Crashing Paradise Read online

  Two vampires dragged the mother to the ground in the yellow lanternlight.

  “No!” Eve snapped.

  Clay was otherwise occupied, and she was closer.

  Eve ran toward the vampires as they tore into the parents.

  The leech who’d grabbed the baby unwrapped it from its sling with a sickening grin, like a hideous child opening a candy bar. A long rivulet of pink saliva drooled from its mouth.

  Beyond them, a solitary figure stepped into the Rue Obscura from one of the alleys that crossed through it.

  “Stop!” he commanded.

  Pure, white light flashed as he lifted his hands. Eve cried out as the light seared her skin, and she threw up her hands to protect herself. The vampires who had been attacking the couple shrieked, and she heard them collapse on the cobblestones.

  She lowered her hands, eyes slitted against the diminishing light, and vile, poisonous hatred bubbled up inside of her.

  The new arrival had taken the screaming infant from the vampire’s hands. The leeches had fallen to their knees around him, hiding their faces.

  “No babies,” the angel Jophiel declared, white-feathered wings unfurling behind him. His stern, too-perfect features were pale and gleaming in the divine light that streamed from within him. His golden hair hung to his shoulders.

  Stylish prick, Eve thought.

  The vampire who’d had the baby in his hands whined. The others laughed softly and went back to murdering the child’s parents. They tore open the mother’s abdomen and pulled out coils of her intestines with a slippery sound. A red-haired female vamp ripped her uterus from the gaping wound and began to gnaw on it.

  Now she understood why the vampires had not run. They hadn’t come alone. This whole thing had been a setup. A few vampires circled her warily but did not make any further attempt to attack. They were waiting for Jophiel to give the word.

  “Wow, saving babies,” Eve said, glaring at her ancient enemy. “You’re a fucking hero.”

  Jophiel grinned at the irony, spreading his wings farther.

  He loved to show them off. Eve had ripped them from his back once, but they’d grown back.

  “You’ve got strange taste in friends,” she snarled.

  For some reason, Jophiel thought that was very funny. He laughed and shook his head, then sighed. “You have no idea, darling.”

  “Clay!” Eve shouted, without turning to look at him. “The baby!”

  “Coming!” the shapeshifter called, and she heard the crack of bone and shriek of pain from a vampire that had stood in his way. The cobblestones shook as he made his way toward her. “What the hell is going on?”

  He’d seen the angel. Still, Eve didn’t bother to turn.

  “Unfinished business,” she drawled. “And the time’s come to finish it.”

  “Not today,” Jophiel said, kissing the baby’s tender skull.

  The child had stopped crying and gazed up at him with love.

  His golden eyes gleamed as he looked up at Eve again. “Not to worry. I’ll leave him in human hands.”

  “You’ll put him down, or we’ll take him from you,” she replied, sliding the Gemini Blade back into its sheath at her back. Her long talons were enough to tear the angel apart, and that was what she wanted—to do it with her bare hands.

  Jophiel arched an eyebrow, caressing the baby’s scalp.

  “Who’s we?”

  Wary, Eve risked a quick glance over her right shoulder at Clay. The massive shapeshifter reached over his shoulder and peeled the vampire from his back, hurling it aside. His dry, cracked, clay flesh was already filling in where it had been torn away. Lanternlight gleamed on his bald pate. His eyes shone green in the shadows of the Rue Obscura.

  Vampires still lunged for him, but he paid them no mind.

  Together, Eve and Clay would take down Jophiel, and as many vampires as the turncoat angel wanted to throw at them. Finally, the bastard had shown his true colors. Down across the millennia he had pretended that his hatred of Eve was in the righteous service of God, but she had known he was a sadistic shit all along. Allying himself with vampires was all the evidence of his hypocrisy she would ever need. It had lifted her heart to see, because there was no longer any doubt in her mind. Jophiel didn’t speak for God. He had divine essence in his blood and flesh and the light of God in his hands, but he was just another flawed creation.

  “You get the baby,” she told Clay. “I kill the angel.”

  “Done,” he replied, not questioning her for a moment. She felt absurdly grateful.

  Then a shiver ran through her, and the very air in the Rue Obscura seemed to ripple. Several of the unbroken lanterns went quietly dark, and her skin crawled with the attentions of a thousand spiders. A stink filled her nostrils, and it was familiar.

  The vampires began to laugh.

  Jophiel sneered at her.

  Eve had thought the presence of the angel filled her with hatred. But that was a tiny candle flame compared to the infernal rage that filled her now. Stomach twisting with revulsion, she turned to see the hunched, hulking figure coming along the Rue Obscura behind Clay. The vampires scurried from the demon’s path. His hooves clacked on the cobblestones, and he moved so swiftly that Clay barely had time to turn before Abaddon reached out his giant hands, gripped the shapeshifter by the head, and hurled him back along the vaulted passage.

  Clay slammed into an arch. A massive slab of stone shook loose and crashed down on his right shoulder. He grunted and went down face-first on the cobblestones. Clay started to rise, but then the vampires swarmed him, all of them at once, tearing and beating at him and shrieking in pleasure.

  Abaddon stood taller than Clay. Even crouched on his haunches, he had to bend to stride through the Rue Obscura.

  Bones jutted from the top of his spine, sharpened yellow spikes. His wings were pinioned behind him, and his crimson flesh was such a dark red that the shadows turned it black.

  His eyes burned hot as coals, fire licking up from the corners, and his two, massive horns curved back away from his skull and dragged up sparks when they brushed the stone ceiling.

  Eve stood between the angel, cradling the baby, and the demon. Images flashed across her mind of the days, the months, she had spent as Abaddon’s plaything. She could still feel his vile touch, the pain as he violated her, tearing her, ruining her, and now his insinuating laughter filled the Rue Obscura, and it was as though only moments had passed since his terrible ministrations had transformed her into this.

  His blood, his seed, had infected her, and created of her a new monster.

  Eve’s scream tore up from her throat. She lunged at Abaddon, ancient madness overtaking her.

  Abaddon opened his arms to embrace her. Eve plunged her talons into his flesh, tearing, digging. Black blood spilled.

  “I’ve missed you,” the demon whispered into her ear, nuzzling her hair, breathing her scent.

  Eve shrieked, but Abaddon held her so close and so tightly in his grip that she could not break his hold, could not withdraw to tear at him again. She forced her talons deeper. If she couldn’t pull away, she’d push all the way through and rip out his spine.

  But then she felt the searing of her own flesh and saw the brilliant white glow that told her the angel was close. Jophiel came up behind her and touched her hair, just as he had the baby’s. She despised him even more for that.

  “Come on, Eve. Time to take you home.”

  THE vampires squirmed above him like a nest of vipers.

  Clay tore at them, crushed their heads, ripped out their hearts.

  They could not kill him—he didn’t think so, anyway. But there were so many that even he began to grow weary. The ash from all those that he had killed swirled in the air, dust devils eddying in the breeze along the cobblestones.

  At last, they began to flee, vermin scurrying into the sewers.

  They crawled away on the ceiling or raced out through one of the arches and along the alleys that led up into th
e old city or down toward the sea. People were shouting and screaming in French and German. He heard the pounding of running feet and realized that the police were coming at last.

  Clay crushed a vampire’s skull in his hands, and when it flashed into nothing but drifting cinders, he looked around the darkness of the Rue Obscura, finally free to fight their real enemies.

  But he saw only the corpses of the humans who had been slaughtered. There was no sign of the angel, or of the demon.

  They had vanished while he was buried in leeches.

  And they had taken Eve with them.

  6

  CONAN Doyle closed his eyes and focused on isolating the pain in his hand as he spoke into the cell phone. The stump of his finger throbbed with the beat of his heart.

  “I’m fine,” he told Ceridwen. “All that matters is that you’re safe.”

  He shifted his gaze to the wooden table in the kitchen of the Dubrovnik home he’d rented, high above the old harbor.

  His detached and bloody index finger lay on the table, staining one of his silk handkerchiefs.

  “Arthur—”

  “I told you I’m fine,” he said. “Nothing that cannot be repaired easily enough. I’m far more troubled by the timing of these attacks. Can it be coincidence that both of us—”

  Conan Doyle recoiled from the sudden shriek of static that emanated from the tiny phone. This isn’t good, he thought.

  With a heavy sigh, he turned off the phone and set it on the table.

  The Red-legged Scissor-Man never should have been able to inflict the kind of damage that he had. The creature was nothing more than a minor bogey—a threat to small children who were easily manipulated by fear. Even in the earliest days of Conan Doyle’s mastery over the mystic arts, the Scissor-Man had been merely an annoying afterthought.

  But tonight he had been something much more dangerous, and Conan Doyle had paid the price for his presumptions.

  Something—or was it someone?—had made the bogey formidable.

  As he reached down to pick up his severed finger, a gust of wind rose within the cottage, a swirling mass beginning to take shape.

  He’d hoped to have his finger reattached before any communication with his operatives, especially with Ceridwen.

  But the cell phone, which was to be used only in the case of absolute emergency, had started to ring before he’d had the chance to gather his wits and prepare the healing spell that would allow him to reattach his severed digit.

  The wind grew in intensity, forming a swirling vortex of dust and dirt in the center of the living room. Conan Doyle stepped back, raising his uninjured hand to protect his eyes from the tiny specks of flying debris. A familiar figure appeared within the maelstrom of dust and dirt, ruffling curtains and sliding furniture, knocking over a floor lamp.

  Ceridwen had arrived, riding the traveling wind from Sedona to his side.

  He would have preferred that she stay exactly where she was until he had a better understanding of what had befallen them, but still Conan Doyle found his pulse racing at the sight of her. A smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

  The wind ceased as abruptly as it had been aroused, and the Princess of Faerie stood before him, her flowing cotton robes stained with the dirt of the desert and spattered with what could only have been blood.

  “You were injured,” Ceridwen stated, her violet eyes finding his.

  Like a small child caught in an act of disobedience, he put his injured hand behind his back.

  “Nothing to concern yourself with, my dear,” he said, trying to slip the bloody handkerchief containing his finger into the pocket of his jacket.

  “Why am I having such a difficult time believing you?” she asked, leaning her staff against the wall before crossing the room toward him.

  “Truly there was no need for you to have—” Conan Doyle began, but she stifled his explanation with a hungry kiss. He brought his arms around her, ignoring the throbbing pain in his hand, lost in the feel of her against him.

  She gripped the wrist of his injured hand and lifted it up for her to see.

  Conan Doyle sucked air through his teeth, the injury throbbing beneath the makeshift bandage he’d made from a dishrag.

  “Is this what I’ve no need to concern myself with?” she asked, carefully pulling the rag away to reveal the bloodcaked stump of his finger. Ceridwen gasped, a Dannaaini curse leaving her lips at the sight of the injury.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, pulling his hand away and making his way toward the kitchen table. “I was just about to reattach the finger when you called.”

  He took the handkerchief from his pocket as he pulled out a chair to sit down.

  “You say a bogey did this to you?” she asked, and he could hear the disbelief in her tone. If the situation had been reversed, he would have doubted it as well.

  “A bogey whose abilities have somehow been increased tenfold,” Conan Doyle said as he carefully unfolded the handkerchief to expose his severed finger.

  Ceridwen moved to stand behind him. “And while you were dealing with your foe, I was confronting mine.”

  “Exactly,” he said, picking up the finger, examining it to make sure that none of it was missing. He was pleased to see that it was intact.

  “Do you think there might be a connection?”

  “A distinct possibility,” the mage said, bringing the bloody end of the finger up to his mouth. In the ancient tongue of Fey healers, he spoke to the severed flesh, coaxing it back to vigor. He stared at the drying gore of the finger’s trunk and blew gently upon it.

  The dried flesh grew suddenly moist, the cells and capillaries reinvigorated by his incantation. He could still recall learning that spell during the Twilight Wars. Gleaw the Wise would coax those who should have bid good-bye to life back to health so that they could continue the battle.

  Conan Doyle hissed between clenched teeth as he rejoined the finger to his hand. He continued to speak the ancient language of healing, convincing the still-living flesh, blood, and bone to accept what had been removed. The living flesh protested, having little interest in allowing the dead matter to be rejoined with the still thriving. Feeling himself growing tired, Conan Doyle focused his will and repeated the incantation, demanding that his flesh acquiesce.

  Then he felt her hand upon his shoulder, her voice in unison with his—her magic joined with his—and he felt the pain as his body began to heal. Bone fused back to bone, tendons reconnected, blood flowed through capillaries. His flesh knitted itself together, thanks to the power of their combined magic. Conan Doyle knew that he was one of the world’s most powerful mages, but with Ceridwen by his side, her strength added to his, the enormity of what he felt flowing through him left him in awe.

  His finger tingled painfully, but he was able to move it.

  The faint bloody line where it had been bitten away and rejoined had already begun to fade.

  “How does it feel?” she asked him.

  “Whole,” he replied, rising from the chair, wriggling all his fingers, glad to be complete again.

  She took his hand in hers and brought it to her mouth, softly kissing the once-injured finger. “As good as new,” she said.

  They both smiled at the Fey princess’s use of the vernacular.

  Gazing into her eyes, Conan Doyle saw all the reason he would ever need to continue with the struggle against the encroaching darkness. That war had come to define his existence, but in the years that they had spent apart, he had become numb and hollow. She had brought him to life again, reminded him what he was fighting for.

  “What of your own injuries?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper, eyes still locked upon his. “Bumps and bruises that have already begun to heal.”

  Conan Doyle cupped her face in his hands, bending down to kiss her. It unsettled him to know that he cared so very much for anyone. Love made him vulnerable, but he could not—and would not—combat h
is own heart.

  Just as their lips were about to touch, the two of them lost in one another, his cell phone began to ring.

  “I’LL be there as quickly as I can,” Dr. Graves said, then the connection to Dubrovnik was broken.

  The ghost could have held on to the phone, but it required sustained concentration for him to grasp solid objects.

  Instead, Danny had dialed and held it up for him to talk, and to listen to Conan Doyle. Now he nodded to the boy, and Danny set the receiver back in its graffiti-incised cradle. They were standing in the dark beside a pay phone outside a convenience store off the Jamaica Way. The streetlight above them had been broken, and the darkness was welcome.

  “Well, what did he say?” Danny asked.

  “His suspicions were already aroused,” Graves replied, watching as Julia came out of the store, removing the cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes. She’d been so upset by what they had just experienced that she’d scrounged together the necessary change from inside the car to restart a habit that she had quit over ten years ago.

  Long dead himself, in life the ghost had been a medical doctor. He wanted to say something to her, but knew that this was not the time.

  “Both Conan Doyle and Ceridwen have been attacked as well,” Graves said, looking back at the demonic boy. Danny had thrown on a hooded sweatshirt that he’d found in the backseat of his mother’s car, helping to hide some of his more disturbing attributes.

  “Clay attacked them, too?” Danny asked.

  “No, two foes from their past.”

  “Who was attacked?” Julia asked, shaking out the match she’d used to light her smoke and letting it drop to the ground. She nervously puffed on the cigarette.

  “Ceridwen and Mr. Doyle,” Danny answered.

  Julia looked at Graves, fear in her eyes. “Are they all right?”

  The ghost nodded. “They’re fine, but Conan Doyle cannot imagine the timing of the attacks being coincidental.”

  “Did you tell him that it was Clay who attacked us?”

  Danny asked.

  “I did, and he suspects there is something more to this as well.”