The Possession

by Jennifer Armintrout

  “I deserted her.” He kissed her bloodless forehead the way a mother would kiss her child’s head. “I’m not going to do it again.”

  “You didn’t desert her. You were kidnapped,” I reminded him. Stupidly, since he’d apparently moved on from blaming me, and for a moment I’d stood a chance of not being staked while I slept. “Please, Cyrus. Let me get you out of here before your father finds you.”

  The words fell like a veil over him, obscuring the strangely human Cyrus before me long enough for him to assume the cold expression of the Cyrus I knew. Though it was familiar, it wasn’t comforting.

  “My father.” He rolled the words in his mouth like a bit of food he was considering spitting out. “No, I think I’d like to see my father.”

  I forced away the chill that crept up my spine. “I can’t let you do that. You know I can’t.”

  “Why?” He laid her on the bed and stood. “Do you think you have the power to stop me?”

  He advanced with the predatory grace I remembered. The languid movements that had made me weak-kneed with desire and terror alternately. Even without his vampire charisma, he seemed dangerous.

  “You have to sleep sometime.” The way he said it, as a casual comment and not a threat, made it all the more frightening. “When you do, I’ll toss you out into the hot sand and watch you burn, the way you watched me burn.”

  I wanted to swallow, to soothe my suddenly dry throat, but I didn’t want him to take it for a sign of weakness. So I spoke with a voice like a pack-a-day smoker. “And how did I watch you burn?”

  “Without remorse.” It didn’t take him any time to answer. “With pleasure.”

  He turned away again, went to the dresser and pulled out clothes. The act shocked me. I’d grown so used to his nakedness, I hadn’t truly seen it until now.

  I waited until he had some pants on to respond. “That’s not how I remember it.”

  He snorted. “I’m so concerned with how you remember it. Do please write it down, so I can read it should I ever find I care.”

  “Whether or not you care, you can’t accuse me of being heartless.” Shocking wetness stung my eyes, and I blinked it away. The thought that I was about to say things I wished so many times I could have said to him before lent an air of importance to the moment. It dried my words up, and I floundered to think of what I should say. “I wanted to save you so many times.”

  His back went rigid, and though he didn’t face me, I saw his jaw tighten in profile. “Oh?”

  “I wanted you to be a better person. I thought if I could see just a little of the good in you…” I shook my head. “But I never did. You never showed me an ounce of the good in you. If you had, I could have loved you.”

  He looked at the ceiling, his head limp on his neck as if in defeat. Then he rounded on me with frightening speed, catching me off guard and pushing my back to the wall.

  His grip on my shoulders was painful, but I didn’t struggle. He leaned close to my face, so close it was hard to focus on his furious eyes. “I was supposed to show you the good in me? I was supposed to make you love me?”

  My breath exploded when he shoved me into the wall. He pointed to the corpse on the bed, stabbing the air forcefully as though he could wound it. “She loved me. She loved me! So maybe the problem didn’t lie with me.”

  “She was trapped in a basement with you! You were the only other human here!” The words were cruel, but I couldn’t stop them. “Of course she loved you, if you protected her from them!”

  He slapped me, but his heart wasn’t in it, and I barely felt the blow. “Don’t say these things to me! Do you think I haven’t thought them myself? She loved me. She loved me and I—”

  His face crumpled and tears spilled over his eyelids. “She loved me,” he repeated, grasping my shoulders, shoving me against the cinder blocks over and over.

  I could have reacted with anger. I could have knocked him out and dragged him back to the van. There was still the threat of the Fangs, and the even greater threat that a passerby might notice the supposedly burned-down church had been reassembled.

  Despite all this, I put my arms around him and pulled his body to mine, murmuring words of apology and comfort and true remorse. I couldn’t look at the girl on the bed. She deserved better than what she’d gotten if she’d managed to crack Cyrus’s cold facade.

  The Fangs might have pulled him out of the afterlife, but she had made him human. It would take a lot more than few days in captivity and a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome to manage that.

  I’d wanted to treat him as a thing, an ingredient in my recipe for saving Nathan. My plan had been to swoop in and snatch him up, then drive back to Grand Rapids without a care in my heart. If I had known then how naive and insensitive that plan was, an innocent girl’s life could have been spared.

  Cyrus wept so long, he ran out of tears, but the violent sobs that racked his body wouldn’t subside. With my hands on his shoulders, I gently pushed him back. “Calm down. You’ll make yourself sick.”

  “Calm down?” He glared at me through reddened eyes. “How can you tell me to calm down? She’s dead!”

  Okay, bad tactic. “I know she’s dead, and it hurts you. But you’re not doing her any favors if you stay here and get yourself killed.”

  He nodded, though I suspect he only forced himself to appear reasonable because he thought I didn’t care or understand. “You’re right.” He rose and went to the bed. “We’re not leaving her like this, though.”

  “Do you want to bury her?” It sounded extremely crass and earthy, but I didn’t mean it that way.

  It didn’t bother him. I could tell by the way he looked her over, as though she were merely a fragile, valuable object and not a dead body, that he’d removed himself from the reality of her death. While the shell she’d left behind was still precious to him, he clearly didn’t associate her with it.

  “No. It’s only sand out there. I don’t want an animal finding her.” His voice cracked slightly on the last words, but he didn’t cry. “Get me some towels from the bathroom, so I can clean her up.”

  That’s how we spent the rest of the night. Cyrus carefully washed the blood from her skin and asked me to bandage her torn throat and the bite marks on the rest of her body. He combed her hair, despite the gore that matted it, and laid her head on the pillow. Using the technique I’d learned in medical school, we carefully changed the soiled sheets without moving her body from the mattress, then clothed her in the sundress that appeared to be her only article of clothing.

  “The sun’s almost up,” Cyrus noted when we were finished, his voice strained and tired. “We should get going.”

  “You’re coming with me?” I wondered at his motive. Grief or not, he was still the man who’d gleefully procured victims for his father’s blood lust and killed innocent young girls for his own, sick pleasure. I couldn’t fully trust him.

  He nodded, never tearing his gaze from the girl’s dead, staring eyes. Absently, he reached out and gently closed her eyelids with his thumbs. They eased slightly open again, giving her the look of a person asleep.

  “I can’t leave her here to—” he swallowed thickly, covering his eyes with one hand “—to rot.”

  “Do you think we should bury her?” I looked to the sky. The stars were beginning to fade. I didn’t think we had enough time. At least I didn’t. “The police are going to notice that this place has reassembled. They’ll be here by morning. I’m surprised they haven’t been yet. Do you really want to be burying a dead body when they arrive?”

  “Oh, yes. That would be the worst thing that could happen to me, going to the electric chair.” He laughed bitterly, but I don’t think he really understood yet what it was to be human again. How important his life would be to him when he was close to losing it.

  He covered his face with both hands, a gesture more of fatigue than grief. “We’ll burn it.” He fixed me with a determined stare. “We’ll burn the whole place down.”

&
nbsp; I left him alone with her while I searched the building for supplies we could use. The Fangs had, either in their haste to leave the place or out of sheer wastefulness, left a nearly full can of gasoline behind. I thanked God for small mercies and poured it sparingly in a line from the kitchen, around the pews in the sanctuary, and down the steps to where Cyrus knelt beside the bed, his hand covering the dead girl’s stiff fingers.

  “Is it done?” he asked, lifting his tear-stained face to look at me.

  I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “Yes. Well, except I’m going to disconnect the gas line to the stove in the kitchen and let nature take its course. You should move the van. Get it clear.”

  “And what about you? How are you going to get clear?” He looked back to the girl and took a deep breath. “I don’t want you to die over this.”

  “I thought you wanted to kill me,” I said, trying to inject some humor into my voice. It fell horridly flat.

  “Oh, I do. At least, I’m mad enough to kill you.” His voice lowered to almost a whisper. “But I don’t want you to die.”

  As bizarre as his logic sounded, I understood him. I’d stood over his bed once, wondering if I could kill him while he slept, so angry I probably could have done it. But I wouldn’t have truly wanted him dead. “I’ll be fine. But we have to hurry, before the gas evaporates.”

  Leaning over the girl, he gently kissed her bloodless lips and stroked her hair. Then, with a sudden violence that startled me, he reached down and tore a strip of material from her skirt. Closing the scrap in his fist, he lifted it to his nose and inhaled, pain creasing his forehead above his closed eyes. Then, just as quickly as he’d seemed to lose control again, he tucked the cloth into his pocket and turned away from the bed. “Let’s go.”

  Arson is a bit more difficult than I expected. The stove was way too heavy to move on my own, so, after I lit a phone book on one of the burners, I held it away and turned all the dials to Light and blew out the pilot. As I hurried through the vestibule, I dropped the burning phone book on the gas trail. For a moment I worried that it wouldn’t catch, and I stood, frozen in horror, as it appeared the flame would go out. Then, with a whoosh of oxygen being sucked away, flames blossomed to consume what was left of the white pages, traveling slowly down the path of saturated carpet. I turned and ran out the doors, across the cracked lot to where Cyrus waited beside the van on the other side of the road.

  “Get behind the van!” I shouted, remembering too late the kind of wounds flying debris could cause. The gas in the kitchen ignited before he could move, and I dived for him, shielding him with my body until the noise of falling rubble hitting the pavement finished.

  “My God,” Cyrus whispered, climbing to his feet when I finally let him up.

  My gaze fixed on the burning building, I nodded. “I didn’t expect it to go up so fast.”

  We stood side by side, watching the fire. I tried not to think about the girl we’d left in the basement. When I looked at Cyrus, I knew that was all he thought of, and my chest ached with my guilt.

  “Do you know where my father is?” Cyrus asked quietly, tears filling his eyes.

  I didn’t know if lying or telling the truth would be the best way to persuade him to leave with me, but dishonesty felt cheap after the postmortem ritual we’d just shared. “No. I know he’s planning something, and I know I needed to find you.”

  He cocked his head, a bit of familiar Cyrus mannerism peeking through. “Really? How did you know?”

  “The Oracle.” I didn’t bother to explain. In his vampire life, Cyrus had known the goings-on of nearly every vampire faction. I had no doubt he’d know who the Oracle was. “She told me your father is trying to become a god. But she didn’t tell me what all that entails. She did say I needed to seek you out. That you would be in the land of the dead, with the toothsome ones.”

  Despite our grim circumstances, he chuckled. “Still speaks like Nostradamus. I never really cared for her, but she was on the mark with that prophecy.”

  “Cyrus, what is your father doing?” He had to know. The Oracle wouldn’t have sent me all this way for nothing.

  “I don’t know.” He looked back to the church. “But I’ll do what I can to help you find out.”

  I blinked and turned to him. “You will?”

  It seemed as if he’d never blink as he watched the flames leaping into the night sky. “If my father hadn’t decided to raise me from the dead…I blame him for her death,” he stated.

  But I blamed myself. Because it was my fault. I could barely breathe with the knowledge of it.

  The feeling of a piece falling into place nagged at me again, and I remembered my earlier observation, that the pain I felt from Nathan through the blood tie was the same as I felt over the girl’s death.

  And that’s when I knew. Standing in the desert, watching the flames from the burning church blending in with the new day lightening the horizon, I realized the only demon possessing Nathan was his own.

  I just didn’t know how to save him from it.

  I can’t imagine my life without her, but every day it seems more likely that she’ll be taken from me.

  Max rubbed his eyes and reread the sentence. So far, Nathan’s journal had provided insight into only one area of his life. The mopey, insecure part.

  Looking up from the book, Max studied Bella. She lay on a nest of blankets and pillows she’d fashioned into a dog bed—her words, not his, tossed playfully at him when he’d asked what on earth she was doing—intently reading a tattered copy of The Sanguinarius. Max didn’t put much stock in the book himself, but it seemed easier to let her read it than try to give her his own crash course in vampire lore.

  It had surprised him when she’d said she’d never read it. Though it was at the top of the required reading list for vampire assassins, she’d told him the book had never been made available to werewolves during their Movement training. Max hoped he wasn’t breaking any rules by sharing the book with her, but then remembered just how many rules they’d both broken already.

  “Are you going to continue staring at me or are you going to finish invading your possessed friend’s privacy?” She didn’t look up as she spoke.

  Max sighed. “I’m not getting anything here. Just pages and pages of how much he loves Carrie and how much pain it causes him.”

  “That is something.” Bella sat up, the movement graceful and catlike, despite her canine heritage. “Sometimes all you need to reach the trapped soul is a piece of personal information. Perhaps if Carrie spoke to him—”

  “There’s other stuff, too.” Max wanted to get Bella off that dangerous line of thinking. He wasn’t going to be the one who fessed up to Nathan that he let Carrie read his diary. “Like his ex-wife.”

  “He is divorced?” She made a face. “I will never understand that human custom.”

  “It’s not a custom, it’s an exception,” Max corrected. “I don’t understand it, either. If you just don’t get married at all, it makes things a lot simpler.”

  “What I meant was, it is unnatural to be separated from your mate.” She tossed a pillow at him.

  He caught it and threw it back. “Nathan’s not divorced. His wife died. He killed her.”

  “Why would he do such a thing?” The knowledge seemed to wound Bella.

  Max flipped back a few pages and read, “‘Every night I wish I’d done it differently. I wish I had let them starve me. If I had been strong then, I would be dead now, instead of living with this guilt.’” He snapped the book shut with one hand. “I’m guessing he ate her. Wasn’t that in his file?”

  “Perhaps in his sealed probation file,” she snapped. “You speak of these things as though they do not matter. Because you are a creature without knowledge of death, life does not matter to you!” Her body trembled, with rage or fear or both, he couldn’t tell.

  Whether she was afraid or not, her accusation made him angry. He stood, fighting the urge to favor his left leg, which was engu
lfed in an unpleasant prickling sensation. “Listen, I know plenty about death.” Marcus’s face flashed through his memory, knifing pain through his chest. “I don’t kill anymore.”

  “But you did. At one time, you did.” It wasn’t an indictment, just a simple statement of fact.

  One he couldn’t argue with. “Almost all of us have, at one time or another. And you’re an assassin. You kill vampires. What’s the difference?”

  She sat up straighter, if that were possible, righteousness radiating around her like hellfire. “Because I kill those who prey upon the weak. I kill out of necessity for order and peace.”

  “Right, and indulging your animal instinct is just a perk.” This was rapidly becoming an argument. One he didn’t feel like having. They’d been so peaceful for a few hours.

  “I do not enjoy the killing.” She said it through clenched teeth. “Those of us who appreciate the meaning of our true nature do not seek to become one of those murdering lupins.”

  To his amazement, she crossed herself and spit daintily after she said the name. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Okay. Your true nature. Mind cluing me in?”

  She reached for the zipper at the top of her high collar and tugged it down. Beneath her ever-present long-sleeved, black leather jacket, she wore only a bra. The horny department of his brain noted it matched the panties he’d glimpsed the day before, though she didn’t wear them now. They were hanging over the shower rod in the bathroom.

  He didn’t have time to dwell on the thought of her naked body beneath the jeans she’d borrowed from Carrie. As Bella shrugged the jacket off her shoulders, he became more interested in the dark lines of text wrapping her upper arms.

  She held one arm away from her body so he could read it. Some was Latin, some Hebrew, some a strange language he couldn’t identify, and some Italian. The words all followed their native course, up and down, right to left, left to right. He picked out a single strand of Latin and translated it easily. “‘A debt owing to the death of the God-Man, Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus the Christ of Nazareth, never to be repaid.’”

  The sentence switched unfathomably to Italian, and he lost his ability to read it. Shaking his head, he grasped her other arm. “‘The seed of Pilate will be sown on barren fields, the harvest of atonement will mock him as killer of the lamb. Let his blood be on our heads and the heads of our children.’”