The surety of it nearly sent her reeling.
“You shouldn’t listen to me anyway,” Corinne said, her eyes on Asher’s quelling expression. “I have a natural predisposition toward paranoia. Plus, I’m a reporter. I think everything is a conspiracy. But honestly, I was just trying to help.”
Daphanie forced herself to focus on her friend and nodded. “I know you were. And I do appreciate it. Like you said, I’m better off knowing what I’m up against.”
“Just remember, you’re not up against anything alone.” Corinne gathered her papers back into their messy pile and flipped her folder closed. She nodded toward Asher. “In addition to the big guy, here, you’ve got me and Missy and Graham and Rafe and the whole crew on your side. And I’ll keep digging, too. Something is nagging at the back of my mind about this whole situation, and I just can’t put my finger on what it is. I hate that feeling. Which means I’m not going to let this drop until I figure it all out.”
“Thanks.”
Corinne dismissed Daphanie’s word with a wave of her hand and stood to make her way out. “Don’t thank me. This is what friends do.”
Daphanie slipped out from under Asher’s hand and walked her friend toward the door. “Still—”
“Of course, friends also tell each other all the juicy details about their sex lives. Especially when they involve big, strong men with faces like Renaissance sculptures and asses you could bounce a quarter off of.”
Daphanie caught her friend’s wiggling eyebrows and shoved her playfully out the door. Even as she shot a quick glance over her shoulder to see if Asher had overheard. His expression remained as bland as ever. Which told her nothing.
“As if,” she teased back, keeping her own voice hushed. “Go get your own sex life, D’Alessandro, and stop trying to live vicariously through mine.”
“Oooh, so you and the Yummy One have a sex life? Already? Damn, girl, you work almost as fast as I do!”
“Ha! Wouldn’t you like to know. Good girls don’t kiss and tell.” And with that, she closed the door in the other woman’s face, still grinning.
Determined to get the last word, Corinne laughed at her through the thick layers of steel. “Maybe not,” she called, her voice muffled but clearly intelligible. “But bad girls have more fun!”
Eight
In the end, every human being needs to make a choice: do I continue to live my life the way I’ve always lived it and simply keep my distance from the things and creatures who frighten me? Or do I take a chance and see where this new adventure of a life among the Others will lead me?
—A Human Handbook to the Others, Conclusion
She kept her eyes closed and her head tipped back toward the apex of the tented ceiling, showing the loa no fear and no shame. Again, she smelled incense and charcoal and the sweet, earthy scent of burning tobacco. Her people offered only the finest, grown not two miles away in the English’s cherished fields.
Her pulse throbbed, filling her head and trickling down the back of her throat like the rum she’d taken in Their names. Her heart beat louder, tempo increasing, urgency rising as the rhythm of the drums drove them all faster. Her feet pounded against the cool earth, the grit of dirt clinging to her soles. It was a new feeling for her, this cool, dry earth, different from the rich delta soil she’d been used to, but the dirt didn’t matter.
Neither did the air matter, cooler here, thinner, for all the complaints the white men offered when the summer sun beat down on them. They were weak. They would not have survived in the thick, tropical humidity on which she had suckled. At home, fire had been a gateway and a duty, but here, the glow of firelight became a thing of beauty, a necessity that kept the biting chill from drawing her away from Their arms.
Now the drums beat faster. Voices sang louder, driven by the drums, driven by the spirits. In the morning, the farmers and traders in the town at the tip of the island would whisper of dark rituals and dangerous spirits in the distance, and she would laugh, knowing the truth would only frighten them more than their ignorant speculations.
She felt a familiar rush of fullness within her. Her gros bon ange began to shrink, making room to let the greater Ones in. She could feel the power welling up within her, feel the excitement, the exaltation. She lifted her arms to the roof and gave herself over to the communion with the divine, the dark, the eternal. She felt His ange settle over her like a heavy weight, thick and ancient with power, and when her eyes snapped open, they were His eyes, dark with menace and bright with intent.
Nous sommes au ras au ras, chère. J’vas t’donne tous la puissance, tite fille, His voice whispered in her head, et nous avons choquer le ciel, non?
She laughed, loud and long, and the sound made the drummers stutter in their blows.
Daphanie sat bolt upright in her sister’s bed, her sheets and tank top soaked with sweat. She scrubbed at the skin of her arms, trying to rid herself of that feeling of heaviness, but it didn’t shift. It clung to her like oil, coating her from the inside out. It wasn’t just her body that felt heavy, but her soul.
She couldn’t stay where she was. She felt tainted and she needed to get away. From the bed, from the dream, from herself. Throwing back the sheets, she scrambled to her feet and stripped off her clothes as if they’d been splattered in blood.
God, she needed air.
The thick fog of the dream stayed with her, a feeling she’d come to both know and dread over the past week. Every day for seven days she’d woken with this hazy, unclean feeling, and her nerves suffered for it. Every day she woke feeling a little heavier, a little less herself, and tonight, the one-week anniversary of her night at the club, she was ready to tear off her own skin to make the sensations go away.
She needed air.
Not stopping to think, Daphanie grabbed her sister’s cotton robe from where it hung on the back of the bedroom door. She was already halfway through the great room as she dipped her arms in the sleeves, and she barely had it belted closed when she pushed open the door at the back of the kitchen and stepped out onto the rooftop terrace built above the apartment building’s lower wing. She hadn’t even glanced toward the sofa where Asher habitually slept. She just needed to get out.
She hurried over to the low wall facing the street and drew in great gulps of cool night air. Her hands trembled as she pressed them flat against the granite surface, and her eyes fixed sightlessly on the light traffic moving twelve stories below.
Daphanie, she chanted to herself over and over. Your name is Daphanie. You’re a blacksmith. You’re a human being. It was only a dream.
The problem was, it had never felt like a dream.
Even the first night, the sensations of dancing to the beat of drums in a tent on the edge of nowhere had felt more real to her than the polished wooden floor of her sister’s swanky new apartment. It had been bad enough then, when all she’d dreamed of was a little dancing, but every night since, it had only gotten worse.
At first, the dream had progressed with glacial slowness, advancing one footfall at a time so that the first couple of nights she hadn’t realized it was advancing at all. But by Thursday, the feeling of anticipation had built to a fever pitch, and last night she’d finally understood that in the dream, the woman she was had been inviting some sort of spirit to possess her.
Tonight, she’d felt the first touch of that foreign presence within her body and the memory of it made her want to vomit.
It had been dark, black, inside her, a feeling of corruption and vice and bone-deep malice Daphanie had never experienced before. It had threatened to consume her, but the Daphanie in the dream had gloried in it, had invited it in and welcomed it, even as she understood the evil it represented. The Daphanie in reality couldn’t even begin to comprehend that, but to the Daphanie in the dream, the spirit, the dark thing inside her, had represented power.
For the first time in her life, Daphanie finally understood the concept of selling one’s soul to the devil. She felt as if hers was gone a
nd the devil now crawled underneath her skin.
“Are you all right?”
She choked back a hysterical laugh.
The voice behind her was soft and deep, low and fimiliar. He stepped out of the shadows of the small, private terrace and stood close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from his body and seeping through the thin fabric of her borrowed robe.
“I’m fine.”
If you called feeling like a stranger in your own skin “fine.” If “fine” meant feeling as if she were still walking around in the dream. Or as if the dream walked in her.
Her hands clenched on top of the wall, the rough stone scraping across her skin as her knuckles curled. She flinched when his big, warm hand settled on her shoulder.
“You don’t look fine.”
This time she did laugh, and the sound rang with bitterness and fear. Was it hers? Or the dream’s? Did not being able to tell make her a lunatic? “That’s what I admire most about you, Asher. You’re just a fucking charmer. You just take my goddamned breath away.”
He turned her to face him and studied her expression. “What’s wrong?”
She tried to tug away from him. “Not a thing. Everything is just frickin’ peachy.”
Asher held firm. “Everything is very obviously not fine. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Well, I haven’t.” She’d felt one, maybe, but she hadn’t seen one. Her eyes had remained closed for almost the entire dream. What she’d seen when she opened them …
It hadn’t been a ghost.
“I can honestly say, I didn’t see a bloody fucking thing. Satisfied?”
“No.”
“And isn’t that sad for you.”
Daphnie knew she was acting like a brat, but she couldn’t seem to do anything about it. She wasn’t acting like herself, not thinking like herself. Her body didn’t seem like hers; her words didn’t seem like hers.
God, what the hell was wrong with her?
She jerked away from him and stalked back toward the kitchen. God, she didn’t want to go back inside, but she couldn’t stay out here with him. The dream still buzzed in her head, crawled under her skin, and knotted her stomach. She felt like all she had to do was close her eyes and she’d slip right back into it, right back into the grasp of that other self. Of that heavy, black soul that had settled over her.
“Daphanie.”
He caught up with her in two long strides and tried to make her face him. When she shrugged in an attempt to slip out from under his grip on her shoulders, he stopped trying to turn her and simply wrapped his arms around her from behind. He tugged her back against him and leaned his head close to hers until his breath fluttered against her cheek.
“Tell me. What happened?”
She couldn’t help it. She melted against him. His body drew hers like a lodestone, softening her bones, relaxing her muscles. Every lean, hard plane of him conformed to her softer curves. They fit together like two halves of a whole and the sensation made her want to weep in joy and frustration.
“Tell me.”
Oh, how she wanted to.
She wanted to pour her heart out to him. She wanted to tell him every new detail of the dream, but something inside her rebelled at the idea. Her mind screamed that if she spoke the words aloud, it would only give the things inside her more power; it would send the blackness seeping deeper into her soul, make the taint more permanent. She couldn’t speak of it.
All she could do was lean against him, trying to absorb his strength through her skin, as her eyes drifted helplessly shut.
* * *
Asher felt the change in her.
Actually, he felt both of them.
The first made something inside him roar in triumph as she relaxed into his embrace. She softened against him, letting him press her closer to his body, letting him support some of her weight. She felt heavy, not physically—he could have lifted her in one hand without noticing—but mentally, emotionally. Psychically. Something was eating away at her from the inside and he wanted to demand that she tell him what it was. He couldn’t fight it unless he understood it, but she guarded the truth from him with a wary sort of ferocity.
She didn’t trust him completely yet, and while he understood it, it nearly drove him mad.
“Tell me,” he urged, curving his body around hers, trying to shelter her from the demons in her own head. He felt her tremble. He watched her profile as her eyelids dropped, shuttering their velvet depths, and that’s when he felt the second change overtake her.
Her body shifted. Instead of relaxing into him, her muscles took on a subtle tension. She no longer felt soft in his arms, like a sleepy child, but sinewy and strong, like an anaconda, all muscle and predatory instinct.
Tension flooded through him.
“Daphanie?” he inquired cautiously.
She rotated slowly in his arms, a move that originated in her hips, which she swiveled against him, deliberately dragging her soft warmth over the vulnerable and suggestible flesh between his legs. He hardened helplessly and cursed.
Her eyes still closed, she tilted her face toward his. The smile on her full lips made him simultaneously horny and horrified. He watched in frozen fascination as she strained upward, pressing her breasts against his chest, taking every opportunity to wriggle and sway against him. She felt like sex in a nightrobe, but he sensed something very wrong in the sightless face below his.
Her hands slid into the close-cropped hair above his nape and tried to drag him toward her.
“Come, cher, ” she purred in a voice replete with seduction and devoid of Daphanie. “ Donnes-moi le bec doux. Just a li’l sugar, baby.”
Asher nearly choked on his tongue. The words were so foreign, so unexpected, he didn’t even recognize her as she spoke. And he certainly hadn’t expected her to revert to speaking in some odd form of French.
He reached behind him and grasped her hands to drag them away. Something was very wrong.
“Stop it, Daphanie,” he ordered, deliberately making his voice sharp and raspy. Or maybe that was a byproduct of his involuntary arousal. His mind might understand that this wasn’t like Daphanie, but his cock didn’t seem to care.
He drew her hands out to the sides, but she continued to lean toward him. “Open your eyes.”
She collapsed against his chest, rubbing hard little nipples against him provocatively. His shirt and the thin fabric of her robe provided a woefully inadequate barrier between them.
Her lips drew together in a pout, one that only served to make them appear more luscious and more kissable. “Don’t be so mean, bébé, ” she purred. “Just a little kiss…”
Asher opened his mouth to repeat his demand that she open her eyes, but she was faster than he’d expected.
The moment his lips parted, she lunged forward, striking like a snake. Her lips landed on his before he was even aware of her movement, her tongue sliding wetly into his mouth to tangle with his.
Shock cost him a precious second of reaction time and when he finally grasped her torso to put her away from him, she had already wrapped herself around him like an octopus reeling in its prey. She had propelled herself upward so that her legs wrapped around his waist, her thighs bracketing his hips and her groin rocking indecently against his involuntary erection. Her arms clung to his shoulders as if locked in place, her fingers digging into his scalp as she seemed to try to devour him whole.
For the first time in his life, Asher thought he might begin to understand how a woman felt when subjected to an unwanted sexual advance. He’d wanted Daphanie from almost the first moment he saw her, but this was not Daphanie. It didn’t feel like Daphanie, didn’t even taste like Daphanie. Instead of the sweet, honeyed kiss he remembered, this woman tasted of bitterness and rage and malice.
He tore his mouth from hers and tightened his hands around her ribs until he feared injuring her, but that was what it took to pry her off him. He looked down into her beautiful face, now contorted into
an unrecognizable grimace of fury, and whispered a grim apology.
Then he struck her with a precisely measured blow to the bundle of nerves at the base of her ear and caught her as she crumpled.
Scooping her up in his arms, he headed into the kitchen and out the apartment’s front door. It was past time to find out what had been bothering Daphanie Carter, because he had a sneaking suspicion it had just tried to bother him, as well.
Nine
Possession —a state in which a person’s mind, body, and/or soul are controlled by a foreign entity. This control can be exerted either externally (through psychic or magical influence) or internally (by a noncorporeal entity entering and inhabiting the body of another being). Possession can occur either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Most humans tend to associate the concept of possession with the classic horror film The Exorcist, in which a young girl is possessed by a demonic force. In actuality, possession can be accomplished by any of a number of different Others, of which demons are only one example.
—A Human Handbook to the Others, Glossary
Daphanie regained consciousness slowly. First she became aware of an acute throbbing in her head, then of the sound of voices nearby speaking in hushed tones. She had to struggle to make out what they said.
“… good you brought her here … did the right thing … just wondering who to call … and the Council … not exactly on the friendliest terms.”
Daphanie thought she recognized the voice, but her intellect hadn’t quite caught up with her consciousness. She couldn’t quite conjure the correct face or name for the speaker. It was a man, though. She could tell that much.
“… hit her so hard?” This time a woman spoke, the voice soft and concerned, and also discernibly scolding. “… probably feels like her head is exploding.”
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