J.R. Ward - Envy

“Proving that he’s a fan of DelVecchio Sr. isn’t enough.”

“It’s a start.”

“Agreed, but there has to be something more. And before you ask, yes, I’ll call the sergeant—unless you want to?”

“I’m going to be busy with Veck. Maybe he’ll have some ideas.”

“Roger that—”

“I don’t know how you pulled this off.”

“Officially, I didn’t.”

“Well, I really owe you. You’re a lifesaver.”

She ended the call and got out the keys to her unmarked—

“Actually, that’s not quite the word I would have used.”

Reilly didn’t get a chance to spin around. A hand grabbed the back of her head and slammed her face-first into the car’s hard contours, the top of the door catching her right at the browline.

As her lights went out and her knees buckled, all she heard was Bails’s voice in her ear: “You really should have looked behind you.”

Adrian slayed the last minion with an arcing slice that went from high to low, the pitchfork’s tines piercing an oily black chest, all knife-through-butter.

At least . . . he thought he was the one who did it.

As the body fell to the ground with a wet thud, he looked around . . . at all the others of him. Who, at the very same moment, turned and looked in his direction.

He spun the pitchfork around and stabbed the ground—and the other dozens of himselves did the same thing a mere split second later.

If Eddie were here, he thought, the guy would have been pissing in his pants. Too many openings for a good assslapping.

Shit, Eddie . . . why hadn’t he been the one with the nine lives?

At that moment, the face of every Adrian grew tight, those mouths that he knew so well flattening out, those pierced brows lowering . . . until he was surrounded, literally, by his own grief.

The sound of slow clapping brought their collective faces up and around. Colin had come out of the apartment and was standing on the top landing of the stairwell.

“Well-done, lad, well-done.”

“I had help.”

Huh. None of the other Adrians spoke up, so this had to be him—and what a thing to be relieved about.

For fuck’s sake, this shit was going to give him a disorder.

“I would have joined you,” Colin said as he floated down the stairs and then walked across the steaminglack-stained ground. “But as you pointed out, I am here to take care of our dearly departed.”

“Eddie okay?”

“Yes.”

Ad shook his head. “Thank God you were here.”

“Indeed.”

As the archangel strode through the remains of all those minions, his boots remained pristine even though the ground was a sloppy mess.

He and the other Adrians all looked impressed. And then he realized that they were steaming: Every Adrian had tendrils of smoke rising from their shoulders and backs, the corrosive blood eating through the leather, heading for skin.

On that note . . . Adrian ripped off the duster—

Not even a split second afterward, a chorus of flapping went off, like a flock of geese had gotten goosed and taken to the sky. And then the Adrians tossed their coats down on the ground with disgust just as he had.

Colin stopped in front of them all. “Would you like to keep your little friends?”

Adrian looked around at himselves. “They’re great backup—I wonder if they do windows? And if you don’t mind me asking, how’d you pull this off?”

Colin extended his hand. At some kind of command from him, the surface of the inky sludge covering the driveway and lawn began to vibrate, and then here and there, tiny objects rose, dripping with—

They were shards, Adrian realized, as they shed their coating of minion. Glass—no, mirrored shards.

“Tricky, tricky,” Ad murmured.

“Say good-bye to your crew, mate.”

He glanced around. And found that he wanted to tell himselves thank you—

In perfect synchronization, all of the other Adrians put their right palms up to their hearts, those dark heads dipping gravely.

And then they were gone, along with their coats.

“Can I have them back if I need them again,” Ad asked. “Like if I have to lay some carpet, or move a piano.”

“You know where to find me.”

“I do.” He reached out, but then dropped his hand when he saw the condition of his gloves. “I gotta know something.”

“What.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“You were going to lose.”

“Are you going to tell Nigel?”

“Probably. I subscribe to the notion that it is better to apologize than ask permission.”

“Know that one well.”

There was a period of silence. “Thank you,” Adrian said roughly.

The archangel bowed with grace. “ ’Twas a pleasure. Now, I think we should get this cleaned up. Not many neighbors about, but it would be hard to explain, don’t you think?”

Good point: If there was just a skirmish, there wasn’t a lot of reason to worry about the icky aftermath. God knew that humans left plenty of oily messes around, and smudges on the ground soon disappeared with enough sunlight. This?

“The only option,” he muttered, “would be to tell people the oil tanker exploded on the front lawn.”

“And does that not require a permit or some such?”

“Probably. As well as a lot of gunpowder.” He shook his head. “Damn, we’re going to need a lot of—”

Cleaning solution was the term he was going to use, as he started to wonder how much of that witch hazel concoction he could pull together. Enough for a fire truck would do the job.

Colin, however, took care of it all: Sweeping his hand in a circle, he disappeared every trace of the tremendous fight.

Adrian whistled under his breath. “You wouldn’t be in the market for a second job, would you?”

Colin smiled with a dark edge. “That would be against the rules, dear boy.”

“And God forbid we bust those bitches.”

Adrian yanked off one of his gloves and matched the archangel’s cynical expression as the pair of them clapped palms and shook hard.

“Jim’s probably waiting for me,” Ad murmured, glancing up toward the garage.

“And at the moment, I have nothing better to do.”

The relief that Eddie wasn’t alone was so profound, he was tempted to hug the motherfucker. “Then I’ll just get back to work now.”

“And so shall I.”

As Adrian nodded and took to the air, he was prepared for Devina in ways he hadn’t been before.

Good thing, as it turned out, considering what he walked in on when he got to Veck’s.

When Veck’s phone went off at quarter to nine, he was so keyed up, he almost didn’t bother answering the fucking thing.

He’d been marching around his house, waiting for something, anything to go down with Heron, that he was practically vibrating off the floor, all live wire with nothing to plug into.

“Aren’t you going to answer it,” Jim asked from the other end of the kitchen. The angel had been smoking quietly in the chair he’d sat down in, like, frickin’ days ago.

Okay, it hadn’t been days. This stretch of nothing happening felt like decades .

As the ringer went off again, Veck glanced over. He’d tossed the cell on the counter and it was on vibrate, the thing inching closer and closer to the edge with every trembling ring-a-ding-ding.

He was quite content to let the POS walk itself right off into a free fall. Except then he saw that the screen had one word on it: Reilly .

Veck all but dived across the countertop. “Hello! Hello? Hello!? ”

He had no idea why she would be calling him, but he didn’t care. Maybe she’d misdialed, or maybe she needed the pizza guy’s number. Or, hell, even if she just wanted to cuss him out, he was down for—