“What are you going to do about it?” B asked.
“I have absolutely no idea,” she said, the weight of helplessness and frustration bearing down on her like a landslide. “If I can find them, I’ll do what I can to stop them. Briggs is apparently blind to whoever it is, so convincing him to take it seriously is out. If I can’t, I’m going to do everything I can to protect the trapped souls when it goes down.”
“Why are you telling us?” Gutierrez asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe I needed to get it off my chest? I like you both, and that’s the God’s honest truth. I’d hate to see y’all get caught in the crossfire.”
“That may be true, but I’m guessing there’s another reason.” B grinned at Gutierrez.
Gutierrez grinned back and said, “You can’t do this on your own. You need allies. You need us.”
“We’re in,” B said. “We’ll do our own investigating and we’ll have your back. You got ours?”
Vivian smiled. A spark of hope ignited within her for the first time since she and Darkmore arrived in Jackson. “You know it. And I’ll tell you what I find. Where are you two planning to start?”
“With Chet,” they said in unison.
“Good. I’ll be working on a way to sneak out and get a message to the souls at the asylum. Darkmore can help with that. If we can keep them safe, we might be able to get a few on our side.”
They all shook on it and decided to split up and mingle before accelerated boot camp training recommenced. On her way out the door, Gutierrez turned to Vivian and said, “If you do decide to part ways with your reaper, I’ll help you.”
Chapter Twenty
Vivian collapsed onto the sofa and closed her eyes, barely acknowledging the reaper when she walked past him. That had been standard operating procedure for her since his revelation—and hers. Those exchanges had been far more intimate than their physical relationship, and it had left Vivian confused, anxious, and exposed in a way that made her want to hide. Given Darkmore’s self-imposed distance and manner, she suspected he felt the same way.
He was becoming more and more human with each passing day. Powerful and deadly with many of his supernatural powers intact, but still human. More human than he’d ever been in any of his past lives, and it was changing him. What he was becoming and the possibilities his transformation opened frightened her more than his darkness ever had.
He sat down next to her and took her hand, a very human gesture. God, she hoped he didn’t want to talk. The mental and emotional energy it would take for that conversation was more than she could muster.
“Take a moment to catch your breath, but you need to prepare for a quick jaunt.”
She opened one eye and looked at his handsome face. He’d shaved again, as he seemed fond of doing. Memories of his first shave since becoming mortal warmed her more than she liked, which was stupid. Wait, a jaunt? What did he mean?
“We can’t leave. Briggs and his guards are watching us, or have you forgotten?”
The reaper shook his head. “No, I haven’t forgotten. The guards are simply irrelevant.”
“I don’t understand. Unless you’ve been holding out on me and can still do that spirit materialization transport thing, there’s no way we’re getting out of this house undetected.”
Darkmore grinned. “Trust me. You won’t like it, but it will get us in and out with our captors none the wiser.”
Briggs and his band weren’t exactly captors, but they did have her and the reaper under heavy guard. Between that and exhaustion from two days of hard training, she could barely keep her eyes open. The reaper’s warning about not liking whatever he had planned sent a jolt of adrenaline through her body.
Some wake-up call.
Darkmore walked to the kitchen and came back with two steaming mugs of fresh coffee.
“Liquid courage?” she asked.
He looked at the ceiling, the corners of his mouth twitching. “No. Just something to keep your hands occupied.”
Before she could protest, a dark vortex appeared above them, dropping Uphir into their living room.
“Son of a bitch!” she yelled, nearly dropping the coffee mug. “A little warning next time?”
Uphir smoothed her form-fitting pencil skirt and gave Vivian a teen-worthy eye-roll. Shifting her gaze to the reaper, she flashed a wicked grin and said, “You’ll owe me for this.”
He bowed low over her hand, brushing his lips over her skin. “Lovely to see you, my dear. I believe you’ll find that this matter concerns you as well.
“Fine. We should go before one of these uppity mortals catches a whiff of my power.”
“Go?” Vivian stared at the pair. “How?”
Darkmore pointed up at the swirling vortex of darkness. Knowing the demoness, it was a gateway to one of her torture chambers. Uphir was supposedly the underworld’s leading medical authority, but she seemed interested in healing only as a means to extend the lives of her victims, torturing them to the brink of death, only to bring them back from the edge so she could repeat the process and feast on their agony. Not that her victims didn’t deserve it. The child rapist she’d brought Vivian to heal deserved what Uphir and the reaper did to him. That didn’t bother Vivian.
What bothered her was how much Uphir and the reaper enjoyed feasting on the wretched soul’s suffering.
And now Vivian was supposed to just hop into this demon’s portal and trust that she’d see them safely to their destination?
And what about the tortured souls?
Vivian carefully set her coffee mug down and braced for a fight. Meeting Uphir’s gaze, she said, “You don’t touch them.”
Uphir went very still, from the roots of her raven hair to the tips of cloven hooves, the only visible sign of her demonhood. No, scratch that. Her eyes shifted from a rich chocolate brown to deep crimson, and Vivian swore scales rippled beneath the smooth flesh of her neck. Darkmore heaved a sigh, swore under his breath, and grabbed Vivian’s arm, yanking her up through the portal before she had the chance to scream.
Vivian had traveled through vortices created by spirits before. Not her favorite mode of travel, but the waves of nausea didn’t last as long as her first trip.
The demon portal was an entirely different experience. Pitch black, reeking of ozone, and painfully loud, only the reaper’s grip on her arms kept her from being torn asunder. Screams echoed from somewhere in the void. Uphir probably kept some of her victims trapped in this…place? Limbo? Or, fearing the demon and her tender mercies, some of the souls she claimed may have taken their chances and escaped into the portal’s ether.
From their shrieks, some likely regretted that choice.
A biting chill pierced her flesh as they flew at breakneck speed through the void. Too fast. She couldn’t breathe, could barely hold on to the reaper. Risking a glance at his face, she was shocked to find it contorted with the same agony. His diminished powers and mortal body rendered him as vulnerable to the demon portal as she, and yet he’d still come with her, knowing the risks.
He must have sensed her thoughts, since he twisted his lips into some semblance of a grin. “Hold on tight. The landing will be worse.”
“What—”
In the next instance, they crashed to the ground with bone breaking impact. Darkmore had positioned his body beneath hers to break her fall, damaging himself in the process. This time, he didn’t object when she used her light to mend his body, ignoring her own aches and pains until he was fully restored. She rolled off the reaper and sat up.
Big mistake. Her head spun and her ears were ringing with remembered echoes of screams.
“Do we,” she began, struggling for breath, “have to go back the same way?”
The reaper grimaced, which was answer enough. He rose and offered her a hand, pulling her off the cold, grass-covered ground. At least it had given them a softer place to land than the nearby asphalt. That was about as far as her night vision went—no streetlights, no nearby homes or busi
nesses, no passing cars. They appeared to be out in the boonies.
“Where are we?” she asked, wondering if they were even still in Mississippi. Her heart lurched in her chest as a sudden longing for home hit, stealing her breath.
Darkmore touched her shoulder and then ran his hand down her arm to clasp her trembling hand. Uphir dropped in front of them, landing gracefully on her cloven hooves and glaring at Vivian.
“What?” Vivian growled. It was stupid, but she figured the demon had gotten back a bit of her own during the spirit travel roller coaster ride from hell.
Instead of lashing out, Uphir flashed a wicked grin and transformed from an attractive human-sort-of woman—aside from the goat feet—into a seven-foot-tall, horned beast with a bifurcated tail and pitchfork.
“Do pick your jaw up off the ground, my dear,” Darkmore said, dryly. Turning his attention behind Vivian, he said, “Earl. How nice to see you again.”
“It’s Lothar.”
The deep growl of a voice made Vivian spin around. She barely stifled a scream when confronted with a reptilian creature that appeared to be half man, half dinosaur. The dinosaur half included a head full of teeth fit for a T Rex and clawed talons.
Vivian gulped, and then regained enough composure to say, “Nice upgrade.”
He grinned, baring more sharp teeth. “My mistress is generous when I please her.”
Uphir sneered at her minion. Vivian figured Earl—he’d always be Earl to her—was a masochist who enjoyed being belittled and humiliated by the demon. Not really wanting to know what other special treatment he might enjoy receiving, she turned her attention back to the reaper.
“Let me ask again. Where are we and why are we wherever we are?”
Her night vision had adjusted enough to see that they were at some sort of rural crossroads. In Mississippi. Oh, God, she didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream.
She settled on a bark of laughter as a tall man in a dark suit and hat materialized, cigarette dangling from his lips and a guitar slung across his shoulder. She stopped laughing when he leveled her with his gaze, fathomless and cold to the core. The shade of the Blues Legend turned his icy gaze on the demon and her minion, disdain dripping from his aura, before turning his attention to Darkmore.
“You the only one dressed decent,” he said, his Southern drawl as smooth as aged whisky on the rocks. He flicked his cigarette, the spectral ash disappearing into the night. “What’s your story, Red?”
It took Vivian a moment to realize he was speaking to her. Star struck, and more than a little wary, she said, “I’m with him. Didn’t pick him up at a crossroads, and I still have my soul.”
He grinned wide. It made him look more human, but the otherworldly quality he carried still had the hairs on the back of her neck standing at attention as a chill gripped her to the marrow of her bones. “That so? I bet there’s a story in there. You can maybe tell me after. Right now I expect you want those touched souls. Found a couple wandering the grounds. They followed me here.”
“Hey, I tracked those souls,” Earl said, sounding entirely too whiny for a man in his current form.
Cutting off the petty spat that was brewing, Darkmore inclined his head. “We are obliged to you, Kalunga-ngombe.”
The shade barked a laugh. “I ain’t the lord of the underworld—not yet. I just work for him in these parts. I’ll bring the souls out with one song. You got ten minutes, then I’m gone, and they gone with me.”
A jolt of excitement went through Vivian. She could warn them, let them know that help was on the way and that, if they chose, they could stay and use their power against their captors, the guardians, and maybe the whole damned council.
If she could get through to them—in ten minutes. No use worrying about time limits. She looked at the man from myth and legend and nodded. “Bring them, please.”
He winked, settled his guitar, and began to play. Chords rang out in the still of the night, haunting, sultry, and like nothing she’d ever heard before. When he sang, it wasn’t the high-pitched, on the edge voice she’d expected, like a man on the run from the rougher side of life. The voice was that of a man whose demons on his trail had caught up to him already, raw, deep, and it grabbed Vivian by the soul and clung to her.
One by one, lost and lonely spirits emerged from the darkness, drawn to the music and its power. She doubted any soul, living or departed, could resist such a call. God, for all the pain and suffering her connection to the world of spirits had caused, it had allowed her to witness sights and sounds beyond belief and so beautiful as to seem unreal. If the man’s music held even a sliver of the magic it held on the other side of the grave, it still would have been the closest thing to magic she’d ever heard.
It ended too soon, and it took a moment for her to recover. Clock was ticking. “I have a message for you to take back to the others,” she said, disturbed by the vacant stares of the spirits. “I’m with a group of living soul brokers. We want to set you free and help you cross over, if you want to move on. If you don’t, we want you to join us and help us set other souls free. You have the power to break their chains and bring the guardian spirits to their knees.”
The souls didn’t stir, didn’t move, didn’t even flinch with the drop in temperature as the reaper and demon moved closer. Damn it, it wasn’t their fault. They were lost souls, lost in life due to mental illness and God knew what other horrors, and now they were being held prisoner by the very entities who were supposed to send them on to peace. By the spectral remains of their clothing, some of them had lingered for more than a century. Dirty, ragged skirts and petticoats hovered above the bare feet of one young woman. A boy with scars carved into his wrists still carried the chains that made them, and a man with a shaved head, emaciated to a degree that made Vivian think he’d actually died of starvation, stood naked.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, you have to tell the others. When the rebels come, they’ll be shooting spirit light to destroy, not to disable. We don’t want you or the other prisoners to be caught in the crossfire!”
“They can’t hear you, my dear,” Darkmore said. “And I cannot read them. Perhaps if I were…as I was before, I could see into their darkness, but not now.”
Uphir’s sharp gaze landed on the reaper. Shit. He’d given too much away. The sadistic bitch would know his weakness and make it her mission to exploit it. She tightened her grip on the reaper’s hand and stared at the demon in her frightening form, refusing to drop her gaze.
“He’s mine,” Vivian said. “Come after him, and you’ll deal with me.”
Uphir grinned. “Why would I want him when I could have you? If the reaper no longer has the power to guard his get, then you’re fair game.”
Without thinking, Vivian channeled spirit light, not from the misery she carried, but from a long-ago memory. She was a young girl holding a tiny, fragile infant in her hand, cooing and babbling things only children understand. The baby smiled, drooling and wiggling small limbs as Vivian’s younger self squealed in delight. Smelling of powder, sour milk, and innocence, it was the first time she experienced the fierce kind of love that bonded protector and protected. Mae was hers to love, to teach, to nurture, and to cherish. Together, they would discover the world and all of its wonders.
She hadn’t realized there was a time before Mae’s disability, a time when their family had been filled with the promise of two full lives, filled with hope, filled with possibility.
Uphir shrieked as the light hit, transforming her back into her woman form. Even her feet looked like an ordinary human’s. No cloven hooves or fur. She huddled on the ground and glared up at Vivian, hissing.
Vivian might have gloated, had she not been shocked. Going after the demon was stupid. Sure, she could channel spirit light and had helped take out a few rogue guardians and spirits, but testing her unpredictable powers on a creature like Uphir? Monumentally stupid.
Still, Uphir didn’t know that. Probably. Best keep up the
pretense of I-meant-to-do-that for Darkmore’s sake, as well as her own.
Earl roared, baring fangs and slashing out with claws. She was tempted to blast him, too, but Uphir’s pet masochist would probably enjoy it. Best to just ignore him. Or perhaps she could salvage the situation.
“Stop that! Go grovel at the feet of your mistress, you useless sub!”
Earl obeyed, shrinking back to his normal size and crawling on hands and knees to Uphir. The demon had gathered herself enough to rise—on cloven hooves—and savage her dignity. She kicked her minion, who then proceeded to give Vivian a sly smile.
Good. She’d allowed Uphir to save face, done Earl a favor by allowing him to defend his mistress, who’d rewarded him with the punishment he craved, and hopefully secured their return trip back to the apartment.
“Five minutes, Red.” The Blues Legend stood bathed in moonlight, strumming the odd chord here and there. He seemed amused. Whether it was her outburst, the demon’s reaction, or the fact that she’d wasted precious time in a pissing contest when she should have been trying to get through to the lost souls, she wasn’t sure.
“What do I do?” The question was rhetorical, but Darkmore answered.
“Nothing.”
She whirled around and stared at the reaper in stunned silence. “What?”
He offered her a sad smile, equal parts understanding and pity. The reaper had once seemed so otherworldly, so ancient, so remote, and so utterly inhuman. In this moment, the reaper had never seemed more human.
As was she.
That was it, then. She’d done her best, used her power and influence to get here, call the spirits she needed to protect to this place, and deliver her warning. And yet, in the end, she couldn’t make them listen, couldn’t get through to them. For the first time since becoming a living soul broker, she’d failed.
“Time’s up.”
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