Where Demons Fear to Tread

by Stephanie Chong

  “It’s done, sir,” Harry said gently. “I’ve already arranged for a team of men to watch her and a detail to follow Corbin, as well. I suspected you would want a follow-up.”

  “Tell them to be discreet. I don’t want her knowing they’re there.” Julian’s shoulders slumped. If he couldn’t be with her himself, at least he could still offer his protection.

  “Don’t worry, sir. Corbin promised not to hurt her. He signed a contract. In blood,” Harry said, grimacing.

  Julian wanted to howl. Corbin was forever making bargains, but he always found some way to manipulate himself out of them. He was a master of twisting the rules. Although he ought to have been bound by them, somehow he never was. Julian could only hope that the blood contract would restrain him. He had no other option. Keeping Serena might protect her from Corbin, but it would not protect her from himself.

  Instead of howling, Julian snorted a laugh. “Never bet the devil your head. Haven’t you ever heard of that old saying, Harry?”

  Harry’s forehead furrowed and he shook his head.

  “It’s from an Edgar Allan Poe story about a man named Toby Dammit, whose favorite saying is, ‘I’ll bet the devil my head.’ The devil challenges Dammit to jump over a certain obstacle. When Dammit goes to jump, his head is severed off by a sharp metal bar over the obstacle. Moral of the story: you can’t trust a deal with the devil.”

  Harry climbed onto the stool beside him. “But Mr. Ranulfson isn’t…”

  “The Prince of Evil? Not quite. But close enough.” Julian gave Harry a hearty clap on the back. “Sit down, Harry. You have a lot to learn if you’re going to survive in this business.”

  He ordered another round of gin and tonics. Outside, dawn was about to break. But here in the casino, the night was far from over.

  In the penthouse suite of the hotel across the street, Corbin pulled back the curtains and stood looking at his beloved hotel. Luciana joined him at the window, her hair still tangled and her lips slightly bruised after just leaving Nick’s bed.

  “You should not have gone to the human’s room,” he frowned, turning to her. “Julian could easily have found you.”

  “Julian is too busy to care tonight, and you know it,” she shrugged. “He has that girl.”

  “The hotel staff are on his side now. But no matter. It’s merely a temporary setback. We’ll regain the ground we lost with Julian and Serena. And we will make them pay.”

  “And Nick?” she said, hopeful.

  “Are you becoming attached to him, my dear? Your new lover will come in handy soon. He’s easily led, and he’ll do as we say. For now, it’s best that he’s gone along with Serena. Until we can figure out a way to use him.”

  Luciana nodded. The time for vengeance was near.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Nick stroked his fingers through the silk of Serena’s hair as she slept, stretched out in the back of his limo as they drove back to L.A. Even in slumber, her face showed signs of stress, her forehead pinching into a little furrow as she dreamt. She still outshone every girl he knew, even the ones who got paid to be beautiful. Why she didn’t seek out fame or attention for her beauty, he had no idea. But it made her all the more extraordinary.

  Julian is a fool for letting her go, Nick thought. Once Serena and I are finally together, I’ll never let her go.

  His driver pulled up at the address she’d given, a weathered two-story house in Santa Monica. Respectable, but not luxurious. Nick would change that. He would make sure she never had to work a day in her life again. And she would change his life, too. He would finally have the love he had always craved. They would both be happy at last.

  And he would make sure she never, ever came into contact with Julian Ascher again.

  Gently, Nick shook her awake. She blinked, disoriented, still looking fragile and sad. He wondered what exactly had gone on between her and Julian, but knew better than to ask. She would tell him herself in time. When she was ready.

  “Thank you for bringing me home,” she said, delicately rubbing her eyes as she sat up. Then she smiled, leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

  He grasped her arm, gently but insistently. He knew he should probably wait, but he just couldn’t stop himself. There was something he needed to say, and he needed to say it now. Because Julian was finally out of the picture, and Nick had already been waiting for so long. “Serena, wait. I need to tell you something. I’m in love with you.”

  She swallowed as she looked at him, her exhaustion apparent in the dark circles beneath her eyes. “Oh, Nick. I’m so sorry. I don’t feel that way toward you.”

  “I know the timing must seem odd,” he blurted, trying to find some way to make her understand. “But I hope you’ll at least consider the possibility of things changing between us.”

  “It’s not a matter of timing,” she told him. “I’m afraid I’ll never be able to return your feelings.”

  “Why not?” he said, leaning forward from the black leather seat, trying to stop himself from appearing too concerned. He tried to mimic Julian’s coolness. But real life was not like playing a role. There were real emotions involved. Real hurt.

  “Apart from the fact that we’re both just hours away from being with other people? There are reasons that I can’t explain. But it all stems from the fact that I’m your—” Something hovered on the tip of her tongue, suspended there by a thin invisible thread. “I’m your friend, Nick. And I can never be more than that to you.”

  “You could be if you gave me a chance,” he said, starting to lose his cool. “You fell in love with Julian, didn’t you?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  He watched her face, the pained compression of her pretty mouth and realized exactly how mistaken he had been. She still wanted Julian, and she would for a long time to come. Her words were so hollow, her grief so deep that she was absolutely incapable of hiding it. Her inability to act was no longer so refreshing.

  She looked back at him, a hurt look in her eyes. She said, “I’m sorry. See you at the studio tomorrow?”

  He turned to stare out the car window, brooding. What would Julian say? He had no idea. He’d never been particularly good at improvising. Now, without a script, he was lost for words.

  “Nick, I know you’re upset.” She sighed, the weariness evident in her voice. He knew she was searching for words, too. But there was nothing left to say. What she finally came up with was weak. “This, too, shall pass.”

  But it wouldn’t. Serena wasn’t the kind of girl you forgot easily—Nick knew that in the pit of his gut. He watched helplessly as she climbed out of the car. And he realized that she was the kind of girl you would remember on your deathbed, as the one who got away.

  “Thank God you’re back!” Meredith said when Serena dragged herself through the front door of their apartment. “You look like you’ve been through hell.”

  “In a way, I have been,” Serena said wryly. She wanted to collapse the moment she stepped through the door, to crumple into a little heap on the kitchen floor. Instead, she settled for one of the kitchen chairs.

  She thought of Nick, looking so dejected in the limo. He needed more from her, she knew, needed reassurance and guidance. But she had nothing left to give. She was utterly and completely tapped out. She had run dry.

  Meredith gave her a look of absolute compassion. Serena didn’t say a word about what had happened, but her roommate seemed to understand completely. “You’re back now. Whatever happened, forget about it. Leave it behind. Get some rest. Tomorrow you’ll be back to focusing on your work, and you’ll move on.”

  Serena wanted to explain, searching for the words to make it all sound reasonable. When she did speak, her words sounded weary. “There’s goodness in Julian. He’s just afraid of it. If you knew him like I do, you would understand.”

  “I know him as well as I’ll ever want to know him,” Meredith said. “I’ve seen what goes on at his house. You’re better off without Julian. In time, y
ou’ll forget him.”

  But Serena knew that she wouldn’t. Julian had been emblazoned on her memory forever. The memory of his touch, of the feeling of his lips on hers, might fade. As much as she wished she could forget him, she knew she never would.

  Alone in her bedroom, she crashed on her bed, too tired to sleep. Beside her, the bed felt huge and empty. She smoothed her hand over the soft surface of the duvet cover, over the space where Julian’s body ought to have lain. And wished there were some way to bridge the gap between heaven and hell. But they were on opposite sides of a natural divide. Good and evil. Angel and demon. There was no way around the impossibility of loving him.

  Julian awoke late Saturday morning with a massive headache to the sound of jackhammers pounding on concrete. Then he realized that the drilling was only inside his own head. He hauled himself out of bed, his stomach struggling to keep down the contents of last night’s meal. Which had consisted solely of gin and tonic.

  “What is the cure for a hangover?” he muttered to himself. He thought briefly about his old standby, Hair of the Dog cocktail. Gin, hot sauce and a slice of chili pepper. Disgusting, but it always seemed to do the trick. To get the ingredients, he’d have to go downstairs and find a bar, or pick up the phone and call room service… To hell with it. Might as well fight fire with fire. He grabbed a full bottle of gin and headed for the roof.

  The gin eased the hangover, replacing it with a buzz that numbed the ache of missing Serena. From the roof, Julian launched the helicopter and took off toward the desert. He flew like a madman, bearing toward his goal at a speed only a man hell-bent on suicide would attempt. He wanted to crash the helicopter. He wanted leave his body to rot out in the desert. Unfortunately, killing himself was not an option. His body would simply regenerate, returning him to the same situation he was trying to escape. Or else he would be returned to the underworld, to the ceaseless burn of those fiery pits. For a demon, there was no easy exit strategy. There was only this unending hell of existence.

  But Julian was no coward, and suicide was the coward’s way out. He was, however, tired. Exhausted by living. Exhausted by the centuries of endless corruption, of unrelenting vice. Any pleasure he’d taken in it had gone forever when Serena had walked out the door.

  He flew for hours, taking the same route he’d flown with her the day she’d almost died. Landed on the same plateau where they’d spread their picnic. Feet from where he’d parked the chopper, where she’d lain in the dirt and fought to stay alive, had grasped the edge of life as it had slipped away and had pulled herself back. She was a fighter, that one. A fighter until the end. She would not be one to wallow. He tried to picture her now, back in Los Angeles, sitting in her apartment or teaching at her yoga studio.

  He sat in the helicopter, staring at the layered rock formations, down into the wide mouth of Bright Angel Canyon. What had once seemed beautiful now seemed merely vacant without her. He’d been right about Keats. Beauty did not always amount to truth. Beauty could be evil, and it could also be empty.

  His bright angel had left him. He had forced her to go. She was better off without him.

  When his buzz started to wear off, he grabbed the bottle of gin from where he’d tossed it on the passenger seat, took a swig and let it burn down his throat.

  Would Serena think of him? If she did, what would she remember? The worst, probably. That he’d coerced her into the trip in the first place. That he’d exposed her to Luciana and that nearly lethal snakebite. That he’d bet her on a card game and almost lost her. That he’d made love to her, then abandoned her like a one-night stand he’d picked up in a bar somewhere.

  She would not remember that he had fallen in love with her. That she meant more to him than any other person or thing he’d ever encountered in his two centuries of existence.

  Because she would never know.

  At the same time that Julian was drowning his self-pity in gin, Nick was numbing out the pain of living by taking copious amounts of prescription painkillers. He didn’t remember calling Corbin and Luciana. But on Saturday afternoon, they showed up on the doorstep of his bungalow in L.A. He peered at them through his drug-induced fog.

  “We made the trip from Vegas just for you, my friend,” Corbin said, as the couple walked in and made themselves comfortable in his living room. “We knew you would need the support.”

  “Finally, some real friends,” Nick said, collapsing onto the sofa beside Luciana. “Nobody takes me seriously, not even Serena. I want what you have. I have wealth and fame. But I don’t have any real power. Nobody respects me.”

  “Hush now, amore,” Luciana said, stroking her long fingers through his hair. “We respect you.”

  “We can make everything easy,” Corbin offered. “It’s going to require one small sacrifice. But afterward, you can have whatever you want.”

  “Like what kind of sacrifice?” Nick asked.

  Luciana laughed. “Caro, have you ever thought about what a pain life is?”

  “Of course,” Nick said irritably, wondering what she was getting at. “But so what?”

  “You don’t have to feel so much pain. If you’re no longer alive…” said Corbin.

  Nick almost laughed out loud. “What, kill myself? You’re kidding, right?”

  Neither of them even cracked a smile.

  “Don’t worry, death is not as difficult as it might seem,” the hotelier said. “Once you get over the pain of living, you’ll be much stronger in your afterlife.”

  Of course they were joking. For all of the pain life had caused him, Nick had never once contemplated suicide. But looking into Corbin’s eyes, a new idea began to form inside his head. Yes. Of course. I might as well end it now. Nothing had ever been so clear to Nick. So he said, “You’re right. I’ll be much stronger in my afterlife. The only question is, how do I get there?”

  “We’ll be here with you,” Corbin told him. “But you have to decide how you want to go.”

  “Well, there’s one easy way that comes to mind.” Nick opened a drawer in his coffee table. Inside was his smorgasbord of drugs, a collection of baggies and bottles that he kept on hand for parties and other little emergencies. Cocaine, Ecstasy, Percocet, heroin, Vicodin. All his favorites were there. And then some.

  “Let me help you,” Corbin said, perusing the stash. He took out a small handful of pills here, a few grams of powder there. “Yes, this should do the trick.”

  Later that afternoon, when Serena awoke after a long nap, the shock of leaving Julian had begun to dissipate. But now the real pain set in. Pain so intense she thought she might die from it. Wished that she would lift right out of her physical body and ascend back to the heavens, back to disembodied bliss. Wished she could burst through the thin membrane of life that bound her to the material realm.

  She had finally experienced love, and it hurt more than anything she had ever known before. Yet, life without Julian would go on. Somewhere deep inside of her, Serena knew that. Whether she would ever get over loving him…now, that was another story.

  Yet, as painful as it was, she knew she could not simply stay at home and mourn forever.

  She did what she had always done in times of pressure and pain. What she had done when her father had died. She went to the yoga studio and rolled out her mat on the studio floor.

  In only a matter of days, her body felt like it had aged a decade.

  She moved slowly, allowing her muscles the chance to readjust to the familiar movements. It hurt, this confrontation with the unavoidable reality that she was yoked in this physical body. As she flowed through the postures, her mind returned again and again to Julian.

  To Julian’s touch. To Julian’s kisses. To the day he had come into the studio. The room hadn’t changed, and neither had her yoga practice. Yet, nothing would ever be the same. He had become a part of her. She closed her eyes and pushed on, trying to lose herself in the waves of her breath, counting each inhalation and exhalation and letting that steady rhythm carry
her through the practice.

  Afterward, she lay on her back in corpse pose, looking up at the bright patterned scarves on the ceiling. Before, this place had always felt like home. Coming to the mat, she had always felt whole and complete. Now, she felt like something was missing. She tried to discipline herself not to think of him. She didn’t need him, she told herself. He was not essential to her life, like oxygen, or water, or food.

  Somehow, she would go on without him.

  Her phone beeped. Ordinarily, she turned it off the moment she entered the studio, but today she hadn’t, not only because she was waiting to hear from Nick. But also in the pathetic hope that Julian would call. Her fingers shook as she picked it up, clicked on the message that she’d just received. Julian had not called.

  It was a one-word text from Nick.

  Goodbye.

  The word sent a chill over her. What did that mean?

  Goodbye?

  Oh, no.

  She slammed out of the yoga studio, fingers shaking as she locked the door behind her, heart thundering in her chest as she jumped into her car. She had taught Nick’s first yoga lesson at his West Hollywood home before moving his sessions into the studio. As she drove there, foot heavy on the gas pedal, every minute seemed to stretch into an eternity. Time expanded, and it seemed as though she had slipped into a surreal nightmare as she sped toward the inevitable.

  Outside Nick’s bungalow, an ambulance was parked, its lights still flashing. She got out of her car and approached the open front door. Inside, a team of paramedics pumped the chest of the body lying on the living-room floor.

  Just like her father.

  And just like her father, Nick was dead by the time she arrived, his body cold and lifeless.

  “May I see him?” she asked, moving toward him. She stood over him, tears slipping down her cheeks. Laid a hand on his forehead. At rest, Nick looked so peaceful, finally. Angelic, almost.