“Aw, man!” Will pounded on the steering wheel once with his fist. “I wish I could see one.”
“No. You don’t.”
Will drove for me. He flew to all areas of the country with me. He patched me up with his EMT training, even going so far as to duct tape my insides to my insides once, to get me to the hospital. That was how I justified asking for his help. But I kept him at a distance, for the challenges. He didn’t need to have demon names flitting around inside his skull. He didn’t need to see the horrors that existed just outside human perception. It was the only way I could repay him, really.
“So did you do some of that kung fu shit and kick his ass?” Despite the injuries he’d helped repair, Will still had some grand Hollywood vision of what being a champion entailed. No doubt, he dreamed of epic battles across rooftops with me dodging bullets and flinging ninja stars.
“No. Just sprayed him with Mace. He left.” The line of cars in front of us seemed impossibly long. I suddenly didn’t want to be in the car, discussing my altercation with Axel. Would Will even know if he’d met Axel? Would he recognize the danger?
“Well, that’s kinda anticlimactic. I heard there was a big brawl and stuff.” The doofus actually looked disappointed.
“Other people were fighting. We were just talking.” Other people would have taken the “I don’t really wanna talk about it” hint. But not Will.
He gave me an odd look. “What do you talk to demons about?”
I shrugged. “Souls. Hell. Stuff like that.” Not entirely true. I don’t think Axel and I had ever talked about Hell. And we talked about way more than souls.
He’d been almost frantic-Axel, I mean, not Will-wanting to tell me something. “What is it, Lassie? Timmy fell in the well?” I doubt Axel would appreciate the similarity. What did he know that was so damn important? It had to be about Miguel and Guy. Axel knew what had happened to them, which meant it was more than just an unfortunate coincidence. And that, sadly, was what I had believed all along. Sometimes, I hate being right.
“Dude! You talk about Hell? What’s it like? Have you seen it?”
I blinked at him, then reached over and smacked him lightly upside the back of the head. “Are you nuts?”
“Ow.” He rubbed his head and glared at me, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “I was just askin’…”
To our right, horns blared and voices shouted. I wondered if it was some of the earlier combatants, meeting for round two. Axel may have nudged them over the edge, but he couldn’t create such rage out of nothing. At least, I didn’t think he could. I hadn’t thought he could assume human form, either, and we’d seen where that had gotten me. I hate being wrong, too.
“So… you need me to drive for you?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“I didn’t think you sat around talking to demons for fun, dude.” He pointed to my tattooed right hand. “And that usually means you got work to do. And then, I got work to do.”
Will has always been strangely pragmatic about the oddities in my life. “Two weeks from now. Night of the full moon.”
He nodded and finally got the car pulled out onto the street, where a traffic cop waved us on through the red light. If Will noticed that I ducked down in the seat, he didn’t mention it. “That’ll give me time to stock up on supplies. You’re not expecting any burns this time, are you?”
“No, not this time.” In all fairness, the fire fight-in the most literal sense-had gone heavily in my favor. I barely got singed, that time. Well, and lost my eyebrows. And burned my knuckles. And lost maybe two inches of my hair. It was a good day!
“Just a normal hack ’n’ slash, hmm?” He nodded his head in time to the music as we pulled out onto the highway and headed north.
“Yeah. For whatever ‘normal’ is.”
“Truth, dude.”
We rode in silence for several miles before he spoke again. “So, can you beat him? The one you were talking to?”
Now that was an interesting thought. If it ever came down to it, could I beat Axel? I was never cocky enough to answer with a “Sure thing!” about any of my challenges. But once, I might have been more confident where Axel was concerned. Now… I wasn’t sure.
What I said was, “Yeah. I can beat him.” Explaining the difference between the demon following me around and the demon I was contracted to fight was more than I was willing to go through tonight.
“Cool.” Will fell silent. Maybe he finally figured out that I wasn’t really up for witty repartee.
I stared out at the city lights whizzing by, my own reflection glaring back at me from the dark window. Somewhere in this whole situation, I was getting screwed. I knew this as surely as I knew the sun would come up in the morning. Even worse, my options weren’t looking good. I was stuck between a very nasty demon and a very hot place.
On one hand, I could bargain with Axel. I could sacrifice something of mine or betray someone I cared about, in order to get some unknown information that may or may not have any practical value. For all I knew, I could give him what he wanted, and he could tell me the sky was blue and water was wet. Dealing with Axel was the same as dealing with the devil, and the first rule there is “Don’t.”
On the other hand, Miguel and Guy were dead, and I was sure someone had worked damn hard to make them so. Neither of them would go down peacefully. Given my recent road- rage incidents, I was fairly certain I was next. Maybe the bull’s-eye was on a champion I had never met. It didn’t matter. If Axel was willing to give up the murderer, was the exchange worth it? He wasn’t asking for a soul, only a name. I wasn’t even sure what he could do with that kind of information. Could I justify betraying a friend, if it saved a life and soul of someone I didn’t even know?
There was no way out that didn’t make my stomach pitch and roll, and the little voice in my head called me eighty kinds of a moron for not figuring something out. And to top it all off, I was pretty sure I was going to be in jail in the next few days. Think, asshole! Think harder! The highway signs whipped past with a rhythmic whooshing noise that sounded suspiciously like “Loser! Loser!”
The mocking silence stretched on, broken only by the music and Marty’s soft snores, until Will took the exit toward Liberty. “Hey, Jess?”
I turned back toward my best friend. “Yeah?”
“If you die, can I put the moves on your wife?”
I drilled him hard in the shoulder and his yelp of pain woke Marty. Any serious thoughts I might have been having were lost in the good- natured roughhousing that followed. It’s a wonder we made it back to Marty’s in one piece, and it was another two hours before I trundled on home.
There was a package on the table when I got home, with a Pikes Peak return address on it. Thank you, Viljo.
While I had intended to creep into the house quietly, the bedroom light was on as I tried to tiptoe my way down the hall, proving that my ninja skills were sorely lacking. Mira was dressed in her usual tank top and pajama shorts, her curly hair piled atop her head in an artfully disheveled mop. She laid her book aside and shook her head at my weak attempt at stealth.
“How was the game?”
“It was okay. We lost.” I sat on the bed to pull my boots off and tossed them into the corner with a thump. With my back to her as I undressed, maybe she wouldn’t see the telltale guilt on my face. If I was any sort of lucky, she hadn’t heard about the brawl.
I should know that luck is not my strong suit. “They said on the news there was trouble out there. Something about a big fight.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too.” While it wasn’t a lie exactly, it felt like one, and that made me feel like shit. I was developing a nasty omission habit where my wife was concerned, and I made a silent promise to rectify that. “I kinda punched a guy in the face and got banned from the stadium for the rest of the season.” I pulled my shirt off over my head and almost missed her quiet sigh.
“You don’t start fights without a good reason. Was it important?”
“Technically, I didn’t start it. I finished it.” And the fact that the punch and the banning were totally separate
