Night Series Collection: Books 1 and 2 (36 page)

Even from here I smelled death. It was leeching out of their pores, sliding through the musk of their sweat. They’d be lucky to last another hour.

Their skin was the dusky gray tone of people who’ve been sick for weeks, not just minutes. My eyesight at night isn’t the greatest, but they were right under a streetlight, and even from this distance I could tell their skin was dry as sunbaked clay.

The dogs looked like they hadn’t eaten a proper meal in months, and I curled my nose at the thought of what was obviously on their minds.

There was a feral gleam in the lead dog’s flat, black eyes, and I grabbed a rusted rebar rod and tossed it at him, striking the mutt in the back heel.

It whirled and, with hackles raised, looked like it wanted to attack me now. Pack mentality had the rest of the group veering away from the bodies. They were now all working their way slowly and menacingly toward me.

“Screw this.” Snarling, I exposed my fangs and curved my fingers, letting the devils inside me glow through my eyes.

Animals have always had an uncanny ability to smell something rotten, because the second they caught a whiff of the nasty I actually am, they scurried for cover, knocking each other over in their haste to disappear.

I never was an animal person.

Both the guy and girl were in dire straits. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see there was something majorly wrong with them. Because the woman was closest to me, I went to her first and grabbed her head, making sure Pestilence was tucked away where it should be. I doubted I could infect her twice, but it wasn’t a chance I wanted to take.

“
Mujer
.” Woman, I said in Spanish. “Look at me.”

Her lashes fluttered and I saw as she tipped her gaze upward that there was still a little lucidity left when her eyes widened and her mouth trembled. She remembered me from the stall.

“Were you sick earlier today?” I asked her in Spanish.

She dry heaved and clutched her stomach. Her lips were cracked and bleeding and her eyes fought not to roll into the back of her head. “No,” she finally croaked.

“Dammit.” In my heart I’d known this infection happened to them because of me, but somewhere I must have still hoped I was wrong, because it felt like I’d just swallowed a ten-pound rock.

I didn’t know how to control Pestilence. Really didn’t have a clue what to do to make this stop. A horrible idea kept pressing in on me—that I should just kill them now to prevent any type of plague from spreading, because I now knew it could definitely spread through touch.

But I wasn’t heartless as I’d feared earlier that I’d become, because I desperately wanted to save them. This was my mess to clean up and no one else should suffer because of it.

A powerful ripple moved through her abdomen, so hard that I saw it through the layer of her shirt, and then she was puking again. Bits of it splashed against my knee, making me cringe as the smell of bile blasted my nostrils.

When Billy had tackled me, he’d told me to suck it back inside. I hadn’t thought it would work, but it had. Thing is, the fog hadn’t infected the person yet. Could I heal her by taking it out? Was it even possible at this point?

The fluttering of panic beat at the pulse of my throat. Visions of bloated faces with their chest cavities exploded open rolled through my head. Red gore was everywhere, black blood caked stems of grass.

And Pestilence was happy, he was showing me what was going to happen to these two if I didn’t kill them, and anywhere the bile of their bodies touched, the disease would spread. But even slitting their throats and spilling their blood would infect the land, causing this potential plague to spread.

“No, no, no…” I shook my pounding head; this couldn’t be happening. I wasn’t going to have more death on my hands. They were already stained with too much blood.

This village had only ever brought me good memories. I couldn’t destroy it; I just couldn’t allow this to happen.

“Shut the hell up,” I snarled to the pest sharing my body. I’d learned through the years that Lust could always color my viewpoints with her own, but ultimately I was the one to make the final decision. My demons lived only for what made them happy; they could give a crap about me. Lust had lied to me before. She’d do whatever she had to to convince me to do things her way. Maybe that’s what Pestilence was doing too.

My soul grew cold and I knew I’d just royally pissed him off. I laughed even through the pain of the frost burning down my veins. “I can take it out, can’t I?”

Grabbing the woman’s hand, I brought it to my chest. She didn’t protest, in fact, she could barely move now. Her body was contorted on the ground, her head bent at an odd angle as the vomit coated her pale blue lips.

The man wasn’t moving anymore either, except for his stomach, which had bloated to twice its normal size. The woman’s was grumbling now too. My vision of an eviscerated midsection was going to come true any minute.

Ice floated through my blood, burned my flesh from the inside out. But I fought through Pestilence’s tantrum and called that dark power back into me.

When I’m using Lust, I can tap into a person’s deepest, darkest corner of passion and manipulate it as I will. The mechanics here were pretty much the same. Closing my eyes, I attuned my senses to finding the demon spawn I’d unleashed.

At first there was nothing but the humming whoosh of blood through her veins, but then the sensation of prickly tentacles crawled over me, made me break out in a wash of goose bumps. Swallowing my revulsion at its insidious touch, I imagined myself pulling it back into me like I was tugging on a long length of rope—one hand over the other, pulling it inward slowly but steadily.

And the more I pulled, the more the pain inside my body intensified. The cold was turning my fingers numb, my feet felt like blocks of ice, and my teeth were chattering.

Pestilence was not happy.

“You… can’t… make… me… stop,” I stuttered at it until finally I knew I had pulled it all out of her. The fog of death now rolled through me. Opening my eyes, teeth clacking so hard I worried I’d break them soon, I looked at her. She was calm, color was slowly flooding her skin again, and her breathing was nice and even. Her eyes were still closed, but she would survive.

Crawling over to the man who looked like he was on his last breath, I repeated the process. Five minutes later, with arms trembling and curls of frost feathering from between my lips, I clutched my own stomach and what little bit I’d managed to eat was now forcefully coming back up.

Hands shaking, I stayed on my knees for a while. No one but Billy knew of my second possession. Luc had accused me of being different; little did he know how different I was. In the past I would have been able to ask Grace for guidance on this, or at least trusted her to tell me the truth. But that truth had been razed the second I’d fallen into Hell.

Luc could barely stomach being around me. His temper flared any time I was near and I knew it was because I was pushing him away, but I just couldn’t ask him about this.

I had no one to talk to, no one to help me understand this or even help me figure out if I could get rid of Pestilence.

Lust was just a great big ball of nothing—she no longer really talked to me, and apart from her momentary excitement at seeing Billy, she’d gone dormant again.

But none of that really mattered right now, because I still had to get back to Tubby. Vision blurry and slightly hazy, I got to my feet, standing still for a second as vertigo held me in a viselike grip. I’d taken most of Pestilence back into me, but the disease still permeated the vomit littering the grass.

Using my very limited ability to ward, I passed my hand over the puddles and murmured a spell, my hands heating to molten levels as I shrouded the grass and the affected areas in death.

Now nothing, not a human, not even a bug, would want to cross these dead zones. I’d done what I could for these guys, but just in case any asshole came their way and tried to mug them while they were still out, I placed a protective ward on them too. It wasn’t my best work and would be lucky to last an hour, but I really needed to get back to the market.

Every step I took was excruciating. Each time I planted my leg, fire bolted up my sides, making me get a hell of a stitch under my ribs. I wrapped my arms around my chest and just focused on getting there.

It took twice as long to get back as it had to find the couple, but when I finally returned to the marketplace, I immediately noticed the man was gone.

“What happened?” I asked a stranger who made to move past me.

She quirked a thin eyebrow in question.

“The man who was lying there?” I pointed to the puddle of water. “Where’d he go?”

I only hoped the paramedics hadn’t picked him up already. Just when I thought I’d staved off an apocalypse, things were taking a turn for the worse again.

She just shook her head and shrugged, pointing to her ear buds before moving on.

“Nice,” I sneered, hating the digital age all over again. People were slowly devolving into mindless creatures obsessed with self, too busy in their own heads to notice or give a damn about the world around them anymore.

Anger propelling me, I forgot about the pain. Walking to the counter, I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “What happened to the man?”

The young girl whom I’d set to guard him looked up at me with a perplexed frown twisting her dark brows. “No man.”

What. The. Hell?

I was already irritated, my body was sore in a million different places, some of which I’d never even known could get sore before, and my patience was nothing but a delicate strand at this point. A stiff breeze would make me snap. Gritting my teeth and curling my hands into the countertop, I took a deep, calming breath.

“I told you to watch him. Where did he go?”

She just shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The old cook looked up then.

I licked my lips, willing my emotions to get under freaking control. “The man! He was dying. He was lying right there!”

The old woman gently pulled the girl behind her back. She hissed; she didn’t say anything, just gave me a cold, furious look, and I figured the girl had to be either her granddaughter or daughter.

Realizing I was making a spectacle of myself, I dropped my head to my chest, intending to take some calming breaths, when I noticed the meat stain on my shirt.

I hadn’t imagined him. I wasn’t going crazy. I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.

Narrowing my eyes, I held up my hand and nodded. “Fine, I’ll go, but I just have one question for you. Did you see me order food earlier?”

The old woman didn’t answer, but the obviously frightened girl shook her head vehemently.

Luc has a friggin’ lie detector for a nose; he can literally smell fact from fiction. But I’m not so bad at reading body language, and the absolute terror in her eyes told me she at least believed what she was saying.

I hadn’t imagined those tacos, hadn’t imagined the man.

Something had happened while I’d been with the couple, because I had a huge grease stain on my shirt. The proof was in the pudding. I wasn’t nuts.

So if I wasn’t mad, then what was happening?

That was a question I had absolutely no answer for. I spent the next two hours searching the streets, not only for Tubby, but for any other bodies that might have touched him. I went to the local clinic to see if he’d been taken there; I did everything I could possibly think to do to make sure sickness wouldn’t soon spread through the town.

As absolutely, wildly impossible as it was to believe, the man was gone. If someone had picked him up, if someone had touched him, he would have left a trail of bodies in his wake. So either he’d gotten up and walked off, which I highly doubted, or I was starting to lose my mind.

At this point, anything was possible.

B
ack at the carnival, I spied Luc coming out of the sex tent. The red glow of Bubba’s half-smoked cigarette added deep shadow to the hollows of his sexy-as-sin face, making him appear more the devil than ever.

Both boys have had their fix for the night. Luc doesn’t notice me, and I contemplate whether to make my presence known or not. Judging from the heated whispering being exchanged, they wouldn’t have noticed me if I’d streaked past with a chained monkey on my back while singing “YMCA.”

Thanks to my sharp demon senses, I can see the vein throbbing in the side of Luc’s neck, even from half a football field away.

He’s pissed, that’s obvious. All of us at the carnival have experienced our boss’s brand of tough love. Growls and pissing and moaning, ranting that can last for days because maybe one of us tagged someone we shouldn’t have, or one of the other ten lust-possessed Nephilim had slept with his piece of tail for the night.

For such a man-whore, Luc was crazy picky about who he’d take to bed. But Bubba’s demon didn’t just admire flesh the way Luc and I did—let’s just say the things he did made a serial killer look tame by comparison.

Apart from his… taste for mortal flesh (ugh, did your stomach just turn? ’Cause mine totally did. I love Bubba, but he sorta freaks me out. Just sayin’…). He’s a fairly easygoing guy, but from the way his face is screwed up and the how he’s holding that cancer stick—practically fisting it in a white-knuckled grip—I know this isn’t just some run-of-the-mill proverbial hand-slap.

There are two sides to Luc; most people only get to see his one face. But I’ve seen them both and I know that when Luc is really pissed, he doesn’t erupt, he goes frostbitten. His gesticulating hands and lip snarl lets me know he’s not at critical mass… yet.

Which meant not my problem; of course, it really shouldn’t be my problem. Let’s just say that things between Luc and me can sometimes get very complicated. I was exhausted, I smelled, and all I wanted was to get this night off me. Realizing I really didn’t need to be subtle, I walked toward my trailer, in no mood to deal with Luc, this carnival, or anything else.

I wasn’t sure if I was in shock, or what was going on with me, but I felt a little light-headed at the thought that Billy was actually alive. I’d seen him die. Seen him shatter. But then I saw that man at the marketplace too, I know he was there. I still smelled the stench of his blood all over me.