“Right,” Jag says, moving so Heidi is behind him. “Now you’re saying you’re an angel?” He inches his way toward the front door of the shop, pushing Heidi toward freedom whether she likes it or not. “I don’t really care. Consider it a gift that I’m not killing you this very second.”
“You couldn’t if you tried,” I say stupidly, letting my temper flare. They aren’t listening. Heidi is coming around, but Jag isn’t about to let her really hear me. He doesn’t want me to have her loyalty or her forgiveness.
Jag stops abruptly. “What did you say?”
Great. Now he’ll fight back just to prove I don’t scare him, to prove he can take me… which he can’t. He’s a storm waiting to happen, and I just gave him the opportunity. The sooner we get it over with, though, the better.
He lunges, and this time, it isn’t in a good-natured test, pitting his strength against mine like at the church. He is going to kill me if he can.
My face is still hurting from the beating he already gave me, and I’m not about to let it get worse, but Jag has other plans. He brings his dagger down hard. I twist slightly at the last second, or it would have gone into my shoulder. It nicks me, but it’s only a scratch. A scratch that stings like a thousand fire ants burrowing their way under my skin.
I roll away, kicking him in the stomach. He stumbles back. I jump to my feet, and we circle each other. Heidi yells for us to stop, her eyes wild with fear, but she doesn’t get involved or try to break us up. She knows better. Jag is single minded, and he intends to finish me. If she accidentally gets in his way… I need to end this now.
I stand up straight and let my dagger fall. “I don’t want to fight you, Jag.”
He lunges again, his knife aimed at the center of my chest. I twist, lift my arm, and push him past me as hard as I can. He rams straight into the wall, head-first. Stunned, he falls to his knees. I take that moment to slam my fist into the side of his face. He hits the ground, out cold.
Heidi screams and runs over to him, turning his body over. A slash on his forehead seeps blood and a cut over his cheekbone is beginning to swell. He’ll have a nasty headache when he wakes up, but he’ll live.
She swivels toward me with eyes full of fury. “You’re lucky he’s not dead, or I’d kill you myself.”
“He wouldn’t let you listen,” I say, pleading. I leave my knife on the floor and kneel beside her. “Everything I said is true. It’s me, Heidi. I’ve come back to help you. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here before when things were so terrible, but there were other things I had to do in… in… Oh, it’s too hard to explain. And Dad didn’t kill me,” I add as an afterthought.
At this point, she jerks away from me, slapping me hard across the face. “How dare you even bring that up?” She’s shaking, her hands in fists, her lips pulled back into a snarl. “I know exactly what happened. I was there. I saw him attack my brother in the hospital. He had a knife to his throat. I know what I saw!”
“I’m your brother. And yes, he attacked me at the hospital, but it wasn’t what you think. You have no idea what was going on behind the scenes.”
“I would if someone told me,” she says finally. Jag moans but doesn’t wake up.
“We need to get out of here before the real demons come back. Here, help me.” I lift Jag by the armpits and wait for her to lift his feet. She doesn’t want to trust me, I can see that, but she also knows I’m right. We can’t stay here.
We leave the shop, hurrying down the street and out of the Down Quarter to a bus stop. A few times, we have to put Jag down and rest. Becoming a bit more coherent, he fights us more. When he finally comes to, he doesn’t let us carry him at all. He holds his head in his hands, scowling as though he hopes his evil looks will kill me.
I ignore him and try not to take his venom too personally.
Once we stop and get on a bus, we help Jag into a seat and Heidi sits beside him. He lays his head back and closes his eyes.
“We should take him to a doctor. I think you gave him a concussion.” She glares at me, but it’s more of a little-sister-who-is-pissed-at-her-brother look than the distrusting, suspicious Heidi who thinks I’m a demon.
“He’ll be all right. He just needs to rest.”
“You could have killed him. You were too rough,” she says with bite in her tone. Her eyes narrow, and I can tell she’s in the mood to quarrel. I remember this Heidi. She’d follow me all around the house like a shadow, hounding me with her opinions or lecturing me until I cried uncle.
“Let it go, Heidi. I’m not in the mood for one of your tantrums.”
“Did you seriously just say that to me?”
Great. And so it begins. I turn to her and level my gaze so she knows I’m not joking. “You have no idea what I’ve been through since I’ve been here. I’ve been given an impossible task with only a bunch of kids to help me.” Now that she knows I’m her brother, I don’t feel the need to coddle her.
“A bunch of kids? Is that what you think of us?”
This isn’t working. “Look, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry I hurt your boyfriend who was trying to kill me.”
“You sound just like my brother.” She stares at me, her countenance rigid and her attitude frosty.
I can’t help but smile back at her. “That’s because I am your brother, through and through. Is that more impossible to believe than the world falling apart and demons possessing people right and left?”
She studies me, her shoulders still tight and her arms crossed over her chest. She doesn’t want to answer and looks the other way, glaring, but I hear her mumble, “I guess not.” She turns back to me, the snotty cheerleader look still there. “But how is it possible? If you’re really Brecken, then how did you die if Dad didn’t kill you?”
I hurry to explain while she seems open to an explanation. “At the time, there was a battle going on in a spiritual realm you don’t know about and… well, like I keep saying, it’s hard to explain, but someone there needed my help, and I couldn’t stay here and let her die.”
“Her?”
“Yeah.” I can’t conceal my smile, and I fight the urge to turn away to hide it.
“The girl you told me about?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe I kissed you.”
True to form, she changes the subject on a dime. “Me neither. Gross,” I say, shoving her from across the aisle. Could she really capitulate so easily? Oh, I hope so. She’s gotten more cynical in the last few years, but my sweet Heidi is still in there, I can tell.
She laughs and hugs me. “It makes so much sense now—how I felt drawn to you, how comfortable I feel around you, and how easily you make me mad.”
“Yeah, that’s a sure sign.”
“It was actually the eggs,” she says out of the blue, losing me completely.
“What?”
“You know. When you made me eggs with avocado. No one else cooks them like that. I should have known.”
“Yeah, but it is unbelievable.”
“Yeah.”
We ride the rest of the way in companionable silence. When we finally make it back to the church, we tuck Jag into his sleeping bag, and then I go in search of Doug and Owen.
It’s time for a Cazador meeting.
Chapter Twenty-four
Dean
Lost and confused, I sit in the dark, my head in my hands. I don’t even try to understand my situation. There are no lights on in the hall outside my cell door, and the demons certainly didn’t give me anything like a candle. What I wouldn’t give for a smidgen of light. I can’t even see my freaking hand in front of my face.
For the millionth time, I stumble to the door, press my face against the window hole, and yell for help, for light, for a voice in the dark, for stimulation of any kind. There is no answer and I wonder if they have forgotten me down here. I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours, so maybe they are trying to kill me by default.
I mean, what do they care? I’m a nobody now that the
y know I can’t be possessed. I don’t know what keeps them from latching on inside me, but I heard someone sneer the word inviolable as I was dragged out of that farce of a party. Three other demons tried their hand at me, and none could possess me. Coem had looked at me like an impossible puzzle he’s determined to figure out.
I take that moment to scream through the door again, banging my head against the rough wood in helplessness. Why am I even wasting my breath? I’m hungry, dirty, and only have the corner of my cell to use as a toilet. They don’t even given me a bucket. It reeks in here, and so do I.
And then…
A light begins to glow far down the hall, bright enough that my hungry eyes search pathetically for the source. I wait, my breath rasping in excited hitches. “Help!” I scream again, hoarse from lack of water. Again, I lean my head against the door, tears forming at the edges of my eyes. “Please,” I whisper. “Please, help me.”
“I will help you,” a voice says happily from the other side.
My head jerks back at the sudden utterance. In the dim light, my eyes struggle to focus. Just outside my door stands a girl. A child really, with red, curly hair, and her eyes… her bright blue eyes… they are so easy to see. They practically glow. She’s about seven years old, but rather than relief at finally having someone to talk to, a dark terror grows inside me. This isn’t a normal little girl. Not with those alien eyes and that piercing voice.
I back away from the door until my legs hit the cot.
“Can you come out and play with me?” Her voice rises to a whine—a clarion bell of pleading—the sound of a spoiled, lonely child with no friends.
I can’t see her, but each time she calls out, a sickening chill prickles my spine. Crawling onto my cot, I push myself all the way to the wall until I’m practically part of the plaster. I squish my eyes shut and cover my ears.
“She’s not real, she’s not real, she’s not real,” I whisper, over and over.
“Come back to the door,” she calls, her shrill tone growing angry and determined.
A long time ago, when I was very young, I woke in the middle of the night, a terrible fear consuming me. At the foot of my bed, I could see a girl. Formless. Wispy. Ghostly. At the time, I was only five or six, but I remember the terror that consumed me. The ghost hadn’t spoken, but she had stared at me with large, soulful eyes, with the saddest expression I’d ever seen. I was so frightened that my bladder released and I wet my bed, too terrified to get up or go to the bathroom. Soaked and smelling of urine, I stayed in my bed for the rest of the night until the sun rose and I could no longer see her. She hadn’t hurt me or even said a word. But her mere presence had paralyzed me.
This girl brings that moment back to me with chilling clarity. My heart pounds in my chest and tears threaten to fall. It doesn’t matter that I’m almost a man and have been living on my own for so long. Somehow, I’m a child again, alone in my room, unprotected and so afraid.
“You can’t hide from me.”
She sounds so close. I crack open an eye because not seeing is just as terrifying as being able to. She stands right next to me in a blue-and-white gingham dress, her iridescent eyes full of fury. I screech, scratching at the cement wall in an effort to Shawshank my way out of here. Something inside me breaks in that moment. I shatter and dissolve.
Chapter Twenty-five
Heidi
I lie on Dean’s sleeping bag, my arms crossed over my chest, staring at the ceiling. The candle that sits on the trunk flickers, making the shadows dance across the bare cement walls and ceiling. I repress a shiver, hating this room, and I think back over the day and all that has happened.
Jag snores beside me, oblivious to my musings. He hasn’t quite recovered from Bret’s punch in the face. He went straight to bed once we got him home, and Bret left without a word to go back to our apartment.
Now, awake in the quiet, I think about my brother, Brecken. Could he and Bret really be one and the same? My mind races to fill the holes of the last five years after he died. Was he reincarnated? And if it isn’t reincarnation, is it possession? Did he take over someone else’s body? That sounds too demonic for a benevolent god to do, but I’m not sure. I don’t know what to believe. It’s all too weird, crazy, and unbelievable.
Glancing at Jag, I study his sleeping form. The skin around his left eye has turned a deep shade of purple, and I wonder if his nose is broken. He has such a pretty face in sleep. So worry free and peaceful.
As though he can feel my gaze, he groans and cracks open his eyes, rolling onto his back, his hand coming up to delicately finger his bruises. “That jack-nit,” he groans. “I think he broke my nose.”
I don’t say anything, propping my head on my hand as I lie on my side. I can’t seem to stifle my smile. He’s so cute, lying there and complaining, saying the swearword he made up. It’s all very Jag and so endearing. Dean once told me he started using it when they were kids. Jag’s mom had washed his mouth out with soap from using a real curse word. It was one of the last interactions he had with her before she died in the Rift. He’d never used “bad” words again.
He glances at me. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” I say, still smiling.
He tries to sit up, but he quickly changes his mind with another groan.
“You want something to eat or drink?” The food I have in my pack runs through my mind. Green tea, two granola bars, a mashed chocolate chip cookie still in its wrapper, and a couple of sticks of gum. Not much in the way of nutrients, but it will fill our stomachs.
“Nah. I’m not hungry.” He slowly rolls until he lies on his side, facing me. “How long did I sleep?”
“Only a few hours. It’s nine PM,” I answer. “Early.”
“Good.” Pushing himself to his feet as smoothly as the cat he is named for, he loses his grace as he stumbles toward the stairs. He leans against the wall, his head resting against the cement wall.
“Where are you going? You should rest. I think Bret gave you a concussion.” I leap up and try to take some of his weight.
He won’t have it and pushes me away as gently as he is capable, which isn’t that gentle. “It’s time to hunt.”
I know for a fact he hasn’t missed a night of hunting in five years. Why would he skip now when we still haven’t found Dean?
He looks up, his gaze heavy, his eyes full of anguish. “I can’t stay here knowing Dean’s being tortured or worse. I can’t rest until I know if… if he’s even still alive.”
If anyone is being tortured, it’s Jag. The rest of us too, but none more than him.
“I know,” I say. “I feel the same, but you can’t fight like this.” I gesture to his whole body, begging him to lie back down.
He shakes his head, making a slow ascent up the stairs. “I can’t. I just… can’t.”
If he goes alone… “Okay,” I say, relenting. “I’ll go with you.” I don’t offer to call Bret for help. I know what Jag’s answer to that would be. I strap on my two runed daggers and pull on my jacket. Jag takes a bit longer to get ready. How he intends to get any work done in his condition, I don’t know, but I do know better than to argue. Maybe we won’t encounter any demons tonight. Maybe we’ll just miraculously stumble into Dean. Wouldn’t that be nice?
As we walk slowly down the church’s darkened street, the stars begin to peak through the clouds. A warm breeze wafts over us, smelling sweet for once, like flowers instead of rotting garbage. I take it as a sign of good luck.
We head to the plaza, which is always Jag’s MO, and hide in the copse of trees. The nightlife has already started. Music pulses from the bar across the street and people visit or dance on the grass. You’d think they’d learn to stay home, but no, night after night, they come back to drink and party and get possessed by demons.
No one looks out of the ordinary at the moment, but Jag studies each swaying hippie and beach bum with intense scrutiny. He doesn’t trust anyone.
We wait until midnight, bu
t no demons show, and for once, I’m glad. Jag is starting to sway himself, so he reluctantly lets me lead him back to the church. The wretched expression never leaves his face. He falls onto his sleeping bag, exhausted.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, not sure, exactly, what I am sorry for. No demons showing up? Brecken hitting him? Me being here with him? Dean missing? The Rift in general? I am sorry for all of it and wonder if he wants me to leave.
“Me too,” he says, turning over and leaving his back to me.
Figuring it’s a sign he wants to be alone, I start back up the stairs.
“Don’t go,” he says. “Can you lay here with me for a while?”
“Sure.” I plop back down on Dean’s bag, unsure if I should snuggle up next to him or just sit there. I’m not good at this. I don’t flirt. I don’t play games. If he wants company, I can be company, but I’ll need a more specific message if he wants something more than that. Like a huge neon sign above his head with a bright red blinking arrow. Just because he kissed me doesn’t mean he likes me, although I hope it does.
“Do you want to go?” He rolls back to face me, his eyes glistening. It makes tears spring to my own to see Jag’s emotions so close to the surface. I don’t think anyone has ever witnessed tears in his eyes before.
“Not really. I just don’t know what to do or what you want from me.”
He studies me a moment, his gaze dipping to my mouth and then back to my eyes. A flush creeps up my neck, and I can’t hold his stare. Taking my hand, he pulls me down next to him, drawing me back against his chest so we’re spooning. He pulls me closer, breathing into my hair. I close my eyes, basking in this new feeling. His thighs press against the back of my legs, and I feel completely protected. A wholly foreign experience for me… at least for the last five years.
What are we doing? Is this love? Is this fluttering in my belly the real thing or just a physical reaction to a hot guy who is all muscle? Is Jag my boyfriend? I can’t picture being this way—lying in someone’s arms, fantasizing about the taste of their lips—with someone who isn’t. What if I let myself really give in, and he breaks my heart? Is that a chance I should take?
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