Deadly Descendant (28 page)

I took all of this in with one quick glance before my eyes found the true focal point of the room.

It was a small, square painting set in a plain gold frame, showcased by a discreet museum-style light set into the wall above it. A figure I recognized from my research as the goddess Kali stood on the body of a naked man against a background of metallic gold. She was painted in a blue so dark it was almost black. Unlike many of the other depictions I’d seen of her, she was adorned not in severed body parts but in lotus blossoms and pearls, although, rather disturbingly, she also had a couple of hooded cobras twining around her torso.

I stepped closer to the painting and saw that there was a little wear and tear around the edges, proving that this was the real thing, not a print or a reproduction. It was beautiful, in a creepy kind of way.

“How old is it?” I asked Jamaal without looking away from the painting. On closer inspection, I noticed that there were little bits of iridescent blue-green paint decorating Kali’s jewelry, and I figured the painting couldn’t be that old after all if the artist had access to iridescent paint.

“Late sixteen hundreds or thereabouts.”

I blinked in surprise, then looked over my shoulder at Jamaal, who had come up close behind me while I was focused on the painting. “Really?” He nodded. “Then what’s the iridescent stuff?”

“It’s actually little pieces of beetle wings.”

“Oh.”

Strange how one little painting could throw me for so much of a loop. I’d have thought it was some kind of family heirloom, except considering what Jamaal had told me of his background, I knew he didn’t have any family heirlooms. Had he bought a work of fine art, or had it been a gift? And if it was a gift, who was it from?

I dragged my attention away from the painting and faced Jamaal. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn he was embarrassed at having revealed this unexpected aspect of his personality. He averted his eyes and plucked at his T-shirt.

“I’m going to put on a fresh shirt. Be right back.”

He disappeared into the bedroom without awaiting a response, leaving me with inappropriate images in my head. I couldn’t help picturing him dragging that T-shirt off over his head. From the fit of his clothes and the cut of his biceps, I knew he would look spectacular without a shirt on. My hormones were more than happy to provide me with a mental image.

Jamaal hadn’t closed the bedroom door, and despite my best intentions and a stern lecture from my common sense, I found myself drifting across the sitting room. I angled toward the bookcase, but the moment my vantage point allowed me to, I glanced through the bedroom door.

Like the sitting room, Jamaal’s bedroom was decorated with a distinctly Eastern flavor in warm, inviting colors. A platform bed covered with a plush
mahogany-colored bedspread dominated the room, which was so painfully neat it was hard to believe a single guy resided in it.

Jamaal was bending over to open the bottom drawer of his cherry-wood dresser when my eyes found him, and the sight was enough to steal my breath away. His jeans clung lovingly to his butt and thighs, and I decided the rear view was just as mouthwatering as the front view.

And then he stood up straight, a black and red football jersey in his hand, and I got a look at his naked back.

It shouldn’t have come as such a shock to me, not after what he’d told me about his childhood. He’d been a
slave,
and though his father had apparently treated him “well,” he’d admitted he’d had a hard life after Daddy Dearest kicked him out to appease the little missus. I just somehow hadn’t allowed myself to think about what that kind of hard life might entail.

Ridged scar tissue riddled his back from his shoulders all the way to the waistband of his jeans, and I suspected it continued on below. I couldn’t even imagine what kind of pain Jamaal had endured when those wounds were inflicted. Obviously, he hadn’t been
Liberi
yet, or there wouldn’t be scars, and I realized that although he’d told me about his childhood, I had no idea when and how he’d become
Liberi
.

The scars marred what would otherwise have been a perfect back. With his broad shoulders and narrow waist, Jamaal was a work of art in his clothes, but shirtless, he was even more stunning. I’d never seen
someone who wasn’t bulked up like a weightlifter and yet had had such perfect definition in his back muscles. Even with the scar tissue, I could see the ripple and play of those muscles as Jamaal stuck his arms into his shirt and pulled the neck opening over his head.

I stood there like an idiot, entranced by what I was seeing, as the shirt slid down his back and hid both his scars and his beauty. In fact, I was so entranced that I think somehow he sensed me staring, because he suddenly whirled around.

I was busted.

I could have turned
and pretended to be looking at the books on his shelf. He probably wouldn’t have been fooled, but I didn’t even bother to try. As long as he knew—or at least strongly suspected—that I’d been looking, I didn’t want to do anything that might suggest I was repulsed by what I’d seen. Jamaal wasn’t what I’d call the shy, sensitive type, but instinct told me those scars represented a serious chink in his armor.

Something dark and dangerous lurked in Jamaal’s eyes as they locked with mine and he stalked toward me. His expression spoke of rage, of pain, and of something else, something I couldn’t identify. I wanted to back away from what I saw in his eyes, but again, my instincts insisted doing so would be a mistake, would hurt him even more than he’d been hurt already. For all of the angry words he’d flung at me, for all of the times I’d seen him practically out of his mind with fury, I knew that at his core, he was a fragile and damaged
human being. And I didn’t want to be the one to make that damage irreparable.

Jamaal’s lips curled away from his teeth in a feral snarl. “Get a good look?” He was still coming closer, and my pulse drummed in my throat. “Want a close-up?”

He lifted the front of his shirt, and I practically swallowed my tongue in my effort to keep from gasping. The scars weren’t restricted to his back; their pale ridged lines sliced through his sculpted pecs and six-pack abs. It looked like he’d been through a paper shredder, and the sight of that devastation made my throat ache.

Without conscious thought, my hand reached for him, fingers wanting to trace his savaged skin as if I could somehow erase the marks. Jamaal’s eyes widened in what looked like fear, and he dropped his shirt down and took a hasty step back before I could touch him.

I kept staring at his chest, even though the travesty of those scars was now covered. In my peripheral vision, I was aware of the way he was looking at me, a combination of hostility, scorn, and challenge on his face, but my vision was starting to blur with tears.

“Sometimes I really hate people,” I murmured hoarsely, then cleared my throat as if that could dislodge the lump that had formed there.

Jamaal let out his breath with a loud whoosh, like the air rushing from a punctured tire. I seemed to have passed some kind of test, a test I hadn’t realized
I was taking, and Jamaal backed away from the edge, his intense glare replaced by an ironic half smile.

“You and me both,” he said. He crossed his arms over his chest as if trying to build a thicker shield to keep those scars hidden.

“Did you kill whoever did that to you?” I blurted without thinking.

He laughed bitterly. “I was a slave, remember? If I’d killed anyone, I wouldn’t be around today, believe me.”

“But you killed someone eventually, or you wouldn’t have become
Liberi
.” He had to have taken his immortality from
someone,
and it would have been poetic justice if that someone was the sadistic bastard who’d tortured him.

Jamaal moved away from me, but he didn’t go far, instead dropping down onto the futon sofa. I wanted to press him for information but managed to control my curiosity. His body language suggested he might continue talking, and I didn’t want to say anything that might discourage him.

“It happened during the Civil War,” he said. “My master at the time was neither particularly kind nor particularly cruel, but I hated him anyway. I pretty much hated everybody, black or white.”

Considering what had been done to him, I could hardly blame him.

“Our plantation was attacked by a bunch of Union soldiers. And believe me, just because they were fighting on the side of the angels didn’t make the men
themselves angels. These guys were more like a rioting mob than an organized troop of soldiers. My master surrendered without a fight, and they shot him down in cold blood anyway.

“When the soldiers first came, I was thrilled to see them. I figured my life as a slave was over, and I could join the Union army and get my revenge on the people who’d oppressed me. I was angry enough that I probably could have looked the other way even after they’d killed an unarmed man, but then they started going after his family. They raped his wife, and they made his daughter run so they could chase her down. She was only twelve.”

“I hate people,” I muttered again.

Jamaal ignored me. “I didn’t have much of a conscience left at the time. It had mostly been beaten out of me. But I couldn’t just stand by while they raped a little girl, so I got my master’s gun and started shooting the men who were chasing her.

“It was suicidal. I was just one man, and there were at least a dozen soldiers. I couldn’t save the poor kid, but I figured at least I could go out trying to do a good deed.” He shook his head. “Maybe at that point, I just wanted to die. I’d seen these soldiers as my salvation, and then to find out they weren’t really any better than the people who’d tormented me most of my life …” He fell silent, his eyes clouded with memories of his haunted past.

“Did you save her?” I prompted, although everything about his body language told me the answer was no.

He shook his head. “I shot three of the soldiers before they got me, but like I said, I was badly outnumbered. I must have taken twenty or thirty bullets by the time it was all over. I should have been dead, but apparently, one of those three men I’d shot was
Liberi
. I woke up hours later, covered in blood, to see the plantation burned to the ground, still smoldering. There were bodies everywhere. The soldiers had slaughtered everyone, even the slaves they were supposedly there to free. That was probably because of me.”

I made a sound of indignation on his behalf, but he shushed me before I could voice the objection.

“They were war-maddened thugs who got a kick out of raping and murdering civilians. By killing some of them, I gave the rest of them the excuse to view the slaves as the enemy. All because I was disillusioned and decided it was time to die.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Kind of funny that I tried to commit suicide by soldier and wound up becoming immortal because of it.”

“Hilarious.”

My heart ached for everything he had been through. He’d been broken—or at least severely damaged—even before he became
Liberi
and had to deal with death magic that had a mind of its own.

“Did you have any idea what was going on?” I asked. “Had you ever heard of the
Liberi
?” As confusing as my own transition had been, at least I’d been surrounded by
Liberi
who could explain to me what was happening. I’d thought they were completely
delusional, of course, but at least they’d provided me with some explanation.

What would it be like to awaken after being shot twenty or more times and have no idea why you weren’t dead? I shuddered. I thought about the time when he had actually been dead, when he must have thought the airless dark was his own personal Hell. To go through that, having no reason to believe it would ever end, was unimaginable.

“Nope,” Jamaal said. “I had no clue what was going on. Thought I’d gone crazy, actually. I thought I’d make it better by blowing my own brains out, but I woke up again after that. It wasn’t until after the war was over that I ended up meeting another
Liberi
. He was a descendant of Odin, and he kind of taught me the ropes—including telling me about the Olympians and emphasizing how important it was to avoid them.

“Problem was, the bastard was bat-shit crazy and hated the world even more than I did. I lost myself under his influence for a very long time, and I did some very bad shit, let the death magic have its way with me. Until Anderson found me and convinced me it didn’t have to be that way.”

And then I came along, killed his best friend, who’d been helping him keep the death magic tamed, and put everything that was good in his life at risk.

My mind took me back to that fateful night, replaying a picture of that dark, sleet-slicked driveway, of my struggles to keep the car in control. A figure appeared
out of nowhere, only a couple of feet in front of my car, no time to stop or swerve. My headlights illuminated his face as he raised his head and smiled at me in the instant before I slammed into him.

I shook my head violently to stop the playback in my head. I wished there were some way I could expunge those images from my brain for good. I’d relived them more than enough already.