Apocalypse Happens Read online

  Praise for Lori Handeland’s Novels

  DOOMSDAY CAN WAIT

  “Sexy, gritty…Readers again view the world through the eyes of ex-cop-turned-humanity’s savior Liz Phoenix [in] this complex mythology.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews (4 stars)

  “Awesome.”

  —Heidi Betts, bestselling author

  of Tangled Up in Love

  “We really enjoyed it…and are looking forward to [more] in this series.”

  —Robots and Vamps

  “Cool…exciting.”

  —Lurv à la Mode

  “Fascinating, vivid, and gritty.”

  —Fallen Angel Reviews

  “Handeland does an amazing job of packing so much punch into the pages of this story without ever leaving the reader behind. Doomsday Can Wait ups the paranormal and emotional content of the series, adding strength to the heroine and a more human touch to one of her closest allies. This is an action-packed series that urban fantasy readers should thoroughly enjoy, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the author takes us next.”

  —Darque Reviews

  ANY GIVEN DOOMSDAY

  “Handeland launches the intriguing Phoenix Chronicles urban fantasy series with a strong story . . . the demons’ evil plans and vividly described handiwork create immense suspense for the final battle.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fascinating. A fast-paced thriller that will have readers looking for book two.”

  —Kelley Armstrong

  “A fresh, fascinating, gripping tale that hits urban fantasy dead-on. Don’t miss this one.”

  —L.L. Foster

  “Sexy, dangerous, and a hot-as-hell page-turner! Lori Handeland world-builds with authority.”

  —L. A. Banks

  “Handeland is back with a striking new series, narrated by a heroine thrown headfirst into a fairly apo calyptic scenario . . . With sex and power intertwined, Handeland looks to have another winner of a series on her hands!”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS TITLES

  BY LORI HANDELAND

  THE PHOENIX CHRONICLES

  Any Given Doomsday

  Doomsday Can Wait

  Apocalypse Happens

  THE NIGHTCREATURE SERIES

  Blue Moon

  Hunter’s Moon

  Dark Moon

  Crescent Moon

  Midnight Moon

  Rising Moon

  Hidden Moon

  Thunder Moon

  APOCALYPSE

  HAPPENS

  Lori Handeland

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  APOCALYPSE HAPPENS

  Copyright © 2009 by Lori Handeland.

  Excerpt from Chaos Bites copyright © 2009 by Lori Handeland.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-36602-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / November 2009

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CHAPTER 1

  They are free.

  Those words had whispered through my head only a few weeks ago. Taken out of context, the phrase should be uplifting.

  Freedom’s good. Right?

  Unless you’re talking about demons.

  The earth is full of them. They’re called the Nephilim. They’re the offspring of the fallen angels—or Grigori—and the daughters of men.

  Yes, the angels really fell. Hard. Their story is a perfect illustration of why everyone should toe the proverbial line. Piss off God, wind up in Tartarus—a fiery pit in the lowest level of hell.

  Word is God sent the Grigori to keep an eye on the humans. In the end, the angels were the ones who needed watching. So God banished them from the earth—bam, you’re legend—but he left their progeny behind to test us. Eden was a memory. We’d proved we didn’t deserve it. But I don’t think we deserved the Nephilim either.

  Fast-forward a million millennia. The prophecies of Revelation are bearing down on us like runaway horses. Perhaps four of them? No matter what the forces of good do to prevent the end of the world, nothing’s working.

  And that’s where I come in.

  Elizabeth Phoenix, Liz to my friends. They call me the leader of the light. I got dropped into the middle of this whole Doomsday mess, and I’m having a helluva time getting back out.

  For reasons beyond mine or anyone else’s comprehension, Tartarus opened; the Grigori flew free, and now all hell has broken loose. Literally.

  “Dammit, Lizzy! Duck!”

  I ducked. Razor-sharp claws swooshed through the air right where my face had been. Not only did I duck, but I rolled also. Good thing too, since seconds later something sliced into the ground right next to me.

  I’d come to Los Angeles with Jimmy Sanducci, head demon killer and my second in command, to ferret out a nest of varcolacs. Eclipse demons. Kind of rare considering they hail from Romania, but I’d seen stranger things.

  Sure, the smog in LA could be blamed for the dark splotches that kept appearing over the moon and the sun, which is what everyone around here believed. But I knew better.

  The varcolac tugged on his arm, trying to free the needlelike appendages he used for fingers from the desert dust. Part human, part dragon, varcolacs are rumored to eat the sun and the moon, thus causing said eclipses. And if they ever succeed in actually devouring those celestial bodies, the end of the world is nigh. Since I’ve been trying to prevent that, I dragged Jimmy to LA and we started hunting.

  Before the varcolac could use his other arm to kill me, Sanducci sliced through his neck. When you’re dealing with Nephilim, head slicing usually worked. At the least, being without a head slowed down even the most determined demon.

  Jimmy’s dark gaze met mine. “Get up,” he ordered, before turning away to dispatch more bad guys.

  I tried not to let the chill in his eyes bother me. Sanducci would never allow anything to hurt me; he’d loved me once. Right now, however, love was no longer on the table, and I had no one to blame for that but myself.

  I did a kip, from my back to my feet in one quick movement—the skills that had garnered me a state champion medal in high school gymnastics had been coming in very handy lately—then retrieved my own sword and went back to hacking.

  Once Jimmy and I were in LA it hadn’t taken us long to find the varcolacs in the desert. Most days they appeared human. They lived their lives; they blended in, only going dragon beneath an eclipse.

  Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The dragon eating the moon or the moon going dark and bringing out the dragon? Hard to say.

  What I did know was that as soon as the Grigori flew free, all the Nephilim stopped hiding. Their time had come. And things, for me and my kind, had become a bit dicey.

  Previously, each demon killer had worked with a seer—someone who possessed a psychic gift to see past the Nephilim’s human disguise to the demon that lay within.

  I’d been a seer once myself, but things had changed.

  Oh, I was still psychic—always had been. Since I was ol
d enough to talk, maybe before, I could touch animate and inanimate objects and I’d know things—what people had done, where they’d gone, what they thought.

  But later, when I’d become the leader of the light, I’d inherited the ability of the woman who’d raised me. As Ruthie Kane died in my arms, all her power transferred to me. I’d wound up not only psychometric, but suddenly I could channel too. Ruthie might be dead, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hear her, talk to her, sometimes even see her. She became my conduit. Whenever a Nephilim was near, I heard about it in Ruthie’s whisper on the wind, and when they were up to something major—they always were—I received a vision that told me all about it. At least until recently.

  “Too many,” Jimmy muttered.

  We were covered in varcolac blood. We’d hacked up a dozen, but a dozen more had appeared. We needed help, but there wasn’t any to spare.

  The federation—that group of demon killers, or DKs, and seers who’d been charged with fighting this supernatural war—had been seriously depleted after Ruthie’s death, and we couldn’t just pick up a few new demon killers at the demon-killer superstore. They had to be trained. New seers had to be discovered. I hadn’t had time to do much recruiting, even before the whole Tartarus-opening, Grigori-escaping incident. And now . . .

  Now I wasn’t going to have time to do much but ride the runaway train to Armageddon. Basically, we were fucked. But that didn’t mean we were going to quit. Besides, I had a secret weapon. What I liked to call a vampire in a box.

  I lifted my arm, traced my fingers along the magic jeweled dog collar that circled my neck. As long as I wore the thing, I was me. But if I took it off—

  “No, Lizzy.”

  I glanced at Jimmy. He’d seen me fingering the necklace. Even if he didn’t know me better than just about anyone, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what I’d been contemplating.

  One of the varcolacs charged, dragon wings flapping, talons outstretched. Jimmy hacked off his head with only a token glance in that direction. Jimmy was good. I still needed to put a bit more effort into killing things.

  I let go of the collar, faced the next varcolac with both hands around my sword and did what needed to be done. I lost track of Jimmy for a while. The damn demons seemed to be multiplying. For every one we killed, two more came out of the darkness. Their wings flickered against the silvery light of the gibbous moon, reminding me of the night the Grigori had flown free, their spirits darkening what had then been a perfectly round orb.

  Jimmy cried out, the sound making my heart jolt, my head turn. One of the varcolacs had speared him through the shoulder with a talon, lifting him clear off the ground. Blood dripped into the sand, turning the moon-pale grains black. Jimmy’s sword lay at his feet.

  There appeared to be an army of dragon men behind them. Their scaly wings flapped in syncopation, filling the sky with a morbid ticktock. Dragon heads and arms, human legs and torsos that sprouted dragon’s wings.

  “Surrender, seer.” The varcolac snorted fire from his nose. Jimmy hissed when the flames started his pants on fire.

  “No.” I lopped off the nearest varcolac head, which hit the ground with a dull thud, rolled a few feet and disintegrated into ashes along with the still-upright body. If you killed a Nephilim correctly, cleanups weren’t any problem at all.

  “You can’t win,” the varcolac said. “We are legion.”

  He was probably right, but giving up . . .

  Just wasn’t my style.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Nice job,” Jimmy muttered.

  We were tied with golden chains, staked into the desert ground, naked. Man, I hated when that happened.

  “This is my fault?”

  I turned my head. The moon sparkled in his dark eyes, sparked off his hair, threading the black strands with silver. The sheen glistened off the supple, bronzed skin of his chest. Sanducci had always been too damn pretty for anyone’s good. Especially mine.

  “Had to come to LA,” he continued. “Had to find out what was creeping around in the desert.”

  “Isn’t that what we do?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. But I don’t think it’s going to go as well as it used to.”

  He was right. Where before the federation had been stemming the demon tide, the tide had become a flood, and the dam had a shitload of holes.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Does it look like I’m okay?”

  Jimmy and I had always had a volatile relationship. Hell, the first time I’d met him he’d put a snake in my bed; then I’d loosened his teeth. We were twelve.

  At seventeen he’d relieved me of my virginity; a year later he’d broken my heart. Same old tune, heard a thousand times before.

  Except Jimmy and I weren’t like a thousand other couples. I was psychic and Jimmy—

  Jimmy was a dhampir.

  My gaze lowered from his face to his gored shoulder, which wasn’t gored anymore. The gaping wound had almost healed.

  Most demon killers were breeds—offspring of a Nephilim and a human. With less demon to contend with, they could choose to fight for the forces of good, and because they had demon blood, breeds had supernatural powers. To fight demons of biblical proportions, they needed them.

  Jimmy was the son of a vampire and a woman. He was very good at finding and killing bloodsuckers of any type. As a dhampir, Jimmy had mythical strength and speed; he could heal just about anything—although wounds made with a weapon of pure gold took longer, and they stung like a bitch.

  My gaze went to the approaching cadre of varcolacs. Each of them now carried a weapon that glinted golden beneath the moon. Hell.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked.

  “Lizzy,” Jimmy snapped. He was the only one who called me that, the only one who dared.

  “Doesn’t cost anything to ask,” I said, but I was just stalling. I wasn’t going to tell them jack. Jimmy wouldn’t either.

  Just because he could heal didn’t mean he couldn’t hurt. Though I’d spent the past seven years hating Sanducci’s guts, lulled myself to sleep many a long, lonely night imagining ways to make him cry and scream, beg and bleed, times had changed. Now I just wanted him to forgive me, but I didn’t think he was going to.

  “Sanducci and Phoenix, what a prize we have won.”

  The varcolacs had returned to their human forms. I’m sure it was difficult to perform torture with claws where your fingers should be.

  “You know killing us won’t change anything,” I said.

  “Killing you will change everything, seer. You are the leader of the light. If you die without passing on your power, all that power is lost.”

  Well, there was that. What they didn’t know was that I was even harder to kill than Jimmy.

  The head varcolac—a guy who resembled some minor pretty-boy actor on a stupid show with numbers for a title—crouched at my side. Another one—big guy, wide shoulders and teeth that reminded me a lot of the Governator before he’d had them fixed—hovered over Jimmy. They both carried sharp, golden weapons, and they appeared as if they knew what to do with them.

  But really, how hard was it? Pointy end goes into flesh, rip and tear. The only difficulty was if hurting someone bothered you. These were demons. It didn’t.

  “I’m going to give you one chance, seer. You answer my question, I will kill you . . .” He took the flat of the blade and ran it over my hip. Wherever it touched, I burned. “Quickly.”

  In the depths of his eyes, yellow flames flickered. He wasn’t going to kill me quickly no matter what he promised. I wasn’t capable of dying quickly anyway.

  The point of the knife, which was big enough to have been fashioned by Bowie himself, pressed to the throbbing vein in my neck. “Where is the key?”

  “To what?”

  He nicked my skin, and blood trickled. “What do you think, fool? To your house? Your car? Your heart?” His eyes twinkled yellow again as he lowered the knife. “Ah, your heart. I always wanted to see
what one looked like.”

  He sliced me across the left breast. The blade grated along bone, and I gritted my teeth to keep from reacting to both the pain and that annoying noise. Wouldn’t do any good.

  “She doesn’t know anything about the key,” Jimmy said.

  I blinked. That sounded like he did.

  The varcolacs exchanged glances. Pretty Boy lifted his chin, a signal to the other, and Jimmy grunted. I caught the scent of fresh blood.

  “Leave him alone.”

  The varcolac at my side snorted. “I don’t take orders from you.”

  “Who do you take orders from?”

  A few weeks back I’d torn their leader limb from limb, literally, so the forces of darkness should be in chaos. That they weren’t was more disturbing than I wanted to admit. Because if hell had flown open and all the demonic fallen angels were now free, that meant the one who’d instigated the rebellion in the first place was free too. And we all know who that is.

  “Samyaza,” I said. Another name for Satan. There were quite a few of them. “Beelzebub is pulling your strings?”

  His eyes flared. He was pissed about something. But what?

  I shifted. I was tied pretty tightly, and any movement caused the golden chains to scrape my skin. The burn was excruciating, but I managed to brush my finger against his knee, and suddenly I understood. “Whoever has the key can command the demons. And you want it to be you.”

  Dissension in the ranks. Gotta love it.

  The varcolac shrugged. “I don’t take orders well.”

  Most Nephilim didn’t. Which made me wonder how Satan planned to rule this rock. Simple answer—he was going to need the key too.

  What I’m referring to is the Key of Solomon, a grimoire or book of spells, supposedly composed by King Solomon. In it are incantations used to summon, release and command demons—for starters. Over the years several translations had been made, but none of them were complete. What we were looking for was the original copy, which held everything.