Immortal (Fallen Angels #6)(82)
Author: J.R. Ward

He became so clear to her, her eyes started to water.

“Do you have him with you?” Eddie asked softly.

“Yes…”

“Okay.”

In the silence that followed, she waited for the little gold dove on the thin gold chain to talk to her in some way.

And waited.

Waited some more.

“What is it supposed to do?” she murmured.

“Concentrate harder,” Eddie replied.

Frowning, she went into even greater detail, seeing things like the blue flecks in his eyes, and the way his front teeth were slightly off center, and the scars from old wounds on his body. She imagined that horrible tattoo under the clothes she’d put on him. She pictured him talking to her, hearing the sound of his voice and his rare laugh. She saw him smiling. Then not.

In her hands, the gold of the necklace warmed … except it seemed to be only from her own palms, not anything supernatural or paranormal.

Come on, she thought. Come on.

Anxiety threatened the clarity of what she was visualizing. And the longer she went without any kind of response from the necklace, the more she worried about him locking heads with Devina and bad, bad things happening.

“I don’t think this is working,” she whispered.

“Goddamn it,” Ad said. “What the hell are we going to do now?”

“Give it a little more time.” Eddie cleared his throat. “Let’s just relax.”

Except no amount of relaxing helped. Eventually, she opened her lids and shook her head. “I’m so sorry. I can’t … oh, God, I can’t feel anything.”

“He’s gotta be really fucking invisi.” Ad cursed again. “I mean, for Sis not to get a fucking thing?”

“There has to be another way, right?” Sissy grabbed Eddie’s arm. “There’s got to be something else we can do.”

The angel’s eyes narrowed, like he was playing file-cabinet with every single piece of information that he’d ever learned about anything, going through the headings and subheadings, searching, searching.

“Did he take his phone?” Ad asked.

Sissy shook her head. “It’s upstairs.”

“So much for GPS. Man, too bad they didn’t chip him when he was in XOps. Unless they did?”

Eddie slowly turned and looked toward the plywood-covered windows over on the house’s left flank. “Where’s her book,” he said in a grim voice.

“Devina’s? In the parlor.” Sissy put her necklace on, stretching her arms behind her head to work the clasp. “But I can’t read it anymore.”

And to think she’d assumed that was good news.

“Follow me,” Eddie said before striding back into the house. “I’ve got an idea.”

As Jim picked the lock on the back door of the nondescript office building, he wasn’t sure how much time he had once he infiltrated the interior. Assuming Devina had bought his bullshit, there was a good chance she’d go to the Creator right away—he just didn’t know how long that convo was going to last. He was also banking that her protective virgin-sacrifice signal system wasn’t going to work when she was talking to God Himself. This was based on nothing but a hunch, however—although when he’d been in the Big Guy’s presence himself, the experience had been so completely overwhelming, he’d nearly lost consciousness. With any luck, Devina would have a similar response.

If he was wrong about all of that, though?

Then he had only a matter of seconds to find the bitch’s mirror and steal it—

Click. The stainless-steel locking mechanism retracted on cue, and he quickly put his pick kit away before grabbing the handle. He was doing this B and E the old-fashioned way on the theory that the more magic he used, the more he was going to compromise his invisi. Again, he didn’t know that for sure, but it didn’t cost him shit to be conservative.

In his mind, he counted it down, three … two …

No intel on the layout of the facility. Nothing but the knife to guide him. Probable ambush at any moment.

No backup.

… one.

Jim slipped inside and let the door close on its own. The hall beyond was lit dimly by after-hours energy-savers, and the fact that nothing motion-activated came on proved he was rocking the not-there. But he had to assume that the penetration had triggered her protective spell, and he got a move on, jogging down the brushed-nap wall-to-wall carpet with the knife once again out in front of himself. He passed by empty offices and low-level debris like pieces of paper scattered on the floor, an office phone or two, electrical cords. He was pretty sure that Devina had created an illusion over the “business” to hide herself and her things from prying eyes, but the shit was clearly not working on him.

Either that or the lie rolled out only when she cued it to.

The good news? At least the knife in his hands was talking to him big-time, growing hotter and hotter, vibrating so much it was in danger of slipping out of his hold.

The elevators. It took him to the elevators in the front lobby.

And that was a big no. He was not going to get trapped in one of them if she came back in the middle of him going wherever he had to in the building—

Oh, God, there was the sacrifice.

Even though there was no time, he still approached the naked body that was strung upside down over a tin tub by the main entrance.

He couldn’t leave the young man there.

Moving fast, he got the body down while still hanging onto the knife, and then he dragged the poor battered soul over to the first office he came to and hid it in case Devina came back. After he was done with her? He was going to take care of the guy somehow.

It was just too much like his Sissy to walk away from.

Refocusing, he looked over at the glowing red exit sign in the far corner of the lobby. Racing over, he found that the door had a passcode pad installed by its jamb, but he’d anticipated that. Reaching for his back pocket, he took out a leather sheath and opened the wallet-like fold-up. Inside, there were all kinds of goodies that he’d used in his old XOps trade, and he took out a square piece of plastic that was the size and shape of a credit card—just with added tricks: A set of wires came off one end and he plugged them into a tiny CPU that was no bigger than a driver’s license. Drawing the card through, he froze it in the middle of the reader, initiated a sequence, and watched the red numbers on the readout scan so fast his eye couldn’t track the discrete numerals.

Bingo. The door unlocked itself.