The Deadliest Bite (6 page)

He said, “The fact that you are alive and here now proves that your brother’s soul may also be present in this world. The fact that you, of al people, have been sent to kil me, bodes il for whoever Hanzi is in this lifetime. Because if you fail, your handler wil most certainly send him to complete your work. This puts him in terrible danger, both from the people who have trapped you, and from us.” He glanced at me. “We are trained to act first and think second. We may kil him in self-defense before we have the chance to save him.”

“You’re crazy,” Aaron muttered. “Talking about me like I was actual y alive hundreds of years ago. I’m a lawyer. Almost. I deal with facts. Case histories. Precedents. I could never buy some wacko theory like that.”

“Bul shit,” I said. “You’re the one who thinks he needs to kil a vampire to stop a haunting.”

“Nobody needs an excuse to smoke vampires!” Aaron exclaimed. “Ask around! I’d be applauded in the streets for flicking another parasite off the ass of humankind!” Then, as if realizing that he was sitting right next to one of the parasites he’d just insulted and maybe he should’ve just kept his big fat mouth shut, Aaron pressed his lips together so hard they looked like a single entity.

But not soon enough for me.

I picked up the revolver in one smooth motion and took a shot. Boom! Aaron screamed as the pil ow under his arm jumped and a couple of feathers fluttered into the air. I found myself wishing he’d brought a shotgun. Now that would’ve made a big splash!

“Jasmine! You shot my couch!”

“You’re looking at it al wrong, as usual, Vayl. What happened was that I didn’t shoot your kid.

Now, be honest, which means more to you?”

Vayl motioned to Aaron.

“That’s what I thought. So I’l buy you a new couch, which wil , I promise, be a lot more comfortable than that stiff old backbreaker. I also promise, if this little shit doesn’t start talking I wil start taking chunks out of him.” I chambered another round.

“Don’t tel her, Aaron!” The demand didn’t come from any voice I was familiar with. But Aaron knew it wel . He spun in his seat.

Aaron gasped. “Dad!”

I let the .38 drop to the floor and risked a look over my shoulder. A man, or rather what was left of him, floated in the corner behind the pianoforte stool, Vayl’s framed col ection of Picasso pencil drawings showing clearly through his brown business suit. He held his emaciated hands out, his entire expression echoing the pleading gesture.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked Vayl and Raoul. “Ghosts are supposed to be rooted to their homeplaces.” I put a hand to my eye, trying to shove back the pain that suddenly exploded there.

“Something’s wrong,” I whispered, just as a gout of blood gushed from my right nostril.

My knees buckled. Vayl caught me and pul ed me upright before I could hit the floor. Raoul, only a step behind, had pul ed a length of gauze from a first-aid kit I never even knew he carried. He pressed it under my nose and nodded for me to hold it there as I forced my eyes back up to the ghost, who was continuously scratching his forearms like he couldn’t stand the feel of his own skin. I looked up at Vayl as he wrapped his arm around me. “It’s Brude. I can feel him, beating his fists on the wal s of my mind. We weren’t supposed to know that he’s done something to the Thin. He’s made it so ghosts can walk. So they can travel long distances. Of course. If he’s going to defeat Lucifer and crown himself king of New Hel he’s gotta be able to transport his armies. He must be behind this. If he kil s you, he paralyzes me—” I moaned, not so much from fear of that happening.

We’d survived this long for a reason. But because my head felt like Brude had ripped it off and rol ed it down Vayl’s stairs.

“That is not going to happen,” he said.

“Just because it hasn’t so far—” I put my fingers to my temples and rubbed. It didn’t help. Then Raoul shoved my hands away and took over. The pain began to subside.

“What do you know about Brude?” Aaron had risen from the couch. He held the pil ow in front of him. Aw. Now I was going to have to put it in Vayl’s third-floor armory along with a little plaque with the inscription MOST PATHETIC SHIELD EVER.

Vayl said, “He is the king of a realm cal ed the Thin. It is a nightmare world where souls sometimes travel, or are trapped, on their way to their final destination.”

“My dad’s there?” Aaron whispered.

Vayl answered, “It seems so. We believe that Brude has engineered this entire scene, except for my survival, of course. Because he wants to render Jasmine helpless, at least for the length of time it would take for him to kil her from the inside out.”

That word “helpless” galvanized me. I stepped away from my nurses, my headache bearable now that Raoul had massaged the worst of it away, my nosebleed on temporary hiatus.
It’s gonna
take more than that to put me down, suckah
. In support, Teen Me did a couple of painful y lame front kicks toward the locked door in my mind behind which Brude paced.

Please stop
, I told her.
You may think you’re pulling off Jackie Chan, but the only person
you’re reminding me of is that skinny dude from
Nacho Libre.

Aaron’s nose wrinkled as he stared at me, his lawyer’s mind ticking off new facts that were making his mouth twist with disgust. “He’s inside you?”

“He tried to possess me,” I admitted. “It didn’t work, but I couldn’t boot him out of my psyche either. So I’ve got him trapped. For now. I know how to vanquish him. I was just waiting for this guy to find me the best route into the place.” I nodded to Raoul, who managed to look more anxious than he had just seconds before. As if I needed another reason to worry. Hadn’t his scouts had any success at al ?

“If you beat Brude, what happens to my dad?” asked Aaron. He winced as Senior wailed in the background.

“The Thin existed before Brude and it wil continue after him,” said Raoul. “But once his hold over your father ends, I can save him.”

“You?” Aaron looked Raoul over doubtful y. Now I was doubly insulted. First he dissed my vamp.

Then he questioned my Spirit Guide. That kind of ignorance only came from years of hard work. And I had no patience for such bigotry.

I kept my voice low, which should’ve been a warning to him, as I said, “The fact that you took Vayl down before? That was what we cal a rookie run. It happens to al newbies. Once. Then most of them get cocky and die. You are in the presence of masters, you little shit. Al you have to figure out is whether you want to be standing in the crossfire or watching from the roof when we get down to business.”

While I waited for him to decide I wondered if I’d gone too far. If, maybe, the ghost of Aaron Senior, and Junior’s shocked blue eyes, would cause Vayl to launch into an “Aw, come on, be nice to my wittle boy” lecture. But when I looked up at him, he leaned down and brushed a kiss onto my cheek. “Have I told you lately what a magnificent woman you are?” he whispered, his breath tickling the lobe of my ear.

I shook my head, not trusting my voice to stay steady at that precise moment. I cut my gaze to Raoul, who’d been studying the moaning ghost of Senior thoughtful y. When he realized I was watching, he said, “If you needed any more proof that you’ve got Brude scraping the barrel to save his sorry hide, there it is.” He motioned first to the ghost and then to his son. “My scouts stil haven’t found a clear path to any of hel ’s gates for you yet. But I promise, it’l be soon.” He pointed to my head. “How much does it hurt and how often?”

I tried to shrug it off, but a new, piercing pain forced me to grimace instead. I felt Vayl’s arm slide around my waist as I said, “It’s intense when it comes, which is about every other day now.”

“How long does it last?”

“A few hours. Usual y I can sleep it off.”

“And the nosebleeds?”

I wadded the gauze up in my fist, as if to make it disappear would prevent me from having to answer the question. But when I looked up at my Spirit Guide, he stared steadily into my eyes, waiting, demanding a reply. “Smal ones every twelve hours or so. Big ones every thirty-six.” We both knew it meant my time had wound down from weeks to days. If I didn’t destroy Brude soon, not even Raoul could save me.

I didn’t like his frown. It looked a little too… sympathetic. “I’l be fine. Just find us a way in that won’t get us shredded before we’re even halfway there.”

He held up his hands. “Al the citizens of hel know you have the Rocenz. When Vayl jumped through the plane portal and cut it from the demoness’s grip, he made what you would cal ‘big news’

in the netherworld.” He didn’t add that Vayl had been forced to literal y chop Kyphas’s hands off to retrieve the tool that would save my life. The grisly memory stil woke me up some nights just short of a scream. Raoul went on. “Hel wants it back.”

“Of course it does!” I hissed. “It only turns people into fucking demons!” His eyes narrowed, reminding me to watch my mouth and my temper. Now was no time to lose it, not when actual parts of me were unraveling. I took a breath, tucking in the part of me that stil raged at the memory of Cole, his eyes flashing red, fighting the change as Kyphas carved his name into her heartstone with the Rocenz.

If only she hadn’t clapped the hammer and chisel back into a single fused tool before Vayl set off that grenade. That was the big black raincloud neither Raoul nor Vayl nor I wanted to admit we stood under. Even if Raoul’s scouts found us an unguarded path to one of the gates, we stil didn’t know how to separate the two parts of the Rocenz. Until we did we couldn’t carve Brude’s name on those gates. And it had to be stricken into that blasted metal, because with each blow of the hammer onto the chisel, the magic of the Rocenz, imbued by Torledge, the Demon Lord of Lessening, would reduce Brude to his essence. When we were done with the son of a bitch he would be taken down to the dust from which he’d come. And then, maybe… wel , I hadn’t said anything to Vayl yet. But we’d done some research and figured out that the Rocenz could also separate Roldan, Vayl’s worst enemy, from the gorgon who kept him alive. Split those two, they die, and then you have some sweet revenge on the Were who kil ed our boss, Pete. But I had to survive first.

I took a breath. “So how much time do you figure I have left?” He hesitated, his eyes darting to Vayl before they came back to me. “You’re strong. Anyone else would have surrendered by now. As it is, I’d guess you have four, maybe five days left. Seven at the most.”

I nodded. Crept my hand around Vayl’s arm and slid it down toward his hand until I felt his fingers wrap around mine. I felt better instantly. “Okay, then. Here’s what I think.”

“Um, excuse me?” Aaron was holding up his hand. Geez, did he stil think he was in high school?

“Yes, Aaron?” said Vayl.

“I don’t know if this’l help your plans or not, but I wasn’t just supposed to kil you.” We stared at him so long that he checked to make sure his fly was zipped. Final y Vayl said,

“You were given further orders?”

“Yeah.”

“Noooo, Aaron!” wailed Senior from the corner of the room. Raoul waved at him and the sound muted so quickly you’d have thought he was holding a TV remote.

“Oh, that’s cool,” I said. “You’ve gotta teach me that one.”

“If you survive this ordeal, I wil ,” Raoul promised.

“Deal.” I gestured to Junior. “What were you supposed to do after you’d offed Vayl?”

“They told me to put his, uh, remains in a bag and bring them to their boss.”

“How could you do that? He’s a freaking ghost!”

Aaron shook his head. “No. Look, you keep thinking this guy, Brude, was tel ing me what to do.

But I only heard my dad mention him once. The same way you’d say, I don’t know, Kim Jong-il. Or Bernie Madoff. But he’s not the one who gave me the orders. You know, the one who said, ‘Do this or your dad wil never stop haunting you.’ That was a different guy.”

“Did he tel you his name?” Vayl asked.

“Yeah. In fact, he said it a few times. I got the feeling he wanted me to drop it before I kil ed you.

But that seemed kind of melodramatic. So I didn’t.” He paused. And then when he realized we were waiting for it he said, “Oh! You wanna know—yeah, his name was Roldan.” CHAPTER FOUR

Wednesday, June 13, 2:15 a.m
.

Once Aaron had dropped the name of the werewolf who’d become Vayl’s worst enemy (I would’ve said nemesis, but that’s so Sherlock Holmesian), Aaron Senior gave up the fight and faded away.

So did my headache. Most likely a sign that Brude had just fal en back to find a better position from which to attempt a strokeinducing attack the next time I seemed even remotely vulnerable.

Vayl had looked down at me. “You need food. And I could use another bite as wel .” He smirked at his pun. “Let us take this discussion to the kitchen, shal we?” So we’d ended up crowded around his table for two, using chairs he’d brought in from the dining room to make up the difference, staring out the window into the backyard, where Jack had decided he needed more running time.

Astral had taken her customary perch on the mantel of yet another fireplace that sat between the door and the hal that led to the utility room. Between it and the kitchen sink on the opposite wal sat a wide maple butcher-block table with a built-in knife rack along the edge. The rest of the kitchen had been designed in a horseshoe shape around the table, with the refrigerator to its right as you entered the room. It had been covered to match the stained pine cabinets. The gas stove had been designed to look like something out of a pioneer kitchen with its cast-iron shel , though it had modern guts. My second-favorite item in the kitchen, it charmed me only slightly less than the brick floor, which must’ve cost a fortune to lay, but made me feel cozy every time I came into the room.

Aaron’s comment, as usual, kind of pissed me off. “This room doesn’t real y fit the rest of the house. You should have it redone.”