Discount Armageddon
Page 13

My unnamed new buddy swore under his breath, still shining the flashlight in my face. He dropped whatever he was dragging, digging his hand into his pocket and pulling out a small object. Something wet splashed across my chest and neck a moment later, running down my chin to drip into my mouth and nose. I sputtered, widening my eyes in surprised indignation.
“What the hell did you do that for?” I demanded.
“You said you were going to shoot me!” he replied. One hand still held the flashlight. His other arm was thrust out toward me, pointing an antique-looking silver vial in my direction.
“Newsflash, buddy: threats of violence don’t turn this into a wet T-shirt contest.” More liquid dripped into my mouth as I spoke. I spat it out, but not before I’d had time to taste it: mostly water, mixed with salt, and a bitter herb I recognized as aconite. It’s a pretty standard mixture for banishing incubi and succubi. The poor things are deathly allergic.
I gaped at him. “Did you just splash me with holy water?”
“You’re in my trap!” he said. He was starting to sound uncertain. Whatever his script for this encounter was, I was refusing to stick to it in any meaningful way, and he was obviously getting confused. Tough.
“Your trap was on my rooftop,” I said, as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world. “I’m as human as you are. Now do you want to tell me why you’re setting snares, and maybe lower me down from this thing before I lose my temper and start shooting?”
That seemed to put him back on familiar ground. Straightening, he puffed out his chest and said, “I am armored with righteousness.”
“Does righteousness protect you from small-caliber bullets?”
He hesitated. “You’re sure you’re human?”
“Both my parents swear it.”
“I’ll get you down.”
I smiled, not shifting my aim. “Good plan.”
The snare was anchored to an iron bolt hammered into a nearby chunk of masonry. My captor disappeared in that direction, leaving me dangling. I had just long enough to wonder whether he’d decided to cut and run when I felt a sharp tug on the rope, and I was lowered slowly, if not smoothly, to the ground. I tucked the gun back into my waistband, stretching my hands overhead and using them to turn the end of my descent from a straight drop into a lazy somersault.
Pulling my windbreaker down over my hands made me clumsy, but didn’t prevent me from untying the knot, and kept me from getting any more of that stinging slime on my hands. I had just finished pulling off the snare when the man came back into view. He pointed his flashlight at my ankle, and I let my breath hiss out between my teeth. My sock had been able to protect me from the bulk of the damage, but there was still blood soaking into the white cotton in several places. The human leg wasn’t meant to be used as a long-term hanging mechanism.
“You bleed red,” he said, sounding relieved.
“I bleed red, and replacement socks come out of my paycheck.” I slipped the rope off over my foot. “You ever try to get blood out of white cotton?”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t bleed at all, ma’am,” he said. Suddenly formal, he walked over and bent to offer his hand. “I’m sure you understand my caution. I certainly wasn’t expecting to make so undeserving a capture.” I looked at him blankly. When I didn’t take his hand, he hastened to add, “Dominic De Luca, at your service. I promise you my intention is purely to assist.”
“Next time, assist me by not setting snares on the rooftop, okay?” I ignored his hand and levered myself upright, gingerly testing to see how much weight I could put on my left ankle. The answer: not enough. I’d had worse injuries both in the field and on the dance floor, but a banged-up ankle is never an asset. “Ow.”
“I assure you, ma’am, your capture was not my intention.”
“What was your intention? That thing’s too big for pigeons, and you’re not likely to catch many rats up here.”
An expression of distaste flashed across his face. He was decent-looking when he wasn’t scowling like that; he had a good, strong bone structure, dark eyes, and hair that was either black or a deep enough brown that the low light stole its color entirely. Even standing six inches taller than me made him short by American standards, but perfectly reasonable by mine, and he was built like the men I usually danced with: lean and solid-looking. I knew he had to be reasonably strong. He’d managed not to drop me when he untied the snare.
“There are things, ma’am, that it is perhaps better of which you do not know.”
“Hold on.” I studied him, narrowing my eyes. The formal language. The snare. The holy water. The duster, stereotypical uniform of the “monster hunters” of the world. “Things it is perhaps better of which I do not know?”
“There are more things in Heaven and in Earth—”
I raised a hand, cutting him off. “First, do not quote Shakespeare at me. I get that quite enough from my grandma. Second, what are you doing here?”
He narrowed his eyes in turn, the expression barely visible with the flashlight pointed in my direction. “I don’t think I have to answer the questions of a strange woman who stumbles into my snares and refuses to give me her name,” he said.
I looked back toward the thing he’d been dragging when he first appeared. Before he had a chance to stop me, I half-limped over to where it had been dropped. It looked like an old brown sack at first, until I turned it over with my foot and saw the ahool’s characteristically apelike face snarling up at me. Its eyes were glazed with death.
“Miss—”
“You killed it,” I said numbly. “You killed the ahool.”
“You … know this fell beast?” His steps slowed, taking on a newly cautious edge. “You asked what I was doing here. Perhaps I should be asking you the same.”
“You killed it. It was just—just being an ahool, minding its own business, and you killed it! I mean, sure, eventually, that business might have included biting people, and then it would need to be relocated or exterminated, but you didn’t need to just kill it! Not without observing it and making sure it didn’t have a whole flock of buddies that would swarm and eat us both!”
“Miss.” Dominic’s footsteps stopped entirely. His voice was hard. “Who are you?”