Envy

The homeless man lifted his knife over his shoulder and lunged forward, gunning for Adrian with the kind of superhuman strength that only the crazy had.

Ad sank down into his thighs. His normal move would be to tuck and roll, and come up from underneath, but not with Eddie on the ground: He needed to keep his fallen friend in the corner of his eye . . . because the guy was not moving, not going for a weapon, not . . . oh, shit, not moving . . .

“Come on, Eddie—shake it off!” Switching his crystal dagger to his left hand, Ad focused on the forearm of the possessed harpy, waiting for the right moment—

He caught the flailing limb on the downstroke, at the perfect second to change the switchblade’s trajectory and redirect it back at the bastard. And the course correction should have been easy as pie, with the weapon making an arc that avoided contact with Ad’s major organs and terminated in the gut of the attacker.

No. Go.

The wiry body controlled by the haywire mind slipped from his grip like Ad was trying to hold on to a gust of wind.

And that was when he realized that Eddie wasn’t going to get up on his feet.

Like the harpy could read his mind, laughter bubbled out of the lost soul, sounding like piano keys hit randomly with a heavy hand, nothing but sharp, discordant noise.

The fucker was practically flying over the ground as it came at Adrian again, knife over his shoulder, skin peeling back from that face that was more skull than flesh.

Ad had no choice but to focus on his attacker and protect himself. Eddie was as good as dead on the pavement if Ad didn’t survive this and get him to safety. There was no losing this one.

Crouching down at the last moment, he tackled the piece of shit, pile-driving the harpy back against a building. As impact was made, a blazing pain above his kidneys told him that that knife had broken skin and gone in a hell of a lot deeper, but there was no time to worry about a leak. He reached up, caught that wild-card arm, and nailed it to the wet brick. Locking the limb in place, he stabbed upward with his dagger once.

All that maniacal laugher got replaced by the high-pitched scream of pain.

He stabbed again. And a third time . . . a fourth, a fifth.

Somewhere along the line, it dawned on him that he’d become just as unleashed as the harpy, but he didn’t stop. With vicious, jabbing power, he drove that crystal blade into the man’s torso over and over until he stopped hitting ribs because he’d broken them all, and instead penetrated nothing but a wet sponge of desecrated tissue.

And still he kept going. No longer pinning the man to get control, instead, he held the bastard the loo he could continue stabbing.

The fun and games finally stopped when his blade hit the brick wall, the crystal carving its way into whatever building he had killed against.

Ad was breathing hard as he let his weapon fall to his side. Blood was everywhere, and so was the harpy’s intestinal tract—matter of fact, the bastard was nearly cut in two, his spine the only thing that was linking his hips to the top half of his body.

From out of slack, flappy lips, gagging noises interrupted the steady stream of plasma that blocked the air the man was still trying to get down his throat.

That was going to stop soon, though.

“The devil . . . made me . . . do it. . . .”

“And she can keep you,” Ad growled—before he stabbed the harpy right between the eyes.

There was a terrible screech as Devina’s essence exploded out of the eye sockets of what had once been a street-lost addict, the black smoke coalescing, coming together, preparing an assault of its own.

“Fuck!” With a great leap, Adrian threw his body into the air and went sailing. Eddie’s prone, injured figure was his landing pad, and he covered the angel’s body with his own, becoming the shield that was all that could keep Devina out of his partner’s flesh.

Bracing for impact, he thought to himself, Well, I hadn’t expected to be this right, this soon.

About the death thing, that was.

At least Eddie was going to pull through. It was going to take more than a poke to down him for good. Wounds, after all, could be fixed—they had to be.

As Jim stood with Dog on the sidewalk outside of Veck’s house, he was aware that he was taking a backseat approach to the soul in question, just following the guy from place to place and biding his time until Devina made the next move.

It was fucking painful as shit.

He was much more comfortable assuming an aggressive stance, but wait and see was sometimes the name of the game. Although, damn, the weather could be better. The rain was continuing to fall and he sure as hell could do without the windchill.

Could do without having to studiously ignore what was going on inside the house, as well.

Of course the pair of them were having sex.

Duh.

He’d caught the start of the fun and games just before they’d gone inside, so it was obvious what the next move was: Their chemistry was off the chain, and generally speaking, that was not the kind of stuff you walked away from.

Jim crossed his arms over his chest and hunkered in, all the hot-’n’-heavy making him think about the women he’d been with. Huh. Did Devina count as one? Only if she was in the brunette flesh costume, he supposed. Without it, he probably had to start an “animal” category.

But whatever. Regardless of species, he’d never once been with someone he gave two shits about. The fucking had been a participatory kind of masturbation for him—and maybe, if he was honest, a head game with the chippies. He’d enjoyed getting them off, the sense of control over them being better than anything they’d made him feel in return.

His sex life was over now, though, wasn’t it. What he had with that demon couldn’t possibly count. That was fighting in the war, just with a different set of fists and elbows. And it wasn’t like his lifestyle encouraged frickin’ dating. Although . . .

An abrupt image of Adrian and Eddie hooking up with that redhead in the hotel room in Framingham, Massachusetts, filtered down like it had rained into his head. He saw Eddie stretching over her while Adrian had looked dead behind the eyes as he went to join them.

Devina had done that to the angel. Put that emptiness in his stare.

Fucking bitch.

Taking out a Marlboro, Jim lit the thing and inhaled.

Veck was a lucky man to be with the woman he wanted. Jim was never going to have that. Even if he got Sissy free of—

“Fuck me,” he muttered on the exhale.

Had the shit with that girl gone so far that in some ridiculous part of his brain, he was actually thinking of her as not just “his” as in a responsibility kind of way? But really “his”?

Had he lost his frickin’ mind? She was like nineteen, and he was a hundred and forty thousand years old at this point.

Okay, maybe Adrian and Eddie were right. What was doing with that girl was a distraction. Yeah, he’d tried to package it to himself in all sorts of this-is-cool verbiage, but he’d so been lying. And naturally, when his partners had forced him to look at his head-in-the-sand, he’d thrown it back at them and huffed off like a little bitch.

A scratching at his leg brought his head down. Dog had curled into a sit at his feet and was pawing at his calf, looking worried.

“What is it—”

Jim’s phone went off, and even before he grabbed it and checked the screen, he had a premonition of tragedy.

Accepting the call, all he heard was labored breathing. Then Eddie’s voice, weak and broken. “Trade . . . and Thirteenth. Help—”