Satan's Sword (Imp Book 2) (2 page)

Many angels thought the werewolves were Nephilim, the result of fallen angels who bred with humans thousands of years ago. Recently, some of these angels had been taking matters into their own hands and were trying to exterminate the werewolves.

“Althean said there was a group that felt the way he did and the killings would continue,” I told her, reluctant to add to her paranoia. “Plus, Gregory indicated that all is not peachy in Aaru, either, so you all may not want to relax yet.”

“Aaru is their home?”

“Yeah. I’ve never been there since we’re forbidden under the treaty between our races. I have no idea what it’s like. Probably sucks. From what Gregory told me in August, they have some political unrest. I’m thinking they always have political unrest though. Can you imagine? Hundreds of thousands of those assholes in one place? Sheesh.”

Candy shuddered. “Just between us, I fight the urge to expose my belly and pee every time I’m in the same room as one.”

I snorted. The image of Candy sprawled naked on her back leaking urine was just hysterical.

“Yeah. I fight the urge to hump their legs every time I’m in the same room as them.” Not that I was particularly attracted to angels. I’d fuck pretty much anything.

Candy rolled her eyes and headed in with the cheesecake. The others helped themselves to a sliver of the dessert and a cup of coffee while I showed everyone how I’d mastered the sin of gluttony by scarfing down three big pieces. It had caramel and pecan bits swirled through it in a gooey mess. I wanted to eat more, but I was worried I might explode.

It was nearing midnight when Candy and Michelle headed home. Candy had left the remaining half of the cheesecake for me to eat. Curse her. I’d need to run a fucking marathon to burn the calories off. Wyatt helped with the last of the dishes and took the opportunity to grab me and plant seductive kisses down my neck as I washed out the coffee pot.

“Mmmm, that’s nice,” I told him leaning back against his chest. “But I think I’m going to puke.”

I felt him laugh, which didn’t do much for my overfull stomach.

“That sexy talk turns me on so,” he said. “You shouldn’t have gorged yourself on all the cheesecake. If you’re going to eat like that, you’ll need to install a Roman-style vomitorium.”

“And eat in a reclining position,” I agreed. “Go put in a movie and I’ll be right in.”

I finished the coffee pot and looked at the drops of water in the sink. They were like tears on the sides of the stainless steel.

I’d been working on things. Back home, for the first nine hundred some years of my life, I had great joy throwing about blasts of destruction. Now I found myself on a strange course of continuing education. Trying to learn things that my kind would scoff at. Things like manipulation of elements. Tight, controlled, almost elegant displays of power.

Concentrating, I drew the drops of water down into the basin and together. This wasn’t easy for me. I’d been trying to do this for eight weeks. I never worked so hard on something in my life. It looked so easy when
he
did it. That angel made everything look easy.

I had to focus all my attention on pulling the water drops and holding them into a ball in the sink basin. I held the ball there for a moment to ensure that it was perfectly round and that the hydrostatic pressure and surface tension were equalized. Then I lifted, suspending gravity in a narrow rim around the edge. The ball quivered, becoming wobbly like gelatin, before it stabilized and rose to hover above the rim of the sink. Joy flooded me at the success after so many failures and I squealed, dropping my concentration and letting the globe splashed back into the sink. I did it! Finally some progress. Nowhere near what
he’d
done, but progress still.

Wyatt ran in to see what the commotion was about.

“Watch this, watch.”

I pulled the water together again and held the ball suspended above the sink.

“Cool.” Wyatt was clearly unimpressed. “What are you supposed to do with it? Drown your enemies? Launch it at people like a water balloon?”

That was a good idea. I’d have to remember that one.

“No, it’s just practice. I’m trying to get better at my control over water. Maybe then I’ll move on to air or fire.”

“Well, that’s very nice. Let’s go watch the movie,” Wyatt urged.

Humph. The angel would have been impressed. Or maybe not. He might have just made fun of me for my crappy imitation of him.

Wyatt and I spent the evening curled up on the couch watching whatever struck our fancy. I loved cuddling up with Wyatt this way. This summer, I’d nearly Owned him, come close to ripping the life right out of him to possess him forever within myself. It had shaken him badly and almost ruined our fledgling relationship. Since then I’d been careful to not show Wyatt too much of the darkness that filled me. Still, I worried. What if I lost control and killed him? What if Wyatt saw me in my terrifying, unfeeling glory? He seemed to accept the fact that I was a demon, but I lived with the nagging worry that one day it would prove too much for him. One day, he’d decide it was all too weird and walk out of my life forever.

Around two in the morning, we dozed off sprawled all over each other, only to wake up around five. Wyatt threw an afghan over me and headed back to his house while I snuggled into my couch pillows and went back to sleep. I’d forgotten to call Dar.

Chapter 2

I
had two messages on my mirror. My foster brother Dar had called again. Ugh, he was such a pest. I was in a hurry this morning, so I planned to delete it, and vowed to call him later. The other was from my Steward. Him I never ignored.

“I apologize for interrupting your vacation, Baal.” My Steward used the respectful term meaning “Lord” to address me. “The Low you sent has proven useful. He has also spread wild tales of how the gate guardian bowed down before you and gave control of a major gate into your hands before fleeing your wrath.”

I’d been given what amounted to a free gate pass by Gregory this summer during the werewolf incident. There had been a Low trapped this side of the gate and I’d let him use my passage instead, snapping his wrist to mark him and telling him to work off the fee within my household. He’d been pretty far back during the conversation with the gate guardian, so he probably had misinterpreted it. Or he was cleverly boosting my reputation to secure a long-term place in my household.

“Obviously no one would believe a Low, even with your damage on him. I put some spin on it and looked secretive and enigmatic every time someone inquired. There are murmurings that your status is raised.”

The Steward sounded smug. Any increase in my status was also an increase in his.

“I took the liberty of sorting through the petitions. There is a
very
flattering one. So flattering that you should consider returning immediately. I’ve put them in a packet and sent them over. You should be receiving them in the next day or two. Please let me know your date of return and I’ll put together an interview schedule.”

Damned breeding petitions. I’d never escape them. Breeding wasn’t just about leaving your genetic mark. It formed alliances, and confirmed status. We are a suspicious, violent, and disloyal race. An alliance with the right person could make all the difference in a demon’s life.

Still, I dreaded it. Bad things happened when demons got their personal energy too close to me. I was little worried that my breeding was going to result in someone dead. That and the whole process of reviewing petitions, negotiating, blah, blah, blah seemed to be such a pain in the ass.

The Steward had nothing more to say, so I erased his message. Accidentally, I hit the one from Dar.

“Mal, you
never
call me back.”

Dar calls me Mal Cogida, which he claims is “bad fuck” in Spanish. He Owned a human his last visit over who had taken four years of high school Spanish and he now felt he was fluent. He’d honored me with this name because in my youth, I’d had an unfortunate habit of killing my sexual partners. I have much better control now, but Dar still likes to bring it up. Endlessly. Of course, it didn’t help that I’d accepted the name.

Names are like titles to my kind. We often have a dozen names that, strung together in a particular order, identify your status. Peers can call you whatever they want, but those nicknames only become part of your official name if you allow it. I had been in a perverse mood and accepted Dar’s name for me into my official list. He’s been puffed up with pride about it ever since. As if he needed any further inflation of his ego.

“I want you to get the artifact from the teeth and get it over here to me. I’ll give you partial credit for retrieving it, and thirty percent of the reward.”

I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. Probably because I’d been deleting his messages for three months without even listening to them.

“They won’t meet with me. I keep trying, and they won’t. They said they’ll meet with you. They didn’t know you were there and are curious how you escaped their notice.”

No idea. Not the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

“Oh, and you won’t
believe
the rumors going around about you. One is that you beat a gate guardian with a cosmetics bag and forced her to send a Low through. Another says that you showed her your arm, and that she knelt before you swearing allegiance. The best one, though, is that you have befriended a gate guardian and meet her regularly for lunch and gossip. I’m going to explode if you don’t call me back and let me know the real story here.”

Well, Dar would just have to explode, I thought, erasing his message. I was busy. I’d call him later today. Or maybe tomorrow. Whenever I got a moment. Right now I needed to hurry, or I’d be late for my walk-through.

In half an hour I stood admiring what would soon be my newest acquisition, a block of twelve brick houses bordering the waterfront. This section of the canal hadn’t been part of the beautification project that swept through downtown a decade ago. Just three blocks away, promenades, sculpture, and fountains transformed the flood-prone, algae-strewn canal into a tourist paradise. If you looked closer, though, you could see the cleaned-up graffiti and the broken bits of liquor-bottle glass. The civilized veneer during the day vanished after dusk, and even the gentrified areas became a haven for loitering teens, prostitutes, and drug dealers.

I was about to own a block of hovels. The brick on the row houses was broken in places, and mortar crumbled from the walls onto the pavement like pebbles and thick dust. Even the unbroken windows had plywood boarding on them.

“I took the liberty of coming down here last night and speaking with the tenants,” the male werewolf beside me said. He’d been introduced to me as Reed, and I admired his initiative as much as his military good looks and melting southern drawl. “About twenty live here now, but there are probably only four or five onsite during the day. Some come and go, but the majority just uses this as their storage area and night time location. They were easily convinced of the advantages of continuing to stay under the new terms and management.”

I liked this werewolf. “Were you able to identify a potential representative?” I asked. It would be important to have a relatively sane individual to act as a liaison between the crazy homeless tenants and the werewolf.

He nodded. “Guy said to call him Bob. Doesn’t seem to be a drug user, and has enough intelligence to know what side of his bread the butter is on. I think he’s got authority issues, but I don’t have a problem working around that personality trait.”

That was saying a lot. I could imagine werewolves would bristle at the thought of someone not recognizing or respecting their authority. I appreciated Reed’s flexibility in this matter.

“Twenty isn’t a lot of people for twelve units. Think we can spread the word and fill up without having permits or the licensing authority on our heads?” Or the press. Damned press would have a field day. I’d already made the political cartoon section once this year and didn’t want to see that rather truthful caricature again.

“I think we can do one-fifty. As long as the place doesn’t reek of excrement, Department of Health should turn a blind eye.”

I considered this. “Okay, but I’m charging more if I need to supply them with shitters. It’s not my problem if they’d rather crap next to their sleeping bag than walk down to the gas station; it’s not coming out of my profits.”

The inside of the houses was worse than the outside. Thick dust coated the floors, disturbed only by tracks of footprints in places. There were a few sloppily cleared areas where the residents spent their time. Crates of scant belongings sat in sections of the rooms. One enterprising person had two shopping carts, stolen from the local grocery store, with an assortment of recyclable goods in them. He sat next to the carts and eyed me suspiciously, as if I planned to take them. The whole place reeked of urine and unwashed bodies.

“It’s okay, dude,” Reed told the shopping cart guy softly. “I told you, this is the new owner and she’s just looking the place over.”

“All my prayers and God has sent Satan to protect us?” The guy looked me over, tugging at his dark beard. “Evil will defeat evil, and the Ear Man will go down at the hands of the very one he worships.”

I didn’t exactly have a witty reply to that, so I moved on to the next house. They were all in various stages of decay with smashed drywall and attempts at artwork on floors, walls, and ceilings. One hideous room had finger paintings of animals done in shit on the walls. There were only a couple more people still in the houses. The rooms were mostly full of neatly segregated piles of unwashed, smelly belongings, reminders of the occupant’s presence. Bob was in the last house. He looked at me with grim acceptance, as if I were a nasty pill he was being forced to swallow.

“I don’t like this,” he told Reed.

I cut Reed off before he could even reply. “It’s almost winter, and it’s hard to find a spot at the shelters. You’ll freeze outside and all your stuff will either be ruined or stolen. I’m not telling you what to do. I’m giving you an opportunity. You can be an entrepreneur. Or you can just walk the fuck out. Either way, you’re your own man.”