She Talk to Angels preview!
Since She Talks to Angels releases today, I thought I’d give you all a sneak peek into the opening of the book, kinda like a tease to get you to go out and buy that shit. Here’s the linky to aforementioned shit.
Chapter 1
“Not a good time, Harker,” I said into my cell phone as I put the Toaster in park. My beat up old Honda Element isn’t sexy, but it’s paid for and has all the cargo room I need for my day job. That day job at the moment had me stashing my panty-dropping grocery grabber at the far end of a parking lot across from The Last Ride, a biker bar on the outskirts of St. Louis. The preferred modes of transportation for the occupants of the bar apparently had at least one, usually two fewer wheels than my Element, but there were a couple of old Detroit-made penis compensation methods in the gravel lot as well. Still, I thought I’d be better off leaving my sensible sport utility vehicle parked away from all the testosterone. By the looks of the place, my car would get chlamydia if it got too close.
“I don’t really care, Gabby. This is important,” the self-important prick known as Quincy Harker said from my phone. I don’t like Harker. I don’t like the fact that he lied to me to get me to help him on our first case together (admittedly I mean more “not shoot him” than actually help). I don’t like the fact that he spends the majority of his time with Dracula, the monster my great-grandfather famously hunted and thought he killed. I don’t like that he seems to know a lot more about Grandpa Abe than I do, having actually met the old man when he was a little kid. And I really don’t like that he and his little merry band of assholes called The Shadow Council keep talking me into doing shit that goes directly against my best interests, like getting in the middle of a goddamned demon invasion in Georgia, of all godforsaken places.
Fuck Georgia. I’m a Midwest girl, through and through. I like St. Louis. I like Chicago. I even like Detroit, and nobody likes Detroit. So even six months later, I was still irritated at Harker for getting me wrapped up in some bullshit save the world scheme in Atlanta last year.
“So is me getting paid, Harker. Some of us have jobs, remember? We can’t all live off the riches our parasitic uncles have stashed all over the world.”
“You know there’s a stipend available for all Council members, right?”
I felt my eyes widen at his slightly distorted words. I took the phone off speaker and brought it to my ear. “No. That wasn’t part of the friggin’ welcome packet, you prick.” Did this asshole mean to tell me that I’d been living on ramen and shitty bail jumper gigs for almost two years since he fucked my deal with Homeland Security?
“Oh, sorry about that. Must have slipped my mind. We can have all your back pay deposited into your account this afternoon. Now can I tell you about Lucifer?”
“No,” I said. “We are not done with me bitching at you yet. You think you can just kill my contact at Homeland Security, get my monster-hunting contract with the government cancelled, and I’ll forgive you just because you wave a fistful of singles under my nose like I’m some dancer at your favorite topless bar?”
“One, I don’t go to strip clubs anymore. My fiancée doesn’t approve. Two, you didn’t even know Smith was your contact until he was dead and your contract got cancelled. And three, the stipend is a little more than a fistful of singles.” Harker named a figure, and I got quiet. That was a big fistful of money.
“Is that the two years I’m owed in back pay?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“No, Gabriella, that is your annual stipend. So you’re owed double that. Like I said, I’ll have Dennis deposit the money this afternoon. Now can I get you to focus on the important things, like saving the world?”
I put the phone back on speaker and set it in the cupholder. I leaned back, keeping an eye on the front door of the bar. My intel said that the skip was inside and unlikely to leave until daylight, so I wasn’t in much of a rush. “Got ahead, Harker. Spill it. What’s so damned important? I thought we were just hunting down your hottie angel’s wings.”
“Yeah, it got more complicated,” he said. “Lucifer is involved, and he’s taken Uriel, one of the other Archangels, to Hell. If he kills Uriel while they’re on a divine plane, he can take up Uriel’s mantle and become an Archangel again. Then Lucifer will be able to get back into Heaven at will. I’m guessing you can see how that ends poorly for most of the known universe.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound good. So are we off of Operation Wingy-Dingy now and back on the Save the World train?” I asked.
“Not yet. We need to figure out how to get to Hell—”
“I’ve told you to go to hell a lot. You should have listened.”
“Funny. Anyway, Luke and Dennis, along with Sealtiel, are trying to figure out how to get us across the planar divide without the requisite dying. Until they get that figured out, we’re still working on the idea that the more Archangels we have at our side when we storm the Gates of Hell, the better.”
“Makes sense. I’ll get right on finding Ragu as soon as I’m done here.”
“Raguel,” Harker corrected.
“Gesundheit.” I hung up the phone, laughing. It was petty, and I knew it, but he was just an infuriating son of a bitch. He had it all—looks, sexy British accent, and a girlfriend that I would just love to get alone for an hour or ten. I shoved the thoughts of Harker and his hottie aside and refocused on the target at hand.
I swiped and tapped at my phone for a couple seconds, and a picture appeared. James Monroe “Blackheart” Burris was a big guy, six-three according to his mug shot, with a dark ponytail showing a little gray and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Tattoos all over his arms and creeping up from under his shirt to peek out under the neck of his t-shirt. According to my surveillance, he favored black t-shirts, often with a Harley logo, jeans, engineer boots, a chain wallet, and a leather jacket with his Sons of Hell cut on the back of it.
You know, just the kind of guy you want to take home to mama. If mama was a psychopath. I swiped across the screen, and my motivation for this job popped up on the screen. Taneisha Cooper Burris, estranged wife of the asshole currently sitting in a biker bar with his hand on a twenty-year-old waitress’s ass while Taneisha sat home worrying about losing her condo if this dickhole failed to appear in court in three days. In Chicago. In Illinois, where Blackheart Burris was supposed to remain until such time as he faced trial for armed robbery according to the terms of his bail.
So while his wife worked two jobs to keep his four-year-old daughter clothed and fed, Blackheart yukked it up across state lines with some of his Sons of Hell buddies from another chapter. He’d been hanging around St. Louis for about a week before I caught wind of him, and I’d had eyes on the clubhouse for a couple days now. It was your typical biker bar—dingy, well-armed, shitload of David Allen Coe on the jukebox, and next to no police presence in the surrounding blocks.
I got out of the Toaster and walked around to the back doors. Pulling them open, I flipped the back seats down, yanked the headrests off, and lifted the inside edge of each seat, then hooked it to the wall. That turned the back of the Element into essentially a small panel van. I opened the tool box I had bolted to the floor and took out my Sig Sauer P320. I clipped the holster to the inside of my jeans and slipped the pistol home in the front of my jeans. I pulled on a loose black hoodie, dropped the front of the sweatshirt down over the butt of the gun, and grabbed two pair of zip cuffs out of the box. Not for the first time, I wondered how badly my little toy box would be received in a traffic stop and vowed to obey more speed limits and road signs in the future.
I closed the doors of the Toaster, took my hair down out of the ponytail I usually wore, and used my reflection in the rear windows of the car to slut up my lipstick and poof my hair a little. I thanked Eema for the thick black hair her Romany heritage blessed me with and put a lot more strut into my walk than normal, then headed toward the front door of the club.
I was halfway there when I realized I’d left my phone sitting in the cupholder. Oh well, it’s not like there was anybody I could call to bail my ass out if I got in over my head anyway. Just another day in the glamorous life of Gabriella Van Helsing, great-granddaughter of the most famous vampire hunter in history, now reduced to chasing down bail jumpers in shitty bars in Missouri. But hey, on my off days, I got to save the world with a bunch of weirdos and monsters. Yay.
The no-neck imbecile at the door didn’t even pat me down, just looked down my hoodie at the cleavage on display and waved me in. It’s not even like I was wearing anything sexy, just a scoop-neck t-shirt. But men are stupid. I might as well use that stupid to my advantage.
Aforementioned stupid was on display at its finest in the bar, which boasted not only dim lights, thick smoke, and loud music, but also a pair of behemoths arm-wrestling, two stick-thin girls weaving between pinching fingers to deliver drinks, and a giant bald guy behind the bar glaring at everyone and everything. Why is the guy behind the bar always pissed off? It’s not like he gets hit in the inevitable fights, he’s got bar to hide behind. I sauntered over to the bar, making sure to get my hips rocking from side to side as I strutted across the sticky floor, and I leaned my hoodie-clad elbows on the damp wood.
“How about a shot?” I asked, giving him my best “come hither” look.
He responded with a scowl. “What you want?”
“Let’s try something fun. How about a red-headed slut?” I gave him a smile usually guaranteed to get me at least a couple of phone numbers, if not a free drink or three.
He didn’t return the smile. If anything, his scowl deepened. “All our sluts are brunettes. You want Jack or Jim?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the limited booze selection.
“How about Wild Turkey? I’m feeling like bourbon. Wanna feel?”
Still nothing. Not even a crack of a smile. Damn, that one even gets me a laugh at gay bars where all the boys are prettier than me, but this guy was not interested. He poured me a shot of bourbon, and I knocked it back, feeling the brown liquor burn all the way down. I turned the glass upside down on the bar and looked at CueBall. “Another. This one on the rocks.”
Then I turned around and looked around the rest of the bar, trying to zero in on my quarry. I found him easy enough, sitting at a table with his back to a wall and a blond piece of jailbait on his lap. The remains of most of a case of beer littered the floor around his table, and he and a pair of other goons passed a joint around the table right under a No Smoking sign. Everything pointed to a pretty rocking poker game in progress, and every time Burris dragged a pile of chips back to his side of the table, he slipped one into the brassiere of the girl on this lap. After a run of particularly good hands, the married bail jumper whose wife was about to lose her house because of his unauthorized travel plans spun the girl on his lap around and spent a good minute and a half using his tongue to check the health of her tonsils.
Yeah, this guy was going to get an ass-kicking. I sipped my bourbon and watched my quarry until I was down to ice cubes, then I reached behind me to set my glass down and go get my jumper. That’s when the bartender grabbed my wrist and leaned over. “You’re about to make a big mistake, little girl.”
I really hate being called “girl.” Shit was about to get real.
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