The Warrior

  I reach down and grab the siren’s bicep and tell Kraven to let me have him. At first, he fumbles to keep hold of the intruder in his hands, but when I see the wild gleam in Kraven’s eyes, I bark for him to let the siren go. He does.

  I stand tall on my feet and pull the siren up.

  He stops fighting, and our eyes meet.

  “Holy hell,” I mutter.

  I recognize the guy in my grasp. It isn’t a siren.

  It’s a collector.

  “Zack,” I breathe.

  Using my bewilderment to his advantage, Zack breaks away and takes three quick strides down the hallway. Annabelle and Charlie press themselves against the wall, but he isn’t moving toward them. He turns and meets my gaze. He grins. It’s a long smile on a wide, thin-lipped mouth. Hair hangs over his forehead so that a thick strand of it sticks to his eyeball.

  “Semunla Katra,” he says.

  I have no idea what gibberish he’s spewing, but I lunge toward him.

  Then I stop cold.

  A black hole opens in the ground like a gaping wound. He waves at me like he’s a freaking pageant queen, then takes a small step and drops through it and out of sight.

  The hole closes over his head, and he’s gone.

  4

  Talk Among Books

  I’m frozen like an icicle in the ninth ring of hell.

  “Who was that?” Kraven asks in a wary tone.

  “A collector.” I silently curse myself for not opening my mind to sense another cuff. Because once I realized who it was, I sensed that cuff with screaming clarity. It was a careless mistake.

  Turning around, I spot someone I don’t know standing near the girls. My legs move before my brain even processes what I’m doing. Then I’m standing between New Guy and Charlie. I grab the guy by his plaid shirt and shuffle him back and into a wall. “Who are you?”

  “Whoa, calm down, steroids,” he says in a slight, British accent. “Name’s Paine, and I’m going to give you some if you don’t ease up on the death grip, capiche?”

  His words hint at smooth confidence, but he speaks in a submissive voice. It’s the voice of someone desperate to please others.

  I barely recognize it.

  Kraven speaks up. “He’s one of us, Dante.”

  Paine nods at his ankle where I imagine a gold cuff must lie hidden.

  “A liberator?” I ask. Paine grins sheepishly, and I let go of his shirt. “Don’t be sneaking up on us like that again or you’ll be taking a dirt nap.”

  “Sorry,” he says, and seems to mean it. He offers his hand. It’s wide and calloused, and I respect that it appears he’s done real work in his short life. I shake it, feeling like an arse.

  The guy looks to be in his early twenties and has a shaved head, though I can still spot the reddish-blond color he’s trying to hide. Paine’s eyes are set a bit too far apart, and he has long, chick-like lashes. His forehead protrudes, giving him a slight caveman appearance, and his body is that of a wrestler’s, like he’s itching to take someone to the mat. Overall, Paine kind of looks like a model, someone girls would dig because he’s strangely attractive. That’s not me. I’m hot like a bucket of fried chicken, baby.

  “Didn’t mean to surprise you guys,” Paine says. But he isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at Annabelle. “Are you okay?”

  “Me?” Annabelle’s voice cracks as she points toward herself.

  “Yeah, you.” Paine steps away from me and toward Anna. “You almost took a fall there.” Paine breaks eye contact with her to glare at Kraven. I’d almost forgotten Kraven had tossed Annabelle away like a dirty diaper.

  Annabelle runs a hand over her short, ink-black hair. Her quirked eyebrow is barely visible above hard-cut bangs. “I’m okay.”

  I can practically hear Kraven growling low in his chest. “Stop talking. All of you. A collector infiltrated the Hive.” He looks pointedly at Charlie. “Everyone will meet in the library in ten minutes.”

  “And disappeared through a hole in the floor,” I add.

  “What?” Kraven says.

  “A collector infiltrated the Hive and disappeared through a goddamn hole in the floor. You forgot the last part.”

  “Don’t take His name in vain, Dante Walker. Not here.” Kraven glances at Annabelle like he wants to add something else. Then he strides away, his wings folding back into his body.

  He wasn’t surprised, I realize. Kraven didn’t even flinch when that collector used a freaking portal or whatever to disappear. Me, on the other hand, I’m freaking out, which roughly equates to a long sigh.

  I’m not into overreaction.

  Charlie presses herself against my chest as Paine and Annabelle walk away together, chatting awkwardly.

  “Charlie,” I mutter into her hair. “Why did you do that? Why did you lunge at him?”

  “I thought I could do that thing with my hands.” Charlie inspects her palms, and I inspect her purple skirt. Nothing gets me going like a skirt. Or bacon. Or any sliver of skin on any part of Charlie’s body. Jaysus, she’s just so innocent. Makes me want to ravage her with my darkness, and I know just how disturbing that sounds.

  “Dante?”

  “Hmm?”

  “We should head to the library.” Something tells me this isn’t the first time she’s said this, but it’s all good. Everyone needs to take a mental fantasy break now and then. That’s what Kit Kat’s really selling.

  Charlie hooks her arm in mine, and we stroll like royalty toward dusty ass books that I have no interest in whatsoever. Charlie’s into them, though. Says it helps to escape her head, to forget about Grams and Aspen and be somewhere else for a while. I say give me a cigarette, a neat scotch like hustlers drink, and Charlie in my bed. I may have died at seventeen, but I have the heart of a thirty-year-old Viking.

  When we spill into the library, a small smile touches Charlie’s mouth. I’m not sure why. There’s enough dust in here to make Oklahoma farmers extremely nervous. Books clutter the shelves, floor to ceiling, but they aren’t organized in any fashion. Some spines face in and others out. Some books teeter in big stacks out of reach, while smaller stacks litter the floor.

  The library is similar to the rest of the Hive: chaos. It’s like someone came in with a wheelbarrow of books, then starting fly-balling them across the room one at a time, which sounds like my kind of fun with literature. A dozen or more light bulbs on strings drip down, creating the world’s tackiest chandelier. It looks like the multicolored bulbs decided to off themselves—death by hanging. I don’t blame them, considering their location.

  Valery and Max are already in the room, sitting on a brown leather couch that’s seen better days. I nod what’s up to Max, and he returns the gesture with questionable enthusiasm. If before he was sad about being unable to commit to Valery, now he seems angry. It makes me angry, too. Why shouldn’t they be able to wed? Max has more than proven that he doesn’t work for Lucifer—err, Lucille—anymore.

  The Quiet Ones, two women who sport hideous brown dresses, stride in. Actually, they don’t so much stride as they do float. They’re liberators, but from what I overheard, they made a choice to serve the soldier and savior versus fighting in the war. I call bullcrap.

  Because there are few liberators, eight including Paine, they’ll be needed, and saying you’d rather wash dishes and sew clothing isn’t right. Then again, I remember the way they cared for Charlie and me after we were hurt following our stint in hell. So it’s hard to be too upset.

  Paine walks in, all shoulders and thighs, and glances around the room, not finding what he’s searching for. When Annabelle enters the room a moment later, the disappointed look on his face vanishes. Blue is by Annabelle’s side. He sneers at me, but I only turn away. I don’t feel like dealing with his resentment right now, not after what I saw that collector do.

  When Kraven comes in, he’s walking with someone I’ve seen only a few times around the Hive. His name is Neco, and he’s got a buzz cut and forearms that make me
think of old Popeye cartoons. He and two walkers administered our test a couple of weeks ago to demonstrate whether Blue and I had passed the self-defense sector of training. Neco is the eighth and final liberator in the Hive. Outside of him, there’s Blue, Valery, Kraven, the Quiet Ones, Paine, and yours truly.

  Kraven stands in the center of the room, his back straight, chin tilted. The man of few words looks like he has a handful of them now.

  “We’ll resume training first thing in the morning,” he states.

  “Come again?” I say.

  His gaze meets mine. You heard what I said is what he replies without speaking.

  “Yeah, Cyborg, listen.” I dig my fists into my pockets to keep from throwing one across his face. Him and his damn training. “A collector just appeared and then vanished through an anus in the floor. We can’t sit around learning how to fight. We need to take action.”

  Everyone who wasn’t there to see the collector gasps. Kraven fills them in on what happened in a calm tone, and though I can’t believe my eyes, everyone seems comforted after he’s finished speaking.

  “There will be six sectors of training and an additional course if you pass the others strongly enough.” He continues with his spiel as if the collector’s ability to pop into our joint at any time is simply a minute obstacle to overcome. Nothing we can’t handle. I’ll give him props for confidence. “In the past, we’ve undergone training separately. Starting tomorrow, we proceed through each sector together. We’ll need to learn how to battle as one. We need to understand each other’s strengths, as well as our weaknesses.”

  Valery steps forward. “So if we’ve already completed a sector—”

  “Then you’ll be repeating it.”

  Valery nods and steps back. What is up with this guy? Why doesn’t anyone question him? I raise my hand like I’m back in high school. Gag me. “So we’re going to stay here in this easily infiltrated crap hole? And we’re going to train? These are the orders you’ve been waiting for from Big Guy? The man upstairs is telling us to stick around while collectors are popping up like moles? What about launching a counter attack? What about making a plan for war?”

  For once, Kraven appears nervous. He shifts inside his white jacket. “There is a reason we must remain here, Dante, especially now that war has been signaled. We have two weeks to prepare before the day our king ordained takes place.”

  The liberators grow silent at Kraven’s confirmation that the trumpet we heard was the signal we’d waited for. And that in two weeks’ time, the war between heaven and hell will begin.

  “We remain here because we know the Hive’s layout better than our enemy, and that provides protection. And we don’t launch an attack because we are working on our king’s timetable. But trust me, our day will come. Until then, there will be additional patrol as you sleep. As always, the bells will ring if there’s a break-in.”

  I accept his answer, but it seems to me Kraven is auditing his answers. If he insists we remain inside and train, there must be more to the Hive than he lets on. Out of all the places in the world for us to prepare for battle, why here?

  Kraven pulls himself up taller and looks to the arched doorway. “Oh, good, you’ve arrived.”

  All heads turn to see who’s entering the room.

  My eyebrows nearly touch my hairline at the sight of him.

  5

  Old Dude

  A dude as old as air shuffles into the room. He’s got tufts of white hair sprouting from every part of his body, and his arms are way, way too long for his torso. He looks like he’s moments from swinging through the Amazon rainforest and biting into a banana. But the most amazing part of this dude is his ears; they’re as big as my palms. Many old people are hard of hearing, but I bet this guy could hear a beetle fart from six hundred miles away.

  Also, he’s wearing a robe. It’s red. The moment I spot it, I forget all about him looking like a monkey with semi-sonic hearing and toss him insta-respect for rolling like Hugh Hefner.

  “This is Oswald,” Kraven announces. “He’s a retired professor who taught mythology. He specialized in demon and angel folklore.”

  Oswald bobs his head as Kraven speaks like, Dude’s not lying.

  “I’ve let him know about our goal to analyze ancient documents,” Kraven continues. “Oswald understands our desire to study here, in privacy, before handing the information over to our investor. I’ve given him the basement area to work.”

  So what Kraven’s saying is he made up a whole lot of bull crap about some rich MoFo who’s into folklore and hired us to research the subject. Glancing at Oswald, at his blue-gray eyes and knowing smile, I doubt he bought a single word of Kraven’s cover. I bet, just like the humans working the Hive, he knows something is up. But like I’ve always said, nothing keeps a secret safe like a mouthful of cash.

  “Oswald, would you like to fill us in on what you’ve learned?” Kraven takes a couple of steps back and waves his arm in front of him, gesturing that the old man can take the floor.

  Oswald looks like a kid who got caught with his prick in his hand. His face flushes. “Umm, I—yes, yes,” he stutters. “Kraven has asked me to study the scroll you folks found.”

  He means the twin scrolls; one for the heavens, one for the underworld, each only readable by Charlie and Aspen. I’m all ears waiting to see what the guy has learned and more than a little thrilled that Kraven brought someone in to research it. I wonder if he thinks, like I do, that the answers to winning the war are on there.

  “The scroll appears to be blank, but I have located the correct spoken words to uncover the message.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I ask as Charlie leans into me. Without thinking, I wrap my arm around her.

  Oswald spins around. After he takes me in, he says, “You must be Dante. It’s a pleasure to me you.”

  “It always is,” I say. “What is this you’re talking about? Saying something out loud to uncover a message on the scroll?”

  Soft murmurs erupt around the library. Kraven implies Oswald doesn’t know about us, about the freaky stuff we can do as liberators, but what the old man’s talking about sounds more like—”

  “It sounds a bit like magic, I know.” Oswald shows us his open hand as if to admit it seems crazy. To me, it sounds about as crazy as corpses eating and breathing courtesy of gold ankle jewelry.

  “How can this be? We would know about this.” Valery looks pointedly at Kraven before returning her gaze to Oswald as if remembering the front. “What I mean to say is we’ve been studying this scroll for a long time.”

  Oswald wraps his arms around himself. The gesture looks feminine what with his red robe and all. “I’ve made this my life’s work. And I can tell you now, when it comes to things like this, the sacred and historical, you have to keep an open mind. It’s said that monks kept messages hidden within the pages of numerous tomes. Revealing them is a mixture of the right words. Some say it isn’t magic, that it’s the heat from our breath that makes a delicate ink appear. But I disagree. I believe there are a great number of things we don’t understand, because we won’t allow ourselves to believe.” Oswald taps his temple as a closing point.

  “So you’ve seen what the scroll says about the soldier? About how important she is according to the text?” Blue glares at me with vengeance as he asks this.

  “I’ve read about the soldier and the savior, yes,” Oswald admits. “And about other things, too. About doorways that can be opened—”

  “Let’s talk more in the morning,” Kraven interrupts. “It’s late.”

  I realize Kraven has basically told us to retire, but I’m barely listening. Instead, I’m concentrating on what Oswald exposed, that there is definitely more on that scroll than Charlie was able to read, because I certainly don’t remember anything about doorways. Maybe it could explain how that collector got in here. The back of my neck tingles imagining what else is on there, what else Oswald knows that I don’t.

  “Meet in the traini
ng room at seven o’clock in the morning.” Kraven tucks his blond hair behind his ears and pulls in a long breath. “Expect it to be a long day.”

  Everyone begins filing out of the room, off to bed like good boys and girls. What the H? I can’t believe no one else cares about what else Oswald knows.

  I turn to Charlie. “Can you believe this?”

  I expect Charlie to agree with me, or to tell me to shut my trap and follow someone else’s lead for once in my life. Instead, she kisses me. We’re alone in the library, and her hands are crawling up my spine, and my heart is slamming inside my ribs.

  The past few minutes expire in a rush as Charlie replaces every last thing in my mind. My fingers trace the curve of her hips, the dip of her waistline. Then I run my hands back down and grasp her thighs. She moans softly into my mouth.

  “I’m starting to like libraries,” I mumble against her.

  She giggles and reaches up on tiptoes.

  “Let’s go to bed,” she says low in her throat. I like to imagine she’s saying it like an older, experienced woman, because technically, she is older. She and Aspen turned eighteen not long ago.

  I don’t even reply. I scoop her into my arms and carry her toward our bedroom suite. She laughs, and the sound makes me feel like superman. Even though our destination is some distance from the library, with her lips nibbling at my ear, the journey is over too quickly.

  I all but kick the door down, and thankfully, Blue and Annabelle are already in their separate rooms. There’s a small lounge area in the center with dilapidated, mismatched furniture, and branching off from there are four smaller rooms. Each one has a rustic dresser, a single nightstand, and a bed. The dresser and nightstand could burn to the ground for all I care.