitte, the gentleman pirate in old New Orleans—complete with slick black hair, swarthy complexion, flashy white teeth, and a distinctly European mind-set.

Even though he called himself Legrande, I knew he’d grown up right here in blue-collar Baltimore. He’d gone to the same school as the wealthy Vanderventers, except I figured he’d done it on a scholarship.

I nearly jumped as the object of my thoughts yelled down the stairs at me. “Dammit, Clancy, doors! Open doors!”

Andre must have taken care of Nancy Rose and cleared the customers out of Chesty’s in record time.

Not bothering to waste breath asking why he couldn’t open his own damned doors, I started flinging open every one in sight. He knew better than to yell at me like I was some kind of low-IQ sheep.

No hoards of pirate gold or exotic harems down here—very disappointing. I’d expected more from our alpha male.

One room had tubes and paraphernalia like a chemistry lab. Another was filled with computer equipment. A third contained a pretty damned extravagant theater that would have made any Hollywood director proud. I was pretty sure the flat-screen TV in here was bigger than sixty-four inches. Clearly either we were far enough away from the Zone for Andre to have his play toys or the underground bunker acted as a buffer against the Zone’s eccentricities.

I threw open the only remaining barrier and found a
hospital
room. Damn, Andre just kept getting
spookier and spookier. I could almost believe vampires, but Frankenstein was out of my territory.

“Tina, give us a hand here. Tim’s fading out.”

“Am not,” Tim argued—faintly.

I spun around to see Andre and Julius holding up the corners of one of those shiny, colorful comforters they sell in fancy department stores. Sure enough, Tim had disappeared, and his corner was sagging.

On the comforter lay Sleeping Beauty.

“C
olor, Tim,” I scolded, grabbing the sagging duvet at Beauty’s feet. “Concentrate.”

Tim had been only five when the first chemical flood had spilled through the home of his drug-addicted mother. Small, bullied, and neglected, he’d grown into a terrified gay adolescent who loved plants—and turned invisible when frightened. Made sense in a completely Zonish way, but he’s one of the reasons we don’t like strangers around.

He colored in enough for me to see his hands and feet so I didn’t step on him. I nodded at Julius, whose face was lined with weariness and worry.

Still dressed with flawless elegance, Andre held up the opposite side of the blanket all by himself. This
mysterious Sleeping Beauty was sufficient argument to keep my distance from my former boss. Who the hell was she and where had they been hiding her? A few months back, I’d lived in this building for days and hadn’t seen or heard another woman. And how could anyone sleep through this commotion?

That was, assuming we weren’t carting a dead body around. The Zone was paranormal enough—I didn’t need to
read
fantasies about zombies and vampires. I was probably living with them. I’d left normal far behind with Max’s death.

Andre backed through the doorway of the hospital room and maneuvered the duvet over the naked cot with a skill born of experience. Anywhere else, and I’d worry about the cleanliness of a bare mattress in a damp cellar, but I was pretty sure Andre would have ionic air cleaners and space shuttle technology to prevent anything resembling so much as a mote of dust.

Andre wasn’t poor, just weird, in a controlling kind of way. He always knew what was needed and where. Maybe it was his Special Ops training.

I’d learned enough not to demand explanations if there was any chance I wouldn’t like the answer, so I didn’t ask any. Yet.

Now that I had time to look, I could see that Beauty was breathing. The wrinkles in the corners of her eyes framed a face too old for her to be Andre’s wife and a little too young for her to be Julius’s. Like her fabled namesake, she appeared lovely and healthy, but also as in the fairy tale, she didn’t wake up, despite
the jostling acrobatics of the clumsy men and Andre’s irritated growls.

I’d have said something witty about kissing her awake, except Julius’s mouth sagged with sadness as he tenderly arranged her nightgown and used the long end of the duvet to cover her bare feet. I liked Julius, even if he was Andre’s father. Besides being kind, he had aristocratically chiseled features, distinguished silver streaks in his hair, and an elegant mien Andre might someday aspire to.

Come to think of it, so did Beauty.