Reaper: The Demontouched Saga (Book 3) (4 page)

“And what do I expect?”

“That he is doing all of this. He is on your side,” he says. “On our side.”

“Then there shouldn’t be a problem,” I say, walking back towards my car.

- 5 -

The area around the old Holiday Inn is quiet as usual. Nal used to keep a security force on hand to keep people away from the area, but as his territory expanded he had to send those people elsewhere. Except for the occasional attack from a rival, people generally tried to avoid the area.

That is until a pack of demons decided to attack the place.

I park the car a few blocks away. Call me paranoid, but I want to scope things out before they know I’m here.

“What is it you expect to see?” Zeke asks when I pull out the binoculars.

“Just playing it safe.”

“You can put them away. I promise you will survive whatever is inside without them.”

“Fine.” I throw the binoculars into the back seat and pull out my sword. Turning around I notice Zeke is standing back with his hand over his mouth. “Everything OK?”

“I,” he says. “I’ve never been a fan of those blades.”

That I can understand. While I have it in my arsenal to help me in killing every demon I come across, they also happen to be one of the few ways to actually kill an angel. There are so many things that can kill a human that we only freak out when they are being used to threaten us. I could easily see myself freaking out if I was looking at one of the few things that could kill me.

“Let’s get this over with,” I say. “If you are right, it won’t even leave my hip.”

Within a few minutes we come up on the parking lot. Unless Nal opened the place for business, he has loads of company today. Company was one thing he was firm about spreading out. When your business affairs cross over into various boundaries, you end up working with a wide variety of people. The more pieces you have to play with, the more likely it is that some of those pieces won’t get along together.

Nal must have called me a few dozen times that first year while he learned that lesson the hard way, but all I could do was break things up after the fact. I ended up doing some pretty disturbing things to one repeat offender, but even that didn’t keep them from starting shit on Nal’s front door.

It took one of them killing his dog for him to finally change. It wasn’t even over anything important. Two people were trying to open up a shop about a block from each other. The one owner, a woman in her late forties, insisted that she was there first and that the other needed to pack up and find another spot. When Nal told her that competition could be a good thing, the woman stormed out in a hurry. Things would have been fine, but the other woman was downstairs waiting for an appointment.

The angry gal pulled out a gun from her purse and fired a few shots at the other. She was a horrible shot, thankfully, but she was persistent.

Joe walked in the door with Nal’s dog when she was changing out her magazine. He let go of the leash and that dog just ran at her.

That was one of the smartest dogs I’ve ever seen. Nal trained him to attack someone if they had a weapon out. He didn’t attack often, but when he did it was nasty. Nal has a dozen or so pictures to prove it.

She got the magazine into the gun just seconds before she was taken down. With a lucky shot she managed to hit the dog in the chest. Amazingly, it didn’t stop the dog. That dog latched on the woman’s throat, ripping it out before he collapsed a few minutes later.

Nal didn’t take the woman’s picture that day.

From that day forward, he made it a point to keep an hour or so window between appointments, though he couldn’t bring himself to get another dog.

“Are you sure he still controls the place?” I ask. There are only two explanations at this point. Either Nal has changed his ways, or someone else has taken over.

“There is only one way to find out.”

We take our time walking across the parking lot. I don’t notice any movement, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t someone hiding in one of the cars.

The doors to the lobby are propped open by a chair. Before walking in, I look down at a red stain on the pavement. This has to be the spot Joe died. I close my eyes and say a silent prayer. There is no way this place will be the same again.

I walk inside and notice the lobby is empty. Not only is all the furniture gone, there isn’t anybody here to watch the front entrance.

“Where is everyone?” I ask. Nal isn’t the paranoid type, but he knew the value of having a set of eyes at the entrance. You just never knew when someone was going to grow a set of balls and try to start a fight.

“Something is wrong.”

“Let’s head upstairs. Maybe he is redoing the lobby for some reason.” Doubtful. He may not have liked how it looked down there, but he also didn’t spend enough time there to give a shit. I doubt one of the guys could have talked him into it either. He wasn’t afraid to invest resources when the time called for it, but he also hated to waste them.

I enter the hallway, walking past the elevators and toward the staircase.

“Still afraid of elevators?” Zeke says laughing.

“I prefer the term ‘cautious pessimism’.” There are a dozen ways I could label it, but that has to be the closest. You can triple it when there are questions about stability, like in here.

“Let’s take it nice and slow. No sense in announcing that we are coming,” I say.

Zeke nods and enters the stairwell. We make it about half a story when the lights flicker. Zeke snickers when I give him my best ‘I told you so’ look.

He stops at the doorway to the second floor and peeks in the window. “I see three of them in here.”

“Close?”

He shakes his head.

“Let’s keep going, then.” I hate to be caught between groups, but there is no way to know how many people we are dealing with in here.

Zeke walks up three stairs when the door opens. I duck back against the wall in a feeble attempt to hide. My thoughts go back to my son trying the same trick with me. He had the advantage of having a father who was fine with letting him win. Something tells me I don’t have that advantage here.

I hear the audible clink of the door closing before he has a chance to speak.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Friends of Nal.”

He looks at me curiously. My instincts are telling me that I need to take this guy out. He may be harmless, but there is no telling about the other ones behind that door.

The guy pushes in the thumb latch and opens the door. I hear a light thud a split second before seeing the head of an arrow stick out from the man’s chest. He lets go of the latch, causing the door to slam shut before he falls face first, rolling down the stairs. I hold onto the handrail and jump over the body as it passes by.

Zeke walks down the stairs and looks into the window again. “We need to move.”

I don’t ask why, instead rushing down the stairs as fast as my legs will allow. I’m nearly at the bottom when the sound of gunfire fills the stairwell. The echoing shots ringing in my ears. I look back in time to see Zeke’s shoulder twitch slightly before noticing a bright white light shining from the bullet wound. If the shot was slowing him down, he was not showing any sign of it as he reached the ground floor quickly.

“You OK?” I ask.

“I’m fine. We need to go.” He takes off down the hallway and I follow close behind. When we get to the lobby the gunfire starts again. It is impossible to dodge a bullet, especially ones you can’t see, but I can tell they are firing blind as I hear the shots hit the wall behind me.

When I reach the door I turn around to face the bastards shooting at us. It is hard to use my tricks in an enclosed area, like the stairwell. But in a wide open area, like the lobby here, I am free to do my thing.

Three people, two guys and a woman, stop when they see me and square off and open fire.

I hold my hands out in front of me and concentrate on the metal heading towards me. Stopping a bullet is as simple as putting as much, or more, energy into the front of the bullet to match the amount of force that was used to fire it. It may sound like it should never work, but I have an edge after about fifteen feet.

I’ve stopped a bullet from as close as five feet away, but that was so close that I don’t wish to try that again. From this range, however, I can stop them all day long.

I keep my effort into stopping the new rounds as they continue to unload their magazines at me. After a few seconds the gunfire stops. I guess they finally noticed the bullets flying in the air between us.

“You people and your guns.” I throw my hand forward to push the bullets back at the shooters. The air in front of them shimmers and change into light shade of red as the bullets close in. When they hit the red the bullets turn bright orange before flickering out before they hit their mark.

A temporary stalemate is as good as a win for them. Now that I know they have some form of shield, I tuck my tail between my legs and rush out of the front door before they fire again.

I make it to the first line of parked cars before the gunfire starts again. Ducking behind a Dodge Charger as the bullets ricochet off of vehicles around me.

“Zeke,” I say, trying to get his attention. It isn’t like him to leave someone behind, but he may not have noticed me dropping off in the lobby.

“Over here.” He pokes his head around the side of a truck about three rows back.

I peek around the side of the Charger, looking for my opportunity to get out of here. It takes another thirty seconds before it comes. The gunfire stops for a moment so I make my move.

Crawling on the ground as fast as I can, I work my way back towards Zeke. Another round of sporadic gunfire opens back up. From the sound, I can tell they aren’t even close. We just may get out of here yet.

“Five more just came out to play,” Zeke says when I lean against the truck. “Either we need to stand up and fight, or we need to run.”

As much as I want to stay and fight, this isn’t a battle we are going to walk away from.

“I vote run. Death just doesn’t seem like a lot of fun at the moment.”

Zeke snorts and helps me to my feet. “You have a way with words, my friend.”

We make it back another row before the gunfire hits the surrounding cars. I drop to the ground to avoid getting hit myself. “Think you can take that asshole out for us?”

Zeke nods before peeking over the trunk of the car. He readies an arrow and leans to the side of the car before loosing his shot. “He’s down,” he says a moment later.

“The yellow one. Blow the yellow one,” I hear someone say from a distance. Zeke and I look at each other and then at the yellow Mustang that is about five yards away from us. There is no time for us to think, only run.

I get about three steps when the blast sends me in the air and into the rear bumper of a minivan. In another three seconds, things go dark.

- 6 -

When I finally come to, I find myself tied to a chair in one of the hotel rooms. I’ve stayed here more than enough times to know how they look on the inside. Nal never even considered changing a thing about the rooms through the years. He figured they would work just fine if any of his people needed a place to stay without putting any time, or money, into them.

Across the room I notice Zeke laying on a bed with hands and feet tied to the bedposts. His shirt and pants are ripped beyond recognition but he doesn’t have a scratch on him. If it wasn’t for the blood that soaked into the sheets, you wouldn’t even know he had been hurt.

“Zeke, you OK?”

“I was wondering if you would wake up. The way you hit the van, I was sure you were dead.”

“How long have I been out?” I felt like I’ve got a bad hangover, but I wouldn’t think that I’ve been out for more than a few hours.”

“Three days.”

Holy shit, I must have taken a nasty hit. As you can imagine, my mouth has gotten me in trouble occasionally. There has been a time or two it wrote a check I just couldn’t cash. It has only happened once post-Eunie, and there may have been a fifth or two of vodka involved. If you think I have a mouth sober, you should see me drunk.

“What about you. Your clothes look like shit.”

“I’m fine. A large chunk of glass from the car severed the tendons in my legs. They wouldn’t have taken me otherwise.” While it is difficult to kill an angel, they still can be hindered by any damage their host takes.

“I know we are in the hotel, but where did they take us?” I wiggle my wrists around trying to break them free with no luck. Whoever tied me up wanted to make sure I didn’t go anywhere.

“Somewhere on the fourth floor. I counted the steps as they took me up.”

“What are our odds on getting out of here in one piece?” I ask.

“Unless you found the secret to using all of your powers without letting Einuir take over, probably well below zero.”

Looking around the room I’m not finding anything that could help us either. Wooden chair in front of a wooden desk against the wall with Zeke tied up to a wooden bed.

“Any idea on how many they have outside the door?” I ask, staring at the brass doorknob.

“As far as I know, just two. They never leave even if someone else comes in.”

“Been checking on us, eh?”

“Every few hours.” He hesitates for a few moments. “Checking on you.”

“Anyone I would know?”

“Remember the guy we saw downtown?”

“The one with the orb?”

“Him. He has been trying to draw Einuir out without killing you. One of the others wanted to just kill you for it, but for some reason your friend wants you alive.”

“Sounds like fun.” It wouldn’t be the first time someone wanted to bring him out. Something tells me it pisses their kind off to know that someone is using their powers to fight against them. Especially now when they finally work together somewhat. “When was the last time they were in here?”