Nephilim Rising: The Complete Series, page 38
part #0 of Nephilim Rising Series
I switched my gaze to Josh, who was hovering by the bedroom door. He shook his head slightly as he gave me a look, as if to say, "Don’t…"
Frankly, I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t just that Brody was a demon, though that was bad enough; it was also because I could sense his barely concealed malevolence. If my raging grace was anything to go by, Brody was also a demon of considerable power. He was no lower echelon demon, that was for sure.
"Let me grab my jacket," Josh said to Brody. "Then we can go."
When Josh disappeared into the bedroom, I looked at Brody to see him smiling at me.
"What?" I said.
He shook his head. "Nothing, I’m just taking in the Nephilim who killed the great Abigor; although from what I hear, you are no longer just a Nephilim, are you?"
"What would you know about it?"
"News spreads quickly in the city’s underground, don’t you know?"
"What are you doing with my brother?"
He put his hands in his jeans pockets and stood casually. "Just hanging out, that’s all. We have a common interest, which is fighting. It’s how we met."
"How sweet."
I hated everything about him, especially since I could sense his dark intentions. Surely Josh could sense them as well, or didn’t he care? Was that who my brother was now; was he on the "other side" these days?
"Don’t worry," he said, clearly enjoying my discomfort at the situation. "I’ll look after your brother."
"He doesn’t need a fucking demon to look after him."
"So who does he need then…you? From what I hear, you tried to kill him with a sword."
"Fuck you—" I went to get up, but sat back when Josh appeared.
"Everything all right?" he said looking over at us.
"Fine," Brody said. "I was just telling Leia here about our common interest. Speaking of which, are you ready to kick some ass tonight?"
Josh nodded. "You know it."
"You’re fighting tonight?" I asked.
"Yeah, at a club in the Warehouse District."
"You can come along if you like," Brody said. "We can get to know each other better."
He had a smug sort of smile on his face that Josh couldn’t see. Son of a bitch was fucking with me.
"Josh, can I speak with you for a minute? Alone."
Josh shook his head as he moved toward Brody. "I gotta go, Leia."
I gritted my teeth as I struggled to hold myself in check. My Watcher Knife was strapped to my leg, and I so wanted to pull it out and stab Brody with it. The bastard knew it too.
"Well, don’t forget, Josh," I said. "I have to go too."
Josh’s blank mask faltered for a second as he stared at me. "I’ll come and see you tomorrow."
A derisive snort left my mouth, and I shook my head. "Whatever."
"Going somewhere, Leia?" Brody asked.
Right then, I knew he knew about my situation, that he knew exactly where I was going. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. It was written all over his smarmy face.
"What if I am?"
Brody smiled and shook his head as if he didn’t care. "Have fun, wherever you are going. We certainly will, won’t we Josh?"
I jumped to my feet then and stared hard at him. He merely smiled back as if I was no threat to him.
"Come on," Josh said putting a hand on Brody’s shoulder. "We’re going to be late."
"Yeah," Brody said. "We can’t be late, can we?" He was looking at me when he said it.
"Let yourself out," Josh said to me.
Then the two of them turned and walked out of the room. A second later, the front door opened and then slammed behind them.
Practically shaking with rage and frustration, I crossed to the window and looked down to the street just in time to see Josh get into the passenger side of a red Evo. As Brody opened the driver’s side door, he paused for a second to look up to the window and stare at me with glowing orange eyes. Then he smiled and got into the car. As the Evo sped up the street, I was certain of one thing:
Brody was bad news and he was going to take what was left of my brother away from me.
And the worst thing was, there was nothing I could do to stop him.
4
When I left Josh’s apartment, I did so with a dark cloud of depression, worry and loss hanging over me. As I began to walk through the streets with my hands shoved tight into my jacket pockets, it felt like my life had exploded, and now all the pieces were sliding inexorably into a deep hole. Which they were in a way, considering I was heading straight for Hell.
The pain in my arm had subsided considerably, and I had most of the movement back in my shoulder. My jacket was ruined, but what are you going do? I wouldn’t need clothes were I was going anyway.
The effects of the pills Eva gave me were beginning to wear off as well. Deciding I wasn’t ready to let the numbness go just yet, I stopped at a corner store and bought a bottle of vodka with fake ID that had somehow found its way into my jacket. The ID used to make it easy for Kasey and me to stay fueled up, so to speak.
God, I missed her. But I was also glad she wasn’t around to see the mess I had gotten myself into. Knowing Kasey, she probably would’ve insisted that she go with me to Hell. I wouldn’t have put it past her.
"Fuck it," she probably would’ve said. "This city is like Hell anyway, so what difference will it make? I wonder what kind of drugs they have there…"
I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought as I cracked open the bottle. Then I stopped for a moment to chug back some of the vodka, wincing at the taste afterward, the drink burning my insides. Despite the acrid taste, I took another few gulps before screwing the lid back on and putting the bottle inside my jacket.
For the next twenty minutes, I walked aimlessly from one street to the next, hardly paying attention to my surroundings. A light rain soon began to fall, though I hardly noticed it. By that point, I had drunk half the vodka. The alcohol had gone some way toward numbing me, but it wasn’t far enough. I needed a deeper kind of numbness, the kind I could only get from one thing: Oxy.
As it happened, I knew a dealer who was usually stationed only a few blocks from where I was. Ten minutes later, I was handing the dealer cash in return for four pills, two of which I banged straight away, washed down with more of the vodka. The dealer tried to make conversation, but I hardly registered what he was saying as I just smiled and nodded at him. Once I had the pills, I began to walk away, still having no direction in mind, not really caring where I ended up.
Pretty soon, the Oxy began to kick in, and the world around me began to change, slowing down so that car lights became long streaks in the darkness, and passersby became blurry and indistinct.
Inwardly, I felt deeply relaxed as the Oxy spread throughout my system. My grace seemed to be staving off the high somewhat, but not enough to cancel it out completely. To be sure, I swallowed the other two pills, again washing them down with vodka, which was almost gone. I carried the near empty bottle in my hand as I moved languidly through the streets, like a bubble drifting aimlessly down a turbid river.
I was so out of it, I didn’t feel the arm snaking around my neck until it was too late. One minute I was walking along, the next I was being dragged back into some dark alley by someone or something. The arm around me seemed human, and I grabbed it and pulled, but the grip was tight and didn’t budge.
Then I realized I still had the bottle in my hand, so I swung it up behind me, hoping to hit the head of whoever had grabbed me. I heard the bottle smash as glass fell over me, then a cry of pain. Grabbing the arm again, I yanked down hard on it as my instincts, fueled by my grace, began to take over.
The arm moved this time as I pulled down on it. Free from the grip, I lurched forward and spun around, brandishing the jagged bottle neck in my hand. In front of me was a man of about my height, wearing a long coat. His face resembled some sort of animal, given it was covered in fur. I just shook my head, the mixture of Oxy and vodka in my system dampening my fight or flight response, making me seem docile almost, which the predator in front of me obviously mistook for weakness, given the self-assured grin on his face. "What the fuck are you?" I asked him. "A Furby?"
He didn’t take too well to being called a Furby, and he growled at me. "Nephilim or not, I’m going to eat your flesh, little girl."
He lunged toward me then, leaping off the ground and locking his limps around me as he used his weight to take me down to the ground. The next thing I knew, he was sinking his teeth into my chest. A delayed scream escaped me, followed by a burst of anger that made me grit my teeth and scream again, but this time with rage. The broken bottle was still clenched in my hand, and I swung it as hard as I could at Furby’s neck, a feeling of immense satisfaction going through me as I felt the jagged end of the bottle sink into his flesh.
As Furby screamed in pain and shock, he sat up on me and tried to stem the blood that was jetting in thick arcs from his torn neck. His groin was right in front of me, so I stabbed the broken bottle into it, eliciting another scream from him. In response, he tried to swipe me with his long claws, but I caught his wrist and pulled down hard on it, taking him off balance so that he fell off me to the side. Then in one swift movement I was on top of him, stabbing him repeatedly in the throat with the broken bottle, his hot blood splashing all over me as I stabbed and stabbed until it almost looked like his head was about to come off.
When I finally stopped, I looked down at what I’d done, at the bloody violence I had wrought. Violence that he had caused.
"You picked the wrong girl tonight, motherfucker…"
When I left the alley, I did so as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that my hand was covered in blood, and probably my face and neck as well. I didn’t care, though, even when the odd passerby would notice. Their face would register shock and disgust as they gave me a wide berth. Eventually, I had to tell myself that I needed to get off the streets before someone called the cops. Even in my stoned state I hadn’t forgotten that I was still wanted for questioning in the murder of Diane. If I got picked up looking like fucking Mrs. Patrick Bateman, that wouldn’t be good for me. They’d lock me up and throw away the fucking key.
Eventually I had to concede that there was only one place to go, and that was Demon Ecstasy, to see Lucas. It’s where I intended to go anyway when I left Josh’s, but I instead found myself putting it off because I knew when I did eventually see Lucas it would be for the last time before I went to Hell, and so maybe the last time ever, which was breaking my heart to think about. Here I had finally found someone who I loved and connected with on the deepest of levels, only to have that love snatched away. It just felt like a cruel joke.
Sometime later when I finally reached the Sex Quarter, the crowds on the street had thickened, and my surroundings became bolder and brighter under the endless neon lighting. Which meant I was lit up in all of my bloody, messy glory for people to gawp at. Most people gasped in horror when they saw the state of me, covered in blood, an obvious wound around my left breast. A few freaks, though, looked at me with approval in their eyes, even lust, as if they wouldn’t have minded licking all that blood off me in some sick act of foreplay.
Thanks to my Oxy daze, though, I was able to float along in my little bubble as I managed to ignore people’s looks and reactions, until finally I made it to Demon Ecstasy. I was greeted by two familiar faces standing guard at the door. Two brutish bouncers who were also werewolves. As I stood in front of them not saying a word, the two of them looked at me like I was some freak they wanted nothing to do with.
"You again," the bald-headed one with the tattoos on his temples said.
"Yeah, me. Are you gonna let me in or do I have to kick your ass like I did last time?"
"Are you kidding? If we let you in there you’ll freak out all the damn customers."
"Have you fucking seen yourself?" the other bouncer said. "You look like fucking Carrie."
"Someone got in my way earlier. Are you going to get in my way now, too?"
The bouncers looked at each other and sighed. "I guess we gotta do this," the bald one said, and then they both stepped toward me.
"Here we go again," I all but sighed, as I got ready to deliver two powerballs of grace into the advancing bouncers.
But I had barely brought my grace to the surface when Lucas suddenly appeared in front of me. He stood staring at me a moment as if he couldn’t believe the state I was in. "What the hell happened to you? Are you hurt?"
I shook my head. "Long night…"
"We didn’t want her scaring the customers, Boss" the bald bouncer said. "She looks like fucking Carrie."
I leaned around Lucas to look at the bouncer. "I’m sorry, who the fuck is Carrie?"
The two bouncers looked at each other and sniggered, but said nothing.
"Let’s get you out of here," Lucas said, gently taking hold of my arm.
"Who is Carrie?" I asked him. "I’d really like to know."
Lucas smiled patiently. "Don’t worry about it," he said, throwing the bouncers a look that soon wiped the smiles of their faces.
Then he teleported us away.
5
I was expecting to end up in his suite inside the club, but instead we ended up inside a huge, plushly furnished apartment that looked like it cost a fortune.
"Nice pad," I said looking vaguely around, still feeling like my head was wrapped in cotton wool.
"Welcome to my penthouse apartment," Lucas said. "I live here when I’m not at the club, which isn’t that often, to be honest…"
"You have any booze here?"
He gave me that patient smile again. "I don’t think you need anymore booze, Leia."
"On the contrary, I need plenty more. Didn’t you hear?" I moved toward a drinks cabinet, spying a bottle vodka there. "I’m going to Hell tomorrow night."
"What?" I didn’t look around to see his face, but I knew from the sound of his voice that he was shocked by the news. "I didn’t think…"
"Yeah, neither did I." I grabbed the bottle of vodka, opened it and took a large swallow from it, closing my eyes against the acrid taste.
"Is this why you are in such a mess then?"
"What do you think?" I stood staring at him as I held the vodka bottle, hardly able to look him in the eye for fear of bursting into tears.
"That doesn’t explain why you are covered in blood, and why you look like you’ve been ten rounds with a Hellhound."
I took another drink. "That’s funny…and also not far from the truth. The night started when I got bitten by a Demon Beast that almost took my arm off. Frank killed it, though…the Demon Beast, I mean. Then, as I was walking here, I got attacked by a Furby."
Lucas frowned. "A what?"
"Some dude with a furry face, I don’t know what the fuck he was…a werecat, maybe. Is that a thing?" I shook my head. "Whatever he was, the bastard attacked me, bit my left tit as you can see."
"So what did you do?"
"I broke a vodka bottle over his head, and then I stabbed him repeatedly in the throat with the jagged end until he was dead." I made a gesture with my hand to indicate my appearance. "Hence why I’m covered in blood and apparently look like some chick called Carrie."
"It’s a movie."
"What is?’
"Carrie, it’s a movie, based on a Stephen King book. In it, the lead character gets drenched with pigs blood."
I nodded as if I understood. "Right, okay. Hilarious then."
Lucas smiled and shook his head. "Why don’t you hit the bathroom and clean yourself up. I can get you some fresh clothes to put on."
"You normally keep women’s clothes lying around here?"
"No, but I know where to get them."
I smiled. "Of course you do."
"Go and take a shower. I’ll be back."
With Lucas now gone, I took another swig of vodka before putting the bottle on the cabinet again. Then I crossed the room, past the kitchen area to where two doors were. When I opened the first one, I discovered a massive bedroom that had walk-in wardrobes and a kingsize bed. "At least there’s no mirror on the ceiling," I muttered before closing the door.
The next door led to the bathroom, which was also massive, containing a huge chacuzzi bath and a very spacious looking shower. There was also a mirror above the sink, which I cautiously moved in front of to see what kind of state I was in. As expected, I looked a sight. There was dried blood all over my face and neck, and the bite mark on my chest looked nasty. My hair was also a mess and my eyes looked stoned as fuck. "Jesus Christ…what the fuck have I become?"
I stared into the mirror, half expecting a reply from my wretched reflection. Then I shook my head and went and turned on the shower, stripped off my bloody clothes and stepped inside, the run-off water immediately turning crimson as the blood on me got rinsed away. When the hot water hit the wound on my chest, I winced and looked down to inspect it, noticing it didn’t actually seem that bad. It was just teeth marks. Nothing my grace wouldn’t heal up soon enough.
After a very long shower, I dried off, wrapped a towel around myself and walked out of the bathroom to find Lucas cooking in the kitchen. Whatever he was making, it smelled delightful, despite my lack of appetite.
"Is there no end to your talents?" I asked him with a smile.
"I’ve been around a long time," he replied as he sprinkled herbs into a pan. "You pick things up. Do you feel better? You certainly look better."
"I’m okay."
"Good. Go in the bedroom. I got you something to wear."
"You didn’t have to," I said, but smiled nonetheless at the gesture.
Lucas smiled back. "I know."
When I walked into the bedroom, I spotted a red dress lying across the bed, along with a pair of red shoes. "Okay…not what I was expecting."
When I held the dress up, I noticed how expensive the material felt. It probably cost more than my whole wardrobe, which admittedly wouldn’t be a stretch. The dress certainly wasn’t anything I would’ve chosen for myself, given that I’m more a jeans and T-shirt kind of gal. Still, it felt nice to know that Lucas obviously thought I was worth such an expensive outfit.
