by Hall, Marie
“Let him die!” And all the anger, all my hurt, it came tumbling out then. I couldn’t stop myself. I slapped his chest so hard the reverberations moved like a shockwave through my arm. “I know you don’t much care what happens to humans, but I do,” I gritted out, intending to walk away because I couldn’t believe I’d hit him. I’ve never in my life hit Luc; it hadn’t felt nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped either.
His hand shot out and he yanked me back to him hard, his beautiful face contorted into one of barely leashed fury.
“Who says I don’t?”
Growling, I shoved him off me and turned, keeping my eyes peeled for a small boy in a red-and-gold shirt.
“Tell me, Dora? Huh? Since you’re the authority on what I do and don’t feel, tell me how you know I don’t fucking care?”
And I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t. I kept telling myself to let it go. To bow out of this one. Because all we kept doing was making the water under this bridge so impossibly deep we were both going to drown in it, but all my self-admonishments flew out the window.
“You asshole,” I hissed. “You think I don’t know what you did to those kids the night Kemen died? You think I wouldn’t find out that not a one of them were saved? You killed them all. You lied to me. You’ve been lying to me, you keep lying to me. So who’s the bigger bastard here?”
I was breathing so hard by this point that my vision was going blurry. He looked as if I’d slapped him. Startled. Shocked. Not the composed, cocky sonofabitch he usually was.
I blinked because I wanted his frost. His fire. I wanted more shouts and screams, something to feed the beast inside me, but he was giving me nothing other than raw, visceral hurt.
“Deny it, Luc, please.” My voice cracked a moment later. “Please tell me it’s not true.”
Turning his face to the side, a visible ripple rolled through his shoulders. “I can’t,” he finally muttered and shoved past me.
I tried to pretend like it didn’t bother me. Shoving my hands deep into my pockets, I cried out to Carlos. Over and over, yelling his name, getting strange glances from within the crowd, but no matter how many people we saw or how many little boys walked our way, there were none that were Carlos.
Thirty minutes later, Luc turned to look at me. “The boy’s not here.”
I didn’t want to concede defeat, but there was absolutely no boy fitting the description walking the carnival. I’d called his name multiple times, but it was hard to hear above the cacophony of music and chattering of brash humans.
“We haven’t checked outside the carnival. I really think we should—”
“Dora.” He gripped my face in warm hands and his touch brought both pleasure and pain. My lashes fluttered and my lips tugged downward and there was a cry building up in the back of my throat that had so much more to do with us than the boy. “He’s not here.”
“But you don’t know that for sure.” I looked at him. Dead-on, square in the eyes. Because I needed the contact, needed to see Luc. It wasn’t easy letting go of a love I’d had for hundreds of years. As much as I knew Luc and I weren’t right for each other, a part of me would always need him.
It was a sick, twisted connection we shared.
“I do know that. Before I asked you to go to the tent, the mother handed me a jacket that belonged to Carlos. I smelled it. If he was here, I’d have caught his scent.” He swallowed hard and for just a second, his thumb traced my cheekbone.
I shuddered.
Luc’s sense of smell could rival that of any animal’s. If he said the boy’s scent wasn’t here, then there was no use arguing the point.
Hanging my head, feeling the crushing weight of death all around me, I moaned. Suddenly everything came crashing down on me. Kemen’s death, Luc’s disgust, Grace’s deception, Pestilence’s awakening and Lust’s desertion... The burden of it all made me feel suddenly ten times heavier and utterly exhausted.
He hugged me, wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in close, and I melted into his embrace, feeling the steady beat of his heart move in sync with my own. I dug my fingers into his back.
“You weren’t ready yet, Dora,” he whispered into my hair, kissing my temple and rubbing soothing circles into my arms. “I’ve been so furious with you. Angry at you. You shouldn’t have gone back to work yet. You need to rest, you need—”
Heat built up behind my eyes, and I laughed because I didn’t want to cry. “I don’t need more sleep. I just need the death to stop. You have no idea what’s going on with me.”
“Because you won’t share. You won’t tell me shit. You just expect me to figure it out. I don’t know, Dora. Is it because I left you to do it on your own? Because I swear if I’d known what Grace was going to do...”
Holding his wrists, I shook my head. “Luc, I wish that’s all it was. But it’s so much more.” I closed my eyes. I hadn’t told Luc about Hell, or Wrath, or so many other countless things that’d happened to me.
And now there was just so much I didn’t even know where to start. “We have to go back and tell Juanita.”
I inhaled deep as the knots in my stomach writhed and twisted in on themselves. I’d been so sure we’d be able to find the boy. Because fate, God, whatever couldn’t hate me this much. Surely at some point something had to work in my favor, but with each disappointment I was beginning to suspect that I’d become the running joke in some cosmic punch line.
“Yeah, we should.” And just like that he was buttoned-up again, aloof and indifferent, and it was all so heartbreakingly familiar that I simply nodded and followed.
I’d already told Luc I would be the one to break the news, and each step as we were walking up to the tent felt like I was marching toward a guillotine so that by the time I opened the flap I was pretty sure that had I eaten anything, I would have thrown it all up.
Luc remained outside.
Entering the tent, I looked around for Juanita and frowned when I noted her empty chair. “Cash, where’s the girl?” I pointed to the empty chair.
Poking his head from behind a screened-off partition, he came out with a smile on his face that instantly died.
“What the hell?” He looked from the empty chair to me as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “She was just here. I swear, Pandora. I stepped away for a second to itemize the jewelry.”
“Wait a second.” I held up my hand as a nasty suspicion spread like rot through my gut. Visions of the man in the marketplace came suddenly into clear, haunting relief. “Where’d she go?”
Shoving long fingers through his shockingly orange-red hair, he shook his head and ran up to the chair, waving his hand over it as if he could somehow magically make her appear. “I swear to you, she was just freaking here. Like literally less than ten seconds ago. I just now went back there—I would have heard her leaving.”
And I knew he wasn’t lying; there was nothing more galling to a pride Neph than to not know everything, to not be fully, one hundred percent aware of everything around him.
“Shit, shit, shit.” He panicked, eyes roaming from side to side as he and his demon commenced to have a freak-out of epic proportions.
Grabbing his upper arm, I was able to twirl him around even though I was much smaller than him. My fear of having the situation escalate quickly out of control lent me strength. Yanking his chin in my direction until his nose was practically pressed against my own, I cocked my head.
“You come the hell down, you hear me?”
His nostrils flared, the gold of his eyes glowing like molten, poured metal. His demon beat just beneath the surface of his flesh.
“She’s gone,” he whispered in a guttural growl of both man and nightmare.
“Yes, I know. But you remember where you are and get yourself under control now. Before I make you.”
The muscles in his jaw locked down tight and I could almost feel the strain of his body as he fought an invisible battle with his demon for dominance. Pride hated to lose at anyth
ing.
But finally, finally, I could sense he’d turned a corner. Knowing it was safe to now give him his space, I dropped my hand and took a step back.
“Cash, you may not believe me, but you did nothing wrong.”
His eyes were still large. “She disappeared on—”
“No.” I sliced my hand through the air. “Something’s happening here, but it’s not your fault. You hear me? Relax, man. Go play a couple of rounds of online poker and relax.”
Clearing his throat and riffling his hair in an agitated manner, he marched to the back room and disappeared behind the flap. I didn’t move until I heard the scrape of a metal chair being pulled out and the click click clicking of a keyboard.
Walking out, I looked at Luc. “Girl’s gone. We need to talk.”
We headed back to my trailer only after Luc had called off the rest of the search party. The moment I stepped inside Kemen’s space, I yanked off my jeans and shirt and tossed them to the floor.
I wasn’t generally messy, but something about Kemen’s trailer almost demanded I be as sloppy as my best friend had been. Going to the bedroom, I crawled onto the bed, grabbed a pair of roll-up socks I’d kept tucked under the pillow, and yanked them on before turning to look at Luc.
For most people being in the buff in front of an ex might be a strange thing. But Luc understood that my aversion to clothes ran deep. If I could get away with only ever wearing thongs and knee-high socks I’d probably never wear real clothes again.
He leaned against the doorframe. “Getting comfortable, aren’t you?”
I shrugged, running my fingers through my hair. “This isn’t the first time tonight someone’s disappeared on me.”
Narrowing his eyes, he came to rest on the foot of my bed, crossing his leg in front of him. “What do you mean?”
“After I met with Grace I got hungry, so I went to an outdoor market and bought some tacos.”
He lifted a brow in surprise. Again, demons don’t often get hungry, but it wasn’t an earth-shattering confession either. “And?”
I couldn’t just blurt out the pestilence thing, that would require a lot of backtracking which we’d do, just... not yet.
“A guy bumped into me. I’d overhead that same guy in a bar earlier tonight, talking to someone about a friend of theirs that’d been found in the desert.”
“You bumped into the same guy twice? This isn’t a big village, but still...”
“I know.” I pursed my lips. “Coincidences aren’t something I really believe in anymore. But that wasn’t the strangest part. When he bumped into me at the stand, I pushed him back. I didn’t think anything of it, it was just reflex. He fell.”
His eyes scrunched up. “Get to the point here.”
This was where the story got a little tricky, but I gave it my best shot. “He didn’t look right. And then there was another couple that kind of had the same look. But the dude who knocked into me was on the ground and he was pretty much contained. The other two ran off and I chased after them.”
“Why?”
I could read him trying to connect the dots in my story and finding the pieces lacking. Giving half a story was so much harder than just telling the truth.
“Because the way they were acting, I was afraid whatever was going on might spread if they got in contact with anyone else.”
I waited with bated breath for him to call me out on this— Luc knew me like no one else in the world. Not to mention the fact that his nose is a lie detector, but I wasn’t lying. Just keeping certain parts of the story under wraps.
He scratched his jaw, icy blue eyes shrewd with intelligence. “Okay.” He nodded and I almost breathed a sigh of relief when he accepted the story. “What happened then?”
“I caught the couple, made sure they weren’t as sick as the guy in the marketplace had been, and once I was satisfied that they were good, I ran back to the stalls. Guy was gone.” I shrugged helplessly. “I thought I was losing my mind because nobody”—I waved my hands—“remembered him or me. Not even the girl I bought my dinner from.”
“Gone?” He shook his head just slightly, toying with a loose thread on Kemen’s fluffy red thermal blanket. “Just like that?”
I nodded, pressing my lips together. “Just like Juanita. There one second, gone the next. What do you think’s going on here?”
Exhaling, shoulders slumping, he said, “I don’t have a damn clue. What does Grace want you to do?”
“Go in search of some zombies in the Sierra Madres.”
Squeezing his eyes shut, he ran his fingers across his brow bone. “Of course she does. Let me guess, by yourself? Because that’ll never happen again.”
Was he implying he was wanted in on the action? Did I even want that anymore? Honestly, I wasn’t sure.
“No.” I shook my head. “She said I can bring whoever I want.”
“What?” His forehead scrunched. “That doesn’t sound like her.”
“Yeah, well if you don’t think that sounds like her, then you should have seen how she was acting.” Dragging one of Kemen’s sweaters toward me with my foot, I slipped it over my head and inhaled the faint spiciness of his scent, which still lingered on it. I wasn’t cold. But it felt sort of like a hug when I did it, and right now I needed my Sandman’s arms around me.
“How?” Tentatively he reached out, as if unsure whether to do it or not, before eventually tugging on the edge of the sweater.
I could feel us falling into this push and pull all over again. Knowing you needed to cut something out of your life didn’t make it any easier. I wanted the friendship without the drama. But with Luc it was all or nothing. That’s how it’s always been with him.
“I don’t know, not something I can really pinpoint and say this and that, but she was distracted and just... weird.” I gave a helpless shrug.
“Last time we were crawling in vampires, this time people are disappearing.” He frowned, seeing but not seeing, obviously lost deep in thought. I chewed on my thumbnail, waiting on him to work through it. “That woman’s fears were real. I smelled her panic. But...” He rubbed his hands on his jeans, then stood and began to slowly pace back and forth.
“What’s up?” I asked softly, because it wasn’t often that Luc got this worked up over one of my cases. Generally, unless it involved a Neph, he was totally hands-off. Until recently, anyway.
“I dunno.” He twirled on his heel, pinning me with a hard blue stare. Unless we were gripped by Lust, our eye color wasn’t a glowing lavender but rather a cerulean blue. “I don’t know.” He grimaced. “Just this gut feeling I’ve got, thinking back on it. How do two people just disappear like that?”
“Three.” I lifted my fingers because he wasn’t counting the guy at the taco stand. “But whatever it is, I’ve got this terrible feeling that somehow this might all be intertwined. Call it a hunch, but I believe the Order is screwing with us again.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his jaw. “Let the games begin.” Clapping the doorframe, he made as if to leave, then paused and turned to look at me.
And there was a change in his look. A haunted aching filled his eyes and I swallowed hard.
“That night, when you disappeared. I couldn’t find you, Dora.” His brows twitched. “I couldn’t find you. None of them would have survived anyway; I gave them the only mercy I could.”
I sensed it was as close to the truth of what’d gone down that night as I would ever get from him.
I searched his cold, beautiful face and whispered, “I’m sorry, Luc. For everything.”
And for a second I could have sworn the hard shell cracked and that for an infinite moment in time he was as conflicted and unsure as I was. But it was so fleeting it made me question whether I’d seen it all.
He grinned. “Yeah, I bet. Get some rest.”
Then he was gone and I was alone, just me, Kemen’s sweater, and a head full of memories.
***
By two in the morning, I figured out sleep wasn�
�t happening. And though I was supposed to be scouting for an elusive zombie hive, there was no way in hell I’d be doing that in the middle of the night.
I might be strong, but I’m not stupid.
So I traced to my trailer, just long enough to grab a vintage bottle of cabernet sauvignon and that ratty old book Billy had told me to read.
Billy.
Just the thought of him made my toes curl and a delicious heat spread through my middle. Where was he right now?
Returning to Kemen’s home, I set the wine down on small end table and walked to the window, pushing aside the curtain as I stared out. The night was pitch-dark. We were a few miles outside the village, which meant we had no city lights to mar the splendor of the rugged, harsh beauty of the Mexican desert at night. Barrel cacti and dry sagebrush dotted the landscape. A full moon took up the center of the sky and a million stars winked back at me. And I felt completely alone and small.
“Billy,” I murmured, leaning my head against the cool pane of glass and allowing myself one moment that was mine alone.
One moment to remember his touch, the way he’d felt on me. How his hands had caressed my face. And yes, there was lust when I was around him.
But when he’d died, I’d felt any semblance of humanity inside me bleed out. And though there’d been so many questions hammering in my skull—whether he’d meant to kill me that night or whether he’d been there to save me—I could never let him go. Out of one toxic relationship and into another, it seemed a curse I was doomed to repeat ad nauseam.
I snorted. “You’re freaking sick, Pandora.”
With a slight shake of my head, I walked back to the bed. Uncorking the bottle, I drank straight from it. I wasn’t even trying to play around tonight. The full-bodied red hit my empty stomach like a sledgehammer, but it felt good. Woke me up, gave me the focus I needed to tackle this coma-inducing medieval read.
Cracking open the book, I greedily inhaled the musty scent of old pages and was just ready to flip to the beginning when a sheet of paper that hadn’t been in there before caught my eye.