All Hallows Night (Night Series) (2 page)

But since that night and the possession of my third soul, Lust wasn’t working so well for me anymore. My desire for sex was practically nil. Luc was the first person I’d slept with since waking from my semi-coma, and even that had left me empty and cold.

I knew I should be a lot more worried than I actually was—I dunno, maybe Lust was still in shock after our stint in Hell. Meeting Wrath had done things to Lust, screwed with her head. She was like a whimpering, terrified dog tucking tail and hiding in a corner, and there wasn’t much I could do to bring her out.

So I had to do this sleuthing thing the good old-fashioned way. Being as old as I am, you get a feeling for people. The outer shell might be different, but the inside was always the same. If I wanted to find what I was looking for, I had to go someplace designed to loosen tongues and get men talking. Get a man drunk enough and he’ll tell you anything you want to know.

Opening the door to the first dive I found in town, I entered and stood just inside as my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lighting.

Taking off my Stetson, I wiped my brow and then headed for the bar where I leaned against the chipped and pitted wood. I lifted my finger and ordered a beer. A second later, the paunchy bartender with moles all over his face slid a cold bottle at me. I lazily sipped on my Corona, eyeing what few customers there were at this hour.

This place was your typical townie dive. Floors tacky with food and drink, a battered billiard table sat to the back. It was dark save for the few red jalapeno Christmas lights strung along the corners of the ceiling. The walls were covered in posters of half-nude women draped around the necks of grinning
luchadores
.

There were no windows in this building. Everything was designed in such a way as to get a man deep into his cups without realizing how much time had passed. But I knew it was nearly dusk.

I had an hour before I needed to meet with Grace. I took another long pull on the bottle, swallowing the bitter drink with a grimace. If only I had the power to slow time down, meeting Grace was something I’d put off as long as I possibly could.

“De verdad, lo ve con mis ojos, Juan.”

The excited whisper of the gangly man sitting with his back toward me at the table nearest the door snagged my attention. He leaned closer to his ruddy-complected friend and bobbed his head up and down, shaggy black hair dancing around his face with his furious gesture.

“
Tu si eres loco, Antonio. Él no está muerto. Hable con Eduardo ayer
.” The one called Juan snorted as if he’d heard a funny story and started chugging his brew.

I grabbed my hat and nonchalantly sidled closer. I pretended to study my nails as I sat down at one of the empty tables. The hard, torn plastic of the chair cut into the backs of my thighs, but I ignored it as I continued to listen.

My Spanish is exceptional. There’d been a period in my life—about three hundred years ago, give or take—when I’d seriously considered planting roots and settling down. I’d bought hundreds of acres of land in the interior of Mexico. I could speak with barely the trace of an accent and I could understand it even better.

Skinny had apparently stumbled across the dead body of an acquaintance. Tubby didn’t believe him.

Antonio slammed his palm down on the table. “
No soy mentiroso
,” he snarled between clenched teeth as he vehemently denied that he was lying.

“
Como puedes estar cierto? Tú me acabas decir que la cara estaba desfigurada
.” Juan snorted again and chuckled.

Tubby was drilling him about being certain, especially because Skinny apparently mentioned the face being disfigured, so the possibility of facial recognition would be slim. I shifted around on my seat and took another sip of my drink, barely even tasting it.

A disfigured corpse was one of the hallmarks of a zombie-style killing. But I’d never overlook the possibility of it being a human killer either. Sometimes you can’t always blame a monster for what goes wrong in this world.

Though my family and I run a carnival, which is why we’re
supposedly
here in Mexico in the first place, the truth is Nephilim hunt down
Others
. Creatures of the dark. Vampires, shifters, zombies, and some you’ve probably never heard of. Before leaving our last assignment, Grace had told me of a possible zombie uprising (pun intended).

But she’s lied to me before. My last assignment had been nothing but a red herring meant to distract me from the truth. What that truth actually was, I’m still not even sure. But I will find out. Even if finding out means I have to plead ignorance to her deception.

Antonio smirked, wearing the pleased look of a man who knew his next statement would make a believer of his skeptical friend. “
Un cicatriz, aquí
”—he pointed to the tip of his index finger and traced a jagged line to the crook of his elbow—“
hasta aquí
.” He lifted a brow, waiting in the expectant silence.

Except for the telltale curling of Juan’s fingers around the neck of his beer bottle, it almost seemed as if he hadn’t heard Antonio.

But I could tell the mention of the dead man’s childhood scar had unnerved him. The rich hue of his copper skin turned almost white around his mouth, and the muscle in his right cheek started twitching.

“
Dios mío
!” Juan gasped, hurtling the chair he sat on to the floor as he shoved to his feet and ran out the door.

Antonio’s lips twitched with the ghost of a smile, then he laid down some cash, tipped his hat toward the barkeep, and followed his friend.

I licked my lips and waited a moment for the room to quiet down. The men’s sudden departure had turned the tiny bar into a buzz of disjointed conversations.

The whispered voices wondered about the men and what they’d been talking about, but none of them seemed clued in to the body. I likely wasn’t gonna learn much more.

I stood, rolled my shoulders until the bones popped, and gave a satisfied sigh as if I hadn’t a care in the world. I winked at the barkeep, a surly old man with pockmarked cheeks, and smiled.

For a second I could have sworn I’d felt the swirl of Lust coming to attention.

I could tell he wanted me, could see the flush of sweat on his skin and the throbbing pulse at the side of his neck.

I waited for Lust to get demanding and bossy as she usually did when confronted with prey. Fill my head with visions of me walking up to the man, grabbing his sweat-stained shirt, and dragging him behind the club for a quickie.

My brows lowered.

Granted, I’d just had sex with Luc, but sex was sex, and for Lust that was everything. Nothing existed for her outside her need for it.

Yet aside from the initial twitch of a reaction she’d had, she was silent.

Unnerved, I dropped some cash on the table and jogged outside, leaning against a pillar of wood for support. It smelled like sewage, droppings, and piss. I didn’t care. I took in long, greedy gulps of air and fought to quiet the sudden trembling of my hands.

What in the hell was wrong with me?

Why should I care that Lust no longer seemed to control my every word and thought? I was more in control and yet—I closed my eyes, aware of the alien presence inside me—I was far from all right.

“
Estas bien, gringa
?”

“Hmm?” I mumbled, opening my eyes to see a small child, no older than eight or nine, staring up at me with large, wide eyes. He shoved a greasy hank of hair out of his face. He was far too skinny. The pants he wore were a size too small; knobby knees protruded from jagged holes.

I wondered where his parents were, then realized he was probably one of the many orphaned children living in the streets.

He looked genuinely worried, and suddenly I remembered another little face. Brianna. At least there’d been one child saved that night. Maybe it was my memories of her and not him, but a reluctant grin tugged at the corners of my lips. Reaching into my pocket, I grabbed a hundred-peso note, roughly eight American dollars, and handed it to him.

“I’m fine,” I told him in Spanish, but he didn’t look at me. Rather, he stared at the bank note as if he were afraid it might disappear. He swallowed hard, then began to back up slowly.

“Go,” I muttered and flicked my wrist.

He needed no other prompting and quickly disappeared inside the maze of shacks and alleyways.

I took one last steadying breath. It was time to meet Grace.

The sun had long since set, and the night rang with the sounds of locusts and nesting birds. I walked slowly, my hands shoved deep into my pockets, and kept within shadow.

I moved down back alleys for several blocks with nothing but rats and stray dogs for company. I caught a few sets of eyes studying me. Some with curiosity, others with malicious intent. I was a lone, beautiful woman. Clearly not a local. Easy prey.

Or so they thought.

But I walked with a sense of confidence and eventually the hard gazes disappeared.

Many times I have no idea where Grace plans to meet up, but she and I have met in Mexico for many decades now. I hardly paid attention to my surroundings, letting instinct guide me.

Light, glowing a buttery copper color, caught my eye. I snarled as my anger flared to a violent pitch. Not a hundred yards in front of me sat a mud-thatched shack. Inside, Grace waited for me.

Now that I was here, I wasn’t sure I could do this. Pretend she hadn’t betrayed me. Betrayed us.

I stopped walking, staring at the light like a moth trapped in the deadly glow of flame.

I was a veritable weapons cache. There was a razor fan tucked between my boobs, a flip knife down each snakeskin boot. Two nine mils were strapped to my back, and the hairpin that was holding my hair up wasn’t a pin at all, but rather an ice pick.

Was I plotting to destroy Grace? It would seem so. And maybe subconsciously it’s why I’d come down here so loaded, but revenge wasn’t a luxury I had at the moment. The minutes were ticking by, and then a dark silhouette moved behind her closed curtains. Grace was pacing, probably wondering where the hell I was. But I just couldn’t move.

Frozen with indecision, I might have remained there forever if the heavy press of eyes hadn’t just drilled a hole through my consciousness, snapping me out of my trancelike state.

Narrowing my eyes, I turned in the direction of the hot gaze and caught a flash of black that wasn’t shadow.

The sun was so low there was hardly any natural light left in the town, but my heart was thumping like a rabbit on crack because deep down in the darkest corners of my mind, I could swear that build and shape could only belong to one person.

With a growl, I ran toward it. Hurriedly I moved down the narrow alleyways of a shantytown, the shacks stacked one against the other against the other, scraping my knuckles and face raw as I’d take a turn into a rusty nail or roughened termite-riddled wood But the amorphous shape was always just out of reach, leading me on a long and dizzying path so that I’d completely lost my bearing because I was too focused on catching up.

“Hey!” I finally panted at it after what felt like hours. “Stop running.”

Heads poked out their houses, staring at me with quizzically raised brows and worried gleams in their inky eyes. I ignored them.

The blur didn’t listen and a fire like I’d never felt before zipped down my spine, blurring my vision. “I said
stop
!” I roared. It was mindless and crazy-sounding, but I was mindless and crazy.

I wasn’t thinking straight, that much was obvious. But what I didn’t notice, and I probably should have, was that the second I screamed, frost burned my skin.

A powerful something barreled into me, knocking the air from my lungs and shoving me to the dirt. Otherworldly power ran like a shock of electricity against my flesh before a hand clamped itself over my mouth.

Panic clawed at my throat, turned my blurry vision hazy, made my fangs lengthen and my claws unfurl.

“Shut the hell up,” the voice hissed in my ear. “Get your fucking panic under control or so help me, I’ll cut your head off.”

The voice literally made my brain feel about to short-circuit, and I blinked, breathing heavily, feeling as stupid as I’d ever felt in my life because there was no way in hell that what I was hearing,
who
I was hearing, was really...

“Billy?” I mumbled around a half sob of surprise. I couldn’t see his face—he was obscured within the voluminous folds of his hoodie sweater—but that voice. That voice would haunt me forever.

And this time Lust didn’t just twitch, she roared.

My body went from hot to molten. My skin was so sensitive that I was unbelievably aware of his form on my body. Anywhere we touched. His pelvis grinding into mine, his knee between my thighs, his breath brushing against my neckline.

“Good,” he rumbled, and damn if I didn’t want to yank the black sweater off him immediately. “I’ve halted time, but it won’t last. When you screamed, your demon came out.”

“Lust?” I couldn’t believe the breathy quality of my voice, because I should want to rip his hands off, gouge his eyes out, and saw his tongue in two for making me believe he’d died. For making me hurt and ache and need and want. But the emotion working through me wasn’t hate, it was desire and more. So much more.

My body tingled, shivered, and my back teeth clacked.

“Look over my shoulder,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear. “You see the boy?”

I looked and spied a small head, four, maybe five years old. He was leaning out of his doorway with eyes grown wide. Hovering before him was a puke-green mist. I nodded.

“You see the miasma in front of him?”

I nodded again, unable to trust my voice not to give me away. Now that Lust was dominating my thoughts, Pestilence wasn’t nearly as loud or powerful as earlier. It felt good, right, to have control of my body, to feel it again the way it once was. I strummed my finger down the length of his muscular back, wanting to weep from the exquisite torture of having him back in my arms.

“That’s Pestilence,” he said. “Before I can release time, you have to suck that demon spawn back inside you. If you don’t, the outbreak will level this village.”