by Vivi Andrews
Jay’s hands stilled.
“I suppose I could do that for tomorrow,” Sasha mused. “You can’t walk two feet in this town without bumping into an actor. They’d probably pay me just for the chance to be in the same room with my mother. Playing you would be the ultimate method-acting exercise.”
“You aren’t hiring anyone to be me,” he grumbled against her neck, his body close enough to feel the shiver that rolled down her spine in reaction.
“No? Somehow I doubt that means you’ve changed your mind and decided to have Christmas with us.” She shrugged him off, making it seem like she was only reaching for the rolling pin, but he could tell she was hurt by his refusal.
Sasha didn’t let people in easily—asking him for this was as vulnerable as she’d let herself be in the entire six months of their relationship. It killed him every time he had to say no and watch her walls go up again, higher each time.
And they were definitely up now. So much for one last night. She rounded the corner of the counter and Jay didn’t try to close the distance. He doubted she would want him touching her for what he said next. Better get it over with…
“Sasha, I might have to be out of touch for a while. I’m heading out of town,” he began, meaning to work his way up to the whole demonspawn thing. Frustration at what he had to do roughened his voice and gave it a brutal edge.
Sasha stiffened, her gaze locked on the wad of brown dough, her knuckles going white with the force of her grip on the rolling pin. “That’s right. How could I have forgotten? We ‘need to talk,’ don’t we?”
Jay took a step back to get out of rolling pin range. Okay, clearly he should have phrased that differently.
“When do you leave?”
“I have to go tonight.” Or I’ll be smote to the lowest level of Hell by the wrath of God because I’m evil-begotten. Probably best to save that tidbit until she wasn’t armed.
“Are you coming back?” The question was a projectile, flung at his face.
“Yes.” Unless he couldn’t. Nothing was certain in Hell. “I want to. I’m going to try.”
“Right.”
Jay winced at the bite in her tone. He’d been hoping to ease her into his revelations a little at a time, but he should have known better. Sasha never took the easy way.
***
Sasha didn’t know what it was that made her want to pounce on Jay and start a fight.
Maybe it was a reflexive dump him before he can dump you. Maybe it was defensive anxiety because he was the only man she’d ever met who could make an ache start up in her chest when he walked into the room or her fingertips tingle every time he touched her. The only one she’d let get close enough to hurt her.
Maybe it was just the knowledge he’d always been too sweet for her and she’d always known it. He was too gorgeous. Way too nice. Too much of a good guy for a temperamental bitch like her. Saint Jay.
Saints belonged with nice girls—and nice girls didn’t fantasize about bludgeoning strangers with canned goods or ripping the fingernails off Hollywood hopefuls from Oklahoma.
So what if she might be a little head over heels for him? It’s not like he was perfect. He couldn’t commit and he was too inclined to let her walk all over him, though sometimes she got the strangest sense he was forcing himself to be a doormat.
It was almost like he was two people—the Jay who was the poster child for thoughtfulness and responsibility, and the one with the wicked smile and subtle manipulations. Those little hints of devilishness that made her feel like he understood every dark corner of her soul and loved her vices as much as her virtues.
Sasha wasn’t the kind of girl who had the milk of human kindness flowing through every vein—and she needed to be with someone who wasn’t going to make her feel guilty for the lack. She wanted someone who pushed back when she pushed, a tough guy who could give her the friction of pitting her will against his—though lack of sexual friction had never been a problem for them.
When Jay had appeared in the kitchen, for a second she’d forgotten to be defensive. Forgotten to brace for the worst. Forgotten “we need to talk.”
The sunset streaming in the windows behind him made Jay look like an angel stepping out of a beam of light. It accented the muscular curve of his shoulders and caressed the matinee-idol slant of his jaw. The words tall, dark and handsome had been invented for this man. His hair and eyes were both wholly, deliciously black.
With his dark, sculpted features, he looked like sin. But looks could be deceiving. Jay was the nice one.
And she was the one spoiling for a fight. Anger would keep her strong, keep her from sniveling all over him. If he was leaving, she wasn’t inclined to make it easy.
“So. Going out of town. Is that like ‘I have plans for Christmas’? Some kind of guy code? It’s not me, it’s you, right?” She looked down at her hands, remembering the gingerbread dough. Baking therapy. She focused on it so she wouldn’t have to look at him, rolling it out with short, aggressive strokes.
“Sasha…” His voice was low, serious, without any of the usual laughing undertones that could make her smile even when she wanted to be mad at him. “It’s complicated—”
That empty tone, more than anything else, sounded the death knell of their relationship. He really was about to break up with her. On Christmas fucking Eve. No way. Her throat closed off and her hands tightened convulsively on the rolling pin.
“Oh, I know it’s complicated.” She heard herself cut him off, shoving words into his mouth, even though she had fully intended to let him speak. But once she was started, the words just kept coming, punctuated by the repetitive thump of the rolling pin hitting the dough. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the best lies are simple, Jay? It’s the complicated ones that trip you up. Like you really shouldn’t tell your girlfriend an elaborate story about not having any family left in this world and how you never do anything special for Christmas, and then expect her to buy some bullshit excuse about mysterious long-standing plans when she wants you to meet her family.”
She’d rolled the dough too thinly but didn’t bother to redo it. Instead, she grabbed the little man-shaped cutter and attacked the dough, flipping ginger men onto a cookie sheet.
“You’ve been acting weird ever since I brought up Christmas. If you’re freaked about committing, that’s cool. We don’t have to be official. You don’t have to meet my mother. But if you want to be with me, you have to stop with the lying and evading. If you want to break up, fine. But at least be man enough to admit it. None of this bullshit hiding behind having to go out of town suddenly, out of the blue and for no reason.” Sasha balled up the dough fragments and started rolling the scraps out, forcing herself to stop talking.
“You done? Can I explain now?”
“You don’t have to. I get it, okay?” She whacked the cookie cutter onto the dough. She’d fallen for the flashes of bad boy, but had she only seen them because she wanted them to be there so much? Jay couldn’t even be a jerk long enough to break up with her properly. “We both know you’re too good for me.”
“What?” Jay made a strangled noise that could have been a laugh. “That’s what you think this is about?”
“You’re the nice one, the considerate one. And that’s great and all, but if you think I don’t get sick of being the big bad wolf in every argument, you can think again. There are times when I kind of hate dating Saint Jay, Prince Among Men—”
“Sasha, baby, that’s really cute in an extremely delusional way, but would you please shut the fuck up and let me talk?”
She turned away and shoved the full cookie sheet into the oven. Slamming it shut, she spun to face Jay and folded her arms across her stomach, pressing her back to the oven door. “Fine. You talk.”
“First, you need to understand that I want nothing more than to be able to stay here. I haven’t been a hundred percent honest about some things, but you can trust that I want to be here, with you, more than anything.”
That didn’t sound like a break-up speech. More like an I have three weeks to live speech. Had she been imagining the pre-break-up vibes? Anger retreated in the face of nervous concern.
“I have to go. It’s not because I want to, but I can’t stay. I only had permission to be here temporarily—”
“Like a green card?” Jay didn’t have an accent, but he did have kind of an odd way of speaking sometimes, like he’d been brought up using English differently. Deportation was definitely preferable to some scary terminal disease. Unless their relationship had been a ploy to stay in the country.
Jay winced. “You could call it that—”
“So you’re using me for citizenship?” And just like that, anger was back in command again. “Is this like a proposal? ’Cuz if it is, you suck at it.”
“No. Sasha, can you just listen? This is hard enough without the interruptions.”
She pressed her lips together, pinning back the questions she was itching to ask. For once he didn’t smile or tease her about the effort she had to exert not to interrupt him. Jay took a deep breath and Sasha wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. She had a feeling she wasn’t going to like what was coming next.
“When I said I didn’t have any family in this world, that wasn’t a lie. Not really. But it wasn’t the whole truth either. I didn’t set out to lie to you. When we met, I thought you knew…that you could tell, I mean, some people can pick us out—”
Was she supposed to be able to spot illegal immigrants? He could pass for Latino, but she’d never heard him speak Spanish and citizenship wasn’t exactly tattooed on people’s foreheads.
“My father died before I was born and I came to L.A. to find out more about him, to see if I had family here on his side. I didn’t lie about that. But my mother—”
A sound like timber splitting cracked through the kitchen.
Sasha yelped in surprise at the fractured noise. Her hands flew up to shield her face as a seam ripped open in the fabric of space directly behind Jay, spilling blinding streams of hellfire and expelling a noxious wave of brimstone and sulfur.
Sasha had worked on movies where they recreated Hell vortexes with special effects, but the reality burned away those pale replicas. The air in the room was instantly so hot it hurt her throat to breathe. Hellfire seared her retinas, but somehow she could still see every detail of Jay’s face—his dark eyes flaring wide, his mouth forming her name though all sound seemed to have been vacuumed out of the room.
His body jerked back, flying toward the vortex as the portal snapped closed around him, sucked right out of his shoes and straight to Hell.
Chapter Three
How to Cope When Your Boyfriend is Abducted by the Prince of Darkness
Sasha stood in the middle of her kitchen, gaping at the empty air. She could actually feel herself going into shock.
The mixed scents of gingerbread and brimstone lingered in the apartment as Sasha stared at the dingy grey Adidas cross-trainers where her boyfriend used to be. An ashy taste lingered on her tongue. Bing crooned about a white Christmas from the stereo in the living room as the last of the residual puffs of sulfur from the Hell vortex evaporated.
Her only semi-rational thought was to wonder if this meant she’d won the argument.
Disappearance into another plane midsentence really ought to be grounds for forfeiture, but it wasn’t a very satisfying win. Wasn’t it just like Jay, to vanish into Hell before she could tell him to go there?
Through a mental haze, she realized she ought to be screaming his name and clawing at the air where the Hell gate had been. In her defense, it wasn’t every day a girl’s fella was yanked into the Underworld just when she was starting to win an argument. Wailing and gnashing of teeth was undoubtedly called for in these situations, but Sasha just stared dumbly as her brain cells jibbered incoherently to one another.
She hated those shoes.
From time to time, she’d fantasized about burning them while Jay slept. Wasn’t it just her luck that the one thing left behind would be those smelly old sneakers?
Clearly she needed help, but who were you supposed to call when your boyfriend was kidnapped by demons? Ghostbusters? Hysteria bubbled up inside her, spilling out of her mouth in a laugh she couldn’t stop.
“Interesting. You’re taking this much better than I anticipated.”
Sasha spun toward the voice, her laughter cutting off abruptly. The last rays of the setting sun had disappeared and shadows filled her living room. A hulking silhouette stood just outside the light spilling from the kitchen.
The muted shrring of the carving knife sliding free of its block whistled in her ears before she registered the conscious decision to reach for the knife. She took a defensive stance, waving the cleaver warningly.
“Who are you? What do you want? What did you do with Jay?”
The figure shifted and hunched, like a large man trying to fit through a small doorway, before straightening into the light. His overcoat fell away. With a rustling snap, a pair of wings filled the narrow space between her cabinets.
“Holy shit.” There’s an angel in my kitchen. Sasha’s breath caught and the knife slipped from her fingers, clattering to the floor.
Even jaded as she was, being in the company of an actual angel was majestic. She trembled, suddenly understanding why the words awe and awful were related.
His wings were crisp, shining white but scarlet-veined, the tips a gleaming, darker red, as if they’d been recently dipped in blood. He stepped farther into the room, snapping them wider. When they shuddered and stretched, the red markings on the primaries became more noticeable, a blood-red spiderweb draped over the downy perfection of the feathers.
The radiance of his presence would have filled the space, even without the pageantry of the blood-marked wings.
Sasha had heard angels were tall and seen them towering over the common man in television reels, yet his height still startled her. He must have several inches on Jay’s six-three, but while Jay was Vin Diesel bulky, the angel’s physique was sleek. Muscular, with a trim, aerodynamic elegance.
His hair seemed to change color in shifting light, even though the light wasn’t shifting. Platinum blond, silver-tipped white, white tinged with red, and back to blond again. He stood statue still, even his bright blue eyes unmoving.
A silver breastplate, dented by use, molded to his chest and matching wrist bands circled his forearms. An elaborate contraption of a sword belt hung from his hips, complete with a massive sword that could have fallen right out of a sixteenth-century headsman’s hands, but otherwise his clothing was disturbingly human—jeans, snug black T-shirt and black cowboy boots.
Sasha blinked. An angel in cowboy boots?
“I am Zacharael, the remembrance of Him,” he said in a ringing voice made powerful by its lack of emotion. “I did nothing to your Jay. I am come to deliver you unto your quest.”
Sasha mentally scrolled through the familiar names of the angelic pantheon, trying to place Zacharael. He had the look of a warrior—the gigantic sword was kind of a giveaway—but lots of angels played soldier without being of the official warrior caste. He wasn’t an Arch, she knew that much, but “the remembrance of Him” didn’t give her much to go on. The Angel of Forgetfulness?
“You have been chosen to represent Goodness and Virtue,” Zacharael continued mechanically.
“Whoa, rewind a second.” Sasha held up her hands in the universal symbol for hold-the-fuck-on. “I didn’t sign up for any quest. You’ve got the wrong girl.”
“You were chosen,” he repeated. “No other can replace you. If you refuse the commission, he remains below.”
“He—you mean Jay? If I refuse you, Jay stays in Hell? No. Bring him back from wherever you sent him and go find someone else’s life to fuck with.” Sasha took an aggressive step toward the angel before she remembered the exact level of stupidity involved in threatening an immortal warrior.
“It was not I who took him and only you
can guide him back.”
“Guide him… Don’t you guys ever just speak plainly?”
“If you wish to spare him eternal damnation, you must venture into the Underworld and guide him out before the sun rises.”
That was pretty plain. “You want me to go into Hell? The Hell? Are you insane?” She was a stunt double, not a commando.
“You are the Champion of Virtue, representing the angels in a quest of redemption.”
Sasha couldn’t hold in her disbelieving snort. “I hate to break it to you, buddy, but I’m not exactly the virtuous type.”
The angel in her kitchen had been staring fixedly at the wall behind her head, but now his gaze shifted to lock on her. Sasha managed not to squirm under the impact. It occurred to her, rather belatedly, that a smart girl wouldn’t argue with divine entities, or call them buddy. Thou shalt not mouth off to angels was sort of an unwritten commandment—but she could always blame the shock. Demonic abduction had to count as an extenuating circumstance.
It was freeing, in a way, giving herself permission to misbehave. She knew she was supposed to just salute and fall in line, but Sasha had never been very good at taking orders. Especially orders for insane suicide missions.
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m no one’s idea of an angelic champion. Trust me. My name has been on Santa’s naughty list since birth. You’ve got the wrong girl.”
For a long, stretching second, the angel just stared at her. Then something softened around the glacial blue of Zacharael’s gaze, making him look almost paternal. “You are being given a rare opportunity, Sasha Christian,” he said, a gentleness entering his tone. “An opportunity to have a life with the one you love. But the price must be paid. From sunset to sunrise tonight, you are the Champion of Virtue, whether you wish to be or not. If you succeed in fighting back the cloak of darkness and guiding your lover from the depths of Hell, you will never be called upon by angels again.”
