Soulless (The Heartless Series Book 2) (18 page)

“If I could take everything back, I would. Believe me. I would.”

“You wouldn’t torture me every night?” She bites back.

“You did that, remember? Not me. You… it’s complicated. Something inside you, though, knew that you were evil.”

She looks at me. Tears are streaming down her face, and it breaks my heart. “Not evil… not… something knew that something was wrong with you. Something was different. You controlled everything that happened. Not me. I know it’s hard to understand, but maybe someday you will. Maybe someday you won’t hate me… I don’t know, but I know this: I need you. Right now. I need you.”

Gracen wipes her tears as she sits down on the bed next to the book. I stay where I am, not chancing being thrown against the wall any more. “Wow, you sure turn on the charm when you need me. I guess this is all a lie too…”

“No… no. Not a lie. I do need you. I need…” I take a deep breath. Time to be honest. For once in my miserable after life, I need to tell the truth. “They have Lucien.”

She looks up at me very quickly. “Lucien.”

“Yeah.” I clear my throat and push my hand through my hair. I’m buying time, trying to find the right words. “Yeah, I didn’t know. After I buried the bodies, I came inside and you were on the phone with your mother, remember?”

“It wasn’t like it was a year ago, Hart. It was a few hours.” She snaps.

Okay then. “Right. Well the phone rang again when I was upstairs. It was your home number on the caller ID. I picked it up and…”

She cringes. “Bet she sounded familiar to you.”

I deserve that. “Very familiar actually.”

She tilts her head to the side and her eyes narrow.

“Because
she
was my mother.” There it is. The big secret. The thing I didn’t want her to know—spilled. I could give a rat’s ass about the book; it’s my mother I’ve worried about this entire time. How do you explain that to a person? You don’t. You just… you can’t.

I didn’t leave her speechless, but close to it. “Your… your mother is a demon?”

I have to close my eyes and bite back the tears. I’m not crying. I’m not. Not now. Not ever. “My mother’s name is Amelia. She died right before the war started. It was part of the reason Lucien and I enlisted. He was always such a mama’s boy, and I couldn’t stand being around him or our father after she died. The grief in that house… you can’t imagine.”

“Your mother went to Hell?” She says like it’s impossible.

“People go to Hell all the time, Gracen. Not just the murderers and rapists. Anyway, my mother, Amelia, she’s the one…” The words stick on my tongue, not wanting to come out. This is stupid. STUPID. Gracen is going to know sooner or later. “Amelia is the one who tortured me in Hell; she’s the one who turned me into what I am.”

“Wow.” Gracen says. That pretty much sums it up.

“Yeah… wow.”

“I don’t… I don’t know what to say.” I can hear compassion in her voice, and I don’t want it. I don’t deserve it. A thing like me doesn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy. Especially not a girl we love… not a girl we hurt.

I do the only thing I know to do. I shrug like it’s nothing and bury every bit of pain and regret and abandonment and loss and betrayal down deep in myself. It’s what I’m good at. Other demons, they don’t have to bury. They don’t remember. They don’t feel.

I feel. I hate it, but I do. I wish I could turn it off. I’d give anything to not be what I am.

Pipe dreams and all that.

“Don’t say anything. It is what it is. I’m telling you that so you know. Amelia, the thing that was my mother, she’s pure evil.”

“That’s pretty ironic coming from a demon.” She scoffs lightly. A small smile pulls on her lips as she fiddles with her fingers. She’s not looking at me, not directly. I see her eyes cut in my direction every once in a while. That’s good, though. I don’t know if I could handle her looking directly at me.

“It is. I know.” I reach for her hand and take it in mine. I shouldn’t. There is no way I should even be in the same room with her, much less holding her hand. She hates me. She should. She has every right. So why is she letting my hand stay on hers? Why hasn’t she flinched? Why doesn’t she zap me dead right here?

“Amelia is a much stronger demon that I am. She’s like one of the big bads in Hell. I’m not sure what she’s planning, but I have to get my brother away from her. I owe him that much.”

“By using me.” It’s not even a question.

Humanity hurts. Humanity, my heart, makes me want to pull Gracen into my arms and let her know it’s okay. That I’m not doing this to hurt her. That I’m not going to let anything happen to her. Instead, I push it all—every bit of good feeling I have toward her and the feelings I don’t deserve—down into the deepest parts of myself.

“If I have to.”

I swear she flinches at the matter of fact, lifeless way I answer her.”What does your mother have to do with us going to see mine?” Her words catch in her throat, and I think she’s already figured it out.

I rub my thumb lightly over her knuckles, not for any sort of love or lust or longing or whatever those people write about in those skin novels. I need to feel closer to her, closer to somebody. This is difficult to talk about. In fact, I never have. Nobody knows what I’m about to tell Gracen. For this moment in time, I need something, someone to cling to. I don’t deserve it. I’m a bastard for doing this to her. I’m evil enough not to care.

“Amelia was one of the things that escaped Hell when the gate was open. I recognized her. I don’t think Lucien did. She stared at me, and then she was gone.”

“And Lucien went in.”

“Yeah… to save me.” I blink back tears. I don’t remember the last time I cried over my family. In Hell, Amelia twisted time. It’s one of the tricks they do to souls to get them to turn off their humanity. Hurt something or someone bad enough, long enough, and they give up. They shut it off so it won’t hurt again—then they forget what it was ever like to be human, to have that feeling, to even remember they turned that part off anyway.

“In Hell…” I have to tell somebody. I have to… I clear my throat, wishing for the tears to go away. Instead of listening to me, they slide right down my cheeks and onto my shirt. Gracen flinches. I’m sure she never saw this coming. “In Hell, you don’t automatically become a demon. Demons have to be made. They take everything from you. Everything but hope.”

“Hope?” No. She wasn’t expecting that at all.

I nod and keep my gaze on her tiny, delicate hand as my fingers follow the circles of her knuckles. “Hope. If a person, if a soul, loses hope, then what else do they have to lose? They give up. Don’t even try to fight. They fall into despair and turn into the things that line the bottom of Hell. The Fallen. And they are nasty, nasty things, Gracen. Usually, they are angels. Angels that were in Heaven and fell. Hell took them in, tried to change them, but took their hope. Then they fell again….

And they will continue to fall.”

I feel her shutter beside me. “I can’t imagine an angel falling. Heaven sounds so much more wonderful than Hell.”

“Depends on the marketing.” I try to smile. It doesn’t work. Another tear falls down my cheek. “Amelia was my torturer. She remembered me, but not in a way a mother remembers a son. She knew who I was. Remembered my birth on that cold, snowy February morning. She remembered Lucien. She remembered she loved him best.”

I stop and bite my lip. It’s too much… I can’t. It hurts. But if she’s going to understand this, if she’s going to help me, I have to, for one time in my life, be honest. I’m doing this for her—for him—or at least it’s what I’m telling myself. In reality, I think I’m doing it more for myself.

“Lucien was always Mother’s favorite. I knew it then. I know it now. I knew it in Hell. It’s different when you hear the words from your mother’s lips, ya know?”

Breathe. I have to do this. “Hell… it’s all… it’s terrible. And I never wanted to go back, but I was prepared to stop the world from ending because no matter how stupid and bad and wrong and confusing and… did I mention stupid… this world is, I still like it better than Hell. The curse of humanity, and I know you don’t think it, I know you think I’m the worst thing in the world. You have every right to think that. The things I’ve done to you—the things I’ve made you think—are inexcusable. I thought I was doing the right thing to get my revenge on my brother.

“I didn’t care about the damage to you or your family or those other girls I drove crazy to keep Lucien off my tail. I have my humanity, not that it showed, and for that I’m sorry. I can never tell you that enough. I don’t expect you to believe it or for you to ever forgive me. I don’t expect you to. I’m just trying to get you to understand. I have to go to Prospect. I have to. I have so many things to make up for. So many things.”

“Amelia is possessing my mother, isn’t she?” Some words should not be spoken calmly. They should be yelled or screamed or said with dripping sarcasm. Gracen does none of that. She’s calm. Eerily calm. Too calm. It’s almost like she’s snapped. Like there is no more room to process anything else in her mind, and she’s simply shutting down.

I can’t let that happen.

“No.” I avert my eyes, wishing for the tears to go away. “She’s possessing Aunt Willow.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

GRACEN

I
SUPPOSE
I
SHOULD BE SURPRISED.
Or shocked. Or anything really. I should feel something, anything. Instead I feel numb. Hart’s evil mother is possessing my aunt—a person I don’t even really know. Someone who has been in a mental hospital since Hart drove her crazy all those years to keep an eye on me.

I should yell at him.

I should slap him.

I should at the very, very least walk out of the room.

I should feel anger.

Rage.

Disappointment.

Confusion.

Sadness.

I should feel something.

Instead, I’m numb.

I can’t feel anything.

My arms are heavy. My legs are weak.

I’m glad I’m sitting down because things might get ugly if I weren’t.

“Gracen?” Hart stops rubbing my hand. Doesn’t mean he lets it go. Doesn’t mean I want him too. Doesn’t mean anything.

I thought I knew what it meant to be numb before. In high school when I didn’t get the part in the play because Ariel Shaffner, rich girl townie, wanted it, I felt numb. I wasn’t even mad. I couldn’t feel.

I always had the thought in the back of my mind that I really was heartless like Hart had told me so many times in my dreams. I had no heart. I had no soul.

I had no feelings.

No real feelings.

Like there’s some important part missing inside me.

What else would explain why I’m even here with Hart? Most people would have run. Most people would have done anything to get away from him. Most people wouldn’t be sitting in a hotel room, allowing him to hold their hand.

Most people would care.

I’m not even sure I can.

It’s too much.

I just… I want it all to be over with.

“Talk to me. You’re scaring me.” He’s never told me that before. Oh, he’s scared me a bunch of times, but this is a new one. New for both of us, I imagine.

It might be nice to be scared. To feel anything but this emptiness inside. At least being scared would pump up my heart rate and make me feel something.

I wonder what it’s like—to be a real, not messed up human. A thing with only one species of blood: not angel and demon and human all melded into one abomination.

“Say something,” he says with a little more fire in his voice. I think I’m irritating him. Good.

“What is there to say?” I shrug. My shoulders round, and I feel like I could fall onto the bed and sleep for days.

“What is there to say?” He has no trouble feeling anything. A demon is more emotionally stable than me. I’m sure that means something really bad. “How about yell at me? Tell me it’s all my fault. Tell me you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.” I don’t blame him either. Not really. It isn’t like he can control his mother. I blame him for his stupid grudge against his brother, but the rest of it, being manipulated by Seth, I don’t. Not really. I can see how anybody can be brought into that.

He sits up straighter and pulls his hand away from mine. I glance at him, and he’s looking at me now. His eyes are wide. The red rings around them are nearly undetectable.

“You don’t hate me? That’s the craziest thing ever. You should hate me. Why don’t you hate me?”

“Do you want me to hate you?”

“Yes! Yes, Gracen. I want you to hate me. I want you to freakin’ care! My mother has possessed your aunt. She has Lucien and says she’ll send him back to the darkest part of Hell—where they send all the fallen angels—if I don’t bring you to her. You should hate me. You should feel betrayed and upset. Hell, you should kill me for what I’m doing. I played you! I lied to you! I’ve been lying to you this entire time. And you don’t hate me?”

He’s shaking now. His voice. His body. His hands. I’m not sure, at this moment, that there is anyone in the world who hates him more than he does. I should. I can’t.

I’m broken.

I have no soul.

“I want to hate you.” It’s the God’s honest truth. “I do. I want to yell and scream. But I can’t. It’s like I can’t even feel right. Like I don’t have a heart.”

“Come on, girl. Don’t be that way. You know I was lying. When I said you had no heart or no soul, I was lying because Seth said I needed to. I don’t believe that. I’ve been with you your entire life. I’ve seen the good in you. I’ve seen the passion, the anger, the fire. I saw the damn fire tonight when you threw me against the wall and earlier when you slowed down time. You got angry, and you did something about it. What’s changed now?”

I don’t have an answer for him. “Maybe all the demon blood I’ve had in the last three days. Maybe the wreck. Maybe the overwhelming understanding, the revelation, that no matter how much I want it, nothing will ever be okay. I’m done, Hart.” I move from the bed and lightly run my fingers over the formerly white lampshade. “I’m done. I want it over.”

The bed squeaks, and in a matter of seconds, Hart is behind me. He’s not touching me, thank goodness. I can feel him, though. Feel his breath against my neck. Feel his body close to mine.