She didn’t give him the chance to defend himself before she floated as far away from the park as she could, because, knowing Darwin, he’d be happy to offer up more of his pious views on her life before death.
Rationally, she knew he had nothing else to go on but bits and pieces of a story that involved her killing her husband and locking his soul in a box. With the little she’d shared, he certainly had every right to judge. But she’d been judged for more years than she cared to count, and now it was all coming to a frothy head, bubbling over in angry splashes of guilt and secrecy.
She’d reached a point of no return, the point where the criticism and jabs at her morality had become too painful to keep hearing. What once had been an easy task, hiding her past had now become the ultimate in lies and deceit.
The very things that had left her where she was to begin with.
And now Armando was loose.
Her dirty deed had come full circle.
Skulking into the store, she stayed hidden in the shadows for a moment while she watched Mrs. Ramirez gather a sleepy Carlos and his things and head out the door. Closing her eyes, Marcella stood in the hushed, dimly lit silence and breathed.
There was no explanation as to why Carlos’s grandfather had given him the box or where he’d gotten it. Isabella must be long dead. Marcella had never verified that, though. When she’d become a demon, she’d stayed far away from her family and anyone she’d known in her life so they’d never be tainted by her choice. That had been the deal when she’d signed on the dotted line. She’d serve Satan. He’d leave her family and friends alone. But Isabella couldn’t still be alive. At the time of Marcella’s death, Isabella was thirty-five, ten years her senior.
She had to tell Kellen what had been in the box. If she was careful, the explanation didn’t have to involve anything other than Armando and his hateful soul.
Because the rest of her tale . . .
Shaking her head, she fiercely pushed away the day she’d sold her life and focused on coherently giving Kellen an explanation that would satisfy him. He was too smart to fall for her tripping over her words with a half-assed story.
“Sheee’s baaa-ack,” he crooned from behind her shoulder, husky and easygoing.
The sound of his voice, the sweet tendril of the thrill it had always given her, circled her intestines, drawing them in a tight knot. Marcella turned to face him with a solemn exterior. “She is.”
“Carlos is gone, and Mrs. Ramirez managed to get Solana out of the slammer.”
“What a mess.”
“A mess that somehow involves that box?”
Her eyes found the floor in guilt. “Indirectly, yes. I guess it does.”
“The way you ran out of here earlier means this box can’t be good. You ready to tell me about it?”
“Is this multiple choice?”
“Nope.”
Resignation set in as she formulated her plan. She’d just say it. Period. It didn’t make her a slut for once having a husband. “Okay. The box. My dead husband was in the box.”
Silence in all its painful accusation greeted her ears.
Her eyes avoided his.
Apparently, Kellen wasn’t going to allow that. Tilting her chin upward, he forced her gaze to meet his, and while there was no condemnation in it, it wouldn’t last. “Someone was married to you?” When he asked, the emotions in his eyes were hard to read. She wasn’t sure if what she saw was disgust that anyone could ever be married to her, or a hint of jealousy mingled in with all that surprise.
“I knooow,” Marcella cooed playfully. “It’s like finding out Hannibal Lecter was once a silly schoolboy who had a major crush on his biology teacher, right?”
His eyes hardened when he shoved his hands back into the pockets of his sweatshirt. “Very close. Now stop with the smart-ass.”
“Okay. Yes. I was married back in 1934.”
“To?”
“A man.”
“Yeah. What man?”
“Armando Villanueva. Ring any bells?”
“Not even a tinkle. But your last name is Acosta.”
“It’s my maiden name. I didn’t want to keep Armando’s after . . .”
“How long were you married?”
Just long enough to provide . . . “Just a little over a year.”
“And how does that explain the box?”
She was stringing him along, she knew it. He knew it. But if she hoped to keep at least some of her secrets, she had to keep it simple. If killing someone were simple. “Armando was in the box.”
“Do you mean his ashes?”
Only if you wanted to split hairs. Technically, that had been all that was left after she’d knocked him off . . . “No.”
“Okay, you lead, I’ll follow—how the hell did Armando get in the box?”
Looking him directly in the eye, her lips thinned to a sneer. “I killed that spineless, stupid, bastard pig and put him in there.”
“So I’m guessing the two of you weren’t in the throes of connubial bliss?” he quipped.
“Mensa’s holding a coveted spot for you right now.”
Kellen’s face almost broke into a smile, until her earlier words obviously hit him again. “You killed him.” The question wasn’t asked; the answer was stated, flat and monotone.
Murdered, knocked off, whacked, capped his ass. Yep. “I did.”
“Finally an explanation about your demon origins.” His disappointment was so evident, so palpable, it was almost as if he’d been waiting to hear otherwise, and she’d blown him out of the water by telling him she was a killa.
Arrogantly, her head lifted. “Seems that way.”
“Wanna tell me why you killed him?”
“Not particularly.”
“Right, because you don’t do explanations. But you can’t just drop a bomb like that and not have something to say for yourself. Some sort of defense.”
Her seesawing emotions stopped on angry. Lately, it was like spinning a wheel to see where her next emotion would land. “I don’t have to defend myself to you or anyone, but in the interest of our new policy of sunshine and goodwill, I killed him because he was a bastard who deserved to die.” So chew on that.
And here it came. Marcella saw it in the stiffening of his spine and the thought he put into his next words. “Lots of people probably deserve to die. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right to kill them.”
“Well, if you’re married to me, you forfeit your rights.”
“When did he die?”
“In 1934.” In a blaze of fucking glory while she spat on his still-warm body, but not before she’d clubbed his cowardly ass to death.
Kellen paused. “You died in 1934, didn’t you?”
“It was a good year.”
The snort he gave was sarcastic. “Some coincidence, huh? You killing your husband and then kicking the bucket yourself? Or maybe it was divine justice?”
That’d work. “Divinity at its finest. Always on top of things up there, they are,” she said, allowing the sarcasm of her words to ring clear.
Kellen made the external effort to avoid the bait she dangled by blowing out a sharp breath of air before responding. “What could he possibly have done to you to make you want to commit murder?”
Backing away from him, she threw up her hands in question. “Why does there have to be a reason? Maybe he was just a shitty husband who never called when he was going to be late for dinner. In fact, that son of a whoremonger never, ever took out the trash, and getting him to mow the lawn was like asking him to relocate Mount St. Helens to the Caymans. You know what he used to call me when I complained? His cheeky wench. After all my nagging, I decided I’d reached my last straw, and one night when he was late for dinner—I did what any wife with an overgrown lawn, overflowing trash, and a cold meal would do. He was late once too often. Tipped me right over the edge and I whacked him. I guess I showed him what cheeky was all about, huh?” She tacked on a sly smile to enforce h
er blasé attitude about murdering one’s husband.
Kellen wasn’t amused, not by the grim set of his mouth or the tight set of his teeth. In fact, if she were to lay bets, she’d say he was clinging to this newfound happy-clappy attitude toward her. “Lay off the bullshit and tell me why you killed him.”
Her emotions took another wide swing while she watched him try to fight the disappointment in his eyes because it was like a wound on her heart. She wanted him to fight with her. She didn’t want him to fight with her. Good God, she was like the Three Faces of Eve.
But would it really hurt to tell him part of the truth? If only so he’d stop looking at her like she’d been responsible for Chernobyl, the Titanic, and Hiroshima combined? Her face grew apprehensive, her words strained. “Armando was a Lucifer lover. Much like your half brother, Vincent, he’d signed a contract with Satan. His soul was due to him upon his death. I just sped up the negotiations.”
A quick flash of understanding passed over his dark, hard face, lightening it a bit. “He served Satan in life.”
Hoping for cocky, she kept her explanation simple, but as offhand as possible. “Yep, and I found out about it. I was deeply religious, and divorce wasn’t something that happened as easily as it does in this day and age. So I saved myself some money and a buttload of court appearances and killed him.”
He fought a smirk, then straightened because this was Kellen, and they were talking murder, and his sense of morals just wouldn’t allow him to see the good she’d done by knocking off Armando. “And put him in a box . . .”
But first I burned him to a nice Original Recipe crisp. “It was all the rage for husband killers back then.”
“If his ashes weren’t in that box, explain how he got in the box.”
“I summoned his soul and put that in a box. Not him per se. That’s not the point. The point is Carlos has the box—which means Armando is free. Somewhere.” She couldn’t hide the shiver of fear that knowledge wrought from her. “So the first question is how the hell did Carlos’s grandfather get that box?”
“Hang on. Do I want to know how you knew how to summon a soul?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I dunno. It’s purty skeery,” she joked.
But Kellen wasn’t laughing, and he wasn’t done looking for answers. “What did you do with the box after you, you know, put his soul in it?”
Marcella measured her words. “I gave it to someone who obviously didn’t heed my warnings that no one should ever find it.”
His interest grew in the arch of his eyebrow and the purse of his lips. “And that someone was . . . ?”
“Someone who obviously didn’t do a very good job of getting rid of it. That’s not the point right now. The box is here. It’s real. A very, very malicious freak is loose because of that box!”
Kellen’s dark head shook with disbelief. “I don’t even know what to say. There’s this huge chunk of your past, a pretty important one that you never shared with us, that involves murder. Why didn’t you ever tell anyone? At the very least Delaney? She’s your best friend.”
Her shoulders lifted in a disinterested shrug. “No one ever asked, and now that you know what happened, it should make you feel like you’re walking on air. My explanation definitely justifies your superior moral construct. Which means we can get back to business as usual and you can stop behaving like you’ve communed with God himself in a field of buttercups and he gave you a direct order to love thine enemy.”
Though he said nothing, she saw the wheels of his razor-sharp mind turning.
Marcella’s sigh was weary. Telling this tale twice in one day had sucked her energy points right out of her. Darwin’s disappointment had hurt, as much as she hated to admit it. Kellen’s would be worse when he finally got around to the absorption stage. She hoped to avoid that by getting the information out and leaving before she had to physically see how disgusted he was by her.
“Look, Armando was a monster in life. In death, I’d bet he’s the Son of Sam times a million—especially after exile for seventy-six years. We have to find him and stop him. And if he goes near Carlos, I’ll find the fuck and whack him all over again.” She paused at her big words. How she’d whack him was still pending. “So call up your gal pal Catalina and tell her we need to get on this shit now. We need contacts in Hell, something I don’t have anymore.” Her rising hysteria showed in the strain of her voice as it hit an octave of panic she didn’t know she was capable of.
“Whoa,” he chided, his eyes surprising her by distinctly revealing sympathy for her plight. “Hold on. I get your panic. You killed him. He’d probably want revenge for something like that, but it’s something he can’t wreak on you because you’re no longer a demon. You’re afraid of him. That’s understandable, but do you really think if he wanted Carlos he wouldn’t already have hurt him? Carlos did set him free, that’s true. But Carlos didn’t mention anyone being in the box, and he knows enough to at least tell us if he’d encountered something like he experienced yesterday here in the store. I think he trusts us enough to tell us. So right now, your husband’s not any different from any other demon.”
Marcella shook her head, wrinkling her nose to show her displeasure. “Never call him my husband again. It makes me want to yark, and I think that would be too easy. I wish I could take comfort in the idea that Armando would just go on about his demonic business like all the rest of Satan’s minions, but something terrible is going to happen. I feel it in my gut, and it involves Carlos. I can’t disregard my contact’s warning that ‘they want him.’ Whoever they are. Carlos and Armando are connected. From what I’ve gathered when we talked this afternoon, he’s too young yet to understand the ghosts he’s seeing need his help. So he hasn’t crossed anyone over that might have been eluding Lucifer—which as we both know was what set Lucifer’s balls on fire with Delaney. That’s the only grudge I can see Lucifer could hold. I don’t know how or why Carlos’s gift of sight is so important to Hell, but it seems as though it is. We need to know why.”
Kellen was reaching for his cell phone at the insistence of her words, his face determined but not yet showing the signs that what she’d done to Armando had sunk in. “So I call Catalina.”
Yay. Let’s do call Miss Hades 2010. Woot.
Gnawing on her ragged fingernail, she fought the onslaught of memories Armando’s existence brought in hateful, vivid colors. How she’d ever been so stupid as to fall in love with a man so hideous . . .
She’d ignored the warnings from the other side because she’d been so infatuated with Armando’s dark good looks and charm. Charm that oozed from his every pore all while he’d wooed her, but she’d been nothing more than a tool. Back in the day, at twenty-five she was no spring chicken when it came to marrying. Her parents said she was too strong-willed, too opinionated for a man to want to lock horns with her for life. Until Armando had come along. He was the kind of man who’d encouraged her will of iron like none of the others who’d offered their hand, and she’d fallen blindly—head over heels.
He’d incited her on more than one occasion with his opposing views. On everything from politics to religion Armando had made her think. He’d challenged her. He’d brought more than just the idea that she was going to end up a marital doormat to the table.
And then he’d betrayed her.
In the sickest, most fetid of ways.
Kellen ran a finger along her upper arm, disrupting her long-buried memories. “I got her voice mail, but I left her a message and told her it was crucial she call us back.”
Marcella’s gut churned in anxious worry. “So we wait.”
“We wait,” he confirmed with a half smile she had to look away from in order to avoid returning.
And now she could escape his heavy disappointment at her killerlike tendencies. “So I’ll go, and if you hear anything, see anything, you just dream me up there, big boy. I’ll come running.”
Kellen’s hand, callused and lean, clasped her arm. “Where do you go
when you leave here?”
“Shopping, silly. Can’t you tell by my new dress?” She held up the ripped edge of it and curtsied. What sucked sweaty balls about that was she could touch the dress, feel the fabric between her fingers, but she couldn’t take the damned thing off. It was like some eternal curse.
“You can stay here, you know.”
How thoughtful to offer her the opportunity to see him in all his glorious muscledness while he strolled through the house in his Calvin Kleins. She’d rather wear this dress for eternity than be subjected to his House of Fabulous. “I’m good. I know your life is jam-packed with Discovery Channel marathons and figuring out global warming. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“You could watch with me.”
Her head cocked to the left at his quiet request. “Aren’t you supposed to be calling me a murderer and, like, reading me scripture so I can atone for my sins?”
He regarded her with cool eyes. “If Armando was anything like Vincent, then he must have deserved to die.”
What. The. Fuck? What was going on with him? It was like the Dalai Lama had possessed him. “Hold on there, Mr. Self-Righteous, Law-Abiding Citizen of the United States. Did I hear you just condone my murdering someone?” She made a slicing motion across her throat. “Because I did him in but good. Very gangsta, by this day and age’s definition. In fact, maybe you should just call me killa from here on out.” That she was working so hard to get a rise of distaste out of him plainly showed her insecurities. She wanted his approval—longed for it—and she’d take it any way she could get her unmanicured mitts on it. So she was seeing how far she could push him, testing him to see if he’d walk away. Self-loathing rose in a swell of disgust.
My Way to Hell Page 14
