'Tween Heaven and Hell (21 page)

I frowned. “I don’t see how your buying me lunch will settle
my accounts, but if you insist, who am I to deny you.”

He laughed. “I’ll see you soon.” And his face faded from
screen with a slight crackle.

* * * * *

Bridge Street was busier than usual. Of course I’d only
really been to the church in the dead of night before, when most sane people
are locked safely in their cozy abodes. For a few minutes, I sat in the Viper
and watched people come and go from the various buildings on the street. Then,
when the street was pretty much empty, I got out of the Viper and climbed the
well-worn stone steps to the front door.

The door was locked and the building looked sad and
deserted. That didn’t fool me however. It had also looked deserted when I’d had
my little coffee klatch with the evil Rayanne and her drooling minions the
night before.

Glancing around to make sure no one was looking, I shot my
thief’s laser into the keyhole and let myself in. Natural light shone through
the gold-tinted round windows, which were set high in the stone walls and
illuminated the staircase. I climbed swiftly, hoping the evil dark Barbie and
her hairless, cranky pets weren’t still hanging around upstairs.

I followed the hallway to Deaver’s office and let myself in.
The police tape had already been shredded away from the door, which probably
was locked at one time, but which now stood open, its frame splintered and
pulled away from the wall where the lock had once been. Two inches of an
old-fashioned deadbolt lock jutted away from the inside edge of the door. I
briefly wondered what kind of strength would be needed to rip a deadbolt right
through solid, age-hardened oak like it was paper. I decided I didn’t want to
know.

Naturally, the office was a mess, but it was the kind of
mess that would have been left behind by the Strange Death squad rather than an
intruder. Which made me wonder why the door had been bashed in.

Deaver’s desk was locked. I used my handy dandy laser again
to remedy that little problem. Inside the large, shallow drawer in the center
of the desk, I found a lot of lint and discarded writing utensils and not much
else. The deeper drawers on the side were filled with old sermons and personal
as well as church correspondence. I ruffled through these with little hope of
finding anything useful. Then I turned to the information unit sitting on top
of the desk.

The system was very old and had only the most basic security
layer in place, which I was able to bypass easily. I quickly found the address
log and Deaver’s assistant’s address within it. “Copy file.” I waited for the
ancient machine to copy Susan Cooper’s address and personal information onto
the cylindrical memory bar I’d inserted into it. While I waited, I did a visual
scan of the office.

On the surface the room appeared to be unchanged from the
day Deaver had met his brutal end there. However, I sent out my sensing power
and quickly picked up the residual aura of some kind of dark presence.
Surprisingly though, the evil was overlaid with a bright light that would
indicate the other side had also visited recently. I frowned and jumped when
the unit announced completion of the data transfer. Pulling the cylinder from
the unit, I dropped it into my coat pocket and, looking at my watch, decided to
dig around a bit more before DD Raoul showed up to spoil my fun.

It took me only a couple of minutes to find the records
Deaver had been keeping on Prince Nille’s captivity. I began to scan the file,
which was written in diary form, apparently from Deaver’s point of view. Just
for grins I retrieved the memory bar from my pocket and reinserted it into the
unit. “Copy file.” The unit whirred as the information in Deaver’s diary file
started to duplicate onto the memory cylinder:

Year 2096, eighth month, day five

I know I should not trust him, but somehow I do. He begged
me again today to save him. His pale eyes filled with tears as he told me once
more of the nightmares he’d been having. He said that
they
were
responsible for the dreams and that he wasn’t sure how much longer he could
hold out.

Indeed, he does seem to be in a fragile state. He says the
dreams are so real that he wakes up imagining that his flesh has been ripped
apart. I promised him I was still searching for the key to his prison. He
seemed so sad, as if he knew I would fail.

Year 2096, eighth month day six

He seemed stronger when I arrived this morning. He even
managed to smile at me. He spoke to me of his world and told me that there were
forces of good and evil at work that would soon change both the spirit and
human worlds beyond return. He told me the Devil Court had been fractured for
nearly two thousand years and would soon be forged into one Royal Court. The
battle he found himself at the center of was for control of that ultimate
ruling body. He seems to have no loyalty to his own people, indeed he seems not
to trust them. I left him with my usual promise that I was making progress. I
need to talk to Susan…

I scanned the next several entries, which were pretty much
the same, to the last two.

Year 2096, eighth month, day twenty-eight

Today, when I took him his food, I found him lying in a pool
of blood. He barely raised his head to look at me as I said my prayers for him.
He wouldn’t speak. I fear he won’t last much longer.
They
had visited
him again. I heard his screams from my office. My prayers don’t seem to be
helping. Perhaps my God will not help him. I fear for his soul. I have decided
to contact the woman, the Tweener. She is my last hope.

Year 2096, eighth month, day twenty-nine

I had a dream last night. An angel of God spoke to me and
told me how to break Nille’s prison. I sensed fear in the angel’s manner and
asked him what he was afraid of. He told me the forces I was dealing with would
prove too much for me, that I would die, but that I would have a place in
Heaven if I could save this one soul. My dream was shattered when something
dark flew at the angel and the two spirits, the dark and the light, spun away
in a horrendous struggle. I woke in a sweat, sure that my dream had been purely
symbolic. But I will try what the angel told me to try. I have nothing to lose.

* * * * *

I heard the heavy door at the front of the church slam shut
and jumped. DD Raoul’s footsteps sounded heavy and weary on the staircase. He
called out to me as he reached the second floor hallway. “System off, remove
previous entry from memory.” I quickly stood up and walked away from the
information unit, hoping I didn’t look as guilty as I felt. I called out to
him, “In the office.” I met Raoul at the door.

He whistled and gave the door a once-over. Crouching down,
he ran his hand over what appeared to be claw marks on the wood doorframe, a
couple of feet from the floor. I hadn’t noticed those. “Looks like our friends
came back.”

I nodded. “I ran into them upstairs last night.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Them? More than one? And you
survived?”

“Don’t ask.”

He gave me a long, measuring look and then a slow smile.
“You are amazing, Mx. Phelps. Now, you can buy me lunch and we’ll talk about
what you need from me.”

I frowned as I flipped off the light and followed him out
into the hall. “Whatever happened to you buying me lunch?”

DD Raoul wrapped an arm around my shoulders and gave me a
friendly squeeze. “Now you know it’s your turn, Astra. I bought last time.”

“That didn’t count, it was a rapid restaurant.”

He merely shrugged. “Rapid or not, I paid. It counted.”

I shivered as we left the church and he glanced sideways at
me. “You cold?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t want to tell him I’d felt a current of evil
as we’d closed the door and started down the steps. Out of the corner of my eye
I saw something shimmer and turned my head. A human-like form was standing in
the shadow made by one of the tall, stainless steel buildings as it towered
over its squat, stone neighbor.

The figure in the shadows was tall and slim and held itself
stiffly, as if in pain. It was only there for a second, but before it faded
away I saw its eyes. They were pale blue and filled with pain. I’d seen those
eyes only once before. They belonged to my lost Prince.

I ran toward the spot where the shadow had been, but Prince
Nille had already shimmered away by the time I got there. I heard DD Raoul
pounding up behind me as I closed my eyes and threw out my sensing power.

A blast of arctic air hit me full force as I opened my
senses to the aura in that shadowed spot. Although Prince Nille had gone, there
was magic in the air where he’d appeared, I could feel it. Concentrating hard,
I extended my arms and probed the core of my power, pulling it outward. The
power surged away from me in electrically charged fingers to saturate the
atmosphere around my body. On some level, I heard DD Raoul gasp and felt him
move outside the sphere of power, but I was beyond the physical plane and
couldn’t respond to him.

Shrill, probing whispers of air swirled around me, touching
me with icy tendrils that coated my power and muted it. From somewhere in the
midst of the swirling tendrils a voice was emerging. At first, the words were
overwhelmed by the whispering sounds and were hard to understand. They danced
in the swirls of icy wind like sheets of loose paper in a storm and finally
emerged one by one, filled with pain and fear.

“…save… spirits flown… must intervene… power… much power… I
have failed… lost…”

Though the words came to my ears in a disjointed and
scattered fashion, I easily heard the message of despair they carried.

The tendrils suddenly disappeared and I felt the frigid air
that had contained the vision seep away until the natural warmth of the day touched
my flesh again. I regained my sense of reality on a frantic gasp. In that first
instant of return, I found myself struggling to breathe.

Suddenly I felt DD Raoul’s hands under my arms. He held me
up as my knees buckled beneath me. “Here, Astra. Lean on me. Come on.”

He led me to the stone steps of the church and helped me
sit. The steps had gathered the heat of the sun into their concrete pores and
seemed eager to share it with me as I sat there shivering. After a few minutes
my flesh started to regain its natural warmth and I could think clearly again.
“Shit.”

Raoul was sitting next to me on the steps, rubbing my arms
and staring into my face with worried eyes. “What the hell happened there,
Astra?”

I turned to look at him and shook my head. “Hades if I know,
DD. But I think I just communicated on some level with a missing devil prince.
And I think he may have been dead.”

* * * * *

DD Raoul followed me and the Viper home to make sure we made
it all right and then followed me into my food service area to make sure he got
some of the strong, black coffee I was gonna make.

We sat companionably sipping for a while until some of the
color returned to my face and then he acted like a good detective and started
asking questions. I didn’t have a lot of answers for him about what had
happened outside the Church of the Twined Hands, but I did tell him about my
strange encounter with the evil Barbie and her brain-dead fan club the night
before. I left out the part about not knowing who’d tucked me safely into my bed.
I didn’t think I could stand another of those raised eyebrow things right at
the moment.

Then, when guilt started to set in, I told him about the
entries in Deaver’s electronic diary I’d illegally accessed.

DD Raoul leveled his hard, brown cop’s eyes on me and said
nothing as I explained how I’d breached security on the information unit and
read the files. He said nothing when I admitted I’d gotten Deaver’s assistant’s
name and address from the unit and copied it so I could find her. He simply
stared at me until I gave up babbling and pushed my arms out in front of me,
palms up and pressed together. “Okay, just take me in now, Raoul. I broke the
law. I’m guilty. Arrest me.”

Having made his point with nary a spoken word, he lowered
his eyes and went back to sipping his coffee.

“So are you gonna help me find this Susan Cooper woman?”

He flicked a spilled drop of coffee off his dark blue
uniform jumper. “Oh yeah.”

I grinned. “Great!”

He looked up then and what I saw in his eyes ripped the grin
right off my face.

“No, it’s not great, Astra. It’s not great at all. You see,
your Mx. Cooper, or what’s left of her, is piled up in a drawer at death
central right now, with a crematorium tattoo on her left foot.”

I felt my brief affair with hope leave me as my stomach
clenched. “Shit.” I thought about it awhile longer and then slammed my fist on
the table between us. “That just sucks.”

He drained his coffee and stood up, arcing a dark eyebrow at
me and nodding. “Yeah, I’m sure Mx. Cooper would agree wholeheartedly with that
assessment.”

Chapter
Nineteen

Tuck and Roll

The silvered wings did whip her face, until it was
quite red,

And then the gilded Angel of God, did pop her on the
head.

It turned out that, among the horrible holograms DD Raoul
had been looking at that morning, had been one showing the tattered remains of
Mx. Susan Cooper. Mx. Cooper, it seemed, had been unfortunate enough to be in a
well-known demon nightclub when things went a little sour and a fight broke
out. According to Raoul, one of the club’s younger demons, who got his kicks
out of terrifying the clientele, let his mask slip just enough to send a
pretty, young woman running for the exit, screaming for her mommy in language
only a sailor’s mother would appreciate. The demon that’d started the ruckus
didn’t seem to like having his date escape him so easily and had gone after
her. This caused several of the non-demon male clientele to come to her rescue
and the place exploded into a party mix of teeth, fists, claws and various
flying bodily fluids.