The Taking (35 page)

Despite the fact that he still held her hand, she backed up a step, wanting distance from him, from the malice reflected in his eyes.

“I told you, I’m a demon. A fallen angel.” Beau smiled. “I would bow, but frankly I’m lazy. Another one of my so-called flaws. Greed is my specialty, my true sin, and the one I will never apologize for. I wanted Camille from the moment I laid eyes on her. It really, really irritated me that Felix got to her first. Here he was my servant, my creation, and he was what she wanted. Very irritating. And I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to right how I was wronged, and I found it in you.”

“Excuse me?” Regan glanced at him, trying to retrieve her hand again. He didn’t look like Beau as she knew him. His eyes were different. They were a strange amber gold color, and maybe it was just the sun, but she could swear they were glowing.

“The first time we went out to dinner, we walked past the house on Royal, and you expressed a fascinated interest in it. You also had an unusually high interest in death and the possibility of ghosts because of your sister and your job, and you were very malleable, very eager to please. For those three reasons, you were the perfect woman for me to marry, the perfect vessel to bring Camille’s spirit into, so she and I could finally be together.”

Regan tugged harder on her hand, panicking, but he wouldn’t let her go. “You never wanted me, did you?” She had known, the minute she had married him, that something was fundamentally wrong. It had been a gut reaction, an instinct, a feeling of entrapment, and the desperate need to get out almost immediately. But she’d had no idea why ... what he was. No idea such things even existed, let alone that she had married one.

A demon.

And he had set her up, like a pawn on a chessboard.

She fought the urge to scream for help, knowing it would do no good to draw attention to them and anger Beau. No one could help her.

“I was going to give you the house as a Christmas gift. We would move in together, I would unleash Camille, let her take your body, and we would live happily ever after.” He shrugged. “At least until your body got old. Then I’d have to start again. But you screwed my plans up royally by leaving me and getting involved with Felix, who has been more thorn in my side than he is worth. You did buy the house, which worked in my favor, and it definitely appears Camille has been accessing you, so I think maybe we’ve reached a state of compromise.”

“How is that?” she managed to say even though she was certain there was no spit left in her mouth.

“We reconcile and I move in with you. I keep Camille at bay sometimes, allowing you to still be you for the most part, and when I want a little excitement or to have sex, you let her in. It’s really the perfect scenario for all of us.”

Horrified, Regan managed to finally yank her hand out of his. “That is utterly disgusting!”

He rolled his eyes. “Which is why I don’t want to have sex with you. Such a prude.”

“I’m not a prude,” she said, infuriated. In the short time they’d been together Beau had made her doubt her sexuality, her attractiveness, her entire self, and she would be damned if she would let him continue to insult her. “I just didn’t like sex with you. It wasn’t satisfying for me.”

When his eyes flashed amber gold again, she realized it might not be wise to tick off a demon.

“Oh, and Felix can satisfy you? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Regan looked behind her. She was only one house down from Chris’s. She was terrified, but at the same time she was so tired of being polite, of being afraid that she would hurt someone’s feelings if she spoke the truth, so exhausted from trying to keep the boat from never rocking. If there was anything she had learned through this divorce and her relationship with Felix, it was that she was entitled to be honest. To say and to do and to be whatever she wanted to.

So wise or not, she opened her mouth and told Beau, “Yes. Felix and I had a fantastic sex life. And I think maybe what you need to factor in is that it was never going to be good between us when neither one of us really wanted to be with the other one. You wanted Camille and I was with you under coercion, though I didn’t know it. How can there be any passion in that kind of arrangement?”

His eyebrow shot up. “You know, I hate to admit it, but you’re probably right.”

Encouraged by his agreement, she continued. “Think about it ... you really wanted Camille, and I was with you because you were clearly exerting an influence over me. My free will was battling with it, just leaving me discontent and reserved. We should have never gotten married.”

“Maybe not the way we did. But now that you know the truth, you will agree to reconcile with me.”

The one moment where she thought he had actually understood her point of view and might be rational disappeared. She wasn’t surprised. It was too easy to think that she could just walk away. “Why would I do that? There’s nothing in that scenario for me. You of all people should understand I’d want something for myself.”

Beau wasn’t looking at her, but across the yard, his expression distracted. “Hey, how long has it been since you’ve seen Felix?”

“I haven’t seen him since the night of my party. Why?”

He nodded. “You broke up? What a horrible shame. Well, don’t expect to go running to him now. He’s kind of tied up these days.”

Something about the way Beau said that triggered fear in Regan. “What do you mean?” she asked in a tight voice. He wasn’t making a casual statement, she was sure of it. He knew something, and it wasn’t good.

“Just that when you disobey, you’re punished. It’s very simple. So I wouldn’t plan on seeing Felix for a while.”

It flashed in front of her, so brief she almost missed it. Felix, hanging in darkness, his face etched with pain, blood and sweat trickling down his bare chest.

She gasped. “Oh, my God, what is going on? Where is he?”

“Prison. One of his own making.” Beau pulled his car keys out of his pocket and tossed them into the air. As they lifted, they morphed into a ring. He held it out to show her. “Your wedding ring. I look forward to putting it back on your finger.”

Regan stared at the platinum band, jaw gaping open as the diamond flashed in the sunlight. That ring was back at the house on Royal Street. At least she thought it was. She didn’t remember where she had put it, exactly, that day that Felix had come home to find her wearing it. She remembered the heavy unpleasantness of it on her finger, yet also the way it had called to her, beckoned. She must have thrown it back in her drawer after Felix had yanked it off of her, freeing her. And yet she was staring at it in Beau’s hand. She reached forward to touch it, to convince herself it was real.

But then she saw the satisfaction on Beau’s face and she snatched her hand back.

He thought he had won.

But he hadn’t.

The ring was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Just an ordinary key chain again, holding his car key.

“Just think about it,” he told her. “It’s best for everyone, really.”

Beau kissed the top of her head, his lips warm and hard against her skin, and Regan stumbled backward, not bothering to answer. Whirling around, she turned and ran back to Chris’s house, exerting more energy and speed than she had in weeks as she ate up the distance. Within a minute she was pounding up the steps of the front porch and slamming the door shut behind her.

“Chris! I need a ride to Felix’s!”

The pain was different this time. Instead of being random, a lightning strike of torment he could never anticipate, this time the pain was constant. An endless, ever present barrage of agony, from the roots of his hair to the ends of his toenails.

He was in a rack, being stretched so taut he was surprised he was still in one piece.

Maybe he wasn’t.

Maybe this time Alcroft had taken away his immortality and he was in death, in Hell, being punished for his many, many sins.

“Felix!”

The voice penetrated the fog of his pain and his incoherent thoughts, and Felix blinked, trying to find focus, a glimmer of light to break through the darkness and allow him to see his hallucination. In Hell or merely hanging in insanity, Felix had heard Regan’s voice, and he wanted to see her beautiful face just one last time.

But no matter how hard he strained, there was nothing but darkness.

“Oh my God!” Regan came grinding to a halt in the doorway of Felix’s bedroom, stunned at the horror of what she was seeing.

Chris crashed into her back. “Why are you stopping—”

His voice changed to a shocked whisper as he looked up and saw what she did. “Holy Jesus. What the hell am I looking at?”

“I don’t know.” Regan swallowed hard, fighting back the bile that had shot up her throat. She wanted to step forward but her feet seemed to have turned to stone at the sight of Felix, hanging suspended in the air, arms and legs drawn out like he was being pulled in four different directions.

There was nothing holding him at all. He was just ... there. His eyes were open, but he stared at the floor, and he definitely didn’t see her, didn’t react to her presence. The only way she was certain he was even alive was because she could see his chest rising up and down rapidly, though he made no sound. Moisture and blood stained his bare chest, and his jeans were dark to the knees, wrung with sweat. His dangling feet were covered in crusted blood, and a glance up showed his fingers were the same.

That’s when she realized his nails had been ripped out.

Regan clapped her hand over her mouth and fought the urge to throw up. There was no time for sickness, no time for weakness, no time to debate why none of this was logical in the world as she had known it. It was real and that was all she needed to know.

Felix had told her the truth about him, Beau, Camille, and that meant that everything he had felt for her, the entirety of their relationship, had been real. This was the man she wanted to be with, regardless of what he had done in the past.

That gave her the courage to step forward and circle around the front of him, trying to assess what she was looking at. It was an invisible torture device of some kind, but the question was, how did she get him out of it?

“Felix!” she said, willing him to react. She needed to know he was still in there, needed him to guide her, to explain how she was supposed to free him from this binding.

Maybe it would be as simple as removing the binding rings they’d both worn. Felix had pulled hers off, and she had slipped his off with no impediment. Maybe if she just pulled him down it would break the invisible chains holding him.

Regan stepped forward. A second later she was lying on her back on the floor, almost back in the doorway. She blinked, struggling to suck in some breath, the wind knocked clean out of her, with no idea how she had shot through the air so quickly she couldn’t even remember moving.

“Regan?” Chris’s worried face popped up in front of her. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, dizzy, a gnawing knot of nausea in her stomach. But nothing hurt, and she forced herself to sit up. “Yeah, I’m fine. What the hell just happened?”

“You reached out, and bam, you shot backwards like you’d taken a cannonball in the gut.” He reached out his hand to help her up. “Re, this is serious shit” His voice was a shaky whisper. “I don’t think we can handle this ourselves. I don’t even know what I’m looking at.”

Regan dragged herself to her feet, fighting to clear the dizziness. “We don’t have time to get anyone. And who exactly would we get?”

She moved toward Felix again, fear being replaced by the agony of seeing him so clearly in pain. It was devastating to imagine how he was suffering, and she would help him, somehow, some way. “Go downstairs into the shop. It should be unlocked from the back. Find a book of spells. There has to be something in there about breaking someone free ... I think it’s called uncrossing a spell.”