Harsh Gods (26 page)

“Get out!” Father Frank roared.

“Yep. You’re definitely one of Zack’s.” Lil tucked her hair back in its bun, gratuitously rolling her eyes. “You’re infected with his stupid.” At that she stomped to the half-open door, the heels of her boots sharp against the tiles. Another volley of thunder shook the building, followed by lightning so intense the ozone prickled on my tongue.

Lil paused at the entrance to the darkened room, sparing a glance over her shoulder. “You two keep tilting at windmills. I’ll be in the hall intercepting the night nurse again when she inevitably comes to investigate all the noise.”

Father Frank stood vigil at Halley’s side, glaring at Lil till she slipped from the room. With my hands fisted in my pockets, I moved to stand beside the padre.

“I’m still not going to do it,” I murmured. A muscle in his jaw twitched and he drew breath to speak. Before he could voice his objection, I said, “Not for any of the reasons Lil gave, and not because I’m some kind of self-doubting coward. You made your point on that.”

“It could give her a fighting chance,” he urged.

“Maybe,” I allowed, “or it could paint an even bigger target on her head. Think about it. How many enemies do I have?”

His silence was eloquent.

“Because of the amnesia, I don’t even remember what this anchor shit does. I didn’t know I could do it until our exchange in this room.” I shot him a look. “And it’s permanent, isn’t it?”

“As far as I can tell,” he acknowledged, “but it’s a gift, Zack. Don’t you doubt that for a second. It’s saved my life a hundred times over. I’m sixty-nine. I’ll be seventy this August. I have been shot up, blown up, and gassed. I run marathons for charity—and I rank near the top. I teach girls like Sanjeet at the dojo, and I can take more punishment than black belts half my age. The way I see it, you didn’t ask because who the hell would believe you were serious with an offer like that?”

I wanted to agree with him, but the queasy fluttering in my gut never subsided. The blind fervor in his voice didn’t help. All I could think of was Roarke and all the other no-necks like him, kowtowing to their Nephilim masters. All the padre had done was drink a different flavor of Kool-Aid.

“There are no down sides,” he insisted.

Mutely, I shook my head. “I’m not sure you’d be able to see them, even if there were.”

His frown stamped stark lines between his steely brows.

“Just trust me on this,” I said. “I didn’t like where the impulse was coming from. If I were to even consider it, it would be for Halley. When I tried to do it inside her mindscape, it wasn’t about saving her. The impulse was something uglier than that—something selfish.”

“Selfish is denying her because you’re having a crisis of faith.”

“I’ve got enough guilt without your help, Mazetti,” I snapped. Leaning on the rails of the bed, I gazed down at the girl in question. Halley murmured in her sleep, eyes tracking rapidly beneath waxen lids. The way her dark hair pooled around her on the pillows, the fairy-tale comparisons were almost unavoidable—Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, never mind her favorite of Rapunzel in her tower. I felt the same protective ferocity that clearly drove the padre—but it was time to shift the narrative.

I bent and murmured close to her ear.

“Hey, Rapunzel—I know you can hear me, even through that crazy minefield you got leading up to your high tower.” The ceaseless motion beneath her lids halted and I felt the subtle brush of her mind as it sought my own. “You keep working on those walls like I told you,” I continued. “And use that crazy moat to your advantage. It keeps you in, but it can keep everyone else out. Make it your strength in this. We cut the ties, but believe me—he
will
try to get at you again.”

“Zaquiel…” Father Frank began. His broad, high brow creased with worry, and contrition.

“Let it go,” I cautioned. I straightened, rolling my shoulders. The leather of my jacket creaked, jarringly loud in the relative hush of the room. The thunder now raged outside, unabated, a dramatic reminder that we’d blackened Terhuziel’s eye. There would be a reprisal—the storm was just the first act of the show. I laid a hand on the padre’s shoulder, felt the watchful, weary tension he carried in his old bones.

“She’s got the tools she needs for now, and I’m going to go out there and do everything I can to get the bastard before he gets his claws in her again. Then we won’t have to worry about things like anchors.”

Silently, he nodded. He remained standing over Halley as I strode to the door.

Outside, the Lady of Beasts fumed at the end of the hall.

“Come on, Lil, we have a crime scene to break into,” I said before she could start. “I want to figure out where Ter-hoo-ha’s hiding, and put this nightmare to bed.”

I fell into step behind Lil as we turned the corner to the nurses’ station, making a token effort at upholding our initial ruse.

I needn’t have bothered.

A tall and honey-voiced gentleman leaned jauntily on the counter overlooking the station. He wore nondescript scrubs and a white lab coat, but somehow managed to make them look suave and dapper. He could have passed for Denzel Washington’s younger clone, and he flashed the nurse a smile that unironically oozed charisma. There was no mistaking what was on his mind.

The older woman swooned like a tween at a Bieber concert, giggling as he joked.

Lil could have saved that trust charm—the night nurse was well and truly distracted.

Lil and I strode right past the station, making for the elevators. The night nurse wiggled her fingers pleasantly as we went by, shooting Lil a suggestive wink. The Lady of Beasts smiled back, subtly gesturing toward the doctor, whose back was to us. She gave the woman the thumbs up as the elevator swallowed us.

“Looks like someone’s getting lucky tonight,” she mused, stabbing the button with the butt-end of her pen. “He’s cute.”

I leaned against the back wall of the elevator, staring at her reflection in the ceiling.

“All you think about is sex.”

Her lips curled in a sphinx-like smile. “That’s not fair. I also think about murder.”

I snorted. “Remind me again why I hang out with you?”

“Because you like murder, too.” Her smile widened till it became a feral baring of teeth. The air around her reeked of spice and vanilla, and the scent stirred some atavistic part of my brain that held little differentiation between sex and violence. My traitor pulse sped up, sending a rush of blood to points south of my beltline. I squirmed under Lil’s knowing gaze, but offered no denial. Her laughter rang full and throaty in the tight compartment as we moved toward the lobby.

“You never get tired of tormenting me, do you?”

“You haven’t disappointed yet.” She grinned.

We picked up another two passengers at the third floor, and Lil fell quiet till we made it the rest of the way down. I pressed my back against the wall and tried to ignore how tight my jeans had become.

Stupid body.
Damned thing had no idea how to prioritize.

The lobby was mostly empty, save for a few stragglers. Most stood at the big bank of glass doors gawking at the blizzard outside. A few held their car keys, clearly reluctant to go out. Thunder growled and the answering lightning flashed against an unrelenting sheet of white. It was as if the world beyond the hospital had stopped three feet out, everything lost to a snowy void.

“This is going to suck,” Lil grumbled. She tugged the scrunchies out of her hair, shaking loose all her long curls. “You left my jacket upstairs.”

“I thought you were as immune to the cold as me,” I ventured.

She made a face as the wind gusted. “Two words. Snow, and cleavage.” A swirling wall of white surged against the doors. “Even if I were the ice queen, that would still suck.”

She plucked off her glasses and slipped them back into her purse. The clipboard had already disappeared. I didn’t remember seeing her put it down, and for all I knew, that had been swallowed by her TARDIS-like handbag as well. I didn’t think the thing had a bottom.

Lil pressed close to one of the doors, scowling ferociously at the raging sea of white. Not bothering to hide my smirk, I leaned above her, reaching to press my hand against the frigid glass of the door.

The wind fought me—I didn’t have leverage for shit at this angle—but I managed to push it partly open. I was rewarded with a gale-force gust that drove a column of snow through the crack, hitting Lil full-force in the face. She glared up at me, white flecks speckling her lashes, her hair, and—most importantly—the perfect stretch of flesh exposed by her plunging V-neck.

“Asshole,” she spat.

“Payback’s a bitch,” I said, stepping around her to plunge headlong into the storm.

The lights were still out in the parking lot. Not that it mattered—the snow was so thick, lights wouldn’t have helped anyway. I couldn’t see any of the cars till I was right on top of them. I kept my head down and aimed in the general direction of the garage. Lil was right behind me—I could hear her cursing even over the thunder.

“I’ve felt that thing you do with heat lightning when you get really pissed off.” I yelled to make myself heard. Even so, the wind tried to steal my words. “Don’t you have some control over the weather?”

“A little,” she called back, “but to counter something like this, you’d need my sister, the Lady of Storms.” Her hair whipped across her face and, spitting, she shoved it back. I bet she was regretting taking out the scrunchies.

“How many sisters have you got?” I asked.

“Alive, or dead?” she countered.

“Does it matter?”

I didn’t hear her response, assuming she offered one. Lil could be maddeningly dodgy about who and what she was. Last fall, Sal had let slip the sobriquet “Daughter of Lilith,” so I had a few ideas—but they were vague at best. The only thing I knew for certain was that Lil was immortal, though exactly how her immortality worked remained a mystery.

Among my siblings, each tribe differed in the way they clung to the flesh-and-blood world. My tribe, the Anakim, were the most prosaic. We got born the old-fashioned way, and when we died, we sought out a new set of parents to do the whole thing over again.

Last time around, I’d intended for Frank Mazetti to be one of those parents. That was one of the purposes of an anchor. I’d gotten that much in the flash of memory up in the hospital room. I wondered again about the circumstances that had altered the path so that instead, he became a priest.

I’d have time to ask him.

Later.

The unforgiving press of the wind subsided somewhat as we finally made it to the parking garage. The exterior lot wasn’t that big, but it felt like we’d crossed the Antarctic. I stood on the lee-side of a concrete pillar, shaking clumps of ice from inside the collar of my jacket. The interior of the parking garage yawned cavernous in front of us. The power was still out, and not even emergency lighting had kicked in.

“Fuck,” I muttered.

Lil caught up to me, her bronze features fixed in a perma-scowl. Snow was matted in her hair, weighing the russet curls down till they hung practically to her waist. She reached down the front of her blouse, grabbed the slush that had collected there, and lobbed it at me.

“Happy?” she snarled.

I swiped the icy meltwater from where she’d pelted it at my cheek and grinned.

“Yeah, actually.”

She muttered a blistering curse in a long-dead tongue.

“Come on, Lil,” I chided. “That wouldn’t be fair to the sheep.”

“Fuck you,” she replied. “Where did we park?”

“Three-E,” I said automatically.

“Well, let’s start walking.” She shook clinging crystals of ice from the ends of her hair.

I moved in the opposite direction. “Elevator’s this way.”

“No power, no elevator, Einstein,” she spat. “I think the stairs are over here.”

“Don’t they have back-up generators?” I asked.

Broadly, she gestured. “Do you see any lights?”

Muttering my displeasure, I trudged glumly along. The concrete cavern of the parking garage was bad enough with no power, but the sheeting snow cut off any ambient light from outside. I put one boot carefully in front of the other, fighting the urge to reach my hands out so I could feel my way through the shadows.

Ahead of me, Lil moved quickly, swift and sure as a cat. She walked on the balls of her feet, rolling her arches forward so the heels of her expensive boots never touched the cement of the floor. Once she realized how far I’d lagged behind, she halted. I could barely make out the look of irritation that creased her features.

“Yeah, yeah, spare me the insults,” I muttered. “I’m just not as cool as you when it comes to creeping around in the dark.”

Lil’s full lips twisted into a smug grin as she started to respond. Then, all of a sudden, she froze. Canting her head, she listened intently, then sniffed the air. I fell silent, straining my own senses. All I heard was the thunder and the wind.

The next instant, she dashed off, crouching below the line of the cars. Certain now that the storm had been some sort of cover, I angled my back to a wall, whispering my power. Subtle light danced around my fingertips, ready to explode into deadly brilliance once the enemy closed.

To my left came the sound of a scuffle. The shadows swallowed any sign of who or what it was. I heard Lil hiss a rapid string of curses, followed by a meaty thump, like she’d dropped a body to the ground.

That body complained immediately in accented tones.

“Really,” it said. “You don’t have to pull a knife on me.”

“Remiel!” she snarled. “I could have killed you.”

My brother barked a dry, ironic laugh. “Hardly.”

Fussing with the lapels of a smartly tailored woolen coat, the Nephilim stepped into my line of vision and moved toward me. His sleek fall of black hair was swept away from his face and plaited into a tight braid that ended at the small of his back. He had porcelain-pale skin that seemed almost luminescent in the gloom of the concrete parking structure. Model-perfect features boasted cheekbones that could incite some Hollywood actors to envious acts of murder. Angled above his brow was a jaunty fedora. He’d worn the damned things so long, they’d come back into fashion.