Diana Read online

  Marvin widened his eyes like the answer was obvious.

  Samantha glowered at him.

  “Seriously. Because I’m a woman.”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because it isn’t women’s work,” Marvin said with another grin. “I’m a traditionalist.”

  “Because women are going to get their little selves hurt?” Samantha asked. Marvin laughd.

  “I’ll go with that.”

  “So if I can beat you, you’ll sell it to me?” Samantha asked.

  “Nope,” Marvin said, coming to lean against a post near Carter. The demon flicked a glance at Carter with what might have been a wink. Carter didn’t like people who winked.

  “I’ll bet you that you can’t beat me, though,” he said. “You win, you take it.”

  Carter folded his arms.

  Unexpected.

  “What’s my side of the wager?” Samantha asked.

  “Just your dignity,” Marvin said, kneeling to take a long dagger out of his boot. He stood, and Samantha’s head ticked another fraction to the side.

  “Nothing,” she said. “You’ll wager me…” her head tipped back slightly as she took in the rest of the booth. There was a very quick, very, very calculated shopping spree, and she put a nice selection of things onto a board, “all of these against nothing that you can beat me in a spar?”

  Marvin shrugged.

  “I don’t see a problem with that.”

  Samantha gave him another incredulous look, then shook her head, drawing Lahn.

  That was a motion that scared even Carter, somewhere down in the primordial recesses of his gut. She’d trained with the angels on that blade, an angel-forged epic sword whose name was the angelic word for both ‘peace’ and ‘victory’. The sword hated demons. Hated them. Where most epic swords were demon-forged and had a penchant for destruction, Lahn had a purity streak that simply detested the presence of demons anywhere. Ever. Carter had won her in a card game, but he’d never trusted her, sensing she could tell his demonic history, and he had been glad to hand her off to Samantha. It was a good fit.

  And then Samantha had died.

  And spent fifteen minutes earth-plane time - probably sixty to ninety years on the paradise plane - training with angels, learning magic, language, the whole bit. An awkward misfit young woman with no demonstrated capability with magic had come back… well. That.

  She’d come back that.

  Marvin blinked once, but he didn’t show any real fear as he backed up onto the basketball court, dagger poised in front of him.

  Was the idiot truly not afraid of her because she was a woman?

  “Show me what you’ve got, beautiful,” Marvin murmured. Carter actually smiled at that. Red meat.

  Samantha shook her head again, advancing against him with a sort of rage that Carter respected. He heard something up at the top of the hill and sighed, moving to intervene as Abby came storming down the grass embankment.

  “Stop,” he said.

  “Carter, what did you do?” she asked.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he complained. Why did she always blame him?

  “Stop him,” Abby said. He looked back, hoping he wasn’t missing anything yet.

  “No,” he said, taking Abby’s arm.

  “Carter,” she said, exasperated.

  “No,” he said. “He challenged her, she accepted.”

  “She’s fighting a demon,” Abby said. Carter frowned.

  “You watch her do this every day.”

  “No I don’t,” Abby said, still watching like she might make a break for it and physically prevent the fight. He calmed himself, feeling his depths of power.

  “Be still,” he said. She opened her mouth to fight, then her eyes got wide. He didn’t use his power over her that directly very often, but she couldn’t defy him. Couldn’t. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Do we have an understanding?” he asked.

  “Bastard,” she said. Bastard buzzed. He snarled. Needed to get rid of her and pick a new blade.

  “Go stand by the car,” he said.

  “No,” she said, her voice wobbling. She couldn’t do it. He remembered that feeling. He’d known it often, before Zee died. She would have never believed it if Carter had told her that Zee had been even more oppressive than he was. And he wouldn’t have blamed her. But Zee had trained a lot of us, and he was brutal about it by the time he got to Carter. That sense of broken freewill… It was devastating every time, like stepping on a street grate and not being sure if it was going to hold or not.

  She took a step back and he started walking, ignoring her. He went to lean against the car, turning quickly so that he didn’t miss any more of the fight than he already had.

  Marvin was good. Carter could see that from the very first moment. He was quick, and he was well-balanced. He’d been on this side long enough to have mastered glitching and micro-glitching, the nuanced way demons had of accelerating their motion while maintaining physical momentum in a fight. Carter was jealous.

  Samantha was quick, but she wasn’t actually prepared for this. Something about the way she gathered herself before a fight that she’d missed because of how this had come up had put her on her heels and she was retreating in the haphazard way of someone who was fighting a well-trained glitching demon. Carter nodded to himself.

  She needed more training like this. Marvin knew his stuff.

  Lahn was quick and she was effective; Marvin had little chance of actually scoring a hit against Samantha, but if she failed to knock him back, he’d win on points.

  Another minute went by, and then two. Fights rarely went this long, and a crowd of demons was beginning to form, glitching away in ones and twos and coming back in fives and sixes. At this point, Samantha needed to win, just to keep her fledgling reputation alive. Carter stood taller.

  She wasn’t using language.

  It was an oversight that had come from going after softer demons, ones who stood little chance against her with that angel blade and her extensive angel training, but her instincts for solid earth-plane fighting were off, because angeltongue didn’t hold anywhere near the same power on the paradise plane as it did here. There, it was more or less just words, but here, especially against demons, her exhaustive angeltongue vocabulary would make a huge difference.

  She was headed for a wall, losing her focus, flailing like she had before she’d died, losing her balance, losing her composure.

  “Talk, you idiot,” Carter yelled.

  Marvin was teasing her now, playing with her for the crowd.

  Samantha took one final step back, just inches off of the wall, and then she paused. Stood tall. Something about that posture made Carter queasy again, the angelic form behind it so clear and unmistakable, and she spoke words. Words he couldn’t hear or understand at this distance, but words that he none the less felt like thunder you anticipated before it came.

  It was like a puppeteer pulled Marvin up tight, and then he was retreating, falling back this way, feinting that way, always with Lahn coming to meet him. He was still quick, well composed, and good humored, but he was clearly overmatched.

  Less than a minute later, it was over. He found himself with his back against the wall, Lahn’s dual front-facing points at his throat. Carter cast a quick warning glance at Abby, then started down the hill, clapping humorlessly once, twice, three times.

  “I’d have had her if it weren’t for you,” Marvin called, unconcerned.

  “Can’t have that,” Carter answered. “Go collect your earnings.”

  Samantha spun to face him, eyes active, breath still violent enough to bring her shoulders up and down where she stood.

  “Why did you help me?” she asked.

  “Pride,” he said quietly, taking a slight step to the side to draw her attention to the crowd behind him.

  “You’re proud of me?” she asked.

  “N
o. I’ve got too much pride to tolerate having trained someone who loses to the likes of him,” he said, jutting his chin at Marvin, who grinned.

  “Good match,” the demon said. Samantha looked back at him.

  “I beat you, fair and square,” she said.

  “You did,” he nodded. “And you’re welcome to do it again any time. That was fun.”

  Samantha stepped closer, imposingly, toward him.

  “What’s your game?” she asked.

  “I’ve got standards,” he said conspiratorially. “So long as you’ve gotta best me, I can keep ‘em and be the pretentious bastard that won’t sell to women. It’s a brand.” He paused, a smile growing sideways across his face. “Give ‘em hell.”

  Samantha held his attention like a threat for just one more second, then spun and left, heading back to the pile of stuff on the board at the booths.

  “I’m not paying you,” Carter said flatly.

  “Oh, yeah you are,” Marvin answered, his tone changed to a much more businesslike one. Carter raised an eyebrow. Marvin nodded. “She’s going to like me. And you’re going to do what she says. Only person in the world you answer to, and we’re going to be friends, she and I.” He let that hang for a second, then he flashed his grin again. “Everything’s business.”

  Carter nodded, respecting the demon better for understanding him.

  “I see.”

  Marvin winked again, and once more Carter disliked him. Shaking his head he went to match steps with Samantha as she went back to the car.

  “If I’d have known chauvinism would work, I would have tried it days ago,” he said.

  “Work how?” she asked, angry.

  “You’re back,” he said simply, happy.

  “You aren’t chauvinist,” she said. He had to concede the point. He’d known too many powerful women - demonic and otherwise - for any sort of bias against them to stick. None of them were as powerful as he was, but… Nuri, all by herself, was more powerful than every other demon he knew combined, leaving aside her husband Kjarr.

  “Make me a sandwich, woman,” he said, anyway, knowing that poorly-faked misogyny would rile her just as much as the well-faked kind. She gave him an exasperated look and stepped away, heading for the driver’s side door. Carter made a shooing motion at Abby and waited as she got into the car and slid across the back seat - he wouldn’t let her ride in the front with Samantha, either - then he got in behind her.

  “Home,” he said as he sat. “I’m serious about the sandwich.”

  “Bite me,” Samantha answered.

  He smiled under his hand all the way home.

  “Make one of Nuri’s people do it,” Samantha argued, standing in the doorway to the closet.

  “I told you to,” Carter said from the table, re-folding his newspaper and pretending to read the next page. She couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see her. It worked for them.

  “Why?” she asked. “I want to go to bed.”

  “So?” he asked. “I told you to go shopping.”

  She sighed.

  This was going to happen.

  “They don’t have to get in a car and drive over there. And they don’t have better things to do.”

  “You don’t have anything better to do,” Carter observed at the newsprint.

  “Sleep,” she said, like she thought he wouldn’t understand.

  “Shut it off,” he said.

  “I do that, you take the first opportunity to drop me in a public space and leave me there unconscious,” she complained. He smiled. That had been fun. She waited. He had nothing to say to that, so eventually she went on. “I woke up in jail after they tested me for a drug overdose.”

  He nodded.

  Very fun.

  “I remember.”

  “I’m going to find a way to lock this door,” she said. He grinned wider.

  “Good luck.”

  Doors. Ever since he’d come back, they’d just somehow failed to stop him. The magic of locking a door was a specialists’ game, and he was the champ.

  “I am,” Samantha warned. “I have three people at the market working on it.”

  “I have no doubt,” Carter said.

  “I’m not going,” Samantha said.

  “Yes you are.”

  It was already done. She just didn’t know it yet, poor girl.

  “Why me?” she asked again. He folded his newspaper down and leaned all the way to the side so he could see her leaning in the doorway.

  “Because Nuri’s people never get my brand of granola bars,” he said, then stood. “Breakfast is at eight. I want to see real effort.”

  He stole a final glance at her, trying to read her face, then went to take a shower.

  That always worked, when he wanted to get rid of her.

  The bathroom didn’t have a door, and neither did the shower.

  Two hours later, he was sitting at the table with a plate in front of him: bacon, eggs, toast, and some kind of fried potato that Samantha had a name for.

  The girl could actually cook.

  Cleaning was next.

  That was happening.

  He picked up a fork and poked at the eggs, then looked at her.

  He’d been avoiding this for a while, but it was getting to the point that he needed to deal with it.

  “We should talk about it,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Samantha answered, continuing to scrub at a pan without looking at him. She didn’t lie, as a matter of habit, so it was likely that she wasn’t absolutely certain what thing he wanted to talk about, but her avoidance clearly indicated she understood, categorically, what he meant. He pursed his lips and let his eyelids drop, setting his fork down.

  “You didn’t grieve him,” he said.

  “Shut up, Abby,” Samantha said. Carter didn’t know if this was one of those times that she was actually holding her half of a conversation with the psychic - they did that, obnoxiously enough - or if she was taunting him by calling him Abby, but he moved past it, regardless.

  “I mean it,” he said. “If you aren’t in control, it’s going to come around and snap you when you aren’t ready for it, and it’s going to end up being me bailing you out when it isn’t convenient.”

  “And I’d hate to inconvenience you,” Samantha said. He nodded.

  “You did something,” he said. “Broke something that had been working for you. And you’ve been testing your purity when you think I don’t notice.”

  “We didn’t…” Samantha started defensively, then looked back down at the sink. Trying not to rise to the bait was a good sign, but today he didn’t actually want to talk about sex.

  “You know that I know,” he said. “Don’t be funny.”

  “You think this is a game?” she asked, her temper flaring.

  “It’s all a game, Sam,” he answered, sitting back in his seat and picking up the slice of toast to nibble on it.

  “It isn’t,” she said. “Carter, I’m supposed to save you. I put all of this energy in to it…”

  She collapsed into herself for a moment and he frowned, trying to think back over the last few months. Nothing came to mind that fit that description, so he dismissed it.

  “Nothing you do is going to change what is going to happen to me,” he said.

  “But God sent me back here to save you,” she said. “And I spend all of my energy on it, and then I can’t…”

  Ah.

  “You can’t even save Justin,” he said.

  “It’s your fault,” she said, eyes shooting up to look at him from where she was still hunched over the sink. “If I hadn’t been paying so much attention to you.”

  He ran his tongue over his back teeth. That hadn’t been a twist he’d seen coming.

  “You would have noticed that a rogue demon was going to try to poke me with a stick by going through you?” Carter asked. It wasn’t nice, but it wasn�
��t supposed to be.

  “Yes,” she said, her tone hopeless. She knew just as well as he did that demons were hard to predict, unless you already had sights on them. That they didn’t know who had done it meant that they hadn’t been watching for it. You can’t protect everyone. Not when gray demons and properly dark demons have commercial relationships.

  Killing a human is a tough order for a demon - they have to interfere with the natural order to do it, and when it comes to humans bathed in protective ignorance, it means they have to have a serious store of power to do it. Possessing another human, they can get a lot closer, but even then, it’s tricky. Influencing a human. Now that’s got potential. That was how Samantha’s family got done in.

  Justin and his family had been splashed by a true demon. Carter’s testing, quick and brutal as it had been, had confirmed that much. A powerful one, and one he and Samantha didn’t know about.

  “If he’d wanted to kill you, too, he probably would have,” Carter said. “But then he would have had me to deal with. Keeping it a stage removed…”

  She threw a pan at him.

  He watched it go by, time bent to slow it down enough that his reaction was fluid and casual, then he dropped his grip on time. His reflexes there had never been better.

  “I’ve been following you around and doing everything you tell me to, and it got all of them killed,” Samantha said.

  “No,” Carter said, his voice even. This was the knife. But this was what she needed to hear. “You got all of them killed the day you sat down on the subway next to him and smiled.”

  Well, she might not have needed to hear it, but he needed her to hear it. She was one of us now, and that was the risk they took with every relationship they had.

  She collapsed deeper over the sink, her head just barely above the faucet.

  “I can’t do it,” she whispered. “I don’t have any left.”

  “You need to tell me what you broke,” Carter said. She didn’t move. He finished his toast and took a fork full of eggs, chewing them casually and swallowing before he put his fork back down and shifted in his chair.

  “Samantha,” he said. She looked up. He nodded at the chair across from him. “Sit.”