Soulless (The Heartless Series Book 2) (8 page)

“I don’t know what to believe. Seth seemed to think it was true. It’s why he used it on you. Said it would be the only thing that would hurt you.”

“But I’m an angel, or part one, not a demon.” Six of one, half a dozen of the other. All evil. Or trying to be. “And besides, you had it in your dream way before Seth did.”

“Another one of those mysteries of life. Did I have it in the dream, or did you put it in the dream with your wacky psychic powers?”

As if my mind needed anything else… “You did.”

“You sure?”

I’m going to smack him.

He sighs, clearly tired by this exchange. Honestly I am too. I’m ready to move on. The past is in the past. What happened the last three days happened, and now it’s time to move on. To figure out how in the world we’re going to fix it and move on, because that’s what’s important. Moving. On. Fixing things. If there’s any way under the sun to fix them. I hope there is. I don’t want to be this thing forever.

I can smell it.

The blood.

I caught a hint of it when I came downstairs, but now I can feel it tingling every nerve in my skin, singing in my ear. Oh God I want it.

I want to throw up. We have to talk about something else. We just have to. “Why did you get back into Sam’s body?”

“Again with the stream of consciousness crap! You are making me dizzy.” Hart rolls his eyes and tosses the knife down on the table like it isn’t the most powerful weapon in the entire world, especially if it can kill me and I’m supposedly unkillable. Well, I mean, after I fully turn, and who knows how that will happen. He gets up and goes over to my seat. He throws the middle-aged women over his shoulder and starts for the back door. It’s then that I squint to see through the glass French doors, which are in my direct eye line, and look into the backyard. It’s dark out. Midnight dark, and it’s not even late afternoon. I can’t make out everything, but I swear I see a big mound of dirt.

There is a mass grave in my backyard.

Totally normal.

The demons would have killed them anyway.
I hear Hart’s words in my mind. Hart stops, the body draped over his shoulder, and turns his head so I can see its silhouette.

“I did them a favor, Gracen. I know you don’t believe it, but I did. Not only did I save you, I saved them. I don’t know if they went to Heaven or Hell. Obviously, I’m not in control of that, but I do know… I know that the human soul is awake when their body is taken over by us. They see everything we see. Feel everything we feel. Touch everything we touch. They watch us kill, watch us torture, watch us do whatever we damn well please, and they can’t do a thing about it. They can’t move. Can’t scream. It’s no life, Gracen. It’s torture in the worst way possible. If a demon stays inside long enough, it’ll drive the soul crazy.”

I think about my Aunt Willow. “You did that to her.”

He doesn’t answer as he opens the outside door.

I don’t feel anything. Not really. Should I feel anger? Hell yes. What Hart did to my aunt was wrong. She lost whatever was left of her life because he played dress up in her body to watch over me all those years. Yeah, she’d been in a car accident, and—or so my mom said—they thought she was going to die. I’m not asking Hart if he saved my aunt’s life. I’m pretty sure he healed her so he could use her. Why he didn’t just let her die, instead of living in the same body all those years, I don’t want to know. That’s a lie, I do want to know, but I don’t think he’ll answer me now.

“You want to know why. I can tell. It’s the thing with humans. Always the why. Like there has to be a reason. I was the same way with Lucien. I wanted to know why he shot me, and that why, that one question, led to two centuries of torture and heartache and misery. Don’t do the same with Willow or Sam. What’s done is done. I had to have Willow inside me.” He doesn’t even stop to make a stupid sex joke. I appreciate it. “Or inside with me because she was the one with the memories. I don’t know anything about this body’s life. Nothing. Not even a name. But with your aunt, I needed to know everything: what she did with your mother when they were young, where they went to high school, everything, and the only way to get that information…”

“Was for her to be alive.”

“Was for her to be alive.”

“You bastard.” I can feel the anger rising in me like I did before in my room. I know I should feel angrier, actually. What he did… it can’t be undone. I feel the same tingle in my stomach, only this time it’s barely there, barely able to be felt. The red I see isn’t as dark or pure as the red I saw before in my bedroom.

“If you are thinking about hurting me, you can’t. Don’t have enough demon blood in you. You need to recharge.” He starts out the door, leaving me there to stew in all my anger and confusion and regret—so much regret.

There’s one more thing I need to know… one more thing. Well, many more things, but one more that is bugging me so much. I hate that he did that to my aunt. I hate it with everything I have. But I understand it, and that scares me so much. I don’t want to understand it. I don’t want to understand anything a demon does. But I do.

It’s now or never. “You could get out of Sam,” I say as I stand.

Hart stops in his tracks. By the way he’s standing, it doesn’t even seem like he has a slightly overweight body draped over his shoulder. Demons must have extra powered super strength.

“You don’t need him, not really. You could find some other poor body to inhabit.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t. You went back, and I honestly hate that I have to say it like this, inside him even though you could have picked someone else. Why?”

Half of Hart’s body is inside our little apartment and half of his body is on the outside. I can feel the cold air pour in through the open glass, which is disheartening since it’s September.

“Tell me why you stay Sam.” I push.

Hart lowers his head, averting looking in my eyes.

“Because you love him.”

CHAPTER NINE

L
ESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, MY
living room looks completely normal. One would never know that it’d been a slaughterhouse earlier in the day. After Hart took the bodies outside, I cleaned… and cleaned… and bleached, until I had no more nose hairs left.

While I clean, I turn the television on to see how bad things have gotten around here. It’s bad.

The eclipse, going on three days, has turned the entire world nearly crazy. Looting. Sacrifices. The upside, I suppose: churches have never been so full. Lots of people seem to think this is the end of days. It’s all that’s on almost every channel, save HGTV. They are showing
House Hunters
. I love
House Hunters
and am tempted to leave it there and pretend the world isn’t falling apart around me. Seems like an excellent plan to me.

However, being the ever responsible Abomination I am, I change it back to local programming. Hundreds of people are missing. Hundreds… I pray Hart didn’t do all that for me.

Then I wonder if God can hear my prayers. A strange thing to wonder, I suppose. I’ve always been to church on and off. It isn’t that I don’t believe. I most certainly do now. Hell, Seth opened the Hell gate
just
to give God the middle finger. Seth certainly believes. I believe.

I just want to know where He is, and why He’s not down here fixing this mess. On a different note, why didn’t he stop Seth from having sex with Ruby Sullivan eighteen years ago and producing a child? Free will is one thing. Allowing the thing to happen that will destroy the entire, beautiful thing you created is totally another.

If I think about this long enough, I’ll get a headache. Or a bigger one. I have the makings of a pretty big one right now.

I wonder where Seth is.

I wonder where God is.

I wonder about my mother.

I’m afraid of myself.

This is too big for me. Way too big, and the only way I can deal with it is to clean the blood stains off my recliner.

Mundane.

Normal.

God, to be normal.

The phone rings, and I nearly jump out of my skin. Must be my guilty conscious. “Why no, officer, we haven’t seen any of those missing people around here.” All the while Hart is throwing dirt on their grave.

I don’t want to answer it. I figure if I wait long enough, it’ll eventually stop ringing, and then everything will be fine. Well, as fine as it can be.

If I ever write a story about my life, I do believe I’ll call it
Denial: The Gracen Sullivan Story
.

Thankfully, blessedly, the phone stops ringing after the fifth ring. Yay!

My happiness lasts for all of three seconds. That’s how long it takes for the phone to start ringing again.

Sam and I had talked about not having a landline and only using a cellphone for all our calls. My phone was upstairs. I wouldn’t have had to hear it ringing, wondering who it was on the other end.

I wish we’d made a different decision.

I wish we’d made a lot of different decisions.

I throw the bleach-filled paper towels away in the kitchen, careful not to look outside the window at whatever Hart is doing. I mean, I know what he’s doing. But if I really make myself, I can make myself believe that he’s planting a garden…

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary…

The phone rings for the third time, and I decide I should at least look at the answering machine. Mellow. I fell strangely mellow. Normally, something like this would have ticked me off to no end. Now, I don’t even think I care. Having someone dig a mass grave in your backyard will do that to a person.

It’s not like I run to the phone. I do take my time because I still swear up and down that it’s the police—I don’t care what Hart says about taking care of it—and they are calling to see if we’ve seen all the missing people. Do the police even call anymore? Or ever? Heck if I know, but I do know that I’m a bit paranoid now. Another side effect of… well… the mass grave.

When I see the name on the caller ID, it’s much, much worse than the police.

My mother.

My mind instantly flashes back to the dream I had, the nightmare.

The alley.

The knife.

The blood.

Seth.

My mother dying.

I killed her.

I
killed her.

Everything I have in me wants to answer that phone. I want my mommy. If we could go back to how things used to be, I’d be the happiest girl in the world.

But I know I can’t be around her.

What if the Abomination inside me gets loose and does something? What if my nightmare is true, and I kill her?

I can’t live with that. I wouldn’t be able to.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop it. Who kills their mother?

Then again, if I don’t answer the phone, she’ll worry. Her house isn’t that far from Crimson Ridge, and she’ll be up here as soon as she can if she thinks I’m in trouble. With the world in such chaos, who wouldn’t think I was in trouble?

Finally, I pick up the phone. My heart beats wildly in my chest as the fear takes over. I don’t want to hurt her… I don’t want to hurt anybody…

“Hello.” I try to sound peppy and innocent. I don’t want to give her any reason in the world to worry.

“Gracen Marie Sullivan!” she says in that mom tone that lets you know you’ve done something very, very bad.

Those three words are all she has to say before I go off on a big excuse tirade. “I’m sorry, Mama! I wasn’t around the phone or even up yet. And I had to run downstairs because my cellphone was upstairs and…”

“I called
it
first.” Her voice is low, deep, and irritated as heck.

I also think she’s scared. That makes two of us. Only I’m not just scared of what’s happening in the world or even in my backyard, I’m terrified of what’s happening inside me.

“I’m sorry.” It’s all I can say. There are no excuses. Funny how even someone who can vote and legally drink in the UK can be brought down to Earth by their mother.

I hear her let out a long, slow breath on the other end of the line. “Are you feeling better?”

Can’t say I was expecting that. “Yeah, why?”

“Because when I’ve called three times a day for three days, Sam said you had a really bad stomach flu and were resting. I wanted to come up there, but he said he was taking care of you. Now, Gracen, I know what you’re thinking, but I honestly gave him the benefit of the doubt like you keep saying you want me to do. I kept my distance, but it’s been pretty dang hard. Now tell me, really, are you all right? Do I need to come up to Crimson Ridge?”

“No,” I say much too quickly. I make myself cringe. Yes I want her there. God knows I do. It’s an incredibly bad idea, though. A very. Bad. Idea.

She doesn’t say anything for a minute, and I’m pretty sure I’ve hurt her feelings. Then I hear another voice in the background on her side. “Who are you talking to?”

I freeze.

I know that voice.

I haven’t heard it for a while, but I know it.

Aunt Willow.

“Gracen.” My mom’s voice is mumbled like she’s put her hand over the receiver and doesn’t want me to know she’s talking about me.

“Mama, is that Aunt Willow? Is she there with you? How?” I have more questions, but those will have to do.

“She called me from Shadybrook three days ago. Said she was feeling much better and wanted to come home.”

“And you just went and got her?”

“No, I didn’t just go and get her. Really, Gracen. Do I seem that stupid to you?” Mama’s in a snarky mood. Oh good… “I talked to her doctors, and they said she made a miraculous recovery. She can talk in full sentences again. She’s eating. She knows her name and all that. It’s amazing.”

I look outside where Hart is throwing the last of the bodies—the bodies of the people he said would never recover. If Willow did, then why couldn’t they?

“That’s good. That’s… great.” Something isn’t right. It’s not adding up. As I watch Hart toss dirt onto those poor souls, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve been lied to this entire time. What if you could get better for whatever reason? What if a person could live after being infected by a demon?