03 Before The Devil Knows You're Dead-Speak Of The Devil (15 page)

“What are you going to do?” Harold sounded worried.

“I’m going to get him up.” I wrapped my arm around Mal, using all my muscle to get him upright again. He groaned, and was pasty and covered in sweat.

“I thought nurses were supposed to be gentle?” he asked and then shifted, trying to keep weight off his wounded leg.

“Sorry, I’ll give you a sucker and a smiley face sticker for being a brave boy once we get to the PICU, but right now we’ve got to get inside.” I managed to get his arm slung over my shoulder, hefting him up beside me.

“I can do it on my own.” Malachi tried to struggle away from me and I muscled him in closer to my side, pinning him against me. “I’m a five-thousand-year-old dread demon. I destroyed cities and empires and—” He stepped his full weight down on his foot and his wounded leg crumpled beneath him.

“Oh, shut up already and let me help you, big baby.” I pulled him closer and hoisted him up, half dragging, half carrying him along beside me.

“Grab the spear,” Malachi said. “We don’t want to leave it lying about.”

“Fine,” I snapped and helped him limp toward the PICU. “I’ll come back for it.”

“Don’t forget,” he grunted when I let go of him, letting him rest his weight against the wall beside the fire doors.

“I won’t.” I pounded on the doors again.

Mary Beth’s wide green eyes appeared over the bottom edge of the observation window and an instant later the door flew open. “What the hell took you so long?” she said, grabbing for me.

“Dr. Webber is some sort of reaper sleeper agent.” I shifted away from her and hoisted Malachi further up beside me, helping him hobble through the door. “Oh yeah, and he also happened to have the Roman Spear.”

“The what?” Her eyes were huge and her jaw fell open.

“Discuss it later. Get the spear now,” Malachi said as I gave him a gentle shove toward her. Mary Beth leaned forward, putting her shoulder into his side to support his weight.

I didn’t bother to answer either of them. Once I was free of Mal’s weight I sprinted back down the hall, sliding to a stop by the spear, and snatched it up. I spun on my heel and raced back toward the rest of the group, trying to ignore the clawing I heard coming from the stairwell. Whoever it was, I wanted a fire door between us and them before they got through that seal.

“Go!” I yelled and waved my hands at them. They hurried through the door, Mary Beth supporting Malachi’s weight, and I slipped in behind them, slamming the doors closed.

“Move so I can seal the door,” Malachi said, his voice weak.

“Oh shut up,” another familiar voice said, and I saw Aurelia standing by the nurses’ desk, hands on her hips. “Give me the spear.”

“I’m not—” I looked at her and felt worry niggling at the back of my mind.

“You’re as bad as he is.” Aurelia motioned with her head toward Malachi and then stepped forward. She snatched the Spear out of my hands and jammed it into the door handles. She bit down on her thumb, like Malachi had, and then grabbed for his hand, mingling their blood before swiping her thumb across the door in the shape of a cross. “Sanguinis Deus.”

“Do you two know each other?” I asked, looking between them.

“I don’t know.” Aurelia glared at Mal. “Do we know each other, Malachi?”

“Meet my ex-wife,” Malachi panted.

“What? You never told me you had a wife.” I looked between the two of them, my jaw hanging open and my eyes wide. Mal had a wife? My bodyguard. Mal? Oh shit, did Dad know?

“I don’t,” Mal said through gritted teeth. “Mine buggered off to join the reapers.”

“I was reassigned because you kept interfering with my work,” Aurelia snapped.

“Look,” Mary Beth said. “Not that this isn’t really interesting but what the hell is that thing?”

I glared at the nasty thing. “The Roman Spear.”

“The what?”

“The Roman Spear,” Malachi said, letting Aurelia help him hobble toward the desk so he could sit down. “Otherwise known as the spear that killed Faith’s cousin. Jabbed him in the side? Remember? It’s sort of one of those crucial elements of the Crucifixion story.”

“That thing? You’re saying that thing is the spear that killed Jesus Christ?”

“Yes, and Webber skewered Malachi with it,” I said. “Which is bad since it has the power to completely take apart immortals all on its own. If the legends are right…”

“They are,” Malachi said.

“If the legends are right,” I said. “The Roman Spear doesn’t simply rip an immortal being from the mortal plain, it destroys them completely. In every facet of space and time. It destroys the energy that makes up their very existence. Any creature killed by the Spear is taken out of the past, the present, and the future. It will destroy entire bloodlines for all time.”

“Wow.” Mary Beth whistled. “That’s some weapon. The question that always got me was how did Jesus survive it, then? After all, he’s not been ripped from space and time.”

“The Alpha did it after,” I said. “In a fit of rage befitting one of the cocreators of all things, he found the man who owned the spear and cursed him to eternal life and then he cursed the spear as well.”

“Then he turned on the guy and stabbed him in the chest,” Malachi said.

“You mean the Alpha made the guy who killed his son immortal, then made a weapon strong enough to kill him in a fit of revenge?” Mary Beth asked.

“You haven’t heard the best part yet,” Malachi said.

“What’s that?”

“Anyone can use the Spear.” He looked up at me and smiled. “Even mortals with an itch to hunt angels. Especially mortals with an itch to hunt angels.”

“What’s it going to do to you?” Mary Beth asked, turning to look at the dread demon panting beside her.

“Who knows?” He grinned. “Thankfully, this might be what you call a ‘flesh wound.’ No one’s ever written about those.”

“That’s because most demon slayers have a better aim than Webber did,” Aurelia said. “Lucky for us.”

“Can you two heal him? Between Mary Beth’s medical knowledge and Aurelia’s… Well, you know? Can you keep him alive?” I asked and heard Harold suck in a breath he didn’t actually need behind me.

“I think so,” Mary Beth said. “We’ve got to get him into a bed and I need to get his pants off.”

“My kind of girl.” Malachi chuckled and let his arm tighten around her. He tried to make it look like he was feeling her up but I could tell he was trying to stay upright. “We’ve known each other all of three minutes and she’s already getting to the fun part of the date.”

“Honey.” Aurelia came around to his other side and pulled his arm up around her shoulder so that she could help Mary Beth carry him to room one. “Shut up. Otherwise I’m going to get that spear and jab you somewhere a bit more sensitive.”

“I wouldn’t let you touch me again even if it was with a ten-foot pike and you were wearing lead-lined gloves,” Malachi said as we lifted him into the bed and started unbuttoning his pants.

“What do you need me to do?” I pulled off his shoes and dropped them on the floor.

“Keep the others calm, because the mortals are starting to freak out.” Mary Beth jerked Mal’s pants down, taking his underwear with them. Malachi clamped his hands down in front of himself and she smacked his hands away. “Then give us some privacy.”

“Privacy?”

“I’ll keep him alive,” Aurelia said. “The Holy Ghost knows I don’t want him constantly trailing around in Purgatory, getting in my way. I’d never get anything done. Not to mention the damage he’d do to my love life.”

“Go. We’ll be fine. Keep everyone else calm,” Malachi said, his face was bright red. Embarrassment rolled off of him, even if I could no longer smell it.

“And what do you mean love life?” He glared at Aurelia. “Since when do you have a love life that doesn’t involve me?”

Chapter Eighteen

I stepped into the hallway and looked at Harold who was floating back and forth. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure,” I said and Malachi’s tortured scream filled the air in response as the lights above us began to flicker.

“I’m going in,” Harold said, a grim look on his face.

“You’ve got to help me keep everyone else calm.” I threw my hands out, blocking the door. “Mary Beth and Aurelia can handle it.”

“I’m a ghost, and that’s not exactly the person you want keeping people calm.” Harold floated through me, causing me to shiver from the icy feeling of him passing through my liver, and then faded through the closed door.

Tanya stood in the middle of the hallway, her face pale and her eyes the size of saucers.

“What are you doing here? What’s going on?” she said.

“I saw on the news that there was an emergency and I thought we might need extra hands.” I tried to keep my voice calm. I needed to come up with some sort of an excuse that sounded more believable than the fact that there were angels and demons flying around outside so that everyone stayed calm.

“Dr. Lee called a Code Yellow and then the entire floor shook,” Tanya said, shoving her hands in her scrub top pockets and shuffling from one foot to the other. “I have no idea what’s going on though. The televisions aren’t picking up a signal and we can’t manage to get a call out. No one’s cell phone is working and the outside line is down.”

“There’s been a terrorist attack,” I said and hoped she believed me. “I saw it on the news before everything went blank. Now people are starting to panic and that’s causing riots”

Alpha protect me I hoped we’d be able to eventually pass this off as terrorism and riots, otherwise we had a real problem on our hands—beyond the whole angels of death in Pittsburgh situation.

“Do they know who it is?” another nurse asked. “Is it al-Qaida? The Taliban?”

“They don’t know.” I tried to keep my voice calm as I came up with bullshit on the fly. “I think it might be some other group, though. Something domestic, because Dr. Webber was with them.”

“Dr. Webber?” Tanya asked. “The surgeon? Are you sure?”

“He attacked me when I was coming into the building.” I shooed them down the hallway and farther into the ward. I needed a way to get everyone in one place and keep them calm, I just didn’t know how.

“Dr. Webber attacked you?” the second nurse asked.

“He stabbed my cousin as we were coming in the hospital and then took off. Two other friends of mine who are nurses at Presby are in bandaging him up now. They came in with me to help.”

That should do it. Under normal circumstances Tanya at least would have been suspicious of two more completely random nurses showing up to volunteer but right now I could tell she was going to take my word for it. Not that I blamed her. Right now we were going to need every pair of hands we could get—licensed medical personnel or not.

“Dr. Webber stabbed someone?” a frazzled-looking, brown-haired woman with a messy ponytail asked. “He’s the doctor who did my Jennifer’s jaw surgery. How could he have stabbed someone? He seemed like such a nice man when we met him. I’d have never thought he was the sort to start randomly killing people.”

“I don’t know.” How was I supposed to keep all these people calm in the middle of this craziness if all I wanted to do was curl up underneath the desks and hide? “I never suspected he was crazy, either, but he stabbed my cousin Mal in the leg while we were coming down the hall to the PICU.”

“So what do we do now?” another woman asked from back in the main trauma area. “Where are we supposed to evacuate to?”

“We don’t.” I tried to determine we were all on the same page without reading their minds. Crap, I never thought I’d miss that power, but right now it would have come in handy.

“We stay right here and wait to be rescued,” I said and hoped the other nurses would rally behind me. “The rest of the hospital has been evacuated behind their floor’s fire doors. We’re locked in here. So we wait.”

“What do you mean we wait?” the brunette asked. “We can’t sit here and wait.”

“That’s exactly what we do,” a man said from the back of the group. I looked up at him and saw the close-cropped black hair in a buzz cut and tried to place him. Muscled shoulders, no-nonsense attitude, and I had absolutely no idea who he was. “We move all the kids to this area so they’re in one place.”

“You.” He pointed at me. “What’s your name?”

“Faith Bettincourt, night shift charge nurse. Who are you, sir?”

“Captain,” he corrected, his dark eyes fixed on mine. “Nice to meet you, Faith Bettincourt, night shift charge nurse. Do we have food on this floor that we can get to?”

“In the emergency-provision closet. We’ve got enough in there for a couple of days, probably. Hospital administration makes us keep supplies on hand as part of the disaster response plan. Now I once again, ask who are you? And don’t say ‘Captain’ again because I’m really not in the mood,” I snapped.

Now was not the time for me to have to deal with some sort of control-freak parent. It was the middle of the Apocalypse, I did not need some --do you know who I am-- CEO asshole making my job harder.

“Meds for the kids? How much do we have before someone’s got to leave this floor and get to the pharmacy?” He continued.

“I’d have to check the lock boxes for single doses but we’ve got at least two days’ worth of meds for each patient. Once again, before I lose my patience—Who. Are. You?”

“Two days,” one of the fathers said, his voice panicky. “We can’t stay locked in here for two days. Surely someone will come for us before then?”

“We do what we have to do,” Captain Tall, Dark, and Bossy said with a hard-edged glare that made him look like he could be my father’s younger—mortal—brother after an atrocious crew cut. “For right now, parents team up with your child’s nurses and help them shift the kids into one common area.”

“I—” the father from before started.

“Do what he says,” Tanya said, her voice sharp. “We need everyone where we can keep an eye on them. If we spread out and someone gets through that door, we’re all dead. It’s best to stay close to each other.”

“You’ve got this under control?” the man asked Tanya and she nodded, her entire being radiating the cool competence that came from her being a former military nurse.

Captain. Military. Of course. The army had finally gotten Hannah Stavlinski’s father here—right at the same time as the reaper who had failed to take her soul decided to invade Pittsburgh. Talk about lousy timing.

“What about room three?” one of the other nurses asked as she pushed the trolley full of patient charts away from the desk. Room three. Room three. Who was in Room three again?

“We can’t move him out here with everyone else. He’s under infection protocols because of his wounds,” she said and suddenly I knew who room three was. room three was the ten-year-old little boy whose stepfather had set him on fire for shits and giggles. He was on life support and covered in third-degree burns. We couldn’t move him. He was going to have to stay behind.

“I’ve got him,” a fourth nurse said.

“Are you sure?” Tanya asked. “You’ll be alone on that end of the hall.”

“I said I’ve got him. I’ve raised three boys who are all bigger than me and I have a canister of mace in my purse. Let me get it out of the medication room and then I’ll be fine. If anyone else tries to hurt that little boy, they’re going to have to go through me.”

“Good,” the man beside me said grabbing my arm. “You all do what needs to be done. I need to talk to Nurse Bettincourt.”

“That’s—” I tried to pull away from him and he clamped down harder on my hand. I struggled but it didn’t get me very far. Even if I’d have had my powers, this guy would have been stronger than me. With nothing but my wimpy mortal frame, he could manhandle me wherever he wanted and I wasn’t going to put up much of a fight.

“I’m not going to hurt you, but I need to know what you saw out there. You’re the last person in, and you can tell us what’s going on. Think.” He kept walking until we were alone in one of the side halls.

“I don’t know.” I shook my head and sunk down the wall so I was sitting on the floor, my knees curled up to my chest. “I saw the first explosion on the news and I came to the hospital in case they needed extra hands. That’s what we’re trained to do.”

“No you didn’t,” he said, his voice sharp. “I was watching the news when everything went dark. They were discussing the new exhibits at Phipps Conservatory. Now, what happened? What did you see?”

“There was this explosion and the whole world went dark,” I said, trying to stick close to the truth without telling him the whole angels-and-demons aspect of the current situation. “Then everything was chaos. Everywhere I looked there were people running and fire. So I came here.”

“How did you get in the hospital? Where did you come in?”

“The emergency room. That’s what we’re trained to do. In the case of an emergency, we’re supposed to report to the emergency room so we can help with triage and they’ll assign us to where we need to go.”

“You came into the hospital even though it’s under attack?” He looked at me, his eyes shrewd. “Or were you already here when they attacked?”

“I—” I faltered and my hands started to shake.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked. “What are you hiding?”

Shit. There was no way I was going to be able to keep this guy out of the loop. He wasn’t stupid and all it was going to take was one glance out the window and he was going to get a whole eyeful of crazy. But there was no way I could just tell this guy I was a demon. Not without him deciding I was some sort of psycho and locking me in a closet. Or even worse, believing me about being a demon and decide I was a threat.

He was a soldier. He was used to seeing insane shit and following orders. Mal was the same way. Maybe my dread demon would be able to figure out how to get this guy on our side. After all right now we needed all the help we could get.

“Come with me.” I stood and grabbed his T-shirt sleeve. I started walking toward Malachi’s room and he followed. I pushed open the door and ushered him inside.

“Who are you?” Malachi said. My dread demon was trying to sit up, a white sheet draped across his legs. “What’s going on?”

“Psycho angels,” I said.

“Excuse me?” Captain Stavlinski asked, his eyes wide and his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“That’s what caused the explosion. Pittsburgh is under attack from a bunch of psycho half-breed angels. They’re pissed, and the hospital is their target.”

“Really? That’s the best you can come up with?” Hannah’s father said. Instead of answering, I went over to Malachi’s window and pulled the shade open before gesturing him forward.

“See for yourself.” The hospital was surrounded by a crowd of white-winged creatures. Humans massed behind them, some of them waving Bibles while others wept and tore at their hair. All the signs of the End of Days had appeared. I should have known the crazies would come out in force, but I hadn’t expected them to get their acts together so quickly.

Captain Stavlinski looked out the window and froze. “Holy Sweet Mother Mary.”

“Is not impressed,” Aurelia said from her place, standing beside Mal, her hand on his shoulder. “She always hated crowds.”

“What aren’t you telling me?” Stavlinski asked.

“Oh boy.” Mary Beth shook her head.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Those are reapers.” I pointed out the window before flicking my fingers so that the blinds dropped again, to keep us from being spotted. “The angels chosen to take the souls of the dead and dying. Either to Heaven or well…you know.”

“Yeah, and you know that how?”

“They’re here for me. I’m sort of the devil’s youngest daughter and up until a tragic, and completely unforeseen, accident this afternoon I was also, technically, maybe their boss.”

“You’re what?” His face filled with stunned disbelief.

“I’m the daughter of the devil,” I repeated and pointed at Malachi, who was pulling on my shirt so that I was pressed against the bed rails. “Otherwise known as the once and future Angel of Death, as soon as I get my powers reinstated. This is Malachi, my dread demon and—”

“Your what?”

“Dread demon,” Malachi answered, his hands tight on my shirt. “Otherwise known as Commander of His Majesty’s Legions, Destroyer of Worlds, Rider of the Red Horse, Bringer of War, Guardian of the Last Bastion of Death. You can call me Mal.”

“What are you two?” Stavlinski glared at Mary Beth and then Aurelia. “Leprechauns?”

“I’m Faith’s assistant. Or I was. Now, I think technically I’m the crazy angel leading the current rebellions assistant but he’s an ass so I’m throwing in with her instead,” Aurelia said.

Mary Beth sidled away from him, pressing her back to the wall. “I’m actually the daughter of an angel, but I’m on Faith’s side since she’s dating my brother and all.”

“Engaged to him, actually,” I said.

“Really?” Mary Beth gaped at me. “So he finally asked? Thank the Alpha for small miracles at a time like this.”

“Have you set a date?” Aurelia asked. “We’ll want to make sure not to schedule any of the year-end evaluations during your honeymoon. Once we get you back into the job, that is.”

“Oh great,” Stavlinski said and ran his hands over his face. “The VA docs warned me it was possible I could experience some of the symptoms of PTSD because of the combined stress of Hannah’s condition and my upcoming return to civilian life. They warned me hallucinations were possible, but I didn’t believe them. I should have believed them.”

“Possibly,” Malachi said his voice cautious. “Although that doesn’t change the fact there’s a whole mess of reapers out there who would tear apart everyone in this hospital if they thought it would get them one step closer to Faith. So, you can have a complete mental break later, but we need to figure out how to keep everyone safe now.”

“Why do they want you now?” Stavlinski asked, his eyes trained on me. “What set them off today, specifically?”

“I may have accidentally, and totally unintentionally, triggered a small coup by the guy who thought he should have gotten promoted into my job instead of me.”