bedeviled & beyond 01 - bedeviled & beguiled (2 page)

Leaning back against the wall, I grinned at him. Emo stood where I’d left him, his large feet braced wide apart and his corded, red arms arcing away from his short, muscular body. Lesser devils are generally not very tall, but what they lack in height they more than make up for in girth. Every muscle in Emo’s body was on red alert, pun intended and I do mean
every
muscle.

Emo saw where I was looking and grinned back at me, his wide red face dimpling near the corners of his mouth. “Interested?”

I snorted unbecomingly. “You wish, bud.”

Devils, whose thick leathery skin is surprisingly sensitive, always prefer to be naked if they can get away with it. The general public, which frowns on devils anyway, doesn’t really appreciate it if Emo walks around au natural so he usually forces himself into clothes when he’s out and about. At the offices of the Angel Network, however, I let him be comfortable. As long as I have no clients coming in.

Shaking my head with a wistful smile I pushed away from the wall and started for my office. “That’ll do for tonight. I have to meet a client later. I’m gonna go grab a bite. Want something?”

Emo cocked an eyebrow at me and grinned mischievously. “A bite? Of whom?”

“Har, har.” I left him standing there and retreated to my small corner office to grab my coat. As usual, my well-worn, brown, leather coat was thrown carelessly across the extra chair in my office. I started to reach for the coat and had a sudden thought. Turning back, I returned to my office door and called down the hallway to Emo, “Put another one of those rat traps in that damn hole too. I want that little asshole killed and hacked into a million pieces.”

Emo’s mumbled response was particularly unsatisfying. I was quickly becoming convinced that my devilish partner enjoyed watching me freak out over the rodent. He didn’t seem at all motivated to get rid of the disgusting thing. Shaking my head I turned back toward my office. My legs stopped their forward motion about two steps into the room. The air felt strange...somehow thicker. And I could have sworn I’d heard a low moaning sound. I stood very still for a moment, listening, but heard nothing. Doing a mental shoulder shrug, I went to get my coat. I figured it must have been the wind outside my window.

As I reached for the coat, my skin suddenly prickled and I watched the hair on my arms stand straight up like a battalion of Intergalactic Marines at attention. I dropped the coat and rubbed at my forearms, looking around the room and flaring my nostrils with alarm. I couldn’t sense anything though, except a cold draft that seemed to come from the windows. The breeze was strong enough to ruffle my long, straight, auburn-colored hair and it smelled like rotting earthworms. Since the heat in the old warehouse building I was using for an office wasn’t very dependable at its best, I didn’t panic over the sudden plunge in temperature, but a sense of impending doom still prickled between my shoulder blades. I retrieved the dropped coat and shrugged into it, shivering.

As I turned to leave the room, something powerful slammed into my chest. My feet were wrenched off the floor by the invisible force and I flew through the air. Thinking fast, I considered my range of options. It didn’t take long because I didn’t have any. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I had the option of slamming against the window behind me.

My body slammed against the window behind me. As I slid painfully toward the floor, gasping to regain the air that had been pounded out of me, I heard the ominous sound of cracking glass behind and above me. Plunging my hand into my coat pocket, I felt around frantically for my cross.

I had the platinum cross out of my pocket and was holding it in front of my face as my butt hit the floor. Determinedly ignoring the throbbing pain in my tailbone, I sprang immediately back up onto my feet. As the cross began to vibrate, I heard the moaning again. It seemed to come from every corner of the room. My eyes moved quickly around the space, searching for an aura to glom onto. Whatever the thing was, though, it wasn’t visible either spectrally or physically.

The moaning increased as the air my body occupied pull away from me with a sucking sound, threatening for a second to take me with it. I braced my feet and leaned away from the pulling force. The entity seemed to be retreating from the cross, which was now making a humming noise in my hand and vibrating frantically.

I swallowed hard and realized I didn’t have any spit in my mouth. Besides my dust-dry tongue and teeth, the only other thing in there was my heartbeat. Casting about in my memory for information on the various types of spirits and demons I knew about, I couldn’t come up with any knowledge that would help me understand what I was dealing with in that room at that moment. All I knew was that the thing was damned powerful if it could get past Emo and sneak up on me without being sensed. It couldn’t be a devil because Emo can smell another devil from a mile away and no demon I’d ever encountered had that kind of effect on my platinum cross. The thing was humming so loudly I was amazed Emo didn’t hear it and come running. I had to wrap both hands around the cross as it tried to jump right out of my hand.

“Emo!” The muscles in my arms began to scream and shake with the effort of holding the cross against the force so I risked lowering it just a couple of inches and the thing moved in again, pressing heavy, putrid smelling air in my direction. Before I could raise the cross back up, the invisible power surged forward and slammed against me. I flew backward again and slammed into the edge of my desk hard enough to crack several ribs. As I fought to regain my equilibrium, my invisible enemy wrapped me in its sucking arms and pulled me off the floor in a crushing embrace. I wrinkled my nose against the thing’s dead, moldy smell.

By gathering all of my strength and pushing the cross into it, I bought myself enough space to expand my chest. I screamed Emo’s name again and concentrated on holding onto the cross as my unseen nemesis dangled me several feet off the floor and then flung me toward the window with a roaring sound.

My body met splintered glass and the window gave out with a sharp, biting sound. The glass followed me out into the cold, black night and danced toward the ground far below with a musical tinkling sound. My hands grabbed frantically at the building as I left it but the force of my exit took me too far out into the bottomless night and I was left grasping at nothing but frigid air. For several, long seconds, I hung there, suspended in the black air by an invisible thread of power. Then the string snapped and I started to fall.

The last thing I saw as I began the descent down six flights was Emo’s red, angry face at the window. Then I closed my eyes and prepared to die.

CHAPTER TWO

Angel Highs and Devil Take It

’Tween Heaven and Hell the spirits play and dance their dance of death.

’Tween Heaven and Hell the Devil smiles and inhales your last breath.

I counted floors as I plunged toward my death. I was surprisingly calm for somebody who was gonna be a fuzzy splat on the sidewalk in a few seconds. I suddenly realized I was still holding the cross in my hands and cursed myself for my stupidity. Pressing it to my forehead, I said her name in my mind just about two seconds before I hit the ground.

About six inches short of a deadly concrete kiss, my downward spiral stopped suddenly on a whoosh of fragrant air. The sweet scent of spring flowers enveloped me. I turned my head and placed a gentle kiss on Myra’s pink, angelic cheek and said, “What took you so long?”

She narrowed impossibly large, blue eyes at me and shook her blonde head. “You’re damned lucky I was in the neighborhood.”

I grinned at her. “Tsk, tsk, Myra. Angels aren’t supposed to swear.”

“Bite me.” Despite this less than angelic discourse, Myra held me firmly in her heavenly arms and lifted me back toward my shattered window with loving care.

As we entered the torn window and hovered over the center of the room, Emo frowned up at us and began to pace in anger. “What the Hades did you think you were doing, Astra? You could have been killed. Why did you wait so long to call Myra? I was screaming at her but she ignored me as usual.” He followed this statement with a glare toward the aforementioned angel that would have curled the quills on a porcupine. Myra was unimpressed.

She dumped me on my butt in the middle of the floor without ceremony and pointed her finely chiseled, divine nose into the air, looking down on Emo with disdain. “I don’t answer to devils. Especially crass, disgusting ones.” Having thus dismissed my devil, Myra smoothed out her long, white dress and fluffed the full sleeves of her sheer white and gold over-robe with a sniff.

Emo took a menacing step toward my angel and I stood up quickly to get between them. “Whoa boy. Myra, why must you always goad him?”

She grinned in a totally non-angelic way and brushed her hands together like she’d just completed a dirty job. “He asks for it, Astra. Just look at him.”

I looked at my naked, fiery-faced partner and shrugged. He looked okay to me.

Myra sighed her frustration and started to shimmer as if she would go. I grabbed at her arm. “No, wait.”

She stopped shimmering with an impatient look. “What is it now, I was in the middle of something.”

I shrugged, suddenly feeling like the small child I’d been the first time Myra had stepped in to save my life. “I just wanted to thank you for saving my life. Again.”

Myra shrugged, flicked a long, slender hand in my direction and shimmered off.

Emo stopped his angry pacing to yell at me. “Why the Hades did you have to get such a cranky angel?”

I had often wondered that myself. “Did you see the thing that threw me out the window?”

Emo’s angry face cleared a little. “What thing? I didn’t see or hear anything.”

I looked at him long and hard. He was usually pretty trustworthy, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to work together. But he was at least half devil. “You wouldn’t lie to me would you?”

“Of course not! I heard the window break and I ran in here, but you were already sailing through the air.”

I shivered, but this time it was just with remembered dread. The room was warm again. Even overly warm. “This thing, whatever it was, wasn’t visible. It seemed to be some kind of invisible power force with electrical components. Just before it hit me I felt a charge along my arms.”

Emo’s face clouded over and he turned away quickly, moving over to the shattered window to examine the damage with a little too much interest.

I knew my devil too well to be fooled into thinking he was considering a new career as a handyman. “What? Emo? What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

He turned to me with a frown. “I don’t know anything.” At a look from me he raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. “Really. I just don’t like the sound of this new enemy of yours. You do have a way of picking up trouble, Astra. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

As he’d intended, that succeeded in distracting me. I was very thin skinned on the subject of my apparent magnetism where evil was concerned. “Oh, so now this is all my fault?”

Emo grinned and turned to leave. “I’ll call around and try to find somebody to come fix the window.”

As I watched his rotten, scaly, red carcass leave the room still smiling at my indignant anger, I thought maybe I did see what Myra had seen. The dirty devil...!

I stormed out of the office without another word to Emo except to tell him to put on some clothes. A sour look crossed his scarlet features and it made me feel a little better.

Stepping into the flash elevator outside my office door, I slid the
Level
bar to select the basement, where my carriage awaited me. Two blinks later I exited into the poorly lighted sub-street level parking area. I stepped out of the flash and moved quickly past the dozens of tightly packed, bullet shaped vehicles that waited, hovering on wings of air, down both sides of the wide parking aisle. With the new anti-color law that had been enacted because of pressure by ultra-green environmentalists, six out of ten of the vehicles in the parking garage were a paintless silver. I moved to my own, sleekly made Viper air model and punched a code into the keypad on the fire-engine red exterior.

I’d purchased the vehicle just before the anti-color law was passed and I was damned if I was gonna buckle to pressure and buy a silver vehicle. I would run this one into the ground and then buy one on the black market if necessary. Politically correct I was not.

The door of my Viper whispered open and I stepped in, pulling my long, leather coat inside just as the door swung shut from the pressure of my butt in the seat. “Home,” I stated in an exhausted voice and the Viper lifted from the floor and swung toward the exit. As my sexy red vehicle rose into the cool night sky, I leaned my head back on the black, buttery leather seat, which was also politically incorrect, and closed my eyes in exhaustion. I’d been going since five that morning, when I’d been pulled from sleep to vanquish a minor demon for a regular client and I wasn’t done. I still had work to do.

I set my mind to determining how I was going to handle the meeting that evening with my new and as yet unseen client. I’d taken a call the previous week on my office televisual, from a Mx. Deaver, who claimed to have a devil’s advocate after him. According to Mx. Deaver, who was a cult preacher, the advocate was pissed off at him in a major way for running his devil out of the ancient building where Mx. Deaver had set up his new church. Apparently the devil had been living there for several centuries and hadn’t been keen on relocating.

Devil’s advocates, in case you’re not up on devildom’s career designations, are kind of like lawyers for devils, except that they don’t follow the same rules that human lawyers follow and they’re harder to get rid of. A devil’s advocate generally wins a case for his client by killing off anybody who disagrees with his legal opinion. And the only way to fire him, or defeat him, is to turn him into atmospheric gas.

I was meeting Mx. Deaver at the Church of the Twined Hands that night at nine o’clock. Suffice it to say I was not looking forward to it.