“Hey,” she cut in. “Hey! Who is this?”
She flashed the paper to the pair of them and they looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Who is this?” she demanded, pointing to the man. “This is one of the souls, isn’t it.”
As alarm bells rang in her head, she focused through her fear.
“Yeah.” Ad shrugged. “So what, we got bigger problems than where Vin diPietro is holding a garage sale of all his—”
“Do you see this?” She jabbed her forefinger at the picture. “Do you see what’s over his head?”
The two of them leaned in as if they both knew damned well they either checked it out or she was going to shove the newspaper in their faces until they answered her.
“No,” Eddie said. “I don’t see anything.”
“You?” she said to Ad.
“Nope. Nada. No offense, but if you need your eyes checked—”
“Jim’s the last soul.” As they stared over at her with all kinds of WTF, she jogged the newspaper and spoke with crystal clarity. “Jim is the final one in play.”
Chapter Forty-five
As Adrian narrowed his eyes on Sissy, his heart skipped a beat and seemed to consider taking a lunch break altogether. Except then he thought, as smart as Sissy was, she had this wrong. Somehow she had to have this wrong.
Eddie clearly felt the same way. “Listen, Sissy, I’m not sure—”
“This man has a halo.” She pointed at the grainy picture of Vin. “Was he one of the souls in the war?”
When neither one of them replied, she nodded grimly. “He was. Wasn’t he. And the man I saw in Home Depot, the one I pointed out to you, Ad. He was also a soul, right? And then there was a guy at my funeral who had a halo, a musician here in town—and I read that he had died in the paper … right after Jim told me we’d lost the round before mine.” She pointed to her own head. “I have a halo.”
Now, an electrical shock went through Ad’s nervous system, the kind of thing that he imagined happened when humans saw what they thought were ghosts, or maybe when you were driving down the highway and an SUV swerved into your lane.
It was the response of an adrenal gland that had just up and wakey-wakey’d.
“Jim also has a halo.” She tossed the newspaper down onto the table. “So I have to be right about this.”
With a curse, Ad closed his eyes and prayed that Eddie jumped in and came up with the ironclad reason this was not true. Eddie would know. He knew everything—
“Let me make sure I understand you,” the other angel murmured. “You see these things?”
“As soon as I got out of Hell, I noticed that Jim had one, and I asked why you two didn’t. He didn’t see it. Doesn’t see mine.”
“Well, I have to tell you, I don’t see anything over your head.”
She shrugged. “Fine, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Is there anyone else who was a soul? Let me see a picture of them, and I’ll tell you. Come on—let me prove this to you.”
“Okay, okay … lemme see what I can find,” Ad muttered, taking out his phone. “How the fuck do you spell DelVecchio—never mind. His father was that serial killer, both of them are all over the Net.”
When he’d found what he was looking for, he turned his phone around and flashed the screen at Sissy. As she bent down and her brows came together, he measured every nuance of her face, from the clarity of her eyes to the tightness of her mouth.
She exhaled with frustration. “Well, I guess I’m wrong. He doesn’t have—”
“That was his father,” Ad said, taking his phone back. Another touch or two and he flashed her a second picture. “How about him.”
But he knew what she was going to say.
“Yes,” she breathed, pointing down. “Right here. It’s right here.”
Ad glanced across at his best buddy. “I thought Jim was supposed to be the fucking savior.”
Eddie’s shell-shocked peepers were not good news. “I, ah, I would not have seen this coming. But I guess … it’s the Creator’s game, right? He made all the rules, and there’s certainly nothing in them that suggests Jim couldn’t also be in play.”
“Mother … fucker.” As Ad leaned back, his bad leg ached so badly he had to sit forward again. “You know, just when I thought things couldn’t get worse.”
“He went after Devina,” Sissy said in a dead tone. “Because of what that demon did to me. Is that his crossroads?”
Eddie whistled under his breath. “Yeah. If he tries to destroy her—”
“Even if it’s for the right reasons,” Ad chimed in as he got to his feet. “Shit.”
“—then, yeah, I could see how it could be a loss for us. Even though Devina is evil and has done a lot of shit, the target isn’t the point. It’s the soul’s decision at the time, it’s the intent that is the measure.”
“We have to stop him,” Sissy said in a small voice.
“Assuming we can.”
Ad rubbed the back of his neck. “Look, regardless of whether or not he’s in play, we gotta go get him. We can’t let him try to take her out on his own. He’s powerful, but Devina? That bitch is capable of things even he can’t make happen.”
“Can she be killed?” Sissy asked.
Eddie shrugged. “Only under the most extreme circumstances. But again, it wouldn’t matter in terms of the war because it’s about his intent.”
Sissy kicked up her chin and glared at the both of them. “I’m coming, too. I don’t care what you say, I’m not—”
“Of course you’re coming,” Ad gritted out. “You’re probably the only one who can get through to him. More to the point, you’re going to find him for us. He could be anywhere in this city.”
Jim landed in a park down by the river, the one close to the boathouse that he’d been in during Matthias’s second round. He stayed away from the lights on the walking lanes out of habit, not necessity: He was deep invisi, undetectable not only by the human eye, but the demon one.
The bene of a little spell he’d been working on in his spare time.
Putting his hand forward, he stared at the knife he’d managed to lift from the penthouse. It was the one Sissy had almost used against Devina, the one that had come from the demon’s precious collection of kitchen cutters. And how did he know its origins? The instant he’d snagged it off the bar while they’d been talking, a vibration had traveled up his arm and nailed him in the chest.
It was her. It was Devina’s very essence.
Getting the thing out of there had also been easier than he’d expected—all he’d had to do was slip it into his waistband and make sure his T-shirt stayed down.
Turning the weight over in his palms, he pictured Devina not just from memory, but as if he were creating a 3-D sculpture of her out of thin air. Every nuance, from the arch of her eyebrows to the curve of her breasts, from the length of her torso and dip of her waist to those long legs and the narrow feet, became totally front and center. And even when he figured he’d gone far enough, he made sure he added the black gleam of her evil eyes and those cherry-red lips … as well as the glow that was always above her and the vicious aura that surrounded her—
The knife began to vibrate.
Like the point of a compass fighting to find true north.
He put one hand over the other and squeezed hard to make sure the thing didn’t get stripped away from him … and then he followed where it took him. Traveling at a jog, he followed the pull sure as if there were a rope around the metal parts and someone was drawing them home.
Passing out of the park, he went by skyscrapers, jogged down streets that paralleled the warehouse district, continued onward to the seedy part of downtown with its clubs and strip joints. And then the knife started to veer to the right, leading him by the apartment building complexes and toward the suburban strip malls and the—
The building it eventually brought him to was low-slung and gray, a nondescript box of functionality with a sign that read, INTEGRATED HUMAN RESOURCES, on the front facade.
Against his palms, the Henckels grew hot, as if it were excited at being so close to their mutual goal.
“Let’s get inside,” he hissed, walking around to the back.
Chapter Forty-six
Sissy walked out of the old mansion’s front door, following Ad and Eddie into the night. As she zipped up Jim’s leather jacket, she breathed in the scent he’d left behind on it … and wondered how in the hell she was going to find him. The two angels seemed convinced she’d be able to, but damned if she knew how.
“Did you know that Devina is a hoarder?” Eddie asked as he held up the necklace Jim had left behind.
She struggled to track what he was saying. “Ah, no.”
Ad sheathed a crystal knife at his hip. “Yeah, she puts the ‘demon’ in OCD.”
“The reason she collects things,” Eddie said, handing the chain with its dangling dove over, “is because ownership is transmitted and collected in metal. The purer the metal, the stronger the tie, but that’s not the only determinant. Strong emotion, physical pain, bloodshed—these strengthen the bond between the animate and the inanimate.”
“It’s why he left that necklace behind,” Ad muttered. “He didn’t want any tie to you to fall into Devina’s hands. Too dangerous.”
“But it’s also going to be how we find her.” Eddie nodded. “That’s gold, for one thing. Very powerful. Add to that the fact that your mother gave it to him and it was yours? And he wore it during times when he was searching for you? Lot of emotion. He’s bonded to that thing as much as you are.”
She stared at the fragile links, the sweet charm. “Okay, so what do I do?”
“Close your eyes. Picture Jim standing in front of you, and recall every detail of him that you can think of. Imagine him in three-D, feel his presence, the weight of him—make eye contact with him. The stronger and more clearly you see him, the better the direction will be. Then when you get the link and it begins to guide you, we’ll drive to wherever he is.”
Sissy nodded, thinking that of all the things she’d done in the last couple of days, this made the most sense and was the least scary. Shutting her lids, she thought about Jim and visualized him before her, noting everything from his dark blond hair to the shadow of beard on his jaw, from the cigarette in his hand to his combat boots, from the jeans and the perennial white T-shirt to the muscular chest. And then she even imagined the necklace itself was on him …
He became so clear to her, her eyes started to water.
“Do you have him with you?” Eddie asked softly.
“Yes…”
“Okay.”
In the silence that followed, she waited for the little gold dove on the thin gold chain to talk to her in some way.
And waited.
Waited some more.
“What is it supposed to do?” she murmured.
“Concentrate harder,” Eddie replied.
Frowning, she went into even greater detail, seeing things like the blue flecks in his eyes, and the way his front teeth were slightly off center, and the scars from old wounds on his body. She imagined that horrible tattoo under the clothes she’d put on him. She pictured him talking to her, hearing the sound of his voice and his rare laugh. She saw him smiling. Then not.
In her hands, the gold of the necklace warmed … except it seemed to be only from her own palms, not anything supernatural or paranormal.
Come on, she thought. Come on.
Anxiety threatened the clarity of what she was visualizing. And the longer she went without any kind of response from the necklace, the more she worried about him locking heads with Devina and bad, bad things happening.
“I don’t think this is working,” she whispered.
“Goddamn it,” Ad said. “What the hell are we going to do now?”
“Give it a little more time.” Eddie cleared his throat. “Let’s just relax.”
Except no amount of relaxing helped. Eventually, she opened her lids and shook her head. “I’m so sorry. I can’t … oh, God, I can’t feel anything.”
“He’s gotta be really fucking invisi.” Ad cursed again. “I mean, for Sis not to get a fucking thing?”
“There has to be another way, right?” Sissy grabbed Eddie’s arm. “There’s got to be something else we can do.”
The angel’s eyes narrowed, like he was playing file-cabinet with every single piece of information that he’d ever learned about anything, going through the headings and subheadings, searching, searching.
“Did he take his phone?” Ad asked.
Sissy shook her head. “It’s upstairs.”
“So much for GPS. Man, too bad they didn’t chip him when he was in XOps. Unless they did?”
Eddie slowly turned and looked toward the plywood-covered windows over on the house’s left flank. “Where’s her book,” he said in a grim voice.
“Devina’s? In the parlor.” Sissy put her necklace on, stretching her arms behind her head to work the clasp. “But I can’t read it anymore.”
And to think she’d assumed that was good news.
“Follow me,” Eddie said before striding back into the house. “I’ve got an idea.”
As Jim picked the lock on the back door of the nondescript office building, he wasn’t sure how much time he had once he infiltrated the interior. Assuming Devina had bought his bullshit, there was a good chance she’d go to the Creator right away—he just didn’t know how long that convo was going to last. He was also banking that her protective virgin-sacrifice signal system wasn’t going to work when she was talking to God Himself. This was based on nothing but a hunch, however—although when he’d been in the Big Guy’s presence himself, the experience had been so completely overwhelming, he’d nearly lost consciousness. With any luck, Devina would have a similar response.
She flashed the paper to the pair of them and they looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Who is this?” she demanded, pointing to the man. “This is one of the souls, isn’t it.”
As alarm bells rang in her head, she focused through her fear.
“Yeah.” Ad shrugged. “So what, we got bigger problems than where Vin diPietro is holding a garage sale of all his—”
“Do you see this?” She jabbed her forefinger at the picture. “Do you see what’s over his head?”
The two of them leaned in as if they both knew damned well they either checked it out or she was going to shove the newspaper in their faces until they answered her.
“No,” Eddie said. “I don’t see anything.”
“You?” she said to Ad.
“Nope. Nada. No offense, but if you need your eyes checked—”
“Jim’s the last soul.” As they stared over at her with all kinds of WTF, she jogged the newspaper and spoke with crystal clarity. “Jim is the final one in play.”
Chapter Forty-five
As Adrian narrowed his eyes on Sissy, his heart skipped a beat and seemed to consider taking a lunch break altogether. Except then he thought, as smart as Sissy was, she had this wrong. Somehow she had to have this wrong.
Eddie clearly felt the same way. “Listen, Sissy, I’m not sure—”
“This man has a halo.” She pointed at the grainy picture of Vin. “Was he one of the souls in the war?”
When neither one of them replied, she nodded grimly. “He was. Wasn’t he. And the man I saw in Home Depot, the one I pointed out to you, Ad. He was also a soul, right? And then there was a guy at my funeral who had a halo, a musician here in town—and I read that he had died in the paper … right after Jim told me we’d lost the round before mine.” She pointed to her own head. “I have a halo.”
Now, an electrical shock went through Ad’s nervous system, the kind of thing that he imagined happened when humans saw what they thought were ghosts, or maybe when you were driving down the highway and an SUV swerved into your lane.
It was the response of an adrenal gland that had just up and wakey-wakey’d.
“Jim also has a halo.” She tossed the newspaper down onto the table. “So I have to be right about this.”
With a curse, Ad closed his eyes and prayed that Eddie jumped in and came up with the ironclad reason this was not true. Eddie would know. He knew everything—
“Let me make sure I understand you,” the other angel murmured. “You see these things?”
“As soon as I got out of Hell, I noticed that Jim had one, and I asked why you two didn’t. He didn’t see it. Doesn’t see mine.”
“Well, I have to tell you, I don’t see anything over your head.”
She shrugged. “Fine, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Is there anyone else who was a soul? Let me see a picture of them, and I’ll tell you. Come on—let me prove this to you.”
“Okay, okay … lemme see what I can find,” Ad muttered, taking out his phone. “How the fuck do you spell DelVecchio—never mind. His father was that serial killer, both of them are all over the Net.”
When he’d found what he was looking for, he turned his phone around and flashed the screen at Sissy. As she bent down and her brows came together, he measured every nuance of her face, from the clarity of her eyes to the tightness of her mouth.
She exhaled with frustration. “Well, I guess I’m wrong. He doesn’t have—”
“That was his father,” Ad said, taking his phone back. Another touch or two and he flashed her a second picture. “How about him.”
But he knew what she was going to say.
“Yes,” she breathed, pointing down. “Right here. It’s right here.”
Ad glanced across at his best buddy. “I thought Jim was supposed to be the fucking savior.”
Eddie’s shell-shocked peepers were not good news. “I, ah, I would not have seen this coming. But I guess … it’s the Creator’s game, right? He made all the rules, and there’s certainly nothing in them that suggests Jim couldn’t also be in play.”
“Mother … fucker.” As Ad leaned back, his bad leg ached so badly he had to sit forward again. “You know, just when I thought things couldn’t get worse.”
“He went after Devina,” Sissy said in a dead tone. “Because of what that demon did to me. Is that his crossroads?”
Eddie whistled under his breath. “Yeah. If he tries to destroy her—”
“Even if it’s for the right reasons,” Ad chimed in as he got to his feet. “Shit.”
“—then, yeah, I could see how it could be a loss for us. Even though Devina is evil and has done a lot of shit, the target isn’t the point. It’s the soul’s decision at the time, it’s the intent that is the measure.”
“We have to stop him,” Sissy said in a small voice.
“Assuming we can.”
Ad rubbed the back of his neck. “Look, regardless of whether or not he’s in play, we gotta go get him. We can’t let him try to take her out on his own. He’s powerful, but Devina? That bitch is capable of things even he can’t make happen.”
“Can she be killed?” Sissy asked.
Eddie shrugged. “Only under the most extreme circumstances. But again, it wouldn’t matter in terms of the war because it’s about his intent.”
Sissy kicked up her chin and glared at the both of them. “I’m coming, too. I don’t care what you say, I’m not—”
“Of course you’re coming,” Ad gritted out. “You’re probably the only one who can get through to him. More to the point, you’re going to find him for us. He could be anywhere in this city.”
Jim landed in a park down by the river, the one close to the boathouse that he’d been in during Matthias’s second round. He stayed away from the lights on the walking lanes out of habit, not necessity: He was deep invisi, undetectable not only by the human eye, but the demon one.
The bene of a little spell he’d been working on in his spare time.
Putting his hand forward, he stared at the knife he’d managed to lift from the penthouse. It was the one Sissy had almost used against Devina, the one that had come from the demon’s precious collection of kitchen cutters. And how did he know its origins? The instant he’d snagged it off the bar while they’d been talking, a vibration had traveled up his arm and nailed him in the chest.
It was her. It was Devina’s very essence.
Getting the thing out of there had also been easier than he’d expected—all he’d had to do was slip it into his waistband and make sure his T-shirt stayed down.
Turning the weight over in his palms, he pictured Devina not just from memory, but as if he were creating a 3-D sculpture of her out of thin air. Every nuance, from the arch of her eyebrows to the curve of her breasts, from the length of her torso and dip of her waist to those long legs and the narrow feet, became totally front and center. And even when he figured he’d gone far enough, he made sure he added the black gleam of her evil eyes and those cherry-red lips … as well as the glow that was always above her and the vicious aura that surrounded her—
The knife began to vibrate.
Like the point of a compass fighting to find true north.
He put one hand over the other and squeezed hard to make sure the thing didn’t get stripped away from him … and then he followed where it took him. Traveling at a jog, he followed the pull sure as if there were a rope around the metal parts and someone was drawing them home.
Passing out of the park, he went by skyscrapers, jogged down streets that paralleled the warehouse district, continued onward to the seedy part of downtown with its clubs and strip joints. And then the knife started to veer to the right, leading him by the apartment building complexes and toward the suburban strip malls and the—
The building it eventually brought him to was low-slung and gray, a nondescript box of functionality with a sign that read, INTEGRATED HUMAN RESOURCES, on the front facade.
Against his palms, the Henckels grew hot, as if it were excited at being so close to their mutual goal.
“Let’s get inside,” he hissed, walking around to the back.
Chapter Forty-six
Sissy walked out of the old mansion’s front door, following Ad and Eddie into the night. As she zipped up Jim’s leather jacket, she breathed in the scent he’d left behind on it … and wondered how in the hell she was going to find him. The two angels seemed convinced she’d be able to, but damned if she knew how.
“Did you know that Devina is a hoarder?” Eddie asked as he held up the necklace Jim had left behind.
She struggled to track what he was saying. “Ah, no.”
Ad sheathed a crystal knife at his hip. “Yeah, she puts the ‘demon’ in OCD.”
“The reason she collects things,” Eddie said, handing the chain with its dangling dove over, “is because ownership is transmitted and collected in metal. The purer the metal, the stronger the tie, but that’s not the only determinant. Strong emotion, physical pain, bloodshed—these strengthen the bond between the animate and the inanimate.”
“It’s why he left that necklace behind,” Ad muttered. “He didn’t want any tie to you to fall into Devina’s hands. Too dangerous.”
“But it’s also going to be how we find her.” Eddie nodded. “That’s gold, for one thing. Very powerful. Add to that the fact that your mother gave it to him and it was yours? And he wore it during times when he was searching for you? Lot of emotion. He’s bonded to that thing as much as you are.”
She stared at the fragile links, the sweet charm. “Okay, so what do I do?”
“Close your eyes. Picture Jim standing in front of you, and recall every detail of him that you can think of. Imagine him in three-D, feel his presence, the weight of him—make eye contact with him. The stronger and more clearly you see him, the better the direction will be. Then when you get the link and it begins to guide you, we’ll drive to wherever he is.”
Sissy nodded, thinking that of all the things she’d done in the last couple of days, this made the most sense and was the least scary. Shutting her lids, she thought about Jim and visualized him before her, noting everything from his dark blond hair to the shadow of beard on his jaw, from the cigarette in his hand to his combat boots, from the jeans and the perennial white T-shirt to the muscular chest. And then she even imagined the necklace itself was on him …
He became so clear to her, her eyes started to water.
“Do you have him with you?” Eddie asked softly.
“Yes…”
“Okay.”
In the silence that followed, she waited for the little gold dove on the thin gold chain to talk to her in some way.
And waited.
Waited some more.
“What is it supposed to do?” she murmured.
“Concentrate harder,” Eddie replied.
Frowning, she went into even greater detail, seeing things like the blue flecks in his eyes, and the way his front teeth were slightly off center, and the scars from old wounds on his body. She imagined that horrible tattoo under the clothes she’d put on him. She pictured him talking to her, hearing the sound of his voice and his rare laugh. She saw him smiling. Then not.
In her hands, the gold of the necklace warmed … except it seemed to be only from her own palms, not anything supernatural or paranormal.
Come on, she thought. Come on.
Anxiety threatened the clarity of what she was visualizing. And the longer she went without any kind of response from the necklace, the more she worried about him locking heads with Devina and bad, bad things happening.
“I don’t think this is working,” she whispered.
“Goddamn it,” Ad said. “What the hell are we going to do now?”
“Give it a little more time.” Eddie cleared his throat. “Let’s just relax.”
Except no amount of relaxing helped. Eventually, she opened her lids and shook her head. “I’m so sorry. I can’t … oh, God, I can’t feel anything.”
“He’s gotta be really fucking invisi.” Ad cursed again. “I mean, for Sis not to get a fucking thing?”
“There has to be another way, right?” Sissy grabbed Eddie’s arm. “There’s got to be something else we can do.”
The angel’s eyes narrowed, like he was playing file-cabinet with every single piece of information that he’d ever learned about anything, going through the headings and subheadings, searching, searching.
“Did he take his phone?” Ad asked.
Sissy shook her head. “It’s upstairs.”
“So much for GPS. Man, too bad they didn’t chip him when he was in XOps. Unless they did?”
Eddie slowly turned and looked toward the plywood-covered windows over on the house’s left flank. “Where’s her book,” he said in a grim voice.
“Devina’s? In the parlor.” Sissy put her necklace on, stretching her arms behind her head to work the clasp. “But I can’t read it anymore.”
And to think she’d assumed that was good news.
“Follow me,” Eddie said before striding back into the house. “I’ve got an idea.”
As Jim picked the lock on the back door of the nondescript office building, he wasn’t sure how much time he had once he infiltrated the interior. Assuming Devina had bought his bullshit, there was a good chance she’d go to the Creator right away—he just didn’t know how long that convo was going to last. He was also banking that her protective virgin-sacrifice signal system wasn’t going to work when she was talking to God Himself. This was based on nothing but a hunch, however—although when he’d been in the Big Guy’s presence himself, the experience had been so completely overwhelming, he’d nearly lost consciousness. With any luck, Devina would have a similar response.
