But she had to try. She had to.
Before she could change her mind, Gina ran her finger across the ink of Vance’s name.
The living room just . . . went away. As it often was in her visions, everything was painfully clear, as though an enormous, sparkling clean magnifying glass had been placed over a piece of the world just so she could get up close and examine it. That didn’t always mean she knew everything—she might see into someone’s life but never know where they were at the time her vision was taking place. But if she could bear it, she could usually find out. She just needed to be able to stay in the vision long enough.
And sometimes that seemed almost as painful as whatever she was seeing in that strange, omniscient eye inside her mind.
He was in someone’s bathroom, sitting on a chair of all things, right in the middle of the bathtub. Wait—he was tied to the chair, and he was very, very sick. His left hand was swollen and streaked with black and green, with red lines of infection crawling up his wrist and feeding into the veins of his arm. Pus and fluids dripped from the black, decaying stump of his severed finger, mixing with the filthy water that had backed up the tub’s drain all the way to the middle of his shins. His skin was pocked with odd little punctures, as if someone had poked him repeatedly with something thin and sharp. A knife? He was sitting in his own waste and he was cold, but that was about it. He was beyond hungry, and beyond pain. He was dying.
Gina forced herself to do what she called “dialing out,” a little maneuver akin to pulling the focus back on a camera lens in order to see the bigger picture. Now she could see more, the whole bathroom, the living room beyond it. It was a pit, the main room in an apartment in some kind of decrepit, filthy building. Cockroaches and silverfish were painfuwhere, but they weren’t as bad as the rats that were drawn by the smell of the rancid water and her husband’s putrefying flesh.
She gagged and squeezed her eyes shut even as she kept one hand jammed against the envelope so she wouldn’t break the contact and lose the vision—if she did, she wouldn’t get it back. She dialed out again, looking for anything that might give her the address, a mailbox, a piece of junk mail, anything. Now she was in the hallway, and it was just as squalid as the apartment; she needed to get farther back, as many times as it would take, so that she could get the building number and the street name.
A female presence, something infernal and dark and indescribably evil, blew past her in the hallway.
Gina gasped and fought to stay in the vision, pushing back against every instinct in her mind that screamed at her to run. Part of her wanted to do what she’d originally intended—dial out and get that damned location—but another had to follow this woman back into the dreadful apartment, had to see what she was going to do. Was this the person behind the telephone calls? It had to be. Gina could feel some kind of crazy strength emanating from her, but it wasn’t a good thing. It was wrong somehow, in a doesn’t-belong-here way that she couldn’t actually pinpoint. It was alien.
Even though she wasn’t really there, she couldn’t bear to leave her husband alone with this evil thing.
So she went back in, following an ethereal trail that reeked of everything bad in the world and smelled like potatoes forgotten and left to rot and liquefy on the bottom shelf of a pantry. Her throat spasmed and for a second all she could think of was how badly she wanted to vomit, to clear her throat and lungs of that loathsome scent. But throwing up was a luxury she didn’t have, she couldn’t get physical or open her eyes and suck in the untarnished air of her humid apartment—nothing in the real world could be allowed to turn her back from her vision.
She was back in the bathroom with Vance, watching as the presence—even her abilities weren’t enough to see beyond the strange shroud that appeared to cover it from head to toe—leaned over the rim of the tub and looked at Vance. What was it doing? It was amorphous, completely without shape, and because of that Gina couldn’t tell anything other than a part of it reached over and did something to her husband. It must have been painful because Vance’s head rolled to one side and he moaned—Gina heard him as clearly as if he were sitting on the couch next to her. Then he went abruptly slent and what she was seeing began to fragment at the edges, fade inward like a lens closing around a circle of light. A few seconds later, everything inside her head just went . . .
Black.
She felt suddenly like someone standing in the midst of a totally lightless cave, arms outstretched, vertigo washing over her. Gina waited as long as she could stand it, then her eyes came open; she was standing—she had no idea when she’d done that—with her arms outstretched exactly as she’d imagined, fingers clutching at the unseen darkness she’d thought had surrounded her.
No, not her.
Vance.
Could that blackness mean anything other than he was dead?
“Oh, dear God,” she wheezed. “God . . . no.” A dark part of her mind chimed in then. What did you expect, you idiot? Roses and ribbons?
She sank back to the couch and sat there for a long, long time, until the night and exhaustion dropped her into the same bleak abyss down which she imagined her husband had now fallen.
THE KNOCK AT THE door came at almost nine-thirty in the evening when Brynna and Eran were just about ready to go to bed for the night. They were both tired from the stress of the day and trying to figure out the ins and outs of Casey Anlon and Georgina Whitfield, how to get her to reveal who Casey might save next so that they could avoid whatever disaster might result from it. There was also the matter of Danielle Myers and what might happen with her once she was released from the hospital. At only nineteen and mentally disabled, the Myers girl seemed harmless enough but Brynna had gotten a glimpse of her potential and how in its own way it might rival the scale of the tragic things accomplished by Glenn Klinger and Jack Gaynor. Brynna was also smart enough to consider that it was a creative world and humans were always coming up with new things to somehow hurt others, sometimes when they themselves least expected it. That meant she could go on to even bigger things.
The rap on the door made enough of a vibration so that Grunt gave a single irritated bark from her makeshift bed in the bathroom. After voicing her annoyance, the dog sighed and went silent. If nothing else, thise Brynna a bit more convinced that their late-night visitor was human and not one of Lucifer’s soldiers.
She and Eran were still not sharing a bedroom—Brynna wouldn’t allow it. They had made love twice now, and after each time Brynna had been more fulfilled, both physically and mentally, than she had ever been in her entire existence. She wasn’t sure what surprised her the most, the physical or the mental part. Physically, she had done things in Hell and on Earth during her time of searching for weak human souls that the man watching television in the other room could never imagine. She’d had lovers whose skills could never be equaled by anyone on this Earth, so her only explanation for the sense of utter fulfillment she felt was that Eran also satisfied her emotionally. Lucifer had never touched her in this manner and she had believed for longer than a mere human could conceive that she would spend eternity by the fallen angel’s side. The combination of fleshly gratification and emotional completion was, it seemed, that most exquisite connection about which humans talked in the marriage vows that had, at least once upon a time, been so sacred.
The knock came again and Brynna got up to answer the door when Eran didn’t notice it over the noise of the television. She wore a T-shirt and sweatpants to bed, nothing less and certainly nothing fancier. Had she been living on her own, she would have worn no clothes at all, but the fact that Eran was in the house made that too tempting, for both him and her. She had no preconceived expectations about who the caller might be—Eran never had visitors except for his partner—but when she pulled the door open, there stood the last person she’d thought she’d see, Charlie Hogue.
Brynna froze. For a long moment they stared at each other, then dismay settled over her. The look of desire on his face was una
dulterated. She’d seen that look countless times over thousands of years, and it had never ended well for the human involved. That was bad enough, but because the man in front of her was Eran’s brother, this could result in nothing but disaster.
A wide smile spread across his plain face and he spoke first. “Brynna—you’re just the person I’ve come to see.”
“What can I do for you?” She made no move to step aside so he could come in, nor did she give him an invitation. For all her efforts to learn, she still wasn’t that good at socialization; even so she still knew her actions were solidly on the side of rude. After all, newly discovered or not, he was a Redmond family member.
The look on Charlie’s face said he realized it, too, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. “Can I come in?”
She was hnting for a reason to say no when Eran came up behind her. “Brynna, who’s there—oh! Charlie . . . hi.” He looked from Charlie to Brynna and she could tell he’d immediately picked up on her discomfort. “Is there something I can do for you? It’s kind of late.”
“Yeah, I know. I, uh, came over kind of on the spur of the moment.” He stood there, his gaze flicking from Brynna to Eran. “Listen,” he finally said, “I hope you don’t mind and I know it seems a little strange, but can I talk to Brynna alone?”
Eran opened his mouth to reply but Brynna cut him off. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Charlie frowned, then folded his arms across his chest. “How can you say that when you don’t even know what it’s about?”
Brynna shrugged. “I don’t know you. I apologize if it seems rude but I don’t have any reason to speak to you alone.”
“It’s really important,” Charlie said.
Brynna shook her head. “Sorry, but again . . . no.”
It was Eran’s turn to look from her to his brother. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“Fine,” Charlie said instead of answering. His chin lifted as if he’d just made a big decision and he turned his attention fully on Brynna. “Then I’ll just say it outright.” He took a deep breath and Brynna’s stomach twisted in apprehension because she knew what was about to come out. “From the moment I saw you, I think we really had a connection. I asked Eran about you the first day I met him and he said that you two aren’t involved. You’re just living here as his roommate. So I wondered if you would go out to dinner with me.”
Eran’s face registered his shock. “What? Charlie, I distinctly remember you telling me you have a family—a wife and kids back in Ohio.”
For a fleeting instant Charlie looked ashamed, then it was gone and his features reset in determination. Brynna thought it was a terrible thing to see a man so quickly disregard the people who loved him most in the world. “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I have to look forward. I have to look at the rest of my life.”
Eran’s mouth dropped open. “You can’t mean that.”
“I do,” Charlie insisted. “I realized when I first saw Brynna that I haven’t been at all happy. They aren’t what I need in the future. They—”
“This is absolutely out of the question,” Brynna interrupted. “I have no desire to become involved with you, and you’re making an enormous mistake.”
“I’d say,” Eran put in.
“Well, I don’t think so. I know what I feel.” Charlie thumped his chest for emphasis. “If we could just spend some time together, you’d see it, too.”
He reached for her but Brynna easily slid out of range. “No,” Brynna said. “I wouldn’t. And I never will. I’m not what you’re looking for, Charlie. Go on your way. Go back to your wife and your kids and your family, your life.” She slipped her hand into Eran’s. He squeezed hers in response. “Eran wasn’t completely truthful with you. We are involved—we have been for some time. And there’s no one else in the world I want other than Eran.” She felt Eran’s response in the way his grip on her hand tightened even more.
The look on Charlie’s face was almost heartbreaking, the expression of a man crushed by a dream that has just dissolved in front of him. But Brynna knew it wouldn’t last. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, he would come to his senses . . . she hoped.
“I think you’d better leave now, Charlie,” Eran said. “Go back to your hotel room, get yourself a beer, and think long and hard about what you almost did tonight. Think about what you tried to give up. Those are the things that a lot of men spend their whole lives trying to get. Some never succeed. You have them now.”
“Don’t throw away a good life for someone you don’t even know,” Brynna added. “You don’t know me. You don’t want to know me.”
“But I do.” Charlie’s face had gone red and he was almost crying. “I do want to know you.”
Brynna stepped backward, purposely putting Eran between her and Charlie to reinforce that of the two men, she’d chosen Eran. “But you’re never going to.”
“Good night, Charlie,” Eran said. “Catch the next flight back to Ohio, where you belong.”
Charlie looked at Eran. “Maybe you can talk to her,” he said, ignoring Eran’s words. “Make her understand.”
But Eran only shook his head. “No—because I don’t understand.”
“You’re my brother,” Charlie began. “You—”
“You’re out of line,” Eran interrupted. “I may be your brother, but I don’t know you any better than Brynna does. You don’t ask this type of thing from someone who just found out you even exist. I can’t do this for you. I won’t. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not leaving until you talk to me,” Charlie said stubbornly, looking again at Brynna. “I’ll stay right here, all night if I have to.”
Brynna’s face remained impassive. “Then I guess that’s where you’re going to sleep, because this conversation is over.”
Before Eran or Charlie could say anything else, Brynna reached out and closed the door in Charlie’s face.
For a few minutes that felt like an hour, she and Eran stood there in the kitchen. She knew he was waiting for her to say something but she didn’t. Although in previous times it had always ended much differently, the scene that had just occurred—at least until she had turned him down—had been commonplace in her previous incarnation as a demon. It had been expected—her job had been to find the weakest souls, thoroughly corrupt them, then send them screaming on their way to Lucifer’s not-so-lovely dwelling place. But things were different now, very different. Instead of the triumph of previous eons, she felt oddly embarrassed about what had just happened.
Finally Eran said, “If I haven’t asked this before—and I think I did—where did that come from? Has he contacted you and I didn’t know it?”
“No,” Brynna answered. “It’s a side effect of . . . just being me.” She forced herself to look him in the eye when she really just wanted to stare at her own feet. “I told you before, you have no idea of the things I’ve done. You want to forget the facts, or pretend they don’t exist, but they won’t just go away. I’m a demon, just like I reminded you the other day in your office. I have an effect on men, and women, and this is something that may or may not ever go away. It’s part of who I am.” She found herself looking at her toes again. “You keep insisting that you want to be with me. If you do, this is the kind of shit that’s going to drop on us from time to time. You’re going to have to learn to live with it.”
To her surprise, Eran didn’t hesitate. “I can do that. I’m not the jealous kind. I’ve had my problems in the past but it wasn’t because of that. If I love someone, I have faith that person will be honest with me, that she’ll be faithful to me. You can say that, right? That you’ll be faithful to me? Because I’ll be faithful to you. I’ll put no one else before you, Brynna.”
She laughed a little nervously. “Sounds a little like a marriage proposal, Eran. Don’t go there.”
“I’m not,” he said after a few seconds. “I know that’s not something that would probably ever be possible. I’m just saying I
want it to be you and me and no one else. No matter what’s gone on in your past.” He put a finger under her chin and made her look at him again. “What do you want, Brynna?”
“I told you what I want.”
“Besides that. Redemption for you has to come from someone bigger than me. I’ll help you as much as I’m able, and I want to help you. But if you have to live in the human world while you find it, what do you want out of your life while you’re here?”
Brynna didn’t answer right away. A month ago she might have said, Nothing, and meant it. Now she felt like she wanted everything, and that everything included a kind-of-human life with Eran in this little coach house on Arlington Place, with that big white dog in the other room and her sometimes interesting, sometimes boring translation career. How odd that all these humanly things had insinuated themselves into her being, into her heart, so that she wanted them as much as any human woman had ever wanted the same things.
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