Fallen Angels 03 - Envy (15 page)

Fifty thousand years of evolution knew what was up.

With a surge, Veck came back to her mouth, kissing her deep as his hands drifted downward—

The curse that shot up her throat was more vibration than sound: His hand was back between her legs, brushing over her inner thigh, heading for the match to the bra he’d already seen and dominated.

“Veck!” she barked again as his touch slid to that center strip of satin.

He was careful, putting just enough pressure on that sensitive place, stroking her in a tight circle that made her body go both utterly loose and unbearably tense.

Screw the panties, she wanted nothing between them . . . and yet the silk barrier was not al bad, the seam at the top adding another dimension to the rhythm he’d fal en into. And he didn’t stop kissing her mouth or her neck or her breasts, until she felt as though he was al over her, surrounding her, taking her even though they had yet to become ful y joined.

With a quick shift, he lifted his torso from her, and pushed his hips into her sex, locking their bodies together. Then curling his lower spine, he ground into her, stroking her with his erection as he looked down at the connection.

God, his face was dark with hunger, that cool reserve of his gone, that impassive mask blown to hel and gone by the driving need that locked his jaw.

They
were
going to do this, she realized.

Which was a shock. In her life, choices were made based on data screens of
should
and
have to
and
better not
. This hot sex was definitely in the last category . . . and yet she wasn’t going to stop it.

They were going to do it safely, however—although not in a bed. This table was working just fine.

But there were things she wanted to get a better feel for first.

Reaching down her body, she took her palm and slid it between them—

Veck’s head dropped back. “Fuuuuuck . . .”

Perfect sentiment: His erection was even bigger than she imagined, and it kicked against her palm—

The sound of the doorbel was loud as a gunshot.

And yet for a moment, she couldn’t comprehend what the hel the noise was, or why she should care.

Veck recovered his senses first. “Pizza.”

“Wha . . .t?”

With quick, logical thinking, he reached over and canned the lights so that whoever had brought their pepperoni and sausage didn’t get a floor show.

Then, with efficient hands, he pul ed her shirt back together, tugged the hem of her skirt down, and reached into his pants, rearranging his arousal so his fly didn’t look like a circus tent.

“I’l take care of it,” he said in a level voice. Like nothing had happened. At al .

As he walked off for the front door, Reil y sat up slowly, her head swimming and her body shaking. Holding her blouse together, his brisk return to normal made her feel total y out of control—and then she shifted herself off the table, and the papers on the Barten case fel to the floor.

The flurry of individual pages formed a kind of carpet at her feet, and they were just the kind of mirror she needed to see herself clearly in: Across town, there was a whole family mourning for a daughter they knew they had lost, and instead of focusing on their pain and her job . . . she was hooking up with a man she had no business getting within ten yards of.

Couldn’t get a better conflict of interest than this one. It was frickin’ textbook.

Fumbling with the buttons on her shirt, she did them up fast and then bent down to pick the copies of the report up. As her hair fel into her face, she thought, where was her scrunchie?

Who the hel knew.

Tucking the tangled mess behind her ears, she pul ed the printouts together with careful hands, reordering the pages, separating everything back into two piles, hers and Veck’s.

Separate was better.

Had she lost her mind?

Downthe hal , the deep rumble of a thank-you was fol owed by the front door shutting and his heavy footfal s coming back toward the kitchen.

Standing up fast, she put the two stacks of papers on the table and kept her eyes on them. She couldn’t look at him. Just didn’t have the strength at the moment.

“I think you’d better go.” Her voice didn’t sound right, but then, she didn’t feel right.

“Okay. I’l cal a cab.”

Crap. His bike was back at the station house, wasn’t it.

With a silent curse, she muttered, “That’s al right. I can drive you—”

“No, a cab is better.”

She nodded and brushed the front page of the report . . . right where Sissy’s vital stats and disappearance date were listed. “We’l go through this in the office tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah.” As he pul ed on his coat, the soft sound of fabric on fabric was loud as the doorbel . “I’m sorry.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and nodded again. “Yeah, me, too. I don’t know what got into me.”

But she damn sure knew what would have if dinner hadn’t arrived in the nick of time.

Moments later, he was gone, and he shut the door behind him so quietly it didn’t make any sound.

When she final y looked over her shoulder, al she saw was the pizza on the counter. Uh-huh, right, like she was eating anything right now.

The box went right into the fridge.

On her way out, she passed the table and found her panty hose on the back of a chair. Her scrunchie, on the other hand, was on the floor by the archway into the little dining room. Leaning over to pick the thing up, she went eye-to-eye with the Victoria’s Secret payload.

And realized that her bra was stil waaaaaay out of place.

She left the bags where they were and fixed the immediate problem with a couple of jerks and a whole lot more cursing.

As she headed for the stairs, she thought, tomorrow she was wearing her old boring cotton underwear to work, thank you very much.

“Q
uestion. Is it stil B and E if you don’t actual y break anything to get inside?”

Adrian let that little ditty fly just as Jim and the boys took form in Thomas DelVecchio Jr.’s front hal —and al things considered, the angel could have come up with a much worse comment. Or broken into an ear-destroying, off-key rendition of “Take Me Out to the Bal Game.”

Jim had never spent so much time praying for plugs and muffs.

At least the bastard didn’t try to rap.

“Wel ?” Ad said.

“Look, we don’t even exist,” Jim muttered. “So you could argue we’re not real y here anyway.”

“Excel ent point. Guess it’s legal.”

“Like it would bother you if the shit weren’t.”

The house was decorated in exactly Jim’s style: functional, nothing special, lot of empty floor space. The problem? Nt a lot of personal effects, and they needed one that had some metal in it. Preferably gold, silver, or platinum. If they could get just an object with enough of Veck’s imprint on it, they could use that as a connection to get into the man’s brain from a remote location: According to Eddie, it was too risky to do it one-on-one in person. Not with Devina around.

“Let’s split up,” Jim said. “I’l cover the second floor.”

As Ad and Eddie fanned out, he mounted the stairs two at a time. The master bedroom took up one whole half of the second story, although that sounded more impressive than the reality, because the total square footage of the place wasn’t more than twenty-one hundred, maybe twenty-two.

“Christ, here much, buddy?” he muttered.

There was nothing in the room but a big bed and a crappy bedside table with a lamp on it. No alarm clock—guy probably used his cel phone for that.

No landline telephone, but why would you need one? Requisite flat-screen screwed into the wal with the remote in the tangled sheets.

Some dirty clothes were in a plastic bin in the corner, socks and boxer briefs hanging off the sides as if the thing were drooling black cotton. Closet revealed . . . shit actual y on hangers, which was better than the duffel bag shuffle Jim had lived with for years. On the back of the door, there were a couple of belts with metal fittings, but there had to be something better he could use.

He headed for the bathroom. Al the lights were off, but the guy didn’t believe in drapes, so there was enough from the streetlights to go by—

As soon as he stepped into the squat, tiled room, the back of his neck went wild, ants crawling over his skin.

Devina.

“Where are you,” he said, turning in a tight circle. “Where the hel are you . . .”

The demon had been here—he could sense her presence lingering in the air, kind of like the stench of garbage hanging onto a trash bin even after the thing had been emptied.

And didn’t this lend a little credibility to Devina’s reveal at the diner.

As he turned to the sink, he frowned. The mirror was covered with a towel, and the tickling at his nape grew more intense as he reached up and pul ed the terry cloth down.

Nothing except an eighties-vintage medicine cabinet sunken into the drywal . But the glass-front face of the thing was utterly contaminated.

Had she come through it somehow? he wondered.

The instant his fingertips made contact with the reflective surface, he retracted his hand. The medicine cabinet was icy cold.

Shit, Veck knew something was after him, didn’t he. Why else drape the thing? The question was, how far was that demon into him?

“What did you do to him, bitch.”

Replacing the towel, Jim opened the vanity drawers, rattling the backup deodorant and the extra toothpaste and the nail clippers—hey, maybe they would work. Except they were hardly something the guy would have an emotional connection with—

Light swept across the front of the house, blasting through the window Jim was standing in front of, and reminding him that he hadn’t bothered to go invisi.

Disappearing himself, he looked out of the window. Directly below e driveway, Veck got out of a Yel ow Cab.

Jim ghosted away from the master suite and drafted down the front stairs, becoming nothing but a disturbance of the air. Over in the kitchen he found that Ad and Eddie had done as he had, and the three of them waited together, forming nothing more than a warm pocket in the far corner of the room.

She’s already in him
, he thought to his boys.

I can feel her from here
, Eddie sent back.

At the far end of the front hal , the door opened and closed, and got locked. Then some heavy-ass feet came down toward where they were standing.

“Fucking . . . hel . . .”

The cursing continued as Veck entered the kitchen, tossed his keys and ripped off his jacket. Next move was to go to the refrigerator and grab a longneck. Cracking the lid and drinking hard, it was clear he’d had a whole lot of bad night wash over his transom—

Abruptly, the man leveled his head, lowered the beer, and looked directly where they were al standing.

He shouldn’t be able to sense them, much less see them.

None of them moved. Including Veck.

And that was when Jim looked on the linoleum floor behind the detective . . . and noticed that the guy threw two shadows.

Single light source? Two opposite patches at his feet?

Keeping quiet, Jim pointed to the ground, and his wingmen nodded.

Veck reached out with his long arm and flipped a switch so that more lights came on. Then he glanced al around.

“Fucking . . . hel .”

Obviously, that was the guy’s theme song, and but for the fact that it might encourage Ad into a vocal riff, Jim was thinking of humming a few bars himself.

With a shake of the head, Veck went back to his beer, sucking it down on a oner. Leaving the dead soldier on the counter, he got two more and walked out of the room.

Destination: living room couch.

Jim and his boys drafted after him, but kept their distance. Veck was either extremely intuitive or pol uted enough to have a radar screen for the angels.

Knowing their luck, it was the latter.

Sitting down, the detective disarmed, removing a respectable autoloader as wel as a nasty knife. And then he unclipped his badge.

His shiny, gold-and-silver police badge.

The man held the thing in his cupped palm for the longest time, staring at it as if it were a crystal bal that he could see into . . . or maybe a mirror he was trying to see himself in.

Put it down, buddy, Jim thought. Finish up those beers, lie the fuck back, and take a little nap. I promise I’l return it when I’m done.

Veck fol owed the orders wel , putting the badge with his name and serial number on it by the weapons, swal owing the beers one after the other, and then leaning back against the cushions.

His eyes closed a moment later. It took a while longer before those hands went lax on his thighs and fel to the sides, but then slow, deep breathing was the confirmation—and the cue to get what they needed and go.

Jim extended his hand at waist level and went Jedi on the badge, levitating it up off the bare floor and drawing it through the stil darkness to him. The instant his palm came in contact with the object, the same cold from upstairs registered, Devina’s evil dwel ing in the space between the molecules of the metal.

Eddie’s caution had seemed over-kil —until now. Given the strong signal the badge was giving off, you didn’t want to get caught with your pants down if you were working on the thing.

Jim nodded toward the window, and just like mist disappearing, the three of them were up and out of there.

Across town, in the thick of Caldwel ’s urban core, the St. Francis Hospital complex was a mammoth operation that glowed like the Vegas strip. Under its some twenty different roofs, lives started and ended by the thousands every year, the fight against the Grim Reaper waged by every kind of doctor and surgeon and nurse there was.

Devina was wel familiar with the place: Sometimes those humans in white coats and green scrubs needed a little help to make sure the job got done properly.

And usual y that meant death, but not always.

The demon entered the emergency room wing through its electronic front door. Wearing her banging-hot skin of female flesh, she got al kinds of stares from the col ection of fathers and frat boys sitting in the waiting room. Which was why she didn’t take the shortcuts she could have. Ghosting through glass, steel, or brick was efficient, but lame: She loved being gawked at. Ogled. Hit on. And the burning glares of the other women, al those hate-fil ed, envious eyes? Even better.