Armageddon Rules (45 page)

He stood on the step and reached up to take my hand. “What do you want to do today? We could go to the forge, do some work there. You want to have lunch on the waterfront?”

“I was thinking of looking for wedding bands. I know a jewelry store that’s having a great fire sale.” I tucked his hand in mine. If anything, I’d learned over the years: Happily ever after may be out there, but it doesn’t come to you. So we did what any smart couple would do. We chased it.

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Wish Bound

COMING SEPTEMBER 2015 FROM ACE BOOKS!

WHEN I WAS a little girl, my mother used to say, “A little birthday party can’t hurt anyone.” She stopped saying that after my seventh birthday, when the ponies they rented stampeded. Then it was “How bad could a birthday party be?” which lasted until my tenth birthday, when the microwave oven exploded, coating everyone in melted frosting. Then it was “Let’s get this over with,” followed the year after by “You know, this year let’s let Marissa celebrate her own way.” Which meant I spent my birthdays reading alone while my parents went out for drinks.

And that’s how I planned to spend my twenty-eighth birthday. Which fell on a Monday, which statistically, it does once every seven years. Mondays, in my experience, are lousy, and birthdays are even worse.

I ran to work that Monday, keeping my girlish figure looking slightly more girlish than trash-can-ish, and Liam ran with me. Liam. Almost six feet, built like a barrel, with arms like tree trunks. My fiancé. My other half. The man who’d stood by me through the end of the world. Also, a man in lousy shape.

“Marissa, could we take a break?” Liam limped along a few dozen feet back.

I learned to run earlier in my life. Run to get away from things that wanted to kill me, run to get away from things I couldn’t get away from. Technically, these days I could eat the buffet and the table it came on and still not gain a pound, thanks to the gift from a harbinger of the apocalypse, Famine. Being the apocalypse bringer had its benefits, but I wasn’t taking chances, so we still ran.

In case you’re imagining a romantic run through the city, two lovers getting an endorphin kick to keep us ready for work, stop. We had company. A few feet behind Liam came a bombshell blonde, curvy and pale, with brilliant blue eyes and a figure that stopped hearts.

“You can run on. I will stay with my liege.” Svetlana, the aforementioned beautiful disaster, waved to me. I wasn’t about to leave her any more than she ever left us. Which was never. It wasn’t just devotion to my fiancé, it was a form of contract. Thanks to the machinations of an evil queen and her team of assassins, Liam wound up holding a stake in, well, everything Svetlana’s people owned. Given that they were all vegetarian vampires, they objected to stakes of any flavor.

I jogged in place, waiting for Liam to gain his breath.

“This is a lot easier when I have four feet,” called a six-foot-eight man with curly brown hair. The head of our shipping department and full-time Big Bad Wolf, Mikey, never passed up a chance to chase people, even if he wasn’t allowed to devour them. The crowd parted for him in a way that would have made Old Testament Moses envious. Crowds in the city don’t move for anyone, but most folks had a healthy self-preservation instinct. “I’ll see you at the office,” Mikey shouted. He loped off, nearly sprinting.

We took another forty minutes to arrive, mostly due to my fiancé, partially due to a flower vendor who insisted I wanted a dahlia. What I really wanted was to shove the dahlia somewhere he’d find painful.

For the record, Liam and I had an unremarkable dinner the night before. One without candles, streamers, or balloons, with no mention of “happy birthday” or any of that nonsense. That’s exactly how I liked it, exactly how I needed it to be. Parties never worked out well for me. Whether it’s the hazmat team having to hose everyone down, the cake catching fire, or the wheel of evil cheese appearing in the office fridge, my birthdays went better without celebration. The end of the world was actually a couple of years ago, and having survived that, I wasn’t terribly eager to do anything else to, well, kill everyone. So I didn’t plan on attending my own party.

I arrived at the Agency, ran up the stairs for that final calorie-burn burst, and exploded through the front door, ready for a Monday.

Our receptionist, Rosa, hunched over a man, shocking him repeatedly with a stun gun.

I nodded to her. “Morning, Rosa.”

She made the sign of the cross with her middle finger, blessing herself and telling me off in one pass, and muttered under her breath.

Since Rosa obviously had the morning crowd under control, I checked the schedule. In my office, a six-by-four mirror pulsed, glowing orange in the darkness. I had the mirror divided into slots for each day and hour, keeping a schedule that Grimm couldn’t claim not to see. Monday morning. Liam had an appointment in the sewers, where a group of mud men awaited the “Final Flush.” I hoped Svetlana brought her muck boots.

Mikey needed to be down at the docks, where something on a container ship kept eating the night watchmen. If you are what you eat, something had a cholesterol count that might kill it.

I looked at my name and saw the whole day blocked out without explanation.

The column next to mine looked identical.

“Morning, Marissa. Does this outfit make my eyes look more or less yellow?”

I recognized Ari’s voice and couldn’t help but smile. In the doorway to my office, Arianna Thromson stood, dressed in a yellow tracksuit. The yellow made her red hair look lighter, and it made the diseased, yellow, blind eyes in her head look only mildly diseased and yellow.

Arianna Thromson, my best friend. Also, princess, and witch. Don’t hold those last two against her—the first you could blame on her parents, the second on an evil queen who forced Ari to use too much magic at once.

“Looks better.” I looked at her dead-on, making sure she knew that regardless of how she looked, she was still just Ari to me. “You and I have some sort of all-day engagement.”

“I’m meeting Wyatt for lunch.” Ari narrowed her eyes at me, then looked past me to the board. Despite the fact that her eyes had neither pupils nor irises, she could see perfectly well without them. In fact, if what you were looking for was a spirit, spell, or curse, she saw better than I did.

Ari read the schedule, then put one hand to the bracelet on her wrist. A simple gold bracelet, the key to our communication with the Fairy Godfather. “Bastard Grimm, you come here this instant.” Using Grimm’s first name was something even I avoided, and I outranked Ari.

The calendar faded from the mirror, and Grimm swirled into view. He adjusted his coat, looking every bit the English butler I always imagined him as. “Ladies, how may I assist you?”

“I was going to have lunch with my prince.” Ari crossed her arms and tapped her foot.

Grimm took off the heavy black glasses he wore, revealing eyebrows like a yeti. “Young lady, I’m sorry. We require your assistance. I’ll make it up to you. Reservations to anywhere in the city.”

“What exactly are we supposed to be doing?” I went around to my desk and opened my ammo drawer.

“Marissa, you always say I never let you travel for business. I think today I’ll correct that. You are going to visit another realm.” Grimm’s calm smile left me worried.

I’d traveled to other realms. Inferno, a few times. It was better than the Department of Licensing. I’d been to a fairy’s realm as well, and would rather not go back. “Which one? Avalon? Say Avalon. Or Atlantis.”

Grimm looked down. “Nowhere near as extravagant. We’ve suffered an influx of goblins for the last few weeks, and I would like to check the health of the realm seal.”

Of course. The realm seal, if it looked like the others, was a giant ball of lightning that acted as a barrier. Grimm couldn’t go himself, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t send others. “I don’t want to go to the Forest. I want to go to Avalon.”

“You don’t have enough frequent-flier miles built up, but we’ll talk about it afterward. Meet me at the portal in fifteen minutes.” Grimm faded out.

“You’ll get to shoot some goblins, and I’ll be that much happier to see Wyatt tonight.” That was Ari, always trying to salvage a bad situation.

“There’s no point in shooting goblins. They’re dumber than the bullets in my gun. As a matter of fact, I’d bet on the bullets—”

Grimm appeared in a burst of light in every reflective surface in my office. He spoke from all of them at once. “Code Mauve, Marissa. I need you immediately in my office. Alone.” Grimm kept his tone calm, his eyes fixed on me. Not good.

I ran down the hall, threw open the door, ready for murder, mayhem, or destruction. The air conditioner’s hum competed with the murmur of the crowds in the waiting room for loudest noise. “Yes?”

Grimm appeared in his mirror, his regular gray silk suit changed out for black, his look stern. He ignored me, keeping his eyes on the high-back chair, where I noticed two feet in penny loafers.

“Ah, so good of you to come at once.” I knew the voice. Knew the man, if you could call him that.

I shut the door behind me. “Nick.” Nickolas Scratch. The Adversary. King of demons, ruler of Inferno, and first-order paper pusher.

He rose from his chair, barely as tall as me, with heavy wrinkles around his eyes and a bald spot that could blind a girl. “I hate to bother you, Marissa. I really do, but I have a problem, and your driver’s license doesn’t expire for another two years.” The Adversary’s second job, at the Department of Licensing, allowed him to be truly evil.

I chose my words with care. “Anything that’s bothering you is way out of my league. I’m trying to pick on things my own size.” Refusing the Adversary directly could be bad, but not, in my book, as bad as agreeing to help him.

Nick walked over, putting one hand on my shoulder. “I know. I wouldn’t ask, but I don’t have anywhere else to turn. There’s been a theft.”

Grimm disappeared in a flash, leaving me alone. And for once, I didn’t feel abandoned. Grimm had mastered the art of foretelling the future in a dozen ways, all of them bloody enough to make me lose my lunch. I was convinced he secretly made no effort to evict the rabbits that infested his home, because they came in handy when a quick fortune needed to be told. Right now, I needed the knowledge he’d gain from slaughtering a few bunnies as much as he did.

“Where?”

“The Vault of Souls.” Nick’s eyes glowed like fireside embers as he spoke. “Think of it like a bank vault, only instead of your mortgage papers, or some certificates of deposit, I keep valuable things. Mass murderers. Tyrants. Genocidal maniacs.”

“Who broke out?” I slipped around the desk and sat down in Grimm’s chair.

Nick’s hands clenched, turning white, and he trembled with barely contained rage. “There’s never been a breakout. Someone broke into Inferno and took three souls from the vault.” With each word, the lights in the office flickered, as if each shadow siphoned away the light. I’d stood face-to-face with demons, dealt with the harbingers of the apocalypse, including Death himself, but the Adversary was so far out of my league I didn’t even pretend to threaten him.

“The angels did it?” The angels were the only creatures I could imagine being dumb enough to mount an attack on hell itself. Now would be a great time for Grimm to make an appearance. I’d gone toe-to-toe with demons and survived, but the Adversary could squash me like a bug if I said the wrong thing.

He rumbled like a thunderstorm. Anger or laughter, I couldn’t tell. “Are you kidding? They want most of the souls in the vault locked up just as much as I do. The two I want back were mine by right. Given to me freely.” Blood dripped from Nick’s hands as his nails cut into his palms. The blood drops burst into flames that licked the edges of his fingers.

For just a moment, my curiosity got the better of me. “Don’t you have armies? You know, the sort that you’d need to bring about the end of the world?”

The Lord of Destruction looked at me over his bifocals, his eyes round. “I can’t admit there’s been a lapse in security. My own children would rise up against me. So, you are going to retrieve those souls. If they’ve been lashed into another body, you have my permission to take them apart in any way you find convenient. Death will take care of bringing them back to me at that point.”

The friendly grin on Nick’s face made my spine tingle. “I’m sorry. I’m your girl if you need a pair of slippers returned, or a library book, but souls? Maybe Fairy Godfather can find them and—” The words got caught and strangled in my throat as Nick began to belch black smoke and sulfur.

“You
will
do it. If I don’t get them back, I’m going to start killing random people on the off chance that one of them has a soul I’m looking for. And you won’t have to find the two I’m after. They’re going to come for you, Marissa. I’d bet on it.”

I think his final words scared me more than his threats. “Who?”

For just a moment, Nickolas Scratch looked almost concerned. “An ex-queen and her son. Both of whom have issues with you.”

Where two seconds earlier I could have baked bread just by setting it on my desk, now beads of sweat formed on my head and I shivered. I knew who he meant—I had barely survived the last time she tried to kill me. Maybe they hadn’t meant to get her. Maybe—

“Marissa, don’t kid yourself.” The Adversary crossed his arms and shook his head. “That was no accident. There were murderers in that vault a thousand times more deadly; hell, Rip Van Winkle’s soul was in a Mason jar two shelves down.”

I nearly died at the hands of Rip Van Winkle, Kingdom’s own boogeyman. “Who was it that broke in? And who else did they take?” I couldn’t have moved from Grimm’s seat if I had to, wrapped in a spell of fear as I waited for an answer I dreaded.

“You should probably have that discussion with your Fairy Godfather.” He rubbed his hands together, extinguishing the flames. “I’ll see myself out, assuming that receptionist of yours doesn’t shoot me again. If she ever wants a night job, send her over. She’ll fit right in below.” Nick put his clipboard under his arm and marched out, leaving scorch marks on the carpet with each step.