Chapter Five
When I walked into the kitchen, Tenrael was cooking breakfast—a surprise since demons don’t need to eat. But he hummed happily while he fried bacon and eggs in a cast iron pan, his wings moving slightly to the rhythm of the song. He was naked this morning. Nothing sexual about it, simply a creature comfortable in his own skin. Grimes, wearing black trousers and a burgundy shirt, sat at the small kitchen table with a glass of water and a newspaper. The morning light coming in through the windows gave everything a lemon-and-butter tint. It was a cozy scene, far more domestic than anything I’d witnessed in my own family, and I had to fight hard to strangle a new tendril of hope. This would never be me. The only time a guy like me gets a white picket fence is when he’s using the pickets to stake things.
Without looking up from his newspaper, Grimes pointed at an empty chair. Then he got up and poured a mugful of coffee from the old-fashioned percolator on the stove. He brought it to me and sat down again. “Ten and I did some research on your problem,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Didn’t find anything useful. Went on a wild goose chase after chupacabras, though.”
“That’s a mixed metaphor,” Tenrael said from the stove.
Grimes shot him a look of annoyance and fondness in equal measure, then turned to face me. “We’re fairly certain it’s not a chupacabra.”
“Well, I guess that narrows it down.” I sipped my coffee—bitter and strong—and sighed. “Is it a vampire?”
“Are you looking for verification that you didn’t fuck the perp?”
“No, not really. I only…. I’ve jumped into things blindly before. Don’t want to do it again.”
Grimes gave me what I hoped was an approving look. “We don’t think it’s a vamp. Neither of us has heard of one doing this to its victims, and we’ve been around for a while.”
“A while.” Chuckling, Tenrael brought over two overflowing plates of food and set them in front of us. Mine had the expected bacon and eggs, but Grimes got pancakes nearly drowned in syrup. I never imagined I’d be served breakfast by a naked demon, and damn, the food sure smelled good. I thanked him and dug in. Before I knew it, I’d cleaned my plate and drained a second cup of coffee.
Grimes cleared away the dishes and washed up while Tenrael dried. They moved easily together in the cramped space, a well-practiced dance punctuated by quick smiles and caresses. After all the breakfast things were tucked away and Grimes had wiped down the counter, he sat again at the table and Tenrael knelt beside him. I didn’t understand why he knelt, but they both looked entirely comfortable with it. It was probably hard to sit in chairs with those big wings.
“How are you paying your bills now that you’ve left the Bureau?” Grimes asked.
“Didn’t leave—they canned me. They gave me severance and I had a little bit saved up.”
“And when that’s gone?”
I shrugged. I guess I hadn’t expected to outlive my savings. But now, for no reason I could articulate, I did want to survive. Well, I’d worry about my finances later, if I got that far.
Grimes rubbed his chin. “What about signing on with a local police force?”
“Don’t really picture myself as a boy in blue.” I’d never been a team player. One of the good things about the Bureau had been the degree of independence I’d had. “Anyway, you don’t need to give me career advice. That’s not what I came for.”
“I know. Let’s talk about what you did come for.”
“You said you couldn’t find anything out.”
There was a flinty aspect to Grimes’s smile. “You think we give up that easy? I used to be an agent, once upon a time. And my Ten? He endured horrors you can’t imagine and came out of it strong as hell.”
Looking at Tenrael, kneeling placidly and leaning slightly against Grimes’s side, I wondered about those horrors. What would terrify a demon?
“What else do you have in mind?” I asked.
“We’re going up to San Francisco with you. We’ll see if we can help you find your perp.”
The travel plans were slightly complicated. Grimes would follow me in his vehicle to the car-rental place, where I would return my shoebox on wheels. Then he and I would ride north together. Tenrael? He was going to fly, apparently. Fuck.
“Is there a reason you won’t go in the car?” I asked him.
“It’s not very comfortable for me. And I like flying.”
Simple enough. If I had wings, I’d chose them over the freeways too.
Before we left, Tenrael and Charles embraced, and then Tenrael plucked a feather from his wing and handed it over. Smiling, Grimes tucked it into a pocket. It was such an intimate scene that I found myself blushing. I hadn’t thought myself capable.
Grimes owned a 1960s GTO, light blue and in pristine condition. Even the pale vinyl upholstery looked straight out of the showroom. The exhaust rumbled thrillingly, like an angry rhino, and the seating was comfortable even for a man as big as me. It turned out that zooming up the 5 was a lot nicer in this car than in an econobox.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a car guy,” I commented as we were passing over the Grapevine.
“I’m not. I found this one, I liked it, and I take good care of it.”
“Did you do the restoration work yourself?”
Grimes shot me an inscrutable grin. “I bought her brand-new.”
That raised a basketful of questions, but I couldn’t think how to phrase them. What the hell are you? seemed a rude thing to ask a man who was doing me a favor. I deflected my questioning to another topic. “How did you and Tenrael, um….”
“Become partners?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Bureau man and a demon.”
I thought about it. “Dunno. Maybe not. Probably have more in common than if you’d hooked up with an insurance salesman or waiter or something.”
“Probably.” He drove silently for a few miles, neatly accelerating past some semis and an RV. “I was supposed to destroy him. I freed him instead.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I’d done any differently.”
I nodded in complete understanding. “What did you free him from?”
The corners of his mouth turned down. “You’re imagining monsters, aren’t you? Things with talons and fangs and scales?” He snorted. “It was humans. Just ordinary Homo sapiens.”
“Fuck.” I believed him. While I had specialized in other species, I’d seen what my own was capable of.
“You want to know something funny? After I freed him, I left. The men who’d been torturing him for years were right there, and he could have torn them to pieces. Nobody could have stopped him, and I wouldn’t have thought any less of him if he’d done it. But he simply flew away.”
I might have had trouble swallowing a story like that before, but now that I’d met Tenrael, I found it entirely credible. “So the demon is better than the human?”
“Maybe. Sometimes. He came to me of his own free will and desire. And the more he got… under my skin, the more I thought about tracking those motherfuckers down and giving them a taste of the pain they’d inflicted on him. Ten talked me out of it.”
“An ethical demon?”
“A practical one,” Grimes answered. “He didn’t want me to go to prison. Anyway, for a long time now I’ve had the satisfaction of knowing they’re moldering in their graves while Ten and I are still kicking. Kicking together.” He smiled.
Grimes stopped twice to get gas and once for a late lunch. While I had a burger and fries, he ate apple pie. I didn’t ask him about his unusual diet.
Without offering to stop at my place—and I didn’t ask him to—Grimes crossed the Bay Bridge into the city, which he seemed to know well. He had no trouble maneuvering through heavy traffic and down meandering streets, and he finally pulled into a garage beneath a little hotel across the street from Sutro Heights Park. I waited in the garage, leaning against the warm metal of the car, while he checked in. He came out glancing at his watch. “Ten’ll be here soon.”
I hadn’t been a part of the discussion about where Tenrael would meet us, and I was frankly curious as to how he’d flap down unnoticed. I understood better after I’d followed Grimes across to Lands End and up a trail that overlooked the Pacific as it entered the Golden Gate. Eucalyptus and other trees grew tall there, and a foghorn made its mournful calls. We sat on a bench and watched as a fog bank swallowed the sunset and crept forward to engulf the city. I was glad for my jacket.
Tenrael’s approach was silent, perhaps muffled in part by the sound of the ocean beneath us. I startled wildly when he landed, but at least I didn’t go for my gun. He wore dark pants, and with his bronze skin and black wings, it was hard to see him clearly. But Grimes didn’t hesitate to fold him into a quick, hard embrace. “Good flight?” I thought Grimes sounded wistful.
“Hmm.” Tenrael nuzzled at Grimes’s neck.
I found myself wondering where Marek was.
The darkness camouflaged Tenrael’s wings as we walked back to the motel, but since it was San Francisco, perhaps nobody would have found them remarkable. I saw strange things in the city nearly every day, and that wasn’t even counting the supernatural residents. Tenrael sat in the front passenger seat, his wings squashed awkwardly, while I took the back seat and gave directions to the club where I’d met Marek. There was no particular reason to believe our prey would be there tonight—the city had a lot of clubs—but it seemed a good place to start. Several of the murder victims had last been seen alive there.
Grimes parked the GTO in a lot nearby. We made an odd trio as we marched down the sidewalk, Tenrael barefoot.
Interestingly, the bouncer seemed more eager to let Tenrael into the club than to admit Grimes and me. Tenrael was certainly intriguing and exotic, while Grimes and I looked like disgruntled dads—and not in a good way. Still, after sizing us up and perhaps deciding either one of us could best him in a fight, he allowed us inside.
A mixed crowd jammed the bar and dance floor. Young people mostly, but some in their thirties and forties. Although the majority were male, the entire gender spectrum was represented. The one thing almost everyone had in common was a scarcity of clothing. While they must have been comfortable in the oppressive heat, I felt distinctly overdressed, and the mingled scents of cologne, alcohol, and sweat nearly overwhelmed me.
The three of us fanned out, each threading his way through the throngs in search of anything unusual. I was groped, jostled, and pawed, although my glare persuaded even the drunkest to back off quickly. I had a few pangs of longing over the beautiful naked flesh and the joyful way these people moved their bodies. I’d never experienced such casual pleasure, not even when I was their age.
An hour or so later, I stood outside the club with my companions, none of us much wiser after our expedition. “There are ghosts there,” Tenrael announced as he shifted his ruffled feathers into place. “They float along the edges of the room looking forlorn.”
I hadn’t noticed them, but then I had no special gifts for seeing the incorporeal dead. “I’ve never heard of a ghost killing people like this.”
“Nor have I. They’re not who we’re looking for. I doubt they want to harm anyone. They just long for what they’ve lost.”
Because conversation inside the club had been nearly impossible, we decided on an alternate tactic. Tenrael and Grimes stood several yards down the sidewalk, shadowed from streetlights by a shop awning, while I skulked inside a recessed doorway half a block in the other direction. We stopped anyone who came out of the club and questioned them briefly about whether they'd seen anything suspicious. Some of them were too intoxicated to give coherent answers, and the rest had no idea what we were talking about.
The flow of departing clubgoers had slowed to a trickle when Grimes and Tenrael rejoined me. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Grimes said with a scowl.
Tenrael patted his shoulder. “We can try other places.”
“Do you know how many bars and dance clubs there are in this city?”
“We have time.”
“The potential victims don’t.”
Realizing I was famished, I rubbed my belly. “Let’s give it up for tonight. Maybe we can think of a better plan during the day.” I wasn’t as optimistic as I tried to sound, but I didn’t want to simply stand on the dirty sidewalk, feeling defeated.
We walked to the same donut shop where Marek and I had gone. The women behind the counter weren’t happy with Tenrael’s shirtless state. But after they scolded him in Vietnamese and he replied calmly in the same language, they hesitated only a short time before giving in. I wondered what he’d said to convince them. He sat at a booth near the back of the room while Grimes and I ordered coffee and donuts, along with a ham-and-cheese sandwich for me. Then we ate and drank silently, each lost in his own thoughts.
“Will you stay at our motel?” Grimes asked after we were done. “Our room has a couch.”
I shook my head. Trying to settle my substantial body onto a couch was an exercise in anatomical origami that never ended well. Besides, I’d have felt as if I was intruding on their intimacy. “I’ll take BART to my place. I need a shave and a change of clothes.”
We agreed on a meeting time, and I watched as they moved away, their bodies so close that their shadows merged under the streetlights. I didn’t head for a BART station. Instead I walked to Marek’s Chinese restaurant. It held the same desolate air as before, the edges of the brown paper curling inside the windows. I couldn’t see any lights on inside, and there was an unambiguous emptiness to the place, a conviction that nobody was home—not even a vampire.
Still, I hesitated to knock. I ended up going around to the back of the building, an alley crowded with garbage bins and reeking of old food and cat piss. The green paint on the restaurant’s service door was peeling badly, and the flimsy lock was no match for me. Picking locks was one of the many useful skills the Bureau had left me.
I was in a storage room, dark and dusty, strewn with papers and cardboard. A part of me expected to discover bodies with their throats torn open, but the only corpses were tiny ones—several cockroaches, some flies, and a rat. Next I came to the kitchen, cramped and mostly empty aside from dented stainless steel counters and a large, corroded cooktop.
Only one small space remained before the dining room. It had probably served as the restaurant’s office, but now it nearly broke my heart. Marek had set up a pallet on the floor, nothing more than a pile of sheets and blankets. Three shirts hung from a hook on the wall, and two pairs of jeans sat neatly folded beneath them. Within reach of the makeshift bed was a little stack of paperbacks, their covers battered. He might have picked them up from one of the giveaway bins outside a bookstore, or perhaps they’d been abandoned on buses or in coffee shops.
Marek had existed far longer than I had, yet this was all he had to show for it—a lonely little squatter’s nest made of discards. I’m not sure what I’d expected, but I guess I’d hoped that Marek would have established more substance to sustain him.
I buried my face in my hands and considered whether to sleep here. I was just about to remove my boots when somebody—or something—made a small noise behind me. I tried to spin around to confront my assailant, but even as I turned, something sharp sank into my back just below my shoulder blade. A fierce coldness rushed through my veins. Too paralyzed to even cry out, I began to fall. I was unconscious before I hit the floor.