Conspiracy of Angels Read online

  Saliriel stood out like some vinyl-clad version of the White Queen, her pale, slender limbs and long platinum hair Barbie-doll perfect and unreal. She turned her leonine gaze on me, and I noted two things from her expression.

  One, she recognized me.

  Two, she wasn’t pleased that I was here.

  “Oh, really, sibling?” she sighed in a well-trained contralto. “It’s only been two days. Do you have nothing to occupy yourself besides badgering me?”

  Sibling? My brain actually hiccupped for a moment as I tried to process this news. Me, Red Suit, and now Ru Paul’s long-lost white sister—we were related? I could see it, kind of, in the nose and the jawline, but seriously? I wondered what Mom and Dad were like.

  “He says he doesn’t remember anything,” Red Suit offered in the silence that followed. “He stumbled in here and collapsed. No shields. No cowl.”

  Saliriel heard this, and the edge of her mouth twitched, but otherwise she refused to acknowledge that Red Suit had spoken. Her cat-like eyes guarded, she paid the two naked people at her feet just as little mind. For their part, they kept their gaze on the floor, apparently inured to such treatment. I had to fight down a rising urge to tear their leashes from her manicured hand. People weren’t for being owned.

  Still, I was the guest here. Red Suit had made that clear enough.

  Saliriel seemed to read the tension in my shoulders and take a subtle pleasure in it. With exaggerated disdain, the leggy giantess dropped the leashes then strode languidly in my direction. She balanced on the stilettos with such practiced ease that she might as well have been floating. She stopped a few feet in front of me, crossing her lightly muscled arms just beneath her breasts. This had the effect of lifting the surgically augmented D-cups, which were already pretty hard to ignore. It seemed like a practiced and habitual gesture. Otherwise it was really creepy, considering the fact that she had just declared herself my sister.

  She drew herself up to her full height. “And tell us, Remy,” she said. “Why should we believe such a thing? On Tuesday, it was pacts with cacodaimons, and this time—what will it be? Some forbidden amulet, lost on the lake? Wild conspiracies to herald a new war? This is Cleveland, dear brother. It’s not all that interesting.”

  Even though she started out talking to Red Suit—Remy—her gaze remained on me. Her attention pressed like a palpable weight against the barriers in my mind. Instinctively I shoved it away, clenching my fist so hard the knuckles cracked.

  “I didn’t come here to play games,” I snarled.

  Remy sucked a hissing breath, but Saliriel didn’t give him a chance to add anything to the discussion. She walked a slow circuit around me.

  “Oh, but it’s all about games, my dear sibling.” Her sharp heels ticked against the tiles like the second hand of a clock. “Games and favors—it’s all we have left, really. So did you come to play with me, Anakim?”

  The word from her lips nearly sent me into a blind rage. It wasn’t the term itself, but how she said it—like it was something filthy.

  “Stop calling me that,” I growled.

  She smirked, eyes flicking to Remy. “I thought you had no memory,” she purred. “Why would it bother you, if that were true?” She completed her circuit around me, hungry cat eyes searching my own. With a motion almost too swift to track, her pale hand shot out and she plucked at my jacket. “You stand before a decimus of the Nephilim. Take that unlovely thing off. I wish to see you without your armor.”

  I surprised myself by matching her speed, slapping her hand away as soon as it landed. I wasn’t gentle about it. Her pretty pink lips skinned back in a snarl and she hissed at me like she really was half-cat. All my smart-ass comments died in my throat, because I finally saw her teeth.

  Pearl-perfect and flawless, they looked normal except for the two delicately pointed canines that extended almost half again as long as the rest. I stared openly, trying to see some sign of prosthetics or anything that could help it make sense. Yet the impossible teeth continued to look like a very natural part of her unnatural smile.

  Saliriel had fangs. Real fangs.

  My thoughts tumbled back through the earlier vision, and I almost lost my grip on the mental control Remy had so patiently taught me. The creatures were real. I was standing in front of one—and it had called me brother.

  I ran my tongue quickly over the insides of my own teeth, just in case I had missed an important detail like, say, fangs, since dragging myself out of Lake Erie. Nothing. It didn’t seem as if I would terrify my dentist any time soon, and I found myself letting loose a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

  “Do not presume to touch me,” Saliriel bellowed. “You have no standing within my tribe.”

  “You touched me first, bitch.”

  It was out of my mouth before I could think better of it.

  The giantess in white vinyl responded with a string of expletives, most of which seemed concerned with my preferential sexual activities and diseased, incestuous goats. As she spat her venom, she stormed around the room in an exaggerated show of fury, shiny red heels striking the tiles with a sound worthy of gunfire. When her steps brought her toward them, the two collared slaves withdrew obsequiously to a back corner of the room.

  While she ranted, Remy leaned his head close to mine, pitching his voice low.

  “Why do you always have to bait her?”

  “How should I know?” I shot back. “I don’t even remember her.”

  Saliriel rounded on us both.

  “Silence! You, especially, Remiel.” She gave him a look that could have curdled milk, and for all I knew, it would have. He faltered back a step and dropped his eyes to the ground, seeming almost as subservient as the naked slaves. The long, smooth curtain of his hair swept forward, obscuring his face. Saliriel then turned her furious gaze on me, and I surprised myself by meeting it without flinching. This only made her angrier.

  She stopped in the middle of the room, fangs bared and nostrils flaring. Color had risen to her cheeks and a flush was visible across the naked expanse of flesh above her cleavage, running from one prominent collarbone to the other. Her eyes flashed yellow fire and there was no mistaking it.

  They were glowing.

  “You dare to enter my personal domain and accost me with insults.” No longer yelling, this quieter tone carried a deadlier weight. “I am a decimus of the Nephilim, and only the primus stands above me. I know rank holds no meaning for your pathetic tribe, but here it is currency. While you are under my roof, you will respect me. If I ask you to approach me naked and on your knees, you will do so because it is my whim. And if you are unwilling to do that, I will happily eject you as I did earlier this week. Are we clear, Anakim?”

  “Crystal,” I spat.

  I was done—done with all the bullshit about ranks and tribes and other things that made no sense to me, done with the way she treated the other people in the room like they were lower than furniture, done with her holier-than-thou attitude. I turned on my heel and headed for the door. There had to be some other place I could go for answers.

  I glanced to Remy before I left, but he was still staring down at the tips of his crocodile-skin shoes. From his words in the hallway, I knew he was sympathetic to my plight, and I honestly felt bad for the guy. But if he wasn’t going to stick up for me, there was no sense in me hanging around. I started to say something—I owed him a thanks at least for helping me get the visions under control—but I never got that far.

  The doors to the private chamber burst open and Vikram, the bouncer, charged in. The seam of his tailored suit was torn at one shoulder and there was a spatter of blood across the lower portion of his face. His eyes looked huge and shocky, and then I realized the blood was everywhere. It covered the entire front of his suit, slick and still pumping against the dark fabric.

  Saliriel opened her mouth—no doubt to spew some scathing reprimand—then she, too, noticed the blood. Her nostrils flared.

  “They’
re out there shooting people,” he managed. He gulped air, and it didn’t sound right, gurgling faintly. “They’re shooting people in the club.”

  “Who?” Remy demanded. The bouncer turned wild eyes on my brother. When he answered, it sounded as if he didn’t quite believe it himself.

  “Police.”

  11

  A shrill, chittering cry followed the words of the bouncer. All the hairs prickled on my scalp—I’d been pursued by that terrible sound all night. A moment later, a phlegmy voice sounded.

  “Police. Freeze!” A middle-aged officer lumbered into view—the cop from the cruiser. There was a ragged wound on the side of his throat and his uniform was sticky with blood. There was no question that he was dead. Unhindered by this fact, he lifted his gun and opened fire, shooting the bouncer twice in the back. A gout of crimson erupted from the man’s mouth and he went down choking.

  The blast of the gun was incredibly loud in the small space, and all the shouting that followed it seemed muffled by comparison.

  Remy whirled toward the sound of the gunfire, then dashed to the far left of the room with a speed I could barely track. The cop tottered in the doorway, bringing his weapon around with unstable hands. His partner staggered into view. She opened her mouth and loosed that cry of whatever had been stalking me all night. I had no idea what had happened to the two of them, but instinct clamored that it was tied to those delinquents I’d led straight to their cruiser. But the cops had shot them. Had the dead men gotten back up to attack the officers? The possibility turned my guts to water.

  Behind me¸ Saliriel roared angrily.

  “What have you brought to my house, Anakim?”

  My brain stuttered over the possibilities. The barrel of the gun, which looked enormous from my perspective, swung toward me. The arm of the police officer jerked spastically, and this was the only thing that saved me from being uncomfortably ventilated along with the bouncer. Like Remy, I skittered to the far side of the room, ducking behind one of the columns and moving faster than seemed natural. I didn’t question it. It got me out of the way of the damned gun.

  “Fuck my life,” I gasped. “Zombie cops and vampire drag queens.”

  “Police! Freeze!” the guy cop roared again, but it came out mushier than before, as if it was an effort for him to speak at all. From his blank expression, I doubted he had any understanding of the words. He moved more like a puppet than a person.

  Then I saw what was pulling his strings.

  In some way that wasn’t physical, I saw a shadow so black it seemed to drink up the light. It clung to his shoulders and back. Something that might have served it for a head was curled over the dead officer’s balding pate. For the space of a few heartbeats, I thought I was seeing things—but then it looked at me, and I knew with a certainty as nauseating as it was absolute that this nightmare-creature was aware that I had noticed it. It turned its impossible eyes to notice me right back.

  Black and completely featureless, it was like a living shadow shaped vaguely like a manta ray. The only thing shining from the light-swallowing depths of its form were two glaring eyes of murderous red, and then I swore I saw it flash a razor-edged smile, all glittering silver and death.

  As I gawked at his rider, the cop squeezed off another round from his gun. With me absent from the space I had previously occupied, the gun was aimed at Saliriel, but her two collared slaves had sprung to life from the back of the room the minute a threat was imminent. Naked as they were, their response wasn’t to scream in terror or run for their lives. Instead, they threw themselves in front of my towering sibling, shielding her pale, leggy form as much as they could with their own bodies.

  Her male slave took the bullet. It was a lucky shot—or really unlucky, depending on how you looked at it. It caught him in the face, just over one cheekbone. His eye and the entire side of his head exploded in a spray of bone, brains, and blood. Saliriel and the naked woman were painted with it.

  The woman seemed too stunned to do more than stand there blinking. Saliriel howled with fury, gore dripping from her shiny white vinyl. Her voice held such raw, animal power that I expected the ceiling tiles to rattle with it. And then, despite the clinging arms of her female companion, Saliriel did the unexpected—she launched herself at the gun-toting attackers, snarling something in a language that certainly wasn’t English. It communicated her intentions all the same.

  The second cop—the young black woman who had looked so stricken at shooting my pursuer—shambled around her partner, gun at the ready. One side of her face was a bruised and bloody mess and I saw purpling handprints around her throat—as if someone had seized her by the neck and pounded her head against some unforgiving surface. In saving my own skin, I had left both these people to die.

  The certainty of it paralyzed me.

  The same kind of dark shadow-form clung to her back. It had something like arms, but they were thrust into her, working her limbs like a puppet. I felt a stomach-churning sense of wrongness as it twitched and wriggled to make her body respond. This one seemed to be having more trouble, probably because of the head trauma, and the shot from the lady cop’s gun went wild, burying itself in the far wall.

  Saliriel dodged left and right, a blond-maned blur. Both cops swung their guns unsteadily, trying to keep a bead on her, but she was too fast for their zombified nervous systems. In another moment she leapt over the fallen bouncer, practically crawling up the front of the older cop’s body. She wrapped her legs around his midsection and snatched at his gun, the rhinestones in her manicure flashing. I had a sudden thought of her breaking a nail, and cackled madly. Pressed against the wall beside me, I felt more than I heard Remy hiss my name—not Zachary. The other one.

  That snapped me out of it, though I couldn’t shake the icy feeling that those horrible shadow-rays were looking at me.

  “What are they?” I choked.

  “Zombies,” Remy whispered. “Something has to be riding them.”

  “Yeah. I see that. What the fuck are they?”

  Saliriel’s bellow thundered through the room as she wrestled with the dead officer. She disarmed the older cop almost literally, wrenching the weapon from his hand with such force that both bones of his forearm snapped wetly. His hand went limp and he flailed at her. She slashed at his eyes, forcing him to the ground under her weight.

  The lady cop tried for Saliriel again but instead fired into her partner. This didn’t seem to bother him much, and he kept smacking at Saliriel with his useless limb.

  The naked woman who served Saliriel recovered from the shock of getting covered with her male counterpart’s gray matter. She ran to her mistress’s side, then grabbed the gun from where it had clattered across the tiles and, reasonably, tried to deal with the female officer by shooting her in the head.

  It was pretty much a point-blank shot. The collared submissive knew how to handle a firearm. Her stance was good and she gripped the pistol in both hands, anticipating the recoil even as she pulled down on the trigger. She caught the lady cop neatly between the eyes. The back of the woman’s head exploded in a shower of gore. I clapped my hands over my ears, uselessly striving to drown out the ringing.

  Remy shook me urgently. “Tell me what you can see.”

  I looked up in time to watch the thing atop the female officer struggle in the wake of the headshot. The body still stood, despite taking a bullet in the face. The inky black shadow writhed and twisted madly.

  At first I thought it was in pain—then I realized that it was shoving bits of itself deeper inside of her, like it was grabbing fistfuls of her nerves and yanking them like strings. There seemed to be too much damage for any kind of fine-tuned control now that a whole section of her brain was missing. Her gun hand spasmed, sending a wild shot into the floor, and then the fingers started to go slack.

  “Shadows,” I said quickly. “Stuck to the back of them. You can’t see them?”

  “No, but I’m not Anakim.”

  I frowned at th
at. “At some point you’re going to tell me what all these damned words mean.” Then, “You seriously can’t see that shit?”

  Saliriel pounded the male officer into a pulp on the floor and I heard his rider scream in frustration. It was the sound of nightmares. The naked woman fired another round into the lady cop, and her rider also shrieked in fury, if not in pain. I twitched as the unreal sound clawed against the insides of my skull.

  “There’s… smudges. Something behind them,” Remy replied, squinting. Whatever he was doing, it made his eyes flash with unearthly blue fire. Then he made a frustrated noise. “I can’t see them like you can. Tell me what’s happening,” he urged.

  After the second bullet, the rider lost nearly all control over the lady cop. With a final, last-ditch effort, it did something that made no sense at first. Awkwardly, it made her drop the gun, sending the weapon sliding over the floor toward the throne-end of the room. I stared, unable to respond to my brother as I watched the shadow-thing shuck itself out of the lady cop.

  She crumpled to the ground like a cast-off suit of clothes, and then it did the unthinkable. It slithered darkly across the floor, hugging its belly along the tiles. It had more limbs than I could have imagined and reminded me of a fat black centipede crossed with a hooded cobra. It followed the path of the cast-off gun, and too late I realized what it was really after.

  A fresh host.

  “It’s on the move,” I breathed and tried not to bring up any of the food I hadn’t eaten all day. The thing paused between the slave and the dead bouncer, its sort-of head questing with little feelers around the two corpses. Then it seemed to make a decision and dove for its target.

  Remy reached over and grabbed my shoulder. He shook me once, firmly, locking his unearthly blue eyes on mine.