Fallen Angels 06 - Immortal (37 page)

Which was to say, Ad and Eddie had headed up to the attic.

And Jim had come out here with her.

After a day of on-and-off rain, the night was cool and damp and smelled of good earth and growing things. Smelled of Jim’s aftershave, too, she thought as she pulled his leather jacket closer around her.

“Sissy?”

“What—oh, sorry. Yes. God, yes. I don’t think I’ll ever eat again.”

Shoot. Maybe she shouldn’t phrase it like that.

Down at the far end of the lane, a car turned onto their street and proceeded carefully toward them. For a moment, her whole body stiffened—except it was not a big black Mercedes-Benz that was missing a hood ornament.

She relaxed the instant she recognized it as a Lexus.

“It’s so weird,” she murmured. “I feel the absence more than I noticed the presence.”

“Of what—oh, that.” He cleared his throat like he didn’t want to give the thing a name. “What’d gotten taken out, you mean.”

“Yeah.” She put her hands over her pizza-filled stomach and rubbed back and forth. “I had no idea it was there and controlling me. But now that it’s gone, I feel … myself. Which doesn’t mean that I’ve, like, forgotten everything that was done to me or what I lost. I still feel the same things I felt before. It’s just … the foundation is different. More solid. More … me, I guess? I’m babbling, aren’t I.”

“Not in the slightest. Makes perfect sense to me.”

She looked over at him as he took a drag on his cigarette and the tip burned bright orange. “I swear, that is one of the things I like most about you.”

His brows popped. “What is?”

“You always understand me.”

“You’re pretty reasonable. Pretty damned smart, too.”

He leaned in and put a kiss on her mouth—and it seemed like the most natural thing: the soft brush, the giving and receiving, the warm thrill that came with the contact. And when she didn’t want him to move away so fast, all she had to do was put her hand on his massive arm and he stayed right with her.

As if he once again knew what she needed.

Laying her head on his upper arm, she stared up at his face as he resumed looking out ahead of them both. And sadly, the preoccupation that bled into his features was a reminder that this moment between them was the exception, not the rule.

The war was still ongoing.

“What happens now?” she asked roughly.

“With you? Nothing. You’re clean.”

“I mean with Devina.”

Those brows went down hard and stayed there, and the coldness that gleamed in his eyes was a reminder that he was a soldier, not just a lover.

“You don’t have to worry about that.” He leaned in and kissed her again. “You’re safe. You’re free.”

Not as long as you’re still fighting, she thought.

It felt like a crime to contaminate this quiet time between them with talk about the last round. But she figured that was where he was in his head, too. Had to be. He had to be thinking about where the next soul was going to be found, and what Devina was going to—

“I really wish you’d met my mother,” he said roughly.

As Sissy jerked back, he looked over at her. “Did my smoke get in your face? Shit, I’m sorry—lemme put this out.”

“No, no, not at all.” She stopped him. “Honestly, it’s okay. I’m getting used to it now, and it’s funny, it kind of smells nice to me.”

Probably because the scent of tobacco was coming to remind her of him.

“You just surprised me,” she murmured.

“About my mother.”

“Well, yes. And I would have loved to have met her, too.” God, the more she thought about it, the more … “I really would have liked to meet her.”

“She would have loved you.”

Sissy blinked a couple of times. Coming from a man like him? That was the best compliment she had ever received.

“What was she like?”

Jim took a long inhale and made smoke rings that drifted up into the light that bled out of the house.

The night was so much less dark when you were not alone, she thought. And there was never a more connected feeling than talking with him like this.

Well, except for the sex part.

And they were going to get to that later on.

“She wasn’t super-tall,” he said eventually. “But she was strong. Oh, fuck, she was strong. Most farms out there, the women labor in the house, you know—and that’s a lot of work. Farmers are going from before sunup to after sundown, and they need food … need someone holding down the fort with the kids and the bills and the other stuff, too. My mom, she did both sides of it. I once saw her chop up a hundred-year-old oak tree. Tornado knocked it down in the front yard. Took her two school days to do it—but we had firewood all winter just from that beast alone.”

“Do you miss her? I guess that’s a dumb—”

“I miss all of it. I miss the life and the land, and her.” He rubbed his eyebrow with his thumb like he was trying to hide a weakness from her. “I thought that was where I was headed. You know, after I got out of the military. I was going to work here in Caldwell only long enough to make sure Matthias wasn’t going to be a problem.” He glanced over at her. “I was not going to bring that shit out west. No way. A farm in Iowa was going to be my slide into middle age. My final resting place.”

“I guess your life didn’t turn out as you thought, either.”

“No, it didn’t.” He stared at her. “I met you, though.”

She smiled and kissed the curve of his triceps. “There you go again, making me blush.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

He made a sound that was somewhere between “Mmmm” and “Wait’ll I get you upstairs, woman—then we’ll see about blushing.”

But soon enough, he was back to staring out in front of him.

“Jim?”

“Yeah?”

God, she hated to ask this. “What happens next.”

Apparently, Jim was a Neanderthal. Not a surprise, really, considering how brutal he could get. But it didn’t exactly make him a contemporary hero. The reality was, however, that as Sissy put that question out there, all he could think of, as he tried out various gloss-shit-over explanations in his head, was that he didn’t want her anywhere near any of this.

It made him remember something he’d heard about parachutists, the guys who jumped out of planes into war zones. The military commissioned a psych study on them, and one of the interesting things that had come out of it was that a huge majority of them never felt any fear at all in the regular course of their work. None. An issue of self-selection? Probably—after all, you didn’t get into that kind of work unless you had an adrenal gland that was asleep on the job.

But that hadn’t been the data point that had struck him: Nearly one hundred percent of the men said that the only time they did get scared? Their last jump. It was as if they knew they’d rolled the dice and come out on top too many times—and they expected the odds to regulate on their finale, like the universe was going to reach out and grab them at that point because it was its last shot.

And that was exactly how he felt now.

Sissy had squeaked by not just once, but twice. He didn’t want to gamble on a third try.

And as he considered the danger she’d been in? Naturally, he had to think about Devina—and all at once, an unholy anger coiled in his gut, one that was so powerful, it wiped out even any thoughts of Sissy. Fuck the war. Fuck the souls. Fuck everybody and everything.

Devina was going to go down—and not just because she lost the Creator’s little game.

The bottom line was that for him, watching Sissy in that bathroom today had been the final nail in the coffin. She had suffered yet again, been tortured … yet again. And something inside of him had snapped: Even as he sat beside her here, and smoked like he was normal, and was ready to take her upstairs and make love to her like he was normal, he was a beast.

Inside his skin, he was an unhinged, vicious sonofabitch on the knife edge of insanity.

And until he brutalized Devina? He wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on anything else.

“Jim? What happens next?”

He cleared his throat and twisted away from her—ostensibly to stab his cigarette out in the ashtray he’d brought with him, but also because he hated that he was lying to her.

“Same as always.”

“What does that mean?” she pressed.

“I find the soul, somehow, and go to work.”

“Are you worried about the last round?”

“No, not at all.” At least this was the truth, and he turned back around toward her. “I feel great. I feel strong. I’m ready to shut this game down in the right way.”

And that was also the God’s honest. The rage in his bones was a great clarifier, a figurative Windex wash of the filter he had on the world and the war and himself. With it around? He could see everything clearly, what he needed to do, where he needed to go. His target set, he was able to tune out all background noise and movement, zeroing in solely on discharging a kill shot.

“Jim?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you all right?”

He tucked her in tighter against him and kissed the top of her head. “Never better. I’ve never been better.”

The shiver that went through her made him frown. “It’s cold out here,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

“Okay.”

He helped her to her feet and held her close as he led them over to the front door. Inside, he shut things up and locked them, even though his protection spells were better than anything Schlage ever made.

Looking down at her, he lowered his lids to half-mast. “We going to bed?”

“Yes.”

Right answer. So the right answer.

Hitting the stairs, they stayed side by side, even on the landing. Which was good. What sucked? When they passed by the grandfather clock, the one that no one set and nobody cranked, the goddamn thing let out a gong. And another. And a third.

Jim ground his jaw and glared over his shoulder. In a series of quick inspirations, he imagined himself going after the cocksucker with a chain saw … an ax … a flamethrower.

Fourth … fifth … sixth …

“What is it?” Sissy asked as they came up to the second-story sitting area.

… seventh … eighth …

He knew she’d asked him a question, but he was too busy counting, even though he knew damn well what the total was going to be.

“Jim?”

… ninth … tenth … eleventh … twelfth …

“Jim.”

… thirteenth.

“Motherfucker,” he muttered under his breath before snapping himself back to attention. He was not going to let that nasty piece of shit ruin what little time he had with his woman.

Refocusing, he eyed the doorway to the bathroom he used, and was struck by an urge to reroute from the destination of her bedroom. Especially as he pictured her breasts hot-water-slick with soap suds dripping off the tips of her nipples.

Tugging at Sissy’s hand, he drew her over. “Come in here with me.”

Like she was going to say no to him when he looked at her like that?

As Jim drew her over to the bathroom, Sissy followed, because her body wanted exactly what was in his eyes. Her mind, though … her instincts? They were popping red flags all over the place—something was off about him, that hard glint in his eyes the kind of thing she hated to see.

But what could she do? It was late and everyone had had an exhausting day and there was always tomorrow morning. She’d talk to Eddie and Ad then—maybe they could help.

Jim let her go in first, and then he shut and locked the door behind them while she blinked and winced. The crane-arm light fixture over the old-fashioned sink was on, the clinically bright illumination on all the white tile about as romantic as an eye exam—but he took care of that. Reaching up, he unscrewed two out of the three bulbs and then draped a towel over the remaining one, careful not to get the terry cloth too close to the heat.

“Better?” he said.

As she nodded, for some reason she felt shy—although, come on¸ it wasn’t like they hadn’t gotten down with it before. This felt different, however … maybe because it seemed so planned and intentional. Or, no, maybe it was the fact that with the evil out of her, she felt as though she was about to be with him for the first time. Before? Even though everything had been intense and amazing, that contamination had clouded her—

Holy … shit, she thought as Jim lifted his T-shirt up over his abs, his pecs, his thick neck, his head. Even in the now-diffused lighting, his muscles stood out in sharp relief, carved rather than born, powerful even though he wasn’t fighting anyone at the moment.

Leaning to the side, he started the shower, his body flexing in a coordinated series of movements while he twisted the knobs to get the right combination of hot and cold.

As far as she was concerned? He could futz around with the temperature for the next twenty hours.

Except then it was time for him to work on her. Straightening, he came at her with a burning look on his face—like not only did he want her, but he needed the connection they were about to have.

“You’re beautiful, you know that.” Not a question. A statement—and how great was that? “But you have way too many clothes on.”

“Are you going to fix that problem?” Check her out with the come-ons. “Or make me do it myself.”