by Selena Scott
“Well,” Celia reasoned. “You’re also the right-hand man to a demon and basically immortal, so you’ll forgive us if we think it’s strange to see you do something so normal.”
Arturo looked for a second like he was trying to restrain a smile before his face wiped clean. “Were you expecting me to be so powerful I’ve become self-cleaning?” he asked, quasi-innocently.
“Arturo!” Caroline exclaimed in delight. “You made a joke!”
“It’s been known to happen,” he said dryly, pulling an old pair of sweatpants out of the set of drawers in his room and tugging them on under his towel.
“Actually,” Martine chimed in, “he used to be quite funny.”
Arturo scowled at her. “I could still be funny. If I wanted to be.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re too busy putting yourself through unnecessary pain and intentionally scaring the pants off of everyone to have any time to be funny,” she replied, leaning against the wall under the window and letting her eyes drift outward, toward the sky. He scowled at her but she didn’t see it.
“Regardless.” He turned back to the group. “What the hell are you all doing in my room? I thought our lovely little kumbaya moment at the table would have tided you all over at least until tomorrow.”
“Oh!” Caroline jumped a little, as if she were just remembering that she was the one in charge here. “We’re conducting a little experiment. Here.”
She held the blank parchment out to Arturo and he eyed it with distrust. His gaze zipped to Martine. “What’s this?”
She turned to him. “You know what this is.”
He still didn’t take the parchment. “That can’t be right. Martine, you know that can’t be right.” His brow furrowed and they stayed frozen like that—Martine with half her back to him, her gaze out the window and Arturo staring at her.
“Will someone please explain what exactly you’re talking about?” Tre asked impatiently, his arms crossing over his chest. He was sick of the two immortals having all the information and rarely sharing it with the rest of them.
They ignored him.
“Take the parchment, Arturo.” Martine seemed exhausted.
He turned back to Caroline’s outstretched hand and stared down at it. A look of deep confusion crossed over his face, and then it segued, briefly, into something that looked strangely like fear.
For just a moment, maybe half a breath, Arturo’s wall came down and suddenly Tre could read his feelings, the same as he could Jack and Jean Luc’s. Arturo was scared. He didn’t want to touch the parchment. He didn’t want to know its secrets.
But the wall resurrected itself, Arturo’s face went blank, and he snatched the parchment from Caroline’s hand. “Well, there you go,” he muttered as a map of Montana immediately drew itself onto the paper.
“You’re the seventh person,” Caroline said, looking up at Arturo’s face in wonder.
“I knew there was a reason I didn’t fit in with the group,” Martine muttered, finally turning back to everyone. There were no glistening tears. Nothing but a steely expression.
“What do you mean you don’t fit in?” Thea demanded angrily, and perhaps a bit guiltily. She and Martine hadn’t exactly been fast friends. “You fit in just fine!”
“No,” Martine said as she shook her head. “Something has always been a bit off. And now I know what it was.” She turned and looked at the group. “I wasn’t meant to lead you to the demon. I was meant to lead you to Arturo. And now he’ll take you on from here.”
“You’re leaving?” The pain in Caroline’s voice had Tre wincing. He stepped forward toward her but she was already rushing toward Martine, taking her in her arms. Martine was stiff and surprised at the contact, the same as she’d been when Caroline had taken her hand.
“Not yet.” Martine pulled away from Caroline. She turned and stared at Arturo. “All of you have to make a connection with one another or you don’t stand a chance at destroying him.”
“Do you even want to destroy the demon?” Jean Luc asked Arturo, his arms crossed over his chest.
As if a sudden wind had blown through the room, a wave of Arturo’s blue energy pulsed out from him. His feelings came with it. Rage, scorn, pain, humiliation, terror, regret, heartache, all of it washed over them. He couldn’t keep it in. He couldn’t control it.
The group wasn’t hurt, but they were shocked by the outburst. Arturo’s face was dark and hateful, his eyes on Jean Luc’s.
“Of course he wants to destroy the demon,” Martine said, stepping forward and laying a hand on Arturo’s shoulder. “He’s been enslaved by him for nearly four centuries.”
“Drinks.”
Everyone turned to look at Caroline who was squinting thoughtfully into the air.
She nodded. “Yup. We need drinks. Yeah. Okay, everybody into the kitchen.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Once Caroline had made a huge pitcher of some fruity liquored-up punch, they all sat around the kitchen table together.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” was the first thing out of Arturo’s mouth.
“Too bad,” Thea said, swigging her drink and glaring over the rim of the cup.
“How did you come to be enslaved by the demon?” Celia asked.
“I’m not talking about it.”
“Arturo…” Martine tried. To no avail.
“No!” Arturo leaned back in his chair like a petulant child. “I owe these people nothing. Least of all my story.”
“These people,” Martine snapped back, “took you away from the demon, they severed your connection with the demon. They plugged you into their own story, they are the reason you’re the seventh soul, you ass. So whether you like it or not, you’re going to quit withdrawing every possible moment. To your detriment and theirs.”
No one at that table had ever really seen Martine lose her temper before.
Tre capitalized on the shock of the moment.
“What can you tell us about the demon? What’s his style of attack? How do we defend against him?”
Arturo turned his dark eyes on Tre and stared, his expression inscrutable. The seconds ticked away. And then, finally, “Are you scared he’s coming for you?”
Tre told himself to maintain eye contact, this was a pissing contest if he’d ever seen one. But after having spent all these nights touching Caroline, it was almost as if some part of him never stopped pulsing for her. She was sitting across the table from him but he could feel her there. The way she shifted in her chair, the rise and fall of her breath. He tried not to break eye contact with Arturo, but he couldn’t help it. His green-brown eyes flickered toward Caroline for a bare second.
Arturo’s eyes shuttered and a cold laugh wrenched out of him. “I see,” he said slowly. “You’re scared he’s coming for her.”
“Me?” Caroline asked innocently, her eyes ping-ponging between Tre and Arturo.
“You, angel.” Arturo kept his eyes on Tre but he leaned back in his chair so that he was almost shoulder to shoulder with Caroline. Tre wanted to jump across the table and rip Caroline away from this asshole. Apparently Arturo was on a tear. “Loverboy over there probably picked up on the pattern. When the demon went for Jack, he really went for Thea. When the demon went for Jean Luc, he really went for Celia. Now that he’s going for Tre, well he’s probably coming for you.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tre growled, leaning forward on the table. “There’s no reason to freak her out.”
“It’s not like it hadn’t occurred to me,” Caroline said quietly, her eyes on Tre’s. “But I didn’t…”
“Didn’t what?” Tre had to know.
Arturo laughed and it was cruel-sounding. “She didn’t realize you cared enough for that strategy to be effective.”
Tre blanched when he looked at Caroline and saw the truth of it on her face. Somehow in all this, she still hadn’t gotten the memo that Tre cared for her. Truly cared.
Tre felt an ancient insecurity rise up within
him. Even when he cared this hard, he wasn’t doing it right. Every single night, he was trying to show her how he felt. How precious she was to him. And then every day, he woke up feeling vulnerable and a little freaked and all he could do was be sweet and kind and patient with her. What more could she need? He inwardly cringed at that thought. Because wasn’t that the whole problem? That he didn’t know the answer to that question. He didn’t understand what loving someone looked like. He didn’t understand the rules. He didn’t know how to show her he cared. So much so that she hadn’t even known.
He could feel her eyes on him across the table but he didn’t look at her, he kept his gaze glued on Arturo.
“Let me make this real simple for you, angel,” Arturo went on. “I noticed a few things while I was watching you all before my lovely little abduction. Loverboy does care about you. Obviously, considering he can barely keep his tongue in his mouth whenever you’re around.” Tre bristled, but said nothing. It wasn’t like it was a lie.
“But let me just explain a little more about what this man is and isn’t capable of.”
Tre felt sick.
He felt like he knew what words were going to come out of Arturo’s mouth even before the asshole said them.
“Tre is capable of love,” Caroline said, her brow furrowed in confusion, like the things Arturo was saying weren’t making sense.
Tre’s stomach swooped at her easy defense of him, but it also plummeted because what Arturo was saying did make sense. It made painfully crystal-clear sense.
“He’s capable of wanting you. Of pleasing you, sure. But of maintaining a relationship with you? Not at all. He’s not built that way. And neither was I. You all want to know how I know this?”
Arturo pierced each one of them with horrible eye contact. “Because I’ve been there. I was Tre. I had a woman. I had Amelia.”
He turned back to Caroline. “You don’t have to worry if he cares about you, Caroline. He certainly does. He cares about you so much he’d sacrifice himself for you if it came down to it.”
“What?” Caroline looked stricken.
“But don’t let that get your heart in a flutter, angel. Because that’s only half the reason he’d do that for you. You know the other half? Because at some point, you’re all going to realize that the demon is unbeatable. And one of you is going to have to go. And Tre is gonna be damned if it’s you, angel. He’s going to look at himself and decide he’s worth less than the rest of you. The way he’s been doing his whole life. The way even his daddy did. And he’s going to sacrifice himself just to save you, angel. Ain’t that sweet, Caroline? He’s going to put you through a lifetime of regret and loss and suffering all because he couldn’t see himself clearly enough to know that he should just fucking keep on living. God—FUCK. Get out of my head!”
Arturo’s face crumpled in pain as he half-rose and clutched at his head and stomach at once. His emotions were an impenetrable wall, like a mirror made of ice, but that hadn’t stopped Jack and Jean Luc from attempting to break through and read him. Understand his angle. And that probing was the only thing that could stop the tirade of words from Arturo. He crumpled in pain, his knuckles white against the table.
“Don’t hurt him,” Caroline said weakly. “Please.”
The men pulled back and Arturo took a weak, gasping breath. He rose and strode from the room, the door to his bedroom clicking closed.
“I’m sorry,” Martine said into the hands she’d pyramided over her face. “I should have known what happens when you back him into a corner. He fights to the death. Always has.”
“I can’t believe that son of a bitch is our seventh,” Thea griped, pinching the bridge of her nose. Her eyes flew open. “Martine, you can’t leave us.”
“I won’t leave,” she replied. She was realizing that she was going to have to stay and act as a chaperone of sorts. She missed the days when all she had to do was slay the fucking demon.
“What does he mean that he sacrificed himself?” Tre asked quietly.
Martine sighed deeply but figured that Arturo had opened this can of worms just wide enough that she would have to pull the cap off completely. “He means that when the demon hunted Arturo’s group, almost four hundred years ago, the demon captured the woman Arturo loved. Amelia. I was there. I couldn’t get to her fast enough. Arturo got there before I could. He knocked her away and took the blow. It was his soul that the demon took.”
“But he’s still alive,” Jack said.
“The demon had never encountered a soul as… interesting as Arturo’s. He realized he didn’t want to take him all at once. So he took only a bit and has been slowly feeding from him ever since. He’s long since realized what a valuable helper Arturo is. So he won’t kill him. He’ll never fully kill him. He’ll string him along forever. Which is why he hunts you all. For food.”
Caroline barely heard any of this. She only had eyes for Tre, who was white as a sheet across the table, his eyes downcast and his tattoos sticking out like illustrations on a page.
Jean Luc spoke in that low rumble of his. “He was just trying to get in your head.”
Tre didn’t move. Didn’t acknowledge the words for a long moment. Then he lifted his head. “Yeah. Well. It worked.”
“He’s not omniscient, Tre,” Martine told him. “The story isn’t mine to tell. But he isn’t so powerful that he can just look at you and know what’s in your soul. He’s telling you what he sees in you because he knows the path you’re walking. He’s walked it himself. The two of you are actually very similar.”
Tre scoffed in disgust. “Great. So glad I have things in common with that asshole. Can’t believe I thought we should try and befriend him.”
Tre rose up and quietly stepped through the living room and through the kitchen. He was already tugging off his pants as he stepped onto the porch. Caroline rose to follow him but Jack put a hand on her arm to stop her.
Seconds later, they watched Tre’s grizzly bound through the field in the far window.
***
Tre didn’t return for hours. Caroline had several unfamiliar feelings roiling within her. It was something hot in her gut. Something tight. And not necessarily in a good way.
When she heard him return, she ducked out into the hallway to see him but he was back in his room with the door firmly latched shut.
Caroline stood outside in the hallway, staring at that closed door, her arms crossed over her chest in a very un-Caroline-like way. She marched to her room and slid into her pajamas. A button-up pajama shirt with a big floppy collar and pajama shorts. The design was sky blue with clouds all over them. She piled her hair on top of her head and flopped backwards onto the bed.
She remembered once watching a TV show where two people built cars from scratch and then raced them. Whoever won the race won a bunch of money. At one point, one of the cars was revving its engine and the back of the car was slipping and sliding, trying to race forward but it just couldn’t get purchase. That was exactly how Caroline felt at that very moment. All cylinders firing, but she just couldn’t find the traction.
The feeling in her gut multiplied.
And again.
She sat straight up, pulled two scrunchy socks on her feet and strode out of her room and down her hallway. She slammed into Tre’s room without knocking.
Jack and Jean Luc were already there and she barely saw them. She stared a hole into the side of Tre’s head where he leaned against the wall.
Jack slid off Tre’s bed and Jean Luc straightened up from his slouch on the other end of the room. Without a word, they slid past Caroline and out of the room. Jack lingered just long enough to give her a kiss on the side of the head. “Give him hell, darlin’. He needs it.”
And then the door clicked closed behind them and Caroline and Tre were left alone.
All the lights were on in the room. The lamps and the overheads. The night was a black hole out the window over Tre’s shoulder. He stared at her from across the room, his face as p
ale as it had been that morning after Arturo’s speech, his eyes just as unreadable.
A long minute passed with nothing more than breath between them. They stood ten feet apart in the room and it might as well have been fifty. Just that morning they’d been naked and warm and plastered all over one another. So much had changed and Caroline didn’t understand a quarter of it. She didn’t think Tre did either.
Finally, she spoke. “I’m not going to beg you to want me, Tre.”
“You don’t have to beg, love. I want you so bad it hurts. I’m gonna want you forever.” He leaned his head back and his skull clunked against the wall. He looked as if he was in some sort of unnatural pain. Like something at the heart of him was being pinned to the wall by its skin.
She wasn’t dumb. She knew a goodbye when she heard one.
“What is all this?” she asked suddenly, pushing off the wall. “Whatever is happening right now. What is it?”
Tre took a deep breath, the bright lights turning his coppery hair an unforgiving orange. He didn’t take a step toward her but Caroline was almost positive he wanted to. “What Arturo said—”
“Oh, fuck Arturo.”
Tre let out a surprised bark of laughter at the rare joy of witnessing Caroline swearing. He eyed her for a second. “You look like a princess right now.”
“What?” she asked in surprise. She could feel the irritated scrunch of her face, the pile of her hair, the dumb cuteness of her pajamas. She’d never looked less regal in her life.
“Caroline…” He squeezed his eyes closed. “If I was capable of keeping you, do you know what I would want to do for you? I’d want to draw baths for you every night. I’d want to detail your car on the weekends. I’d want to buy you a thousand pairs of those big-ass socks you wear so that your feet never get cold. I’d want to help solve any problem you had. But Caroline, Arturo is right. I’m not capable of taking care of you the way you deserve. The only thing I’m good for is—”
“You’re an idiot.”
“What?”