Deliverance (3 page)

She realized that Arnie had cared for her, maybe even loved her in a fatherly way.

I hope I was never unkind or indifferent to him. Didn’t know I’d miss him so much until I was stuck with Chick.

By the time she reached the door of her condo, images of people she cared about who’d died during her last case were occupying her mind, their faces in life and in death vividly remembered.

That was an advantage of being the demon’s killing machine—never looking back.

Her bags were outside the door, at her request. The door opened before she could do it herself, and Hound drew her inside. She put the box on a table and slipped into his welcoming embrace. She rested her head against his lopsided shoulder and pressed against the slightly hollowed right side of his body, remnants of injuries he’d gotten in Vietnam. He pushed her back to arm’s length. The pink scar that traversed one side of his black face looked like the Grand Canyon had been carved there, not in millennia by erosion but in the split-second impact of a piece of jagged shrapnel. She could see concern in his wrinkled brow and expressive eyes.

“Hold on while I get everything inside.”

She watched as he checked the hallway, then pulled her luggage inside and closed the door. The two of them carried everything into her bedroom. He took her hand and led her to a sofa. Her home was large, since she’d purchased the condo next door and combined the two to make one residence. She had a master-bedroom suite, three guest bedrooms, an expansive living room where she could entertain, and an eat-in kitchen that could handle all of their needs when she had a full house. Since it was her public home, where she might have to meet anyone, from the press to her publisher, the furnishings were expensive but neutral, so the space wasn’t personalized. There was also a hidden armory and a supply room that held everything from ink cartridges to disposable phones.

“Sit down,” Hound said. “I can tell by the way you cringed with my hand on your back that you’ve been wounded. Want me to look? Yanmeng thinks he’s better than I am at this doctoring stuff, but I just humor the old guy.”

She turned her back to him, and he gently raised her shirt. For travel, she’d wrapped layers of bandages around her torso. She flexed her shoulder blades. The wounded area felt stiff.

“I should change that bandage,” he said.

“Knock yourself out.”

Hound went to retrieve her well-stocked medical kit. While he was gone, she unwrapped the old bandages and stretched out on the sofa, belly down.

His gasp when he came back into the room told her that her back wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Christ, you look like you’ve been through a fucking wood chipper.”

“Felt more like a buzz saw, but I’m feeling better. How’s my tattoo?”

Maliha had a tattoo of a hawk across her shoulders, put there as a sign of respect by Master Liu.

“Let’s see . . . it’s intact. The wound starts below it.”

Hound cleaned her back with warm, wet towels, applied an antibiotic treatment, and put on new bandages.

“Mmm, thanks,” Maliha said. “You can rub my back anytime.”

“Be more fun if your spine wasn’t almost showing. Dampens the mood. Is it my imagination, or are you healing slower these days?”

When Maliha was Ageless, her healing was instantaneous. Since she’d broken her contract with her demon, she healed slower, and as she aged, she healed slower still.

“You’re right. Ten years ago, a wound like this would heal in a day. Now a deep wound takes a day to close up on the outside and a couple more to finish healing the inside. Something with a lot of skin loss like this one—” She shrugged.

“Doesn’t that prolong the pain you feel when you get injured?” He put a hand on her shoulder in sympathy.

She shook his hand roughly off and lowered her eyes so she couldn’t meet his. “I don’t need sympathy. Pain is part of my job description. Master Liu says . . .”

“Fuck Master Liu! He’s some ascetic hermit who counts snowflakes on a mountain in China and dips his balls in ice water for the hell of it. You’re not Liu. You live in the real world.”

Maliha couldn’t help smiling at the mental image of Master Liu running around naked, counting snowflakes, with a container of ice water clasped to his groin.

“Okay,” she said. “You have a point. As long as I remain worldly, I can’t approach Master Liu’s way of living. He would say I have barely started on my spiritual journey.”

“So you heard about Arnie leaving?”

Maliha nodded. “I don’t know what to think about the new guy, Chick, yet. It’s strange the way he finishes my sentences. Does he do that to you, too?”

“Yeah. Weird.”

“I want to track down Arnie. The police are treating this disappearance with suspicion and we should too. You and Amaro could get together and start tracing his credit card usage and phone calls.”

Hound looked indignant. “I don’t need the little squirt’s help for that. I’m a licensed private investigator. A dick and proud of it.”

Maliha laughed. It felt good. “Okay, I won’t tell Amaro you called him a little squirt if you can make sure Arnie’s absence is intentional. On top of everything else.”

“I know. You’re thinking about Lucius.”

Maliha hesitated. She hadn’t revealed to anyone her last words to Lucius as he died in her arms.
I’ll do it. I’ll do it for us. I’ll kill the demons and then we’ll be together.

Lucius was in the private hell created by his demon Sidana, suffering constant torture. “I told him I’d bring him back, Hound. I don’t have the slightest idea of how to do that. Even if I kill the demons, does that mean he’s free? Or that he finally dies? Even thinking about what he’s going through . . .”

“Listen, you still have me and Yanmeng and Amaro. And Jake. You still have your goals. Maybe in time you’ll figure out how to free Lucius.”

Hound was a close friend of Maliha’s, one of three who worked with her and understood her situation of trying to wiggle out from under Rabishu’s thumb. Hound had been a medic in Vietnam. He didn’t know that Maliha had been responsible for saving him after shrapnel had left him looking like Swiss cheese on the battlefield. Years later, she hired him as a private investigator. They had a history as lovers, too, but that had cooled as Hound’s relationship with his girlfriend—and now fiancée—Glass, heated up.

Get a grip, woman. This isn’t a soap opera.

Maliha straightened up. “Arnie’s disappearance isn’t the only piece of news. Xietai’s dead.”

“Finally caught up with him, huh? So was he Ageless like we thought?”

“No. I’d sure like to know who trained him, though.”

“Get some rest. I’ll tell Yanmeng and Eliu.”

Maliha stood up. “Yanmeng already knows and I’m sure he’s told his wife by now. I brought his son’s knife back for him.”

It would be up to Yanmeng and Eliu to decide if they wanted a memento of their son’s life or not. If it were Maliha’s choice, she’d say no, but she wanted to be able to give Xietai’s parents a choice.

“I have something else I want to work on. Lucius gave me a key right before he, uh . . .”

“Was pulled into his demon’s hell,” Hound finished for her.

“Yes. He said the key would lead me to a lens shard he took from me.”

Maliha sought not only to balance the scales on her body but also to eliminate the Sumerian demons left on Earth. To do so, she had to collect shards of a lens made by the chief Sumerian god, Anu, then broken by him into seven pieces and scattered across the world. When she had all seven shards, they would seal together into a round diamond lens that would allow Maliha to read the words on the Tablet of the Overlord. By speaking them aloud, she could kill the demons one by one.

Maliha possessed two shards already, plus the Tablet of the Overlord. She’d retrieved a third shard, but Lucius had taken it from her, following the orders of his demon Sidana.

She pulled a key from her pocket. “It has a number on it, but I don’t know how to find the place it comes from. Once we do, it should be an easy retrieval.”

“Nothing seems to be easy where those shards are concerned. What if Sidana knows where the shard is and has guards set up around it?”

“A trap, you mean? I’ll have to deal with that if it comes up. The first obstacle is just finding the location. To start, send Amaro an image of the key and see if he can come up with anything.”

“What was Lucius’s full name? He might need to know if it’s the name on the key’s record.”

“Lucius Antonius Cinna. He used ‘L. A. Cinna’ as a public name. He said the Roman first name was for intimate use.” She handed the key over to Hound.

“So the rest of us are supposed to call him L. A.?”

“You can call him the Great Pumpkin if you want. Where he is, names aren’t needed.”

Amaro Reese, another of Maliha’s assistants, was a computer specialist. She’d saved his life and his sister Rosie’s life when they were in danger from a gang in Rio de Janeiro. Amaro discovered that he had a knack for working with computers, and now had a business breaking into the supposedly secure computer systems of large corporations and governments. They paid him to find the weaknesses in their systems, and Amaro never disappointed them. Or maybe he did disappoint them by the ease with which he penetrated their computer security. Amaro was a world-class hacker.

“You get some rest, and I’ll start checking out Arnie. Maybe Amaro can come up with something on the key,” Hound said.

“Is he staying here?”

“He’ll be here in two or three days. Oh, and Jake’s called several times. He left a message that he’ll be traveling for a few days.”

“Working?”

“Yes.”

Maliha sighed. It seemed like there was nothing to do for a while. She and Jake had a pact that there was no return contact when one person was working because of the dangerous situations that might be interrupted. Since Jake was Ageless, she didn’t worry about him when he was out of touch—he should be able to handle anything that came up in his work.

Lately, time for reflection hadn’t been bringing her peace. She’d been missing workouts, too. She’d been hoping Jake would be available to talk and bring her dinner.

Hound hugged her, avoiding touching her sore back. He didn’t release her right away, and she felt a hardening in his groin pressed against her. She pushed him back.

“How’s Glass doing?”

“Off on a food drop in Africa someplace. She won’t be back for another three weeks.”

“I see. You think we can fool around because she’s on a mission.”

“Crossed my mind.”

Maliha pulled away. “Good night, Hound.”

“Jesus, woman . . .”

Maliha closed the door to her suite, cutting off Hound’s lament. In her private, soundproofed area, she opened her weapons case and spread everything out on the bed. Each blade was inside a locked case. She inspected everything carefully, and all were freshly oiled and gleaming. She was satisfied.

Skipping a shower to keep Hound’s treatment of her back dry, she got in bed and pulled fresh, cool sheets up to her neck.

I’d rather be out there with Hound. No, scratch that. I wouldn’t want to hurt Glass. This “good girl” business doesn’t come easily.

She sighed into the darkness.
Good girls sleep alone. Where’s Jake when I need him?

Just before falling asleep, she remembered the box that Chick had given her. She retrieved the box, got a knife, and cut its well-taped edges. Inside was Arnie Henshaw’s service cap, with the shiny black brim. There was blood, lots of it. Her eyes fastened on the note pinned to it:
The first one rests in peace. Or is that pieces?

She slipped on a robe and called Hound into her bedroom.

“Change your mind?” he said. “You’re not wearing anything under that. . . .”

“Oh, shut up. Arnie’s dead.”

She held out the box with the cap. He took it from her and examined everything, including the note.

“Nothing like a murder to spoil the mood,” he said.

“It’s terrible. Why send this to me when it’s too late for me to do anything to help Arnie?”

“Fuck. I guess Arnie was considered expendable to send you a message.”

“That’s what I think too. But what’s the message?”

Chapter Three

I
t was hours later that Maliha made it back to bed, after she and Hound put together a plan to investigate Arnie’s death. She tried to set aside the sad event and instead started thinking of Jake. She pulled his pillow over and hugged it, thinking she could at least imagine his presence. A vague scent of her Ageless lover remained on the pillow, and she drew in a deep breath to hold it inside her. It was comforting and drew her thoughts further from Arnie’s seemingly senseless death.

Jake Stackman was an immortal assassin beholden to the demon Idiptu, but he claimed that Idiptu had long ago lost interest in giving Jake assignments. That contrasted sharply with Maliha’s demon, Rabishu. In Jake’s case, he had no reason to rebel, since he had all the advantages of being Ageless without a demon interfering in his life. She talked to Jake about it, and he made it clear that he wasn’t going to walk the mortal path with her for the sake of some point of ethics. He enjoyed his immortality, great speed, and nearly instantaneous healing, and he argued that he might be of more use to her in her quest with his abilities intact. She had to admit there was logic to that.

Since when has logic been an element of love? Or am I so out of practice I don’t even recognize love anymore?

Maliha had been married once, over three hundred years ago in the American colonies. Then she’d been accused of witchery and treason, and given the special punishment of being burned at the stake. In the Salem witch hysteria, witches were hung, but in her case, she was also accused of planning to kill her husband to use his blood in her heinous practices. Lies, all of it. But the townspeople, her good friends, and even her husband turned against her in a trial during which she was gagged to prevent her from uttering curses.

Tied to the stake with the fire snapping at her toes, a demon’s offer of immortality was too good to resist. After that, she’d taken up the Ageless way of life, killing on demand, gathering wealth, and enjoying sex on her whim and her terms with men, from kings and sheiks to the blacksmith who shod her horse. If her partner grew too attached, she moved on. Lasting love wasn’t in her behavioral repertoire.

After rejecting the demon’s control, Maliha became a mortal with benefits. It took her fifty years to learn how to reach out in friendship. Falling in love with a man was a lot harder.

Not so much the falling part, just the trusting part. I love Jake, at least I think I do. But . . . there’s always some worry in the way. He still kills, according to his moral code, which he won’t clearly explain. He won’t give up immortality—isn’t that selfish? There are things he won’t talk about, and all he’ll say is that they have something to do with his moral code. Can I live with that? I’ve already trusted him with my whole story but there might always be things hidden from me. He can keep his job secrets at the DEA. They’re not what are bothering me.

And then there’s Lucius.

Bits of their brief time together flitted through her mind. The crossbow bolt Lucius shot through her shoulder . . . the shimmering of his armor in the moonlight . . . their first kiss in a dark alley after he’d saved her life . . . the bloody heart outline he’d carved on a tree for her in the wilds of Ethiopia. She’d thought he was her true soul mate. Lucius was in his demon Sidana’s private Underground. Even if she collected all the shards and destroyed the demons, she had no idea how to retrieve a person from a demon’s fortress in hell. Wasn’t it likely that when she snuffed out a demon, everything the demon possessed would disappear with him in a puff of smoke?

Sidana owns Lucius for eternity. I love Lucius as my one true love, my soul mate. But he’s a shadow now, a dream I can’t touch. No soul mate for me here in the Great Above, but there’s Jake. As long as I keep Lucius locked inside my heart . . . Why not? I could be normal with Jake. He talks about a house in the mountains and kids. . . .

She hugged the pillow to her chest and let the tears flow, and was finally able to sleep.

She woke just a few hours later with the rest of the condo quiet. Hound was either gone or resting, so she took some time to work on her latest book in the Dick Stallion series,
Hot and Bothered
. The books were something she’d taken up to have a visible means of support. Maliha had accumulated wealth over quite a few normal lifetimes: precious metals and gems, art, collectible items, and investments. Still, she liked to have a job that explained away at least the tip of the iceberg of her vast wealth. The Dick Stallion books were designed like pulp detective fiction from the 1930s, down to the garish covers and the cheap, yellow paper. To her surprise, they became wildly popular, and she couldn’t write them fast enough to keep up with the demands of her agent and publisher.

In this passage, Dick had gratuitous sex with an airline attendant somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, unaware that the attendant was a recruiter for an international sex ring of bored housewives. She reported him to the Guiltless Orgasm Society as a candidate. After deplaning in Paris, he proceeded with his improbable adventure of saving the kidnapped daughter of a fabulously wealthy philanthropist while evading the Paris chapter of GOS.

Later, she removed Hound’s bandage and took a shower. She adjusted the spray as hot and hard as it would go, sending liquid needles into her injured back. It was painful but in a good, cleansing way. Then she turned her face up to the water and accepted the pummeling for unspecified sins past and future.

Wrapped in a thick cotton robe, Maliha went into the kitchen. She hadn’t eaten in a long time. There was a bag on the counter full of fresh croissants from Watson’s Bakery in the lobby area of her building.

“Thank you, Hound!”

“Hound didn’t bring them.”

“Yanmeng?”

“Guilty.”

She made some tea for the two of them and brought several croissants and a couple of plates over to the table.

Xietai’s blood is on my hands.

She picked up a croissant and began to eat it in her favorite fashion: by pulling off one tip and then gently unraveling it. No butter or jam. Watson’s Bakery made their croissants from scratch rather than using frozen ones, and the only thing wrong with these was that they were already an hour or two out of the oven.

“I’m sorry about the loss of your friend,” Yanmeng said.

Maliha nodded. She didn’t want to talk about it now.

“Yanmeng,” she said between mouthfuls, “do you believe in unconditional love?” It was her indirect way of asking how he felt about his son’s death at Maliha’s hands.

Yanmeng’s method of eating croissants was to bite them straight through, one end to the other, no mercy. He had a few flakes of pastry caught in his white moustache. The corners of Maliha’s lips turned up, until she remembered that this was a solemn conversation.

“No.”

There was an awkward silence. She’d hoped for more from him.

“You told me once that you loved me,” Maliha said. She’d been riding a camel at the time and had nearly fallen off, until Yanmeng made it clear he wasn’t talking about romantic love. “What did you mean by that?”

“I meant that you have earned my love, my respect, and my loyalty. I have given myself over to your cause. I would die for you.”

Maliha lowered her head. She couldn’t take the intensity of the look that Yanmeng was giving her, a look like an X-ray reading her inner truth. “Wouldn’t you consider that unconditional love, then?”

“No, because if you return to the service of the demon Rabishu and assassinate at his will, I would be betrayed.”

“You have my word I will never do that,” Maliha said.

“You are a worthy person, regardless of your past,” he said.

A few minutes passed during which Maliha unraveled another croissant. All of sudden it struck her that this was Yanmeng she was sitting with, Yanmeng who could already walk different planes of existence, Yanmeng who was on his way to joining the god Anu in the highest plane. She viewed his aura and was stunned at the beautiful white and gold light radiating from him. He’d progressed far since the last time she’d looked.

With a gasp, she bowed her head. “You honor me.”

He waved his hand. “We’re just two friends talking. And cut out that aura viewing. My wife Eliu says I already have a big head.”

“I killed your son.”
Duh. He already knows that.

“You removed a scourge of evil from the world. Xietai betrayed Eliu and me a long time ago. What kind of son turns his parents in for death sentences to gain favor for himself with the government? Our love was broken!”

“Thank you for saving my life. I brought home something of his, a knife. Do you want it as a memento?”

Mixed emotions played across Yanmeng’s face. In spite of his words, pain showed in his eyes. “No. We’re finished talking about Xietai. Hound mentioned that you had some scraped skin on your back. I’ve got just the thing for it, some salve my grandmother used to make. Let’s take a look. I hope he didn’t mess anything up.”

T
he stars sang of adventure and Maliha’s ears were tuned to them. It had been three days since her arrival home, three days during which Hound and Yanmeng had alternated treating her back. The wound was healed enough by her standards, yet Yanmeng kept putting on gray gooey stuff that smelled like fish, and Hound kept washing it off in favor of antiseptic cream. Finally she mutinied and declared that no one would attempt to heal any part of her, ever.

Hound had nothing definitive to report about Arnie Henshaw.

“Arnie made few phone calls, most of them for food delivery. He’d purchased a one-way ticket to Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. The building management said he’d given written notice two weeks before his disappearance, saying that he was retiring to some peace and quiet, no forwarding address given. Then he’d taken accumulated vacation days for the two weeks of his notice, so the day his resignation letter came in was the last day anyone saw him,” Hound said.

“I wonder what the rush was. If he’d been planning this retirement for a while, he could have worked the last two weeks,” Maliha said.

“He was within the letter of the regulations to pull that trick, but it was the act of someone not concerned about getting a good reference for his next place of employment. Someone retiring and leaving the country and his former life behind. Human Resources was concerned that they had no place to send his last paycheck.”

“They do know he’s dead, right?”

Hound sighed. “The police aren’t certain of that. Now they say it looks like Arnie needed to get out of the country fast and wanted people to think he was dead.”

“Meaning somebody was after him and he sent the hat and note to me himself. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have asked me for help if that was the case.”

“You might have it wrong. Maybe the bad guys made it look like
you
were the one after him. Arnie was too scared to approach you. He didn’t know who to trust.”

Maliha shook her head. “We’ve got to find him, if he’s still alive. Whatever his problem is, we can . . .”

“Make it go away?”

Maliha nodded. “Or find out who killed him and why.”

“One more thing. Arnie’s financial holdings were liquidated and sent to a private Swiss bank account.”

“Interesting. Maybe he really is out there, living off the grid,” Maliha said. “I’d sure like to think so. That note creeped me out, though. ‘The first one rests in peace.’ The only way I can interpret it is that there would be more deaths. Why would Arnie write that if he was behind this?”

Hound shrugged. “Who knows? To make a convincing disappearance. Say he was trying to make it look like a sociopath had written the note.” Hound latched onto a thought, his brows furrowing. “Maybe he
is
a sociopath.”

“Oh, I can’t believe that.”

“I’d be happy to hop down to Antigua to look around for him.” His face took on a hopeful look.

“I’m sure you would.” Hound’s smile disappeared. “Did Arnie actually board that plane or just buy a ticket as a ruse? Amaro’s coming in later. Let’s see what his electronic approach turns up.”

When Amaro arrived later that day, he brought news on the key Lucius had given her—the one that supposedly led to the hiding place of the third shard. The three friends pounced on the search for Arnie and the latest about the key, and that left Maliha with time on her hands until there was something actionable.

She decided to make herself useful.

She dressed wanting to be prepared for anything and opted for her leathers. She tied her hair in a thick braid, with a black silk scarf wound around her head. Flexing the skintight black gloves on her hands, she moved toward her weapons collection.

The cache was in a small room that served as an armory for the team. In her private haven, nine floors up, there was an entire wall devoted to displaying weapons openly. With the possibility of visitors down here, the goodies were locked out of sight.

She ran her hands over knives, swords, guns, and axes. The gleam of the two
sai
caught her eye. They were three-pronged edged weapons with the middle prong longer than the other two. She’d made leather sheaths for when she didn’t want to wear them tucked through her belt. Strapping them on her back, she was pleased that the handles didn’t show over her shoulders. From the front, she looked like an unarmed, though oddly dressed, woman.