by SM Reine
“And what’s that, exactly? What came before?”
Isobel shook her head. “I don’t know.” Before I could say anything, she lifted a finger to silence me. “I’m serious. I don’t remember much from the time before I worked for Ander. One of my contract terms was forgetting everything.”
“Does that mean you also forgot that you died?”
I meant for that question to hit her hard, but she only looked thoughtful. She stepped into my bathroom to wash her hands. The water sluiced from her skin brown, mingled dirt and blood.
Leaning on the doorway, I could see both of us in the mirror. Me with my big hulking shoulders and sunburned cheeks and dusty dark hair. Isobel with her beads and feathers and shadowed eyes. We both looked like we were alive—we were too miserable to be dead.
“I know that I must have been on the brink of death at some point,” Isobel finally said. “All of Ander’s contracts depend on the victim being in mortal peril. I don’t know how it happened or why.”
“Might have to do with the murder you committed,” I said.
She turned off the faucet. Flicked the water off of her hands. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
Isobel leaned back against the sink. “I know that I trust you, Cèsar. I know that I haven’t enjoyed keeping information from you.”
“You did pretty well at it, if you didn’t like it.”
“I didn’t have a choice. I was hiding from everyone I used to know, and I was willing to do anything to keep myself safe.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I guess I don’t need to be careful anymore.”
Isobel stripped off her jewelry and set everything on my bathroom counter. The bone bracelet. The anklet. The feathers clipped to her hair.
And as she did, pieces of glamor fell away, too.
Glamors were tough magic. It was a way of taking one thing and changing it so that it looked like something else. Most commonly, that meant projecting a fake image over reality, like the way that Gertie made the kitchen at Paradise Mile look normal.
Isobel’s glamor was more advanced. It seemed to have altered her physically.
I wasn’t all that surprised to see the change in eye color, lightening to a striking shade of hazel surrounded by dark rings. I wasn’t surprised that her hair turned lighter and more coppery, either. But her heart-shaped face rounded. She had acne scars. Her lips were a little thinner, the bridge of her nose wider, her eyebrows plucked thin.
She was still beautiful. It was a more normal type of beauty, less exotic, but still someone you’d stop to stare at in public.
Most shocking was the spread of patterns over her bare skin. They looked like vitiligo—a condition that made pink patches appear on darker skin—except that these glistened like fresh burns. Burns that might never heal.
They were on her hands, her forearms, even her neck. Same kind of burns that had been on that one corpse.
No wonder she had looked so scared.
“I have a lot of witch friends.” Even Isobel’s voice was higher-pitched. “They made the jewelry for me.”
“Jesus, Izzy, what happened to you?” I asked, reaching out to take her hands.
She jerked back. Slipped out of the bathroom. “It was Ander. He’s a really powerful demon, a one-of-a-kind hellborn.” She said it like that was significant, like it should mean something to me.
“Sure,” I said, following her back to my bedroom. “I’ve heard of hellborn demons. The OPA deals with more than the occasional incubus.”
“He actually lives in Hell, Cèsar. I went to Hell when I was in his service. That’s where I got burned like this.” Isobel stared fixedly at my stack of eight-track tapes as she spoke, hands wrapped around her throat to hide the burns. For the first time, she showed a hint of shame in her body.
“You went to Hell?”
“For a year,” Isobel said. “Because I made a stupid deal. Because I did something terrible as Hope Jimenez and paid the price for it. That’s what Ander told me.”
“I didn’t think humans could go to Hell.”
She shuddered. “They can. It’s easier when the demon brings Hell to you. Ander travels—moves his domain around. When I knew him, the entrance to his house was in New York. All you had to do was knock on the right door.”
“So how’d it happen?” I asked. “You killed someone. Someone else killed you for it—what, in retaliation? So Ander picked up your soul.”
“I don’t know. I must have already been on Ander’s radar if he managed to pick me up before dying, and I must have thought survival was worth the cost of service to him,” Isobel said. “Five years with a demon to have my life restored. It sounds good on paper.”
“But you murdered someone.” I was still stuck on that part.
“That’s what they always told me.”
Who could Isobel have possibly wanted to kill? I stared at her, trying to see a criminal—more of a criminal than the woman who irked the OPA by talking to the dead for money.
If she’d killed someone, it must have been for a good reason.
It had to be.
At some point, I’d sat down on the edge of my bed. Now she moved to stand between my knees. Her skin was hot, even through my dusty slacks, and she didn’t shy away when I grabbed her wrists.
The burns were smooth and shiny and hairless. Like they’d healed to patches of plastic.
“Does it hurt now?” I asked. She shook her head, and I traced my fingertips over the edges, where healthy skin met scar.
There was nothing delicate about Isobel. She wasn’t like Suzy, who had such a slender frame. Isobel was sturdy. Big hands for a woman, big hips, a layer of fat over everything that made her jiggle just the right amount when she moved.
The skin of the burns felt fragile, though. Like touching them too hard might break the skin and leave her bleeding.
“Ander’s house was in Hell, but I often traveled to Earth to do his bidding. Before you ask, he didn’t have me killing, or being a thug, or anything like that. He just wanted me to talk to people. Dead people. Find out where things and people were hidden.”
“So that Ander could do the killing instead,” I said.
“Sometimes,” Isobel said. And then she said, “Many times.” Her voice cracked. A tear slid down her cheek. “I hated it, but I was in that contract. I didn’t have a choice. When he commanded me, it was like being a zombie.”
Was she a zombie? I rested my fingers on her wrist. She definitely had a pulse. I was pretty sure I would have noticed earlier if she hadn’t.
“I got free,” she went on. “A kopis confronted Ander for what he’d been doing—the normal demon hunter stuff. The kopis obviously won. It created an opening in my contract, although I’m not sure how. I didn’t leave the others behind deliberately. I just wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to escape.”
“When you say the others, you mean Lynne and Nichols.”
She sighed, rubbing both hands over her face. “Yeah. There were a lot more than the two of them at the time, though. Ander had hundreds of employees in his corporation.”
Hundreds of desperate souls willing to do anything to survive.
“What did you do to Nichols?” I asked.
Isobel touched her hair as if expecting to find the needle-tipped feather there. It was strange to see her without any adornment. “When I left Ander, I wanted to make sure he couldn’t send anyone after me. One of my witch friends made me a special weapon just for Ander’s employees.” She bit her lip. “He’s dead. It was a mercy killing. I don’t know what Ander had him doing, but death had to be better than that.”
“I think Ander had Nichols summoning demons. That’s what it looked like to me. He’s the one I found in the basement under Paradise Mile.” I gave Isobel a quick description of the altar and what exactly had happened, just in case she recognized it.
But she only looked confused. She shook her head.
“It doesn’t sound like anything And
er used to do, but all those vines, that little girl… I guess he’s branched out. Anyway, once I was free from my contract, I wanted to help people. So I became Isobel Stonecrow. When I talk to the dead, it heals families. It mends shattered hearts. It resolves problems that should be irreconcilable after death.”
“You don’t have to defend yourself with me, Izzy.” I didn’t just mean about her necrocognition.
I’ve got a good gut instinct. Not just when it comes to magic.
Everything inside me was saying that Isobel was being honest now, and that she hated what had happened, and she regretted it.
She didn’t have to defend herself for any of it.
Even the murder—well, she didn’t remember it. How much could I blame her for something she’d forgotten? I didn’t remember killing the succubus assassin who’d attacked me, either.
The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “You called me Izzy.”
“What? You’d prefer Hope?”
“No,” she said firmly. She tilted my jaw back with gentle hands. “I prefer Isobel. And when it’s coming from you, I like Izzy. But only from you.”
The energy in the room was shifting away from misery and regret into something that fizzed in my stomach. Something electric in the places where Isobel’s skin touched mine.
But there was a question I couldn’t drop. I hated to bring that darkness into her eyes, didn’t want to make her remember. But I needed to ask.
“What’s it like?” I asked. “You know…down there?”
In Hell.
She sank against me, thighs settling on either side of mine. Those hadn’t changed at all with the glamor. I couldn’t help but run my hands up her knees toward her waist. I’d been wanting to touch her for so long, it felt like sin to get to finally curve my fingers around the swell of her hips.
“Where I was, the sun was always at high noon.” Her trembling hands brushed my jaw. “Walking around outside was like being rolled across the top of a barbecue. Always bright, always on fire. Except for Ander’s house. It was dark in there. Full of shadows.” Her thumbs framed either side of my face, and she gazed down at me with blank eyes. Seeing but not seeing. “And the shadows burn, Cèsar,” Isobel whispered. “In Hell, everything burns.”
I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like.
She’d gone to Hell to work. For a year. Isobel had come back broken, a different woman, someone with few memories and many regrets.
The fact she’d come out at all was amazing.
“Ander’s going to come for you,” I said. “I need to know more if we’re going to stop him.”
Her forefinger flicked the top button of my shirt, opening the collar. Her fingernail tickled against my chest. “Then I need you to help me remember. I need you to investigate Hope Jimenez and find out what she did. If we can follow her trail, maybe we can find a way out of the contract before Ander brings me back.”
“The contract. Right.” My mouth was dry.
She undid another button. “Will you help me remember, Cèsar? You’re the only one I trust to look into this.”
Frankly, I didn’t want to investigate. I didn’t want to know anything about the person Isobel used to be, or whom she had killed, or how she had died. I liked who she was now, straddling my hips and slowly stripping my shirt off.
But I’ve never been one to refuse a lady.
“Yeah,” I said. “I can investigate, even though you’ve lied to me about everything.” I added that last part mostly as a reminder to myself.
“Not everything.” She stroked her fingers through my hair. The light scrape of her fingernails radiated all the way into my stomach. “My past is a secret. Who I am—I’ve never been anything but honest about that with you. I’ve never pretended to act like a different person. The woman you know is the woman I am.”
It sounded good. She was saying the right things. “But you outright lied in Paradise Mile. You put us in danger.”
“I was afraid,” Isobel said. “I’m sorry.”
It was awfully hard to think when she kept stroking her fingers through my hair like that. I couldn’t decide if the urge to trust her was because my gut instinct thought I should, or because a slightly more southerly organ had taken control.
“I’d never turn you into the OPA, Izzy,” I said. “Whatever you did for Ander, whatever led you to Ander—that was another life.”
Relief sighed from her. “I haven’t let anyone in for a long time,” Isobel murmured, angling her hips so that she was rubbing against me, slow and rhythmic. “Living a lie is lonely.”
Yeah, thinking rationally just kept getting harder.
It was a bad idea to get cozy with Isobel, and not just because of the secrets and lies.
There was another reason I’d been resisting her. A reason who drove a Bugatti, wore designer everything, and once proposed marriage to Isobel. You know, the guy who I’d sworn my life to protect as his aspis.
That reason.
But goddamn, the last woman I’d been with had been a succubus assassin, and I didn’t even remember it. I’d had a dry spell of some embarrassing, not-worth-counting number of months leading up to that.
Isobel wasn’t the only one who lived a lie. Working for a secret government organization, my life was nothing but lies. And yeah, it was lonely.
There’s only so much self-control a guy can exert before he runs dry.
Isobel kissed me, and I let her. Her lips were the softest I’d ever tasted. Everything about her was soft. Her skin, her thighs, her breasts molding against my chest.
She pushed, and I dropped back on the bed. I didn’t stop her when she unbuttoned my shirt. But there was more between us than just clothing. There was my kopis, my boss, Isobel’s ex-boyfriend.
“I shouldn’t,” I started to say, but Isobel didn’t let me talk.
“No, Cèsar,” she said against my lips. “Don’t. Not anymore.”
Like I said, a guy only has so much self-control before he runs dry.
And I was definitely dry.
CHAPTER TEN
THERE ARE WORSE THINGS than waking up smashed against the wall of my apartment by a warm, curvy female body.
Even if the female body in question is a massive bed hog.
Not just a bed hog, but a pillow and blanket hog, too. My head was flat on the mattress, and I was completely naked, almost cold, while Isobel was swaddled in all of my sheets.
The blankets were pulled low enough to flash one bare breast. Her arm was flung over her eyes. She was oblivious to my gaze as it traveled down her exposed flesh to the curve of hip wrapped up in my sheets.
Her right leg was thrown over mine. She didn’t react when I cupped her thigh again.
Still just as perfect as the evening before.
I didn’t need a pillow anyway.
My hand kept stroking her leg absently as I mulled over the previous night. Not what had happened with Isobel and me, but what had happened after I had fallen asleep.
I hadn’t had any nightmares about the hallway. No dreams at all, as far as I could recall.
It would have been too much to hope that our confrontation at Paradise Mile had ended the nightmares. Ander was still out there. He still planned on making Isobel fulfill her contract. And he obviously knew where I lived—he’d sent me that invitation, after all.
The fact that he hadn’t come for us must have meant that my wards had worked.
Bless Suzy and her amazing witchcraft lessons.
Isobel rolled over with a sigh, scooting back so that her butt pressed against me. I might have believed she was still asleep if it weren’t for the little wiggle that made sure I was wedged right between the cheeks of her ass. It was a great place to be. Probably the best place in the universe. It definitely had been the night before.
“That an invitation?” I murmured into her neck.
She made a contented noise, a little bit like a purr. “It would be, but…”
“But?”
“Look at your clock, Cèsar.”
I did. And I immediately regretted it.
It was after nine in the morning.
I was running late. Really late. As in, an hour after I was supposed to be sitting at my desk late, with an hour of miserable traffic separating me from my destination. And that didn’t even take into account that Fritz would have expected to see me at his gym that morning.
The realization was even more effective at murdering my libido than a cold shower.
But Isobel was stretching the rest of herself up against me now, reminding me of the perfect curve between her ribs and hips, the weight of her body on top of mine.
The idea of leaving her alone was unbearable. Going where I couldn’t keep an eye on her—where I couldn’t keep two hands on her—seemed like the worst idea I’d ever had.
My cell phone caught my eye. The alert light was blinking.
As I watched, it buzzed with another text message.
I considered ignoring it. But Isobel said, “You better check that and get going.”
“You’re killing me.”
She gave me a pitying smile. “I’ll see you later?”
Like she could keep me away.
“You’re not leaving this apartment while I’m gone,” I said. “Got it? Not even to check the mail or, hell, to stick your hand outside a window and feel if there’s rain. I’ll be back for you as soon as possible. Until then, you’re stuck.”
Her expression darkened. “You don’t have to convince me to stay inside your wards.”
“Good.” I slapped that extremely juicy ass and got out of bed.
According to my cell phone, I’d missed multiple calls and texts. Only a couple of them were from Fritz. The rest were Suzy. All of them meant that I’d be in pretty big trouble, one way or another.
When you work for a government agency that routinely handles preternatural threats, getting trapped in a haunted house isn’t a valid reason to miss work. I mean, that’s the job. You have to make an appearance unless you’re literally tied up or dead.
Fritz would understand. He would have to, once I told him that Isobel was in danger.