God Hammer: A novel of the Demon Accords (34 page)

One of the other guys, I think his name was Doug, laughed.  “Last time you got
low
with Stacia, she choked you out.  Took you like five minutes to get your shit together,” he said.  Deckert snorted and the other security guy, James, laughed a short, sharp bark at Stevens’ expense.

Doug pulled open the van doors and we piled in, Stacia and Awasos first.  That left Declan and me, along with Deckert, standing outside the van, watching the witches.

“Go ahead, Declan. I’ll cover,” I said.

“I thought I better cover, on account of they’re witches and all,” he said.

“Gentlemen, kindly enter the vehicle. 
I
get paid to cover your exits,” Deckert said with a sigh.  The kid and I exchanged glances, then we jumped in almost side by side.  Deckert backed into the van and gave Stevens a whistle while he closed and latched the doors.

The witches were separating, moving in opposite directions.  Overhead, the clouds began to break up, a single ray of sunlight shining down on the newly empty field as if a beam of light from God.

I was more than a little bummed.  Nothing ever seemed to get settled with these witches.

“At least they won’t bug you about the book any more,” Chris said suddenly.  He must have been on a similar train of thought.

“But they know he looked through it, so they’re going to want to pick his brain,” Stacia said from her position slumped on the opposite seating bench.  Her long legs were sticking out into the open floor space and her pants clung to lean muscle.  The other two guys were looking her over and it bothered me.

“You think so?” Chris asked her. 

“I know so.  Mitzi’s been texting me non-stop since we left.  Trying to use our friendship to get to D,” she said.

“That seems kinda shitty,” Chris said.

“Her exact first words. 
Stacia, I feel kinda shitty, but can you give me Declan’s number.”

“They’re desperate,” one of the security guys said.  “Declan’s a huge prize.  Powerful, with the promise of producing powerful witch babies
and
a mental repository of lost witch knowledge.  Things like friendship get tossed aside when survival is at stake.”

“Survival seems a bit much, doesn’t it, James?” Chris asked.

“Not really.  The Irish witches were like a SEAL team, if I got that right,” James said, looking at me for confirmation.

“Yeah, that’s a real good analogy,” I agreed.

“And the New Yorkers more like National Guard, inexperienced ones at that, not combat vets.  They have the numbers, but the Irish ones have vastly more skill and firepower.  And the Irish ones were on the hunt for a backpack nuke named Declan.  Only this nuke can make more of itself. Can’t let them get that much advantage.  So her whole clan or coven or what have you is looking over her shoulder right now, waiting to see what you text back,” James said.

Stacia looked up at him from her phone, surprised.  “A man of hidden intellect.  I like it,” she said, making me unreasonably angry. 

Now, I’m not an idiot.  I knew perfectly well that I was being jealous and I had no personal shot with her, but that didn’t make a lick of difference to my emotions.

So, jealous and angry, I did what every teenager does in an angsty situation—I retreated to my own phone.

“What
did
you tell her?” Chris asked.

“I told her to step the F off.  Any messages would have to go through me,” she said, which made me feel better.

“After all, we gotta take care of our team member brothers and sisters,” she said with a quick friend zone smile in my direction.

And back to feeling sorry for myself.

Unworthy,
Sorrow said.

She was unworthy of me? I wondered.

Self-pity is an unworthy emotion for you.  Gifted beyond measure, desired by hundreds.

Can’t even hold my own pity party without crashers.  Maybe he was right.  I opened up my texts and found a recent one from Mack.  He had a funny story about trying to impress one of Jetta’s waitress friends and slipping in a puddle and totally wiping out.  I almost chuckled out loud.

“Funny stuff, D?” Stacia asked suddenly.  I hadn’t realized she was paying attention.

“Just Mack.  Funny story about a pretty waitress,” I said.

“I like stories about pretty waitresses,” Stevens chimed in.

“You’d like my roommate, Stevens.  He’s a ladies man, too,” I said.

“No, I’ve met Mack.  He’s an
actual
ladies man with
actual
game,” Stacia said.  “You could probably take lessons from him, Stevens.”

“Oooooooo,” Doug said.  “I smell toast.”

“I’m going to tell him you said that.  It’ll boost him back up.  He failed hard with the waitress,” I said, laughing as my fingers texted.

She gave me a little smile, then went back to her own phone.  The rest of the ride was quiet.

Back at Demidova World Headquarters, I got busy with checking the Gmail account we created to receive the results of Cuttle’s infected phone. A single message sat in the inbox.  I opened it.

Fifteen minutes later, I came off the elevator on the Executive floor, heading for Tanya’s door in a rush.  The receptionist was a vampire, a redhead, perfectly quaffed and dressed like a million dollars.  She managed to slide between me and the office door in a blur of pale skin.  She bared fangs and nails that had become talons.

“I have to see Chris and Tanya,” I said.

“Nobody barges in!” she hissed, her elongated fangs twisting her words.

“I don’t have time for this!” I said.  I raised my right hand and made a knocking motion from seven feet away.  The heavy doors shuddered under the blows.  The receptionist hissed again and blurred straight at me.  She came to a sudden stop against my shield, fangs and claws six inches from my face.

I picked her up and held her in mid-air, but before I could move, the doors opened and both Chris and Tanya stood there, ready for battle.

“Celeste?  Why are you hovering in mid-air and snarling at Declan?” Tanya asked.  “Declan, why is my assistant floating up there?”

“He tried to break in!” Celeste snarled.  Perfect blue eyes and unearthly violet ones turned my way.

“Cuttle’s phone hack came through.  I have the entire contents on my laptop,” I said.

“That’s good news but please put Celeste down and apologize to her,” Tanya said.

“Sorry Celeste,” I said, lowering her down behind her desk.  She sniffed and ignored me, pulling out her chair and gracefully sitting down.

I shrugged at Chris and Tanya.  Chris let a quick smile flicker over his features, but Tanya just raised one eyebrow.  Thoroughly ensconced in her domain, Celeste the assistant turned to her computer and began typing with vampiric speed.  After a second, she turned and smiled up at the power couple.  “Anything else, ma’am?”

“No Celeste.  Thank you for your bravery,” Tanya said.  Chris waved me into the office while Tanya spoke for a moment with her ruffled secretary.

“Sorry, but I was in a hurry and then she got up in my grill and well, I just reacted,” I said.

“You couldn’t knock?” he asked.

“I did!”

“Almost broke the doors,” he said.

“Well I got in trouble for not interrupting your HR meeting, so now I guess I went too far the other way,” I said.

Tanya slipped in and closed the doors behind her.

“Is she alright?” I asked.

“Mad, embarrassed, and more than a little afraid,” she said.

“Afraid?” I asked.  “She’s a freaking vampire.  Came at me like a crazed supernatural spider monkey hopped up on speed.”

“You have a significant reputation among the staff.  She takes her job extremely seriously.  She thought you would burn her to ashes,” Tanya said.

“Burn her?  I just wanted to update you on Cuttle,” I said.

“You stopped a falling elevator, drove off a dangerous program, and destroyed an army of vampire-killing robots.  Our security staff has a special protocol in place in case you freak out,” Chris said.

“I hardly ever burn people to ash,” I protested.  “Maybe I should get her flowers or something?” I wondered.

“Not a bad idea,” Tanya said. 

“Enough of all that. What did you find?” Chris asked.

“Here, check this out—a set of texts that sound an awful lot like he’s requesting a hit.  This one even has Krysta’s name in it,” I said.

The computer disappeared from my hands in a rush of displaced air.  Chris gave me an apologetic shrug on his vampire’s behalf because she was already poring over the contents of the cell phone at her desk.

“This is the motherlode,” she said, reaching for her phone.  “Celeste?  Track down Lydia, Josh, Darion, and Chet.  Ask them all to come directly to my office, please.  What?  No, you were entirely correct.  He was just excited to present this to me.  Very well,” she said.

“What’s the gist?” Chris asked me.

“It’s like a poorly written spy movie dialogue.  Cuttle uses pretty obvious language and requests that a situation be resolved.  Then in one text, he gives the recipient her name and address,” I said.

“This is excellent,” Tanya said, her head coming up to look our way, a feral gleam in her bright blue eyes.  Somehow, I felt like I had just launched a missile at this guy Cuttle, one that might take some time to arrive on target, but when it did, it would be game over.

The door opened and Celeste showed Chet and a young guy in a dark suit and dark-rimmed glasses into the office. She gave me a glare and them a smile.  Yup, flowers were definitely in order.

“Chris?  When do I get paid?” I asked.

“Every other Thursday,” he said, looking up from the scrum of people clustered around my computer.  “Today, in fact.”

“Good, I need to see about some flowers, and I don’t think you guys need me here,” I said.  He waved me off.

“Okay then.  I’m off.  I’ll see about getting my computer later,” I said.  No one answered, all involved in the texts.

I showed myself out.  Celeste ignored me.  “Again, I’m sorry,” I said.  She pretended not to hear me.  Right.

Pulling out my phone to search for florists, I instead found a text from Mack.  His sister was going on a weekend girls shopping trip to Manchester, Vermont.  He wondered if he caught the train out of Saratoga if I might want some company.  I sent back a
Hell Yeah
.

Then I checked my bank account.  And checked it again.  Something was wrong.  Way, way wrong.  The balance made no sense whatsoever.  I called H.R.  The numbers were right.  My first paycheck was bigger than my entire summer job the year before.  Actually, maybe almost two summers of work.  Then I multiplied it by twenty-six pay periods.  That number was just stupid.  I was so befuddled that when the elevator door opened, I just got off and found myself on the gym floor, not my floor.  The doors had slid shut before I figured it out.  Then I heard fighting.

The gym doors were locked, but I could sense Thing Two inside, and the growls and snarls sounded entirely familiar.  The lock and I had a brief Earth witch-to-lock conversation, and the door slipped open.

Inside, I found a white-furred werewolf in combat form fighting the killer centipede.  She thrust at it with the pinch pry bar, jabbing between the whirling blades, the sledgehammer held in her right paw, waiting to place the kill shot.  But the pede was adapting to her tactics.  It dropped down flat, scuttling forward under the spearlike pry bar.  She swung her hammer but the pede hunched up its first three segments and spun a single blade.  The steel edge caught the wooden haft of the sledge just behind the head and crunched into it, knocking the heavy hammer aside.  A blur of metal feet and it was inside her weapon range.  She scrambled back but a single mandible flicked forward, scoring a touch on a giant white foot.  Then it stopped, frozen by the constraints I had programmed into it for sparring.

The werewolf snarled in frustration, throwing down the bar and the hammer with a clang and a wooden crunch.  The head of the hammer was now cockeyed; the haft cut almost all the way through.

She spun to me and growled, then Changed, shifting in a blur of crunching and shrinking till just a naked woman stared at me.  A magnificent woman whose perfection was only enhanced by her anger.

“Does a locked door mean anything to you?” she demanded.  “Do you just enter wherever you like?”