by Nina Croft
He stared at her like a lovesick fool. But then she’d always had that effect on him, from the moment he’d first set eyes on her. She’d been hurling plates and bottles across a bar, her long red hair flying. Now his gaze wandered over every inch of her. She was the same and yet different. So beautiful. Exactly like his Zaria. Though it wasn’t immediately obvious. Her dark-red hair was pulled up into some sort of bun at the back of her head. But her golden eyes were the same, huge and rimmed with thick, dark lashes. High cheekbones and a wide, sensual mouth—though right now her lips were held in a tight line. She wore a black dress that disguised her voluptuous figure and reached nearly to the ground and was covered by a big, black, equally long coat. The only sign of frivolity were the tinsel balls dangling from her ears.
And she wore a dog collar.
He hadn’t believed it when Torr had told him that little snippet. “She’s a vicar?” That’s what he’d said when Torr had handed him the file on her. In the time he had been out on the street searching, Torr and Finn had been busy.
“Didn’t you notice the dog collar?” Finn had asked.
Hell, no. Devlin hadn’t noticed anything. He’d been in shock. Still was.
“It’s how we found her so easily,” Finn continued. “There aren’t that many female vicars.”
Obviously, she had remembered everything. And she wasn’t happy. And she no doubt still hated him if the slap was anything to go by. Now, he had less than five days for her to say I love you, or she would die and never be reborn and he’d lose her forever. And then he would have to find a way to die, because he couldn’t go on without her a second time.
“You have to go after her,” Torr had said. “The five days has begun. You can’t waste any time.”
“You saw what she did.”
“Somehow, she’s remembered.” Torr frowned. “What exactly has she remembered? Why would she slap you?”
“And call you a ‘goddamn liar,” Fin added.
Devlin wasn’t going into that just then. He needed to talk to her first. Find out what was going on. He needed to see her, look at her, maybe touch her.
“Lilith will probably already know she’s been found,” Torr said. “She has spies everywhere. No way would she have missed that little exhibition, and it won’t take her long to put the pieces together.”
Under the rules of the Covenant, Lilith wasn’t allowed to harm their wives. But they knew from past experience that she wasn’t above letting others do her dirty work. There could be demons heading to Zaria right now. If they had found her easily, then so would Lilith.
“I’ll take some of the men. I’ll protect her.”
And he had. Two of his best men had come with him; they were still seated on their bikes, waiting for his instructions. He would have them patrol around the vicinity. Keep an eye out for any unusual activity. Though he hadn’t sensed anything yet.
“Call us if you need us,” Finn had said.
Now she was in front of him. And he was going to fuck this up. Actually, he wasn’t going to fuck it up—it was already fucked up. He had no clue what he could do. How he could fix the unfixable. First, he had to find out what she knew and how.
“You’re a vicar,” he said. Talk about stating the obvious.
“How did you work that one out?”
He frowned. His Zaria had never been sarcastic.
Then she scowled. “What did you expect me to be—a pole dancer?”
“Can we go to your place and talk?” he suggested in what he hoped was a reasonable tone.
“No,” she snapped. “Go away.”
He took a deep breath. “Please, Zaria.”
“Don’t call me that.” She studied him for what seemed an age. “I suppose you’re not going to go away until you have your say?”
He stuck his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “No.”
“And if I talk will you go away then?”
“Maybe, but not very far.”
“As long as it’s out of my sight, I can live with it.” She marched away then, tugging her coat around her as she headed across in front of the church, through a small iron gate that led into a walled garden that wrapped around a quaint house of yellow stone with turrets and mullioned windows. He followed her to the front door, waited while she fumbled in her pocket for the keys.
“Torr and Finn told me to say hi,” he said as the door closed behind him. He stood in the hallway, looking around. The place had a comfortable feel, the hall painted dark red, lined with paintings, the frames decorated with holly.
“That was them, today? I wasn’t sure. They’ve changed so much, and I wasn’t really taking a lot in.” She looked him over, a little line forming between her eyes. “You’ve changed as well.” She waved a hand down his body. “What’s with all the black leather?”
He shrugged. “Just practical.”
“Hmm.” She slipped out of her coat and hung it on a stand by the door. He did the same, then pushed up the sleeves on his black sweater.
“You’re not staying,” she said. “So don’t get too comfortable.” She led the way through a big studded wooden door into what looked like a library or a study with a lot of books. A fire was glowing in the large fireplace, and the room was decorated with more holly. No mistletoe, though. Pity. He wandered around for a minute, running his hands along the mahogany of the big desk, the smooth leather of the couch, rubbing the soft velvet of the curtains between his fingers. He was putting off the moment when he would have to confront her.
Finally, he turned around and found her standing in the center of the room, watching him.
“Are you happy?” he asked, not knowing where the question came from.
She frowned. Then thought about it for too long.
“I don’t mean now,” he added. “But I mean your life. Has it been happy?”
She opened her mouth to answer. Then closed it again. Obviously, it wasn’t an easy question. “Do you want a drink?”
He didn’t, but he nodded anyway, willing to agree to anything that would put off the moment when she tossed him out of the house. She crossed to the sideboard and pulled out a bottle of red wine, opened it quickly, and poured two glasses. She came back and handed him one, and he cradled it between his two hands, then took a long gulp.
She blew out her breath, and her shoulders sagged. Then she turned and crossed to the sofa, sank down into the corner, and sipped her drink. “Since I left you this afternoon, I’ve been in some sort of denial, not thinking about…” She waved a hand in his direction. “Because really, it’s crazy, and I’m not sure why I’m not screaming my head off right now. Except it explains so much.” She raised the glass to her lips and swallowed the last of the wine, swiping her tongue over her lower lip, making heat curl in his belly. “No, my life has not been happy.” She stared into the glass then raised her golden eyes to him, her nostrils flaring. “Where the hell have you been for the last two thousand years?”
He hadn’t been expecting the question—hell, he had no clue what he’d been expecting; his mind hadn’t been functioning too well. And he had zero idea what to say. He really didn’t want to get into the whole I spent a lot of time in the Abyss conversation. Because he wasn’t sure, as a vicar, how she would feel about that.
“I mean, I get it,” she continued when he remained silent. “We didn’t part on the best of terms.”
“You said you never wanted to see me again,” he reminded her.
“Well, at the time, it didn’t seem as though I had a lot of choice. I know what happened to me that day.” A visible shudder ran through her. “But what happened to you?”
He had a flashback, so strong he could feel the heat of that faraway sun on his face.
“I hate you. I never want to see you again. You’re a cheating, lying bastard.”
She didn’t say any more. She couldn’t. They dragged her away, but there was hatred in her eyes.
“Zaria,” he yelled, “I’m sorry.”
Another almost inhuman scream of pain, not Zaria, and a gray plume of dirty smoke rose from the village.
There was fighting. He stood back to back with Bryce, his mind not functioning, just filled with the expression on her face. She was all he’d ever wanted, and she hated him. He’d done this to her and to himself. He had no one else to blame.
They fought, but for every angel they cut down, another appeared. Finally, he dropped, exhausted, to his knees. There was nothing but an eerie silence from the village.
They tore the wings from his back, and the physical pain was nothing compared to the pain in his soul. He threw back his head and screamed her name. He didn’t notice when the portal opened, a black gaping maw in reality.
Hard hands pushed him then, and he was falling. Hurtling through the darkness, with no care as to where he would land. Zaria was dead because of him. He welcomed the pain.
At last, he crashed to the ground. He lay on his back, staring into the semi-darkness. Then even that was blanked out. A figure loomed over him. A woman. Even through his pain he could see she was beautiful. Long, red-gold hair, her face marked with runes of power, which rippled and glowed in the dim light.
“My name is Lilith. Welcome to the Abyss.”
He shook away the memory—it was long ago and best forgotten.
“Did they send you home?” she asked.
“Home?”
“Heaven.”
He snorted. “No, they didn’t send us home.”
“So what did they do to you?” She studied him, head cocked to the side. “You don’t look very...angelic anymore.”
“I try my best.”
“And I’m guessing it’s hard.”
He thought of some of the things he had done in the years after she’d been taken from him. The blood he had spilled. The lives taken. He was trying his best to atone for those years, but deep down, he suspected he didn’t deserve forgiveness.
He couldn’t tell her that. They weren’t able to reveal anything about what had happened to them after that day, nothing about the Covenant, or the fact that her life would be forfeit and his allegiance would return to Lilith.
Never going to happen.
“We’ve been looking for you,” he said. “We knew you had been reborn.” That was safe. “At first, we had no clue where to look, how to find you. But now, we own a company—Stormlord Securities—and we’ve been using every method we could to search for you and the others. Then you just turn up. What happened? How did you remember?”
She looked at her empty glass, and he crossed the room, grabbed the bottle, and filled it up. Then topped off his own, dropped the empty bottle in the bin, and sank down at the opposite end of the sofa. She eyed him warily but didn’t shout at him to move.
“All my life,” she murmured. “I’ve dreamed of dying.”
At that moment, he wanted to drag her into his arms and hold her close, take away the pain he could hear so clear in her voice. He forced himself to ask the question, because he’d never known. “How did you die?”
She took a sip of wine. “You mean that first time? Because I’ve died so many times.”
He thought his heart would shatter with the pain of those words. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, sorry isn’t good enough. But to answer your question, they took me up the Tower of Lies—it seemed appropriate at the time, as it was due to a lying bastard I was there at all. Then they tossed me off the top. I didn’t die from the fall, but it broke something inside me, and they left me there to die. It took a long time. And through all of that time, I kept thinking you would come and save me. And I can tell you—it hurt. A lot.
Oh God, she was going to end him. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” she mimicked. “You’re like a goddamn stuck record. I don’t care that you’re sorry. It doesn’t matter anymore. I just want to get over it and move on.”
To where? He suspected someplace that wouldn’t include him.
“I want a life, just one, that’s not haunted by you.” Pain tightened its grip around his heart. “Anyway,” she continued, “I kept seeing this ad everywhere. Do you dream of dying? Oh, yes. It could have been speaking directly to me. I ignored it as long as I could, but then I gave in, did a little research, got an appointment with someone high up in the field.”
“Why didn’t you answer the ad?” If she had, his men would have picked her up before the regression hypnosis, and this would not be happening. Instead, he would be wooing her, reminding her that she loved him, not hated him.
“Because I wasn’t ready to be somebody’s lab rat. But afterward, I remembered the ad, and your company—it was the only lead I had, and I needed answers. Why did you do it, by the way?”
“It was Rachel’s idea or rather Damaris, as you knew her. She was...is—Finn’s wife—you remember her?” She nodded. “Well, Rachel had the idea that if the rest of you were out there, then you might be experiencing the same things she did, and Bella—Torr’s wife and Phoebe, Cade’s. The dreams of dying, the phobias. And that the ad might draw you out.”
“It worked. Anyway, I remembered everything. You. That first life. That first death. Then all the others.” Suddenly, she slammed the glass down on the table and wine sloshed over the top. She glared at him. “And most of all, I remembered that you lied to me. You told me the Elixir was freely given, but you goddamned stole it.”
She swore an awful lot for a vicar. Though he had to admit, he hadn’t known many. He tried for a reasonable tone. “Would you have taken it if I’d told you it was stolen?”
“NO! I would have told you not to steal it in the first place. What were you even thinking?”
“That I didn’t want to lose you.”
“Well,” she snarled, “that turned out super-well, didn’t it?” She jumped up, strode out of the room, and he just sat there, trying to take it all in. Trying to work out what he could do to stop the hurting. Stop her hurting. Should he go after her? But while he was trying to decide, she appeared in the doorway, another bottle of wine dangling from her fingers. The anger had faded from her face. Now, she looked sad. He’d rather have her angry.
“I wanted to live forever,” she said softly from the doorway. “I wanted eternity with you. But at the same time, I wanted to be good. I’d done the whole sinner thing. Then an angel, a real honest-to-God angel had fallen in love with me. Made me believe that, however bad I’d been, God hadn’t forsaken me. When you offered me the Elixir, I thought it was proof that he’d forgiven my sins. Except you lied. Clearly, I haven’t been forgiven for anything. And I’m being punished.” Her voice was rising now. “And it’s not fair because it’s NOT MY FAULT. I didn’t do anything wrong. Except believe an angel. I mean, who wouldn’t believe an angel?”
He opened his mouth to say he was sorry. Again. But managed to close it before the words fell out. He didn’t think she’d appreciate another apology right now.
“Nothing to say?” she asked.
He struggled to find some words, any words, that would persuade her to give him another chance. “We can make this right.”
“Really?” There was that sarcasm again. She sighed. Loudly. “Just go.”
He got to his feet. “We need to—”
“Right now there is no ‘we.’ Just leave. Maybe after Christmas, things will seem more...real. Hey, we can catch up. That’ll be fun. But right now, I need some space. Just let me have a few days.”
We don’t have a few days.
But that was something else he wasn’t allowed to say.
She took a step closer. Her expression hardening. She was getting angry again. Halting in front of him, she jabbed him in the chest. “You know something? You keep apologizing. But at the same time, I’m getting this really strong feeling that you’re not exactly being honest with me. In fact, I think you’re lying to me. Again.”
“No, I—”
She jabbed him again. “And right now, that just really pisses me off. Go!”
So he
went.
CHAPTER 6
Imogen didn’t want to open her eyes. In fact, she didn’t want to wake up. For once, she hadn’t been dreaming. Just a total blankness, which she suspected wouldn’t last. Her head pounded, and her brain threatened to escape her skull and explode in a mess all over her bed. Except she had a strange idea she wasn’t in her bed.
That made her sit up fast!
She blinked. Then forced her eyes open. She was on the sofa in her study, and she almost collapsed with relief.
The light was dim. That was because the heavy velvet curtains were still drawn, but around the edges, she could see daylight. What time was it? It was nearly Christmas. She has so much to do.
Including a parish meeting, first thing, to go over the last details of the Boxing Day party.
Pain engulfed her. Her stomach churned, and she swallowed. Then lay down again.
She had to take this slowly.
Rolling onto her side, she peeked open her eyes. On the floor, directly below her, an empty wine bottle lay on its side, where she had no doubt dropped it.
After Devlin had gone, she’d drunk the whole bottle and then passed out. She’d never been drunk in her entire life. Well, not this one anyway.
That first life, before Dev had saved her, she’d spent a lot of time in bars, drinking and dancing. If she was perfectly honest with herself—which she tried to be—she’d actually enjoyed it. Until she’d met Devlin and…
It all came back to her then. Had it been a dream?
No such luck. He was real.
She peered at her watch. Ten-thirty-five. She was late for the meeting. No doubt someone would come looking for her.
Almost as if she’d conjured that someone up, the doorbell rang.
Agh.
She looked around wildly.
She had to move. Somehow, she had to look like she hadn’t spent the night in a drunken stupor. She had a reputation, a responsibility to her parishioners, not to appear a total lush. She had the headache from hell.
Sitting up, she held her head with one hand as she swung her legs off the sofa and to the floor. She could do this. Taking a deep breath, she pushed herself to her feet and staggered across the room. Standing in front of the door, she smoothed down her hair and straightened her dog collar. Would whoever it was notice she was wearing the same clothes from last night? Probably not. She didn’t think anyone noticed what the vicar wore. Except John, maybe. Oh God, she hoped it wasn’t John at the door.
