by Anthology
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “I didn’t mean to. It just happened. I wasn’t trying to turn it on. I swear.”
He searched my face, and I let him, knowing with absolute certainty that he’d find nothing but the truth there.
“Anyone else gets in my head like that, and they’d be dead by now,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact.
I lifted my chin defiantly. “Then why am I alive?”
He smiled in answer, then traced the line of my jaw with his fingertip. The simple promise in his touch shot straight through me, making my skin tingle and hum with both memory and anticipation. The need was ramping up again inside me, my body seeming to pulse with the lights of the club, desire so close to the surface I feared it would overcome me.
“It scared you,” he said. “What you saw.”
“I don’t scare easy,” I said, moving closer to him, proving to myself just how easy it was. How easily I could control this new power I’d found within myself.
“Is that a fact?”
I only smiled in answer, my fingertips tracing his shoulder, lightly stroking his arm. Closer still, the light burning inside me. That thrall. That trick. That sweet surrender I’d watched in the boy’s face as he danced with me. I’d brought him in, caught him in a spell.
And I could do the same thing to Deacon.
And the power of that realization only fueled the fire inside me.
His head turned so that he could watch as my fingertip lightly grazed the soft skin of his forearm. “What does scare you?”
I lifted myself up on my toes, leaned in so that my breasts brushed his chest, nipples hard under the thin layer of my tank top. I placed my mouth close to his ear and breathed in the scent of bourbon mixed with mint. “You,” I whispered, my voice little more than air.
“You should be scared,” he answered, and the truth of that declaration shot all the way through me. Except it didn’t scare me. It excited me. Made me want to push limits and test boundaries.
Apparently, all I’d needed in order to really feel alive was to die.
I pressed in closer and pitched my voice low. I was playing with fire, but until I got burned, I wasn’t sure I could stop. “Does that mean you’re dangerous?”
He stroked my hair, my head fitting into the palm of his hand. “You weren’t scared of me last week. So you tell me, Alice. What’s changed? And don’t say the vision, because you stood me up long before that.”
What’s changed? Wasn’t that the question—and I stepped back, the spell evaporating as reality circled around me. A reality in which Alice was dead, Deacon was a demon, and the mystery of Alice’s death loomed over me.
“Alice?”
“Nothing’s changed,” I said, trying to figure out how to play this.
“Interesting.”
I looked at his face, but he was giving nothing away. “What?”
“You told me twice you needed to talk—begged me to meet you, to be on time, to not forget—and then you stood me up.”
“Last week I didn’t—”
“What?”
I drew in a breath, quickly considering my options, and deciding to go with the big bomb. “Last week I didn’t know you were a demon.”
His eyes narrowed, but otherwise he showed no reaction. Almost imperceptibly, he moved closer, his body generating an electric reaction between us. “Didn’t you?” he asked, the question confusing me. If Alice had known the truth about Deacon, then not only had I completely blown my cover, I’d also stumbled across the burning question of the century: What was pretty-in-pink Alice doing hanging around with demons? And had her less-than-savory acquaintances somehow gotten her killed?
“Does knowing what I am bother you?”
I looked into his eyes, the memory of everything I’d seen within him washing over me. The vile blackness. The raw fury.
I shivered. And then I caught myself, remembering what I was. “No,” I said firmly. “Doesn’t bother me at all.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Should I be worried?”
I cocked my head, my brow furrowed.
“Because of your new career,” he said. “You’re going into the demon-hunting business, right?”
I tilted my head up. “That’s right.”
His head moved in, and he nuzzled my neck, my hair, his proximity sending little flutters and sparks ricocheting through me.
“Their scent is on you,” he said.
Something hitched inside me, and I answered through a thick throat. “What?”
“You’ve killed tonight,” he said. “Demon.” He sniffed again, breathing in deep of the scent of me. “And there is blood on you as well.”
He leaned back, looking at me with a question in his eyes that bordered on accusation.
“I didn’t hurt her,” I said. “I was trying to save her.”
“Of course,” he said. “It was, after all, the demon you were hunting. Not the girl.”
“What do you want?” I said. Because right then, although I’d thought I wanted to lose myself in lust, I was more interested in him going away. Because with him that close to me, I really couldn’t think.
“I want answers, Alice.”
“I don’t know the question.”
“Then let me spell it out for you. You’ve changed. And trust me when I say I’m going to find out why.”
“No, I—”
His finger moved to my lips, and I had to fight the urge to draw him in and suckle. “I didn’t feel this way about the Alice who asked for my help, and I’ll admit that bothered me. Made me think I’d been wrong about the whole thing.”
I blinked. What whole thing?
“But the Alice in the alley?” he continued. “The Alice who let me watch while she slid into my head? The woman who got naked with me in a shared vision? She’s the woman I’ve craved. She’s the woman I want. And trust me when I say that I will have her.”
I tried to say something, but the fact that my body was melting pretty much prevented speech. Instead, all I managed was a breathy little noise.
His lips brushed my ear, his breath hot against my skin. “So tell me, Alice. Tell me what happened to you.”
A whisper of fear skittered down my spine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“One way or another, I’m going to find out.” He leaned back, his gaze riding hard over me before he turned to leave. He stopped once, then turned to look back. “And I take my promises very, very seriously.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He knew.
Somehow, Deacon knew I wasn’t really Alice.
I took a deep breath of the cool night air, far cleaner than the miasma of smoke and drugs and body odor I’d inhaled in the rave. The air not only cleaned out my sinuses, it cleared my thoughts. He didn’t know. Not for certain. He was suspicious, yes, but that was entirely different from knowing. And even if he did have questions, I doubted that the possibility I’d hijacked Alice’s body would pop to the front of his mind.
My long stride ate up the sidewalk as I turned it over and over and over in my mind, making myself dizzy with the permutations, making myself sick with speculation.
No question, Deacon was a threat. An unknown commodity I’d have to watch. A wildcard about whom I needed to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, the thought of following him home and playing Nancy Drew had come too late. As a result, I was stuck with more mundane methods of research. I might not be a girl detective, but I did have the basic skills that come manifest with my age group: I could Google with the best of them. A skill that was thwarted as soon as I returned to Alice’s apartment and saw absolutely no evidence of a computer.
Frustrating at first, but then I remembered the pink leather bag I’d seen in the back of her closet as I’d been digging for waitress attire. Sure enough, the bag was one of those fancy, girly laptop cases, and snug inside was a shiny white MacBook.
As I set the compu
ter up on the kitchen table, I wondered vaguely if she’d been packing to go somewhere before she died. Surely most people kept their computers out and running, loath to be more than a minute away from e-mail or instant messages.
Feeling more than a little voyeuristic, I plugged it in and powered it up, reminding myself as I did so that I had a perfect right to poke around in there. Technically, the computer was mine now.
As the machine went through its startup routine, I pushed the button on Alice’s nearby answering machine. She’d left a cheery outgoing message which, thankfully, included her phone number, and I made a point to memorize it. Then I listened as the digitized voice announced that she had three new messages.
One from Gracie—no surprise there. Another from someone named Brian wanting to know if she wanted to take in a movie. And the last from Sylvia, who had called to say goodbye before she left for a European vacation with her boyfriend.
Friends. Alice had friends and a life and people who cared about her. People who would have mourned her if they’d known that she died. I swallowed, realizing my throat felt thick, and wondered if anyone was mourning Lily Carlyle. Other than Rose and Joe, I rather doubted it.
I swallowed and forced the melancholy down, then eyed the machine again. Gracie was already in my new life and, honestly, that was about all the friendship I could handle. It was hard enough being the new me. I didn’t think I could be the old Alice at the same time. Not yet. Not until I got better at the role.
I reached over and pressed the delete button, then listened as the machine whirred, erasing the friends. Starting from scratch, I thought. Starting over.
But a secret part of me wanted to meet Sylvia and Brian. Wanted to know them and have a beer and take in a movie. And a bigger part of me wondered if they would look at me and see Alice. Or if, like Deacon, they’d see that something had changed.
Frustrated with myself, I forced my thoughts aside. Alice’s computer had finished its boot-up, and I was happy to see that not only had she not password-protected the system, but there were at least four wireless networks I could piggyback onto.
I had planned to type in Deacon’s name, but instead my fingers insisted on my own, pulling up the rather morbid announcement that my funeral would be held on Thursday afternoon, at which time it was assumed the police would have released my body.
I shivered, the idea that I was walking around while my body was on an ME’s gurney creeping me out. More than that, though, I thought of Rose and my stepfather. Of how they must feel, knowing I was gone. And of how it must have killed them to identify my body in the morgue.
An image of Rose, her face tear-streaked and battered, swam into my head. I still had the cash I planned to give her, and I found an envelope in Alice’s kitchen and shoved it inside before scrawling out Rose’s address for delivery. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Just as the locket that now hung over my heart wasn’t much, but to me it was also everything.
I wanted to give her more. Hell, I wanted to talk with her. Wanted more than the brief, shell-shocked girl I’d faced at the door. And even though I knew I shouldn’t, I grabbed up the phone, then dialed our home number. Surely one quick phone call from Lily’s supposed friend wouldn’t result in all the demons of the world descending on her doorstep.
“Hello? Hello?” Her voice was soft, rushed, and I realized I’d probably caught her getting dressed for school.
I opened my mouth, but my words stuck in my throat.
“Dammit,” she said, and slammed the phone down, cutting off my broken whisper of “Rose.”
I held the handset out, staring at it until I felt the tears pool in my eyes. I’d scared her, and I hadn’t meant to. I’d only wanted to hear her voice. To have that hint of connection.
And my selfishness had probably conjured up memories of Johnson’s horrific phone calls.
He, at least, was dead.
The articles I’d found confirmed what Clarence had told me. Both our bodies had been found at the crime scene. So, yes, I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do—I’d killed Lucas Johnson.
I’d made a plan; I’d gone out; I’d killed.
And I didn’t regret it for a moment.
I closed my eyes and drew in a deep breath, truly seeing for the first time what Clarence and Zane had already seen. What I’d experienced when I’d taken down that bloodsucker: I could kill. I could face evil down and thrust the blade in.
I liked that about me, I realized. I liked it a lot.
I shook myself, determined to focus. I had another mission here.
With grim determination, I typed in Deacon’s name, but found nothing. The man was a mystery. Or, to be more accurate, the demon was.
Mostly to distract myself from blossoming thoughts of Deacon, I switched my search to Alice Purdue, but the findings were also a toss-up between slim and none. A few measly hits about her high school graduation, a reference to her birth date and one photo showing her and Egan and a woman identified as Alice’s sister, Rachel, standing in front of the Bloody Tongue at the ceremony to designate it a historic landmark.
I mentally filed the information about the sister, then gave up. For better or for worse, twenty-two-year-old waitresses don’t tend to garner a lot of hits on Google.
A good deal of her life had been spent at the Bloody Tongue, and that was a place I wanted to know more about. I went first to the website and reviewed the standard PR material—the excellent restaurant reviews, the pub’s longstanding history of ownership all within the same family, the authentic pub menu mixed up with a few new favorites. And, of course, the pub’s reputation for being haunted and creepy. All of which I remembered from my Haunted Boston tour.
The truth was, the Bloody Tongue did good business playing up the rumors that it was dark and dangerous, that it had ties to witches and witch trials, and that witch hunter Cotton Mather himself had tried to force the pub’s doors shut in the late 1600s but had been unable to pull off that feat. A fact that either supported the argument that the pub had no actual connection to the demonic . . . or suggested that the place was so firmly entrenched in real black magic that the false persecutors of the time couldn’t touch it.
The website left the question open, the mystery adding to the allure of the pub. And though all the tourist websites that referenced the pub mentioned the tie to the dark arts as something amusing and a little kitschy, I had to wonder if there wasn’t a great deal of truth tied up in the PR.
I poked around in her browser, figuring I might get a clue as to what had been so important to Alice that she’d scheduled a clandestine meet with Deacon. But the history had been cleared, and so had the cookies. There was nothing, which meant I learned nothing. Nothing, that is, except the queer fact that little Alice obviously had some secrets. And she held them very, very close.
I drummed my fingers on the desk, considering where to poke next, and decided that I might as well learn more about my strange new world. Clarence had started teaching me about various demon species, but I’d never really been a lesson-oriented girl, and considering all that had happened to me in day number one of my new career, I think it’s reasonable that the information pretty much poured out of my head as fast as he shoved it in.
Demons, I soon learned, are not a topic easily explored over the Internet. Rather than the scholarly information I’d hoped to find, I pulled up page after page of fan fiction, summaries of various television shows, and a few Apocalypse-related gloom-and-doom sites. There was some information I recognized—like Clarence’s explanation about how some demons actually had a human form, whereas other demons dove in and possessed a real, sometimes willing, human, which truly grossed me out. Goth girl had been an actual, human demon. I hadn’t yet met a possessed human—willing or unwilling—but I figured in my new line of work, the odds were good that it was on my agenda.
Other than that, though, I couldn’t tell where reality ended and fiction began. Apparently, I was going to have to pay more attention to
Clarence’s lectures and books. I wondered idly if I could just get the CliffsNotes.
At any rate, I gave up on learning about my newfound life’s work pretty quickly, and decided to give Alice-exploration another attempt. This time, I poked around in Alice’s file structure, hoping for some insight into the woman I’d become. It was a short-lived detour, though. Alice might not have password-protected the computer itself, but each individual file was locked to me.
I managed to open only one file, in fact. An odd stroke of curious, stupid luck, really. The folder on her desktop labeled “For Saturday” caught my eye, and I took a wild leap and input “Deacon” as the password. Lo and behold, the gates opened and I was in.
Not the most exciting of victories, though, because the folder contained exactly one file. A single photograph of a bear of a guy with pockmarked skin, sagging eyelids, and a don’t-fuck-with-me demeanor. He was facing away from the camera, so I could see only about half of his face. The picture had been taken at night, and the image quality was poor, as if Alice had snapped it with her phone while walking. The file name was “T,” and there was no other information. Nothing stood out as exceptional about the picture. It was just there. On the computer. Taking up space and, possibly, hiding some deeper meaning. But damned if I knew what that was. Certainly I couldn’t guess why it had been password-protected any more than I could guess why Deacon’s name was the password.
Was that merely a convenience because he was the one she’d been planning to meet on Saturday? Or did he know this man? If so, what could he tell me about T? I had no answer, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a low, tingling hum that coursed below my skin when I realized that I needed to see Deacon again. Yes, he was dangerous. Yes, he suspected me.
Yes, he was a goddamned demon.
And, yeah, that made it complicated.
But despite all that, I still wanted it. And damn me, I wanted him, too.
My thoughts were drifting toward the prurient pleasures that this forbidden lust could provide when a persistent—and puzzling—pounding at my door shut down my fantasies. Puzzling because it was barely dawn, and at least in my world, people do not come in the wee hours of the morning.