Chapter Five
Jedda had been in a lot of uncomfortable and
downright dangerous situations before, but something about this one made the
others, even the battles, seem tame.
Shrike wasn’t your average Big Evil. He was Bigger Evil with
an attitude. She had no idea what fallen angels were capable of, but it was
probably safe to assume that they could make most demons look like kittens.
Razr, on the other hand... She wasn’t sure what to think
about him. He was smoking hot, for sure. She’d always been a sucker for dark
hair and dark eyes, and she’d bet her life-stone that beneath his expensive,
exquisitely tailored suit was the body of an athlete. He probably had amazing
wings, too.
But there was also a familiarity between them that didn’t
make sense. She would have remembered meeting him, and yet she swore she felt a
connection, as if their pulses were synced. And if that was true, then his
pulse was pounding as hard as hers as she watched a bunch of blunt-snouted,
horned dudes with wicked blades on the ends of long poles advance toward the
center of the room. She thought the weapons were called halberds, but she
supposed their name wasn’t important. The fact that they could cleave a body in
half was.
Razr moved close, and while Jedda could take care of
herself, she had to admit to being grateful that he was, at least for now, her
ally.
“Shrike,” Razr growled. “What’s going on—”
He broke off as, in a single, coordinated move, the halberd
guys swung their blades so suddenly and so fast that she didn’t have time to
scream before a dozen heads plunked to the floor. Their owners’ decapitated
bodies collapsed next to them with wet, obscene thuds.
“Lexi!” A roar of rage tore from Razr’s throat as a female
in a crimson evening gown hit the tile, blood spurting from her headless neck.
Nausea and horror rolled through Jedda, and she stumbled
backward as the shock wore off the crowd. Some people screamed, some cried, but
most laughed.
Razr launched in a blur of fury. His fist
slammed into Shrike’s jaw, knocking him into a wall. Before Shrike could
recover, Razr had Shrike by the throat and pinned, their faces nose to nose.
“You killed her!” Razr snarled. “What the fuck?”
“This is a demon dinner party,” Shrike growled
through bloodied lips. “What did you expect?” He smiled, one Jedda assumed was
intended to be comforting but only came off as terrifying. “Besides, wasn’t
Lexi cursed with a bunch of lives and deaths? She’ll pop up again somewhere.”
His eyes lit up with a malevolent crimson light, and little bursts of lightning
sizzled at the tips of his fingers as he raised his hand toward the back of
Razr’s head. “But you won’t.”
“Don’t do it, Shrike,” Jedda warned. “He’s with me, and if
you kill him, I swear that whatever ‘proposal’ you have for me is going to die
with him. I will never work with you.”
Shrike snorted, but he dropped his hand to his side again.
“I think you will. But I’ll let him live. For now.”
The crowd began to chant a bunch of mumbo-jumbo
Jedda didn’t recognize, but she did understand one word: Lothar. Her gut
churned again.
“Fuck you.” Razr shoved Shrike hard enough to make his skull
crack against the wall. “Let us leave, you piece of shit. The ceremony is
over.”
One of Shrike’s hooded goons spotted his boss’s predicament
and headed their way, the edge of his blade dripping with blood. Jedda forced
her wobbly legs to move closer to Razr so she could impress upon him the
urgency of their situation. Shrike might have shelved his homicidal urges for
the moment, but he seemed like the kind of psycho who could change his mind in
an instant.
“Hey.” She spoke under her breath, her words meant for Razr
only. “Maybe you should back off a little...”
“You really have no choice but to release me.” Shrike’s
deceptively calm voice wigged Jedda out. In her experience, hotheads were far
better to deal with than people whose emotions ran cold. Both could be
dangerous, but hotheads were more predictable and easier to manipulate. Shrike
didn’t strike her as either of those things. He gestured toward a closed door
nearby. “Why don’t we go someplace quieter to talk?”
Razr hesitated. He was going to refuse and get them both
killed, wasn’t he?
Jedda had been sealed inside collapsed diamond mines and had
never felt this trapped.
Finally, just as she was counting the number of goons between her and the nearest door, Razr cursed and
backed off. What he didn’t do was stop glaring daggers
at the other fallen angel. Not even while Shrike led them to a grand library
full of literary classics, modern fiction, and a sprinkling of demonic tomes.
Seething at Shrike’s trickery and betrayal, and still hopped
up on an adrenaline dump, she rounded on the bastard as soon as the door
closed.
“What is it you want, Mr. Shrike? And why didn’t you simply
make an appointment instead of inviting me here for this...this...spectacle?”
She looked over at Razr, who stood a couple of feet away,
his fists clenched at his sides and his dark eyes smoldering. Hatred
practically seeped from his pores, and she swore she could feel it in a wave of
acid heat washing over her skin.
Shrike walked around the desk and sank into the leather
chair behind it. He gestured for both her and Razr to take seats in the two
chairs across from him. She accepted, but Razr shot the other fallen angel the
bird and remained standing, his gaze sharp, his stance deceptively relaxed.
Jedda got the impression that inside he was coiled like a snake and ready to
strike.
Shrike shot Razr an annoyed glance
but then focused on Jedda. “I invited you here because the things I’m going to
ask you for aren’t going to be easy to find. Hence, the sacrifice. It’s
important that its energy envelops you.”
Evil bastard. Jedda didn’t have a whole lot of room
to lecture anyone on the subject of ethics, but she’d
never tricked anyone into attending a murder-themed dinner party.
No, but you’ve killed too.
Dammit, no she hadn’t. Not intentionally.
But she’d benefited from the death, hadn’t she?
Shoving her errant thoughts back into the deepest recesses
of her mind where they belonged, she looked Shrike in his steel-gray eyes.
“I don’t appreciate the deception,” she said in her brisk
business voice, the one she used when dealing with deplorable people like Tom
from the Taaffeite mine. “And I definitely don’t
appreciate being enveloped in some strange spell. So I
don’t think I’ll be doing business with you.” She started to stand, but
lightning fast, his big hand clamped around her wrist.
A snarl rang out, freezing her in her seat more effectively
than Shrike’s grip ever could.
“Release her.” Razr’s eyes glittered with the
threat of violence. It made her wonder what fallen angels were capable of. And
it was a little bit of a turn-on.
Shrike grinned, a smile so cold she shivered. “As long as
she promises to hear me out.”
Shit. She didn’t want to hear another word from this bin of
burning rubbish, but she also didn’t have a death wish, nor did she want to see
Razr’s body flopping around on the floor next to his head.
“Of course,” she agreed with forced calm, hoping to
alleviate the tension and get this meeting over with. “I suppose it can’t
hurt.”
“Good.” Shrike released her, and she resisted the urge to
rub her wrist, where her skin burned as if his fingers had been sticks of fire.
“Now, here’s the deal. What I want will be a challenge, but I know you’ll come
through for me.”
“Just tell me what it is, and I’ll tell you if I think it’s
possible.”
For some reason, he looked amused, and she didn’t like that
one bit. “You are, of course, familiar with the famous crystal skulls of
Mesoamerica.”
She couldn’t stop herself from rolling her eyes. Not only
was every one of them almost certainly fake, but if he wanted one he could easily hire any competent dealer in
antiquities. He didn’t need her for that.
“Of course. But—”
“Are you also familiar with the crystal devil’s horns?”
She sucked in a startled breath. The existence of the
crystal devil’s horns wasn’t common knowledge. Even most of those who were
familiar with the legends didn’t believe they existed.
“I’m sorry,” Razr said, “but what the fuck is a crystal
devil’s horn?”
Shrike sat back, the smug look on his face so obnoxious she
wanted to slap it off. “Not long after the first crystal skulls came onto the
scene, a human archaeologist digging in Mexico discovered a curved crystal
horn, much like a ram’s horn. It was perfectly seamless, with no flaws.”
Jedda leaned forward eagerly, unable to contain her
excitement. She loved mysteries that surrounded the elements of the earth.
“It was found deep inside a cave full of human skeletons,”
she said, “and it was reportedly hot to the touch. The man who found it went
insane shortly afterward, and the horn was lost to the ages. But then, in 1938,
Adolf Hitler sent a team to the same cave in search of more treasures. They
found another horn, and they assumed that it, along with the first one,
belonged to a crystal skull. But no skull that matched the horns was ever
found.”
Shrike shook his head. “A skull was found.”
He dug into his desk drawer and pulled out a black and white
photo of what she could only describe as a crystal skull. A crystal demon
skull.
“That’s incredible,” she murmured. “All the other skulls are
human, or at least primate in nature. But this looks like something you’d find
in a demon graveyard.”
Its long, pointed chin and sharp teeth gave it a monstrous
profile, and two perfectly round indentions at the temples appeared to be the
perfect resting places for horns.
Razr strode over and pulled the photo to the edge of the
desk. “Where is it now?”
“According to my sources, Satan himself owns it.” At Razr’s
snort, Shrike took insult, his mouth tightening in a
grim line. “You have something to add?”