Soul Stealer (42 page)

Claudia smiled at him, and he returned it sweetly. She wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him. He hugged back without hesitation.

She breathed him in, feeling the way confidence, peace and contentment seeped out of him and into her very core.

Then she gave him a peck on the cheek, scooted across the bed, and when he climbed in after her after turning off the lights she wrapped herself around him, and he held her as well, tucked neatly under one arm.

She fell asleep with the sound of his heartbeat in her head and his breathing moving in synch with hers.

Chapter Forty

Voro had every detail, or lack of detail, of Peter’s door memorized. He had been staring at it for what felt like years already. A white panel, featureless and perfect. No name plate. Just a chrome knob.

Perfect. Non-offending. Boring as fuck.

Voro shifted his weight to his other leg, feeling how his knees were locking up from standing in one place for so long. But he wasn’t going back to his chamber until he saw Raphael again.

He decided to sit on the ground. He slid down the wall, shoving the crossbow out of the way. The broken arrow was in his back pocket. He took it out to get comfortable, studying it.

The black of Praesul’s blood had tinted the wood darker. Closer to the feathers it was still its same reddish-brown hue. But the rest was now a dark-stained walnut hue. As he ran his thumb down that odd shaft he felt a shiver, a tingle down his spine that was surprising and yet darkly familiar.

His body still somewhat recognized what it was touching right then. Like his inner Sin Eater was recognizing an old friend in Praesul’s blood.

For six hundred years he had known clearly his purpose. It was simple, it was his nature. It was all he knew. Being trapped between the two sides as he was now had him feeling discombobulated.

At some point he dozed off and he came to as someone kicked his foot. He jolted awake, dropping the two splints of wood. He smiled up at Raphael and climbed to his feet, handing over the arrow to Raphael.

“Hey man,” he said, trying to be casual. “Grabbed you a souvenir. We got him, Raphael. You made a hell of a mess of him. We did it, man.”

Raphael stared at him. Voro knew trouble when he saw it, and Raphael was a mess. His friend was heartbroken.

Voro put a hand on his arm. “What do you want to do now? Should we clean up, head back down and go for a drink?”

Raphael gave a sad smile as though he appreciated what Voro was trying to do. “I need to go to sleep. And not wake up for a month. If I even want to get up then. So you go ahead. I’ll just … stick around here.”

He watched Raphael wander off down the corridor, head downward; the very picture of a broken man. Voro wasn’t good with this shit. He never knew how to make people feel better. He let Raphael go.

Voro sighed and let his head smack back against the wall. There was a small laugh and Voro jumped.

Peter was laughing. “Sorry, Voro,” he said, completely insincere. “You got a minute?”

Voro felt his sarcasm slide in to place. “Do I have the option of saying no?”

“No.”

Raphael followed Peter through the door he’d been staring at. He sat in the chair opposite Peter’s desk. Exhaustion was really catching up to him, and he hoped this was a quick debrief before he could go and pass out for about thirteen consecutive hours.

Peter, to his credit, did seem to understand. “I’ll make this quick,” he began, sinking into his chair. “I want to thank you for everything you did. Jehoel brought me up to date and I’m very impressed and grateful. You showed bravery, intelligence, and dedication.”

Voro shrugged. “He had to be stopped. Even without the change that happened to me I would have wanted him stopped. It doesn’t help either side to have that kind of freak trying to take over the world.”

Peter nodded. “I thank you for protecting the others, and Raphael. I actually didn’t know if he would come back to us, you know.”

Voro nodded. “I know. This was the first time this ever happened, right?”

“Exactly.”

Voro was itching to go, then he remembered something. “Down there, Praesul said my soul would have been enough to complete his transformation, as though I were equal to an angel,
decipio
or
frustro
, even the
jinn
. But I don’t have a soul, so what’s he talking about?”

Peter looked uncomfortable for the first time since Voro’d climbed the golden ladder. “He could sense that you were changing.”

Voro raised an eyebrow. “I’m changing? Like, dear diary, something feels funny when I climb the rope in gym class?”

Peter scoffed. “When did you ever take a gym class?”

Voro was stuck. Peter had never outgunned him like that before.

“You’re here because you saved Iola’s life. By sacrificing your own. You know that. And the longer you’re with us, helping us, the less the Sin Eater remains.”

Voro inhaled like he’d been sucker-punched, but he had gathered this much since Praesul had identified his burgeoning goodness. “If I were to go back to the other side?”

Peter spread his hands out. “You know they wouldn’t take you. They’d send you somewhere even worse than this place, Voro.”

It was true: forgiveness was for the fluffy side of the clouds. Down below it was one strike before you were out. He felt Peter waiting for a response so he threw a generic, ready-made one out there. “Well, thank you for being so forthcoming.”

“Well, you’re welcome.”

“One more question.” Peter just raised his eyebrows. “What did I do right before I killed him?”

Peter frowned. “What do you mean?”

Voro tried to put it in to words. “I got into his head. It was just like Sin Eating. And instead of cutting the ties and severing him from his evil … I think I forgave it.” Peter’s gaze was level, and Voro wondered if the guy wasn’t having a mini-stroke or something. “Peter?”

He shook himself back. “Sorry, Voro. I’m trying to comprehend. When he vanished we thought he was scattered again. But we can’t detect the slightest trace of him. We were wondering if it was possible he was completely destroyed. But forgiveness is very potent. The thought that you might be capable of it …”

His palms were sweating. He felt he might be sick. “So now I can forgive people?”

Peter’s very pulse likely sped up at the thought. “If you can, that’s a pretty big deal.”

Voro ran his hands through his hair, trying to ignore the cold sweats. “Shit. I can’t -”

“I want you to consider something.”

Voro froze, hands on the arms of the chair, ready to push off. “What?”

“Your previous set of skills doesn’t have to be gone, or used only for evil. You can sense the true evil of humanity. That’s important. But you can be equipped to negate it.”

Voro decided to settle back in his seat. “What are you talking about?”

Peter looked a little guilty now. “This event with Praesul proved a lot of things to us. We know you’re willing to risk a lot to help us. And you can be counted on no matter what.”

Voro waved a hand, cutting him off. “Peter, you know this ass-kissing shit doesn’t work on me.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry. What I’m saying is: we’d like you to stay a Sin Eater. But unlike before, you’ll actually be wiping out that filth. You’ll be doing what false sin eaters of old were arrested for, but you’ll actually be doing the real thing.”

Voro let his eyes slide closed. Focused on the here and now. Waited to get angry or want to hit something. Or throw something.  But it didn’t come.

He opened his eyes, and Peter was looking at him, not with expectation or hope, just understanding. And apology. Voro didn’t like it any more than he liked sympathy.

“I can do that,” Voro said, surprised at how hoarse he sounded.

Peter nodded. “I appreciate that, Voro. And I want you to have an understanding that what you will do in this capacity is very important to us. It will mean a lot.”

“Yeah, we’ll hug it out later,” Voro said, finally standing up. “I got something else to take care of now.”

Patrice woke slowly, stretching herself more alert and rolling on to her back, clocking the position of the sun and guessing it must have been around noon, maybe a bit before. Her body felt sore but fantastic, and she guessed that she was still feeling the afterglow from being made love to so completely. It was glorious really –

She froze, eyes widening as the realization hit her. Last night had happened, things she didn’t understand, people died.

And Raphael was an angel.

She rubbed her hands up and down her face roughly, willing the real wake-up to happen. The one that told her the dream started sometime after setting eyes on that beautiful blonde man.

Patrice realized she was crying. Again. The crying hurt everything; lungs, chest, head. She must have wept herself to sleep the night before because this felt like opening an old wound.

She dragged her sad ass out of the bed, waddling to the en suite and turning on her shower. She stood under the hot stream, wet her hair, but couldn’t muster the energy for shampoo. She washed her face and ran a bar of soap over her skin, maybe even getting suds on all parts of her. But she didn’t care; she was locked in her own head.

Her brother had been sick, yes. Paranoid. Seeing things towards the end. His biggest psychological problems had likely more to do with the drugs than his own issues. Patrice had always worried she carried the same gene. She seemed to lack the gene that would ensure addiction, or at least it had been dormant so far. She had watched her brother dissolve away to a madman she didn’t recognize, hoping like hell it wouldn’t happen to her and feeling guilty for that all the same.

Remembering Raphael discussing that he was an angel, how he had been rendered normal when he burst into her apartment to save her from a viciously evil demon, brought back her brother, of course. But Raphael had none of her brother’s manic tendencies. He had earnestly told her everything calmly, story never wavering, always looking her straight in the eye. The biggest difference had been that he knew she would think he was insane.

So that meant he wasn’t crazy. Only sane people doubt their sanity.

But the hypothesis that left her with was that it was all true. And how the hell could that possibly be?

She flipped off the water, toweled herself dry roughly, then pulled on her robe, letting her hair touch the lapels and soak the satin almost immediately. She stared at herself in the mirror.

She was aging well, she supposed. No wrinkles; likely from the no-marriage-no-kids aspect of her life. Hair was brown, reddish in sunshine. A few freckles that didn’t fade from youth. She had always thought she was plain. Ralph had made her feel actually beautiful, possibly for the first time ever.

That realization didn’t make her cry. Actually, it made her smile.

Patrice left her room, wandering down the hall, thinking maybe a cup of tea was needed. In her living room she surveyed the view; a sunny day, too pretty for her current mood. She would have loved to see rain.

A man was sitting in an arm chair facing away from the floor-to-ceiling glass. She jumped, then recognized him as Ralph’s friend.

Patrice looked to her front door. Her inside security measures, the dead bolt and chain, were not in place. But then again, Claudia had locked her away the night before. She couldn’t very well slip a security chain in place from the hallway.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, tightening the belt on her robe.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Patrice. Just have a seat. Please.”

For all his size and menacing countenance he was terribly polite. Standing on good manners herself, Patrice parked it on her sofa, legs bent up beside her.

“I want to apologize,” he began. “If I had been better back-up to Raphael none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have ended up here, wouldn’t have been messed with by that thing you saw last night. That was the same thing that had been in this apartment when Raphael burst in here. The more souls he took from people the closer he was to becoming a solid, flesh and blood God. Apparently, the soul of an angel was like a super-charge to the process. One more super-charged soul and he would have been done. So we were in that garage last night to destroy him.”

Patrice watched his face. He, too, knew that this story was beyond belief. But his earnest faith in it was what prevented her from stopping him and throwing him out.

“I don’t know what you know of angels, but they love people. I mean it. The second they meet someone pure of heart they are gone. Over the moon. Unfortunately, humans have a tendency to become obsessed with them. With desire, want, lust. They’re all beautiful, as you saw. But most humans can’t even touch angels. They’re trip-wired for their own protection. Apparently when Raphael’s soul was taken, he was able to touch you. And be touched. That’s not normal for him. But besides the shock, or burn, humans can’t handle it mentally. Any humans who have been able to tolerate a caress or more have all, without exception, gone mad.”

Patrice put a hand to her throat, surprised.

“He never thought of that. But don’t hate him for that. He can’t help but love. If beings can be one act, feeling or thought, for angels it’s strictly love. So please don’t doubt that he loves you. If he’s not here, it’s because he can’t risk causing you distress of any kind. He told me about your brother. His guilt is crushing.”

Patrice closed her eyes, covered her face.

“Raphael loves you so much. He doesn’t know I’m here. He doesn’t know I’m telling you any of this. Just believe me that he loves you terribly, and not just because he has to. You were good to him, Patrice. So I wanted to say thank you as well.”