“But . . .”
Pressing his fingers to my mouth so I’d stop, he continued. “When Frigg made every earthly object take the vow not to hurt Baldur, she missed one thing. Mistletoe.”
True regret etched his face, even though it was such a young face. Was some of his godliness coming through?
“I was at the height of my ego back then,” he said softly. “And I decided it would be a great joke to make a spear out of mistletoe. Then I decided it’d be even more clever to give that spear to Baldur’s blind brother, who was taking part in a foolish contest the gods were having, tossing every sharp object they could at Baldur, just because they knew he couldn’t be hurt.”
Oh no. He was right: I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the rest . . .
As he gazed up at me, his eyes were haunted, and now I knew why he felt such a kinship with spirits who were tied to a tether some of us couldn’t leave behind.
His tone lowered. “So Baldur died, and Odin made sure the god’s brother was destroyed for killing him. But I was such a proud being that I wouldn’t mourn Baldur, and I was punished, banished from sight of the other gods.”
“To the star place?”
“Not at first.” He skimmed a finger over my cheek. “I was tied to a rock and made to watch one of my sons kill the other. My dead child’s intestines were used to bind me, and a dark being was brought in to place a serpent above my eyes, dripping poison into them, blinding me. The pain was so awful that whenever I writhed in agony, I’d cause earthquakes.” Shadows deepened in his gaze. “My wife stood by all that time, wiping my eyes. . . .”
I glanced away, but he guided me back to looking at him.
“The earthquakes didn’t please the gods, and I was cast out again, a great deal of my power stripped away, and sent to a limbo, where I wouldn’t make trouble.”
Now he was talking about the star place.
I started to back off him. “Why haven’t I met your wife there?”
He grabbed my arms. “She hasn’t been by my side for thousands of years. Even the most loyal woman won’t stay with a god whose pride was more precious to him than she was.”
“Then . . .” I swallowed. “Is she one of the stars you keep up there?”
His smile was tender. “No. But you might say that for a long time, I was trying to replace her company with my entire, growing collection. I never could, though. Then one day, I realized that I couldn’t even remember her face because I’d been staring at the stars for too long. A century afterward, I saw you come out of your time loop.”
The depth of his loss and emotion shook me. And when he led me back to his lips, kissing me again, I felt his . . . love?
Had he learned that emotion after a near eternity in his star place? Was that what he had for me?
Whatever I felt for him was still new, still surprising, but my body was all too sure of what it felt, and when he took off my bra, kissing, nuzzling, worshipping my breasts, I became all his.
He knew exactly what he was doing, just like he’d never lost a step as a full-fledged god, with all those parties and orgies I was sure they’d had. He was a pro at coaxing off my jeans, my panties, and all the rest, then picking me up and laying me down on the bed. He stood above me in all his golden, humanlike glory.
He’d spent thousands of years in punishment, and now he wanted to be my champion, even if he was only thirty-nine years away from forgiveness.
I kept thinking about what he was sacrificing for me as he rubbed his hands up my naked legs, my waist, coasting his thumbs over my nipples, then back down over the center of my trembling stomach. Down, down over my belly to my center, where he parted me with his fingers, massaging.
My hips churned as I watched him watching me. I was ready for him. I’d been ready for months but I’d had pride, too, and I’d fought him tooth and nail.
“Make me pay,” I whispered.
His smile was starving now as he stood, stripping off his clothes, then standing before me with those gorgeous, streamlined muscles under tanned skin. Old meeting new, memory versus the mythic.
All mine, too.
He came to the bed, pressing skin to skin, pushing the hair back from my face and looking, just looking, at me until his erection nudged against me, sliding in.
I sucked in a breath, taking him inside, wiggling my hips and urging him as far as he could go. As he moved with me, I wrapped a leg around him.
Mine. His. Each other’s.
It felt like time was forever as fire breathed through my veins, huffing, scorching, ripping, and making me rise on a crest of hot, licking air, up, up, and—
I exploded so fast that I arched against him, crying out, dizzy and reeling as I breathed. Breathed. Holding him, wanting him even more . . .
Soon, he climaxed, and we clung to each other. Then, for some reason, I got shy. What was he to me now?
He stroked my neck, kissed it. Whenever I finally went back to being a ghost, I was going to be so colored up from being with him that everyone would know I’d popped the big O. That’s life.
He said, “I don’t have to read the future to tell you that they’re almost here, Jenny.”
They. The enemy. The ones who’d put me in the position to summon a god.
“We should be protected from negativity by those spells outside,” I said.
He played with a damp strand of hair that had stuck to my cheek. “Take it from me: hanging back in a safe place where you never get involved isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Your star place?” He’d made that promise to stay removed there.
He nodded. “You had a place like that, too, in your human days.”
The time after my parents had died. Smoky marijuana days, locked away from the world. Yeah, I knew.
“Are you telling me that I should go outside to face everything instead of just sitting and waiting to see if it can get at me?” I asked.
“I might be,” he said. “But anywhere you are, I’ll be there, too, Jenny. You just sealed that deal.”
As I turned my head toward him, losing myself in his gaze again, I was pretty sure I’d sealed much more than that.
23
Dennis Smith, my dark spirit, arrived with the witching hour.
But even before the time came, I had put my clothes back on and had gone downstairs to introduce Dean—I’d decided it was only natural for me to keep calling him that—to everyone. Of course, they loved him in his blond, grinning guise. He was charming, handsome, and here to save my world.
Maybe they could meet Loki later.
J.J. and Sierra had already dealt with the police and 10’s body, and they’d come straight here from Amanda Lee’s casita, even though they could’ve driven off in their ghost-hunter van and left us behind. I materialized and thanked them for sticking with us.
They were weary. J.J.’s bright eyes were even reddened, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the wood smoke in the room, 10’s death, or because he needed rest. Could’ve been all of the above.
“The cops want a word with Amanda Lee, since Landry died on her property,” he said. “She was around when your friend Marg died last year, and they’re going to start getting suspicious, won’t they?”
“Probably. But her hands are clean.”
Sierra’s glasses barely hid her own exhaustion and sadness. “Amanda Lee asked Ruben to run interference, since he’s an ex-cop. That should help.”
They’d told the authorities that they weren’t sure how 10 had died—she’d keeled over while staying overnight at Amanda Lee’s. It was as good of an explanation as any, I supposed.
Three o’clock arrived not long after that, and I knew exactly when the clock hit the darkest hour, because all the ghosts in the house got deathly quiet, like someone had walked over each and every one of our death spots. The Wiccans in the house h
ad already left by then, but we were set.
Dean came over to me from where he’d been chatting with Amanda Lee, while Ruben, his ball cap pulled over his face, lay on the couch nearby. Somehow he’d fallen asleep through everything. Maybe he was mental twins with McGlinn, who was also clocked out, a pile of hair and sprawled limbs in his easy chair.
“Your killer’s outside,” Dean told me. “He’s past the perimeter that the Wiccans put up. So’s the demon. It’s that thing’s power I’m feeling most of all.”
I remembered what Dean had said about either staying in a safe little corner of your own world or going out and facing your demons. Literally. And I thought about how Suze had convulsed during that hallucination tonight. How it could happen to Gavin and Amanda Lee and Ruben and Wendy, too, someday.
Dean laid a hand on my shoulder, his imprint strengthening me. I was colored up and healed from our time in the bedroom. I didn’t even have a skull wound anymore.
But we did have an issue.
I wouldn’t be able to fight as well in the body I had whenever he was around. In other words, I wouldn’t be as fast and or be able to wield the skills I had as a ghost, and in a body, I’d be open to all the mental tricks I’d played on humans, like hallucinations. Then again, with a body, I wasn’t sure Dennis would be able to do something like steal my essence.
I guessed I was about to see which way I’d be better off during this fight.
Dean understood my dilemma. “Listen, you say the word, and I’ll go as far away as I need to for you to be a ghost again. If you want to.”
“Sounds like you know how to get through one of these fights.”
I smiled. When he grinned back, everything inside me flipped.
Then his face took on a darker expression. “Damn, I haven’t been in a good fight for . . .”
“Thousands of years?”
“I was gonna say that I haven’t been in one since my powers were diminished.”
I touched his face. “You’ll still kick ass.”
Wow, I sounded brave, but I meant it. I had every confidence in Dean. Plus, I wanted to get this over with. Dennis Smith needed to be expelled from all our faces.
I glanced at Amanda Lee, who’d walked over to us, her hands folded in front of her.
“You’re so calm,” I said.
“I’m looking forward to this.” She had on that don’t-mess-with-mama smile.
As we walked toward the front door, Sierra joined us, blocking Amanda Lee. She laughed a little, then tentatively adjusted Amanda Lee’s turquoise necklace. Then, in the second awkward move I’d ever seen her make, she pushed her glasses back on her nose.
“Go, gladiator,” she said with a straight face. “Get the asshole.”
Amanda Lee seemed like she was going to respond, but a soft smile took over her lips instead. She laid a hand on Sierra’s arm, and they exchanged long looks.
But then Amanda Lee took a deep breath, opened the door, and marched out into the night, as reserved as usual. Maybe she’d just remembered Elizabeth’s face and she’d decided she wasn’t going to betray her dead girlfriend.
Maybe.
With one more look at all my friends—Suze standing next to Gavin, Wendy leaning her head on her brother’s arm, as they all slowly waved to me—I smiled with confidence, because I had a god with me. I walked over the threshold, Dean at my side.
Clouds corkscrewed the moon, giving a dreary feel to the chill of the dark. Suitable for the night we were about to have.
“Straight ahead,” Dean said.
I took the first step off the porch, and Amanda Lee matched my stride, along with Dean. I could feel everyone from the cabin watching us go, but I’d announced that I’d kill them if anyone made themselves vulnerable by leaving the protected spell area.
With every step, my heart slammed harder into me.
What the hell am I doing?
Maybe staying here would be smarter. . . .
But my thoughts spun away from me once we got deeper into the trees, and I spotted a glowing ghost hovering in the dimness, surrounded by the dark grasp of branches that looked like they’d been blackened by a fire at some point.
“All right,” Dean said under his breath. “He’s just across the protective boundary. He senses the Wiccans’ spell.”
It really was working. “Where’s the demon?”
“Don’t know.”
Amanda Lee stayed quiet, even as we got closer to Dennis, who started hopping up and down like an athlete warming up for a game. His compact, skinny body and chubby cheeks made me think he would’ve ridden any bench in high school.
“Look at that,” he said, switching to some lunges. “She showed up. And with friends! Amanda Lee, top of the night to you.”
Nothing from Amanda Lee.
That didn’t stop Dennis. “And who’s your man, Jensen? A boyfriend? You always had one of those in high school.” He talked to Dean. “But she didn’t put out back then. I wouldn’t get excited if I were you.”
Dean had his arms crossed over his T-shirted chest and was sizing Dennis up, like he didn’t know what to think of this aerobicizing weirdo.
“Interesting, though,” Dennis said. “Jensen looks as if she has . . . a body? Nice. It’ll be fun to haunt you that way.”
“Haunting’s all over.” This body had no mist in it, but I thought that if it was here, it’d be mocking every lunge and jog Dennis made.
I walked toward the protective line. Dean was ready to start up this fight, too, and we left Amanda Lee behind in spell-defended territory as we moved toward my killer, who opened his arms for me, laughing—
Before I got to the line, a blast of wind pummeled me, driving me away from everyone, and I reached for Dean, seeing him get smaller and smaller as I was lifted higher and higher . . . so high that my body went back into its ghost form because Dean wasn’t near.
Fighting the wind, I used all the energy in the air around me to untangle myself from whatever was controlling me, but I was strung up in the atmosphere. Was it Dennis doing this? Or was it his demon guide?
As my form whipped around, I couldn’t stop what was happening, not even when I saw what was spinning right in front of me: a light, a bright pool, with hands emerging from it . . . hands as graceful as waving lotus leaves raised to welcome me . . .
A glare.
I tried to put on the brakes, pulling back hard, harder. Where was Dean? And could a demon or my killer force me into a glare? Wasn’t I the only who could make that choice if I wasn’t the kind of bad person who should get dragged into the afterlife by a wrangler?
The air next to me seemed to crack open. Dean appeared, giving me back my body.
He floated, yelling above the wind. “Come to me, Jenny!”
I strained toward him, but I was in something like a tractor beam.
“That glare is an image from his demon!” Dean said. “But I don’t know what’s in it!”
Maybe something worse than the afterlife I was meant for?
When I glanced back at Dean, I could see him motioning toward the glare. Trying to erase it?
God versus demon. But it was a banished god with lesser powers . . .
The weirdest thought came to me as that glare towed me in. Flag football in PE. I’d been good at it, holding the class record for most touchdowns my junior and senior years. And I’d made them by avoiding the hands grabbing for my flags.
By twisting.
I jarred my body in a circle, then again . . .
Keeping at it, I twisted and twisted until I jerked out of the glare’s pull slightly, only to get caught up in the tow again.
I accelerated my twists more, more—
The air snapped free around me and, suddenly, Dean had my body in his arms and was bolting back down to the ground with me.
“H
is demon’s fighting his war,” I yelled.
“Dennis ain’t gonna like that.” Dean held me to him.
Another idea blipped into me, and it had everything to do with how Dennis was always disrespecting his demon. . . .
As we zoomed down to the ground, Amanda Lee and Dennis were in a staring contest. I could tell he was getting frustrated because he couldn’t cross the protective-spell line to lay his ghost hands on her while his demon was busy with me.
Dean quietly set my body on its feet, and I ran toward them, coming to stand in front of Amanda Lee, physically blocking her from Dennis. “Where’s your demon now?”
He glared. “I told you I don’t need it to help all the time.”
“Wasn’t it your pet that just blew me away?”
An awful cry sounded from above us—that baby’s caterwauling we’d heard before from the demon at Amanda Lee’s casita—and I started to understand how the thing might’ve been able to blow me away to that fake glare. It hadn’t crossed over a protective line; it’d circumvented it by coming at me from above.
“Cool, Dennis,” I said like the high-school senior who wouldn’t have ever given him the time of day. Or maybe I could’ve been his blond, sexually appealing, disapproving sister. “Way to have someone else fight your battles for you, loser.”
“I said I don’t need help.” His blue eyes pierced the night, fed by the fear I’d given him earlier when he’d been axing me to ghost-death. He looked into the sky. “Do you hear that? I didn’t ask you to hang around tonight, so you can just go back to hell or wherever you—”
It was like an invisible hand grasped Dennis, lifting him high, then tossing him into the sky. . . .
I held my breath while Dennis screamed, free-falling back down, only to be caught midair by that unseeable something.
Dennis reached out to us, panic on his baby face. “Ahhh-ck . . .”
Then it was like he was being rolled around in the air, and he started falling apart piece by piece, like he was in a mouth we couldn’t see and was being eaten.
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