Page 23 of Inferno (Chronicles of Nick 4)
“Don’t worry. An ambulance is on the way.”
Nick nodded as a male officer came up and jerked him to his feet. “What are you doing?”
“He says you attacked him for no reason and that he was protecting himself from a homicidal lunatic. Since he’s the one bleeding the worst and your girlfriend was holding an unregistered gun on him when we arrived … We’ll take you all down to the station until we get this sorted out.”
“He mugged us!” Nick growled, indignant that Alan might skate free after all.
It didn’t matter what he said. The cop slammed a handcuff down hard on his wrist and jerked his arm behind his back to lock it to his other hand. He yanked Nick to his feet so hard, Nick was amazed it didn’t tear his arm out of the socket.
“He’s crazy!” Alan shouted as the cop dragged Nick toward the parked police cars where a large, curious crowd had formed. “Don’t get him near me. He’s on drugs or something. I ain’t never seen nobody act that way. He even set me on fire!”
Nick had to bite his tongue to keep from saying Alan deserved it.
As they reached one of the cars, a deep voice rumbled next to them. “Hey, Lenny, what’s going on?”
Thank God, it was Acheron.
The cop paused next to Ash, who, courtesy of his black biker boots, was almost seven feet tall. “I don’t know, Ash. We got a call about multiple gunshots and now we’ve got this guy,” he jerked Nick’s cuffed hands, “claiming to be mugged and that one over there saying this one attacked him for no reason.”
Ash shook his head, then leaned down to speak in a low tone. “You know you’re arresting Kyrian’s Squire, right?”
The cop paled instantly. “He’s one of us?”
Ash nodded. “Fully inducted into the sacred council.”
“Son of a … No. I had no idea.”
“I have my Squire’s card in my wallet,” Nick said over his shoulder. “It’s on the ground back there where I dropped it while trying to hand it over before he shot at us … first.”
“Kyrian’s been training him to protect himself from our natural enemies.” Ash jerked his chin toward Alan. “Looks like Nick’s been a good student.”
“Yeah, I’ll say. He beat the crap out of him.”
“What was I supposed to do? He threatened to rape my date and kill me.”
The cop reached down and unlocked the cuffs. “Sorry about that, but you have to appreciate what we saw when we got here.”
Turning to face him, Nick curled his lip. “Yeah, I know what you think you saw … Cajun trash.”
The cop looked away, shamefaced.
Ash folded his arms over his chest. “You okay, kid?”
Nick didn’t answer as he saw the paramedics pushing Casey’s stretcher toward the ambulance that was parked a few feet from them. He ran over to see how she was doing. She was conscious and they had an oxygen mask over her face.
“Casey?”
She reached for him. “Nick? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, you?”
She nodded.
“We’re just taking her in as a precaution,” the EMT explained as they stopped to open the back doors.
Casey squeezed his hand. “Can you get my car home for me?”
“You sure you don’t want your dad to get it?”
“I’m sure. My keys are in my bag.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. You just get better.”
She smiled at him as the EMT broke their hands apart. They lifted the stretcher and slid her inside.
Nick didn’t move as they shut the doors and took off with her.
Ash came up and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “So what really happened?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Ash arched a bitterly amused brow. “I’m an eleven-thousand-year-old warrior, Nick. I can tell the difference between someone fighting back to protect himself, and when someone beats the crap out of someone he has a personal grudge against. What’d he do to you?”
“He’s the one who shot me the night I met Kyrian.”
“And you didn’t kill him?”
Nick shrugged. “Police got here first and they looked a little trigger-happy.”
Acheron nodded as he dropped his hand. “Good call.” All of a sudden, his phone started ringing. “Excuse me.” Ash pulled it out and moved away to answer it.
Nick left him to check on Simi, but there was no sign of her. He walked over to the woman officer who’d been so nice before Lenny roughed him up. “Where’s my friend?”
“They just took her off in the ambulance.”
“Not Casey. Simi.”
“Who?”
Was the woman blind? Simi was a hard creature to miss. “The tall, Goth girl who was here a minute ago?”
She screwed her face up. “I didn’t see her. Hey, Tim? Was there another girl here?”
“Nah. Why?”
Nick opened his mouth to respond, then snapped it shut. Now to most people, it would be weird for no one to remember seeing a six-foot-tall Simi holding a gun on Alan.
For him …
Business as usual.
Simi had some impressive psychic powers and obviously amnesia for others was one of them. Man, to have those awesome Jedi mind tricks. That and the Force choke …
Two things every teenage boy could use to make his life a lot easier.
Wishing for what couldn’t be, he walked over to the officer who was bagging Casey’s purse and his wallet. “Um, can I have my stuff back?”
The officer hesitated before handing his wallet over, but he kept the purse.
Really? Nick sighed as he braced himself for a fight. “Her car’s over at Canal Place. She wanted me to get it home for her. Kind of hard if I don’t have her keys.”
He screwed his face up in doubt.
“Give the kid the keys, Leo.”
“You sure?” he asked Lenny, who was heading over to the woman officer.
“Yeah, but I’ll take her bag to her at the hospital.”
Nick rolled his eyes. “What? You think I’m going to steal it?”
“It’s just protocol.” Lenny handed him the car keys, then moved away.
Still irritated, Nick went back to where he’d left Acheron, who was just finishing his call. “Can I ask a favor?”
Ash slid his phone into his back pocket. “Sure.”
“Casey wanted me to take her car home and since I don’t have my license yet…”
“Your mom’s still holding that card over your head, huh?”
Nick made a sound of profound disgust. “Yeah. She says I don’t have enough time behind the wheel. Whatever, I guess.”
“Your mom loves you, Nick.”
“I know, Ash. I really do. But there’s a difference between love and ownership and suffocation, you know?”
“Better than most,” he mumbled under his breath. There was so much sincere sympathy and anger in his tone that it made Nick pause.
“Your mom, too?”
Acheron laughed, flashing a tiny bit of fang. “No. My parents weren’t around when I was a kid. I was raised by strangers.”
Those words startled him. Ash rarely spoke about his past to anyone. “What was that like?”
Ash shrugged. “It was like being raised by strangers … People who don’t care what happens to you and who never have your best interests at heart. Mostly, it was really lonely.”
Yeah, he supposed it was. “So you never saw your parents at all?”
“Nope.”
“Did they die?”
Ash snorted. “It’s a long story, Nick, and not a happy one, which is why I try not to talk about it. And it’s why I have a hard time whenever you bitch about a smothering mother I’d have sold my soul to grow up with. I know Cherise is hard on you at times, but there’s a difference between someone who’s genuinely worried about you and your future, and someone who’s punishing you for their own interests and perverse pleasure. Trust me.”
He’d never thought of it that way. “I’m sorry, Ash.”
“Don’t be. No matter how bad you think your life is, there is always someone out there with a story to make yours look grand in comparison. At least the people who were cruel to me weren’t really family. In my opinion, it would’ve been a lot worse if they had been the people who were supposed to love and protect me from harm.”
Nick nodded. “Sometimes, Ash, you irritate me. But honestly, I really appreciate the way you put things in perspective. It helps, you know?”
“That’s the one good thing about living so long … it definitely gives you time to reflect and see things you miss when you’re being assaulted with problems and are trying to get through a very finite life span.” Ash stepped back. “So where’s her car?”
“Canal Place.”
Ash fell in beside him as they walked over to the parking lot where he and Casey had left the car.
“This was not the way this was supposed to turn out,” Nick said as he unlocked the car doors.
“That’s true of most days. So are you driving or me?”
Nick laughed. “I’ve had enough excitement for one day, Ash. I don’t think my heart could handle a trip through evening traffic with you behind the wheel.”
Grinning, Ash folded himself into the car while Nick got in and started it.
As he drove toward Casey’s house, the day’s events kept replaying in his head. But the one thing that he fixated on was how close he’d come to really killing Alan and Tyree. Yeah, he’d killed zombies, but they weren’t living people, and he’d banished demons, but …
“What’s it like, Ash?”
“What’s what like?”
Nick swallowed hard as he forced himself to ask what he needed to have an answer to. “Killing someone.”
Acheron hesitated as if reliving something brutal in his own past. “It sucks. For both of you. Especially the first time.” He paused for a second before he continued. “Savitar has a saying…”
Nick had never met Savitar, but from the way Acheron talked about him, he assumed the ancient being had been some kind of mentor to Ash over the centuries. And an extremely powerful one at that.
“When you first take someone’s life, two people die. The person you just killed and the human being you used to be. You’re never the same after that—it changes you forever and not in a good way—and no matter how hard you try, you can’t go back to the innocence you had. Ever.”
Nick turned left as he considered that. “So who was your first?”
“My brother.”
Nick gasped at that most unexpected answer. Ash? Fratricide? Had he heard that correctly?
Surely not. Ash was a good guy. He would never take his own brother’s life. Would he?
No, not unless there was a really good reason for it.
“What was that?” He glanced over to Ash, whose face was completely stoic. “Why? How? Was it an accident?”
Ash let out a long, tired sigh. “Not an accident at all. Purely and ruthlessly meditated. I stabbed him while he was asleep in his bed.”
That hit Nick like a punch to his breadbasket. “How old were you?”
“Not much older than you are … Just a baby with a bad temper.”
Chills ran over him at the harshness of killing someone while he slept. Man, that was cold, and it was so out of Acheron’s character. “Why would you do something like that?”
Ash made a bitter sound before he answered. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.… Luckily, even though he died, they brought him back. But it didn’t matter. What I did was inexcusable. And in my heart, I knew I had killed my own brother for what was basically my own selfish reasons and jealousy. That I had looked right into his eyes when he awoke in pain, and I saw the shock, fear, and horror he felt as his life drained out of him and his warm blood covered my hand. I can still feel it sometimes … along with the shame and disgust I had as I realized I wasn’t the person I thought myself to be. In that one awful moment, I saw myself for what I really was—a heartless animal who deserved nothing but hatred. The reasons didn’t matter. They still don’t. And death, even when necessary and justified, will haunt you forever.”
Nick tried to imagine the emotions Ash was talking about, but really he couldn’t. And honestly, he was grateful for that mercy. There were some experiences no one needed to have.
“What about the Daimons you kill?” They were the demons who stole human souls to elongate their lives. If a Dark-Hunter didn’t find and kill the Daimon, the stolen human soul would die and be lost forever, giving their victim eternal torment. The only way to save the human soul was to kill the Daimon before they totally devoured it. “Surely you don’t care about killing them.”
