Jerry stripped his clothes off and let them fall to the floor. Steam billowed out from under the shower curtain. He was just about to step into the sweet liquid relief when he heard a knock at the door.
“Gods dammit, Ramiel, leave me alone already!”
Who the hell else would be bothering him? Besides the fact that the angel was so not worth getting dressed for, Jerry had no plans to be kept from the shower any longer than it took him to say “Go fuck yourself and goodnight, Sir.” He rounded out the bathroom and opened the door, in what the French call la buff.
Riona took one look at his full and frontal and went all agape. For a moment, Jerry hesitated. Then decided, to hell with it, she had seen him naked before—even if it had been in a different body—and he would stand his ground. Meaning, stand in his doorway.
“Help you with something, witch?”
He expected her to either: A. slap him in the face, then tell him to get some clothes on; B. kick him in the balls, then tell him to get some clothes on; C. make some snide remark while either slapping him in the face and/or kicking him in the balls, then tell him to get some clothes on; or D. … Well, D was an open ticket, but he was pretty sure it would end with him writhing on the floor in pain and her telling him to get some clothes on.
So, he should probably skip to the end and get at it. Only, to his surprise, Riona didn’t seem concerned at all with causing him any form of pain. She just stood, unemotionally observing his body as though studying it based on its scientific merit.
Which, oddly enough, made Jerry feel suddenly exposed and improper.
“Come down here for a peep show, Riona?” He opened the door all the way, inviting her in. “Got something on your chest? Want it to be me?”
“No, I, um …”
“So, what then?”
As though she’d just realized Jerry was capable of speech, her eyes flashed up from where they had lingered—if pressed, he would have said just south of his Mason-Dixon line—and looked him in the face, her cheeks blushing. “Can I come in?”
“Of course.” His hand swept across the air.
“And can you put some clothes on?”
Ah, there it was. “I could ...” Dashing into his bathroom, he grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his hips. He left the shower running, but pulled the lever under the faucet. Immediately, hot steamy water began to fill the tub. “You’ll have to settle for the guy wrap thing. I didn’t exactly inherit a massive wardrobe with this body. I ain’t about to make extra laundry on your account.”
“No, that’s fine.”
The basement bedroom was tiny. Only a twin bed and night stand filled the space. Given the lack of options, she took a seat on the mattress.
“So …?”
Her blood-shot eyes darted everywhere, like suddenly he was painful to look at. “I think I saw your dream. We … You were in Hell, and you were with Azazel?”
“Yeah, so?” He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised. Nor should he feel like she’d invaded his privacy—it wasn’t Riona’s fault she was an all-band receiver anymore—but he still did.
“You know him,” Riona continued. “Jerry, I need to know what you know. I need to know my enemy. Please, tell me?”
He exhaled, pushing every corner of his lungs before refilling and starting the tale. “Azazel, Commander of the Grigori alliance, General of the Fallen. Next to Lucifer himself, probably the most dangerous foe you could ever face. More dangerous, maybe, because unlike his more famous brother, he still holds a grudge over getting booted out of paradise. Oh, he was also my mentor.”
“My, my, the company you keep.” Riona played with a thread poking out from the quilt on his bed. “What else? What’s his weak point? What’s his tendency in battles? What’s his drive? If he was your mentor, you must be pretty clued in to his game.”
“You might not believe this, Ree, but it’s not really something I’m proud of anymore, and I really don’t want to go there right now.”
“Seriously?” Crossing her arms, she scooted to the edge of the bed. “What, you’ve become some emotional, little, weak wallflower who’s going to crumple under the weight of a few unpleasant memories?”
His voice failed to conceal his rising ire. “Your dad used to pal around with him in the day. Why not ask him?”
“I have my reasons, but chief being that you were ‘palling’ around with hellbeasts a little more recently than Pop.”
“Don’t trust him, do you?”
He could tell by the way her face went limp that he’d hit the nail right on the head. “I don’t know him well enough to ask him to pass me the salt at the table. He’s an archangel, I’m sure I’m just being confused by my daddy issues, but I don’t trust that tendency of theirs to hold back key information. And Azazel… He offered to help teach me.”
Jerry’s backbone went rigid. “He what?”
She had the balls to mock innocence. “I don’t know what else to do! Time’s running out, and I need the truth, no matter how ugly it is. If there’s hope for Marc, I have to know. Ramiel wrote him off the moment he died. Dee isn’t much better. If there’s something I can do…”
In a single swift move, he turned and lunged, pinning her down to the bed. The movement loosened the towel’s tension around his waist. It fell over her like a blanket. In the mirror on the dresser, he caught sight of them: Marc’s borrowed body, naked and ready, with Jerry’s soul within, pressing into Riona, who had finally decided to look surprised.
She tried to struggle, to push him off. Jerry braced her wrists and held her arms over her head, all while pinning her hips to the mattress with his weight.
“No way, you said you wanted to hear this, so listen. I promise, I won’t hurt you, or do anything you don’t want me to.”
The sincerity in his tone and in his eyes must have won out. Her muscles began to relax, though she didn’t let down her guard completely.
“In one form or another, I have walked this Earth since the time of the Roman Republic. I have stared down evil in all forms. I have been evil in several more. And while I’ve served Hell and cursed Heaven, I have never feared for the safety of another. I’ve never cared enough. Lucifer may have gotten the head job after the overthrow, but that’s only because he’s a charismatic bastard. Azazel don’t give a shit what anyone thinks of him, or who stands against him. He’d be a one man army and cause some serious chaos, if it came down to the need. You can negotiate with Lucifer. Azazel is a stone wall.”
His head lowered, so that he could feel her rushing breaths dancing over his cheek bone.
“A few weeks ago, when I saw you with him, knowing how he could reach out and snap your neck before you could even blink … Oh, God, Riona, you don’t know how afraid I was. You’re one bad ass brave fucker, you know that, but even you have limits. Please, please, don’t do something so foolish again. Promise me. Azazel doesn’t take prisoners, he takes lives.”
She struggled against his hold half-heartedly, as though not trying to get away, just trying to get control. “I was in control the whole time.”
“Like hell you were.”
“He said I was off limits.”
“Like he’d give a fuck. Azazel doesn’t like Hell. He’s wanted revenge on Lucifer for the fall for eons, is always looking for any opportunity to take it. Killing you, when Lucifer has ordered you off limits sounds like a perfect plan to me. Fuck, Riona, do you have any idea what I would do if I lost you?”
“I ‘m … not … yours … to lose!” Riona swallowed enough air to float a balloon. “Fine, I get it. Azazel bad. Let me up!”
He knew he should. He knew he would … eventually. But at the moment he commanded himself to move, he felt the witch shift beneath him. His erection pushed itself against Riona’s core, making both of them still. In the struggle, without realizing it, the male part of his body had decided to ramp up for action.
His gaze went up from inspecting his member, to meeting the witch’s gaze. No longer filled wit
h hate, he found instead Riona sucking in her bottom lip, her eyes heavy, pleading.
“Goddess in the grave, do you have any idea how much I want you?” He hissed it out before he had realized it.
Riona fidgeted as he finally let her hands go. Her fingers went up to his cheeks just as he brought his lips down to hers, quickly brushing over them with the ghost of a kiss.
Closing his eyes and letting his forehead fall to hers, he forced the remainder of his statement out through incredulous lips. “To trust me.”
Her eyes went wide. “What?”
“You don’t want to do this. I don’t.”
She swept her legs out to the side, using the leverage to roll her hips, causing him to grind against her. “That suggests otherwise.”
With every ounce of determination he could muster, Jerry removed himself from her, rose to his feet, and created a space between them in more than just the physical aspect. “If I had known you’d be so easy to go with it, I never would have pinned you to the bed.”
Riona shot to her feet. “So, what? You were just toying with me? Seriously, you should open up an amusement park. You build the tallest emotional roller coasters on the planet.”
“Oh, come on. I’m a good guy now, but I’m still an arrogant ass about some things. You can’t expect me to go from a prick to a prince in no time flat. Don’t you try to be something you’re not either.”
She crossed her arm and cocked her hip. “Meaning?”
“Don’t you get it? You’re half-angel. That means more than just a little more umph in your punch. You are one seriously strongly sexual being. It’s in your genetics. And, hey, I don’t hold that against you. In fact, it’s come in handy in the past. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting a little physical comfort when you’ve dealt with so much shit lately. You think that this would make you feel better. And it would. For, like, an hour. Then you’d plummet back down in despair when you realized you just used me, someone who has honest feelings for you, as a drug to numb yourself. You’re not that type of person.” He fetched the towel from the bed and appropriated himself.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Riona argued, trying to step up to him again. “It’s like you said, sometimes a fuck is just a fuck.”
He bit his lip and threw back his head, before snapping it forward again. “I didn’t say that, Freud did. And while I believe it’s true, it wouldn’t be just a fuck for me. I don’t want to be with you just so you can get off on Marc’s body. I don’t want to be with you just so I can get off on yours. I want to be more than that.”
“Jerry Romani, are you refusing to sleep with me?”
“No. Yes.” He laughed as he put his arms around her and drew her violently against him, all while back stepping her toward the door. “Yes, but with qualifications. I promise you, the day will come when I’m going to fuck you certifiably crazy. I am going to take you down on my bed, or on your bed, or hell, even the kitchen counter, and do things to you that will make you think the rapture has come. I will make you come so hard, you’ll want to start a new religion based on my ability to fuck. But mark my words,” he let her go, opened the door, and pushed her in to the hall, “I won’t do a thing with you until you look at me and see something you’ve gained, instead of something you’ve lost.”
And with that, he slammed the door in her face.
Chapter 28
“And this one?”
Riona turned around to see her father pointing at a faded picture posted to a yellowing page.
“Disneyworld, when I was twelve.”
“That place with all the crazy rides and full grown people dressed as cartoon characters?” Michael brought the photo album closer to his eyes and inspected more closely. “Did Molly dye her hair? I can’t imagine anything that would cover that red.”
Pushing away from her desk with a sigh, Riona resigned herself to the fact that she wasn’t about to get any real work done while her father was in the mood to trip down memory lane.
“No, that’s not Momma.” She flipped to the next page where both her, the other little girl, and a woman with short, brown hair posed with an imagineer dressed as Snow White. “Cindy Kirkpatrick, my best friend all through junior high. Her mother took pity on me and invited me on their family vacation. Thought it was the Christian thing to do for the poor little girl whose mother couldn’t crawl out of the bottle long enough to drive to the store some days.”
Michael’s grin soured. He looked to his daughter with empathy only freaking angels dared. “I’m so sorry. Your childhood should have been ideal. You should have known about your birthright. You should have been raised in the ways. If nothing else, you should have been raised with love. I never expected that Molly would become …” He heaved a sigh as he buried his chin in his chest. “It must have been hard for her, Riona. When she vanquished me, the council decided you weren’t safe being raised knowing what you were capable of, of who you were, without someone to guide you. Molly was a damned good witch, but she wasn’t a Pure Soul, and there’s no way she could have stood her ground against a hormonal half-angel. Binding your magic and replacing her memory of who I really was with a fake persona of a drunkard seems extreme, but it was the best solution I could think of at the time. She had to remember me as someone deplorable enough that neither one of you would ever want to track me down. I didn’t know what that would make her.”
“You know what gets me the most?” Riona crossed her arms. “Forget me and my horrible upbringing. It was no picnic, but damn, I got through it. And she wasn’t always bad. I always had clothes on my back and food on the table. But if you loved my mom so much, why the hell haven’t you run your ass up to Salem to see her?”
“She’s not the same woman.” Michael sighed. “Remember, she thinks I tied her to a bed for nine months and forced her to have a child against her will. I could undo that, of course, and let her remember the way it really was, but then, think what she’ll be like when, her mind restored, she looks back on all the crap she’s done wrong with you. It would kill her … I can’t be responsible for that.”
“But you’ll stand by and let her think of you as a kidnapper?” Riona’s eyes pierced through Michael’s shame.
“I’d rather have her hate me than somehow come to blame you. Not saying that would be right,” Michael shrugged, “but the human heart makes a liar of the innocent. Let her hate me. I can endure it. She’ll see all one day in the end.”
Riona wondered if her father meant to imply when her mother went to Heaven. She wasn’t quite sure Molly’s boarding passes were punched for that destination.
“Well, if it helps at all …” Riona went to her bookshelf and pulled down another chapter of her life in photos. “… she eventually got herself straightened out. When I was fourteen, she hit bottom and gave up the booze. I won’t pretend that she transformed into a saint, but she tried her best.” She kept herself from adding, No thanks to you or any of the heavenly host.
When her phone chirped from the desk, Riona had no doubt who was on the other end. She was an hour late in giving back the report. The report Ditter had made very clear was urgent when he’d phoned earlier. Her father, it turned out, was a total attention sponge, and barely let her go two minutes without relating another flashback to her dark days as the child of Molly Dade. The concept of working for living didn’t exactly make sense to him.
“I know what you’re going to say, and no, not yet,” Riona answered without even saying hello. “I’m sorry. I’m just about finished. Ten more minutes.”
“If you promise me,” Ditter answered, “then I won’t be mad. But only if you tell me why.”
She shrugged, thinking that a round about truth couldn’t help anything. “My dad just flew into town. We’re catching up.”
“Of course.” She could picture the pale-faced man nodding. “I guess I should have assumed you’d be very busy right now, with preparations and the such. By the way, I’ll be arriving the day after tomorrow.”
Misunderstanding slapped Riona across the face. “Um, okay. Why?”
Ditter’s chuckle brought a nerve-induced smile to her face. “Don’t be silly, darling. I’m coming for the wedding. You do remember inviting me last year, don’t you?”
She knew angels’ sense of hearing put a human’s to shame. Riona wondered if her father picked up on the tiny blood vessel in her brain bursting. “Wedding?”
“Yes, for you and that fabulous hunk of a man, Gerald was it?”
“Jerry,” Riona corrected. “No. I mean, yes. Yes! Of course I remember inviting you now. I’ll, um … I’ll finish up that report and I’ll let you know the details of the big day um … soon as I figure them all out. I mean! As soon as I figure out the report, then after that. Yeah, I’ll send it to you. Bye.” She clicked the phone closed and went as white as the wall her back slowly slid down.
“Riona?” Michael put aside the photo album and rose to his feet. “I did not know you were betrothed.”
A high pitch squeal only dolphins would recognize as laughter leapt from the back of her throat. “I’m not!”
Michael examined her reproachfully. “Clearly you have not inherited my inability to lie. I don’t understand, daughter. If you are not betrothed, how is it you can be wed?”
She didn’t have time to think about that now. With newfound determination, Riona rose to her feet. Time was ticking, and she had a deadline. “How indeed.”
Breath racing was an understatement. Her panting could qualify for the Indy 500. And head spinning? Yup, like her middle name was Linda Blair.
Memories took her back to Ditter’s last visit a little over a year ago, when she’d been dating Jerry. Dating Jerry, before she knew Jerry was a minion of Hell sent to spy on her and before she’d known her mere words could julienne French fries and demons alike. Ditter was perhaps one of the most pleasant, easy-to-talk-to, and genuine clients she’d had in her five years since getting her Masters in Statistics from Boston U. But he also had a stubborn, traditional streak that he looked for in his clients. For the most part, Riona, with her old school work ethic and determination to tell her clients the truth rather than tell them only what they wanted to hear, fit the bill pretty snug.
Once You Go Demon (Pure Souls) Page 22
