Child, p.14
Child, page 14
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
<><><>
They lay up on the roof of the Cruiser, Jason with his hands tucked behind his head and Kara with her head on his elbow, staring up at a field of stars. From here, the air was thin enough and the light from the nearest cities dim enough that you could see the Milky Way, a belt of light that looked puffy, it was so full of stars.
“Chicago in three weeks,” Kara said. Jason nodded.
“Going to be good to be back.”
“You going to wear the hardware?”
“You know I don’t leave her anywhere.”
She laughed.
“Men want to be you, women want to be with you.”
“Life is good.”
She laughed again, a husky, throaty noise that made him want to tackle her.
“They never stopped asking about you.”
“You want to get out of here?”
“Tell me about demons.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why was Sam’s wedding full of them?”
“She likes them,” Jason said, taken by surprise.
“That girl. The virgin purist. She’s in with demons?”
Jason shifted, and she rolled onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow.
“You know how she’s always saying things are complicated? It is.”
“That’s crap and you know it,” Kara said. “I’m not making accusations. I want you to explain it to me.”
Jason gave her a sideways nod and blew air through his lips.
“Okay. Well, according to Sam, there are only three kinds of creatures out there, demons, humans, and angels.”
“Werewolves, vampires, zombies?” Kara asked.
“You ever kill a werewolf?” Jason asked.
“Not personally,” Kara answered.
“We went after one, once. Turns out he was just a big hairy demon. He asked us to dinner.”
“That’s messed up,” Kara said.
“No kidding.”
“You ash him?”
“No,” Jason said.
“That’s what we do, Elliott,” Kara said.
“I know. But it’s not what she does,” Jason told her. “She only kills things that she’s pretty sure deserve to die.”
“And a demon in a fur suit doesn’t deserve it?”
“He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Demon.”
“Sure. And if you killed him, she wouldn’t say you’d done something wrong. Just that sometimes killing a demon isn’t right.”
“So that’s what she does. What do you do?”
He opened his mouth with a sarcastic answer just rolling off his tongue, but then he paused. It wasn’t something he’d really thought about.
“I thought you liked her,” he said, stalling.
“I do,” Kara said. “And this would go a lot different, talking to her. But I’m talking to you.”
He rolled on his back again.
“I think I do whatever the hell I want.”
She laughed and lay back on his elbow again.
“Just making sure.” There was a pause and he heard her suck on the inside of her cheek. “You ever screw one?”
“No, but there were definitely a few I wouldn’t have said no to.”
She elbowed him in the side.
“Freak.”
“Hey, don’t knock it.”
“You know me,” she murmured. “I’m up for anything.”
<><><>
Jason tried to spit something out of his mouth, but it stuck to his tongue. He tried again and it made it out of his mouth but glued itself to his chin. It took him most of a minute to untangle his arm from the sheets and the pillowcase and when he did, he found a matted feather in his hand. He wiggled his nose and rolled onto his stomach.
“What the hell happened last night?”
“Half a bottle of tequila,” Kara said from across the room. “Janet just left.”
“You feed her a good breakfast?” he asked, trying to get feather down off his face.
“We drank coffee and talked about you,” Kara offered. He wiped his face hard with the heel of his hand.
“Seriously, what the hell happened?”
“You’re not holding your liquor so good these days.”
He snorted.
“You two drugged me.”
She landed on the bed next to him and he struggled to roll over to face her.
“The real problem,” she said, peeling a tangle of feather and blond hair off the side of his face, “is that you drool.”
He grinned.
“She was fun, though, wasn’t she?”
Kara grinned back, then got up again.
“Get scrubbed up. Kerk’s got something.”
“I swear, with two of them, we don’t get any time off at all.”
“They say we deserve it,” she said.
“Kerk find the thirsty man?” Jason asked.
“No, he said he got a tip from Simon. Something you guys have gone after before.”
This brought Jason out of his woozy semi-sleep.
“What is it?”
“Bunch of disappearances. Someone filed a restraining order and law enforcement got involved and closed the book on all of them.”
“Terminal?” Jason asked.
“What?”
“Were they all terminal?”
“Oh,” she said. “I see it. Sure, a couple of them were. Healers, huh?”
“Demons,” he said, getting out of bed and getting dressed. “They’ve done this before. We’ve cleared out two rats’ nests of them, but… dammit, you can’t kill a demon.”
“Putting a bullet into them has always worked for me,” Kara observed, watching him dress.
“They just come back,” Jason said.
She scratched her chin.
“Never really thought about it that way.”
He nodded.
“This is a bad group.” With one leg halfway into his pants, he straightened. “Damn.”
“What?”
“I’m going to have to call Carter.”
“That’s the jerk that Sammy hates, right?”
“Yeah, the one who trained her.”
“Why do you have to call him?”
Jason shook his head.
“Because I can’t do this on my own.”
She raised an eyebrow at him, pulling her foot up onto the chair in front of her and draping an arm across her knee.
“They possess people. Lots and lots of them. I can’t pull that many of them out. Hell, I can’t pull any of them.”
“Been leaning on Sam too long, huh?”
“Can you?” Jason asked.
“I’ve always gone with ‘shoot first’. It’s worked pretty well for me.”
Jason ran his fingernails across his scalp.
“Sam says it’s a bad deal, killing someone who’s possessed.”
“She would know?”
“She would.”
Kara jerked her head slightly to the side, indicating that she wouldn’t argue with that. Jason checked his pockets and then the floor and then the floor under the bed for his phone.
“Did you frisk her before you let her leave?” he asked.
“Check in the bed,” Kara answered. He found it under the blankets down at the foot of the bed and for a moment struggled with the flashes of memory from the night before, trying to remember how it got there.
“Oh, right,” he said.
“Right,” Kara echoed. He lay on his back and dialed Carter, staring at the ceiling.
“Carter, it’s me. I need help,” he said as it rang. And rang. And rang. “Come on, Abby. You can do better than that.”
The call timed out and he hung up and dialed again.
“I’m not going away,” he said.
“Fine, what do you want?” Carter said as he answered.
“We had a group of demons who had possessed a bunch of terminal patients, a few years back,” Jason said. “One of you guys showed up and wiped them all out, if I understand it right. They’ve showed up again.”
Carter cursed in hellspeak. Jason could have gone the rest of his life without hearing someone else use hellspeak again, but he understood it clearly and did, on occasion, speak it himself. The vocabulary of expletives was phenomenal.
“They just won’t give up. Where are they?”
Jason shook his head at the ceiling.
“Not a chance. They’re ours. I just need help.”
“Listen, little boy, you’re out of your depth. If you were mine, you wouldn’t even be allowed out by yourself, yet.”
“Sam signed off on me, and we both know it,” Jason said with a tiny, smug smile. “And if Abby weren’t on my side, she’d have already told you where to look. I’m running this thing, and I’m doing it right.”
Carter grunted, and there was a pause in which Jason could hear a rapid exchange of muffled words on the other side of the line. He grinned.
“Thanks, Abby.”
“Fine,” Carter said when he came back. “But I’m not going to help you convince anyone to work with you.”
“Fine with me,” Jason said. “I’m not sure an endorsement from you would help anyway.”
He heard laughter on the other side of the phone.
“What do you want?”
“I just need Ian’s phone number.”
“That I can do. Abby will be watching. Don’t screw up.”
Jason sat up and trotted to the table, stealing a pen from Kara and taking down Ian’s phone number. Carter hung up on him without saying goodbye, and Jason went to sit on the bed again, dialing. He didn’t remember if Ian had a psychic or not, but he didn’t want to dignify them with an explanation while the phone was ringing. Ian answered on the sixth or seventh ring.
“Who is this and what do you want?”
“Hi, Ian. It’s Jason.”
Ian hung up. Jason dialed again.
“This is your idea of backup?” Kara asked. Someone knocked on the door and she got up to let Kelly in. Jason put his finger in his ear as she started to explain what was going on to the angel.
Ian picked up again, but didn’t speak.
“You can work with me, or you can not,” Jason said. “Either way, I’ll tell Sam what happened, and you can deal with her when she gets back from her honeymoon.”
“Going to hide in her skirts?” Ian asked.
“Just getting to the point,” Jason said. “We both know that she’s gonna be pissed if anyone took advantage of her being gone.”
“What did Carter say?”
“He wished me luck.”
Dealing with Samantha’s people was tricky. Jason usually ended up in a fist fight with at least one of them, but he’d seen her do it, and he’d seen Carter do it, and it usually came down to a show of force. He was hoping that a smaller show of force would work, one-on-one. Confidence. He could hear Ian calculating in the space of silence.
“Not interested.”
“You’ve got a healer colony in your region. Again.”
He grinned to himself as he heard the violent response on the other side of the phone. Someone was getting exactly what they deserved for letting something like that get past them; both Jason and Ian knew that Samantha took this kind of thing personally. It was their job to enforce a minimum set of rules on the demon population, and possession was way, way out of bounds. For them to be operating under his nose, Samantha would hold Ian personally responsible. And that couldn’t be fun.
Ian came back to the conversation.
“Where?”
Jason shook his head.
“See, it’s not going to be that easy. I want you to round up everyone you’ve got with the chops to pull a demon out of a human, and I will meet you there.”
“This isn’t a negotiation,” Ian growled.
“You sounded like Argo, just there,” Jason said. “No, you don’t make threats. You manipulate to get what you want. Only there isn’t another side to play against the middle, is there? There’s just you and me, and Samantha trying to enjoy the only happy months of her entire life. And you’re scared to death that you’re going to be the one who pisses her off when she gets home. So this is definitely a negotiation, and you’re definitely the one with nothing to work with.”
He waited. That might have been pushing things too far, bringing up Argo. None of them got along, but Ian and Argo especially didn’t get along.
“You really don’t want to make an enemy out of me,” Ian said.
“I’m not fishing for enemies,” Jason said. “I’m trying to clean up a mess in your territory, and I’m trying to do it the way Sam would want it done. You’re the one standing in my way.”
“You’re coming at this all wrong,” Ian said, suddenly friendly. “You didn’t even ask.”
“Is that all it takes?” Jason asked innocently. “Great. Will you get together, say, sixteen-eighteen of your closest friends and kinda hang out until we get there?”
He could almost imagine Ian grinding his teeth at that, and he couldn’t help but grin at the ceiling.
“This is my operation,” Ian said. “We will let you come with, but I won’t just turn my people over for you to run things.”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do,” Jason said, deadly serious. “Because I know how you handled them last time, and I know how that sat with Sam. I’m not going to let you do it again, and I swear to you - I swear - I will put a sword through anyone who tries to take a shortcut on this. Listen to my voice, Ian. Tell me I don’t mean that.”
There was a long, long silence.
“Where are you?” Ian finally asked.
“Missouri.”
“I’ll see you in two days.”
<><><>
Jason had never been to Ian’s place before, but he got a text from Carter’s phone with the address. He thanked Abby again.
“They sound like winners,” Kara said as they loaded the Cruiser.
“There isn’t a worthwhile human being among them,” Jason agreed. “Except you, Abby. The problem is that they’re good.”
“We’re good.”
“Not like they are.”
Kara seemed surprised. She turned to Kelly, who was staring off into space, leaning against the Cruiser.
“What?” the angel asked. “Oh, yeah, I didn’t know about you guys before I came here. I knew about them.”
Jason shrugged at her teasingly.
“That settles it, though, doesn’t it? We make the angel radar.”
Kelly made a face at him that Jason couldn’t quite understand.
“What?” he asked.
“I’ve never heard you refer to them as ‘we’ before.”
“Haven’t I?” Jason asked. “I did all that stuff. Why the hell was I doing it, if I didn’t get to be one of them?”
Kelly opened the passenger-side door in the back and stood on the runner facing Jason.
“That’s important, isn’t it?”
“It was a good catch, kid,” Kara said, reaching up and tweaking his cheek. Jason raised his eyebrows.
“You want me to throw the ball again?”
Kelly grinned at him, showing off both dimples, and dove into the car.
“You can’t throw it while I’m in here.”
“Wanna bet?” Jason muttered. Kara laughed at him.
“I like that he gets under your skin.”
“He’s not good at anything,” Jason said, walking around the car. He said it loud enough for Kelly to hear. “I mean, sure he’s got all of these angel powers, and he’s getting to be actually all right with a sword, but, really, what’s the point?”
“You like me,” Kelly said as Jason started the engine. “She told me.”
Kara’s eyes sparkled. Jason glowered at her.
“You are both going to be liabilities when we get to California.”
“Why is that?” Kelly asked. “They know I’m an angel.”
“You undermine me,” Jason said.
“We’re just keeping you from getting a big head,” Kara said. “We need you to be able to fit through doorways.”
Kelly laughed.
“Because if your head got too big, you wouldn’t fit.”
Jason closed his eyes.
“So help me, I will send you back to Doris.”
“Sam said you had to give me stuff to do.”
“How far out of our way is the Grand Canyon?” Jason asked. “I swear I’m going to throw a ball off a cliff and leave you there.”
“You aren’t very nice,” Kelly said. “Doris said that I should tell you to be nice.”
Kara threw her head back and laughed as Jason smacked his forehead.
“Unreal,” he said. “How is everyone on your side?”
Kara put her knees up on the dashboard and tossed her hair out.
“Because it’s so much fun to upset you.”
In the backseat, Kelly was grinning. Jason rolled his eyes.
“Put your seatbelt on. It’s going to be a long trip.”
<><><>
The house was preposterous. As a rule, they all were, but Ian’s house was California preposterous. The driveway came up from the coast across a wide, rolling green lawn and encircled a sculpture that may or may not have been a fountain in the front yard. The house was made of white stone and had more columns than windows. And it had a lot of windows. There were a dozen cars parked out front, bright colors and expensive models. There wasn’t a single sensible vehicle there.
“Wow,” Kelly said as they drove up the driveway.
“Don’t be impressed,” Jason said.
“Think he’s compensating?” Kara asked.
“He lives like a king,” Kelly said.
“Pretentious as one,” Jason answered. “No big eyes, kid. You got it? They’re going to be difficult enough without you making a big deal out of them.”
“These are people who are supposed to be protecting humanity from sleftna pall?”
Best Jason could tell, it was a pretty low term for demons.
“Yup,” he answered. Kelly shook his head.
“They’re soft.”
Jason had to grin at that, and Kara winked at him.
“I think he’s on the right side, here.”
“That’s my man,” he said. “Stay close. I’m not sure how this is going to go.”
