Dying For You (22 page)

Her father couldn’t meet her gaze and turned to stare out the north window. Her mother, however, looked hopeful for the first time in a week. “Oh, Rhea, do you really think so?”

Actually, I have no idea if my plan will work, but don’t give it another thought.
“Absolutely,” she lied.

Her father stood with his back to her, still staring out the window. “Then go,” he said, “quickly. While there’s still time to catch him. Do—do you want me to come with you?”

“I’ll come, too,” her mother added, though she wasn’t a Goodman by blood, of course.

“My, my, look at you two. I’m shocked to my very core. Breaking tradition like that? No chance,” she teased.

“Mmm. And Rhea…”

“Yeah?”

“If it goes badly—”

“I know, Dad.”

“Because it may be an elaborate charade on his part.”

“I know, Dad.”

“To trick you into lowering your defenses.”

“Gotcha.”

“Why was he the one on top when we drove up?”

“Uh—gotta go, Dad.”

Call girls—or “soiled doves” as Chris preferred to think of them—had been disappearing in Boston for more than two months. Chris drove yet another rental down to the harbor for a quick look. And a finder spell, of course. Because he had a good idea what was happening. A K’shir demon: The Taker of the Lost. Looks like a man, feeds like a devil, then looks like a man again. Only a magic user could spot it for what it was—a creature so unnatural to this world that it actually made his head hurt.

In fact, it hadn’t hurt so badly since the day Rhea had smacked the shit out of him.

Don’t think about Rhea.

He tried. He really tried. He’d spent the last two days holed up in his hotel room, determinedly not thinking about Rhea. Trying to become absorbed with the Call Girl Killer.
And in all the not thinking about Rhea, he’d decided what to do: stay away. Don’t go looking for her on his thirtieth.

And don’t knock anybody up, for the love of God!

He swallowed at the thought. Did he have the courage to end his family line? Could he?
Should
he?

If it kept Rhea and the next Goodman safe, then yes. Absolutely.

Feeling a bit better about his decision, he’d decided to look into the missing soiled doves. All had been lured down to the harbor. Other than that, they had nothing in common, except for the way they died—in great terror and pain.

The police thought wild animals were on the loose, even though no one had reported a pack of wolves gone missing. And Chris couldn’t blame them—he’d seen the crime scene photos. A quick show-me spell, a quick forget spell, and he had copies of everything. He had seen. Nothing human could do that to the poor girls. Frankly, he hadn’t been able to eat a thing for quite a few hours after looking through the case files.

He had a strong hunch that the cops weren’t going to be able to solve this case. Ever. So he would step in, again. In truth, he couldn’t wait. All the pent-up anger and frustration at his situation—his and Rhea’s, whom he wasn’t thinking about—could be poured into his attack.

Go back
, the rat in his brain whispered.
Do a spell. Make her come with you to the hotel. Make her take off her clothes and yours and—

He shoved the thought away. It would reappear in another
half hour or so, much to his disgust. After all the lectures Rhea had endured, it looked like he was the bad guy after all. How she would have liked to hear him say so!

But she would never hear him again. He would see to it. And he would end his line and break the curse. And she could live happily ever after, and so could her niece, the player-to-be-named-later.

He parked near Faneuil Hall and walked toward the harbor. His head hurt more and more with each step—excellent. The Taker of the Lost was planning on feeding tonight. Good. Chris was in a skull-cracking mood.

He stopped near a relatively deserted side street, read a Post-It, then stuffed the note back in his pocket and chanted,

“Taker of the Lost

Show your true face.

Then you’ll be bossed

And I’ll hit you with mace.”

Okay, as far as poems went…not so great. Really kind of dreadful. But that was the trick. They didn’t
have
to be good poems. They just had to rhyme, even clumsily. What had Rhea said? Get a rhyming dictionary? How had he never thought of that? The girl—woman—was a genius! But more important, why had she given the suggestion? It was kind of out of character for her—for any Goodman—to help a Mere. Frankly, it—

A startled roar from two blocks over smashed up his train of thought; he started to sprint. The demon was likely to lash out at anybody near it; they hated—
hated
—being forced to
drop their disguises. He heard a car pull up behind him and slam on the brakes, and was absently grateful not to be creamed by what sounded like a typical Boston driver.

He rounded a corner and ran another block, then checked himself before he could run blindly into the alley. He looked up. And there it was, hanging twelve feet up like a bloated bat—all dark leathery wings, two hearts, and bad smell.

“Don’t you want to come down here and kick my ass?” he called up to it, hoping it understood English.

That was when the one behind him slammed into him, shoving him so hard into the wall that he almost lost consciousness.

Two
of them? Oh,
great
, as Rhea would say. It certainly explained the number of missing girls…he’d assumed it was a ridiculously hungry demon, not that it had a mate. Demons of any kind were not known for teamwork. He should have remembered there was an exception to every rule.

Too bad for him.

He rolled away just as the demon’s left foot came down where his head had been, cracking the cobblestones. He felt something warm drip into his eyes and realized he was bleeding from a scalp wound.

It’s possible, he mused, that I jumped into this without planning it so well. Anything was better than wondering how things might have been between him and the girl

(woman)

he wasn’t thinking about. Even facing an extra demon on a Wednesday night.

He watched with something close to disinterest as the male scuttled down the wall and the female edged closer.

He couldn’t think of a thing that rhymed with demon, and he was too woozy to grope for a Post-It and try to read it in the darkness of the alley.

This is it. Heaven, here I come. I’ll go to heaven, right?

There was a shhhhk-THUD and another shhhhhk-THUD, and the female, who had been once again getting ready to stomp him, screamed. Chris wiped more blood out of his eyes and saw two arrows sticking out of the female’s back.

The demon popped her extra elbow joint loose and was able to reach far enough up her back to yank at them, and then screamed again—in anger as much as pain—when she moved them in her flesh but did not dislodge them.

Shhhhhk-THUD, shhhhhk-THUD, shhhhhk-THUD. More screaming. Now the male was roaring in a rage, but (typical of demons) did not come closer to help his mate, preferring to wait in the shadows to ambush—who?

“You dumb shit,” Rhea observed, marching into the alley. She was dressed in super-cool badass black from neck to ankles, and—was that a Kevlar vest?

“It’s nice to see you, too, sunshine. Dressed for the occasion, I see. And by the way, ow, my head.”

“Taker of the Lost?” she asked, studying the wounded female, who had gone down on her knees and managed to claw out one of the arrows. “To think I thought all those stories my dad told me were fairy tales.” Her hand snaked behind her back and she came out with a gun—a really big-ass gun—and
emptied six chambers into the female’s head. “And for the record, you stinking big bastard, the only one allowed to make him go ‘ow’ is
me
.”

“Stinking big bitch,” Chris said helpfully. “This is the female.”

Despite their exotic mythology, demons could be killed with conventional weapons: Destroy enough of the brain and it was a fait accompli. So Chris was not surprised to see the female slowly topple forward and lie still.

He
was
surprised to see Rhea squat in front of him and hand him a Wet Nap, which he batted out of her hand. He’d stupidly assumed she had seen the male as well—which was a gross disservice to the girl. Woman. She’d only known about her “duty” for a little over a week, and damned sure didn’t spend spare time casting spells on demons. She was a fucking poet!

Those thoughts whirled through his brain in half a second, and he brought his knees up and kicked her as hard as he could, square in the chest. She flew away from him like he’d shot her out of a cannon,

(God, God, don’t let her be hurt, please God, I’ll owe you one, okay?)

and then two black feet smashed into the spot where Rhea had been crouching.

“Ow,” Rhea bitched from eight feet away. Then, “Two of them? In all the stories I heard—”

“Yeah, and all those old stories are always totally truthful.”

“Good point,” she admitted, climbing to her feet and popping the cylinder on her six, grabbing a speed loader and sliding
it home, even as she edged toward the male, who, in a rage, was still stomping on the spot she’d recently occupied.

“Jesus, what are you waiting for? Shoot him! He’s alone now, so he’s being careful. Which is the only reason he hasn’t eaten our heads. Shoot!”

“No. You might be killed in the crossfire.”

“Who cares? Shoot the fucker!”

“I care. Freeman, gleeman, semen, seamen, Philemon, cacodemon. Lost, boss, floss, gloss, toss.”

The male twisted toward her, hissing, but it had to climb over the body of its mate to get to Rhea, so he had maybe three seconds.

“Taker of the Lost

Begone to where lives a demon

Lest I give you a toss

Then drown you in semen.”

“I think I’d rather have my face clawed off than listen to another one of those,” Rhea commented as the advancing male suddenly vanished with a loud “pop!”…the sound of air rushing into the space it had so recently occupied.

“Shut up. It worked, didn’t it?”

“You couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with demon, could you?” she asked kindly.

“Shut up,” he said, trying not to sulk. They stared at each other from opposite sides of the alley. Then he wondered why he was sulking. She had come! She had (somehow) tracked him down and found him and come armed and—

“Before I embrace you and cry like a little girl, you didn’t bring all that stuff and wear all that stuff to kill me, did you?”

“Only if you misbehave.” She grimaced, stood, and rubbed the small of her back. “Thank goodness for body armor. You kick
hard
, Mere.”

“Chris. And thanks. My fault, by the way. I had no business assuming you knew there were two.”

“And I had no business charging into an alley before I effectively deduced the threat level. So we both fucked up. That’s why we can’t kill each other.”

“Really?” he asked, almost afraid to hope.

She bent, found the Wet Nap, skirted the dead female, and handed it back to him. “Really. If we try to kill each other, we’ll just screw it up. Excuse me.” She leaned against the wall and efficiently threw up.

He climbed to his feet, wiping more blood out of his eyes, then went to her and patted her shoulder while she vomited. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, as distressed as he’d ever been. “It’s awful, I know. The smell and the—the general unnaturalness of them.” He couldn’t believe she’d walked into a dark alley to save his ass. “It hurts my brain to look at them.”

She coughed, pulled an arm across her mouth, then said, “It hurts my stomach.”

“Then why did you come?”

“Oh, I broke into your hotel room and found all the police reports. After I tracked your car rental. It wasn’t hard to figure out where you went next—I was right behind you those last few minutes, but you ignored my honking.”

“This is Boston,” he said, as if that explained everything.

She laughed, a sound that caused his heart rate to double with pure joy. Then her eyes narrowed, and she cut off her
laugh and said, “You didn’t raise those two, right? You just get rid of them. Right?”

“Rhea. You really have to ask?”

“Sorry. Distrusting you is going to be a tough habit to break.”

“Sunshine, you don’t even know how tough. So now what? Since you’re sure if we turn on each other we’ll screw it up. What does that leave? Teaching each other to knit? Taking a judo class at the Y? What?”

She laughed again. “Now we go back to your hotel room and make a baby.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe this is happening. I just can’t believe it.”

Rhea actually had to lead Chris through the lobby like a Seeing Eye dog. He was so shocked by her plan, he’d almost gone catatonic.

“I’ve been spending all this time not thinking about you, and now you want a Mere baby.”

“A Goodman-Mere baby.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he said again, following her robotically into the elevator.

“Are you all right? You’re like kind of…out of it.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.”

“It’s a good way to break the curse, don’t you think?”

“Curse?”

“The
curse
. The one that’s been on our families for three hundred some years?
The
curse.”

“Oh. That curse.”

She pressed the button for his floor. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Sure as sure can be,” he replied absently. “It’s just that I fell in love with you and was resigned to never seeing you again, and then you saved me in the alley, and now you want to have sex. I’m feeling a little like a Powerball winner. Also, I think we already broke the curse.”

“When you shared your powers with your greatest enemy. And we teamed up and kicked some demonic butt.”

“Right, right.”

The elevator dinged, and they walked out. She used his key card to pop the door open, and inside they went. The hotel had already done turn-down service.

“Look!” Rhea said. “Chocolates!”