The Devil's Angel (Devil Series Book 2) (16 page)

Eve lifted her hand. “It’s okay, Don. He’s with me.”

Don moved his hand away from the weapon, but didn’t sit. His steady gaze followed Lucien into the elevator.

As soon as the doors closed, Eve said, “You could’ve said hello.”

“Why should I? He already thinks I’m going to kill everyone here.”

“You could change his mind.”

“Too hard.”

“For you or for him?”

“We are what we are, Eve. I’m not going to try and convince him that I am a friendly, cuddly creature. It would be waste of both our time.”

“You forget where you are. We have vampires here, and those of us who know them treat them with the utmost respect.”

“And what about the ones who don’t know? Do you think they would be as willing to accept vampires as coworkers?

Eve didn’t have a chance to answer; the elevator doors opened to a plush lobby. The walls were adorned with wood trim and dark paneling. A large painting of an Italian landscape hung to his left, and below it were two antiqued-looking chairs.

A plump woman with long brown hair and black horn-rimmed glasses greeted Eve.

“Who’s your friend?” she asked, smiling at Lucien. Her teeth looked strangely white, almost to the point of glowing.

“This is Lucien. Lucien, this is Julie. She’s our receptionist.”

He nodded and looked away.

“Are you related? Friends?” Julie pried.

“Lucien is a very good friend of mine. He’s in town for a while, so I thought I’d show him around.”

“Well, if you get burned out from entertaining, let me know. I’d love to show him the secret night life of Seattle.”

Eve laughed. “I’m sure he’d like that. Wouldn’t you, Lucien?”

Be polite.
“It sounds wonderful. If I have time then we should.”

Julie’s face lit up. “Great! Give me a call any time. Here’s my card.”

She slid it across the desk, exposing cleavage deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Lucien quickly dropped his eyes to the pink business card and scooped it up. He shoved it into a pocket he rarely, if ever, looked in.

“Is Charlie in?” Eve asked.

“Yeah, came in about ten minutes ago. He looks like crap. You can always tell when he doesn’t get a good night’s sleep.”

“Thanks, Julie.”

As Eve moved past her desk, Julie called, “By the way, Eve, I love your shirt!”

Eve lifted her hand and waved without turning around. She guided Lucien through a maze of cubicles. There were at least twenty people working, all of whom greeted her enthusiastically. They stared at him and then at Eve, hoping to receive some kind of an explanation, but she gave none.

Other than the guard downstairs, no one seemed to recognize him as a vampire. And as far as he could tell, they were regular humans with no magical abilities.

Eve turned a corner at the end of a long hall. Lucien followed behind as quietly and as closely as a shadow.

Charlie stood at an open door way.

“I didn’t think I would beat you here,” he said with a hard edge to his voice.

Eve moved past him into the room.

“Where have you been?” Charlie demanded.

“Eve was shot.” Lucien followed after her.

“What?” Charlie cried.

Eve rolled her eyes and sat down. “Thanks, Lucien. It was nothing, really. We just ran into—”

Lucien coughed.

“I mean,
I
ran into some trouble.”

“Do you care to elaborate?” Charlie asked.

“I interrupted a robbery in process and got shot, but as you can see, I’m fine.”

Charlie turned on Lucien. “And where the hell were you? I thought you were supposed to protect her.”

Every muscle in Lucien’s body flexed like a pulled bow, and he took a threatening step toward Charlie.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Eve defended quickly. “He didn’t know what I was running into. I should’ve warned him.”

Charlie looked at Eve, his eyes tired. “You have to be more careful.”

“I will, I promise. I’ve already received a lecture from Lucien. I don’t need one from you, too.”

Julie stuck her head in. “Sorry to bother you, Charlie, but you have a call.”

“Can you take a message?”

“He said it’s important.”

Eve stood. “Go ahead and take it. We’ll leave.”

“No, stay. I’ll pick it up in the conference room.”

After he left, Lucien asked, “So where’s your office?”

He moved around the room, trying to find out more about Charlie. On a wooden shelf behind Charlie’s desk was an encased, autographed New England football, a bunch of books about World War II, and a stack of magazines.

“I don’t have an office.”

“Do you have one of those cubicles out there?” The top magazine was on guns, and beneath it was a dirt bike magazine. The third one, however, was about gardening.

“No.”

Lucien turned to Eve. “So what do you do?”

“Technically I’m not an employee. I just help out whenever they need it.”

“Doing what?”

“Sometimes I’ll do research with the guys out there, other times I help Charlie. A lot of what we do is track down people who are known criminals that continually evade normal policing agencies. We have a few insiders both in the CIA and FBI who feed us information. Because of that, and the fact that some of our employees have special abilities, we are very successful. Lately we’ve been tracking down several well-known terrorists.”

“What about the real demons of the world?”

“Only a few of us know the truth. We spend our time making sure we know where they all are at all times. But it’s been difficult lately. Vampires are being turned faster than ever before.”

“Do you know why yet?”

“No.”

Charlie walked back into the room. “Sorry about that. It was Michael giving me an update.”

He sat down behind the desk.

“Anything new?” Eve asked.

Charlie opened his mouth to answer but closed it just as fast. “What’s with the shirt? Did he–” Charlie motioned his head toward Lucien. “—pick it out for you?”

Lucien answered before Eve could. “Yes, and I got one for you, too. It says, ‘Nobody knows I’m a lesbian’. It’s in my car. Do you want me to get it?”

“Can you two just stop?” Eve said. “What did Michael say?”

Lucien kept his cool eyes on Charlie, just waiting for him to say something else.

“Michael finally got an invitation to the rumored meeting,” Charlie said. “Supposedly the Dark Prince will be there. We’ll know more in a few days.”

“Good. Is there anything you’d like me to help out with today?”

“Alana sent over a bunch of pictures Michael took of vampires. Would you mind cross-referencing them with our database, see if we already know some of them? And if we don’t, could you add them?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“As for you, Valium–you can leave. I can watch Eve here.”

“I don’t need to be watched,” Eve corrected.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he told Charlie. He could see what Charlie was trying to do, and he wasn’t about to fall for it.

“If you two keep fighting, you can both leave.” She exited the room.

“Now look what you did,” Charlie said and followed after her.

Lucien shook his head. It was going to be a long day.

He crossed the room to the window and peered up, thinking of Ireland. Overcast gray sky, edges of the clouds etched in black. In the north, a darkness was growing.

A storm was coming.

Lucien sat across from Eve in a long room with an equally long table. A dry eraser board hung in the front with unreadable words, written by someone with very poor handwriting. Lucien guessed Charlie’s.

Eve had several photos on the table in front of her. Next to her was a laptop. “Do you want to look through some of these? Maybe you’ll know someone.”

“I won’t.”

She stared at him briefly and then returned to her work, quietly and efficiently. A strand of golden hair fell in front of her face. She ignored it and continued to work diligently. Now that they were alone, Lucien let himself think back to her confession. He could’ve believed the world was flat easier than to believe she could love him, and yet she did. He saw it in her eyes and felt it in her touch.

“Do you need something?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“You’re staring at me funny.”

“Just watching you work.”

She set her papers down. “Are you all right with what I told you?”

He leaned back. “I’m not sure what to do with it.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t have to
do
anything with it. I just thought you should know, maybe then you might understand how hard it is for me when you’re not around.”

“You shouldn’t want someone like me around.”

“Tell me what you were doing last night,” she asked again. “I want to know.”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

She tapped her pen on the table. “Does it have anything to do with small packages?”

“What?”

“Lucien, I know more than you think I know, but I want to hear it from you.”

“How could you possibly know?”

“Maybe I’ve followed you before.” She brought the pen to her lips.

“Impossible, I would’ve known.”

“How?”

“You have a very distinct smell.”

She frowned.

“A very pleasant smell,” he corrected.

“It doesn’t matter how I know about the packages, but I do. What’s in them?”

“Drugs mostly.”

She didn’t look surprised. “How do you know where to find them?”

“I have a connection.”

Eve tapped her pen against the table again and tilted her head. “So, let me get this straight. You find out where criminals are, for example drug dealers, then destroy the drugs, and then destroy them?”

He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “Basically.”

“That’s really interesting.” She had a satisfied smile on her face as if she’d just solved a complex math problem.

“Why is that interesting?”

“Don’t you see the irony?”

“No.”

“You
are
the Deific, only on a smaller scale.” She dropped the pen on the table and folded her arms as if saying “Check Mate.”

“Come again?”

“You hunt down bad guys, most likely they are bad guys that the law couldn’t touch for whatever reason, and then you eliminate them—just like us.”

“You’ve got it all figured out,” he said.

“I’m serious. You are as good as any one of us here.”

“You’re forgetting one very small detail.”

“What’s that?”

“I kill the men I catch and use them for my own selfish needs. So how does that make me any better than the monsters I kill?”

“You are doing the best you can with what you’ve been given. I see no sin in your actions.”

“Then you are blind. I am no better than the devil himself.”

Eve grew quiet, her mood darkening. “I have seen the devil, and you are not him.”

Lucien lowered his voice. “You think you’ve seen evil, but you have no idea.”

Charlie opened the door. “How’s it coming?”

“Fine,” Eve told Charlie, but her eyes were fixed on Lucien.

He returned her stare. Eve couldn’t possibly know what real evil was, but the truth was, he didn’t want her to ever find out.

Charlie pulled a chair next to Eve and looked over the scattered photographs. “Vampires sure are homely looking things, aren’t they?”

Lucien cleared his throat.

Charlie looked up. “Are you still here?”

“Not leaving.”

Charlie turned his attention back to Eve. “Any matches in our database?”

“None. I think they’re all new.”

Charlie leaned back, frowning. “That’s too many. Something’s coming, can you feel it?”

“Like an impending doom, right?” Eve said.

Charlie nodded. They were both silent, staring into each other’s eyes as if communicating telepathically. Lucien experienced a twinge of jealousy watching them together on the other side of the table. It was a side he would never be on.

“Whatever it is, it’s bad,” Charlie said. “I think it’s time I go to Ireland.”

Lucien thought that was the best idea yet.

Surprising Lucien, Eve put her hand on top of Charlie’s arm. Charlie looked down, eyes wide.

“Not yet,” she said. “It’s not time.”

“Then I’ll stay,” Charlie said, a little too quickly.

She pulled her hand away and moved it under the table.

Charlie glanced at Lucien and then back to Eve. “So Eve, the Mayor’s Halloween Ball is tomorrow. I was wondering if you’d be my date?”

“Actually I was going stag if that’s all right.”

“Whatever works for you.”

“What time does it start?” she asked.

“Around eight. I have a meeting with the Mayor a couple of hours before, so I’ll have to meet you there.” Charlie stood. “Let me know if you need help entering those vampires into the database.”

Eve nodded.

“See you around, Valium,” Charlie said without looking at him.

After he closed the door, Lucien asked. “How did the Deific get invited to the Mayor’s Ball?”

“We do the city’s accounting,” Eve said, beginning to type again.

“I didn’t know the Deific actually did any real accounting.”

“Just for the city. We have to appear somewhat legit.”

Eve continued to work quietly for the next several minutes, but Lucien couldn’t stand it anymore and had to ask. “Do you have feelings for Charlie?”

Her hands froze over the keyboard, and her eyes moved to his. “Yes.”

He balled his fists beneath the table where she couldn’t see them.

“But not how you mean,” she said. “I care for him greatly. He’s been there for me when there was no one else.”

He relaxed his hands—a little.

“Would it bother you if I had stronger feelings for him?” she asked.

Lucien squirmed in his seat.

“You deserve to be happy,” he said trying to answer the question in a way that would satisfy her.

The muscles in her jaw tightened briefly. “And if I was most happy with Charlie, what would you do?”

“I would move.”

“You would leave your treasured Seattle?”

“I wouldn’t be able to stand it.”

That night, Lucien didn’t watch Eve’s home from the outside. He was downstairs on Eve’s couch, staring up at the ceiling while Eve slept peacefully in her bed. He tried again to connect the pieces between him, Eve, Ireland, and the “Dark Prince”. He was sure he was missing something. And the more he thought about it, the more he, too, felt like something horrible was about to happen.