“Please,” he whispered. “Don’t make me.”
Then, as if he were hypnotized, his hands slid down my arms, scooped inward and cupped me, lifting, kneading, thumbs rolling over the turgid peaks.
My head fell back as I offered my neck, my blood, myself. He buried his face in the soft mounds, his lips closing over me, taking cotton and flesh within. The heat, the pressure was both pleasure and pain. My hands tangled in his hair, holding him closer, urging him on.
I needed to feel his skin against mine, so I snatched the hem of the shirt, tugging it upward. The material got caught on his face; he released me as I whipped the shirt away.
But that tiny instant was my mistake. As soon as his mouth left me, sanity returned, and he stepped back.
“No,” he muttered. “We can’t.”
“Since when?” I followed him. “This has always been the one thing we could do. Very well.”
“I’ll lose control—”
I snatched his hand and brought it to my lips, pressing a kiss to his palm, flicking my tongue across the center, then grazing the wrist with my teeth as I pressed my bare belly to his erection. “I like it when you do.”
He tore away and crossed to the other side of the room, staring at the door as if he were trying to figure out how to break free. “What are you doing, Lizzy?”
He was too smart by half and far too strong-willed. But I couldn’t give up now.
“I’ll make you feel better.”
“I’ll make you feel dead,” he muttered.
“You can’t hurt me, Jimmy. Come on.” I lowered my voice. “You know you want to.”
“I’ve done nothing but hurt you,” he said, eyes wide, voice desperate. “I—I slept with Summer on purpose. I knew you’d see.”
“And I know you were ordered to do it.”
He went very still. “Who told you that?”
He wouldn’t remember I’d walked through his dreams. Dream walking was like that. The victim might think they’d dreamed of you, but they wouldn’t remember when or what or why.
However, Jimmy was a dream walker, too, and he understood what those wisps of memory meant. Comprehension bloomed across his face, and he cursed. “You saw it in my head. Along with where I was.”
I shrugged. What could I say?
“You walked on the brink of death just to find me?”
“You needed me,” I lied. What was one more in a long, unholy line of them?
“Oh, baby, no,” he whispered, and I nearly caved and ran away.
But I had nowhere to go, no way to leave, so I stayed and I lied a little more.
“I’ll be with you all night. I’m the only one who can.” That was true enough. “If you fight the bloodlust under the full moon and you win, maybe it’ll be gone forever.”
He tilted his head. “Is that possible?”
Doubtful, I thought.
“Anything’s possible,” I said.
God, I was such a Judas.
Jimmy sighed. “You forgive me for Summer?”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” Considering what I was about to do, the betrayal with Summer had been child’s play. Literally. “You did it for me, Jimmy. That only makes you more of a hero in my eyes.”
“Shit.” he muttered. “And Manhattan? When I made you my slave? When I kept you prisoner and drank from you until you nearly died? Was I a hero then?”
“You were as much a victim as I was. The strega was at fault, not you.”
Although it had been Jimmy hurting me night after night, or at least something that looked just like him. I still woke up sometimes and thought I saw him rising above me, eyes flame-red, fangs flaring, as he raped me mind, body, and soul.
“You stay here, and I’ll do the same thing to you tonight that I did to you then. Probably worse.”
I was counting on it.
“I’m not a hero and you know it,” he continued.
I knew nothing of the sort. We’d both been played by forces more powerful than us. We’d been moved around like chess pieces in this fight to save the world, and in doing so we’d been hurt. Hell, we’d died—not that dying was a permanent condition for either one of us.
“I killed for you,” he murmured.
I cast him a quick glance. I’d never been certain what had happened that night.
“If you want to cast me as a hero,” Jimmy continued, “you need to know everything I’ve done.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It did to Mr. Nix.”
The name caused my mind to roll back over ten years. I’d stayed after school to sign up for the gymnastics club. I was so excited to be part of something, anything. I was humming as I shut my locker and turned to go home.
My heart leaped, nearly choking me, when a shadow loomed up and blocked my way. Though the neighborhood was fairly safe, the schools downright decent, we were still close to a large city with a high crime rate, and face it—
Shit happened. I’d just hoped it had finally stopped happening to me.
My gaze had slid right, left, searching for a way to escape; then the light splashed across the man’s face, and I nearly fainted with relief.
“Mr. Nix. You scared me.”
“Elizabeth,” he murmured, his German accent giving my plain English name a lilt. “Why here so late”— he smiled—“and so alone?”
The skin at the back of my neck prickled as my well-developed self-preservation instinct whispered, Why is a male math teacher in the girls’ locker room?
I didn’t want to turn, to take my eyes off the man. When he grabbed me, and he would grab me, I didn’t need to be psychic to understand that, I wanted to be facing him. The idea of having those thick, hard hands clutch at me from behind made me sick.
I shouldn’t have been so scared. I’d been hassled before, many times. I’d been groped by new “brothers,” “fathers,” and even on one occasion a “big sister.” All it ever took was my reciting a secret I’d plucked from their head, and they’d not only let me go in a big hurry, they’d made certain I didn’t live with them any longer.
But Mr. Nix was a teacher, and even though he’d made me nervous on occasion, staring at me too often and too long, I’d just figured he was curious about my background. A lot of people were. I’d never figured on something like this.
For a large man—at least six-four, two-sixty—he moved fast, and when he grabbed me I didn’t have time to think about running, let alone do it.
As soon as his skin met mine, I heard music. Loud, strange, foreign. Not a polka—I’d lived in Milwaukee more than a minute—a polka I knew, but similar. Same instruments, different beat.
Following close on the heels of the sound came the images—ponds, lakes, streams, and rivers. Girls upon girls, floating dead in those waters, and the flashes of what he’d done to them before he’d tossed them away.
He tore my shirt in half with one big, meaty hand. I was a well-developed thirteen, and my breasts nearly burst from the bra that had fit just fine only a month ago.
“I can play a while,” he murmured, his milky blue gaze crawling over my dusky skin. “Play, play, play.”
He drew two pale index fingers over the swells, down to the nipples, which he gave a vicious tweak. I thrust my knee up so hard his cock got very friendly with his larynx.
Instead of going down, he flared his nose like a bull’s, then he swept his arms toward me in a bear hug. I ducked, and his face kissed locker.
Considering how fast he’d grabbed me in the first place, I didn’t expect to get away. But it wasn’t in my nature to just stand there and take it. The instant he fell, I ran.
“Who you think you are?” he shouted, voice guttural, accent even more pronounced with pain. “Nothing yet. No one ever. I will kill you first, fuck you after. It is better that way.”
I burst out of the locker room and ran straight into Jimmy.
I screamed, and he slapped his hand over my mouth. From the expression on his face, h
e’d at least heard the last part. He was furious, and for an instant I thought he might charge into the locker room and—
I’m not sure what. At thirteen Jimmy hadn’t grown into his hands or his feet. He’d never grow into a body as large as that of Mr. Nix.
If he confronted the bigger man, Sanducci would get hurt, maybe die, because of me, and while I’d told him on several occasions, just that morning in fact, to “drop dead”—or had it been the more colorful “eat shit and die?”—I didn’t want him to actually do it.
“Come on,” he said, and took my hand. The anger in his eyes smoldering, he dragged me out the nearest door and into the night.
I shivered, and not just because my shirt hung in shreds, or even because my math teacher had just molested me. But also because it was spring in Milwaukee and snow was still piled at the edges of the driveways, the yards, the corners of the roads. Here and there daffodils pushed through the half-frozen mud, their bright yellow petals brighter because of the remaining splotches of white.
The slick slide of the switchblade registered seconds after the pure silver weapon appeared in Sanducci’s hand. I lifted my gaze from the knife, sparkling merrily in the glow from a distant streetlight, to Jimmy’s face. What I saw there made me shiver even more.
We kept to the alleys and backyards, to the shadows. I didn’t hear sounds of pursuit—the guy couldn’t be that stupid, could he? Of course he didn’t know about Jimmy and his pet knife.
A few dogs barked, a few lights went on as we skittered through yards, but half an hour later we entered Ruthie’s empty kitchen. I’d hoped to creep upstairs, take a scalding hot shower or ten, burn my clothes, and pretend nothing had happened. But as soon as the door shut, Jimmy shouted, “Ruthie!”
“Are you nuts?”
He let his eyes drop to where I clutched my shredded shirt over my breasts. “Are you?”
Ruthie came in, took one look at my torn clothes, at the livid red scratches that marred my skin, then folded me into her arms, and hustled me upstairs. Right before I left the room, I turned back, but Jimmy was already gone.
I begged Ruthie not to call the police. My word against his. I knew how things worked. So did Ruthie. She nodded slowly, and then she put me to bed.
The next day Mr. Nix wasn’t at school. Or the day after that or ever again.
CHAPTER 32
“You killed him,” I said. “Mr. Nix.”
Jimmy shrugged, and his muscles rippled seductively beneath his bare, smooth skin. “He touched you.”
“Jesus, Jimmy,” I muttered. “There are a lot of guys you’d have to kill if that were the criteria.”
“And I have,” he murmured. “Killed a lot of guys.”
My eyes narrowed on his too still face. “How many were actually guys?”
“A few.”
“And Mr. Nix? What was he?”
“A Nix is a German shape-shifter. Horse, snake, fish, or mermaid.”
“Merman,” I corrected absently.
“Whatever. Legends say they have sex with their victims then drag them into the nearest body of water to drown.”
I guess that explained what I’d seen when I’d touched him. Lots of dead girls in the water. And if it weren’t for Jimmy, I’d have joined them.
I heard again the swish of his silver blade. “You killed him,” I said, “and he was ashes.”
“Would explain how he disappeared.”
“You didn’t see?”
“I stuck him and ran. I wasn’t stupid. The guy was huge.”
I frowned. “You didn’t know?”
“That he was a shifter? Not then.”
Which meant Jimmy had thought he was killing a man. A molester, true, but human.
Jimmy saw the understanding cross my face. “He hurt you; he died. End of story.”
I wasn’t sure what to say about that. Nix had been a demon: that Jimmy hadn’t known it when he killed him hadn’t changed what Nix was, what he’d done to more girls than me, and what he would have done to countless others if not for Sanducci.
“Why didn’t you know? Why didn’t Ruthie?”
“Seers can’t see every demon. You’d go loony.”
I wasn’t certain we weren’t.
“There are just too many of them,” Jimmy said. “We do the best that we can.”
Silence fell between us. But it didn’t last long.
“Do you hate me now?” Jimmy asked.
I’d hated him for years, but not for that.
“Nix was a demon,” I said.
“I didn’t know that.”
I moved closer, wrapping my arms around his waist, capturing him when he would have tried to escape, though there was nowhere for him to go, then laying my cheek against his chest and listening to the familiar beat of his heart. “I’ve known for years that you killed him, Jimmy, and I thought he was human, too.”
That shut him up.
“I touched you; I loved you; I gave you myself; and I knew all along what you did.”
“Mr. Nix disappeared. You didn’t know jack.”
“I knew.”
He leaned back, and I lifted my head to meet his curious eyes. “You saw?”
“No.” Amazingly, I hadn’t seen what had happened to Mr. Nix any of the times I’d touched Jimmy, which meant that the killing of the man hadn’t bothered Sanducci all that much. He hadn’t thought about it, dreamed of it, or agonized over it. Neither had I. The guy had deserved to die. Some just did.
“Then how—” Jimmy asked.
“I can add,” I said. “Knife, you, Nix. Deadsville.”
I didn’t tell him that there’d been other times when I’d touched him that I’d gotten wisps of his past, seen faces of others, known things that he’d done. It didn’t matter.
Of course the police had come eventually. A tax-paying citizen—and Nix was that, too, as well as a demon—couldn’t disappear without questions being asked. So they’d quizzed everyone, especially those of us who lived at Ruthie’s place, especially Jimmy Sanducci.
Jimmy had spent time in jail once—juvie, sure, but jail nevertheless. Something about a knife. No shock there. But the incident, whatever it was—and I’d never been able to get him to tell me with words or memories-had been enough to make the cops suspicious.
There’d been other incidents, both before Jimmy had come to Ruthie’s and afterward. Things that Ruthie had somehow managed to make go away. Which explained the wisps I saw sometimes when I touched him.
At the time I’d thought Nix was a run-of-the-mill serial killer. Since he’d disappeared, and I had a pretty good idea how, I kept my mouth shut. I’d learned young not to talk about the things I “saw.” I was happy to “keep it in the family,” as Ruthie advised.
Now that I knew what Nix had been, I had some questions of my own. “Was he after me because of who I’d become?”
Jimmy frowned, considering, then shook his head. “None of the Nephilim knew about Ruthie’s until—” He broke off.
Until Jimmy had been infiltrated. I shouldn’t have brought that up.
“Seems too much of a coincidence that a demon would try to kill me less than a year after I got there.” I mused.
“Even if Nix knew somehow, the knowledge died with him. Otherwise there’d have been a line of Nephlim on the lawn waiting to kill you.”
“How … comforting,” I said. “Still, don’t you think it was weird?”
“Unfortunately, no. The majority of the evil pricks in the world are Nephilim. Serial killers, child molesters, terrorist.”
“Televangelists,” I muttered.
“Very funny,” he said, but he wasn’t laughing. Instead he stared toward the window, and he looked scared. “You have to go now.”
“How do you suggest I do that?” I motioned at the door, which didn’t have a knob on this side, either.
Jimmy banged his fists against it again, putting two more dents in an already dented structure.
“Summer,” he shouted. �
�Get her the hell out!”
“Summer’s a little tied up.” I murmured.
Jimmy spun to face me. “You brought Sawyer?”
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
He leaned against the door, defeated again. “Lizzy, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
But I did know. I was doing what had to be done.
I took him by the arm, led him to the bed. then sat beside him. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out all over his skin. The moon was coming, and he was fighting the change.
I leaned in, letting my breasts brush his arm as I rubbed his back, pretending at comfort. “We’ll fight this together. You and me. Just like when we were kids.”
“You and me against the world,” he murmured.
“You and me for the world,” I corrected, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “Jimmy?”
He lifted his head, and his eyes held a single pinprick of red at the center. He was losing the battle. I lowered my soothing hand from his shoulders to the small of his back, continuing to rub, letting my fingertips trail across the swell of his ass. He shuddered.
“What if I make you like me?” He licked his lips, his gaze locked on the curve of my neck.
“I can take care of myself.”
“Not when I’m like that.” He grabbed me by the arms again, hauled me against him. “It’s damnation, Lizzy. For both of us.”
Perhaps. But sacrifices must be made. Damnation for us, salvation for everyone else. I was willing to take that chance.
“This darkness is a fate worse than death,” he said.
“I won’t leave you.”
“You should kill me.”
“Been there, done that, didn’t take.”
He let me go. “I didn’t give you up then to turn you evil now.”
“Why did you give me up?”
“For your own good.”
Which was why I was doing this now. His good. Mine. The world’s.
Jimmy closed his eyes and whispered. “You’re going to break me.”
I put my hand on his arm. I’m not sure what I meant to say maybe nothing, perhaps everything, but silver trickled through the windows, across his face, across mine and his eyes snapped open.
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