Red Demon (5 page)

With a rough, commanding growl, he shifted on the sofa, moving his legs so he could subtly adjust himself.
It’s not like you ever touched me there while you were alive
, he thought, speaking to Juliana inside the privacy of his own mind.
We never wound up getting anywhere near that close.

Although they’d planned to, he thought, shivering—and very aware of another tantalizing, slow stroke between his legs. Why would she be teasing him sexually now? Maybe she was out to prove a point: that she could still turn him on, make his whole body come alive with yearning for her.

Stop manhandling the goods and leave me alone
, he warned mentally, not sure whether mandates worked with ghosts, or whether the spirits could read minds and thoughts at all.

“She’s here,” Emma said suddenly.

Yeah, no fucking kidding
, he almost replied, shifting his long legs again and willing his full-gun salute to sag before anyone else noticed.

“I feel her spirit moving about the room.” Emma looked up toward the ceiling, and then her gaze tracked back and forth, almost as if following a flittering butterfly.

Like her mother, Emma was a highly gifted medium, one with the ability to hear the spirits, as well as sometimes see and smell demons or specters from the spiritual realm.

“I sense her, too,” Cecilia agreed, her voice trilling with enthusiasm.

Ari glanced up and found both women staring at him, but he hadn’t expected the slightly wide-eyed expression on Emma’s face. She appeared panicked, threatened. He’d seen a similar look in her eyes during their recent show-down with Ares by the River Styx.

River picked up on her reaction, turning toward her in concern. “What is it, Em?” He slid an arm about her shoulders, drawing her against his side. “Are you all right?”

Emma swallowed visibly, nodding. “Juliana says . . . she’s glad that Ari has us as his friends.” She glanced up at River. “That you, especially, are a true, kind friend, and he deserves that . . . needs that.” Emma’s voice had a distant, slow quality to it, as if she were on the telephone, repeating what the person on the other end of the receiver was saying. In a sense, that was exactly what she was doing, only in this case she was listening in on a party line from the other side.

Ari tensed against the sofa, torn between wanting to bolt and needing to move closer to Emma as she spoke.

Emma locked gazes with him, her pale eyes blazing with otherworldly energy. “Juliana says that she waited for you. That you never came back to her.” She tilted her head, eyebrows lowering as if she was straining to hear the words. “Juliana says she kept waiting here, but you were gone.” Emma’s gaze focused on him, eyes brimming brightly.

Panicked at the sudden change in inflection and tone that Emma had assumed, Ari stood. “What’s going on, Em?”

She pressed both hands against her temples as if in pain. “I believed you loved me, Aristos. That you understood how deeply I loved
you
. Surely you knew my heart; I was very clear about my feelings. Why did you wait such a very long time to return to me?”

He began to tremble like crazy, feeling that fiery energy blaze all over his body. His face flushed, his arousal magnifying sharply, and he started pacing in short strides in an effort to walk it off.

One more time she repeated the plaintive question. “Why did you not return to me, Aristos?”

He rounded on Emma, staring at the regal countenance of Juliana herself. Not literally, but the words and timbre of voice coming from Emma were no longer her own. And years of pent-up grief, and heartbreak, and longing, welled up inside of him; he couldn’t hold back the torrent of feeling.

“Why didn’t I come back for you?” he cried out, not trying to censor his reaction. “Because you were long gone! Damn, I was hardly gonna hang around after that.”

Emma jerked back on the sofa as if he’d slapped her, blinking in stinging reaction. “This manner in which you speak is unfamiliar to me. I don’t understand these coarse words. When is this time?”

“Uh, Emma?” Ari tried, never taking his gaze off of her. “You in there still? Emma, I think I need . . . a little help.”

Cecilia moved to his side very quickly. “Aristos, listen very carefully to me,” she said, leaning up to whisper in his ear. “You don’t have to tell her how long she’s been gone, or how she died. She does not seem to understand her fate.”

“She knows who you and Emma are, and that I’m here. . . . Why doesn’t she realize when she . . .
you know
?” he hissed.

“Juliana’s perceptions are not grounded in time and space. Some facts are clear, others very murky,” Cecilia explained in a low voice. “Be cautious with her.”

When Ari gave her a desperate glance, Cecilia added, “If she’s confused about her past, actual details might upset her.”

He nodded and was about to attempt a bland, openended answer to Juliana’s queries, when Emma cried out. She doubled over, pressing both hands against her temples with a moan. River knelt down in front of her immediately, murmuring words that Ari couldn’t make out. The buzzing energy in his own brain had become much louder, deafening, until it blocked out all other sounds.

Emma looked in his direction, her dazed eyes filled with anxiety. “Juliana’s pushing at my mind. She wants to enter me, speak through me . . . touch through me. Before, I was only repeating her words, but now she’s trying to force her way into my mind and body.”

“Just tell me what she says. I can’t deal with anything more, Emma.”

He bolted as far away from Emma as he could without leaving the room, backing toward the fireplace. The posture was his military default—the need to secure his rear, positioning himself where he could see and thwart any impending attack. Current events definitely felt like one hell of an assault.

Emma wrapped both arms about herself as if hoping to bar the ghostly spirit from invading her body. “She’s too strong, Ari. She’s insisting, and . . . she needs to see you. To
touch
you. I can’t keep her out.”

A cold chill chased down his spine as if he’d just been blasted by an arctic wind. His whole body trembled; he shivered like Emma herself was doing. He backed up another step, the fireplace mantel jabbing into his back.

Emma’s head lifted once again, her pale blue eyes—ones that were identical to those Juliana had possessed—locking on him with a vibrant, magnetic gaze.
Emma’s not the one looking at me anymore
, he realized.

Only one woman had ever studied him with that kind of fire blazing in her rare gaze. Juliana Tiades. “I think I’m losing it,” he muttered, rubbing his sweating forehead, but nobody seemed to hear.

With a regal sweep of her right hand, Juliana rose to her feet, standing tall and confidently proud. The refined posture was hauntingly familiar, just as Emma was hauntingly gone from her own body. Ari jerked backward, the mantel pushing hard against his spine. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and Juliana continued walking toward him, that graceful glide the same as it had been more than one hundred years ago.

Their gazes locked across the small space that separated them, and it was as if words passed between them. Volumes of unspoken syllables that he’d never had the chance to murmur in Juliana’s ear; hundreds of excuses that she hoped to offer him as to why she’d taken her own life the day after seeing what he truly was. The harsh truth of his immortal nature, black wings and all.

“Stay back.” He pointed an accusatory finger. “I don’t have anything to say to you. The only reason I’m here is so you’ll leave me alone.”

Juliana seemed unaware of his anger, his bitterness. She practically sailed toward him, a lovely smile filling her face, one that hinted at intelligence and amusement . . . and absolute joy at seeing him again after so many decades. That expression was one he’d seen many times before, one that couldn’t have been imitated by an imposter. The reality of it broke down every argument he’d been trying to wield against her.

Juliana was smiling at him; Juliana was moving closer; Juliana had found him through an intricate maze of death and time.

“What are you doing here, Jules?” he whispered, throat so tight he could barely speak.

She seemed briefly taken aback, standing slightly taller. “This is my home. Need I explain my presence in it, Aristos?”

Ari’s patience boiled over. “Woman, this isn’t your home. It hasn’t been for a long damned time.” Then he remembered Cecilia’s explanation that Juliana didn’t fully understand her current predicament—that she knew some facts but was oblivious to others. “I mean, you don’t belong here now,” he added a tad more gently.

She frowned back at him, eyebrows drawing into a tight line. “Well, sir, one fact has not changed since I last spent time in your presence,” she announced indignantly, a hand fluttering against her breastbone. “You remain sinfully handsome, dangerously so, and you still lack the fine manners of my own age.” She glanced about her in sudden surprise. “What year is it, incidentally?”

A
ri kept wide eyes on Juliana, torn between wanting to get as far away from her as possible—and rushing to hold her again. Whether it made him the worst kind of lovesick fool or not, the latter reaction was winning like a backroom card sharp.

She smiled up at him, a faint blush coloring her cheeks, a reaction he’d observed numerous times during their courtship. Juliana had been unexpectedly shy with him on occasion, despite her conversational charm and poise. She’d often flushed at what he considered to be innocent compliments, or the briefest touch of his fingertips against her hand. She might have maintained an elevated position in Savannah society, but that formality had dissolved in his arms. The first time he’d kissed her? Oh, she’d blazed like an inferno, her face turning as red as the hair atop her head. That uncensored reaction, so naive, had charmed him completely.

It might have even caused him to fall in love.

The familiar russet heat infused her face now; for a moment, the physical limitations of eternity and death melted away. Emma was no longer their bridge, and Juliana was truly alive again, near enough that he could hold her, stroke her hair, murmur in her ear, because she was real, vital. She stood in front of him, obviously expecting him to say
something
, when he could only gape like the ill- mannered idiot he’d always been in her presence.

Except she
wasn’t
real; she wasn’t even physical, he reminded himself. The only reason she was here like this was because she’d overrun Emma’s resistance.

“Juliana,” he ventured carefully. “You’ve taken over my friend’s body. You can’t do that. Not without asking permission.” Was that even how a channeling relationship worked? Was it like borrowing someone’s car or shoes—like when he pinched Nikos’s Harley without
quite
getting the okay?

She peered up into his face. “But I want to be here, with you, Aristos.”

His eyes watered suddenly, forcing him to look away. “You’ve got to leave.”

I need you to leave here because I can’t deal with these feelings again.
He was just too frightened of the swirling emotions roaring through him. “You can’t possess Emma’s body. She’s my friend. You can’t use her, no matter what you want.”

Cecilia barricaded that emotional escape route by piping in. “Juliana could never have gained control or access, not if Emma weren’t willing.”

Blasted mediums
, he thought. Blasted friends who forced you to face things you’d just as soon keep running from.

Juliana moved much closer in that elegant way of hers. The familiarity chilled him, angered him—and made him hope. That was the most maddening reaction of them all.

“Aristos?” she said. “I asked you what year it is.”

He cut an inquiring look toward Cecilia, panicked. If he wasn’t supposed to answer these questions because they might upset Juliana, then what was he supposed to do instead? Lie? Tell her it was still 1893?

“Go on.” Cecilia nodded encouragingly, leaning forward from where she sat on the sofa. Beside her River watched, and his calm reaction lit a fuse inside Ari. How could the guy look so placid when his wife was sharing skin space with their very own version of Linda Blair? “Talk to her, Aristos,” Cecilia pressed.

“About
what
?” he roared in frustration, tossing his hands into the air.

“What do you wish you’d said? If she’d stayed with you? Whatever’s been in your heart and mind, this may be your only opportunity.”

He’d never gotten to tell Juliana good-bye. Or how much he loved her. A love that came from this strange, mystic place in the core of his being, one that he’d never known existed before he met her. He’d never had the chance to acknowledge that feeling, the full scope of how it had consumed him from almost his first sighting of her.

In the end, he’d not gotten to say perhaps the most important words of all—that he was sorry for being a creature so dark, so disturbing, that it had driven her to take her own life rather than face what he was. But those confessions were smothered in layers upon layers of anger over one true fact: She’d given up on them, never let him explain what she’d seen so long ago.

He began hyperventilating slightly as Juliana moved right up into his space. She had him cornered against the fireplace. Her eyes shone brightly, filled with the same vivacious energy she’d always possessed.

She lifted a porcelain-delicate hand toward his face. “Aristos?” She sounded uncertain, vulnerable. Almost sad. “I was so certain you would want me, or at the very least show some joy at my return. Are you not happy to be here in my home?”

His skin prickled with electric tension. “It’s not your home anymore, woman.”