Crave fa-2

by J. R. Ward

  He shook his head. “No looking. Promise me . . . no more looking at me.”

  Pale hands went back up to that beautiful face and she nodded. “My name is Cecilia. Sissy Barten—with an ‘e.’ I’m nineteen. Almost twenty.”

  “You live in Caldwell?”

  “Yes. Am I dead?”

  “I want you to do something for me.”

  Now she dropped her arms and stared at him hard. “Am I dead.”

  “Yes.”

  She closed her eyes as another wave of shaking shot through her body. “This isn’t Heaven. I believe in Heaven. What did I do wrong?”

  Jim felt something hot at the corners of both his eyes. “Nothing. You did nothing wrong. And I’m going to get you there.”

  If it was the last fucking thing he did.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a soldier.”

  “Like in Iraq?”

  “Used to be. Now I fight that bitch—er, female who did this to you.”

  “I thought I was helping . . . when the lady asked me to carry a bag for her. I thought I was helping. . . .” She inhaled sharply as if she were trying to compose herself. “You can’t get out of here. I’ve tried.”

  “I’m going to save you.”

  Abruptly, her voice got stronger. “They hurt you.”

  Shit, she was looking at him again.

  “Don’t worry about me—you worry about yourself.”

  A sound, like something dropping or maybe a metal door shutting, echoed up, startling her and focusing him. Undoubtedly, Devina was going to come soon enough and put Sissy back wherever she had been so he had to act fast. He didn’t know when he was going to return here or how exactly to free his girl.

  Sissy, that was.

  “Is that her?” Sissy asked tightly as footfalls sounded from far away. “It’s her, isn’t it. I don’t want to go back into the wall—please, don’t let her—”

  “Sissy, listen to me. I need you to calm down.” She had to have something to focus on, something to keep her head together while he figured out how to get back to her. Searching his mind, he tried to pull an image out of his ass, something to ease her. “I need you to listen carefully.”

  “I can’t go back there!”

  Fuck, what could he give her to concentrate on? “I have a dog,” he blurted.

  There was a beat, as if he’d surprised her. “You do?”

  As the footsteps drew closer, he wanted to curse. “Yeah, I do.”

  “I like dogs,” she said in a small voice, her eyes locking on his.

  “He’s gray and blond and he’s shaggy. His fur . . .” The footsteps grew ever louder and Jim spoke quicker. “His fur is kind of rough—like it’s made up of old-man eyebrows, and he has little paws. He likes to sit in my lap. He has a limp that comes out if he runs too fast and he likes to eat my socks.”

  Sniffle and a hitch of breath. Like she knew what was approaching and she was going to do her best to hang on to the lifeline he was trying to give her. “What’s his name?”

  “Dog. I call him Dog. He eats pizza and turkey subs and he sleeps on my chest.” Faster. Faster with his words. “You’re going to meet him, ’kay? You’re going to take him out onto a patch of grass and . . . You know how you can tuck one sock into another?”

  “Yes.” Urgent now. Like she wanted as much as he could give her. “A sock ball.”

  “Sock balls—that’s right.” Fast, fast, fast. “You’ve got a sock ball and you’re going to throw it and he’s going to bring it back to you. Sun is out, Sissy. You can feel it on your face—”

  “When are you coming back?” she whispered.

  “Soon as I can.” He was talking at a blur now, the footsteps so close he knew they were stilettos with sharp, pointed heels. “You remember Dog. You hear me? When you feel like you’re losing it, you remember my dog—”

  “Don’t leave me here—”

  “I’ll come for you—”

  Sissy’s face was slick with tears as she reached out for him. “Don’t leave me here!”

  In an instant, she morphed into the condition she’d been in when he’d seen her over that tub, that sheath disappearing and leaving her naked, her body desecrated, her blond hair tangled and matted with blood.

  Abruptly, her eyes shot to the far corner and her stained lips trembled. “No!”

  She put her hands up as if to ward off blows, bowing away—

  Just like that, she was gone. And Devina, beautiful, evil Devina, walked into the candlelight.

  Jim fucking lost it.

  Snapped in half.

  Broke like a motherfucker.

  As he screamed bloody murder, it was all about the girl. The innocent girl who had been taken from her family by a demon, and pulled into a shithole, and imprisoned here . . . and forced to see the aftermath of a grown man defiled.

  Rage was a nuclear blast that went off inside him—

  White light poured forth from his eye sockets, exploding in the room, illuminating the glossy black walls that ran upward into infinity. The release consumed his physical form, freeing him from Devina’s constraints, carrying him around the space in a rush-gust of loose molecules that blew out the candles and knocked over their stands.

  Coalescing, he whirled around . . . and went gunning for Devina.

  Now she was the one bracing for impact, her brunette hair stripped back from her scalp under the hurricane blast of him, the skin on her face flapping against the bone structure underneath as she lost her balance and went over onto the stone floor.

  Just as he reached her, Jim pulled his new form together into a spearing lance and hurled himself right for her chest.

  He entered her body and blew that bitch away, all of her parts going flying, pieces of her skin and tangles of slippery innards and pounds of dark red meat spackling the walls of her dungeon.

  What was left was a black hole of equal mass and energy as that which made up him—and he was ready to go at it with her.

  Except, evidently, she wasn’t up for a head-to-head fight: Her warping shadow shot out of the room and down a hall, making an escape.

  Fuck. That.

  Jim rushed forward after her—

  And slammed into the metaphysical equivalent of a brick house.

  The shocking impact of the nonvisual barrier sent him backward and he became corporeal once again as he skidded over the stone floor on his raw ass.

  He had one brief moment of what-the-hell, before his body’s Game Over sign flashed and he fell flat on his back in utter exhaustion.

  With his anger spent, there was nothing left in him, and a fatal fatigue bled out from his wonky-beating heart and spread through him sure as a weed taking root and thriving. No longer able to hold his head up, he let the thing rest on the stone and just breathed, dimly noting that the air was saturated with both the copper scent of fresh kill and the acrid pinch of still-smoking candlewicks.

  “Sissy,” he said into the darkness. “I’m right here. . . .”

  He had no clue whether she could hear him and there was no response. Just an eerie, molten sound . . . no doubt the souls trying to get free of their prison.

  He hated the idea that his girl was trapped in there.

  Hated that she had seen what he’d looked like.

  At that thought, pain bored into him as surely as if he’d been stabbed with a crowbar. Oh, God . . . that poor child . . .

  A sudden surge of emotion fell upon him in a tidal wave: Naked and broken and filthy, Jim curled onto his side and wept in great heaving gags, his tears hot and salty on the broken skin of his face.

  He had never cared about any damage to himself. Ever. But his failings . . . his failings were unsupportable. And now there were two women he had not been able to save, his beloved mother and Sissy. . . . Both times, he had walked into a room too late; both times the damage had been done before he’d arrived.

  With horrid acuity, he saw his mother on their kitchen floor at the farmhouse, all but slau
ghtered . . . and Sissy over the tub.

  Sissy just now as well, trying to ward off the demon.

  It was too much to bear, the weight of his failures too great for him to withstand, much less go on fighting—

  The sound of his name opened his eyes and slowed the raw sobs.

  With vast effort, he turned his head and looked up.

  Far, far, far above, a galaxy away from where he lay, a pinpoint of light gathered and grew stronger, starting first as the tiny flicker of a blinker on a Christmas tree . . . and then growing to a twenty-five-watt, then a sixty-watt, then a hundred-watt bulb.

  The illumination drifted down to him with all the speed and efficiency of a feather falling through still air . . . of dandelion puffs blown from a child’s mouth . . . of milk-weed caught on a gentle breeze. . . .

  The disconnect between his epic despair and the delicate path of the light was a span too great for his mind to straddle. Closing his eyes, he stopped watching and gave himself over to the random shudders of his beaten body.

  “Jim.”

  A male voice. Above him.

  He cracked his lids to see that the light had become a dark-haired man with magnificent golden wings.

  Colin.

  The archangel. Nigel’s number two.

  “Hey, mate,” the guy said as he knelt down. “I’ve come to get you out of here.”

  From somewhere, God only knew where, Jim called up enough energy to speak. “Take her instead. Leave me . . . take her instead. Sissy. The girl . . .”

  “That I can’t do. I shouldn’t be here even now.” The angel leaned forward and gathered Jim’s broken form into his arms. “But you’re going to need some recovery time before you can so much as sit up, much less drag ass out of here. And the war is proceeding without you.”

  No argument there on his energy level, but God, he’d rather have Sissy a million miles away from here.

  “Leave me,” he moaned.

  “Not on your life. You want Sissy free? You beat Devina. That’s how you unlock this nightmare for your girl.”

  As they began to levitate, Jim’s head lolled to the side and he watched as up, up, up they went, past yards and yards—hell, miles—of the black walls. Along the way, Colin’s glowing form illuminated the shifting, churning surface, and faces pushed against the opaque, liquid barrier, as if those trapped were trying to see them, get to them, join them in the escape. From every direction, hands reached out, contouring into grotesque shapes as the tensile strength of the prison proved too hard to get through.

  Where was his girl? His beautiful, innocent girl who . . .

  Jim’s brain ran out of gas, the weave of his thoughts unraveling, consciousness giving up the ghost and going in for a deep lie-down in the hard-walled crib of his skull.

  As he passed out, his last mental missive was a prayer—that Sissy would remember Dog in this hellish place and hold on until Jim could get to her.

  CHAPTER 33

  Down in the wine cellar, with Jim Heron’s picture staring up out of a dossier, Isaac was pretty damn sure both Childes had lost their minds.

  “He’s not dead.” Isaac glanced between father and daughter. “I’m not sure what you saw or what you heard—”

  “He was in my room.” Grier shook her head. “That’s how I knew you were having the nightmare. He pointed the way so I would go to you. I thought it was a dream, but why would I have pictured his face so clearly?”

  “Because you saw him. Last night at the fight. He was with me.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  Right. The guy had stood directly in front of her. “You said he was an angel.”

  “Well, it appeared as if he had wings.”

  It was theoretically possible that Heron had paid her a visit—but with the security alarm, you’d have to assume that if he had, he’d merely been on the far side of her French door. In her disorientation from waking up, she’d no doubt only thought he was inside. And that had been just a coincidence with Isaac’s nightmare. . . . As for the wings? Jim Heron had been no saint, much less an angel. Whatever she’d seen had to have been reflections in the glass. Had to be.

  Grier’s dad spoke up. “I’m telling you, he’s dead. I keep alert tracers on the Internet on the names of the operatives I know of—and he was shot in Caldwell, New York, four days ago.”

  Isaac rolled his eyes. “Don’t believe everything you read. I spoke with the guy in the back garden here at nightfall. Face-to-face. Trust me, he’s alive, and we need him.” Isaac got to his feet. “His buddies are watching this house as we speak, and personally, I think Heron’s declared a vigilante war on Matthias—so I’m pretty damn sure we can get him to work with us—assuming they haven’t killed him already. I believe he’s MIA at the moment.”

  “I hope he turns up then because the more you have to go on, the better.” Childe tapped the dossiers. “You should plan on reviewing all of this tonight, filling in the blanks, trying to piece together what you know—even if you don’t want to turn in your fellow soldiers, it may aid your own recollections. I’ll go upstairs into the hall bath and use my secured phone there to make some calls and get things set as fast as I can.”

  “Roger that. But I want you to stay away from the windows and not leave the house.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Childe glanced at his daughter. “I promise.”

  As Grier’s dad disappeared up the stairs, Isaac checked the Life Alert. The transistor was still showing that the signal had been sent, but there was no answer yet. Which meant either he was too far underground in this wine cellar to receive it . . . or Matthias was taking his own sweet time getting back in touch.

  He looked at Grier. “I’d better stay aboveground for a while in case they’re trying to reach me.”

  “What are you going to do? If they want to meet with you right away?”

  “Until I turn myself in, I’ve got a little leeway. But your father needs to work a couple of miracles fast.” And please, Lord, let Jim Heron be okay—and show up soon.

  She stroked the dossiers with her elegant hand. “He’s good at miracles. It’s actually his specialty. You should see him in negotiations.” Her eyes went down to the file. “I’m going to stay here. I want to see which if any of these men I recognize. There were a number who came to the door when I was growing up and I always wondered who they were.”

  As she fell silent, he took a step forward. And then another. Around the table he went, until he was by her side.

  When she looked up to him, he carefully brushed back a strand of hair from her face. “I’m not going to ask if you’re okay, because how could you be.”

  “Have you ever felt . . . like you don’t know your own life?”

  “Yeah. And that’s what got me to change.”

  Well, that had been the first step. He was starting to believe that she was the second. And between her father and Jim Heron . . . three was the magic number. God willing.

  “You know what?” she said. “I’m really glad I met you.”

  Isaac recoiled. “How in the good Lord’s name can you say that?”

  “You were the key that unlocked the lies.” She went back to staring at Jim Heron’s picture. “I feel like without you it would never have come to light. Only something so shattering . . .”

  As she let that drift, he stepped back. “Yeah. That’s me.”

  She nodded absently, turning the page and getting lost in the faces of men who were just like him . . . men who had ruined her family.

  Shattered it.

  Were the operatives who had killed her brother in there? With notes?

  Somehow he doubted her father would put her through that.

  “Can I bring you some wine?” he asked before he made himself go.

  Grier smiled a little. “I’m surrounded by it.”

  “True enough.” He should have offered coffee. Water. Beer. An oil change. Anything he could do for her or give to her to ease her.

  Well now, on that no
te, there was an improvement he could make. He could leave her.

  “I’ll be upstairs.” When he got to the door, he looked back. She was buried in the dossiers, brows tight, arms in her lap as she leaned forward over the table.

  Yeah, leaving her was going to make things so much better.

  He turned away and took the stairs up to the kitchen two at a time. Pausing at the base of the back stairwell, he listened. Not a sound. Which made sense if her father had locked himself up in a secured bathroom.

  Shit, he couldn’t believe that he was going to shine a light on Matthias. But then sometimes natural death was too good for someone. Better that they rot behind bars or get lit up like Times Square in an electric chair.

  It was almost as if he was supposed to have met Grier and her father at this precise junction in his life—that the pair of them had been preordained to show him a way out that was far more honorable than what he’d planned.

  Jim Heron was going to be important as well, however.

  Palming up one of his guns, he slipped out the back door into the garden.

  Sidestepping the motion-activated light, he waited in the shadows without making any noise, and sure enough, one of Jim’s pals stepped up a moment later. The instant he laid eyes on the guy, it was clear the vibe remained off: This one with the braid had the tight lips and hard stare of a man who still didn’t know where a member of his team was.

  “Jim not come in for a landing yet?” Isaac asked. Even though the answer was clearly, Fuck no, given that expression.

  “I’m hoping you can see him in the morning.”

  Isaac glanced at his watch. “I don’t know if I’ve got that kind of time.”

  “Make it.”

  Easy for him to say. “Will you let me know if he shows?”

  As the guy nodded once, Isaac got pretty frickin’ worried. “Is he all right?” When the man shook his head slowly, Isaac cursed. “You going to tell me what’s doing?” Silence. “You know, FYI, people think he’s dead.”

  “All I can say is . . . right now, he wishes he was.”

  Adrian watched as Eddie talked to Rothe up near the back door, and whereas Ad was usually nosy as hell, he didn’t care what they were saying.