The Possession

by Jennifer Armintrout

  “You should have been a head doctor,” Max said in a way that didn’t quite sound like a compliment.

  We sat in silence, sipping our breakfast and doing our best to ignore the conversation we’d just had. Occasionally, Max would look up at some imagined sound from the living room, but when Bella didn’t appear he settled down in a disappointed funk.

  I thought he was imagining things again when he swore and shot up from the table, nearly toppling it as he tore from the kitchen. “What are you doing?”

  Despite the fact Bella still slept, he raced through the living room, turning on lights and lifting books, swearing repeatedly.

  Bella sat up sleepily, a crease on the side of her face from the blankets she’d slept on. “What’s going on?”

  “Where’s the book you were reading last night?” Max tossed aside an expensive-looking volume with gilt-edged pages.

  Rubbing her eyes, Bella frowned. “Which one?”

  “Max, what are you doing?” I saved a particularly prized text from knocking over a glass of water on the coffee table.

  “You said Nathan is carrying around loads of guilt over killing Marianne. Who, besides you and me, know about that?” He grabbed the book Bella held out to him and began flipping through the pages with such force I worried he would rip them from the binding. A lock of golden hair fell across his forehead, accentuating the madness that seemed to have gripped him.

  “Well, Cyrus knows. He was there. And so was the Soul Eater.”

  “Max, you don’t think that has something to do with…” My stomach roiled. I had a feeling the blood I’d drunk would soon be wasted.

  Strong hands closed over my shoulders, and I realized belatedly I no longer heard the water running in the shower.

  “Has something to do with what?” Cyrus’s breath stirred the hair at the back of my neck.

  Max coughed and I stepped out of Cyrus’s proprietary embrace.

  “Do you remember the name of the spell Bella told us about last night?” Max asked, the proverbial look that could kill on his face.

  Cyrus and Bella answered at the same time, in two different languages. Cyrus’s words were the ones I could understand. “Dark Night of the Soul.”

  Fully awake now, Bella stood beside Max and tried to take the book. “You are going the wrong way, it is in the back!”

  I turned to Cyrus, dismayed to see he wore only a towel draped low across his hips. “We think we know what your father is doing to Nathan.”

  “I told them exactly what he’s doing. They didn’t believe me, until she ran across it in that blasted book.” He rolled his eyes. “Apparently, my word is only good if I can back it up with written proof.”

  “What is he doing?” I took his hands in mine, not caring what Max would think. “Please, Cyrus. I have to have him back.”

  “Do you love him?” The words sucked the air out of the room. Even Max and Bella stilled.

  I swallowed what felt like a ball of razor blades. “Does it matter?”

  We stared at each other a long moment. In Cyrus’s eyes, I saw the hurt he felt at losing the girl in the desert, and the hurt he would feel if he thought there was no chance I’d ever return to him.

  I felt the word leave my lips before I thought to say it. “Yes.” The admission sliced something open inside me, and I felt the poison that had festered there for the past two months spill free and evaporate. “Yes, I do love him.”

  Whatever had opened in me corresponded to something closing off in Cyrus. He shrugged as though indifferent to the entire conversation, and looked away. “Dark Night of the Soul goes way back. It started out as a spell to test the faith of a shaman or mystic. Basically, it forces them to live the most troubling, painful moments of their life over and over. The only thing that keeps them from going mad is the strength of their mind and their belief in the training they’ve received. For example, a very religious person might call on the Judeo-Christian God for strength when enduring such a trial, and their very faith would break the spell.” He stopped, a hard set to his jaw, but the emotion in his eyes was unreadable.

  “But if you used it on someone who had no hope to begin with…” I knew instantly what Nathan’s Dark Night entailed. “He’s killing her.”

  “Over and over again,” Cyrus agreed grimly. “Father wouldn’t let him off too easily.”

  “But why?” Bella asked, looking up for a moment from the book. “What purpose does it serve to make him insane?”

  “He’s not insane,” Cyrus explained. “He’s sane enough to know what he’s doing, but he can’t control the memory. It’s already happened, so he’s helpless to repeat his actions. He knows who is responsible, at least who is responsible for making him kill his wife in the first place. Father needs to gather to him the souls he’s corrupted. What better way than enrage and torture them until they seek him out to end it?”

  “If we kill the Soul Eater, will the spell stop?” Good old Max, always ready to hack and slash his way out of any problem. Not that I blamed him. At this point, I wanted to kill Jacob Seymour myself.

  Cyrus shook his head. “That’s the beauty part. Even after the caster is dead, the spell continues.”

  “The sigils,” Bella interjected. “They are the anchors.”

  Cyrus nodded, looking a bit too impressed with his father’s cleverness. I turned away, disgusted. “Well, then what, he’s just screwed?”

  “No.” Bella’s golden eyes scanned the pages. “It will not be easy, but there has to be a way to fix this.”

  “Does there?” Max laughed, a weary sound despite the fact he’d just gotten up. “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “Everything has an opposite. No spell exists that cannot be broken.” She sniffed derisively and snatched the book from his hand. “I will be downstairs. I assume I have the supplies there at my disposal?”

  “Of course.” I was fairly certain Nathan would have given away his entire inventory to escape the hell he was in.

  Bella closed the book and slipped it under her arm as she walked toward me with unnerving grace. “Do I have you at my disposal?”

  “Of course,” I repeated, though this time I sounded less certain. “What will I have to do?”

  She tossed her hair and gave a thoroughly European shrug. “Maybe nothing.”

  As she passed Cyrus she paused to give his near nakedness an appreciative once-over. Then she took the keys from the hook on the wall and left.

  “Don’t you have any clothes?” Max growled.

  An antagonistic grin twisted Cyrus’s mouth. “They are, unfortunately, the same ones I’ve been wearing for nearly a week now.”

  “I’ll loan you some of mine. And keep them on.” Max shoved past us and went to the foot of the couch, where his duffel bag lay open. He pulled out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and tossed them to Cyrus. With an angry glare my way he added, “I’m going to go feed Nathan.”

  “Stay away from my girl,” Cyrus muttered in an exaggerated American accent when Max emerged from the kitchen and stalked down the hall.

  “Leave him alone. He’s kind of having a rough time.” I turned my back as Cyrus let the towel drop. He’d been naked in the desert, but those were extenuating circumstances. I didn’t need to see it every chance I got.

  “Having a rough time? Is that emblazoned on some twisted family crest you people wear?” His words were muffled, indicating the shirt was going over his head.

  I turned in time to see him hitch the jeans up his hips. They were at least an inch too big around the waist.

  “The way you people are intermittently feeding me, my weight won’t be a problem,” he quipped.

  “I’m sorry. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen.” If there was anything in the kitchen. I hadn’t even looked since returning home. Funny, that when I was a human woman food had seemed to dominate every facet of my life. Was I eating too much? How many calories were in that slice of pizza? Were eggs good or bad that particular week? Now that I was a v
ampire, the necessity for food had completely slipped my mind.

  Not the enjoyment of it, though. Nathan kept a huge stock of junk food. I looked forward to the nights the supply seemed to be waning, as it often resulted in a manic trip to the twenty-four-hour grocery store. We’d load up on all the bad-for-humans treats we could find, from Doritos to birthday cake, head back to the apartment, snack ourselves into a sugar coma and fall asleep watching videos. Nathan preferred war movies and intense psychological dramas. I always voted for romantic comedies or historical movies with sumptuous costumes. Inevitably, our disagreement would be settled with a screwball comedy like Young Frankenstein or Half Baked.

  “He’s going to be all right, you know,” Cyrus said, interrupting my reverie. With an apologetic smile, he added, “You had that look.”

  “What look?” It seemed too intimate, too soon for him to be able to read my thoughts from my facial expression. Part of me didn’t want to give him that power. The same part worried that if Cyrus knew how important Nathan was to me, it would give him ammunition to hurt me. In my logical mind I recognized the changes in him, but my emotions still lived in a place where Cyrus was my manipulative sire.

  “You have a look when you’re thinking of him. It used to drive me crazy.” What began as a smile on his face faded to a tight grimace of regret. As if he could still read my thoughts—maybe he could—Cyrus said quietly, “What would yours be? If the spell had been cast on you? That’s all I could think of, when I realized what had happened. What if my father had put that spell on me?”

  “My parents?” I laughed at how absurdly human that seemed now, compared to all the hell I’d faced since. “Or you. I don’t know.”

  “Me?” He didn’t sound at all surprised. “When I first turned you, I suppose? It wasn’t an ideal circumstance.”

  “No. When I killed you.” The tear that slid down my face surprised me, and I swiped it away. Not before Cyrus saw, though, and came to my side.

  An emotion that would have been sadness if it hadn’t held so much relief clouded his face. “I heard what you said to your friend this morning. About me.”

  I’d suspected as much, but I hadn’t wanted to discuss it. “I didn’t intend for you to hear—”

  “You don’t have to worry about making me a monster. You weren’t the one making me a monster when you lived with me. I chose to behave the way I did. Yes, there were times you hurt me. Particularly when you stabbed a knife through my heart and sent me to some bizarre purgatory. But you were not so devastating as to destroy my humanity with your rejection. There wasn’t any left to destroy, by the time I met you.”

  Unexpected tears sprang to my eyes. I wiped them on the back of my hand. “I’m not so egotistical that I thought…Well, I don’t know what I thought.”

  Nathan screamed, the sound ripping down the hallway and pushing me over the edge. A loud, hiccuping sob tore from my throat.

  Cyrus held out his arms, but didn’t embrace me, clearly waiting for me to make the first move. I walked into his embrace, for the first time not doubting his motives or his humanity, because he was human, he saw my pain and he wanted to help.

  His arms were strong around my back, his face warm where he buried it against my shoulder. If he’d been this honest when he was my sire, I could have fallen in love with him.

  He drew back, smoothing a tendril of hair from my face. “May I ask you a question?”

  I nodded, feeling a bit foolish for my breakdown. “As long as it’s not ‘Will you marry me.’”

  We laughed liked old friends reunited after a long time apart, not an easy laughter, but one that suggested we were at least working up to that comfortable place.

  His expression turned serious. “Let me kill my father?”

  The easy moment dissipated like vapor into the air. “Absolutely not!”

  “Why? Afraid I’ll turn to the dark side?” He scoffed. “You’ll never believe I’ve changed.”

  I swallowed the lump of tears that formed in my throat. “I believe you’re changed. I do. But I’m not willing to take that kind of risk.”

  Nathan screamed again, the headboard thumping the wall and echoing through the house. This time, I ignored the way it unsettled me, and concentrated on Cyrus.

  “The risk that I’ll return to my father? That I’ll become the monster you remember?” He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen.”

  I didn’t respond, trying to block out the sounds of Nathan’s frantic, pleading voice coming from the bedroom.

  “Right. I’m just a weak-minded human who’ll succumb to the Soul Eater at the first promise of power and wealth.” Cyrus twisted angrily away, marching down the hallway to my room. I followed.

  The way he paced inside the small room alarmed me. I worried he would snap and do something violent or break something. Instead, he grabbed the framed picture of Ziggy off of my desk and thrust it at me. His face twisted with remorse. “I killed this boy. I killed him, because that’s what I was told to do.”

  Ziggy’s face smiled at me from the photo. The glass of the frame caught the light in a glare, and I could only make out his mouth and eyes, giving him the faded appearance of an accusing ghost. My chest tightened.

  “My father taught me to kill for fun and pleasure. He asked me to do terrible things for him, and I did them. How did he repay me? By taking away everyone I loved, until I couldn’t feel love anymore. I could only feel this burning, selfish want. I desired to possess them, that was all.” He sounded as though he would break down and sob. I didn’t know how I would handle it if he did.

  On the other side of the wall, Nathan had become more restless. I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to my temples. Cyrus was there in an instant, this time wrapping his arms around me without looking for permission. He kissed my hair, whispering, “If my father is dead…As long as he’s alive there is always a chance I’ll turn to him, return to the way I was. I never want to become that man again! Do you understand? I want to kill my father.”

  Another pained howl rent the air, and I gasped, shocked by the violence of the sound and the hurt that had caused it. “I have to go. I can’t stand this.”

  I ran out of the room, to the front door, ignoring Cyrus’s call of, “Carrie, wait!” I took the steps two at a time, burst through the door at the bottom before I took a breath. I dragged the chilled night air into my lungs, wanting to drown in it. From here, I couldn’t hear Nathan crying out, but the memory haunted me. It was worse now that I knew what caused it. The thought of Nathan forced to kill his wife every second, the wife he still loved so much he could not let her go, was too much for me to fathom. I stumbled to the van parked at the curb and leaned my forehead against the side, not bothering to stop the shuddering sobs that racked my body.

  Behind me the door opened and closed, and I knew it was Cyrus just from the sound of his footsteps. He put one hand on my shoulder, and I spun at his touch, startling him.

  “I don’t think you’ll become a monster,” I blurted, a bit too loudly, but I didn’t care who heard. I just needed to get some of the crushing, confusing emotion off my chest. “I don’t want you going to him because I don’t want you to die! I don’t know what I’d do if—” I choked on the rest of my words, but they echoed in my head. If I lost you again.

  Though I hadn’t spoken them, Cyrus heard them. He stared at me, hard, his blue eyes, which had always looked so cold boring into me with an intensity he could have been pretending.

  I thought of Nathan upstairs, struggling and in pain. I thought of the agony Cyrus must be going through, over what his father had done to him and the girl in the desert. I wanted the pain to be somehow deeper in me, fearing I wasn’t feeling it enough to truly understand. And then I realized that was all I had been doing—feeling all that horror and guilt until it felt normal, numb.

  When Cyrus kissed me this time, it wasn’t passion and anger overcoming him. His hands tangled in my hair, his mouth crushed against mine as if through touch
ing me he could erase my pain. He did care that he had hurt me in the past, and now he sought to make up for that.

  I didn’t resist him. I still loved Nathan. He was my sire; it was impossible not to feel something for him. But too much lay unresolved between Cyrus and me. It wasn’t betrayal, it was closure.

  Cyrus fumbled beside me for an instant, and I heard the back door of the van swing open. He never let me go, never moved his mouth from mine as he shifted me toward it and laid me back on the horrible gold carpet inside. Maybe he thought if he broke contact and gave me a second to think, I would tell him to stop. I wouldn’t have. I hurt. I wanted for just a moment to feel something that didn’t.

  I scooted back as he climbed in beside me and pulled the door shut. There was a second of hesitation on his part where I saw the thought, We shouldn’t be doing this, flicker across his face. I pulled my shirt over my head and grabbed him, smashing my lips across his. He straightened with shock, then relaxed again, laying me back and covering my body with his.

  When he shrugged out of his borrowed T-shirt, I forced every thought from my mind, for better or worse. We didn’t speak, but moved in a strangely easy dance of pulled clothing and hurried kisses on reachable skin. It wasn’t romantic and it wasn’t tender. It was fucking, in the most disconnected sense of the word.

  He slipped inside me easily and I gasped involuntarily at how warm and alive he felt. Vampires were cold, room temperature. He was human. When his hands closed over my hips to pull me harder, faster against him, they were human hands, not the twisted talons of a monster.

  I clutched at his back and shoulders, shocked all the more by the warmth of him. When he spilled into me I shuddered, but I didn’t come. He withdrew immediately, not looking at me.

  “That was a mistake,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  I nodded, trying to find my voice. “Let’s forget it, then.”

  We dressed silently, feeling dirty and used without really blaming each other. Only when he pushed open the door to the van and the clean, night air spilled in did I speak.

  “You asked me what I would see, if the Soul Eater had put me under that spell. What if it had been you?” I asked, and he looked at me, his face grim. “What would you be living, if it were you under the spell?”