Doomsday Can Wait (Phoenix Chronicles, #2)(11)

Night. Dark. Trees. Water. The acrid scent of terror, the heated brush of danger. Running. Falling. Pain. Blood. Then merciful, blessed oblivion.

Hell. There was definitely something out there.

The poor guy stared at me as if he expected me to turn into a monster. I couldn't blame him. Regular people aren't programmed to accept the arrival of a horror movie in their hometown. Usually the Nephilim didn't leave anyone alive, so we didn't have to deal with the zombielike behavior of a survivor. Which only made me wonder all the more about what kind of beastie we were dealing with.

The old man wasn't as old as I'd first believed. The way he walked, the mumbling, the white hair hinted at seven or eight decades on this earth. But his face appeared more like forty-five, and I realized that what he'd seen had aged him, perhaps overnight.

"Anything?" Summer asked.

I nodded, then jerked my head at the guy, and she flicked her fingers, shooting fairy dust from the tips.

I'd wished on several occasions that I possessed the talent to dispense magical sparkles and make people obey my every unvoiced command, but I couldn't.

As soon as the twinkling particles—invisible to anyone but us—hit the guy's face, his eyes cleared, his back straightened, and he walked off with the gait of a much younger man.

"He won't remember?" I asked.

Summer's answer was a withering stare. Of course he wouldn't remember.

"What are we dealing with?" Summer pressed.

"I don't know."

She frowned. "No whispers? Not a flash?"

"No."

"Huh," she said.

"Yeah." I thought of the amulet still sitting on the seat of the car.

Did whatever was stalking this town have an amulet of its own? Otherwise why hadn't I seen the monster in a vision, or heard Ruthie's whisper as soon as we rolled past the city limits?

Loud voices drew our attention to the other end of the street where several people carried on a heated conversation. Lots of hand gestures in the direction of the distant mountains, the pantomime of picking up a rifle, sighting and shooting. It appeared that more than one citizen had met up with the thing in the hills.

Another man, and a woman wearing a bright green, sleeveless sundress, joined the crowd. I admired the high neckline, and the interesting heart-shaped cutout that revealed her chest and just a hint of cleavage. The man continued the argument with more gesticulating and extensive miming of weaponry. The woman remained silent; she looked a little drugged.

"What do you think?" Summer asked.

"I think you'd better zap them, too." If they went into the mountains with conventional weapons, they were going to get killed.

"I don't understand this," I muttered as we headed for the crowd. "I haven't heard anything; I haven't seen anything. And if Jimmy's in town, the demon in the caves should be dead by now."

Before he'd had his mini-breakdown, Jimmy had been the best hunter in the federation. He wouldn't have needed me to tell him that something wicked had come to Barnaby's Gap.

"You're sure he's here?" I asked.

Summer flicked a huge cloud of fairy dust over the assembled throng. Instead of walking away with a very bad case of short-term memory loss, the group stilled as if they were the best cadre of freeze-tag players in the country.

"Am I sure Jimmy's here?" Summer repeated, and approached the woman in the green dress. She tugged down the mock turtleneck to reveal familiar puncture wounds before her gaze met mine.

"I'm sure," she said.





CHAPTER 5


Summer clapped her hands, and the people wandered off without ever looking in our direction.

I felt as frozen as the townsfolk had been. Jimmy was the demon in the mountains. Now what was I going to do?

Kill him, most likely.

"We need to get the names of the seers out of him before—" I paused at Summer's gasp.

"You can't kill him!"

"Oh, yeah, I can."

"You love him."

"What's love got to do with it?"

Maybe I did still love Jimmy. Probably. But I hated him, too. He'd hurt me so many times in so many ways. Not more than a month ago, he'd kept me as his sex slave; he'd nearly killed me. That he'd been possessed by a medieval vampire witch—a strega—who just happened to be his dear old dad was beside the point.

Jimmy was a dhampir—part vampire, part human— a breed. He had many vampire characteristics—blinding speed, incredible strength, and the ability to heal just about anything—combined with a dhampir's talent at identifying creatures of the night. However, once he'd shared blood with Daddy, his vampire nature had been aroused. He'd gone off to try and put it back. From the appearance of Barnaby's Gap, he hadn't had much luck.

I turned, headed for my duffel, where I'd not only stowed the silver knife, but also, since we were traveling by car, the gun I'd retrieved from the safe.

I knew how to kill a dhampir. Strike twice in the same way. Last time, I'd only managed to stake the bastard once. I wouldn't make that mistake again.

"He hasn't killed anyone," Summer hurried along at my side.

"We don't know that."

She stopped dead, and I did, too, though I have no idea why. Her fairy dust didn't work on me.