Fallen Angels 05 - Possession (24 page)

Devina frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t actually think I’m going to fuck you.”

Feeling like she’d been slapped across the face, Devina had to blink her vision clear. “I don’t understand what the problem is.”

“You
actually
think I’m going to spend the night with you—”

“I just want us to be together—”

“Then you are totally delusional, bitch.”

Losing her temper, she spat, “I’m trying to make this work, Jim. Even after everything you’ve done to me!”

“What exactly have
I
done to
you
? Other than save your sorry ass with that trade we just did.”

Devina was vaguely aware that she was breathing heavily, and that, tragically, Jim was not focused on her heaving breasts.

Talk about criminal. Her bustier was red as blood and fit more perfectly than the skin she was in. How could he not look?

At that moment, a uniformed doorman came around to her.

Not wanting to be rude, and hoping that there was still a date possibility open somehow, she put her window down. “We’ll just be a second.”

The guy seemed confused—oh, right, Jim wasn’t showing himself.

Devina smiled. “I mean, I’ll be a moment.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

As the doorman went back to his station just inside the entrance, Jim leaned into her, but not for a kiss. “Listen up, sweetheart. You and me? We don’t have a relationship, and we’re not fucking anymore. Ever. No matter what you do, or where you take shit, or how this cocksucking game shakes out? I’m not tapping that again.”

Devina recoiled. She’d seen him in a lot of moods over the last four rounds, but never like this. He wasn’t being pissy or showing off or playing hard to get.

Bedrock. In his eyes, there was nothing but granite.

He went for the door handle before she could hit the locks, and then he was out of her car, limping along with that cast, his hospital johnny opening from the back and flashing his ass.

The motherfucker didn’t look back. And he was going home to…

The demon’s stiletto slammed on the accelerator without her being consciously aware of it, and she aimed the Mercedes right at him, her headlights becoming gun sights, her car a bullet.

Her target, seen only by her.

As Jim wrenched around, his face showed nothing. It was as if he were already dead—duh.

In the instant before impact, he closed his eyes, but not in a bracing kind of way: He was trying to concentrate himself out of there.

It worked. Tragically.

Just before he disappeared, there was a bump, like she’d hit a pothole—but then he was out of her sight … ghosting away to his other life, the one that pitted him against her.

Devina hit the brakes, and her car behaved perfectly, coming to a complete stop just before she hit the curb. Yanking at the handle, she shoved the door open and got out. Someone whistled at her—and God help them, literally, if they decided to follow through on any of that goddamn shit right now. She was liable to eat them alive.

Coming around to the front of the Mercedes, she checked out the grille. Not a mark. Both headlights were totally intact and functioning. No dents in the hood.

She’d hit him, though. Surely, she’d—

Yes, she had. The iconic circular symbol of the carmaker was ever so slightly crooked … and when she snapped the thing free and examined it in the bright white glow of her high beams, she saw there was a red stain on the stainless steel—but it was simply a surface imperfection, nothing more.

So she hadn’t hurt him.

Infuriated, she hauled back to throw—

Devina stopped. Retracted her arm. Focused on what she held.

The symbol was heavy in her hand, heavier than it would have been if she’d weighed it—because the angel had left something behind in the metal…

Thanks to the hood ornament having clipped some part of his body, probably his leg.

Well, well, well … wasn’t this a bright spot on the horizon.

Objects, particularly metal objects, retained part of their possessors, and even though there had only been a split second of connection, the pain the impact had caused Jim, the raw mental state he had been in, the weakness of his corporeal form … all of that meant that something of him had been fused into what was now a very, very valuable commodity to her.

Extending her tongue, she licked his blood off the outer rim and smiled.

Inadvertently, he had given her the key to his castle.

When Sissy opened the door to Jim’s house, it was a cliché that the thing creaked. And as she shut herself in and looked around, shades of seventies horror movies, the kind she’d watched with her sister on Sundays, came back to her.

Stalling out in the front receiving hall, she didn’t know what to do. The Englishman had dropped her off here in the same way Chillie had tossed the paper onto the porch—except the angel’s aim had been better. She’d made it to the front door on the first try.

And now, left to her own devices, her anger, her sense that destiny was for shit and fate just another word for “screwed,” made her feel as though someone had their hands around her throat and was squeezing.

What was she going to do now? She had no idea where Jim or his roommate were, and no clue what she could do, if anything, to help them…

Surrounded by the colossal old mansion, with all of its decayed luxury, her mind retreated from the present and sought shelter in memory, her thoughts going back to happier days, when the week had had a reliable rhythm of work and time off, when her family had been something she’d had the luxury of taking advantage of, when her goals had been things like graduating from Union and finding a job … and maybe meeting a guy she could marry.

Sundays had been all about Vincent Price for her and Dell.

Those horror movies she and her sister had been into had been the “safe” sort of scary-scaries. Nothing gruesome, like the
Saw
series, but old-fashioned stalwarts like
The
Abominable Dr. Phibes
and
The House of Usher
and
The Innocents
. It had been an arguably strange tradition, she and Dell impatiently waiting until family dinner was finished and their homework done before raiding their father’s DVD collection and snuggling up in the basement in the dark. They had watched one or two before bed every week during school.

It had been the best way to chill out and get ready for the six-thirty alarm clocks of Monday and the pressure of the M-T-W-R-F ahead.

Mom had maintained that they were sick in the head. Dad had been so proud that he was raising the next generation of movie appreciators. She and Dell had just liked being together.

Haunted by the past, Sissy walked into the parlor and turned on one of the glass lamps. Its shade was probably a single season in the sun away from total disintegration, the creamy yellow a function of age-staining rather than any decor choice.

Boy, her sister would love this place, the furniture all a mystery because it was shrouded, the faded Oriental rug big as a lawn, the dark wood molding carved so deeply it was like a horizontal statue running around the high ceiling.

From what she’d seen, the entire house just offered more of the same.

It was the kind of fancy living that people wrote books about, but this version had been distilled through the grinder of a reversal of fortunes, a case of history not translating well into the present thanks to a lack of funds.

Pity.

Crossing over, she lifted up one of the sheets. Underneath, a faded green velvet sofa with all kinds of curlicues looked orphaned.

She ripped the covering off. Went on to the wing chair next to it and did the same. Kept going around the parlor, moving faster and more violently, until dust hung thick in the air and a pile of dirty laundry took up most of the middle of the room.

At least she’d gotten to the bottom of something.

Not her issues, though. Not in the slightest.

The angel who’d escorted her here from the hospital had magically transported her across town, but it had been without explanations—he’d told her nothing about herself, her situation, or exactly how he’d pulled off the relocation. He’d also left alone things like how he was tied to Jim, and why he’d come to them, and what his role was.

Just more black holes to add to her collection.

Pacing around, she followed the oval pattern on the carpet because it seemed like the only clear path open to her. That anger that had taken root earlier was rising again, making her feel trapped in spite of the fact that the door she’d come through was not locked, the house had dozens and dozens of rooms, and unlike in her previous life, she had no one she had to answer to—no parents, no teachers, no roommates at Union.

She was free.

So why the hell did she want to scream.

Hard to know what exactly started it, but before she knew what she was doing, she was frantically searching the fireplace’s mantel, going up high on her tiptoes in those borrowed sneakers, patting the cobwebbed shelf around the candelabra and the—

The little box rattled as she brought it down, and yup, there were matches inside.

Moving in a jerky frenzy, she ripped a sheet off the pile, shoved it into the fireplace, and struck up a flame.

Holding the teardrop-shaped glow to eye level, she stared into the yellow heat, and the fury in her expanded even further, flowing through her body, changing the shape of her, growing deep within—sure as if it were cultivating in her soul, finding crevices to root among and take over from.

Dropping to her knees, the cold marble bit into her skin through the sweatpants, but she didn’t care—she brought the tiny fire to the tangled wad and held it there. Smoke rose first, a tendril forming and then quickly thickening into a rolling river.

Proper flames appeared, flaring up, licking at the sheeting, consuming the cotton fibers with increasing greed.

Unable to look away, Sissy reached behind herself, stretching out until she connected with the soft pile she had made. Dragging more forward, she fed the heat, pushing the sheets into the blaze, feeling the burn on her hands, her wrists, her arms, her face.

In her head, a string of curses was like the fire she was creating, flaring to life, consuming—

“What the fuck!”

Sissy ignored whoever it was, utterly focused on her inferno as she wondered what else she could put in it. The drapes. She could rip down the—

Hard hands grabbed onto her shoulders and yanked her back—and that was when she lost it. Just f’in lost it.

As if detonated, she went crazy, screaming, kicking, biting at whatever she could get access to. And as she attacked, her vision whited out, nothing registering except the need to hurt someone, anyone—

With the inner explosion came a freakish strength.

Which was how she ended up twisting around and kneeing her captor right in the balls.

“Fucking hell—
fuck
!”

For a split second, the hold on her loosened, and she took advantage of the release, bolting out from the smoke-filled parlor and tearing for the front door. Grabbing the handle, she ripped things open and launched herself off the steps, landing in a messy sprawl on the wide sidewalk. Shoving her hair out of her face, she—

Headlights.

Down the lane on the left, coming toward her.

Jumping up to her feet, she ran for the car or truck or SUV, streaking out into the road, facing off, thinking of how Jim had gotten hurt. She wanted to feel the impact, wanted to be solid enough to sustain the strike, to have at least one of the old rules of life apply to her: Don’t play in traffic because you will get hit.

“Sissy! Shit!”

“See me!” she screamed at the approaching lights. “
See me!
”

“Sissy, goddamn it!”

Her prayers were answered for once. Just when she thought she’d be denied, the car’s horn blared loud enough to get through the fury that was driving her. Then she had a brief impression of the driver looking right at her in terror, some inside light in the sedan illuminating his pale face with eyes stretched wide and a mouth open as if he were yelling—

She was bodily removed from the path, a far greater weight muscling her out of the way as brakes squealed and the world spun.

She landed on the grass strip on the far side of the road, her savior’s body crushing her, pain both clearing her head and scrambling it in a different way. Instantly, she was spun onto her back, her arms pinned over her head, her legs trapped in between two heavy thighs.

Above her, Jim looked as pissed off as she felt—

“Where did she go?”

Dimly, she turned her head. A man was getting out of the BMW that had almost hit her and looking around frantically. “She was right there in the middle of the road.”

A woman emerged from the other side of the sedan. “I saw her, too. She came out of nowhere.”

Just like that cat, Sissy thought numbly as her anger dissipated. The one that had jumped in front of Jim’s truck earlier.

“I’m over here,” she called out weakly. “God … I’m over here…”

The two of them focused in her direction. “Did you hear that?” the man asked.

“Hear what?” the woman said.

The man approached, but it was clear he couldn’t really see her anymore. And as she opened her mouth to yell again, Jim clamped his hand on her mouth, silencing her.

“Don’t you think we have enough problems,” he hissed.

She tried to fight against him, but without her fury, there was no contest: He was way stronger, and stilled her without any real effort. And as expected, shortly thereafter, the couple got back in their luxury car and drove off.

As their red taillights flared, her frustration rekindled.

This was it? After all the good deeds she’d done in her life, after everything she’d unfairly been through down below, her eternity was getting stuck in the halfway-house version of an afterlife? Neither here nor there, Heaven nor Hell—nothing but a shadow that could take shape on rare occasions and maybe make car drivers hit their brakes in passing?

Fucking
bullshit
.