Demon Squad 7: Exit Wounds (2 page)

“Just ignore him, Rala.” Veronica came to her rescue, pulling her aside.

Seemed she’d done that a lot lately, which only made me feel worse. When Veronica was your savior, you knew shit had gone south. Azrael had been so far up my ass that I hadn’t realized just how much of a prick I’d been since I’d brought the young alien back to Earth. And while I could put it all on his shoulders, I’d been the idiot to accept the Angel of Death into my life when he knocked on my door with all his fancy propaganda.
I
should have known better, but I was too wrapped up in my daddy issues to think anything through.

“Sorry,” I muttered; to Rala and anyone else who cared to listen.

Karra set a hand on my shoulder and forced a smile. “It’ll be okay, Frankie.” My gaze drifted from her face to the swell of her stomach and bile welled in my throat. It wasn’t just about me anymore. The realization was a weight settling on my back like a fifty-ton gorilla.

“We need to find a way out of here,” I said, swallowing my frustration.

“We need a place to hunker down and think, first,” Katon corrected. “Those dragons, or whatever they are, scented us. They knew where we were and chose to leave us be for whatever reason. It’s in our best interest not to be so easily found should they find some excuse to change their mind.”

“We go down.” Rahim motioned toward the invisible ground we all hoped was beneath us, the mass of branches and leaves blocking our vision beyond just a few feet. Despite the bluntness of his words, his voice carried none of its usual vigor. It was as if Barry White had lost his groove, which was a painful thing to witness.

“I agree,” Karra said, her voice setting everyone else to nodding. It had been decided.

Confident they could all make it down easily enough—Katon helping Rahim—I started off ahead of the group. If there was something waiting for us below, I wanted to be the first to run into it. I owed them that, at least.

The branches were so thick it was an easy climb, though I veered off from the more direct route because my charred skin was leaving wet patches of me behind. Didn’t need anyone slipping on the gore, but I didn’t let it slow me any. Pain accompanied me down the inordinately tall tree, the rustle of the others sounding above while I scurried earthward. The ground appeared out of nowhere, the leaves thinning abruptly about twenty feet above it. I dropped, landing with a grunt, and surveyed the surroundings before the rest could catch up.

As familiar as the general forest-aspects were, the rest of the place was foreign, alien; even worse than Rala’s planet. The tree bark that had been a deep bluish-purple higher up had faded to a peculiar shade of salmon, the roots worming their way along the floor of the forest, cutting bright lines between the sections of moist, ebony dirt. Shoots of waist-high orange grass grew in patches, obscuring large sections of the ground. The trees gave giant sequoias trunk envy. They were easily thirty feet or more across at the base, with only about twenty feet between them. The branches were an interwoven canopy that blocked the view of everything except the trees. My vision was a roiling field of purple and green sprouting out of columns of pink. It was enough to give a Goth fits.

After peeling my eyes from the trees, I glanced around, pushing my new senses for all their worth. My nose was flooded with the weird scent of the trees and musky dirt. While not much different than home, it was the lack of sound that bothered me. Outside of the group noisily descending, there was absolutely nothing in the way of insects or birds to be heard. That made me nervous.

Katon and Rahim dropped behind me with muffled
thum
p
s
, the others following a moment later, lighter impacts signaling their arrival. I raised a hand for silence, and Katon came to stand alongside me, his eyes scanning the forest. His raised eyebrow was the only sign he was paying attention to me.

“You hear anything?” I whispered.

He paused a moment, listening, turning his head on a slow swivel, only to grunt. “There’s nothing.”

“That’s what scares me.”

“What is it?” Veronica asked, clutching tightly to Rala.

Katon dropped to his knee and ran a hand along the dirt, unearthing a layer of humus and orange grass and poking at a small depression that appeared underneath. “We’re definitely not alone here as these prints are fresh, but something scared the local fauna into hiding; either us or something else, take your pick.”

“Let’s hope it was us,” Rahim grunted. “We don’t need any more surprises.”

“Could this have been the other two women sent here by Azrael?”

Venai and Rebecca Shaw.
Their names popped into my head at Karra’s question. I had forgotten about the two weasels with tits. They’d been gone by the time Rala and I touched down, apparently choosing to face this place on their own.

“No.” Katon shook his head. “Whatever these prints are, they aren’t human.”

I was about to argue that the two DSI operatives were about as far from human as possible—one being a Nephilim and the other a wight, a supernatural killing machine—but I let it go. No point arguing semantics.

Everyone glanced about as if expecting an ambush any second, and I had to admit, I did the same thing. Trapped in an alien prison dimension with only two weapons between all of us, we weren’t exactly prepared for a fight, the first of the day having left the majority of us nursing wounds and completely bereft of magic. We were the dictionary definition of
unprepared
, our smiling faces pictured in the margin. That thought must have invaded everyone’s head at the same time as we all went quiet like we were playing an impromptu game of Stoplight.

Chatterbox broke the uneasy still a few moments later by humming the opening riff to Iron Maiden’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” in a subdued voice.

I couldn’t agree more.

“Let’s find someplace to hunker down where we’re not so exposed,” Rahim said, motioning for Katon to do just as the enforcer had suggested a few minutes back. “We can figure out where to go from there.” His maudlin monotone made Ben Stein seem emotive.

The decision made, Katon started off, the rest of us at his heels without comment. What was left to say?

Two

(Scarlett)

Reality blurred as I was pulled between dimensions by strange hands, too weak to resist. Stars of white filled my vision, but these weren’t Father’s lights on high. There was no comfort to their brightness, no mercy in their brilliance.

A quiet, feminine voice drifted to my ears as the worlds collided one after another, the message a mystery hidden behind the veil of misery that clouded my every thought. Right there, right then, there was only pain.

I screamed but couldn’t hear my voice. A warm wetness bubbled up instead. It spilled from my throat and oozed over my lips, threatening to drown me. I couldn’t breathe. My side burned as though it lay submersed within a bed of raging coals, and I vaguely remembered a shape hovering over me, reaching, tearing… Agony!

Frank?

My head spun with the name, memories flitting past in a mercurial haze. Could he have truly…?

“Be still.” The command pierced the chaos like sharp steel, drawing me from my distorted reveries. “You’re going to hurt yourself worse,” I heard the unseen woman say and realized my fingers were clasped about hers, my teeth bared as my subconscious fought against her restraining grip. Blood gurgled somewhere in the distance. My ears roared. The woman drew a haggard breath above me, worry and impatience seeping into her voice with equal fervor. “Please, stop. I’m taking you to get help, Scarlett; taking you to Heaven.”

My head lolled at hearing her speak of Heaven, a sudden gush of grateful tears washing the stars from my eyes. I was going home…

To die.

“So…tired.” Coldness settled over me like a shroud as we spilled through the shimmering orifice cut between realms, the gritty sand against my flesh nearly too hot to bear. I feared I might melt and drain into its depths.

“Stay with me, Scarlett,” the woman whispered, the hazy warp of her face appearing above mine, slowly resolving into coherence.

Dark, wild hair formed a halo about the concerned expression that looked seared upon her features. Her words of comfort tumbled over me. They were mindless yet soothing, a parent murmuring nonsense to a child to salve its hurt. Of their own accord, my lips peeled back into a smile, memories of God pulling me into His embrace, accepting me as one of His own. The taint of my past fell away in that embrace, I remembered. There was no
other
moment in my life, save this one. For all His distance, I was a part of Him. Once I was done, I would return to the whole.

The moment that thought filled my head, the weight lifted from my chest. My fingers and toes tingled, the feeling creeping up my limbs, inch by inch numbing me, stealing away the misery that set flame to my flesh. I sunk deeper into the woman’s arms, her name coming to mind at last:
Rachelle
.

“You can’t sleep yet,” she shouted, startling me into a vague awareness. “I need you to call to your people.”

The sun hung overhead, but its majesty paled against the shadows that lapped at the edges of my sight, devouring me from within. Wisps of clouds wafted in the sky above, gray banners hung in mourning. They had come to see me home. It was time.

“No!” Rachelle’s voice cut a swath through my wavering unconsciousness, anchoring me for just a moment to my dying shell. “No!” she screamed again. “Don’t…”

Don’t…don’t…don’t…

Her voice faded into static, pushed aside as another slid serpentine into my ears.

“No. It is not yet your time, child.”

Three

After a short, eerily quiet journey through the gargantuan forest of pink trunks, Katon had come across a ravine covered by a recently fallen tree. Still clinging to life, the branches held a good measure of their thickness, obscuring the deep crevice and leaving only one way clear without the clustered leaves and twigs barring entrance.

The air beneath the makeshift roof was cool, closing in on chilly, the hidey hole even further from the sun than the cool forest above. The soil was soft and damp near the top but hardened as we trekked to the bottom, dirt trailing to a rocky surface. All it needed was a couple of cardboard boxes, an out of key warbler warming his hands over a trash can fire and it’d be just like home.

“You sure about this?” I asked, motioning toward the sloping entrance. “Seems were just one flood away from being the deep end of the swimming pool.”

“It’s possible, but I don’t think it was a flood that did this. It was more likely a tremor of some kind that caused the rent; probably the same one that felled our roof.” Katon pointed at the tree looming above us, leaves rustling gently in the light breeze.

And I felt much better for knowing that.
Not.
My displeasure must have been reflected across the burnt toast that doubled as my face.

“You have a
better
idea, Frank?”

I raised my hands at the venom in his tone, hoping to head it off. “Nope, sure don’t.”

Katon turned to help the others get settled without another word, but there was no mistaking the anger that boiled beneath the surface of his placid demeanor. We might well be stuck in a familiar position, both of us dependent on the other to survive, but Katon hadn’t let his fury go. He was still holding on to it, biding his time until he could let it loose. He was too much a professional to willfully let it get in the way of what we had to do, but there were a whole lot more people counting on us to do things the right way, and I couldn’t risk what might happen if his trust issues cropped up at the wrong time. As much as I didn’t want to get into right then, I needed to nip our squabble in the bud before it bit us all in the ass.

I set my hand on his arm and felt him tense beneath my fingers. “I know you’re pissed at me, and I get it. I truly do.”

He spun about with a smirk on his lips, eyeteeth glimmering in the gloom. “Do you now, Frank?”

Karra inched forward, her hand on her hilt, but I waved her off as Rahim came to stand beside her. It wasn’t immediately clear whose cavalry he was planning to be, but I could guess. Veronica and Rala held back a bit, Chatterbox peering out over the alien’s furry forearm. None of them looked interested in getting into it. I couldn’t blame them, but it had to be done before the shit festered.

“Yes, I do, actually.” I met his dark gaze, unwilling to back down. “It wouldn’t take much for me to dump everything that happened on Azrael, but that would be a lie.”

Karra sighed and moved closer to me. Her warm hand slid into mine, our fingers clasping.

“I fucked up,” I told the enforcer; told all of them who cared to listen. “There’s no way around that, and my excuses are all smoke and shit. I don’t have any that matter.” I longed to draw in a deep breath, to feel the cold stir my lungs and gird my courage, but Hobbs’ body wasn’t designed for such simple comforts. My grip tightened on Karra’s hand, and I straightened. More literally than I could ever have imagined, the old Frank was gone. It was time to find out who had taken his place. My gaze shifted from Katon to Karra.

“I’m not simply
related
to Lucifer, some wayward nephew he took a fancy to,” I told her, stiffening with the expectation of violence. “I’m his son.”

Her eyes narrowed but there was a sparkle in her hazel orbs I couldn’t define. I stood there frozen, unsure, when her hand gave mine a gentle shake, a flicker of crow’s feet landing at the corner of her eyes. A quiet chuckle slipped from her smiling lips.

“Did you think I didn’t know that?” Her answer was a bullet slamming into my chest. The place where Hobbs’ shriveled heart lurked seemed to warm a degree, and her smiled widened even further at my obvious surprise. “Oh…you truly did.” She motioned toward the others gathered about. “I think everyone knew, Frankie. Everyone but Scarlett, of course. Why else would Lucifer treat you like he did?”