The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge (36 page)

“Just . . . your hand,” he mumbled. His voice was thickening up from the cheap liquor. That was good. He closed his hand over mine, up and down, eyes closing and head falling back. I kept mine open.

After thirty seconds or so, Eddie gasped, and his eyes came open. “Your mouth,” he slurred. “On your knees.”

“Sure, baby,” I said. I slid down to the floor, knobby old rug digging into my legs. Eddie grabbed me by the hair and put me where he wanted me. I started sucking him off, keeping my ears turned to the next room. Betty and Gil were in there. I could hear muffled cries, the steady, rhythmic thump of Betty’s mattress. I tried not to imagine what was going on. What I couldn’t do any more, but wanted to do very badly, to the demon in Gil’s body. That would just get me shot and dying once had been enough.

Eddie pulled at my hair, shoving his cock deeper into my mouth. I worked at not gagging. It’s a trade skill you develop. “Like that,” he said hoarsely. I kept listening for Betty. Knowing she was alive when I left this goddamn deathtrap of a house would make it a lot easier.

She’d be all right. She was always all right, game for anything. The two of us was probably the only voluntary touch I’d given another person in the five years since I’d left the City. Her hair was soft and her mouth was softer, and I hadn’t needed to pretend anything when we’d been together. “Quite an act,” she said afterward, as we curled in her bed, still naked, counting the money a casino pit boss driving from Atlantic City to Las Vegas had tucked into her garter. “We should take it on the road.”

Eddie came with a shout, yanking on my hair. Once he’d held me and made sure I’d swallowed him, eyes gleaming, I pulled my robe back around my shoulders. “I’m going to wash up.” I could feel the dried blood on my lips, gathered at the corner of my mouth like a lipstick smudge.

I stood up, waiting for Eddie to stop me, but he didn’t. His guard was down. I hadn’t made trouble, and I’d been a good, generous little whore.

Out the door and down the hall. No noise. No one yelling to stop me. Just soft crying, from the room where Betty and Gil were behind closed doors.

In the bathroom, I pulled the chain and watched the single bulb swing back and forth. Light and shadow. Moonlight and night.

Outside the window, the snow had stopped. It was white, all around, far as I could see.

I tried the window. It was painted shut but it gave with some shoving. I was strong, as far as humans went.

Cold air sliced in, turning all my exposed skin to cooled marble. I looked down, past the slope of the porch to the ground.

Even if I could squeeze out the window, get down the roof without slipping and drop, it was too far. I’d end up in the snow with a broken leg and the demons would gather around me and laugh.

Why here? Demons hung around war zones and ghettos and plague pits. They didn’t come to Eden, Kansas. Didn’t ride in sleek black cars that looked like coffins.

Not that it mattered now. I fell. I was as good as human. And now it was time to listen to the man in black and walk away.

The door banged open, gouging a chunk of plaster from the wall, and bringing me back to Earth. Always back down to Earth.

Gil shoved Betty ahead of him. She stumbled and fell, leaving a streak of red across the white tile.

Grinning at me, Gil folded his arms. “You trying to fly away, little one?”

I took my hands off the sill. “Always. I never get very far.”

Gil took a threadbare towel off the rack and threw it at Betty. “I like your friend. You get her cleaned up and ready for round two, and you just might get your wings after all.”

He smiled at me. Not the body he was riding, just the demon. It was a smile full of howling nothingness, fired with bloodlust. Gil patted the Colt where it was shoved into his waistband. The top fly button was out of alignment.

“Then again, I always did like food on the wing,” he said. “Five minutes. And stop her crying.” He slammed the door and locked it from the outside with a skeleton key.

I knelt down next to Betty, folding my legs and putting her head in my lap. Her lip was cut. Her cheekbone was hamburger. Blood was all over her nightgown, trailing down her legs like stocking seams.

“Hey, doll,” she slurred.

“Shit.” I wet the towel and patted the blood off her face. “Shit, Betty. He did a number on you.”

“He said I tasted like sin,” she muttered. “What the fuck’s he talking about, hon? What does he mean, you can fly?”

I felt Betty over, the instincts I didn’t know I still had waking up. Her wrist was broken, and she was bleeding too much for me to stop. She needed Doc Pritchard. Battlefield wounds, I could dress and fix, but this was a beating, pure and simple.

The wind screamed against the glass and through the open window. The cold fell down all around us. I knew some things, things I’d been trying to tell myself weren’t true, but I knew better. I’d been around too long not to know better.

Betty was going to die.

And Gil wasn’t going to let any of us survive the night.

8.

Betty curled her chin down against her neck while I stroked her hair. She whimpered once, when I grazed a shallow cut at her temple. Gil must be wearing a ring.

“You never told me where you’re from,” she murmured. “You know everything about me. I know jack about you, honey.”

“What’s to know?” I said. “And I’ll tell you, Betty. When this is over.”

“My daddy was a preacher, did you know that?” Betty murmured. “He came out of the South. Way down near the delta. Had the thickest fire-and-brimstone accent you ever heard. Voice like thunderheads piling up over the Gulf. Said that the devil was in every man.”

I brushed her hair back, and rolled the bloody towel to support her head. “He was probably right about that.”

“Where are you going?” Betty said when I stood up and pulled one of the pins from my rolled-up hair. Eddie had yanked most of it down, and it hung in snarls at my neck. Like everything else in this little place I’d carved out in Eden. Tattered and used up.

“You stay put,” I said, putting the pin in the lock. A purely human talent, like lying and pretending to think what johns said was funny.

“Don’t leave me,” Betty whimpered. I leaned down and touched her forehead.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and opened the door.

In the hall, Betty’s door was open. I could hear Gil humming to himself. He sounded happy. That was good. Happy was ignorant. He could keep on whistling Dixie right up until I snuffed him out and deported his skinny ass back to Hell.

Because that instinct was awake too. Once upon a time, I’d killed his kind.

And I’d been goddamn good at it.

I stayed away from the front stairs and went down the back, into the kitchen. Frankie’s room was off the big drafty room, the old butler’s pantry. I left the light off, finding the box under his cot by feel. It was wood, flat and long, covered in dust. I don’t think Frankie had opened it since the day he came home from Europe after the war. He’d never needed to before.

Before, Eden had been a nice little town.

I fished a handful of shells out of the box, and pressed four into the Winchester’s magazine. I shoved another handful into my brassiere. Then I opened the door.

I could say the demon had made me remember who I was, but I’d be lying. I hadn’t forgotten. I just hadn’t wanted to remember. Remembering it would make all of this—this house, the frozen world outside, my body, my trapped, aching self—all of it real. Fallen. Never going home. The shadow-body my real body, for however long something like me stayed alive.

That wouldn’t be much longer if I didn’t do something.

Buzz stood in the door of the living room, laughing as he brandished his pistol at Angie. Angie wasn’t more than seventeen or eighteen. Running away from a father who messed with her and a mother who pretended Jesus would solve all of her problems.

I had to be fast. I wouldn’t have more than thirty seconds or so to put down two demons.

Shit. I’d had worse odds in my time.

A few feet from Buzz, I stopped and racked the slide on the Winchester. I pulled it high and tight into my shoulder as Buzz turned around, needle-toothed mouth opening wordlessly. “You really thought I wouldn’t?” I asked him, and squeezed the trigger before I got an answer.

The buckshot caught him high in the chest and threw him backwards, into the center of the carpet. Ruby red flowers on cheap white cotton, shredded and burnt at the edges of their petals.

Angie screamed. The guy on the settee opened his eyes.

The movements were second nature. Work the side. Watch the spent shell fall on the carpet with no sound. Press myself against the sliding doors of the front parlor, out of sight of the stairs. Wait. Wait for the demons to come to me.

My heart jackhammered and I could barely breathe. It wasn’t fear, it was memory. I felt like I was picking up pieces of myself, gluing them back in place with every second Buzz inched closer to losing his grip on his borrowed sack of meat.

The wounded man watched me. His eyes were all white and shine. He was about the same color as the snow outside.

“You going to rat me out?” I asked.

He exhaled, and shut his eyes again. Humans know when Death is coming. We could learn a thing or two from them.

“Buzz!” A door slammed and Gil bellowed. “Buzz, what the hell is that noise . . .” His footsteps slowed. He saw the corpse.

Not that Buzz was dead. It takes more than a load of iron and black powder to get rid of a demon. But while they’re riding a body, it’ll give them something to think about.

“Fuck!” Gil shouted. “Which one of you did this? I’ll put lead in every one of you fucking whores!”

I aimed for the small of his back, spine and kidneys drifting close to the surface under Gil’s borrowed skin.

I didn’t have anything to say to him.

The second shot seemed louder, and the parlor was starting to fill up with acrid blue smoke.

Gil went down in a tangle of legs, gristle and blood. I lowered the Winchester. Angie looked up at me, fist pressed to her mouth. Her eyes were wide and wet. I blinked. I was so fucking tired I could barely see. “Call the cops,” I told Angie. “Do it now.” For what May paid them, they’d be here in six heartbeats, even with the snow.

She bolted off the sofa, and I gestured to the rest of them. “Get out of here. Go lock yourselves in the office.”

May stopped and gave Gil’s body a kick in the crotch. “Fucking piece of hillbilly trash,” she hissed.

Soon enough, it was just me and the demons and the dead man. Gil drew his lips back, black blood dribbling from his mouth. “You bitch,” he slurred. “You’re nothing now. You’re nothing but a . . .”

I unloaded another shell into him, just to shut him up.

The demon in Gil was right. I couldn’t kill him, not like I could in the City. I couldn’t send him down through the spheres and back into Hell.

But I could hurt him, and it had been a long time since I’d made a demon hurt. My ears were roaring. My hand, though—my hand stayed steady. I was made to track and kill. It was in my blood. Even though I was just a human.

The Winchester in my hands wasn’t heavy and my hard pulse wasn’t from panic. I went over to Gil, bent down, and tugged the Colt out of his waistband. “This isn’t yours any more.”

He spat blood at me. “You got bigger problems now, little girl.”

A small sound from the door, a click as a hammer dropped. “Put it down, baby,” Eddie said. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I do.”

Eddie’s pistol was a busted old .38 revolver, so little-used I could see rust. Humans put faith in the most broken things.

“I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing,” he said. “But you’re not leaving me holding the bag for the bank job. Not for that family neither. I’m not a killer.”

I lowered the shotgun and I took two more shells out of my bra. One, two, the vacuum-tube sound of buckshot slotting into its proper place. “Not yet,” I said.

“Don’t do it,” Eddie warned me. “Don’t you do it.”

“Was any of that true?” I asked Eddie. “About Chicago and how you never killed anyone before?”

Eddie lifted one shoulder. “Some. Not all.” He tilted his head, and gave me a smile and all at once, it wasn’t a nice smile. Eddie hid his sin well, because it was so much a part of him it was woven right into his skin. I hadn’t been wrong. He’d be all right.

“Are you going to be a good girl, doll?” he said. “Or do I have to teach you a lesson?”

I raised the Winchester again. “You know, I was good. For a long while.” Eddie’s fingers tightened around the pistol’s grip.

“I think I’m through being good,” I said, very quietly.

I pulled the trigger. Eddie was faster. The bullet caught me high in the chest, carving soft tissue and shattering bone. I fell, not gracefully, but in fragments. I wobbled, and my legs went, and then I was on my side. I could feel blood. The pain made me warm, my skin vibrate, except where blood touched.

Gil laughed at me. We were eye to eye, the demon and me, and he was smiling. “So much for salvation, little girl. Damnation’s much more fun anyway.”

Eddie came over and kicked the Winchester away from me. “You were really going to shoot me, weren’t you?” He crouched down and smiled. “Imagine that.” He turned his eyes on Gil. “Where’s the take?”

Gil’s lip drew back. “Go piss up a rope.”

“You’ve got about five more minutes with that load of lead in you, fella,” Eddie told him. “Five minutes you could spend comfortable . . .” He leaned down and put a finger in Gil’s wounds. The demon screamed. Tethered to a body as it was, it could still feel pain. “Or, you know,” Eddie said, wiping the blood on his pants leg. “That.”

“Fuck you,” Gil snarled. “I was gonna put one in your head when we got to Mexico, you little pissant. You’re not getting shit.”

Eddie shifted his weight. “Buzz? How’s your chest there, buddy?”

Buzz coughed up a bit of what was left in his veins. “The wheel well. In the car. Wrapped in plastic.”

Eddie tapped him on the nose with the revolver. “Smart, kid. And I’ll think of you, when I’m sitting on the beach with sand in my trunks and a smile on my face.”