'Tween Heaven and Hell (12 page)

His hands moved down my wet body to cup my buttocks and pull
me more tightly against him. This more intimate contact certainly didn’t make
me want to pull away, let me tell you.

However, from somewhere in my misty brain came a single,
unbidden but soul saving picture that moved between us, metaphorically speaking
of course, like a gust of arctic air. My mind formed a picture of Timmon,
spread across a cold, stone floor like so much green blood pudding and I felt
my anger rise. The anger flooded through my body, producing a tingly feeling
that felt like power. It was a power I’d never experienced before. It was one I
didn’t know I had. But somehow I recognized it with the primitive instinct that
had served my ancestors and my kind so well.

For an interminable moment, my mind tried to fight against
the wonderful sensations he was producing in my body. I had to create some
mental space between us so I could recover my equilibrium enough to kick his
ass. His lips had left my mouth and were scorching a trail down my throat,
licking away the last of the moisture there and moving inexorably toward more
vulnerable destinations. In desperation I began gathering the fledgling power
around me, using only the barest of instincts to pull it into some kind of
focus.

My body started to vibrate under the building power. His
lips left mine abruptly and his eyes narrowed on my face. My flesh began to
tingle and jump where he touched me and, with widening eyes, he looked down at
the arm he still had wrapped around me. As he did, sparks erupted from the
juncture of our flesh and he released me with a surprised laugh. As soon as his
flesh left mine, I felt the power explode. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus
all of it into a single stream that centered in my right arm. The air around me
buzzed with electricity and began to pulse against my skin, pushing at me
insistently, though I wasn’t at all sure what it wanted me to do. I was going
strictly on instinct, on pure blind intuition, as I raised my arm toward him
and opened my eyes.

The power shot out of the fingers of my hand, taking my
breath with it and almost pulling me off my feet. My arm jerked under the force
of the explosion and, rather than blasting him, I shattered a hologram of my
parents that had been hanging on the wall behind him. I gritted my teeth and
refocused my arm, leaving a scorch mark on the wall as I guided it toward him.

He could have gotten out of the way. He knew it was coming.
But he stood his ground and surprisingly, he had a vague smile on his face as
it hit him. Rather than exploding him as I’d hoped, I merely succeeded in
raising him up off the floor a couple of inches and pushing him back a couple
of feet, until he met up with the wall. He hung there, the smile sitting on his
face and his arms crossed against his chest, bringing a memory, sharp and
disturbing, of him as he’d been in my apparently prophetic dream. Above the
smile, those strange, black eyes, which were now filled with revelation and
something that looked like surprised recognition, were locked on me
unwaveringly.

All too quickly the power started to drain away. It had
pulled every available bit of energy from my cells and had no more fuel to draw
on. A final, harmless spurt of power shot from my throbbing fingers and Dialle
sank slowly back to the floor, still smiling.

My knees buckled and I collapsed. My whole body felt like
just so much stiff rubber. I had no energy left to hold me upright. As I hit
the floor, the world faded to charcoal gray around me and I knew I was going to
pass out.

I landed on the cold floor and lay shivering uncontrollably,
though I somehow knew that the air was suffocatingly warm all around me. As I
floated away, my mind just barely registered the sound of his voice speaking in
Hades over me, in a surprisingly gentle tone. Then I felt him pick me up and my
world faded completely to black. Leaving me to whatever fate I had stumbled
against.

* * * * *

I woke up in my bed, with a seriously woozy feeling in my
head. The room felt unusually cool and, as I pulled the blankets up and tucked
them just under my chin, I realized that my arm was incredibly sore and stiff.
The tips of my fingers still tingled and felt a bit numb. I pulled the strange
appendage out from under the blankets and stared at it in awe. Had I dreamed
the whole thing? Had I really discovered a new power?

I frowned at the seemingly normal hand in front of my face.
I couldn’t see any difference in it. It certainly didn’t feel very powerful at
the moment. As I shifted into a more comfortable position, my entire right arm
pulsed and punished my movements with spikes of pain that started at my
shoulder and ripped a path to the tips of my tingly fingers.

I took deep breaths until the pain passed and lay as still
as possible, restricting my gymnastics to the mental kind. It was true, I did
have magic in my family tree, on both the angel and the devil sides. I didn’t
know much about it and I had made it a point not to find out the details
because the idea scared the holy shit out of me. But it seemed I would need to do
some research. If this power was going to insinuate itself on me unbidden, then
I’d better learn from whence it came and how to control it.

After a few minutes of mental preparation, I forced myself
to get out of bed and realized with a jolt that it wasn’t just my arm that was
sore. My entire body ached and throbbed. I stood up with a small, wimpy moan
and found myself unwilling to move. I just stood there with my eyes closed,
trying to outwait the pains that were shooting up the backs of my legs. After a
minute I realized standing still didn’t help the pain and took a step toward
the food service area. Maybe about a thousand jolts of black coffee would blast
the aches out of me.

The strong, black coffee didn’t take away my aches, but it
gave me the energy to keep moving. As I prepared for my day, my muscles slowly
warmed and softened and, by the time I stepped into the Viper, I felt almost
normal. Only a general fatigue and achiness in my right arm remained to remind
me of my late-night skirmish with the devil.

Along with the jolt of excitement I felt at having won the
minor battle against him with a newfound power of my own, I was deeply aware of
a sense of mental discomfort that I wasn’t ready, or willing, to examine too
closely just yet. I was only dimly aware that it had nothing to do with my
behavior of the night before and everything to do with his.

Chapter
Twelve

The Devil’s Friend Pays a Visit

The thing had fangs the size of thumbs and claws the
length of hands,

It tore the flesh of one she loved and died for its
demands.

There is only one thing worse than being tempted by evil.
That would be paying taxes. In the year 2091, the tax bite basically eats up
about eighty percent of our earnings and business expenses eat up the rest.
That’s why I was in such a foul mood that day. It really had nothing to do with
my previous night’s frolic with evil.

I posted my electronic signature on the payment for another
really scary bill and grimaced at Emo, who, as usual, sat across from me
suffering the slings and arrows of my grimaces and pained sighs with a look of
terror that was only exacerbated by his devilish countenance. Emo, it seems,
has never really learned to trust in our success and, as a result, always
stands on the precipice of despair over such mundane things as bill paying and
fee collection. In other words, in a world that is split exactly in half
between the glass is half empty and the glass is half full types, Emo is on the
Board of Directors for the former group.

With one, final sigh, I paid the last of the bills and
touched my hand to the ID pad to close down the virtual accountant software I’d
been using. With this action, Emo’s despair only deepened. His devilish
features had sunk into a truly deplorable state, making him look more devil
than the angel I knew him to be. I watched him squirm helplessly in his chair
for a minute before I let him off the hook. What can I say, I
am
part
devil.

“Looks like we’ll make it another month, though I’m not
quite sure how we pulled it off.”

Emo sighed and let his red features relax into a neutral
state. “I knew that. I just wanted to hear it from your pretty, pink lips.” His
smile turned devilish and I couldn’t help laughing.

“Yeah. Right. Did you confirm our appointment for this
afternoon?”

Emo stood and walked toward the door of my office as the
bell on the outer office door jangled. “I put the information on your desk.
It’s there somewhere, under all the paper.” He disappeared out the door and I
swiveled to stare out of my newly repaired window.

This time of day, in the part of town where my office was
located, not much traffic moved on the streets below or the sky above. During
peak traffic times, air cabs and sky buses forged an almost constant traffic
pattern across the airspace outside my third floor windows. However, the ultra
green movement had been successful in nearly shutting down all travel between
the hours of one p.m. and four p.m.. Drivers who found they needed to travel
during these hours now needed to have a special permit to do it, which, of course,
reduced traffic during these afternoon hours mostly to Traffic Detectives and
critical care vans. Along with a few, well connected rebels who refused to be
told where they could go and when they would go there. It probably won’t
surprise you to hear I’m one of those. Doesn’t surprise me.

The empty sky outside was darkening with some sort of
weather. By craning my neck I could see the few, scattered trees on the mainly
empty street. The trees had begun to sway from side to side in a quickly
growing wind. Something skittered across my peripheral vision and a sense of
foreboding filled me. A sudden chill ran down my spine and I shivered under it.
Just as the little hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention, I heard a
strangled cry from the outer office and threw myself out of my office chair.

Emo had put himself into a battle stance and was barely
breathing as I came up behind him. He moved one hand just enough to tell me to
stay back. Of course, being me, I ignored him and moved forward so I could see
what his large, red body was blocking from my sight. As my eyes landed on our
unwelcome visitor I just had time to wonder what it was in my nature that made
me resent authority and spurn damn good advice before the thing, seeing me,
sprang.

It was about the size of a very large dog or a small pony.
That, however, is where the resemblance to things cute and fuzzy and man’s best
friend-ish ended. As its ticklike, leathery body launched itself through the
air, my protective instincts kicked into overdrive and I sprang sideways,
reaching for one of the platinum daggers I had strapped to my left thigh as I
rolled behind Emo’s large, sturdy desk and regained my feet.

I heard the impact as the gargoyle slammed into Emo. My
partner’s devil came out in a big way as the thing bared greasy yellow teeth
and went for his throat with a snarl. For the moment, Emo’s devilish strength,
fueled in no small way by the fact that he was monumentally pissed off, allowed
him to match the gargoyle’s strength and hold him off. However, I could tell
what it was costing him by the way his veins were popping and I quickly
realized that he wouldn’t be able to hold the thing off for long.

Clamping the eight-inch-long knife between my teeth, I
dropped to my belly and slithered under the desk, hoping that Emo could keep
the thing occupied long enough to allow me to sneak up on it and break its
spine, which is the only way I know of to kill a gargoyle.

With the instinctive understanding that comes from a long
relationship Emo seemed to sense my intent and, with the last of his quickly
waning strength, began trying to get the gargoyle turned so that its back was
to me.

I was a mere two feet away when Emo began to lose the battle
and went down with the gargoyle on top of him. From where I lay, stretched out
on my belly with the knife still clenched in my teeth, I could see the long,
deep holes in Emo’s arms and legs where the thing had held on and pierced him.
Blood flowed out of him into a pool of shimmering red. Half angel blood. I
quickly dipped the knife into Emo’s blood and jumped to my feet.

The gargoyle’s thick, ugly head turned to me and its snout
opened in a roar as it saw me standing over it with the blood-tipped knife. “To
Hades with you, fool. For God hath tired of you.”

As it whipped around, too fast for anything human to move, I
drove the dagger into its chest and twisted it sideways, feeling gristle, flesh
and bone give way under my adrenaline-fueled charge. The blood that tipped my
knife was like acid to the gargoyle’s flesh. As the sharp, deadly knife did its
work, the blood helped it along by softening and melting away any flesh or
gristle it touched. My nose wrinkled against the acrid smell of burning ’goyle
and I couldn’t help thinking that if some inventive chef ever attempted to cook
up a mess of gargoyle, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t taste like chicken.

The howl of pain the gargoyle let loose covered my screams
as its claws ripped across both of my upper arms and raked my chest just below
my chin. Combined with the platinum of my knife, the angel blood was just
enough to weaken the gargoyle so that Emo could grasp its head and twist until
we heard its spine snap. Then we sank, panting, to the floor on either side of
the nasty thing. We leaned against the twisted carcass of our victim until we
could recapture enough breath to speak.

I looked at Emo over the gargoyle and wrinkled my nose.
“This thing stinks.”

Emo nodded, gulping against the pain in his arms and legs as
he pulled himself upright and away from it. He was making a funny wheezing
noise that bothered me but, under the circumstances, didn’t surprise me much.