Devil's Paw (Imp Book 4) (21 page)

His eyebrows raised toward his hairline, lips twitching with a hint of a smile. “I don’t believe he is part of your household, although the size of your household does seem to be reaching astronomical proportions. He’s not performing duties that fall under the responsibilities of your title either. No, I don’t think he will receive safe passage.”

“Please,” I begged. This had become a ritual, and I pretty much knew his next words before he spoke them.

“I would grant this in return for a favor.”

Damn it all. He’d been racking up favors like crazy for the past six months and had never redeemed a one. Everything I asked lately seemed to require a favor in return. Even getting the can of tomatoes off the top shelf had cost a favor. This one was number twelve.

“Fine. You have another favor,” I snapped.

He smiled benevolently and pulled out his cell phone.

“Hey, you can’t use that on the plane. You’ll fuck up the computer stuff and we’ll crash.”

He shook his head, and dialed. “I’m an angel. I get to break the rules.”

It was so unfair. I broke the rules too, but he always got away with it. I turned to the bemused plane owner beside me. “He’s using a cell phone on your plane,” I told him.

He smiled , his eyes shining with happiness. “He can do anything he wants.”

That pretty much summed it up. I slumped down in my seat and resigned myself to the unfairness of it all as Gregory made arrangements for the safe passage of Amber’s sexual tutor.

~17~

T
he wheels of our plane touched down in Juneau at an unseemly hour of the morning. As soon as the plane door opened, I gasped in wonderment. It wasn’t just the stunning landscape that amazed me, it was the huge quantity of tiny wild gates. Miniscule rents in the air, they sparkled like prisms. Beside the gates were thin sections, as if they were on the verge of becoming. I wondered how long it would take them to reach more than their current few inches and longed to explore them further.

“What?” Gregory asked, squinting into the distance in the general direction I faced.

I remembered his and the other angels’ disbelief when I’d told them about the existence of the gates.

“Nothing. The mountains are very pretty,” I lied. No sense in getting into a huge argument about this, although it would be funny if Gregory accidently stuck his foot through one.

Occupied by fantasies where Gregory fell into a wild gate and wound up somewhere in Hel, I dragged the two bags down the staircase, onto the tarmac. I was wheeling our luggage toward the airport rental counter, when Gregory took my arm and detoured me to baggage claim.

“I’ve got a present for you,” he announced, hauling me past the conveyor belts, circling with their drab–colored baggage, and through a set of doors clearly marked “authorized access only”.

“Stay here,” he commanded.

I remained where indicated while he spoke with another angel who was guarding a large box. The angel craned his neck to send curious looks in my direction around Gregory’s advancing form. As my angel spoke, he stopped trying to eyeball me and replied with a deferential posture. After a few seconds, he darted another quick look at me before vanishing.

“Come here, Cockroach.”

I walked toward him. “I guess that was an angel you trusted? Because he clearly saw me, and I wasn’t exactly being stealthy. He might have thought I was a human, but I doubt it.”

“I trust him. That’s Nisroc, and he’s the gate guardian up here. He’s allowed more leeway in terms of distance from the gate, due to its remote location.”

I approached the box and Gregory waved his hand at it. “I asked him to do me a special favor. The fact that he managed to accomplish it, just further proves his worth.”

Ahh, a protégé. A warmth spread over me. I could empathize; I’d begun to feel the same about Amber, and even Nyalla, of late.

“So, what’s in the box? Flowers? Diamonds? A body part from my enemy?” We demons had particular ideas of what constituted “presents”.

Gregory pushed the lid aside, and I peered down at the corpse of an angel. This would truly be a gift to make any demon swoon with joy, but I doubted he’d meant it to be
that
sort of present.

“This is the angel that was murdered. The one who was found in northern Mexico. I’m still trying to determine why he was here among the humans. There’s a disturbing lack of cooperation among his choir at the moment.”

I shivered. I would truly hate to be an angel in that particular choir. I loved Gregory in a towering rage. His temper totally turned me on, but this cold anger of his did nothing but frighten me and remind me how very ancient and powerful he really was.

The corpse hardly looked human. It seemed more statue than flesh, with pore–less skin devoid of color. With some dread, I lay my hands on its flesh and sent my personal energy within. I’d never examined an angel’s corporeal form in this way. Gregory and I had always been intimate as beings of spirit, and he staunchly resisted any more than cursory physical closeness. Every now and then, he’d slip and caress my face, or rub my hair between his fingers, but any move on my part was quickly rebuffed. This was the first time I’d ever really been able to see how angels put together their physical bodies. It baffled me. Nerve endings were intact for function, but disconnected from pleasure and pain receptors in the brain. Hearing, smell, taste, and vision were dulled. The odd skin texture helped block all but the most vital sensory input. I shook my head, thinking this was a terrible waste.

“Well?” I could sense Gregory’s impatience.

I hesitated, reluctant to disclose what I still didn’t understand. It wasn’t what the angel’s body revealed that perplexed me, it was what it didn’t. There were none of the restraint marks that the demons’ had had. None. He seemed healthy and hale, not a mark on him. There were no indications he’d been in a battle when he’d died. In fact, the expression on his face looked …shocked. Like his death had come out of nowhere and surprised him. He was drained, devoured right out of his corporeal form, but his death had differences when compared to the others. They had been stripped clean, even some of their physical form rendered oddly sterile. This angel had traces remaining. It was as if his death had been a quick, desperate action, with little time for a thorough job. Maybe it was a different killer. Or maybe the killer just hadn’t had a lot of time for this one.

“Cockroach, there are things you aren’t telling me.” Gregory’s voice held a warning note.

I threw up my hands. “I don’t know. It’s different than the demons. Perhaps the killer was in a hurry with this one, or nervous, because he was an angel.”

“Or maybe a different killer,” Gregory mused, echoing my thoughts.

Once again I explored the corpse, taking especial care to examine the faint traces of angel energy that remained. His removal had been incomplete, and there was enough of him probably for the angels to positively identify. There were bits along his torso, and one good–sized chunk at his hand.

I paused, sucking in a breath. Because there, on the piece of him left in his hand, was a scar. A recent scar, barely a day old when he’d been killed. It hadn’t healed, hadn’t even begun to close over. And I recognized this scar.

“What?” Gregory asked, seeing my startled expression.

“This angel …it’s the same one that chased me through Frederick. The one I told you about. The one I summoned you in a panic over.”

He came to stand over my shoulder, the heat from his power leak searing along my back. “This is not good, little Cockroach. It further implicates you in these devourings.”

I winced. “Yeah, I get that.”

“How can you tell it was the same angel? He was devoured. Nothing remains.”

I shook my head. “It was sloppy, hurried. There are parts of him still here, and this part I’d damaged when he grabbed me in the alley. It can’t be a coincidence. It’s in the same place, and it was small enough that he might not have bothered to fast track any healing before he died.”

“That attack on you happened right after the demon was found in Damascus.” His words were right next to my ear. “So close. I could see there might be a connection, but why would his body have been found in Mexico?”

I turned to face him and caught my breath at how near we were. “Demons don’t bother to move bodies. We don’t bother to cover things up, or hide murders. We’ll deny it, blame it on someone else, but we don’t move bodies.”

So either something important took the angel immediately to Mexico, where he was killed, or he was killed in Maryland and there was a specific reason to move the body.

“Who would care to move an angel killed by a devouring spirit?” I asked. And why would they bother?

He looked over my head, focusing into the distance as he thought, but his hand reached up to rub a lock of my hair rhythmically between his fingers. It was a strange habit of his, and I loved it.

“His choir, maybe? Perhaps there were activities occurring in the Maryland area and they didn’t want him to be associated with them.”

“What activities were there in Maryland besides a devoured demon?” I asked, knowing his logic was headed down the same path as mine.

He shook his head and looked down, his eyes meeting mine. “None. I keep a close eye on that area, as I have a particularly troublesome Cockroach to look after.”

“So his choir, or whoever moved the body, didn’t want him connected with the devouring demon that killed him?” I asked, ignoring the thrill I felt at his comment.

Gregory shrugged. “Or he wasn’t killed in Maryland. Perhaps his involvement with the devoured demons found along the east of the continent led to a trip west.”

I let out an exasperated breath. “We keep uncovering more questions and no answers. How does any of this make sense?”

The angel’s eyes narrowed and I felt a shiver down my spine. “I have an idea. But first, we must stop this devouring spirit before he becomes any more powerful. I want to find answers as badly as you do, little Cockroach, but we can’t let our quest for the truth blind us to the crisis before us.”

I wasn’t as convinced of this crisis as he was, but I agreed. Something bothered me, but regardless of that nagging intuition, I knew I needed to find Baphomet’s killer and bring about justice. It wasn’t very demonic of me, but I felt I owed it to my friend to avenge his untimely death.

~18~

W
e’d snagged a rental SUV toward the city. I was driving, as Gregory lacked both the skill and the desire to do so. The city of Juneau was about seven miles to the south, along a narrow strip of coast between the channel to the west and the massive ice field and mountain ranges to the east. I was a bit bummed we didn’t have the time to head a tiny bit north toward the Mendenhall glacier. I longed to see it before the massive ice formation melted into the ever–increasing lake.

We were driving along a typical throughway—straight and narrow, with trees and various buildings to one side, an expanse of floodplain and marsh to the other. Thick, grey clouds hung low over the horizon, covering the tips of the impressive mountain range we’d seen when we’d flown in. A light mist clouded the windshield and forced me to turn on the wipers. I knew Juneau got more than its fair share of rain, but I’d hoped for more pleasant weather than this chilly wetness. June was far more “summery” back in Maryland.

This part of Alaska was strange. The groups of the tiny wild gates revealed themselves every half mile or so, and the rest of the atmosphere seemed thin, as if it were on the verge of becoming a giant passageway. Aside from the supernatural, Juneau seemed to be little bits and chunks of habitable land separated by vertical rock, thick forest, and huge bodies of water. The humans had done their best, carving small sections of usable territory from a harsh and brutal nature. The actual city of Juneau was small — smaller than many of the quaint towns back in Maryland. There were no hundred–story high–rises, no ornate monuments to mankind’s hubris. Everything seemed to realize it existed on a razor’s edge, at the fickle whim of Mother Nature.

As we pulled into the north end of the city, where a harbor full of boats lined the channel to our right, I jumped to feel the jolt of electricity through my thigh. With an apologetic look at Gregory, I pulled the SUV over and yanked the mirror from my pocket.

“Iblis.” The voice over the device trembled with relief and gratitude. “We are forever in your debt. We’ve lost five since you initially turned us away. The remaining ten of us would not be alive if not for your generous protection.”

I felt a stab of guilt. Damn Dar for turning them back. I needed to have a serious conversation with him about this.

“Are you Raim’s steward? The head of his household?” I needed to make sure I was getting my information from the closest source.

“Yes, my former master was the demon known as Raim. If we can do anything for you, Iblis, please name it. Anything.”

Again I felt that twinge of guilt. But there was a murderer on the loose, and I didn’t have much time to find out what was going on before Gregory took matters into his own hands. “Did he devour? I know there are rumors, but I need to know if you have any knowledge beyond gossip.”

There was a lengthy pause. Gratitude was one thing, but betraying a past master, even one you thought was dead, was a matter for careful consideration.

“Once. Just the once that I am aware of.” The steward sighed, and I could feel his anxiety. “Raim was a strong demon; he had no need to resort to such disgusting methods in the normal course of things. Once, when he found himself in fear for his life, he devoured his attacker. I’ve never known him to do that before or after. He may have had the ability and the inclination, but he clearly had the fortitude to keep his perversions in check.”

I winced. Perversions. Ouch.

I’d devoured more demons than Raim. Had he just been good at hiding it, or had something set him off? Or were we completely going down the wrong path?

“Do you know anything about the project he was doing with Baphomet?”