Secrets of the Hanged Man (Icarus Fell #3) (An Icarus Fell Novel) (3 page)

He wanted to tell his family he loved them once more.

But his movements slowed along with everything else, so no words formed before it was too late.

The explosion of the gun firing shredded his eardrum at the same instant the bullet turned his head to hamburger.

***

I hated these kinds of jobs. Most of the time, my target is either alone or in a public place, both of them easier than this. When they’re alone, there’s no one to see me; when it’s busy, I blend in. One or two people around makes my job far more difficult because I stand out like an albino in the Blue Man Group. Gabe must take some perverted pleasure in giving me the most difficult harvests.

I turned my attention to the goings-on inside the little green-and-white bungalow. Luckily, a window on the side of the house facing away from the road looked into the living room, so I’d settled in to wait and watch the proceedings from a bush that would have shocking pink flowers when spring came along. Lurking didn’t number among my favorite activities, but it ranked higher than being arrested.

The man I presumed to be Benjamin Trounce—one of two names on the scroll Gabe gave me—walked down the path to the front door. Inside, another man holding a gun hid around the corner in the living room, a finger pressed to his lips, telling the woman and girl on the couch to keep quiet. One of them must be Taylor, the second name. I hoped it turned out to be the woman because the girl was too young to meet me yet.

From my hiding spot I saw everything: the little girl calling her father, the man with the gun hitting Benjamin Trounce, threatening and jamming the gun against his head. He yelled, too, but the double-paned window prevented me from hearing what he said. I didn’t really want to know, anyway. During my own marriage, I’d been involved in enough domestic disputes to skip the particulars of theirs. Rae and I had many, but none of them escalated to gun play, perhaps because she didn’t own a gun.

I pulled up my sleeve and looked at the three watches strapped to my wrist. Anyone spying on me would have thought them stolen and arrayed as wares for sale, but they weren’t worth selling. Places that don’t specialize in time pieces sell this kind—the type with a battery worth more than the watch. I made use of their countdown timers and wore three because I didn’t trust them. I was late collecting souls a couple of times, and it was a costly mistake for the soul I was supposed to harvest. After a few close calls with a carrion or two, I decided the adage about safe being better than sorry might be one I should adopt.

The man with the gun pushed Benjamin to the floor, landing with his knee on his back, and a tongue of anger flared in me. In the past, more than one knee ended up in my back, so it pissed me off even seeing it happen. I didn’t do anything, though; I’d learned my lesson about interfering in these things: nothing good comes of it. What’s the saying? ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions?’ I don’t think in any case but mine could that saying be taken so literally.

The principals in the drama before me yelled at each other for half-a-minute, then went quiet. Part of me wondered how they came to find themselves in such a situation, but I forced my curiosity aside. It wouldn’t make any difference if I knew; I had a job to do, and the less I knew, the easier it was.

The high-pitched beep of the first alarm sounded, startling me. Nothing happened in the living room. A few seconds later, the second alert went off, followed by the third. I frowned. No death, no soul released from its earthly vessel. Piece of crap watches didn’t keep time worth shit.

What should I expect for ten bucks?

I groped for the tiny buttons on the side of each watch to silence their annoying chirps. As the last one stopped, the man sitting on Ben Trounce’s back pulled the trigger, the blast smearing red and gray brain matter across the carpet.

That stain ain’t going to come out.

It would be at least fifteen minutes before the cops showed, possibly longer. In suburban neighborhoods like these, where guns are seldom fired, most residents write them off as backfires, slammed doors, or leftover Halloween firecrackers. In all likelihood, the police wouldn’t be alerted until the little girl got to a phone to call 911, assuming her name wasn’t Taylor. I looked away from the window. If it turned out I had to collect the youngster’s soul, I didn’t want to witness it happen.

The figure clad in a black overcoat standing five paces away startled me, but I can’t say his presence surprised me. With his broad-rimmed hat pulled low in the front to hide his face, he resembled a much smaller version of wrestling’s Undertaker.

My muscles tensed. I’d bumped into Hell’s version of me on a number of occasions, so I knew what to expect, though I didn’t like the way carrions shot fiery bombs out of their hands, since I couldn’t do the same. I thought I'd better take the offensive, so I lunged forward, my hand raised, ready to knock the stuffing out of this guy. At the same time, the second gunshot rang out at my back, stopping me, and the carrion raised his head, allowing me to see his face.

Except it wasn’t a
him
.

I looked at the blue eyes, the blond hair, the fair cheeks, and the surface of my skin went cold. My lips moved, fully intending to say the word ‘Poe’, but no sound came out.

My one-time guardian angel, whom I recently abandoned in Hell.

“
Hello, Icarus,” she said, and smiled, but not the lopsided, shy smile I’d become used to. This smile held a dangerous quality I’d never seen in Poe.

“
Wh--” The sound came out as no more than as exhalation of breath, so I stopped and cleared my throat. “What are you doing here?”

“
Working, same as you.”

My eyes widened and I bit down hard on my back teeth; the muscles in my jaw bulged. “I don’t want to fight you, Poe.”

She laughed, and the sound didn’t resemble the Poe laugh I remembered. She looked so much like the Poe who’d spent her time hanging around me and doing a poor job of keeping me out of trouble, yet she was so different at the same time.

“
Don’t worry. I’m here for someone else.”

As if to prove her point, a third gunshot resounded inside the green-and-white bungalow. My heart jumped with it—if the second shot hadn’t killed the young girl, surely the third did. Though my son was older than her, the thought made me think of Trevor, of how hard I’d worked over the past months to keep him safe...well, alive, at least. No child deserved to have their young life cut short, not by an angry archangel, not by denizens of Hell, and not by a psychotic gunman with a grudge.

I stared at Poe, mesmerized by the orange glow flickering in her eyes. Her smile remained, but she made no move to enter the house to collect the soul she’d come for, so I tore myself away from her hold, determined the little girl’s spirit would come with me, no matter which direction they wanted her to go.

Broad leaves slapped my cheeks and spilled the remnants of the morning’s rain down my neck as I rounded the corner to the front of the house, resisting the urge to see if Poe had lit out after me.

When I skidded toward the front door, I had to pull up short to keep from running into Poe, inexplicably at the door before me. This time I looked back over my shoulder, in case she had a twin hiding behind me. When I faced her again, the smile was gone off her lips, replaced by a noticeable sadness.

“
Poe.” I held my hands up, palms toward her. “I’m sorry for what happened. I--”

“
You had a choice,” she said. If a cartoonist had drawn her words in the speech bubble of a comic book, icicles would have hung off the bottom of each letter. “You believed her instead of me.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but then didn’t bother. She was right. I’d been blinded by a beautiful liar instead of trusting the guardian angel who risked herself countless times because of my stupidity, and now Poe was stuck in Hell. My arms fell to my sides, my shoulders slumped.

“I’m sorry.” Lame.

She showed me her back and walked into the house. I took a step to follow but stopped; she wouldn’t sneak the souls out the back door, she’d parade them past me to increase my guilt over my poor choice in condemning her. And I deserved it.

A second later, she didn’t disappoint me. She stepped back into the hall and came toward me, followed by the ghostly figure of a tall and gangly teenage boy, his red hair cut short and spiky, a stunned look on his face. With the way souls worked, I didn’t know which of the gunman’s victims this was. I once harvested a young girl from a tough cop, so I decided to determine his identity the only way I knew how.

“
Who’s that?”

“
Tim Franklin,” the teen said. For a second, I thought he’d offer his hand for me to shake, but he didn’t. I frowned at him, not for his lack of politeness, but because who the hell is Tim Franklin?

“
The gunman,” Poe said, reading my thoughts. Normally, it annoyed the snot out of me when angels did read my mind, but I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather have happen than Poe doing it.

The third shot. He killed himself.

I looked from him to Poe. “And--?”

“
The others are waiting for you inside,” she said. “I told them you’d be right in.”

She stepped off the porch and the red-haired teen moved with her like an invisible rope tethered them together. I watched them go and found unpleasant emotions gnawing the inside of my gut: grief, regret, anguish. My heart might actually have hurt.

“I’m sorry for what happened, Poe.” Pretty much just as lame, so I added a heartfelt: “I wish I could change it.”

She stopped, hesitated before facing me, the dead gunman’s soul stepping aside to allow her a clear view. The broad rim of her hat hid her face for a second and I hoped that, when she raised her head, her nervous smile I’d taken for granted would be back to put a Band-Aid on my aching heart.

Couldn’t have been more wrong.

Her eyes were icy, her face looked carved of stone by an artisan with a poor attitude. My chest shrank, compressing my lungs and making it difficult to take a sufficient breath. Poe paced toward me and I resisted the urge to run away.

“You could have taken me,” she said through clenched teeth. “You could have left the cop and taken me, after all I did for you.”

“
I brought him back, I can bring you, too,” I said, embarrassed by my poor choice and by the note of desperation in my voice. “There must be a way.”

She barked an uncharacteristic harsh laugh.

“Do you think they’ll let you find your way back to Hell?”

My mouth opened and closed, but no words came out, my brain incapable of sending messages to my vocal chords. Poe had no such trouble.

“You left me in Hell, Icarus. And I will never get out.”

She spun away, the black overcoat wheeling out around her, and stormed off with the red-headed soul in tow. I raised my hand in a feeble attempt to stop her, my throat giving its best effort at speaking. One word squeezed its way out:

“Ric.”

Correcting her on what I like to be called did nothing to quell the ugly regret bruising my insides. My head sagged forward until my chin touched my chest, my hand fell back to my side. I’d never tell Detective Shaun Williams—the cop I rescued from Hell instead of bringing Poe back—that I made the wrong choice, but I had. Neither of them deserved to be damned, and both ended up in Hell due to my poor decisions, but it seemed Poe was the one to whom I wouldn’t be able to make restitution
.

The only angel who believed in me
.

One thing I learned during my time as a harvester: don’t mess with the plan. Fucking around with the blueprint can have massive consequences and I promised myself I’d never do it again. Whatever appeared on the scrolls given me by Gabe...that’s what would get done.

“Excuse me.”

The voice at my back startled me. I spun around to find the soul of Benjamin Trounce looking at me, the confused look on his face as comical as the surprised expression I likely wore.

“Can you tell us what’s going on?”

His essence looked identical to the way he did in life: same height, same age, same clothes. In my experience, this was uncommon. The woman beside him proved it. Alive, she’d been thirty-oneish, with short brown hair and plain features pleasant enough to consider her attractive, but not make her stand out in a crowd. Instead, the soul sitting at Mr. Trounce’s side looked like a girl of around sixteen, with flowing black hair, sparkling eyes, and wearing a skirt short enough to embarrass me for noticing it.

“I’m sorry to say: you’re deceased,” I told him, studiously keeping my eyes away from his dead wife’s legs. I tensed in case they decided to flee, but they didn’t. Instead, Ben Trounce’s shoulders sagged like someone let the air out of him.

“
I was afraid of that. What happens now?”

“
I’ll help you on your way to--”

The appearance of a third face between them stopped me in my vocal tracks. I stared at the shining eyes, the crooked smile, the curly brown locks, an upturned pixie nose. Cutest little girl I’ve ever seen.

“Who the hell are you?” Not very polite, right? Whatever.