Deadly Descendant (16 page)

“Jamaal?” I said softly, hoping I wouldn’t startle him. Startling a man who can crush you like an ant isn’t good for your health.

He blinked as if coming back to himself, then turned his head slightly toward me. He made a soft grunting sound, put his feet on the floor, and pushed himself up into a normal seated position. If I’d been sitting like that, my back would have been hurting, but he seemed fine.

“What are you doing up?” he asked, his voice gravelly like he’d been sleeping. That was when I noticed the whiskey bottle on the floor by the side of the couch. I didn’t know how much had been in it when he started, but it was almost empty now.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said, then let myself collapse onto the far seat of the couch before I ended up doing it involuntarily. My head spun for a moment, and I had to close my eyes. I was still holding the travel mug of coffee, but I didn’t feel particularly inclined to drink it.

“You should be sleeping,” Jamaal said, ignoring my question entirely. “I know how … draining it is to die.”

I shivered and opened my eyes, to hell with the dizziness. Seeing the room spinning around me was better than seeing the darkness behind my eyes, a darkness that reminded me too much of the complete sensory deprivation of death.

Jamaal had three times surrendered himself to death to win back the right to stay in the mansion after Anderson had kicked him out. Perhaps the first time, he hadn’t known exactly what he was getting himself into, but he knew after that—and he’d done it anyway. I didn’t think I could ever voluntarily allow myself to die again. Not that the first time had been particularly voluntary.

“How could you …?” The words died in my throat as horror threatened to choke me. I wanted to burn the memories from my head, but I was stuck with them, and I wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t going to drive me mad. “You knew what it was going to be like, and yet …”

Jeez, I couldn’t even get a full sentence out. I’d come down here hoping
not
to think about death. I guess it was just my bad luck that Jamaal was the one I bumped into.

“It’ll get better,” Jamaal said, and maybe I was already crazy, but I could have sworn I heard something like compassion in his voice. “I’ve found that the memory fades with time. It feels almost like a bad dream now.”

I nodded and swallowed hard, hoping like hell he was right. I’d barely brushed on the subject, and yet my pulse was racing, my skin clammy. If I wasn’t careful, this was going to devolve into a full-scale panic attack.

There was a rustling sound, accompanied by the telltale clicking of beads, and to my shock, I realized that Jamaal was scooting closer to me on the couch. His proximity did an admirable job of distracting me from the panic. He took the travel mug from my unresisting fingers, popped the lid off, and poured in most of the remaining whiskey. Then he put the lid back on and handed it to me.

“Booze makes it all better?” I asked with a nervous laugh. He was still sitting intimately close. I could smell the faint hint of whiskey on his breath, along with the faded remnants of clove cigarettes.

“No. But sometimes it helps.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so instead, I took a sip. The coffee was only lukewarm by then, and the whiskey was pretty overpowering, but I didn’t care. Beside me, Jamaal raised the bottle to his lips and drained the last little bit. He didn’t strike me as being particularly drunk. Just … mellow. Which is not a word I’d ever have associated with him before.

“I’m sorry,” he said, staring at the empty bottle like it was the most fascinating thing in the world. “I fucked up. Again.” He let out a sigh and set the bottle down on the coffee table. Then he didn’t quite seem to know what to do with his hands. “If I hadn’t lost
my shit, I’d have been there when the jackals attacked. Maybe you wouldn’t have gotten bit.”

I took another sip of coffee, mulling over his words. “I think if you’d been there, we’d both have ended up with mutant rabies. It’s not like either of us would have known how important it was to avoid being bitten.”

He shrugged. “I dunno. I think if I’d been there, it would have been me they went after. No offense, but you don’t look like much of a threat.”

I reached out and patted his knee before I thought about it. “Yeah, well, I don’t think I’d want to be around you if you came down with super-rabies,” I said as my cheeks heated with a blush. I was not the touchy-feely sort, but this was not the first time I’d found myself touching Jamaal when I shouldn’t.

He gave a snort of something that resembled laughter, blessedly ignoring my faux-pas. The hint of laughter faded between one breath and the next.

“I still shouldn’t have run off like that.”

I wasn’t about to disagree, despite my doubts about how useful he’d have been.

“Why
did
you run off?”

He shook his head, the gesture accompanied by the almost musical clicking of his beads. “I knew I was losing it. I didn’t trust myself not to …” Another shake of his head. “I don’t know what I thought I might do, just that it would be bad. I meant to run back toward the cars, but somehow that wasn’t what I ended up doing. I went right into the heart of the cemetery, where the call of the magic was even stronger.”

I could hear a wealth of remorse and self-loathing
in his voice. He’d done some pretty shitty things to me in the past, things I could easily hold against him even though I felt a little too much kinship with him to condemn him. But this I was pretty sure wasn’t his fault.

“Why did you come back?”

“I heard the gunshots. I meant to come back and help you, maybe save whoever the killer was after.”

“And ended up killing the victim instead.” Despite all of my empathy for him, there was still a hint of accusation in my voice. I knew he hadn’t exactly been present when he killed the guy, but still …

“He would have been dead in a few minutes anyway,” Jamaal said.

“You don’t know that. Modern medicine can do miraculous things.”

“I
do
know that,” he said more firmly. “Believe me, Nikki, I know death when I see it. Comes with the territory. The poor bastard wouldn’t have lived long enough for modern medicine to reach him. Look what happened to you.”

“So that makes it all right for you to kill him?” I asked with a definite edge in my voice. He’d sounded pretty damned guilty about having abandoned me, but it didn’t seem like he felt bad about having killed a guy. Maybe I was being judgmental, but it seemed to me he should feel at least a little sorry.

“I wasn’t in control. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I tried.”

“But you didn’t try, did you?”

“No.” He met my eyes, and there was both a challenge and a plea in his gaze. I noticed irrelevantly that
he had absurdly long, thick lashes. “When it gets to a certain point, trying to stop it just makes things worse. I was already well past that point.”

I felt tempted to poke at him some more but managed to shut myself up. He wasn’t showing a lot of overt remorse, but he wasn’t sitting here at two in the morning drinking whiskey and staring at a nature show because of his callous indifference to what he’d done. I remembered Anderson telling me that he was “struggling,” and I had to admit, he didn’t look like himself. Despite the alcohol, there was a tightness to his jaw and an almost haunted look in his eyes. I very much doubted he liked the feeling of being out of control, and I couldn’t blame him.

I wondered what he’d been like before he’d become
Liberi
and realized with a bit of a jolt that I knew next to nothing about him, despite having lived in the same house with him for a few weeks. I didn’t know how he’d become
Liberi
—he had to have killed someone to do it, and I had no idea who or whether he’d known what he was doing. I didn’t even know how old he was. Anderson had made a comment once about how Jamaal had only had “a couple of decades” to learn to control his death magic, but I had to wonder how good a sense of time Anderson had, seeing as he’d been around for thousands of years.

“So that’s my sob story,” Jamaal said into a silence that was becoming uncomfortable. He seemed to have muted the TV without me even noticing. “Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re down here talking to me instead of in your room fast asleep?”

“Let me get this straight. You’re actually initiating conversation with me? Has hell frozen over?” Just because he didn’t seem to hate my guts anymore didn’t mean we were friends, and Jamaal was far from the talkative type. There was something of a dreamlike feeling to this whole conversation, and if I didn’t feel so physically and emotionally drained, I might have thought I really was up in my bed fast asleep. But there was nothing dreamlike about my exhaustion.

Jamaal ignored my half-assed teasing. “Remember, I know exactly how shitty you feel right now. You should be sleeping it off, so I figure you’re down here because something’s wrong.”

“Why do you care?” I asked, sounding pretty peevish even to my own ears. Getting bitten by jackals, killed, and brought back to life didn’t put me in the perkiest of moods.

Jamaal once would have met my flare of temper with one of his own. I’m sure I would have deserved it if he’d done the same now, but he didn’t.

“Because you’re likely the only one who can lead us to this guy so we can stop him. Unless we spooked him last Friday, which I doubt, he’ll be up to his old tricks again in about forty-eight hours. And if you push yourself too hard and are falling over with fatigue, you’re not going to do anyone any good.”

His words stung a little with their cold logic. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I wished Jamaal cared about
me,
not about my special abilities. I guess it was a hint of neediness, left over from my years of
foster care. I was luckier than the average foster kid, having found a permanent home at the age of eleven, but the warmth and love I’d found with the Glasses couldn’t completely undo the damage from the foster-care merry-go-round.

I grimaced and rubbed my eyes, tired down to the marrow of my bones. Yeah, coming downstairs had been a stupid decision. I could feel how my body was fighting me, telling me to stop being a moron and get some sleep. But I knew that the moment I closed my eyes, my mind would take me back to the darkness, and I wasn’t brave enough to face it.

When I stopped rubbing my eyes, I was embarrassed to find that my fingertips were wet. God, I was such a wuss.

“You’ll fall asleep faster than you think,” Jamaal said, his voice conspicuously gentle, something I wouldn’t have thought him capable of.

I blinked a couple of times, still trying to fight off tears. “Huh?”

“You’re down here drinking coffee because you’re afraid to close your eyes, right?” I didn’t want to admit the truth, but Jamaal wasn’t waiting for my confirmation, anyway. “That’s how I felt the first time. But your body will take over, and you’ll fall asleep before you can make yourself too miserable.”

I hoped he was telling the truth, rather than a comforting lie. “I guess I’ll have to find out whether it works the same for me. It’s not like I can stay awake forever.”

I was not looking forward to dragging myself back
upstairs and was halfway tempted to simply curl up on the sofa. Instead, I put down my barely touched spiked coffee and used the arm of the sofa to help lever myself up to my feet.

I got so light-headed I almost fell back down, and I realized I might end up sleeping on the couch after all. I honestly didn’t think I could make it to the third floor without collapsing. But Jamaal shocked the hell out of me by rising to his feet and sweeping me off mine.

I gave an undignified bleat as my feet left the floor. “What are you doing?” I gasped.

He carried me like I weighed about twenty pounds. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

I didn’t know what to do with my right arm, which was positioned awkwardly between our bodies. I should have put it around Jamaal’s neck, but that felt way too intimate.

“You don’t need to carry me,” I said weakly as he made his way to the grand staircase in the foyer.

Jamaal ignored my words, which he had to know were more wishful thinking than fact. I’d have been lucky to make it to the base of the stairs on my own, much less to actually climb them.

Tentatively, I slipped my arm around his neck, because it just felt too awkward not to, like I was afraid to touch him or something. The beads at the ends of his braids tickled my arm, and I was hyperaware of the warmth of his body, the beat of his heart. He’d hated my guts for most of the time he’d known me, and any sane woman would have locked
her libido in a safe and then buried the safe, but I couldn’t help the highly inappropriate little flutter in my belly.

It didn’t matter that he sometimes bore a disturbing resemblance to a raving lunatic; Jamaal was hot, hot, hot. And there was something about him that called to me, that always had, even when he’d been half-mad with hatred. Something that told me that he and I were a lot alike, that we’d both gotten a raw deal in life, that we both felt terribly alone, and that we lashed out at those around us because that felt safer than letting someone get close.

In short, we were both totally screwed up.

There was no particular tenderness in the way Jamaal carried me. He was just helping me because it was the practical thing to do. I’d certainly seen no sign that he’d ever noticed me as a woman. But that didn’t stop my pulse from tripping or my skin from tingling.