by Sara Reinke
“I wonder what he was doing,” Sam remarked, sifting through the papers. “These look like reprints from online, news articles he found. They’re all about people who’ve gone missing.” Lifting one closest to top of the pile, she said, “Listen to this: Home Invasion Leaves Local Woman Missing.” With a thoughtful frown, she added, “It happened in Seattle.”
“Seattle?” Jason remembered the glimpse of the distinctive Space Needle tower from his memories of fighting with Nemamiah. He slipped the page from her hand and stared in stricken surprise at the photograph of a woman that accompanied the article.
Not missing, he thought. I remember now. I remember her.
“What is it?” Sam asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I know her,” he said quietly. “I know this woman. I’ve seen her before.”
Natalie Reynolds, 22, was reported missing from her Ravenna Park apartment late yesterday, the result of an apparent home invasion, the cutline read. Neighbors reported the sounds of a struggle but no suspects were observed entering or leaving the premises. Police have found no signs of forced entry, but say the condition of the apartment indicates the victim fought back against her attacker.
In his mind, he could see it clearly—throttling the girl, slamming her backward into a wall hard enough to crack the plaster behind her. He’d held her pinned here, hoisted aloft so her bare feet kicked and flailed in the open air a foot above the carpet. Her face had flushed nearly purple with the desperate strain to breathe. Her hands slapped weakly against his, her fingernails digging into his flesh as she tried to claw him loose.
Just as her eyelids had fluttered, her eyes rolling back into her skull, her struggles waning, he’d turned, throwing her with impossible force, sending her flying across the room and slamming into the far wall. With a breathless cry, she’d crashed to the ground, shattering a glass-top coffee table beneath her in a sudden spray of glass fragments.
When she’d pushed herself up from the shards of ruined glass, her face had been riddled with cuts, smeared with blood. She was gritting her teeth, and she had no pupils, no irises, nothing discernablediscernible at all, just twin orbs of dazzling white fire, so brilliant, he’d drawn back, squinting against the glare.
“You…won’t take me…so easily, Wraith,” she’d wheezed, her voice damaged from his choke hold, and when she’d stumbled to her feet, he saw she’d grabbed hold of a weapon that had been lying on the floor within her reach, a single-barreled pump-action shotgun. Grasping it in one hand, her blond hair clinging to her bloodied cheeks, she chambered a round with one furious jerk of her arm, then leveled the barrel at him.
He remembered dissipating, the Eidolon shifting into shadow form and transporting him instantaneously behind her. As he coalesced back into human form, he saw the wink of light against something metallic in his hand, a knife with a hilt engraved with the same triangular knot design he’d seen on Nemamiah’s sword.
He’d clapped his hand over the woman’s mouth, grabbing her from behind and wrenching her head back with enough force to snap her neck with a horrible, audible crunch. He’d felt the sharp intake of her breath against his palm as she’d sucked in a breath to scream, her lips mashed back into her teeth, and then he’d dragged the edge of the knife blade beneath the shelf of her chin, opening her throat in a hot, sudden flood.
Before she’d even hit the floor, her body had begun to run like molten tallow, just like his Wraith opponent in the medieval great hall had. The girl had drooped to the floor in a bubbling taffylike heap, and a thick stench had risen as her body had dissolved.
Jason recoiled, tangling his hands in his hair, shoving his hands to his temples as if trying to squeeze the horrifying memory out of his skull.
“Jason?” Sam said, bewildered and alarmed. “What is it?”
That’s why she was listed as missing, not dead, he realized. They didn’t find her body. She didn’t leave one for them to find.
“Jason, talk to me.” Sam caught him by the shoulders. “Tell me what’s wrong. How do you know that girl?”
“She was…my friend.” From the bed nearby, Gabriel’s voice was fragile and hoarse.
Sam whirled while Jason backpedaled in startled fright. He knocked into Gabriel’s bookcase, sending books and CDs tumbling off the shelves and to the floor. The priest struggled to sit up in his bed, propping himself clumsily upright. His face was pale and drawn with pain, his eyes heavily lidded and groggy.
“I…loved her,” he seethed. “And you destroyed her.”
“It wasn’t me,” Jason whispered, shaking his head.
But seeing Natalie Reynolds’ face had unlocked a treasure trove of heretofore forgotten, horrific memories in his mind, a sudden flood of images—a man from Paris, whose fiery white eyes had stood out in stark contrast to his coal-black skin. Jason had overpowered him, forcing him facedown and to the ground, craning his arm behind him at an unnatural angle that had wrenched his shoulder out of socket.
“I…I will be avenged…” he’d gasped as Jason had shoved the gleaming barrel of his Beretta nine-millimeter to the black man’s head. He’d said this in French—Je serai vengé—but Jason had still understood him somehow, impossibly.
“J'attendrai,” Jason had replied, as easily and readily as if he’d known French, which he hadn’t. I’ll be waiting, he’d promised, and when he’d squeezed the trigger, kicking a powerful wave of recoil through his palm, up his arm and into his shoulder, the black man’s brains had splattered back at him, peppering his face with blood.
He remembered a young man in west Los Angeles, Hispanic, dressed in a wife-beater T-shirt, blue jeans and boots, a cigarillo clamped between his teeth as he and Jason grappled, nearly nose to nose, over a pistol in a cramped, squalid apartment. His eyes were ablaze with that same pale fire, his brows defiantly furrowed even as Jason forced the muzzle beneath his chin.
“Fuck you, pendejo,” this man had said, his skin sweat-soaked, the stink of his fear as energizing as an adrenaline surge to the Eidolon.
Jason had leaned forward, letting his lips dance against the man’s earlobe as he’d squeezed the trigger, emptying the man’s skull against the wall behind them: “Su esposa, quizá.” Your wife, maybe.
A woman in Colorado, driving a hunting knife up and through her rib cage to pierce her heart, watching as that blazing light in her eyes faded and died, a thin stream of blood burbling out of her nose, trailing down her chin; a transient man in Philadelphia, his clothes stained with his own waste, his breath reeking of booze, his eyes brilliantly ablaze as Jason had emptied a chamber round through the plate of his sternum. A man in New Orleans; a teen-aged girl in Lake Tahoe; a man in Rabbinical Sabbath garb in Cincinnati; a star high school quarterback in Manhattan, Kansas—all of them with fiery eyes, all of them dead by his hands, all of them disappearing into pools of melting flesh.
Jason crumpled to his knees. On the verge of hyperventilation, he gasped vainly for air. “I didn’t do that, any of it… I…I…” He looked between Sam and Gabriel, desperate and anguished. “It wasn’t me!”
****
“You have to go.”
“What?” Sam blinked at Jason, her eyes wide in surprise.
Whatever reserve of consciousness and strength Gabriel seemed to have mustered had faded within moments, and he’d crumpled back to the mattress with a groan, his eyes fluttering closed. They’d left him to sleep, keeping the door between his bedroom and living room only minutely ajar. Jason had sunk to the floor in front of the couch, exhausted and emotionally spent. Sam sat nearby, her legs folded beneath her.
“You could have been killed the other day when Sitri found us on the train too,” Jason said. “Because of me, because you were with me. And now these things I saw in my head, things I remember, all those terrible things I did…”
“Not you,” she cut in. “You didn’t do anything, Jason. It was that thing Sitri put in your head, the Wyrm. It was controlling you. There wasn’t anything you could do to stop it.�
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“It wasn’t the Wyrm’s power that killed those people. It was the Eidolon. The Wyrm might be gone, but the Eidolon isn’t. And yesterday, it took over me. I couldn’t stop it.” In his mind, he could still remember the damp warmth of Natalie Reynolds’ breath against his hand, the muffled sound of her scream as he’d slit open her throat. “I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you, Sam…if I hurt you—”
She pressed her fingertips to his mouth, quieting him. “You wouldn’t,” she said, eyes all round and trusting.
He looked at her, pleading. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. You told me so—today, at the motel.”
He took a deep breath and lowered his eyes, because he didn’t want to admit the truth to her—that reclaiming control from the Eidolon that morning had taken all of his strength, all of his will. And God help me, I don’t know if I could do it again. “I think it would be better, safer for you, if you weren’t around me anymore.”
After a moment’s pause, during which he suspected she was waiting for him to deliver a punch line to whatever little practical joke he might have been playing on her, her frown deepened. “No way.”
“Sam…” Jason sighed heavily, forking his fingers through his hair.
“Damn it, I said no,” she snapped. “You’ve no right to ask me that, to say that to me. Not now. Not after all of this.” Motioning widely with her hands, she indicated the room around them, and more generally, the clusterfuck that had become their lives.
“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “You don’t—”
“What? Understand? No, Jason. You listen. Because you’re the one not understanding.” She stood, fists balled. “I bought you a new suit when we buried you. It was really nice, navy blue wool, with a white shirt, a maroon silk tie. You would have hated it because it was expensive, but I thought you’d look handsome in it.”
Stricken, he stared at her.
“You were shot once in the chest, then again in the head. The funeral home didn’t want me to see you like that. They told me they could use makeup and some kind of wax to try to hide what had happened, but…”
In the yellow lamp light, her eyes had taken on a glossy cast. “They did that with my dad, and it didn’t even look like him when they were done. I didn’t want that, to remember you that way. So we did everything closed casket. I picked out a mahogany one for you. It had a memory drawer in it, so I bought this little photo album and put pictures in it—you and your parents, pictures of us, different things. I thought you’d have liked that. I had you buried with your parents. They have this way of doing it where your casket goes in the ground stacked on top of theirs.” Her voice faded, and again she looked away.
“Sam,” he said, because he could see it pained her; it damn near killed her to talk about it, and he realized that in all likelihood, she hadn’t, not with Dean or Bear—not with anyone—since his funeral. “Sam, I…”
“I went through your things, cleaned out your apartment, your closet,” she said. “I had to pack up all your clothes and I could still smell you in them, your cologne…” At last, her voice broke, ragged and hoarse and she looked away, clamping her arms about herself in a brittle embrace.
Jason stood from the couch and moved to hold her, but she shrugged away from him, her brows narrowed.
“You don’t know how hard it was to tell you good-bye,” she cried. “To give up our life together, the things we’d wanted and wished for, everything we’d hoped and planned. To wake up every morning after having dreamed about you only to realize that’s all it was—all it ever would be—just goddamn dreams.” She sniffled, swatting at her tears as if they infuriated her. “You don’t know what it was like to miss you or…or how it felt to see you again, to be with you. And then you left, and it was all my fault and I knew I couldn’t do it! I couldn’t learn to survive somehow without you all over again.”
“I just don’t want anything to happen to you,” Jason pleaded. “Listen to me. I don’t know if I can keep you safe. Hell, I don’t know if I can keep myself safe.”
“I don’t need you to keep me safe,” Sam exclaimed. “I just need you! I’ve already lost you once. I’m not going to do it again—not without a fight. I love you too much to let you go. Never again, Jason.”
She caught his face between her hands and cut short any further protest he might have offered with a kiss, pressing her mouth fiercely to his, her tongue tangling against his. His need for her was sudden, desperate, basic and raw. His hands trailed from her face to her throat, sliding down her shoulders, and she uttered a soft moan as they fell against her breasts.
“Stay with me,” she whispered, reaching between them, fumbling to open his fly.
He nodded, relenting as she shoved his jeans away from his hips. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered back, reaching for her, jerking at her waistband. “Not ever, Sam. I swear to God. Not without you.”
She eased him backward and he sat down against the sofa. She straddled him, her thighs enveloping his hips, and she lowered herself atop him, pushing him into her in a single, swift moment.
He groaned her name, kneading her breasts, feeling the bullet points of her nipples hardening beneath his fingertips. He jerked at her shirt as she tugged at his own, and within moments, they were pressed belly to belly, skin to skin.
“Don’t stop,” she pleaded, rocking against him.
“I won’t,” he promised breathlessly, shaking his head as he cradled her hips, thrusting himself more deeply into her.
Her fingers tightened in his hair, and her breath grew sharp, ragged against his ear, and as he moved his hips to match her sudden, fervent rhythm, Jason felt more alive than he’d felt in his entire life. He came hard, arching his back from the seat of the couch and jerking against her. She climaxed with him, tightening against him in a taut, shuddering spasm. Her body went rigid in his arms, her nails dug into his skin and in the aftermath, she huddled against him, trembling.
“I love you, Jason,” she whispered, nestled against him, her words vulnerable and earnest.
Turning his cheek, he kissed her ear through her dark, tangled hair. “I love you too, Sam,” he breathed. God above, more than anything, I love you.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jason had placed Gabriel’s pistol on the living room bookshelf. He and Sam had curled together, side by side, on the cramped sofa until her breathing had grown slow and steady from beside him, her fingers slipping laxly away from his own as she slept.
Moving slowly, careful not to disturb her, he’d slipped away from her side, grimacing as the springs in the old couch had creaked with his shifting weight. Leaving her to rest, he stole to the bookshelf and took the gun down.
Cradling it sideways in his hand, he ejected the clip, then checked the cartridges inside to confirm what the priest had told him earlier, that the bullets were indeed marked with the trefoil design of the triquetra. Thus satisfied, he slapped the clip home again, sparing a glance at the couch to make sure the noise hadn’t bothered Sam. Then, as he walked slowly toward the bedroom door, he thumbed off the safety.
He’d turned off the lamp when he’d left the room earlier. The only light now came from a narrow oblong spilling in from the living room, and the faint glow of streetlights from beyond the windows. It was enough to glisten in Gabriel’s eyes as they opened when Jason pressed the muzzle of the pistol to his forehead, squarely against the bridge of his nose.
“I want some answers,” Jason seethed. His voice shook, as did his hand, and he hoped the shadows draping the room, along with the priest’s murky degree of consciousness, helped disguise this fact.
“I imagine you do,” Gabriel croaked, squinting blearily at him.
He thrust his hand up, his fingers splayed wide, and sudden brilliant fire lanced out of his fingertips like bolts of lightning. With the distinctive stink of ozone, it struck Jason like a runaway freight train, knocking him backward and off his feet, slamming him into the far wa
ll. It pinned him here for an agonizing moment, searing through his body, making all of his muscles spasm and contract in excruciating unison; then he disappeared, shifting into shadow form in a desperate attempt to escape. He coalesced across the room by the desk but immediately crumpled to his hands and knees, choked for breath, still jerking uncontrollably from the electrified charge.
“Please,” he gasped, looking up, his vision blurred as tears streamed down his cheeks. Gabriel staggered to his feet, his body enveloped in a hissing, crackling shroud of energy, just like Nemamiah had been in the Seattle alley. He lurched toward Jason, his fists bared, his hair standing nearly on end.
“Wait,” Jason pleaded, cowering. The gun had fallen from his hand when he’d hit the wall. He could see it across the room, on the floor beneath the window, well out of arm’s reach. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill your friend!”
“No,” Gabriel conceded. “You didn’t. That goddamn shadow demon inside you did. And if it was up to me, I would rip it out of you with my bare hands and send it back to the bowels of the Netherworlde, to whatever wretched, stinking hole in the ground it crawled out of.”
Jason dissipated into shadows again, reforming beside the fallen gun and snatching it in hand. Panicked, he shoved the business end at Gabriel, his finger against the trigger, his hand still badly shaking. “You can do that?” he asked, seized with sudden, desperate hope. “You can get it out of me?”
The light surrounding Gabriel, so brilliant it was nearly painful to look at him, abruptly vanished, plunging the room into relative darkness, leaving Jason blinded, swinging the pistol back and forth wildly.
“No,” Gabriel said. Jason heard a soft snict! as he turned on the lamp, sending a spill of yellow glow in a small circumference across the floor. The priest leaned heavily against his desk, his hand pressed gingerly against his wounded midriff as he gasped for breath. When he looked at Jason, his eyes were solemn, nearly sorrowful.
