Kingdom of Lies (Imp Series Book 7) (18 page)

“That’s impossible,” I lied. “Head out and call me if you find the elf. I’m going to let my angel know what’s going on, and then I’m off to search the other woods.”

She trotted off. I watched her for a moment, once again thrilled with the addition of this demon to my household. Why had I never thought to align myself with a Noodle before? Yeah, we all tended to shun them as ‘weird demons’, but she was smart, talented, and more than willing to jump in and help.

Gregory was still chatting with the other two angels, who were nodding like a pair of bobble heads at every word that came from his mouth. Kind of funny until I caught a few of his words—specifically ‘gargoyle’ and ‘church’.

“Another gateway?” I asked once he had finished and the other two angels had vanished to perform their assigned tasks.

“I’m not sure we have the headcount needed to close these.” He grimaced. “They’re occurring at an alarming rate all over the world. I think we may need to keep track of occurrences as we become aware of them and triage.”

I nodded. It made sense. Harpies and drop bears top of the list, brownies and unicorns at the bottom. Well, maybe not brownies. Those motherfuckers got pretty hostile when someone accidently stepped on their house or mowed down their lavender patch.

“Who’s keeping track of everything?”

He eyed me. It was one of those ‘significant looks’ where I was, no doubt, supposed to know what the fuck he was thinking.

“You don’t mean me, do you? Because you’ve read my four-nine-five reports. I can’t keep track of who I’ve killed, or where I’ve sent all those credit deadbeats. There’s no way I can be your reference for gateways and supernatural creatures.”

“Not you.”

Yeah, that look again. The piercing gaze still wasn’t an effective communication tool.

“Nyalla?” I was beginning to see where he was going, and it wasn’t where I wanted to go. “She’s been asking for things to do lately. Seems to think her future involves chasing supernatural shit around and beating it with a stick or something.”

“Not Nyalla. Wyatt.”

Damn it. Not after the conversation I’d just had with him. Not after the downhill slide our relationship had taken. “How about Terrelle? She’s a Noodle ... I mean an information demon. Classification, maps, cataloging—that’s all her thing. Plus she has a lot of knowledge about unicorns and shit. She’d be perfect.”

I had no idea if she knew about unicorns, but the rest was totally true.

“She’s also proven herself to be skilled in locating gateways. We need her to pair with an angel and do that, not sit in in your living room with a map and pushpins.”

“She can do it on the fly. She’s brilliant. Let her track down gateways and keep all of this in her head, or on her phone. She can call us to coordinate.”

Gregory raised his eyebrows. Another of those ‘significant looks’ was sent my way, and this one I understood. I really wanted to just lob this back at him and make the angel call Wyatt, but I guess I needed to put on the big-girl panties and act like the nearly one-thousand-year-old demon I was. Wyatt was my friend and neighbor, and making things right with him was what I needed to do. I might be mad and a bit hurt, but I didn’t want him out of my life completely, and I didn’t want us to end the way our last phone call had.

“Hey,” I jumped in as soon as he picked up. “We, I mean I, seriously need your help. I’m sorry I got pissy earlier. There’s a bad situation that looks like it’s only going to get worse, and I really need you on my team for this one.”

Silence greeted my words. I let it stretch out between us, resisting the urge to make sure he was still on the phone.

“What do you need?”

Finally. I let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. “The unicorn and brownie thing? Well these gateways seem to be opening everywhere. It takes an angel and a demon paired together to find and close them, and then we have to deal with whatever supernatural shit managed to come through. There aren’t enough of us, so we need a way to keep track of all the rifts and evaluate which ones are high priority.”

“Yeah?”

Not the enthusiastic response I’d hoped for, but at least he hadn’t hung up on me. Yet. “You knew about the unicorn and the brownie even before the angels did. I’m hoping you can keep track of confirmed gateway locations along with what’s come through, scour the internet for potential occurrences. You know enough about other beings that you can triage the locations as red, yellow, or green, and rank them in terms of importance.”

“Would there be a central contact, or would each angel/demon pair check in for assignments?”

Now that was better. I breathed easier. “I’d trust you to assign each pair as they called in, but there will be a central contact that checks regularly and might change priorities based on other criteria.”

“Who?”

I looked over at Gregory, who wasn’t helping me at all right now. When I needed that ‘significant look’ I wasn’t getting any. I wanted to make him the central contact, to walk away from any regular phone calls and conversations with Wyatt until all of the new normal became more... normal. He might hate it as much as I would, but maybe being the central contact and being forced into interaction would help that new normal settle in.

“Me.”

“Okay.” There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation. That one word response given so rapidly made me wonder if all the awkwardness and angst between us was mostly in my head. I heard Wyatt typing in the background, the rustle of a potato-chip bag, the buzz of a distant television—it sent a wave of nostalgia through me that I quickly tamped down.

“So there is a unicorn near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and a family of brownies in Richmond, Virginia. What else so far?”

“A drop bear in Antarctica—dead and the gateway closed. A troll in Intercourse, Pennsylvania—alive and unaccounted for, but the gateway closed. A harpy outside of Philadelphia—returned home and the gateway closed. A gargoyle in…?“ I looked at Gregory.

“Dallas, Texas.”

“A gargoyle in Dallas. And sea nymphs off of Lake Superior. We’ve got a pair already assigned to the nymphs.”

“So right now the open cases are the unicorn, gargoyle and the brownie, and possibly a loose troll?”

“Yep. I’m also on the hunt for something Gareth had stolen from him. I’ll call you later and let you know where Gregory and I are going next.”

“Got it.” There was more typing noise. Wyatt sounded focused on the case, as if he was talking with anybody and not me in particular. I hung up, and Gregory nodded.

“Good job, Cockroach. I’m off to check on Asta and your brother, then to see about this gargoyle. Let me know if you find the elf, and I’ll come to assist.”

Assist? Assist me because I couldn’t handle an elf, or because he was worried I might beat the elf to a bloody pulp. He had good reason to fear. I had a bit of a reputation for not returning those I’d been sent to retrieve alive and in one piece.

I
t was a mile walk to the mini-forest, so I had some time to think about whether I wanted to go after brownies or unicorns next.

Sun filtered through the tree canopy, creating a lacy pattern of light on the forest floor. A nearby pine grove had scattered clumps of needles onto the ground, bringing a contrast of reddish brown to the green of moss and plants. Wild rose reached out thorny arms to scratch my skin and snag my clothes. Vines twisted along tree trunks and across the ground. It was hard going, fighting the thick foliage and spikey plants. I searched in a grid pattern, looking for signs that any other two-legged being had been here. Elves moved like the wind, barely disturbing the ground they walked upon, but I figured Swiftethian might have been careless. Fear, either from being alone in a strange world or from escaping the harpy, might have caused him to leave some sign of his passage.

There were some deer tracks, and an area where it looked like they had bedded down for the night, but nothing to show something bipedal had passed through. No shoe prints, no bruised leaves or broken branches high up enough for an elf to have made them, and no snagged threads of clothing on any of the bramble bushes that filled the small wooded area.

My phone rang. I answered, hoping Terrelle had good news. She didn’t. Her patch of forest yielded the same disappointing lack of elfness. We walked back to meet each other and hung around for a few moments. I contemplated attempting to gate us to my house but figured flagging down a car on the nearby roadway and hitching a ride home would be a more time-efficient option. If passersby were reluctant to pick up two women walking along the roadside, we could always pull off a carjack and get home that way. As long as we didn’t kill any humans, I wouldn’t have to worry about filling out those fucking reports. If we were lucky, we’d find someone with shitty credit, and I could claim I was repo-ing their car to encourage improved vibration pattern in the owner.

We were just making our way to the nearest major roadway when Gregory and another angel appeared. I was fairly used to his unannounced arrivals, but I still jumped. Terrelle just about wet her pants.

“You.” Gregory pointed to the other demon, causing her to cower with wide, panicked eyes. “Go with Sauriel and help him locate and close a gate. You.” he pointed at me. I didn’t cower. I was too stunned that he was ordering my household member around as if she were one of his angels. “Come with me.”

I didn’t have time to argue. He grabbed my arm and hauled me off balance just as he transported us. This method of transportation still made me a bit dizzy, even when I did it, but being half pitched forward as he teleported did nothing to improve the experience. When we ‘landed’, the only thing that kept me from face-planting into the side of a building was Gregory’s arm.

“What the fuck? You don’t get to order Terrelle to go with your angel then yank me around like I’m some damned flunky.” I was arguing to the building wall since vertigo was making it a bit hard to turn around and face the angel.

“Later.”

I staggered after Gregory, kept on track by his hand gripping my bicep. He sounded preoccupied, and that worried me. Irritated, amused, sexy—that I could deal with. Preoccupied meant something else demanded most of his thought process—which, for a six-billion-year-old angel, was considerable. Whatever was in this building he was dragging me through was something I needed to worry about.

One of the perks of being dragged about by Gregory was that security guards smiled benignly as we went by. We didn’t need to sign in, show ID, or get passes. We took the elevator. It dawned on me about five floors up how strange that was. Normally he would have transported us directly to the floor and room of our destination. Did he not want whoever we were here to see to know we were coming?

The elevator opened on the top floor. Gregory led me past the double-glass doors of a CPA firm to a heavy gray door behind which was a staircase I assumed led to the roof instead of heaven. We climbed, each metal step clanging along the way. Sunlight nearly blinded me as Gregory pushed the bar and strode onto the black, flat roof.

I stopped and looked around. This wasn’t the highest building in what I determined by the skyline to be Dallas, but it certainly had an impressive bird’s-eye view across the valley. Other than that, it was a normal roof—HVAC units humming away, fans pumping hot air across my feet, vents like silver-slotted columns rising a few feet from the black floor, another roofed entrance complete with matching gray door, and a gargoyle.

I blinked. The decorative stone statues were usually just below roof level, lining the building sides and redirecting rain runoff from the roof. This one was
on
the roof, crouched in the shadow of the other entrance. And the way he edged sideways into the light, his wings unfurling from his sides and his stooped shoulders rolling, made me realize he wasn’t merely a decorative rainspout.

Gregory stood with his hands folded respectfully in front of him. The gargoyle stopped ten feet away. His wings spread to their full width. In response, the angel revealed his wings, holding them close to his body. I felt like I was watching some odd testosterone-filled dominance display. Not wanting to be left out, I revealed my wings. Wondering what would happen, I extended them to their fifty-foot spread and flapped a bit, just to make sure everyone noticed their matte-black, feathered glory. The gargoyle scowled, stretching his little pebbly wings as far as they could go. Gregory looked at me and rolled his eyes.

“You told my Grigori that you would only speak to the Iblis. Well, here she is.”

The gargoyle eyed me from the tip top of my head to my feet, still scowling. “Where is Samael?”

Gregory didn’t flinch. Not one muscle in his body tightened at the mention of his youngest brother. His very stillness told me how much the mere name of Samael still hurt him. Yes, I knew him that well. “He’s dead.”

I really had no idea, and I suddenly realized that any decent girlfriend, any life mate, would have checked into that for her beloved. Add that one to my to-do list. And move it closer to the top.

“She’s an imp.” The gargoyle didn’t sound impressed at my demon type.

“Yep, I am,” I chimed in. “Wanna see my sword?”

Usually that offer was countered with panicked assurances that no one wanted to see my sword. It was rather insulting, actually. Everyone should want to see my sword.

The gargoyle lifted an eyebrow and pursed his lips as he considered my proposal. “Yes, I would.”

I summoned my status symbol, my ceremonial weapon of office. Lately I’d been requesting it to take the form of a shotgun, as my shooting skills were infinitesimally better than my swordsmanship. Occasionally the sentient device overruled me. This was one of those times, and my shotgun appeared as a long steel rapier. Since I’d been expecting a firearm, I wound up holding the sword by the blade. The thing was fucking sharp. I hid a wince as my blood ran down the length of the blade and dripped onto the black roof.

The gargoyle blinked twice, his stony eyebrows lifting. “I will accept the sword as proof that you hold the title of Iblis.”