“Ohhhhh, she has magic hands,” Diego purred. “Magic, I tell you. Do it again, harder this time.” I was ramming the bristle brush down the barrel.
“Like it up the ass, do you?” I pulled the bristle brush out and laid it on the table, then checked the barrel to ensure there were no stray pieces.
“You know,” Diego said, “we are magical in a sense, imbued with souls and created by spells that not just any savage could pull off. I can feel more than you realize.”
I paused. “You telling me you don’t want me to clean you?”
“Shut it!” Dinah snapped. “I like it.”
“Yeah, I know you do.” I put my hand on her. “I missed you, Dinah. This last year . . . I wasn’t sure I wasn’t going to lose my fucking mind.”
“You and me both, sister,” she whispered.
Sister.
I swallowed hard, not wanting to think about that aspect of Dinah. Her soul belonged to my sister, and when she’d died, she’d been stuffed into the gun. To help me when the time came. Only I’d not known for years that she was someone I knew.
Someone I’d loved.
I let my hands do the work they knew so well as my mind wandered through what I knew for sure, what I suspected, and what I had to find out.
Abnormals were being hunted hard, so much so, the abnormal senators had been stripped of their office. We were being purged out of cities, and human law had been skewed against us.
Fallen angels seemed to be at the head of it.
I needed to find young Harden and get him to hack the tablet to see if we could find out why they were going after abnormals. Because it didn’t feel like it was just as simple as knocking us out of the playing field.
And I needed to find a fallen angel so I could grill the shit out of him or her. The Empire State Building would be the best starting point for that plan. Old school in the clouds.
I must have been talking to myself under my breath because Dinah spoke up as I finished putting her back together. “And where does Killian fit into all of this? You got Bear covered but what about hot stuff?”
“Who is that?” Diego asked.
“Killian is her man,” Dinah said. “A hot-as-sin Irishman who quite frankly I’d like to see down his pants too.”
“Ah, family. I get it. Save the family or stop the bad guys from doing terrible things that might get to your family.” Diego gave a shimmy on the table. “Tough decision.”
I leaned over the table and closed my eyes, struggling to breathe through the emotions. I’d faced this choice before, and it hadn’t gotten any easier.
“Fuck,” I muttered as I got up and went to the small pantry. There were preserved army food bags, and I ripped one open, added water and stirred it up. Once it was somewhat glutinous, I poured it into a bowl and tossed it into the microwave.
While it heated, I paced the small kitchen. Bear had said he was safe enough, but he looked like he’d been through shit. He’d been without me for another year of his young life, again believing I was dead. No, that wasn’t true; he’d been told I was dead and this time he hadn’t believed it at all.
“If you go to him now, they’ll follow you right to him,” Dinah said, stopping me in my tracks. “You have to deal with this first.”
“You sound like Eleanor,” I said.
“Who’s that?” Diego asked.
“My other gun,” I said. “She died protecting me.”
Diego was quiet, no doubt understanding exactly what I meant. Eleanor had been pointed at me, and the only way to save me was to misfire. Doing so had destroyed all her inner workings, killing her a second time.
The microwave dinged and I pulled out the now piping hot bowl and went back to the table. Dinah sighed as I sat next to her. “You know I’m right. If they are hunting abnormals, they’ll want Bear. He’s like you, strong.”
She wasn’t wrong. “I’m a shit mother,” I said as I scooped what was likely supposed to be some sort of pasta dish into my mouth.
“No. You’re a mother bear,” Dinah said. “And mother bears are mean-ass motherfuckers who get shit done. You love your boy, and I love . . . you know, I love him too.” Her voice caught, and I knew she was thinking of her own child. She’d had a daughter before her soul had been stuffed into a gun, and Emerald was out there too. Missing.
That was why Easter had Dinah when they’d been caught by the facility. I’d been pregnant, unable to go looking for Emerald and so I’d asked Easter. I knew that Dinah would do all she could to help Easter find her child. But it hadn’t happened that way, not at all.
“We’ll do this, then we’ll find them both, Dinah. I swear on my life, I will do all I can to find her,” I said, my voice low.
“Okay. Then let’s kill these assholes that have put us into the position of walking away from family even if it’s the right thing to do,” Dinah said. “I’ve got your back, you know that.”
I covered her with both hands. She was right. We had a job to do, and that job was going to get fucking ugly before it was done.
Scarfing down the rest of the meal, I made myself swallow the food even though it stuck in my throat. Next was the shower. The showers in the facility were lukewarm water, and you had only three minutes.
I got the box of hair dye from the bag and took it with me. They’d dyed my hair blond back there, part of their ritual of making me someone I wasn’t. They’d done it to a few of the abnormals.
An
