by J. R. Ward
In fact, he could not look away. But at least he was causing no offense. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught her grandmother smiling in the backseat--and his Marisol glanced his way every now and again, her blush a charming, secret gift.
Yet all was not perfect for him.
Shifting in his seat, he did not like the way his cashmere coat hung off him in folds, even though he was wearing a full suit underneath. And he had disliked the sight of the suit even more, that which had been tailored to fit his proper form dwarfing him the now, turning him into the son trying on the father's clothes.
As he thought about his weight, he murmured, "I am already looking forward to your next meal, Mrs. Carvalho."
"Big breakfast," the grandmother said. "Very big."
"This is good. I have much to regain."
"You have been sick."
This was uttered as if it were a form of absolution, a pardoning of that which was, in other circumstance, an intolerable offense.
"You both could not have come along at a better time," he murmured.
'Lo, how he wanted to reach across and take Marisol's hand, especially as she shot him a smile. But he had to be discreet out of respect to her and her grandmother.
Some ten minutes later, they were pulling into a parking lot beside a grand cathedral that reminded him of the ones built by humans in the Old Country, its buttresses, peaked Gothic arches, and ribbons of stained glass taking him home in ways too intense and internal to bear for long.
"Quite a beautiful church it is," he commented as Marisol halted them in one of the spaces.
There were fifteen other cars parked in a lot big enough to handle a hundred, and the vehicles were all huddled close to the walkway leading around to the front.
As he got out, he opened Mrs. Carvalho's door, extending his hand forth to help her down. Shutting things up, he offered Marisol's grandmother his elbow, and the lady took it, wrapping her arm through his.
They waited for Marisol to come around, and he loved that look on his female's face. That slight smile.
"Ready?" she said, her breath white in the cold night.
"Let us go--oh, madam, the curb." He helped her grandmother up to the sidewalk. "There we are."
As they proceeded over that which had been heavily salted, he looked up at the cathedral's towering height. The structure was maintained in beautiful condition, nothing faded in its grandeur, the interior lighting showing through the stained glass and turning the pictorials into jewels.
"Do they always do midnight rituals?" Assail asked.
"It's a mass." Marisol glanced over her grandmother's white head at him. "It's called a mass. And this cathedral does them on Thursdays and Saturdays each week, as well as on certain holidays. Caldwell has a very active Catholic community, and with so many people doing first and second shifts, these services offer working folks times to worship they wouldn't otherwise have."
The sound of voices behind them had him looking over his shoulder. A man and a woman were walking along in their wake, both burrowed into their coats and talking softly. As he regarded them, it was strange to realize that for as long as he had lived amongst humans, he had never spent much time with them. Yes, he had had business dealings, of course, but not anything of any leisurely pursuit.
Although, to be fair, he had not had much leisure to pursue in any kind of company.
The doors of the church were heavy and carved, and out of habit and manners, he went to jump ahead to open them, but Marisol got there first. Which was probably a good thing. He was not very strong, and just from the walk from the car, he was breathing hard.
Inside, he found himself in a vast entry room with red carpeting and dark wooden walls and stone plaques inscribed in Latin.
"The coatroom is over here," Marisol murmured.
When they reemerged without their outerwear, he found himself fiddling with his baggy suit and the tie that was the only thing holding his loose collar against his neck.
"Marisol," her grandmother said, "you must take off the hat. You cannot wear it."
"Vovo, I have to."
The two switched into their mother tongue, the argument hushed and quick. And then Mrs. Carvalho made a grunting sound and walked forth.
The baseball hat stayed on, and yes, it did hide most, if not all, of Marisol's face--but how he hated the reason she had to wear it.
"Come on," she said, tugging at his hand.
The worshipping space was magnificent, with a lofty vaulted ceiling, marble statuary, and a polished stone floor that went on forever. Hundreds of wooden pews in six sections of tight rows progressed down to an altar that was set beneath a glorious mural of the Christ enthroned. And indeed, the seating was so vast that the thirty people in front did little to fill out things.
At Marisol's prompting, they settled over on the left, a couple of rows back from the last one that had anybody in it. As they got themselves arranged, with Marisol in the middle and him on the aisle, he took a deep breath.
Considering where he had been of late, it was an unexpected miracle to be in this incredible place.
And then the organ began to play, its deep basses reaching into his chest, its ringing highs...reaching into his soul.
I am home, he thought.
Although that was about who he was with, rather than where he was.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Across town, at the head of the alley, Vishous screamed as he saw Jane go from translucent to fully corporeal just as that fucking slayer started shooting.
"No!"
She was right between Phury and the shooter, protecting her patient, his brother, with her very body. And as the bullets went into her, the daggers V had thrown with perfect accuracy went into the lesser's back.
Filled with terror and rage, Vishous threw himself into the air, his dislocated ankle tripping him up, his momentum more than overriding that. The tackle was short of his target so he curled in a ball, rolled the extra distance, and then locked on to the lesser's head with both his hands.
He twisted so hard, he popped the skull off the tip of the spine, nothing but ribbons of skin and sinew holding the thing on.
There was so much more pain he wanted to give the soulless bastard, except he had to get to Jane.
Leaving the undead body, he scrambled through the snow to his shellan, who had fallen on her back. As he reached her, she lifted her head and looked down at her body. There were tufts in her Patagonia jacket where the bullets had gone through.
Her breathing was all wrong--short, tight, fast.
"No..." he moaned. "I'm not losing you again--"
She was mouthing something to him as her eyes met his--blood spattering her lips, her skin too pale. "Love...you..."
Then she was disappearing into thin air--
"Jane!" He wrapped his arms around her.
"Oh, God," he heard someone say. "What did she do? What did she do..."
In Jane's place, there was something in his hands...bullets. The bullets that had been in her had fallen into his palms.
"What did she do!"
He jerked his head toward the male voice. Phury was staring at him with horror, the words coming out of the male as if he felt responsible.
Vishous patted the snow where she had been. Her blood was there, staining the dirty white red...but she was--
"Jane!"
He screamed her name. And then with no answers and nothing but stark terror in his soul, he flipped over and launched himself at that slayer. He attacked the carcass even though it accomplished nothing, ripping with his fangs and tearing with his hands, foul, black blood covering him--until a brilliant pair of headlights flashed into his eyes and some force popped him off his prey.
Thrashing, kicking, biting, he went wild, fighting against everything and everyone around him--
The punch was perfectly placed on his jaw, a floater that hit him like an atomic bomb. Instantly, his body and brain went limp, although he was still conscious as
his head lolled on his neck, a school yard's tetherball.
His will came back online immediately, his need to ahvenge his love a force too great to be denied--but those arms and legs of his refused to follow any commands. He just hung there like a scarecrow in the arms of one of his brothers, lesser blood dripping out of his mouth, his clothes torn, his breath so hoarse and loud it sounded like a windstorm.
At that moment, he realized what the fuck was up with losing his mother.
He didn't mourn the female. He didn't even think she had been particularly good for the race. No...it was more that she was the one who had given him his Jane back.
With the Scribe Virgin gone? He'd been terrified that the magic or whatever the fuck it was that kept Jane in her state of ever-existence was going to be compromised. The shit failed and who did he go to?
No more anyone to pray to. No more anyone to demand that magic keep going.
And what do you know. Fate, the little bitch, had seen fit to place him in exactly the position he had been so terrified of that he hadn't even wanted to acknowledge its existence.
* * *
--
The dog didn't see Vitoria.
So the owner lived to die another day.
Back in her rental car, she took her time and obeyed all traffic laws as she drove out of Miss Fortescue's neighborhood and got back on the Northway. She was not returning to the West Point house, however.
Her old-fashioned map took her to her next destination--because GPS could be traced on car systems and phones--and she was even less impressed than she had been with her first stop in terms of architectural significance and desirability. This rough, lower-middle-class neighborhood was cut up into lots the size of index cards, the houses sitting upon them single-storied and in poor condition. Most had doors and windows covered by bars and chain-link fences around their yards with the cars inside the barrier.
Streeter's house was seven in and on the left, and as she pulled up and stopped, she thought that both places she had gone tonight matched their owners: Miss Fortescue's was an aspirational poseur, an outsider looking in on the world of great wealth and desperately wishing she could afford that which she sold. Streeter was a tough thug and did what he had to in order to survive.
All things considered, Vitoria would take a hundred of the latter before she crossed the aisle for the former.
After she texted him from the burner phone, she waited with little patience. He didn't keep her long.
The man emerged dressed in black from head to foot, the hood on his parka likewise pulled down low over his head and face. He paused to lock up and then strode out toward her, his eyes fixated on the trampled path to the gate in the chain-link as if he were a man that resolutely stuck to his own business and left others alone.
Vitoria got out from behind the wheel. "Have you had any alcohol or drugs tonight."
"I smoked a joint at five."
"You're driving." She walked around and got in the passenger seat. "I will sleep on the way there."
"Okay."
Streeter took the seat she had been in, and then they were off, traveling out of his neighborhood and getting on the Northway.
"Tell me again the story," she said as put her hands in the pockets of her parka and crossed her snow boots at the ankles.
"Two-Tone told his old lady--"
"Please do not refer to any woman like that. Or I shall have to start calling you Short Dick. Continue."
He looked over, the light from a passing streetlamp illuminating his surprise. "Ah, his...yeah, whatever she is...let me in their place. She thought he been on the lam, and that I knew where he was and was keepin' it from her. When I told her I ain't about that shit, she let me go through e'erthing. She still thinks he comin' home."
"And then what." Vitoria shut her eyes and let Streeter's perfectly fine voice and perfectly awful diction and grammar wash over her.
"I made her try to remember the last night she saw him. See, she'd took him to the bar where I saw him later. He was real good about not drinkin' and drivin'."
"Noble of him," Vitoria murmured, laying her head back and tilting it toward him.
"She said he got a phone call on the way. They was fightin' and he took it and she got hella pissed off. While he was on with whoever it was, he was talkin' about meetin' up with a guy in a hour and then something on the southern side of Iroquois. She thought it was Iroquois Avenue, which is like, across town. She said she heard him say 'half a mile' see a drive, and that they had to pick up a package first."
Streeter passed a semi on the right, just before the highway narrowed down to two northbound lanes. "She thought he was meetin' up with a female, but he told her she was crazy. She dropped him off at the bar, told him to fuck off, and then she tried to call him. He never answered the phone again, and that was it. So I was thinkin' about it. Lived here all my life. Never heard nobody talk about south side of Iroquois Avenue. What the fuck she thinkin'." The man looked over. "But that's what I was tellin' you. There's an Iroquois Mountain. And it's got a south side for sure. Then I remembered. Back when I was workin' for him, I overheard Mr. Benloise mention something about a safe place up north, a place where things could be hidden. He said it was almost to the border. That's where Iroquois is."
"I hope you are right."
Five hours one way was a big investment of time. But she would sleep up and back, and make some progress with her jet lag.
And she better get some rest. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day at the gallery. She wanted to be on hand bright and early when the police showed up to ask their questions about the mysterious murder that had taken place the evening prior, poor Miss Margot Fortescue being found by her housekeeper/boyfriend/girlfriend/whoever, shot execution style in her back hall.
By a professional.
"Wake me when we are near," she ordered. "And stop speeding. I do not want the police to pull us over."
As Streeter nodded his acceptance of the order, Vitoria closed her eyes again and smiled. Ricardo would not have approved of any of this tonight, most especially how she had dispatched his salesperson. Oh, the reasoning behind the assassination was sound, and something with which he would have agreed. But his sister? With that gun? Murdering a woman in that brazen, yet calculated manner?
Except she hadn't only studied English during those years he had been away.
The dark arts lessons she had taken had cost two to three times over their going rates: As a female, she had had to convince men to teach her how to shoot, how to fight, how to kill, and as Ricardo's sister, she had had to keep everything highly discreet. If he had found out? He might well have shot her himself.
But thanks to time and practice, she had become very good at solving her own problems. If she could use a Streeter, she much preferred to do so. If one such as he was not available, however? Or if it was a special circumstance that required a personal touch?
She did it herself.
TWENTY-NINE
As Jane became conscious, she jerked upright and grasped at her chest. There were tufts in the front of her parka, holes that bled white feathers, but as she took a deep breath, the suffocation was over. The pain was gone, too.
She was only partially corporeal, however.
Looking around, she recoiled. The snowy alley had been replaced by rolling green grass and vibrant blooming flowers and buildings that looked like they belonged in Caesar's Rome.
Why was she in the Sanctuary?
"Vishous?" She got to her feet. "V?"
Okay, so was she dead...or was this a cosmic restart kind of thing? Like, an existential return to sender that provided, if she "died," that she got rebooted back to where the Scribe Virgin had stayed?
Turning in a circle, she surveyed the landscape. She was smack in the middle of the gorgeous field, halfway between what V had told her were the Chosen's dormitories and the Reflecting Pool.
A feeling of panic flooded her circuits, but she got over that quick.
Collecting herself, she figured she better bite the bullet and--
Hardy-har-har.
Not.
Yeah, it was going to be a while before she used that expression again.
At any rate, she probably needed to try out being fully present and see what happened. Unzipping the parka all the way, she took the thing off and stared down at herself. Using her will, she called upon her body to come forward fully, even as she braced herself for pain.
Except there was none. She felt just fine as she came totally into her flesh--which meant one of two things: She had either died and this was the afterlife or she really was immortal.
As she remembered how the gunshots had happened, she worried about Vishous. She could recall so clearly how he had held her, his face wild with horror, her physical pain getting between them, cheating her out of things she wanted to say to him.
And then it had all gone dark.
She had to get back to him, back down to earth. So she could tell him she was all right.
Thinking about how he had transported them here, she didn't have a clue exactly what he had done. She had just held on to him and let him do the work, that body of his something at once familiar and exotic as the reality had spun around them.
Whatever. She could do this. Closing her eyes, she held her parka against her chest and, on the theory that getting in or out of this realm was just the same as moving herself from one zip code in Caldie to another, she willed herself to up-and-out.
When it didn't work right away, she cracked her neck, took a deep breath, and gave it another shot.
After the third try, she cursed and realized it was not that easy.
Was she stuck here until someone happened to come along? Shit.
Deciding to be proactive, she started walking across the tranquil landscape. Surely, she'd run across Amalya, the Directrix, or a Chosen who had come up here to rejuvenate themselves...somebody, anybody.
Except what she found instead were her own regrets. And man, did they start talking to her.
"What the hell was wrong with me?" she said to the grass. "Why did I waste all that time?"
It wasn't that treating her patients was unimportant. It was more that she had spent hours between cases fiddling around with paperwork and non-urgent things that she could have delegated. Why hadn't she headed home? She could have been with V. They could have been together.