Crave

bulldozer and lost. “Eddie?”

The grounded angel opened his eyes. “Holy hell . . . what . . . I don’t know what happened. One minute I was up. Next . . .”

“You were a welcome mat.”

Adrian reached out a hand to help his best friend up. “What the fuck was it?”

“No clue.” Eddie slowly got to his feet. Then he looked over at Jim and cringed. “Jesus Christ . . .”

Jim frowned and glanced around. “What?”

“Your face . . .”

Okay, maybe he only just felt better. Hopefully the looks part would come later. “You’re saying my days as a calendar model are over?”

“Didn’t know you were into that.” Eddie shook his head. “Listen, Isaac wants to talk to you. ASAP.”

Jim glanced at Adrian. “You stay with the welcome mat.”

“Like I would be anywhere else?”

Jim jogged over to the house. The back door was wide open, which was another piece of bad news—and shit only got more critical as he went into the kitchen.

God, you never got used to the smell of a mortal gunshot wound: There were different flavors, gut versus chest versus brain, but the palette was everything metallic between the lead of the shot and the copper of the fresh blood.

First body he found was a man he knew: Captain Alistair Childe. The poor guy was lying in the archway that led out into the front hall, having crumpled to the floor in a heap.

Not the source of the blood, though. There was none on the clothes or the tile, and Childe was breathing evenly in spite of the little knockout nap he was having.

Body number two was halfway down to the front door and clearly the source of the smell. . . . Yeah, wow, that bastard was a candidate for a closed coffin if Jim had ever seen one: His face was distorted from the inside out, the bullet having traveled up the meat and bone of his chin and nose before exiting on a hrow-open-the-doors- and-sing-like-Ethel-Merman routine at the crown of his skull.

Going by the snake tattoo around the guy’s neck, it had to be Matthias’s second in command.

And Isaac was standing over the guy with a puss full of what-the-fuck.

Rothe looked up and raised his weaponless hands. “He did it himself. He fucking did it . . . himself. Damn it. . . . How’s the father?”

Jim knelt beside the captain to double-check. Yup, Childe had been beaned on the head, likely with the butt of a gun, but he was already starting to moan as if he were coming around.

“He’ll be all right.” Jim rose up and headed down to Isaac and the other guy. As he got closer, the smell got worse—

He slowed and then stopped altogether. And rubbed his eyes.

A shimmering gray shadow covered the body of Matthias’s second in command from head to foot, moving around the arms and legs and blown-off head in the same way Jim’s spell shifted and covered the house they were all in. And the blood was all wrong—gray, not brilliant red.

Devina, Jim thought. She was either in the man or had taken him over.

“He just put it under his chin and pulled the trigger.” Isaac sank down onto his haunches and nodded to the gun that was in the corpse’s right hand. “He used my weapon to do it.”

“Get away from the body, Isaac.”

“Fuck that, I have to clean it up before—”

Jim wasn’t interested in arguing and grabbed hold of the guy, pulling him up and back a couple of feet. “You don’t know what it is.”

“The hell I don’t. He came to pick me up.”

Jim glared at Isaac. “Last I heard you were lamming it.”

“Change of priorities.”

Damn it, get abducted for twelve hours and the world goes to shit: Isaac turning himself in, dead demon in a civilian’s front hall, no one making sense anymore.

“I won’t let you go back in, Isaac. Or sacrifice yourself to keep someone else alive.” Because how much you want to bet that was what was going on here.

“Not your choice. And no offense, but I still can’t imagine why you give a shit.” The soldier took out one of XOps’ transistors, which had this time been disguised as a Life Alert. “Besides, it’s moot. I’ve already resummoned.”

That blinking light made Jim want to holler. So he did. “What the fuck are you doing? Matthias is going to kill you—”

“So.”

A patrician voice interjected. “I thought you were coming forward with information on Matthias.”

Jim glanced over his shoulder. Alistair Childe had gotten to his feet and was coming down to them, his hand on the wall like he needed help balancing.

“I thought that was the plan, Isaac. And, Jim, I thought you had died over in Caldwell. Three or four days ago.”

Jim and Isaac both hopped on the Total Pass Train and ignored the rhetoricals. Which was easy to do considering how much needed figuring out.

The fact that Matthias’s number two had come in and killed himself with Isaac’s gun was only surface dressing. The core truth was that Devina was all over this situation. But to what end? If Isaac was the target, why the fuck hadn’t she just taken him now while Jim wasn’t around?

“Did she—he have a clear shot at you?” Jim asked. “At any point?”

“You mean to kill? Hell, yeah—I was up against the wall, palms planted, with my weapons on the floor. That’s about as clear as you get.”

“This makes no sense.” He looked down at the body. “No sense.”

“We have to get rid of the body,” Isaac said. “Before I go, we have to—”

“I’m not letting you turn yourself in.”

“Not your call.”

“God damn it—”

“My thoughts exactly.” Isaac frowned, his narrowed eyes roving around Jim’s puss. “And what the fuck happened to you last night?”

For a split second, Jim strongly considered banging his head against the wall, except that was redundant, given the shape he was in. How the hell was he going to get Isaac out of this mess?

It wasn’t like he could come clean and explain what was really doing: Well, see, I really did die, and Matthias is not the problem. I’m trying to keep you away from a demon who wants your soul. And I don’t have a clue what she’s playing at here.

Yeah, that would go over like a lead balloon.

Isaac didn’t wait for an answer to the question about Jim’s face. Clearly, the guy had been in a brawl with eight hundred bouncers or some shit, and that was not his business. What did have his name written all over it was this operative who’d somehow managed to magically fix his own arm before he killed himself.

Unless . . . twins?

Shit . . . yes. That had to be it. And what a tool for Matthias to fuck with people’s minds. No wonder he’d picked the SOB to be second in command.

As Jim cursed again and took up wearing a path in the hall’s runner, Isaac bent down and quickly unbuttoned the second in command’s sleeve. No trace of anything on that forearm in the form of a surgical repair, no evidence the skin or bone had ever been broken.

Twins. Had to be.

With a quick rip, he tore open the black shirt, buttons popping off and bouncing on the floor. The bulletproof vest that was revealed was a surprise. Yeah, they were standard-issue, but why would you bother with one if you were going to turn your skull into a piñata?

Unsure exactly what he was looking for, he stripped the Velcro straps off the vest—