“How about we do it my way?” I asked.
“We can do it any way that you like.” His voice roughened in anticipation.
I flicked my hand, hoping I could knock him senseless on the first try. No such luck.
He murmured a few words that didn’t sound like French—maybe Latin, maybe Greek—and something that felt very much like the fist of a giant smacked me in the chest and sent me flying backward several feet. I landed on my ass with a thud.
“Care to try again?” Mait asked.
“What exactly are you?” I managed when I could speak. I climbed to my feet, but I stayed right where I was. The farther away the better.
“God of night demons, protector of de book.”
“You threw my power back at me.”
“Not me. The spell.”
My gaze narrowed. “From the book?”
He shrugged. “What else am I to do while I’m waiting for another Nephilim to arrive?”
I didn’t think he was supposed to be reading the book and trying out the spells. Then again, I would have been.
“What else can you do?”
He smiled and went inside.
Shifting into a phoenix, I followed. In this form I could fly through the doorway, snatch the book out of his hands, or wherever it might be, and leave. If he tried anything, I’d fling fire at him. If he flung it back, it wouldn’t matter. I was a firebird. I didn’t burn.
I never got the chance to see what he’d do; I never got close enough to see anything at all, at least not the Book of Samyaza.
Three feet from the door, I hit a wall. I’d say it was literal, except there was nothing there. Nevertheless, I slammed into a tall, wide, immovable object and fluttered to the ground with the worst headache I’d had since I’d blown my brains out with my own gun. Don’t ask.
Luckily I didn’t lose consciousness. I fluttered my wings until I was upright then stumbled sideways on woozy talons.
Mait leaned through the empty window. “I possess de power of protection. Around anything or anyone I can build a wall that cannot be breached.”
I let out my breath in an annoyed huff and fire swirled outward, running up the invisible barrier, then back down, hitting the ground and disappearing in a puff of dirt and black smoke.
“You have failed.” Mait turned away, dismissing me as if I were no more powerful than the last Nephilim to try.
CHAPTER 24
I cut my losses. I needed to learn more about Mait. I could stand in the swamp until I was as old as he was and never figure out how to break through his invisible, enchanted wall.
I had no doubt it could be broken. One of the many things I’d learned since I’d become the new me was that everything had a weakness. Nothing and no one was indestructible. Just look at Sawyer.
Not a scratch on him but tattoos for centuries, and then I was born. Had he known the first time he saw me that I’d be the death of him? If so, then why had he ever left me alive?
I returned to town as a phoenix. This might be New Orleans, but I still didn’t think I’d make it from the Honey Island Swamp to the French Quarter, naked, without drawing a crowd or at least a cop.
Less than half an hour later, I landed on the terrace, shifted, and went inside. I scared the shit out of the maid.
“Eeek!” she squeaked as I strode in from the balcony.
“Whoops.” I snatched my clothes off the floor.
“I knocked,” she managed. “You didn’t answer.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I could lose my job.”
“Not if we keep this between us, all right? You didn’t come in when I was naked,” I said.
And a woman-sized bird didn’t just land on the balcony, I thought.
She nodded eagerly, her eyes too calm and her manner too normal for her to have seen anything but me walking in off the terrace.
“I’ll just—” I edged toward the bathroom.
“Of course.” She inched toward the door. “I’ll come back later.”
As soon as she left, I flipped the security latch and booted up my computer. I went first to the members-only, password-protected, super-secret Web site of the federation.
Members logged in and entered what information they’d gleaned on every Nephilim and breed combination they came across—specifically how to kill them. Unfortunately the federation was down to a skeleton crew, most of them doing the best they could to stem the demon tide but instead being washed away by the flood. Which meant not too many had the time to add new information to the database.
On Mait I didn’t find much, so I was forced to go about this the old-fashioned way—trial and error by Google search. My luck there wasn’t any better.
I rubbed my eyes. I needed a shower, coffee, and food, in that order. Then I’d make some calls.
The hot water felt heavenly on skin that had been stretched and released, sprouted feathers then regrown skin. My shoulders were a little sore from flying.
My stomach growling and my head beginning to pound with a lack-of-caffeine headache, I wasn’t paying attention when I strode back into the room sans towel. My only warning was a slight shimmy in the air.
I rammed my elbow backward. The blow should have sent whatever had snuck up on me flying into, if not through, a wall. Instead that elbow was grabbed so hard my bones crunched, and I was spun like a top. An instant before my eyes registered the sight of him, my nose caught his scent—cinnamon and soap.
“Sanducci,” I growled.
Jimmy wrapped his arms around me, one hand circling both wrists and holding them still at the small of my back. “You gonna hit me, Lizzy?”
My breasts crushed against his thin overwashed T-shirt—this one with jagged red lettering I’d had no time to read. With his knuckles teasing the curve of my ass and my mouth a mere inch below his, I couldn’t help but whisper, “You want me to?”
Lust flared in his eyes. It had always been like this between us. One touch, one word, one whiff and we were lost.
His neck was so close, the warmth of his skin drew me in, making it impossible not to press my face to the curve and just breathe. His scent flooded me with memories—first kiss, first love, first time. He’d been everything.
That scent was also betrayal and heartache, mistrust, murder, and mayhem. Jimmy was both danger and safety, hatred and love, violence and the first gentleness I’d ever known in a man. For the rest of my life whenever I smelled heated skin and fresh soap, or tasted hot cinnamon toast, I’d think of Jimmy Sanducci.
His cheek touched my hair. His thumb stroked the tip of my tailbone, and I couldn’t help it. I licked his neck.
Without any warning, Jimmy shoulder-checked me into the doorjamb. I managed to grab it before my spine, or the back of my head, connected.
“I like my jugular just the way it is,” he said. “Intact.”
I didn’t bother to explain that I’d been more interested in kissing than killing him at the time. The same couldn’t be said of right now.
“Vampires who live in log cabins shouldn’t throw burning stakes,” I muttered.
He frowned. “What?”
Yeah, that hadn’t made much sense, but—
“If you weren’t thinking with your dick you might have gotten the allusion.” He still appeared confused. “Glass houses and stones, dumb-ass. You’re a vampire, just like me.”
“I wasn’t licking your neck,” he said.
“No, you were too busy grabbing my ass.”
I walked across the room, purposely brushing his arm with my breast as I passed and sat on the bed. I didn’t bother to get dressed. He’d seen it all before. I wanted him to remember what he might never see again if he kept it up. “What are you doing here?”
“Same thing you are.”
Somehow I doubted that.
“I didn’t—” I paused in the middle of saying I hadn’t told anyone what I was doing, because I had told one person. “I am going to kick Luther’s bony behind.”
Jimmy’s gaze began to drift below my neck. Then he stiffened, turned, and strode to the still-open veranda doors. I stifled a smirk. I was getting to him. “Wasn’t Luther,” he said.
“Ruthie.” Jimmy didn’t answer what hadn’t been a question. “What did she tell you?”
“That I’d better haul myself down here to help you before she blistered my backside with a paddle.”
Ruthie continued to threaten us as she had when we were children even though we hadn’t been children since . . .
I sighed. Jimmy and I had never really been children.
Ruthie had made a game of thinking up colorful ways to intimidate us into doing what she wanted. She’d rarely laid a hand on us, and when she had, we’d deserved it. In truth, every kid who’d ever spent a moment with Ruthie Kane would have done anything she asked just because she’d asked.
Take Jimmy for instance. Ruthie had told him to break my heart, and he’d run off to do it so fast, the door hadn’t even brushed his ass on his way out of my life. I needed to get over that.
Eventually.
“I don’t need help,” I said.
“Ruthie disagrees.”
“Ruthie can kiss—”
“Ah-ah-ah.” Jimmy glanced over his shoulder at me, then just as quickly back out the window at the increasingly steamy day. “She knows all and sees all.”
“Not really,” I muttered. In her new incarnation, Ruthie seemed to know a little and only see enough to be a pain in my butt. “Ruthie sent you to help me.” I straightened as if someone had goosed me. “What about Summer? You didn’t just leave her—”
“No,” Jimmy interrupted.
“Tell me you didn’t bring her along.”
“Definitely no.”
“You’re supposed to be watching her.” I stood and began to pace. “She can’t be trusted.”
“Neither can you,” he said.
My hands curled into fists. I so wanted to slug him, but then I usually did. “What’s to keep her from—?”
“What do you think she’s going to do, Lizzy?” Jimmy spun, hands clenched just like mine. “She sold her soul for me. You think she’s going to make that sacrifice worthless by selling us out?”
“I think she’d sell anyone to save you,” I said quietly.
He sighed. “I think she would, too.”
Have I mentioned that Summer’s a little obsessed? “I locked her in a room, put rowan across the exits,” he continued.
Rowan repelled fairy magic. It could also kill them, along with cold steel. I’d started keeping both in my duffel. Never could tell when I might need some.
“I bet she loved that,” I muttered.
“Love isn’t quite the word I’d use.”
I’d seen what lurked behind Summer’s pretty face, and it was frightening. I wondered if Jimmy’d seen it this time, and if he had, would he at last let me kill her like I wanted to?
“Luther wasn’t happy, either,” Sanducci continued. “He thought he could keep an eye on her.”
I snorted. Jimmy’s gaze lowered to my breasts as they jiggled. “You wanna put on some clothes?” he asked.
“If it bothers you.”
Jimmy’s hands clenched tighter. Pretty soon blood was going to run between his fingers.
I found clean underwear, yesterday’s jeans, and one of my new shirts. I purposely left the bras in the bag. It was too damn hot.
Once dressed I faced Jimmy, and my gaze touched on his T-shirt. I shook my head. Red letters on a gray background revealed that: ALL I REALLY NEEDED TO KNOW I LEARNED FROM STEPHEN KING.
Someday that might even be funny.
“Let’s walk and talk,” I said. “If I don’t get coffee, I might go for your jugular.”
Jimmy jerked his head toward the door. His dark hair fell over one eye, and he shoved it back impatiently before following me into the hall.
“Luther thinks he’s a big boy now,” I said as we made our way to street level.
“He’s big enough. He’s just not mean enough.”
“You’ve never seen him go lion. Although . . .” I shrugged. “He isn’t exactly a man-eater then, either.”
“He will be. It’s only a matter of time.”
I understood what Jimmy wasn’t saying. The more horror Luther saw, the simpler it would be for him to kill. It happened to us all—I glanced at Sanducci’s stunning profile—some much sooner than others.
As we stepped onto the street, the heat hit us in the face like a blanket that had had been soaked in the river—heavy, damp, musty-mold. When I tried to breathe, the air not only burned my throat but seemed to fill it with cotton balls as well.
“You sure you want coffee?” Jimmy asked.
“I’m sure.” I headed for Decatur at a pace mere mortals dared not go.
Despite being in a hurry to get to a cup of chicory coffee and a plateful of fried dough, I glanced into the windows of the storefronts along the way. I couldn’t help it. A shrunken head shared space with a gloriously bedecked Mardi Gras mask; Catholic religious icons stood right next to a selection of voodoo dolls. All I had to say was—New Orleans.
Suddenly I stopped, and Jimmy slammed into me so hard he threw me forward. I caught myself, palms against the glass, nose brushing the cool, clear pane.
I’d never seen the photograph before, but I knew Jimmy had taken it. I didn’t need to touch it and “see”; I didn’t need to ask; I didn’t need to hear his answer. I just knew.
The portrait wasn’t even his usual fare. Instead a little boy, stark in black and white, stared out. The smudge of dirt on his face matched the shade of his eyes; his filthy shirt might once have been as light as his crew cut. A fly sat on his pale hair and another on his shoulder. The camera had caught him in the act of blowing air upward; his lower lip jutted out; his bangs scattered. The fly stayed put.
Had he been playing in the mud or living on the street? The picture was both the cutest and the saddest thing I’d ever seen.
My eyes met Jimmy’s in the glass, and he reached for me. “Wait, Lizzy—”
I sidestepped and opened the door. Inside were more photos like the first. All in black and white, mostly of kids, each one asked a question, told a story, tore at my heart.
Perhaps because of his supernatural ability—Jimmy saw what others did not—he had always been beyond talented. Sanducci was famous, and he deserved to be. However, none of the pictures he’d taken for money deserved to be in the same room with these.
I met his gaze. “Why didn’t you ever show me?”
An emotion flitted across his face, one I couldn’t put a finger on before he glanced away. “Baby, I’ll show you anything you want.” He put his hand on his taut stomach and rubbed, tugging his shirt up, trying to distract me with a six-pack.
“Don’t.” I put my hand on his arm. He jerked it away but not before I’d seen the truth. He might pretend the photos meant nothing, but I knew better. Each one held a tiny piece of his soul.
“May I help—?”
I turned, and the eyes of the slim, white-haired man widened. “It’s you,” he said.
I shot Jimmy a glare. “Show me,” I ordered, and the salesman scurried toward the back.
“Fuck,” Jimmy muttered, but he followed.
I stepped into a separate room and slowly turned in a circle staring at so many varied versions of me, I got dizzy. Also taken with black-and-white film, these shone with one huge difference from the others—the brilliant, sapphire blue of my eyes.
Talk about artsy. But they didn’t seem contrived. Instead their beauty was haunting.
Me right after I’d come to Ruthie’s—twelve years old, far too skinny, yet already developing and horrified by it. My legs stuck out like kindling beneath a skirt that was too big; my shoulders were all bones; my breasts softly curved beneath a sweater that looked to drown me. A child hovering, both eager and petrified, at the cliff edge of womanhood.
Me on the balance beam in high school, my
pole-dancer body outlined in a skintight leotard, the expression on my face reflecting my love of the first thing I’d ever been any good at.
The next a silhouette in the second-floor window of Ruthie’s place. My window. I was lifting my arms, taking off my shirt. My skin appeared gilded by moonlight. I had my head turned just enough so the camera caught my face. I’d been thinking of him.
“Perv,” I muttered.
“Lizzy, let’s—”
I lifted my hand to make him stop, and he backed up as if I might hit him, which caused the salesman to cast us a quick frown.
“Great,” I whispered furiously. “Now he thinks I beat you.”
“You do,” Jimmy said.
I narrowed my eyes. “I might.”
In the subsequent image, glancing back at the camera, I walked down the stairs at Ruthie’s. My shirt was twisted, my skirt wrinkled from being hiked to my waist, my hair—long now—was ratty, messy, as if I’d been dancing outside in a tornado. But I was smiling just a little, a smile that said, There’s no one in the world but you.
I expected the next photo to reveal the gap in years between when Jimmy had left and when he’d come back. Instead I took one glance and caught my breath.
Me sitting in the window, rain cascading down the glass, making it seem as if tears ran down my face. I’d just discovered Jimmy was gone.
The next picture made my heart lurch. Me in my uniform, frisking some skid, kicking his legs apart as he leaned over the Milwaukee Police Department cruiser. My hair was short—I’d chopped it off, impatient with the gum perps kept spitting into it—and my mouth was the thin, frustrated line of every city cop.
Several more photographs followed—all taken during the period when Jimmy had been lost to me. Me laughing at one of the Murphys’ barbecues, testifying in court, wearing a ball gown to some charity event and black to Max’s funeral. The photo of me alone at the grave after everyone else had gone brought that day back so sharply my eyes burned.
Jimmy had been there. He’d watched over me. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or sad, glad or really, really mad.
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