Hex Appeal (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 4.60)

“He’s your soon-to-be best boy, and his death doesn’t matter?”

“If you’ve watched him die a hundred different ways, that only means he’s continually changing his fate. I bet he avoids it entirely.”

Considering what I’d done for him, I would bet he did, too.

“What you’ve seen don’t change why he’s there. In fact, now I understand why I was told you should go with him. If you recognize somethin’ from one of your dreams you’ll be able to warn him, protect him, save him.”

As Ruthie’s orders came from God himself, or so she said, I stopped arguing. I’d learned long ago that arguing with the boss only got you stranded on the wrong side of the Pearly Gates.

“What’s the assignment?” I asked.

I could almost hear Ruthie’s smile. “Ask Jimmy,” she said, then she was gone.

Since the shower was on, and I still had the grit of a dozen trolls in my hair, I lost the robe I’d tossed on to answer the door and stepped beneath the water.

I could get Jimmy to tell me the assignment, fly there myself—I didn’t even need a plane—leave him behind, hope he’d go home. But I wouldn’t.

If I was supposed to be with him, I needed to be with him. Bad things happened when DKs ignored their seers’ orders. Yes, we had free will, in theory. In practice, we did what we were told, or people died.

I shut off the water, waved my hand, and I was dry, dressed, and ready. I hadn’t really needed a shower. I just liked them.

When I stepped out of the steamy bathroom, Jimmy’s eyes widened.

“What?” I glanced at my usual outfit—tight jeans, a white, fringed, leather halter top, white cowboy hat, and boots. Not a smudge on them.

“You … uh … from Texas?” he asked.

I frowned. “I’m from Heaven.”

He laughed. “I suppose you’ve heard that line a thousand times.” At my deepening confusion, he added: “Did it hurt?”

“What?”

“When you fell from Heaven?”

“I don’t like to talk about that.”

His laughter died. “That was a pickup line. A bad one. As in, you’re so gorgeous, you must be a fallen angel.”

I sat in the chair next to the dresser. “You do know what the fallen angels are, right?”

He’d better, or we were in a lot more trouble than I’d thought.

“Grigori,” he answered, then something flickered in his eyes. He moved so fast, I barely saw it. The switchblade—pure silver, I could smell it—cleared his pocket as he came off the bed, opening with a single blurring motion of his wrist when he stepped toward me.

I tossed magic dust, and this time it stopped him. Planning to slit my throat was not an errand of mercy.

“I’m not a Grigori,” I said. “They’re all in the pit. Sit.” Another swish of my hand, and he sat, just catching his ass on the edge of the bed. “Tell me what you know.”

“God sent angels to watch over the humans,” he recited robotically, which was what I got when I used the enchanted dust. “But some of them lusted instead and were confined to the deepest, darkest level of hell.”

“Tartarus,” I murmured. An extremely unpleasant place. I’d been lucky.

Jimmy gave a jerky nod. “Their offspring—the Nephilim—were left behind to challenge the humans. They are what we fight.”

“And the fallen angels that didn’t succumb to temptation?”

“Too good to go into the pit, too tainted by earth to return home, they became fairies.” Jimmy blinked, and reason returned to his eyes. “That’s you?”