Child, p.33
Child, page 33
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
Sam responded to her increased alertness by slowing down time, himself, and now he was with her, reacting at the same speed. She felt his instinct for Wrath and she affirmed that. A demon who could fail to react to that strength of angel tongue probably wouldn’t ash for Wrath, but the angel blade would at least give him something to think about. She felt Sam push forward in time a fraction of a second as she set her first step toward Ash. She and the demon were evaluating each other. He was probably thinking just as quickly as she was, looking for the options, the ways to manipulate her. If she was lucky, he would be a talker.
His eyes didn’t give anything away. There was no wiggle to them. It was one of the things she hadn’t yet taught Jason, using peripheral vision to keep your eyes from even the tiniest fraction of budge that someone who was trained could use to predict what you would do.
He simply stared at her, demonic anger there, only just barely under control. She stared back.
Led’dd.
Sam’s focus dropped off quickly. She didn’t have to wait long to figure out what that meant.
The demon vanished, glitching. She cursed mentally, the rough, angry words erupting in her head in hellspeak. She needed to get that under control. Certainly, it was different from using that strength of language in a human language, but that her instincts drove her to hellspeak in her internal monologue really didn’t make her happy.
She let her hand drop mid-draw and scanned the room quickly for anything she might have missed, like the demon glitching behind her.
“He’s powerful,” she said. She felt Sam drop away and she found his obsidian glasses in his jacket pocket where he usually kept them, sliding them over his eyes. Far away, he flashed gratitude as he accelerated wherever he was going. An instant later, he was back.
“He killed him.”
She pulled her awareness toward the car in the driveway and Sam nodded. Detective Curtis was a real person. Had been a real person.
“What?” Connie asked. Samantha turned to find the room universally stunned.
Except Ash. He was watching her for a cue on what to do next, but his posture was easy enough, alert, but unsurprised.
Samantha waited. Simon was the first to speak.
“That was him?”
Samantha nodded.
“They can’t do that,” Jenny said.
“They can,” Samantha said. Rangers hadn’t generally come across demons powerful enough glitch. Their experience with things bouncing from location to location came from ghosts, and Sam and Jason had taken a while to get used to the idea of human-looking demons that could glitch like ghosts.
“Where did he go?” Connie asked.
Matt licked his lips, looking pale.
“I don’t know,” Samantha said. She watched Matt, sympathetic, but not willing to try to make this easier for him. He staggered back a step, falling onto the couch.
“It’s real,” he said hoarsely.
“And it’s just the beginning,” Samantha said.
“How did he do that?” Connie asked. “Is he like Ash was?”
“You knew?” Simon asked.
“What do you mean, is he like Ash?” Matt asked.
“Connie, do you keep anything to drink in the kitchen?” Sam asked.
“There’s lemonade in the fridge,” she said absently, still trying to figure out what had happened.
“He means something with a kick,” Simon said. “Ranger solution to everything.”
“That was…” Jenny said.
“A demon,” Samantha finished.
The air went out of the room.
“There’s a bottle of bourbon in the garage,” Matt said. Sam left, though Samantha thought that the garage sounded like an awfully big place to look for a bottle of liquor, if the garage was the place Matt felt safe to keep it.
He caught Samantha watching him with concern and he shook his head at her and looked away. He didn’t want her to talk to him. She let it go.
“He’s the one who killed my parents, isn’t he?” Ash finally asked.
“He’s involved,” Samantha said. “I don’t know if he was actually one of the ones who was there. Sam can check, if you want him to.”
Ash shook his head.
“He had a badge,” Jenny said. “I checked.”
“Probably took it off of the real officer,” Samantha said. “Killed him and took his stuff to get close to you guys.” She looked around the room. “I’ve only met a few demons in my life who had the self-restraint to not attack me when I spoke to them like I just did. He’s powerful, he’s clever, and he’s willing to play this sideways. He and the demons he’s working with will have had an unimaginable amount of time to plan what they were going to do, when they came to get Ash.” She waited, wanting what she was saying to sink in, and hesitating to scare Ash any more than she had to. “This is just starting, and I can’t give you any kind of promise that it will ever stop.”
Sam returned with an unopened bottle of dark gold liquor and a handful of water glasses. Matt and Simon each took one; Connie and Jenny declined. Samantha gave Sam a sarcastic look when he offered her a glass and he smiled. She couldn’t get drunk. Carter had seen to that. Alcohol was completely wasted on her, and she only ever drank for show.
She looked at Ash.
“You need to be un-grabbable. Someone comes at you that you don’t trust, you keep your guard up, and if you ever think you are in danger, you get out.”
“What if they can see me?”
It was a hard decision. She wasn’t sure she knew what to tell him, because getting people involved, ones who didn’t know what the world was capable of, was dangerous, too.
“Do your best,” she said. “I trust you.”
He took this in and considered it as Sam sat down in an armchair and sipped bourbon. Matt still looked shaken.
“What was it really?” he asked. Connie, at his shoulder, looked to Samantha.
“The world is a big place, but this isn’t all there is.”
“Are they in danger?” Jenny asked.
“Who can find you?” Samantha asked in return. Jenny looked at Simon, then shook her head.
“No one here.”
“Get in your car and go. Sam will be in touch, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“I’m not abandoning them,” Simon said quietly, taking a drink.
“Yeah. You are. The sooner they’re boring, the better,” Samantha said. “If they can’t find you and they can’t get in touch with us - not quickly - they become pretty poor hostage-bait.”
Connie looked ruffled at this, but she didn’t complain out loud.
“What are you going to do?” Simon asked.
“I’m going to get him someplace safe, and then I’m going to make a plan.”
“What do you want me to tell Kerk?”
“What?”
“Kerk,” Sam said. “You remember. The annoying one.”
“I remember him. What about him?”
She realized too late that her tone was too aggressive, too dismissive. Being a Seeker was central to Simon’s and Jenny’s lives. As trivial as she had always felt the work they did was, they didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Tell him what you think is best. I don’t know how you guys work well enough.”
Simon gave her an evaluating look, then turned to Sam. Sam shrugged. Kerk tired him.
“Tell him we’re off-grid again.”
“He’s not going to like that.”
“He never does.”
“You going to tell him that you met them?” Jenny asked pointedly.
“I’ll deal with him,” Sam said. “Eventually.”
Simon looked grateful.
“You’re the one who took out the woman in the blue dress in Detroit,” he said after a moment. She wove her head back and forth in mixed agreement. Jason had contributed quite a lot to that effort. “Sam told me you took it really personally.”
“I did,” she said. “We should have taken care of that one. You shouldn’t have been the first one to find her.”
“And you killed the wraith colony that took out all the rest of the Rangers we sent.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew about that.
“I did.”
Through a cage match in Sam’s head. If she hadn’t been so fractured at the time, that would have been a fun one.
“You do good work,” Simon said.
“So do you,” she answered. He nodded, rubbing his chin.
“Take good care of my brother.”
“We’ll do our best.”
He turned to Ash, and she went to sit on the floor next to Sam’s knees, giving them what privacy she could.
“This is good stuff,” Sam said, motioning to the bourbon as he spoke to Matt.
“Hmm?” Matt asked. “Oh. Yeah. Connie’s dad gave it to me as a wedding present.”
Samantha frowned, curiously, and smelled the liquor. She had no taste in it whatsoever, couldn’t tell the best from the worst of anything.
“Seemed fitting,” Matt said distantly. Connie sat down next to him.
“I stopped believing in this so long ago,” she said, then looked at Sam in horror. “What we did to you boys…”
“It’s okay,” Sam said. “You believed what you believed.”
“A demon,” she said. She took the glass out of Matt’s hand and drank, then coughed. “Everything my dad told us was true.”
Samantha didn’t argue with that. Technically, everything he’d told them had been true to the best of his knowledge, but the Rangers had some gaping holes in their explanation of life, the universe, and everything. Gaping.
She kept this to herself.
“Nothing changes,” she said, instead. “We go, you go back to your lives. I’ll have someone check on you from time to time, but you shouldn’t tell anyone that he’s been here. Like I said, the more boring you are, the better.”
“Is that all you can do?” Sam asked. She looked around the room, feeling it out. Nothing struck her.
“It is. Unless you want me to paralyze them, the way I did Doris and Carson.”
He shook his head.
“Probably not.”
She looked back at Connie, and then Matt.
“Nothing changes,” she said. Connie looked unsure. Matt was somewhere else, entirely.
<><><>
Jason got out of the car as Sam and Samantha walked out of the house. Sam was carrying a mostly-full bottle of alcohol. Jason didn’t ask.
“Where’d Simon go?” he asked, indicating the empty spot in the driveway.
“Home,” Samantha said. Jason frowned.
“What’s going on?”
“The detective was a demon,” Sam said. “Ash is in New York and we’re going after him as fast as we can.”
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, as Jason hadn’t wanted to go in, anyway, but…
“What about Uncle Matt and Aunt Connie?”
Samantha was already waving Kelly out of the car.
“What’s up?” the angel asked.
“I need you to go inside and introduce yourself to the couple who lives here. They’re called Matt and Connie. Find a spot where no one could see you from outside, preferably upstairs, and mark it. I need you to check in on them for a while.”
Kelly nodded, as if that had made sense, and dashed off into the house.
“They going to be okay?” Jason asked. Samantha shrugged, shaking her head.
“I can’t think of anything else to do for them. I don’t think they’ll get possessed; the sides don’t communicate that well, typically, and I haven’t had any good methods of keeping demons out occur to me.”
“Never had a problem before,” Jason said.
“It’s complicated,” Sam said. Jason snorted.
“Shut up. Not you, too. If it’s going to be complicated, she gets to say it, not you. Only one Sam gets to tell me that magic is too complicated for my little pea brain.”
Sam covered his grin with his hand.
“It’s not that complicated,” Samantha said. “It’s that the strongest magic is the magic I apply over a long period of time. If I don’t refresh it and layer it, and, worse, if I just walk away from it, it’s not going to do them much good. A determined demon is going to find a way around it in a few hours, and then the day after tomorrow, they wouldn’t even notice it.”
“See?” Jason asked. “Not that complicated.”
“Did you understand it?” Sam asked.
“I can pretend,” Jason said. In truth, he had a pretty good idea what she was talking about. For as much as he pretended not to listen when they went on about magic and spells and the like, it was hard for some of it not to sink in.
“So the cop, huh?”
“They killed him,” Samantha said, taking some of the fun out of it. Jason nodded.
“What’s our play?”
“Get him away. Keep him away.”
“You going to try to train him at all?” Jason asked.
She shook her head.
“Wouldn’t have a clue where to start. I need to understand him better, and I don’t even know how to do that.”
“Ready when you are,” Kelly called from the car. Jason muttered garbled curses.
“Kid’s got no idea how to stay under the radar.”
Samantha smothered a smile.
“They’re better at it than you think.”
“Who?”
“Angels. Unless they have specific reason to get involved with people, they tend to be pretty good at avoiding them. Though, I’ll admit, it looks like he’s slipping.”
Jason rubbed his face.
“You want to ride with me back to New York?” he asked Sam. Sam grinned and shook his head.
“Not likely.”
“How about you?” he asked Samantha.
“And trust my baby to this troglodyte?” she asked. “Not likely.”
Sam shoved her and she shoved him back. How cute.
“At least take him,” Jason said.
“Have you seen my back seat?” Samantha asked.
“So?” Jason asked.
“He’s your problem, dude,” Sam said with a smile. “We’ll figure it out when we get to Carter’s.”
“Maybe I’ll just send him ahead,” Jason mused.
“Where?” Samantha asked. “Carter isn’t going to take him in.”
“Where is Ash?”
“With Abby.”
Jason shrugged. The idea was appealing.
“She isn’t our babysitter,” Samantha said. “Give us one more day. I’m going to figure all of this out.”
He sighed and nodded.
“All right. I’ll see you there.”
Kelly had the radio on and turned up too loud. Jason groaned.
“What did you do?”
“I like it,” the angel said. Jason shook his head.
“It’s called country, and Gwen doesn’t tolerate it.”
“You don’t want me around,” Kelly said as Jason started the engine.
“Nope,” Jason said. He considered finding better words, but that summed it up well, and Sam was the sugar-coater.
“I don’t know where I belong,” Kelly said looking over his shoulder to watch as Sam and Samantha got into Samantha’s car.
Crap.
It was hard enough with everyone he actually liked trying to have this conversation with him.
“You and me both, kid,” he said, the words out before he was sure he wanted to say them. Kelly squinted at him.
“I’ve seen you. You belong everywhere.”
“Secret to life,” Jason told him. “Make sure everyone else believes it.”
“Maryann is Anadidd’na Anu’dd’s agent,” Kelly went on. “And O’na Anu’dd is her friend.”
“You jealous of a demon?” Jason asked.
“I thought that staying was right. I thought that they would say no if it were wrong.”
“I think they make you turn in your angel card if you’re jealous of a demon,” Jason said. Kelly glared at him. Jason laughed.
“Look, kid, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know about angels. I know an awful lot more about demons than I ever wanted to, but I don’t think that’s gonna help you. Maybe you do have some wicked manifest destiny thing going on, and whatever you do is obviously the right thing, because someone, somewhere would have kept you from doing it, if it were wrong. Most of us schlubs don’t get that kind of thing. You just do the best you can and hope you didn’t screw it all up too bad.”
“Anadidd’na Anu’dd has a commission,” he said. “From God. I want to help with that.”
Jason could hear the lust for meaning in Kelly’s voice. Ash was a nice enough kid, but Jason didn’t have any particular interest in jumping on the save-the-kid bandwagon. If Sam and Samantha needed him, he’d stick around, and if not…
Huh.
Damn.
“And here I thought he was tagging along with me,” Jason said.
“What?” Kelly asked.
“You stick with me, kid,” Jason said as the road rolled along underneath him. “We may not be on a mission from God, but we’ll keep busy, well enough.”
Kelly seemed to accept that. Jason wondered what the hell he was thinking.
<><><>
“Does anyone ever ask themselves why we ever even go out?” Jason asked, scooping delivery Chinese out of the bottom of a cardboard container.
“Because there are no girls here,” Abby murmured from her seat on the couch.
“We can order in,” Jason said. Sam snorted, and Samantha glanced at him.
The apartment was packed. Sized for Abby and her hobbies, it had been crowded when Samantha had slept the night there on the occasions that she’d been unable to tolerate Carter for an entire night. With two Elliotts, though - three, if you counted Ash for size - the place felt like a dollhouse, and the three of them bulls therein. Kelly kept to himself in the corner, just watching, and Samantha attempted not to get stepped on from where she sat on the floor.
