Apocalypse Happens by Lori Handeland Read Free Book Online

out?”
    I blinked. “What?”
    “I’m naked.”
    I laughed. “Right.”
    “I’m serious.”
    “I’ve seen it all before, Sanducci.” And it was good.
    “Then you don’t need to see it again. Get out.” His voice shook, broke.
    I got out.
    Our roles had reversed. Not very long ago I’d been the one saying, Don’t look. Don’t touch. I despise you.
    It hurt more than I’d thought it could. How had he stood it when I’d hated him more than I’d loved him?
    I took a deep breath and forced myself to stop shaking.
    “Big, bad demon hunter,” I muttered.
    I needed to hit something. Summer would do. Beating the location of a dagda out of her was next on my list anyway. I glanced around the room. Empty.
    I walked into mine and found it the same way. By the time I returned, Jimmy was coming out of the bathroom fully dressed and scrubbing a towel through his hair.
    The scent of him wafted over me—sweet water, tart soap and cinnamon aftershave. Jimmy always smelled like he’d just stepped out of the shower. Usually because he had. When we were kids he’d hog the bathroom two or three times a day. It had taken me a few years to figure out that his time on the streets without the luxury of cleanliness had made Sanducci a tad obsessed with it.
    “Where’s the fairy?” I asked.
    “Gone.”
    “Where?”
    He shrugged.
    “Sanducci, you knew I wanted to talk to her.”
    “Is that what you call it?”
    “Talk to. Beat on. Whatever. I need to know where to find a dagda.”
    “She wasn’t going to tell you.”
    “You told her to fly away,” I accused.
    “ You told her to fly away.”
    Shit. I had.
    “I can ask Sawyer.”
    Jimmy’s lips curved. “Not right now you can’t.”
    Sawyer was a Navajo medicine man. He was also a skinwalker—both witch and shape-shifter—one of the most powerful beings on earth. And he didn’t have a telephone.
    “It’s only a matter of time until I find out what I want to know. You could tell me and save everyone some trouble.”
    “I don’t know where to find a dagda.”
    I crossed the room and put my hand on his arm. He shoved me so hard I flew onto the bed, bounced once and tumbled off.
    “My thoughts are my own,” he said. “Stay out of them.”
    I got to my feet. Before he’d shoved me, I’d seen the truth. He didn’t know.
    “You can’t just go around touching everyone, invading their minds, stealing their secrets.”
    “Actually, I can.”
    Jimmy narrowed his eyes. “Oh, really?”
    In the past I couldn’t read everyone all the time, couldn’t see everything. I still couldn’t, but I was getting better at it.
    I picked up my duffel bag and walked toward the door. Jimmy followed.
    “Maybe you’re more dangerous than the things we’re fighting,” he muttered.
    I looked up at the hazy morning sky. “Maybe I am.”

CHAPTER 6
    We hopped a flight from LAX to Indianapolis. The security level was up. The news on television and radio was all bad. A sudden and significant increase in assaults, murders, rapes. The psychiatric hospitals—hell, all the hospitals—were packed.
    The powers that be were at a loss. They were prepared for terrorism, natural disasters, wars. But when the world ran amok, when the citizens you were trying to protect were suddenly the ones everyone needed protecting from, no one knew what to do.
    During the several hours it took to fly halfway across the country, Jimmy and I didn’t talk, which was fine with me. I listened to the people around me. They were scared. I didn’t blame them.
    “It’s a terrorist plot,” the woman to my right whispered. “They’ve put something in the water to make people go insane.”
    “No, it’s an epidemic,” the man behind me insisted. “We aren’t going to be wiped out by AIDS but by a brain-eating bacteria that makes everyone believe their neighbor wants to kill them.”
    “The end of the world.” An elderly woman near the front nodded slowly. “Thought it was nine-eleven. But that was