'Tween Heaven and Hell (2 page)

Emo saw where I was looking and grinned back at me, his
wide, handsome, red face dimpling at the corners of his mouth. “Interested?”

I snorted unbecomingly. “You wish, bud.”

Devils, whose thick leathery skin is surprisingly sensitive,
always prefer to be naked if they can get away with it. The general public,
which frowns on devils anyway, doesn’t really appreciate it if Emo walks around
au natural
so he usually forces himself into clothes when he’s out and
about. Here at the office, however, I let him be comfortable. As long as I have
no clients coming in.

Shaking my head with a wistful smile I pushed away from the
wall and started for my office. “That’ll do for tonight. I have to meet a
client later. I’m gonna go grab a bite. Want something?”

Emo cocked an eyebrow at me and grinned mischievously. “A
bite? Of whom?”

“Har, har.” I left him standing there and retreated to my
small corner office to grab my coat. As usual, my well-worn, brown, leather
coat was thrown carelessly across the extra chair in my office. I started to
reach for the coat and had a sudden thought. Turning back, I returned to my
office door and called down the hallway to Emo, “Put another one of those rat
traps in that damn hole too. I want that little asshole killed and hacked into
about a million pieces.”

Emo’s mumbled response was particularly unsatisfying. I was
quickly becoming convinced that my devilish partner enjoyed watching me freak
out over the rodent. He didn’t seem at all motivated to get rid of the
disgusting thing. Shaking my head I turned back toward my office. My legs
stopped their forward motion about two steps into the room. The air felt
somehow thicker and very strange to me. And I could have sworn I’d heard a low
moaning sound. I stood very still for a moment, listening, but heard nothing. I
did a mental shoulder shrug and went to get my coat. I figured it must have
been the wind outside my window.

As I reached for the coat, my skin suddenly prickled and I
watched the hair on my arms stand straight up like a battalion of Intergalactic
Marines at attention. I dropped the coat and rubbed at my forearms, looking
around the room and flaring my nostrils with alarm. I couldn’t sense anything
though, except a cold draft that seemed to come from the windows. The breeze
was strong enough to ruffle my long, straight, auburn-colored hair and it
smelled like rotting earthworms. Since the heat in the old warehouse building I
was using for an office wasn’t very dependable at its best, I didn’t panic over
the sudden plunge in temperature, but a sense of impending doom still prickled
between my shoulder blades. I retrieved the dropped coat and shrugged into it,
shivering.

As I turned to leave the room, something powerful slammed
into my chest. My feet were wrenched off the floor by the invisible force and I
flew through the air. Thinking fast, I considered my range of options. It
didn’t take long because I didn’t have any. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I
had the option of slamming against the window behind me.

My body slammed against the window behind me. As I slid
painfully toward the floor, gasping to regain the air that had been pounded out
of me, I heard the ominous sound of cracking glass behind and above me.
Plunging my hand into my coat pocket, I felt around frantically for my cross.

I had the platinum cross out of my pocket and was holding it
in front of my face as my butt hit the floor. Determinedly ignoring the
throbbing pain in my tailbone, I sprang immediately back up onto my feet. As
the cross began to vibrate, I heard the moaning again. It seemed to come from
every corner of the room. My eyes moved quickly around the space, searching for
an aura to glom onto. Whatever this thing was, though, it wasn’t visible either
spectrally or physically.

The moaning increased as I felt the air that my body
occupied pull away from me with a sucking sound, threatening for a second to
take me with it. I braced my feet and leaned away from the pulling force. The
entity seemed to be retreating from the cross, which was now making a humming
noise in my hand and vibrating frantically.

I swallowed hard and realized I didn’t have any spit in my
mouth. Besides my dust-dry tongue and teeth, the only other thing in there was
my heartbeat. Casting about in my memory for information on the various types
of spirits and demons I knew about, I couldn’t come up with any knowledge that
would help me understand what I was dealing with in that room at that moment.
All I knew was that the thing was damned powerful if it could get past Emo and
sneak up on me without being sensed. It couldn’t be a devil because Emo can
smell another devil from a mile away and no demon I’d ever encountered had this
effect on my platinum cross. The thing was humming so loudly I was amazed Emo
didn’t hear it and come running. I had to wrap both hands around the cross as
it tried to jump right out of my hand.

“Emo!” The muscles in my arms began to scream and shake with
the effort of holding the cross against the force so I risked lowering it just
a couple of inches and I felt the thing move in again. Before I could raise the
cross back up, the invisible power surged forward and pounded into me. I flew
backward again and slammed into the edge of my desk hard enough to crack
several ribs. As I fought to regain my equilibrium, my invisible enemy wrapped
me in its sucking arms and pulled me off the floor in a crushing embrace. I
wrinkled my nose against the thing’s dead, moldy smell.

By gathering all of my strength and pushing the cross into
it, I bought myself enough space to expand my chest. I screamed Emo’s name
again and concentrated on holding onto the cross as the thing dangled me
several feet off the floor and then flung me toward the window with a huge,
roaring sound.

My body met splintered glass and the window gave out with a
sharp, biting sound. The glass followed me out into the cold, black night and
danced toward the ground far below with a musical tinkling sound. My hands
grabbed frantically at the building as I left it but the force of my exit took
me too far out into the bottomless night and I was left grasping at nothing but
frigid air. For several, long seconds, I hung there, suspended in the black air
by an invisible thread of power. Then the string snapped and I started to fall.

The last thing I saw as I began the descent down six flights
was Emo’s red, angry face at the window. Then I closed my eyes and prepared to
die.

Chapter Two

Angel Highs and Devil Take It

’Tween Heaven and Hell the spirits play and dance
their dance of death.

’Tween Heaven and Hell the Devil smiles and inhales
your last breath.

I counted floors as I plunged toward my death. I was
surprisingly calm for somebody who was gonna be a fuzzy splat on the sidewalk
in a few seconds. I suddenly realized I was still holding the cross in my hands
and cursed myself for my stupidity. I pressed it to my forehead and said her
name in my mind just about two seconds before I hit the ground.

About six inches short of a deadly concrete kiss, my
downward spiral stopped suddenly on a whoosh of fragrant air. The sweet scent
of spring flowers enveloped me. I turned my head and placed a gentle kiss on
Myra’s pink, angelic cheek and said, “What took you so long?”

She narrowed impossibly large, blue eyes at me and shook her
blonde head. “You’re damned lucky I was in the neighborhood.”

I grinned at her. “Tsk, tsk, Myra. Angels aren’t supposed to
swear.”

“Bite me.” Despite this less than angelic discourse, Myra
held me firmly and gently in her soft, heavenly arms and lifted me back toward
my shattered window with loving care.

As we entered the torn window and hovered over the center of
the room, Emo frowned up at us and began to pace in anger. “What the Hades did
you think you were doing, Astra? You could have been killed. Why did you wait
so long to call Myra? I was screaming at her but she ignored me as usual.” He
followed this statement with a glare toward the aforementioned angel that would
have curled the quills on a porcupine. Myra was unimpressed.

She dumped me on my butt in the middle of the floor without
ceremony and pointed her finely chiseled, angelic nose into the air, looking
down on Emo with disdain. “I don’t answer to devils. Especially crass,
disgusting ones.” Having thus dismissed my devil, Myra smoothed out her long,
white dress and fluffed the full sleeves of her sheer white and gold over-robe
with a sniff.

Emo took a menacing step toward my angel and I stood up
quickly to get between them. “Whoa boy. Myra, why must you always goad him?”

She grinned in a totally non-angelic way and brushed her
hands together like she’d just completed a dirty job. “He asks for it, Astra.
Just look at him.”

I looked at my naked, fiery-faced partner and shrugged. He
looked okay to me.

Myra sighed her frustration and started to shimmer as if she
would go. I grabbed at her arm. “No, wait.”

She stopped shimmering with an impatient look. “What is it
now, I was in the middle of something.”

I shrugged, suddenly feeling like the small child I’d been
the first time Myra had stepped in to save my life. “I just wanted to thank you
for saving my life. Again.”

Myra shrugged, flicked a long, slender hand in my direction
and shimmered off.

Emo stopped his angry pacing to yell at me. “Why the Hades
did you have to get such a cranky angel?”

I had often wondered that myself. “Did you see the thing that
threw me out the window?”

Emo’s angry face cleared a little. “What thing? I didn’t see
or hear anything.”

I looked at him long and hard. He was usually pretty
trustworthy, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to work together. But he
was
at
least
half devil. “You wouldn’t lie to me would you?”

“Of course not! I heard the window break and I ran in here,
but you were already sailing through the air.”

I shivered, but this time it was just with remembered dread.
The room was warm again. Even overly warm. “This thing, whatever it was, wasn’t
visible. It seemed to be some kind of invisible power force with electrical
components. Just before it hit me I felt a charge along my arms.”

Emo’s face clouded over and he turned away quickly, moving
over to the shattered window to examine the damage with a little too much
interest.

I knew my devil too well to be fooled into thinking he was
considering a new career as a handyman. “What? Emo? What do you know that
you’re not telling me?”

He turned to me with a frown. “I don’t know anything.” At a
look from me he raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. “Really. I just
don’t like the sound of this new enemy of yours. You do have a way of picking
up trouble, Astra. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

As he’d intended, that succeeded in distracting me. I was
very thin-skinned on the subject of my apparent magnetism where evil was
concerned. “Oh, so now this is all my fault?”

Emo grinned and turned to leave. “I’ll call around and try
to find somebody to come fix the window.”

As I watched his rotten, scaly, red carcass leave the room
still smiling at my indignant anger, I thought maybe I did see what Myra had
seen. The dirty devil…!

I stormed out of the office without another word to Emo
except to tell him to put on some clothes. I couldn’t help smiling at the sour
look that crossed his scarlet features at that and it made me feel a little
better.

I stepped into the flash elevator outside my office door and
slid the floor bar to the basement, where my carriage awaited me. Following a
nearly silent whir, I found myself in the poorly lighted sub-street level
parking area before I could blink twice. I stepped out of the flash and moved
quickly past the dozens of tightly packed, bullet-shaped vehicles that waited,
hovering on wings of air, down both sides of the wide parking aisle. With the
new anti-color law that had been enacted because of pressure by ultra-green
environmentalists, six out of ten of the vehicles in the parking garage were a
paintless silver. I moved to my own, sleekly made Viper air model and punched a
code into the keypad on the fire-engine red exterior.

I had purchased the vehicle just before the anti-color law
was passed and I was damned if I was gonna buckle to pressure and buy a silver
vehicle. I would run this one into the ground and then buy one on the black
market if necessary. Politically correct I was not.

The door of my Viper whispered open and I stepped in,
pulling my long, leather coat inside just as the door swung shut from the
pressure of my butt in the seat. “Home,” I stated in an exhausted voice and the
Viper floated away from the concrete floor and swung toward the exit. As the
Viper rose into the cool night sky, I leaned my head back on the black, buttery
leather seat, which was also politically incorrect and closed my eyes in
exhaustion. I’d been going since five that morning, when I’d been pulled from
sleep to go and vanquish a minor demon for a regular client and I still had
work to do.

At this thought, I set my mind to determining how I was
going to handle the meeting that evening with my new and as yet unseen client.
I’d taken a call the previous week on my office televisual, from a Mx. Deaver,
who claimed to have a devil’s advocate after him. According to Mx. Deaver, who
was a cult preacher, the advocate was pissed off at him in a major way for
running his devil out of the ancient building where Mx. Deaver had set up his
new church. Apparently the devil had been living there for several centuries
and hadn’t been keen on relocating.

Devil’s advocates, in case you’re not up on devildom’s
career designations, are kind of like lawyers for devils, except that they
don’t follow the same rules that human lawyers follow and they’re harder to get
rid of. A devil’s advocate generally wins a case for his client by killing off
anybody who disagrees with his legal opinion. And the only way to fire him, or
defeat him, is to turn him into atmospheric gas.