Side Jobs (27 page)

I could have bailed then. I suppose it would have been the smartest thing. Once the book was removed from the equation, the Stygian’s entire operation was blown. Granted, she and the other members of the Sisterhood would try it again somewhere else, but they would have been stopped for the time being.

But the bitch had messed with my brother.

“For the time being” wasn’t good enough.

Harry came through the front door of the warehouse, with the Stygian treading fearfully behind him, pretending to tremble. Tall, skinny, sharp-featured, and somewhat rough-looking, Harry wore his usual wizarding gear—the black leather duster. He carried a carved staff in his left hand, a shorter, more heavily carved rod in his right, and the tip of the rod glowed with a sullen red-orange flame.

I was waiting for them.

I had wrapped the dark red blanket around my shoulders and upper body like some sort of dramatic ceremonial garb. I stood over the child, a wicked-looking knife I’d found lying on the altar in hand, with my head thrown back and a sneer on my illusion-covered face.

“So!” I boomed in my most overblown voice. “You have defeated my minions!”

“You have got to be kidding me,” my brother said, staring at me with an expression somewhere between bemusement and naked contempt. “I mean . . . Jesus, look at this place. I’ve seen high school plays with a higher production value than this.”

“Silence!” I thundered, pointing the knife at him. I had eyes only for the Stygian, in any case. She was staring at me with a look of blank surprise. Heh. Serves you right, sweetheart. You shouldn’t make up stories about imaginary villains until you’re certain they won’t come true. “Who dares interrupt my—”

“Yeah, you know what?” Harry asked.
“Forzare!”

His staff snapped forward and an invisible truck hit me at thirty miles an hour.

I flew backward, thirty feet or so, and hit a stack of loading pallets.

I went through them.

That hurt.

I hit the wall behind them.

I did not go through it.

That hurt even more.

I landed, dazed, and wobbled to my feet with the help of my demon. No problem, I told myself. I’d planned to fall back to this position in any case—just not quite that vigorously.

The circuit box for the building was on the wall two feet to my left. I reached out and killed the lights.

“Crouch down!” Harry shouted to the woman he thought he was protecting. “Stay still!”

My demon and I adjusted to the darkness almost instantly. The Stygian had done the same. She had produced a wavy-bladed dagger from nowhere and was running toward me on silent feet, her eyes narrowed and intent.

I threw the prop knife I’d been holding when she was ten feet away. She slipped to one side, and it went spinning through the air, striking sparks off the far wall. Her knife struck at me, but I slammed the edge of one hand against her forearm, knocking it away before it could do more than scratch me. I followed that with a pair of sharp blows to the body, driving her back a step, and then drew my kukri from beneath the red blanket-robes, slashing at her head. I missed her, and the follow-up rake at her eyes that I made with my other hand failed to connect as well.

In the background, Harry had his priorities straight. He’d brought forth a little light from his amulet, and was cutting the child free from the makeshift altar. I felt my mouth stretch into a fierce grin.

“So smug,” hissed the Stygian, her reptile eyes flat. “But not for long.” She raised her voice into a terrified scream. “Let me go! Don’t touch me!”

Harry, holding the child over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry, spun toward the sound, raising his blasting rod, and began hurrying toward me.

“Run, Venator,” hissed the Stygian. “But the Blood of the Ancient Mothers is in your veins now. Enjoy your last hours.”

The nick on my arm, the tiny cut from the dagger, suddenly felt very cold.

The book was out of Harry’s hands. The child was safe.

I fled the building.

The wound was poisoned.

Without my demon, I don’t think I would have lasted more than an hour. Even with its support, I was having trouble staying steady. The pain was horrible, and my whole body poured sweat even as I shivered with cold. The Hunger can usually overcome any kind of foreign substance—but while my demon might have been a powerful one, it was not well fed, and I’d been using it hard all night. It had little strength left with which to fight the poison.

It was difficult, but I persevered for three hours.

That was how long it took for me to track the Stygian and catch her alone.

The sweep of my kukri had missed her head—but not the hairs growing out of it. And while my grasping fingers had not found her eyes an instant later, they had snatched those hairs out of the air before they could fall. The tracking spell the skull had taught me had been good enough to let me find the Stygian, despite any countermeasures she might have taken.

When she entered her hotel room, I was half an inch behind her. She never knew I was there until my lips touched the back of her neck, and I unleashed my demon upon her.

She let out a sudden gasp, as my Hunger, starved for so long, rushed into her flesh. Though she might have had the mind and thoughts of a dozen alien beings, she had a mortal life force and a mortal body—a woman’s body, and, as I had told the skull, a rather lovely one at that.

She tried to struggle for five or six seconds, until her nervous system succumbed to my Hunger, until the first orgasm ripped a moan of equal parts ecstasy, need, and despair from her throat.

“Shhhh,” I told her, my teeth gently finding her earlobe and my hands roaming. “It won’t hurt. I promise.”

She cried out in despair again, as her body began moving in helpless acquiescence to desire, and my own reservations flickered and died before the raw, aching need of my Hunger.

I spend most of my life fighting my darker nature.

Most of it.

Not all of it.

I bore the Stygian to the floor and fed her to my demon.

Lara would help me get rid of the body.

A long, long shower and the cleansing force of the rising sun had been enough to wash away the illusion that had obscured my true features.

I visited my brother at his office the next day.

“How’s business?” I asked him.

He shook his head, scowling. “You know what? I’ve been doing so much gopher work for the Council and the Wardens, I think I must be forgetting how to be a private eye.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, I went up against this complete joke of a bad guy yesterday,” he said. “Kidnapper. I mean, you should have seen this loser. He was a
joke
.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“And somehow he manages to get away from me.” Harry shook his head. “I mean, I got the kid back, no problem, but the little skeeve skated out on me.”

“Maybe you’re getting old.”

He glowered at me. “The worst part is that the chick who hired me, it turns out, isn’t even his mother. She was playing me all along. The kid’s been missing for three days, and his
real
parents are trying to get the cops to freaking
arrest
me. After I pull him off a freaking sacrificial altar—okay, a cheesy, stupid sacrificial altar, but a sacrificial altar all the same.”

“Where’s the chick?” I asked.

“Who knows?” Harry said, exasperated. “She’s gone. Stiffed me, too. And good luck trying to get the kid’s parents to pay me for the investigation and rescue. There’s a better chance of electing a Libertarian president.”

“The perils of the independent entrepreneur,” I said. “You hungry?”

“You buying?”

“I’m buying.”

He stood up. “I’m hungry.” He put on his coat and walked with me toward the door, shaking his head. “I tell you, Thomas. Sometimes I feel completely unappreciated.”

I found myself smiling.

“Wow,” I said. “What’s it like?”

 

 

 

Once upon a time, when moving into a new neighborhood, I spent a few days meeting the new neighbors. Nothing big, just visits to say hello, introduce myself to the other family with children my son’s age, another family with a high-school-aged daughter who often babysat for the other families on the street, the usual sort of thing. I had a bunch of innocuous interactions with them that didn’t look like anything special—at the time.

Fast-forward five years. Over the next few years, I came to learn that some of the most inane, unimportant little things I had done or said in that time had impacted several of my neighbors in enormous ways. Not necessarily good or bad, but significantly, and generally in a positive fashion, or so it seemed to me.

If I’d chosen different words to speak, or timed my actions only slightly differently, it might well have altered their lives—and if I hadn’t been paying close attention, I might not have realized it had happened at all. It was my first real-life lesson in the law of unintended consequences—and the basis of my belief that big, important things are built from small and commonplace things, and that even our little acts of petty, everyday good or evil have a cumulative effect on our world. A lot of religions make a distinction between light and darkness, and paint portraits of dramatic battles between their champions.

But maybe the “fight on the ground” is a lot more common than we ever really think. It happens every day, and a lot of the time we might not even be aware that it’s going on—until five years later, I guess. Our smallest actions and choices matter. They tell us about who we are.

That was the idea I tried to carry into “The Warrior.”

That, and the idea that what seems like a good thing or a bad thing might not be either, seen from another point of view. Many readers were upset with Michael’s fate at the end of
Small Favor
—how horrible that a character who was basically so decent got handed such a horrible fate, being shot and crippled for life by the champions of Hell itself. What a tragedy that he couldn’t continue the fight.

Judge for yourself how tragic it was for him.

I
sat down next to Michael and said, “I think you’re in danger.” Michael Carpenter was a large, brawny man, though he was leaner now than in all the time I’d known him. Months in bed and more months in therapy had left him a shadow of himself, and he had never added all the muscle back on. Even so, he looked larger and more fit than most, his salt-and-pepper hair and short beard going heavier on the salt these days.

He smiled at me. That hadn’t changed. If anything, the smile had gotten deeper and more steady.

“Danger?” he said. “Heavens.”

I leaned back on the old wooden bleachers at the park and scowled at him. “I’m serious.”

Michael paused to shout a word of encouragement at the second baseman (or was that baseperson?) on his daughter Alicia’s softball team. He settled back onto the bleachers. They were covered in old, peeling green paint, and it clashed with his powder blue and white shirt, which matched the uniform T-shirts of the girls below. It said COACH in big blue letters.

“I brought your sword. It’s in the car.”

“Harry,” he said, unruffled, “I’m retired. You know that.”

“Sure,” I said, reaching into my coat. “I know that. But the bad guys apparently don’t.” I drew out an envelope and passed it to him.

Michael opened it and studied its contents. Then he replaced them, put the envelope back on the bench beside me, and rose. He started down onto the field, leaning heavily on the wooden cane that went everywhere with him now. Nerve damage had left one of his legs pretty near perfectly rigid, and his hip had been damaged as well. It gave him a rolling gait. I knew he couldn’t see out of one of his clear, honest eyes very well anymore, either.

He took charge of the practice in the quiet, confident way he did everything, drawing smiles and laughter from his daughter and her teammates. They were obviously having fun.

It looked good on him.

I looked down at the envelope and wished I couldn’t imagine the photos contained inside it quite so clearly. They were all professional, clear—Michael walking up the handicap access ramp to his church; Michael opening a door for his wife, Charity; Michael loading a big bucket of softballs into the back of the Carpenter family van; Michael at work, wearing a yellow hard hat, pointing up at a half-finished building as he spoke to a man beside him.

The pictures had come in the mail to my office, with no note, and no explanation. But their implications were ugly and clear.

My friend, the former Knight of the Cross, was in danger.

It took half an hour for the softball practice to end, and then Michael rolled back over to me. He stood staring up at me for a moment before he said, “The sword has passed out of my hands. I can’t take it up again—especially not for the wrong reason. I won’t live in fear, Harry.”

“Could you maybe settle for living in caution?” I asked. “At least until I know more about what’s going on?”

“I don’t think His plan is for me to die now,” he replied calmly. It was never hard to tell when Michael was talking about the Almighty. He could insert capital letters into spoken words. I’m not sure how.

“What happened to ‘No man knows the day or the hour’?” I asked.

He gave me a wry smile. “You’re taking that out of context.”

I shrugged. “Michael. I’d like to believe in a loving, just God who looks out for everyone. But I see a lot of people get hurt who don’t seem to deserve it. I don’t want you to become one of them.”