I gave him a look. “First of all, there’s nothing wrong with One Direction, but if you ever call me a Belieber again, you’ll need to invest the poker money you just won in plastic surgery, capiche?”
A mischievous grin tugged at his lips. “Okay, smart-ass.” His voice challenging. “Hit me with your best shot. What’s your favorite rock song?”
I didn’t have anything to prove to jerk-face, but after he’d accused me of listening to teeny brat Bieber, I was hellbent on defending my honor. “Fine,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Get ready for some real music.” I scrolled through hundreds of songs until I found it—my all-time favorite.
Alex’s jaw dropped. “Is that—”
“Styx’s ‘Renegade.’” I shrugged. “Beats ‘Stairway to Heaven’ any day.”
“Not bad,” he muttered, clearly surprised my playlist didn’t consist of pussy pop and cuddle rock.
The tune vibrated through my system. I sang along, feeling each word as if written for me and me only. The cold, Alex—I forgot all about it as I lost myself in the rhythm. Great music could make me oblivious to how fucked-up my life was.
“Why is it your favorite?” Alex asked as the music faded.
The question caught me off guard and brought back unwanted memories. The first time I’d heard the song, I sat on my drunken dad’s lap. He’d made it his mission to introduce me to real music. Frankly, I think he’d just wanted to piss off my mom. She hated rock. Anyway, I was five or something, and as I sat there, I couldn’t help but picture myself on the gallows. In my case, though, there was no mother to mourn me. In fact, there was no one to give a damn if I was dead or alive.
“You okay?” Alex asked. He looked at me as if I were a broken engine that needed to be fixed. I hated it.
I straightened and put my poker face on. “Sure.” I forced a smile. “Your turn.” I seize hold of his jacket. “And try to be a bit more original than Zeppelin, okay?”
He dug through a pile of cassettes until he found the one he wanted. “Ready?”
I grinned. “Give it to me, baby.”
He rolled his eyes and shoved the cassette into the player. “Gotta work on your Offspring voice, Manda.”
So he does know good music, huh?
I rested my head against the seat and waited for the song to start. It took me three seconds to recognize it. “‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’?”
He smiled. “Best song ever.”
There was definitely a theme to his music taste. “You’re a heaven kinda guy?”
The rainbow color of his aura indicated confusion. He locked his mesmerizing eyes on mine. “What’s a heaven kinda guy?”
I held his gaze. “Means you’re the kinda man who thinks there’ll be peace when you’re done.” I tilted my head to the side and shrugged. “Makes sense, considering you’re a righteous jerk most of the time.”
He stared at me, eyes wide. “You saying you don’t believe in heaven and hell?”
“Sure I do.” I looked at my ankh tattoo, then back at him. “Look around you, Alex. We’re surrounded by hell. It feeds people the illusion there’s a reward at the end of the tunnel—seventy-two virgins waiting for you and you only, eternal peace, unconditional love, forgiveness. It makes the righteous kill to climb up that stairway to heaven, but in the end, when they take their last breath, it laughs in their faces and tells them how dumb they’ve been to ever have believed they had a shot at heaven.”
“Wow.” He blew out a long breath. “Who fucked you up so bad?”
Life, Alex. Life.
****
“Manda?” Alex’s hoarse voice brings me back to the present. “You going to keep this silence up, or are you going to woman-up and tell me why the hell it bothers you so much to ride with me?”
I eyeball him. He looks even worse than he did two minutes ago. His eyes are bloodshot. He’s so pale he could be mistaken for an albino. I need to check his wounds. Sooner than later would be a good idea.
“Manda.” He snaps his fingers in my face.
“It doesn’t bother me,” I finally say.
He flashes me a pained smile. “Yeah. Right.” Of course, he doesn’t buy my lies. Alex never does.
“Riding with you doesn’t bother me.” I hold the steering wheel in a death grip and sigh. “I just don’t understand why you agreed to splitting up.”
He presses a hand against his ribcage. “I’m going to be real honest with you, okay?”
I knit my brows. “Um, okay.”
“We both know I won’t find my soulmate. People like us aren’t cut out for relationships, let alone soulmates.”
A wave of anger hits me. I dig my nails into the steering wheel, trying to keep my cool. “What are you saying?”
He frowns. “I’m saying we both know I will die, and when I do, I don’t want my brother watching.”
Heat flushes my cheeks, and my knuckles turn as white as bones. “You’re using me?” Wow, did I say that out loud?
He turns to the window. “I’m not using you, Manda. It’s just…Jesse doesn’t think straight. You saw what he did back in Bakersfield to get me out of this. He’d never let me go.”
Jesse won’t. But selfish witch Amanda will? That’s so Alex, I don’t even know why it still shocks me. I take a deep breath, suppressing the raging storm inside of me. “You’re a selfish jerk, Alex.”
He glares at me. “I’m selfish?”
“Yes. Yes, you are.”
“You don’t know shit,” he hisses, peeved.
Bitter laughter roars through me. “You’re right. I don’t know why a guy like you decides to sell his soul. Don’t care either. Because no matter how noble your reasons might seem to you, you still chose the easy way out. You decided to leave behind the people who love you and rot in hell. Sorry,” I say, looking him in the eye. “But that’s a page right out of the Amanda Bishop is Selfish book.”
I half expect him to throw a fit or strangle me. He starts coughing his lungs out instead.
“Alex?” He pushes one hand against the dashboard and covers his mouth with the other. Something is wrong. There’s blood on his palm. My heart skips a beat. “Alex, what the hell is going on?” He glares at his bloody hand, gasping for air.
I jerk the steering wheel to the left and stop the car on the side of the road. “Alex?” I unbuckle my seatbelt. “Talk to me.” I sound hysterical. Hell, I am hysterical.
“I’m okay,” he chokes out.
He doesn’t look okay to me. I don’t even bother with the don’t-bullshit-me look. I shove his shirt up. The gauze pads are blood-soaked. Fuck! Our eyes lock. “I need to take a look.”
He nods, and I slowly peel the pads away. I expect purulence, but the cuts don’t look bad. Wish I could say the same about the black veins spread all over his belly and chest. What the hell is that? Sepsis? I don’t think so. Last time I checked, sepsis caused red streaks, not black veins. Maybe he’s suffering from another kind of infection? “We need to get you some antibiotics,” I mutter, replacing the bandages carefully.
He wipes blood off his lips. “You need a prescription for those, and I’m not breaking into another pharmacy.” He’s talking about the Bakersfield incident. To cure Jesse from his zombie state, we had to get our hands on Physostigmine. According to the grimoire, it reverses the symptoms of the zombie drug. We never got to test the theory, though.
“Relax. We won’t commit a felony, I promise. Just need to stop at the next grocery store to get some herbs.”
“Manda.” Alex puts two fingers under my chin. “I need you to understand something.” His eyes are soft, his voice gentle.
“Can we postpone the I-can’t-be-saved talk?” I’m not in the mood to talk death after I watched him cough blood.
“Manda.” He cups my cheeks with such desperation, it makes my heart sink. “I need you to hear this.”
The sadness in his eyes is too much. I look away. “What do I need to hear, Alex? That you have no regard for your life?
That you accept hell out of selfless reasons? Or that you don’t want your brother to watch you die but have no problem making me watch?” Damn, I had no idea how hurt I am.
His shoulders sink. “I don’t want to die. Don’t want to go to the pit either. But what I did, Manda, I’d do again.” He ogles my lips. “You don’t have to like or understand it.” He caresses my cheek with his thumb. “But you have to accept it, just like I did.”
Something in my chest cracks. I think it’s my non-existent heart. For the first time, I see fear in his eyes. He’s terrified of hell but made his amends because…he accepted it?
I’m not sure what to say or do. Kiss away his hopelessness or beat the fucking pessimism out of him? I push his hands away and lean back. Thick black clouds cover the sun, and I can’t help but smile at the cliché. I used to make fun of pathetic fallacy. Thought it was hilarious how authors like Fitzgerald used the easy way out to describe emotions. Little did I know, sometimes the weather really does portray the state of a human’s soul.
I turn the key in the ignition and face Alex with a real smile. “You’ve got one thing wrong, Alex.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m a witch,” I say. “I don’t have to accept anything.”
Chapter 26
Viktoria Mogilova is the definition of beautiful. High cheekbones, full lips, long red-brown hair, and curves Jennifer Lopez would kill for. According to Alex, she’s Russian. It’s quite obvious. She holds her head up high and walks through the world as if nothing could hurt her—invincible.
In a perfect world, she should be the one.
Alex could be happy with her.
They would have a shot at a good life.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Truth is, the world isn’t perfect. And Viktoria isn’t the one.
“Let’s go,” Alex says, squeezing my leg gently.
He isn’t disappointed, broken, or depressed. I am. I still stare at the multi-million-dollar estate on Bay Road, home of Viktoria and her newly-wedded husband, Michael, trying to convince myself she only married him for the money.
She didn’t. When I knocked on their door, pretending to be a helpless chick whose car broke down, I saw the love in their eyes. They looked at each other as if nothing else mattered in the world. For a notorious liar like me, it’s easy to spot a fake. What Michael and Viktoria have is the real deal. I knew right then and there Florida was another dead end. Viktoria had already found her soulmate, and his name wasn’t Alex.
“Come on, Manda. Start the engine.” Alex’s voice is soft, not pushy.
How can he be so calm when his soul is at stake? I press my lips together and glare at the star-sprinkled sky. “What time is it?”
“Almost eleven,” he says, sipping on the garlic, ginger, thyme, and cinnamon tea I made for him.
One more hour to midnight. One day closer to the hellish deadline. Awesome. I blow out some air and move nearer to Alex. He’s not as pale as he was hours ago, but I don’t like the dark shadows under his eyes. “How do you feel?” I wish I sounded less worried.
He smiles a weak smile. “The stuff tastes like poison,” he says, holding up the paper cup. “But I think it helps.” After the coughing incident, we’d stopped at the next grocery store to get the ingredients for an antibiotic mixture. Easy. Getting hot water wasn’t. I’d asked a Starbucks barista for four takeaway cups of boiling water. The dude scowled as if I’d just committed the worst coffee shop crime ever. Changed his mind when I shoved twenty bucks over the counter.
I turn the key in the ignition. “It’s a twenty-seven-hour drive to Winter Harbor, right?”
“Give or take an hour.”
“We better get going then,” I say, backing the car out of the parking slot.
****
Five days to hell
Yawning, I try to keep my eyes on the road. My sight is blurry and my mind drifts to dark places. Alex’s soul lost in the everlasting flames of hell. Him never getting the chance to meet…Don’t go there. Why not? In five days this will be reality, and unless JJ or Sarina turns out to be the one, there’s nothing I can do about it.
Apparently, Alex notices how drowsy I am. “Let’s get a room.”
I smile, because it’s so much better than breaking down and crying. “That an indecent proposal, Alex?”
A boyish grin tugs at the edges of his mouth. “If you call sleep indecent, then, yes, Manda.”
“We can sleep when we’re dead. In your case, that would be in five days,” I remind him.
“Manda.” He loses the humorous tone. “I know you mean well. But”—he points to the road—“a blind eighty-year-old wouldn’t drive such wiggly lines.”
“Shut up, Alex.”
He unbuckles his seatbelt and faces me. “Your eyes are bloodshot, you’re yawning like a lion, and if you don’t take a break, you’re gonna get us both killed with your reckless driving.”
I’m about to argue with him when the car next to me honks like crazy. For a fraction of a second, I freeze. I’d drifted way too close to his Chevy. Shit.
“All right.” I pull the car to the right. “Have it your way. But don’t you dare blame me if we don’t make it in time.”
“I won’t,” he promises.
Pit stop in Savannah, Georgia. Great. I navigate the car into the driveway of the Sleep Inn, a cheap, two-star hotel right next to the I-95N exit. It looked passable on the outside. Should have known better than to judge a motel by its façade. The A/C doesn’t work, the room smells like old carpet, there’s scum on the shower glass, mold in every corner, and don’t even get me started on the cockroach wandering over the filthy bed sheets.
Alex escorts the cockroach out of the room. I might not like these creatures, but I raised hell when he tried to kill it. We’ve got enough shitty karma to battle. No need to add to the list. “Sure you wanna stay here?”
“Hell, yeah. I love a fucked-up motel room,” I lie.
He shuts the door and gives me a look. “You hate cockroaches, Manda.”
I also hate the idea of sharing a room with hunter-heroic, but Bonnie was right about one thing: Alex needs protection from himself and the creature that ripped his torso open.
I throw my bag on the left bed. “I’ll live. Besides”—I bat my lashes at him—“I have hunter-heroic with me. He’s gonna take care of all the cockroaches for me.”
He saunters toward me. Presenting a mesmerizing smile, he scrubs his fingers through his untamed hair. “What happened to ‘I don’t need a knight in shining armor’?”
“I don’t,” I say, flinging myself on the bed. “But I do need a knight in cockroach armor.”
“Okay, Mrs. I’m-not-scared-of-demons-but-little-cockroaches, I’ll hit the shower.”
I push myself up on my elbows. “Need some help?”
I don’t realize how wrong it sounds until Alex laughs. “That an indecent proposal?”
I scan the tight black shirt hugging his six-pack.
He stares at me with a fire in his eyes that’s hard to ignore. “Manda, is it?” He’s fucking serious.
I pull my gaze from his chest, mad at the throbbing sensation between my legs. “Get outta here, Alex.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he looks disappointed.
After a moment of awkward silence, he grabs a change of clothes and disappears into the bathroom. I exhale sharply. Jesus, what is wrong with me? He’s going to hell, and I’m sincerely considering screwing him? What happened to the girl in the closet refusing to play second fiddle? Damn, this is exactly why I didn’t want to split up. Alex and I, alone? That’s as cruel as putting cocaine under the nose of an addict.
I’m spread out on the disgusting bed, listening to the sound of hot water spraying Alex’s god-like body. My imagination runs wild. Gosh, it would be so easy to strip down and join him. So deliciously tempting to trace his wet chest down to a more sensitive area. He’d be game. I remembered what he’d said to me in the closet. If this whole soulmate s
hit ain’t gonna work, this is how we’ll spend the last day of my life. But this isn’t the last day of his life, and I need to get a fucking grip. Forget about the wetness in my panties and move on.
I’m still battling the hunger for Alex’s touch when my phone vibrates. Queen B. Damn, I never told her Viktoria turned out to be someone else’s soulmate. My thumb glides over the accept button. “Hey, baby girl, I’m sorry I—”
“I’m not a girl, but I don’t mind you calling me baby,” Jesse says in a playful tone.
I smile. “Sorry, man. Thought you were Bonnie. Why you calling me from her number?”
“Is Alex with you?” he whispers.
“He’s in the shower,” I say.
“Good.”
“Why are we whispering?” I ask in a hushed tone.
He clears his throat. “Can you go somewhere else?”
I’m not sure I like this. “Hold on.”
I amble out of the room and lean against the wall in the empty hallway. “Where are you guys?”
“Colorado Springs. You?”
“Savannah,” I reply quickly.
“Oh.”
I draw a deep breath and push the bottom of my shoe against the wall. “I’m sorry, Jess. Viktoria is happily married. She isn’t the one.” I should tell him about the blood coughing thing and the black veins, too. Don’t have it in me to hurt him some more, though.
“We still have options,” he murmurs.
“We do.” Very few options, but options nevertheless.
There’s a long pause. “Carter called me.”
My pulse quickens. I have a knot in the pit of my stomach. Both are omens I’m about to get bad news. “What does he want?”
Silence.
“Jesse?”
Painful silence.
“Dude!” I bark, losing my temper. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know how to say this.”
“Just the way it is, Jess.”
“All right, but you can’t tell Alex. Okay?”
I squint. “Um, sure.”
“Carter said a couple of hunters are looking for you. Some work for the Paranormal Analysis Unit of the FBI, others are freelancers. They think you killed that Jules chick at NYU.” He’s talking faster than Eminem raps. “I assured him you had nothing to do with the girl’s death. He already figured that out and called his guys back, but there’s nothing he can do about the ones not working for him.”
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