I raised up from my knees and hugged his neck harder than was necessary. He saved me from that creature. I was still shaking from head to toe when he cupped his hands and blew toward the Lesson, his body turning to ash and blowing away. I didn’t watch this time to see if his soul was gulped down by one of Keeper’s crows. I was a coward.
“Are there more?” I asked tentatively.
“No, they’ve been dealt with.”
He wasn’t completely honest. Keeper didn’t merely deal with Lessons; he eradicated them. “Thank you,” I told him, still holding his neck in a tight grip. I couldn’t bring myself to let him go.
“How did he sneak up on you?” he asked gently.
“I was looking for a knife or something, and I guess with all the commotion outside, I didn’t hear him. The carpet must have muffled his feet, or maybe I was deafened by the blood pulsing through my ears. It was terrifying, watching you jump up on the rail and face them all. I didn’t want you to do it alone.”
His hands found my waist and I gasped.
“I’ve never had a soul defend me,” he admitted, his voice laced with a mixture of confusion and awe. I mewled when his fingers slid under the cotton hem of my shirt and grazed my sides. Every time he touched me, an arc of electricity sparked between us, not simply attraction or even lust. And it hurt a little, to be honest.
“It does. It’s like a sting for me too,” he said softly. “But it’s not unpleasant, just strange.”
I nodded, pinching my bottom lip.
I’d never felt love from anyone. Not even my mother or father. And with men, I’d felt frantic hands and teeth tugging at my lips, been groped and fucked against walls, but whatever this was…it was new.
“Seeing your thoughts is torture,” he said, pulling away from me.
“Well then stop invading my mind,” I retorted. My arms fell uselessly to my thighs.
His jaw worked back and forth angrily. “I don’t like that men have touched you that way, that harshly.”
“It’s how things are now, and I didn’t expect tenderness from any of them. I’m the girl who uses sex to get what she wants. I don’t fuck just to make a man happy, and I’m definitely not the type a man brings home to meet his mother. I’m not marriage material, and I never will be. I’m not built for that,” I breathed against the skin of his jaw. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, wouldn’t turn his head toward me despite the lack of space between us. “But tenderness sounds beautiful coming from your lips. If you turn your head, you can show me how nice you would be.” And I wished he would, with everything in me. I wished he would place his lips on mine. Would the spark ignite us both?
He didn’t turn his head. Despite every cell in my body willing him to, he refused. Keeper blew out a tense breath and I stepped back, allowing him to breathe.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. What was holding him back?
He cleared his throat, lacing his fingers behind his head. “I don’t understand you.”
“That makes two of us.”
“I also don’t understand what happened here tonight. The Lessons have never attacked. They’ve never been coordinated before. This is a big problem.”
“Why are they attacking you now? Power in numbers or something?”
When Keeper looked up, I knew what he was going to say before his mouth opened. His eyes swirled a rich, clover green. “They weren’t attacking me. They were coming for you.”
“Why? What could they possibly want with me? I’m screwed,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m going to be dragged to Hell one way or another, aren’t I?”
Keeper pursed his lips, his features hardening. “I won’t let them have you.”
He called one of his crows and it landed on his extended finger. Holding it close, whispering in his secret language, he gave it a message. The crow cawed once and flew behind his brothers, but instead of landing on the yard below in the gray grass, or on the branches of the dead tree, he climbed into the cloudy gray sky and his dark beak punched through the veil, like pulling panty hose too tight and having it spring back to its original form, the crow escaping through the tiny puncture.
Would I ever get used to seeing that?
“I don’t know,” Keeper answered.
I might never get used to him being in my head. At least I wasn’t shy or embarrassed. For the most part, I was an open book. It was actually freeing. He knew the real me; not the version of me I occasionally projected to civilized society.
“It’s refreshing,” he admitted. “All the other souls try to hide their inner thoughts. You don’t even try to block them.”
“Why bother? Can’t you hear them anyway?”
“I can. Souls can’t shield their thoughts. They don’t have that ability while they are healing or learning. Too much going on in their minds.”
A bubbling sound came from across the room where the Lesson fell. The feathers had begun to soften into a tar-like substance. They bubbled and boiled, reducing his body to nothing more than a slick, black puddle. Why didn’t he turn to dust like the others Keeper killed?
“Lessons are different. The demons who make them use a substance found only in Hell. It’s not tar, like on Earth. It’s a mixture of dark, tormented souls.”
Dark souls. In one’s ears, eyes, or mouth. I wasn’t sure which was worse: this ending, or one like Gus and Chester’s where a simple puff was all that remained until a bird gobbled it up.
“Neither is preferable.”
“Is there another way, Keeper?”
“There is. Souls who rest, or who learn from the mistakes made in their earthly life, have a much simpler and beautiful transition. I hope you get to see that one day.”
Pursing my lips, I stared at the puddle. “I hope so, too.”
I doubted beauty or hope could exist in this place, but at the same time desperately wanted to be proven wrong.
11
I didn’t remember falling asleep or moving to the bed. It was as if I sat on the couch and suddenly wasn’t there anymore, like I ceased to be. Only I awoke in Purgatory again, surrounded by gray and the telltale sounds of crows on the roof above the room in which I lay. Keeper must have helped me to the bedroom. The mattress was soft enough, although sunken in places. The pillows smelled like mildew, but they were better than nothing, and sleeping on the couch near the Lesson puddle wasn’t gonna happen.
Stretching, I sat up and looked out the window, watching the manna rain down from the heavens. This afternoon, when the cleansing rain poured from the sky, I was going to get clean. Padding to the door and down the steps, I found Keeper on the deck again, gathering the soft pillows of nourishment.
“I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up,” he said, raking his chocolate brown eyes over me.
“Awww, that’s so sweet of you to be concerned,” I teased with a grin.
He shook his head. “No, I tried to wake you several times and couldn’t. It was as if you were gone.”
A shiver ran up my spine, the hairs on my neck standing at attention.
“What’s that?” I looked to the sky.
He stood and shielded his eyes. “I see nothing.”
I plucked a piece of manna off the railing of the deck and popped it in my mouth, letting it disintegrate.
“Wait, you felt that?” he asked.
“What?” I said around another piece. “What did I feel?” My eyes searched the yard for more Lessons. Would those bastards attack again?
Just then, a crow returned through the veil and flew straight to Keeper, perching on his outstretched finger. “Thank you,” he said softly.
“Why are you thanking him? What did he do?”
Keeper cooed at his bird. “He delivered a message for me, and also returned a message to me.” I watched the two stare at each other, Keeper stroking the oily feathers of the fowl as if it were a pet.
“What message?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“We will find out more this
evening. Help will arrive then.”
“This evening?”
“Yes,” he said. “Until then, we stay put.”
“What about the Lessons? Will they attack again?”
“They didn’t overnight,” he retorted.
“But they did yesterday, in a very coordinated way, which you said they hadn’t done before, so how do we know they won’t?”
Keeper smiled. “We have faith, and we stay here.”
“Why should I trust you?” I asked, hand on my hip.
He snorted. “Whom else will you trust? A Lesson? Another merchant? You can trust them all the way to your demise.”
“Why do the merchants want souls?”
“They sell them into slavery in exchange for favors or women. It’s disgusting and the trade is thriving, despite my efforts to stop them. And it’s not just souls dragged across the divide; now they’re taking souls from the city. Nowhere is safe, and nothing is sacred,” he explained, looking at the silhouette of the towering buildings in the distance.
“Was it ever safe?”
“It’s been a long time since Purgatory was used for its purpose; a city to house those who needed rest, with the outskirts left to the Lessons and the walls to separate the two. Merchants are nothing but parasites looking to make a deal.”
“You said they would trade souls for favors. What kind of favors?” My stomach churned as I wondered what Gus and Chester would have traded me and Pamela for.
Keeper smiled. “Favors are important here, as important as money is on Earth. For instance, they will give a soul to a gatekeeper in exchange for the gates to open for them another time—a more convenient time.”
“What do the gatekeepers use the souls for?”
“They sell them to the Meat district.”
My eyes bulged. “They eat them?”
“No!” he laughed. “Souls can’t be consumed. The Meat district is much like the red light districts of Earth. It is a portion of the city where souls are forced into slavery, sometimes sexual in nature, but sometimes it is simply servitude.”
I remembered Gus and Chester and the ‘reddies’ they mentioned, and my stomach churned. “That’s awful. I thought sex trafficking was only an earthly issue.”
He sighed. “I wish.”
“You can’t stop them?”
“I try, but I can’t be everywhere at once, and my orders have changed. I guard the fissures and try to stop new souls from being brought across the divide; however, I can’t stop them from kidnapping souls from within the city itself while I’m out here guarding the fissures.”
“Which is the bigger problem? Souls being stolen from Purgatory or souls from Earth?”
“Earth, because those souls often aren’t supposed to come here. That’s why I have orders to protect them. Besides, many souls kidnapped from Purgatory have already lost themselves. They won’t return to their bodies. They’re mindless and easy to capture. But the merchants covet fresh souls from Earth. They’re worth much more, because there’s still fight left in them.”
Someone felt the souls taken from within the city weren’t worth protecting, but even if they lost their minds, they didn’t deserve to be slaves.
He stared at the ground below us.
“Why is it only you and the crows?” I finally asked.
“That is the way.”
“That is the way? Well, that way doesn’t work anymore.” He was exasperating.
He swallowed, his brows knitting together in anger. “I am finished answering your incessant questions.” And with those biting words, he stormed inside, down the stairs and out the front door, leaving me wondering what the hell was going on with him.
Keeper didn’t return in the afternoon, or what I thought was afternoon. He was sulking or pouting—or every other emasculating word I could mentally throw his direction. Asshole. But I wanted to get clean, so I stayed close to the back door and waited for the sky to open up. When the cleansing began, I stripped fast and ran into the deluge like a kid, scrubbing fast, kicking the fast-forming puddles and whooping, scaring the crows around me that otherwise didn’t seem to mind the rain one single bit. That was weird for birds, right?
Can they fly with wet wings?
“They can,” a masculine voice answered from right behind me.
I stared into his eyes, the rain carving rivers down his face. His eyes, swirling sapphire, never left mine, even for a second. We stood so close that I could feel the warmth radiate from him, but our bare skin never touched. It was a different kind of torture to keep myself from reaching out for him.
He narrowed his eyes, silently telling me not to touch him. But why come back at the exact time he knew I’d be naked and cleaning myself off?
“Did you come back for the show?” I shouted as the rain slowed.
“I was never far, but the show was...interesting. You act as free as a child.”
“I had fun.”
He smiled. “It looked fun.”
“Fun usually is. You should try it sometime.” I stood taller, pushing my breasts out for him to notice, and he did. His fingers might as well have pinched my nipples because they ached, straining toward him. And that was just with his eyes on me.
“Perhaps I will,” he mused, finally raking his eyes over the rest of me. Of all the men who’d seen me naked, tasted me, his eyes on me, even without his hands on my body, was more intense than all of them put together. “You’re beautiful, Carmen.”
Remembering the way I looked before I ended up in that hospital bed, a patchwork mess of bruises and torn flesh, was difficult and painful in a way I didn’t expect. My hair was always styled. My clothes were expensive, even if risqué. I was pretty at one time. I was beautiful. But now? I looked like I’d been run over by a train.
“I was,” I answered dejectedly.
“You are,” he said adamantly. “And you are brave. When the Lessons came I told you to stay inside, and yet you went in search of a weapon. You were going to come help me.”
I nodded. “I was. You shouldn’t have to fight them alone, Keeper.”
He crossed the space between us, lifting his hand and tipping my head up. The rain stopped completely as we stood there, staring at one another. His face dipped lower and I strained to get closer, rejoicing that I would finally feel him, kiss him, and touch him. But then his eyes tightened at the corners, transforming from royal blue to black in an instant. He set his jaw and used his body to cover me. “Get dressed quickly and get inside.”
“What is it?” I spun around but saw nothing. My heart pounded in my chest.
“Go!”
I ran for it, leaving my clothes beneath the porch. There were more inside. I bolted up the stairs and into the bedroom, where I searched quickly through the drawers for a bra and panties. Throwing open the closet door, I found jeans and a t-shirt.
Jogging back downstairs, I stopped in my tracks. Keeper was arguing with someone. I heard his voice, angry and sharp in its tone, yet still beautiful. He was speaking the language I loved. Two sets of eyes, almost red in color, turned in my direction. Keeper’s entire body was taut and so was his...brother’s?
“We aren’t brothers,” Keeper barked.
The other man, who looked eerily similar to my new friend, smirked, revealing a dimple in his left cheek—a dimple that Keeper didn’t have. Loose dark curls brushed his shoulders. Those were the only true differences that I could see. Same height, weight, and build. Same mood-ring eyes.
“She’s thought that a few times. What is a mood ring?” Keeper asked.
“It’s a trinket that turns different colors depending on the person’s body temperature, but according to the packaging, it varies with their feelings. I will bring you one when I return,” his near twin promised. “Here are more cigarettes,” he said, offering two packs to Keeper.
Keeper turned toward me, and then quickly, his feet closed the space between us. “Do I look like a fool?”
Our guest – whom I decided to
call ‘Help’ – positioned himself between us, somehow faster than Keeper in that moment.
“Pardon?” I ticked my head back.
“This entire thing – you coming across, tearing the veil, acting innocent in it all. Have you been playing me for a fool?” Keeper stepped toward me, mouth open for another assault.
“She doesn’t know,” Help interjected.
“And how do you know that?” Keeper growled at his friend, who I now knew was definitely not his brother.
“Because I can see it. There is no malice in her. While he is malignant, she is innocent. Look at her.”
Keeper fastened his eyes on me. They swirled to crimson and then faded to a dark blue before turning crystalline once more. “You’re right,” he admitted, his entire posture relaxing. He looked like he was ready for battle seconds earlier, but against me? And who was the tumor in this whole thing? Help said, ‘he is malignant.’ Who the hell was he?
And who was this mysterious friend, anyway? Someone who could procure mood rings and cross the veil, or divide, or whatever weird word they called the barrier today. Looking at Help, I asked, “Who are you—and before you say you can’t tell me, I want your damn name!”
Help amusedly looked from me to Keeper.
“She calls me Help and you Keeper? Why have you not given her your name?”
“Because I don’t understand her.”
“You are too out of touch with the souls of Earth. She makes more sense than most. Don’t you, Carmen?” Help turned his head to the side, quirking a dark brow. “She is honest and forthcoming, if somewhat crude. She values honesty. You should be open and forthcoming with her.”
“I have no idea how my soul compares to anyone else’s, but my attitude is pretty normal these days.” I wasn’t an asshole most days, but I had issues. Keeper did too, and he was an asshole every day, so boo for him.
“She calls you an asshole!” Help cackled, clutching his stomach.
“He is an asshole,” I said, meaning every syllable. “And he won’t give me his name because he doesn’t trust me. I just can’t figure out why.”
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