by BTKT
“You don’t know me, don’t know what I’m capable of or what goes on in my head.”
“I know you’re kind.”
“Only to you, Sasha. It’s so hard to keep myself from being sucked under by the dark side. All that keeps me focused is fighting Eryx. If all of us were redeemed, if we had the same chance of Heaven as anyone else, if God could hear us, we could finally take Eryx out, and the war would be over.”
“Because you’d have God helping you?”
“Because we’d only be fighting Eryx.” He looked away from her. “As hard as we try to keep up, even though there are six of us and only one of him, we lose ground every day because of who we are. We have to fight ourselves as much as we fight him. He has no fight. He’s completely focused on his purpose.”
Sasha wished with all her heart she could help him, but this was all way bigger than her. The hopelessness in him was so sad, she teetered between staying away from him and wanting to know him better.
Maybe that’s why, when he turned and bent his head to kiss her, she didn’t pull away.
It was bittersweet, kissing him now, but no less amazing.
Then, in the middle of the kiss, Jax disappeared, and she was alone.
five
as soon as jax was back on the mephisto mountain he changed into sweats and headed for the old stone dairy that was now a gym. He pounded up and down the basketball court, dribbling a ball, dunking it over and over, working himself into a sweat, trying the only way he knew to forget her.
An hour into it, he was still thinking of Sasha, still pissed that he had told her so much. His careful plan, the one where he would go slow, let her know a little at a time, was history, and he went over every second he’d been with her, trying to find where it had all gone so wrong.
Somewhere between half court and the basket, it hit him— his failure to erase her memory was the sticking point. She had watched him heal her leg, then saw his eyes, and her ability to remember all of it sent everything south. Her questions had to be answered, and he couldn’t make himself lie to her. Weird for him, because he lied without a second thought, but he was looking ahead to the time when he’d need to tell her everything, and she’d never trust him if she realized he’d lied all along.
Why couldn’t he make her forget? What was different today than before, in that old warehouse?
He went to the intercom at the back of the gym and hit the code for Phoenix’s room. “Are you there?”
His brother answered immediately. “What’s up?” “Come play horse with me.” “I hate basketball.” “Heathen. Get your ass out here and talk to me.” Phoenix didn’t respond, but a second later, he appeared, bare- foot, wearing only a pair of jeans. “Make-it-take-it or one-on-one, but no horse. You always do a reverse layup, and I’m screwed.”
“Make-it-take-it.” Jax shot the ball at him and he ran it past, like he always did, shot from center court, and made it.
Jax retrieved the ball before it hit the floor and shot it back to his brother. “Aren’t you going to ask?”
“No point. You look like hell, so it obviously didn’t go well.” He missed his next shot, and Jax dribbled it back to half-court. Phoenix was all over him, but he still managed to get a shot off. He missed. His brother took the ball, and no matter how closely Jax guarded him, he still made his shot. “It’s the worst of your sins, hating basketball when you’re so damn good at it.”
“Jealous?” Phoenix sank another one. “If I could kill you, I would.” They played without talking for a while, until anger and frustration took their toll. Jax lost focus, and the ball. Phoenix didn’t go after it. He stared at Jax. “You better tell me what happened.” Breathing hard, fingers splayed across his hips, Jax did, then ended by saying, “It’s because I couldn’t make her forget that screwed everything.”
Phoenix turned and went for the ball, brought it back, and began twirling it on one finger. “How many times did you kiss her?”
“What the hell difference does it make?”
“It’s the spit, bro. If an Anabo drinks after you, kisses you, shares your saliva, it’s in her bloodstream, and her body goes on notice that it needs to change. She’s going to be hungry all the time, get stronger every day, gain powers like the ability to see Purgs, resist your memory blocks, and recognize Skia. She’s also going to be more like you.”
“She’ll lose Anabo?” That was his worst nightmare, what had freaked him out on the slopes. Now, Phoenix was telling him he’d already caused it to happen.
Without losing his command of the twirling basketball, Phoenix looked at him and lifted one dark brow. “She’ll never completely lose Anabo. If she becomes Mephisto, she’ll be both. She’ll have incredible mental and physical strength; she’ll despise the Skia and lost souls even more than we do; she’ll be more prone to anger and less forgiving than she is now, but she still won’t know what it is to be tempted. Everything she does will be focused on taking out Eryx.”
“How do you know all this?”
Phoenix looked at the ball. “After I found Jane, I asked M, and he asked Lucifer.” He looked at Jax again. “You don’t have a clue how this works, do you?”
“How the hell could I, Phoenix? You never told us anything about what happened with Jane.” His brother flinched and dropped the ball. They both watched it roll toward the double wooden doors of the dairy.
“It doesn’t happen in one moment,” Phoenix said quietly. “She doesn’t remain pure Anabo until she becomes immortal, accepts your ritual, and bam, she’s Mephisto. It’s already happening. By the time she jumps to immortality, almost all that’s left is to mark her, if she isn’t already, and exchange ritual to make it permanent.”
“You’re lying. You have to be lying. Otherwise, she has no choice, and how can she make a decision if she doesn’t even know about Mephisto? What about free will?”
“I assume she kissed you back?” “Only a lot.” “She knew who you are when she saw your eyes. Maybe not
in words, but she knew, and kissed you anyway, of her own free will.”
“But later she didn’t want to touch me. She thinks I’m disgusting.”
“Her mind thinks you’re disgusting. How she was raised, what she knows, her whole worldview forces her to think you’re repulsive. But her soul doesn’t think so. It’ll just take some time for her soul and mind to come to terms. In the meantime, she’s going to change, whether she realizes what’s happening to her or not. If you don’t kiss her again, the process will go a lot slower, but it’s way too late to keep it from happening.”
She drank after him, the cider in his flask, all of it, and they didn’t just kiss—they stood there in the snow and gave each other mouth to mouth for at least twenty minutes. He’d never been kissed like that. He’d never loved it that much. “You didn’t say anything about spit. You said not to sleep with her so she wouldn’t be marked.”
“If sex can mark her so we can find her anywhere in the world, doesn’t it follow that your spit is bound to do something toher? ”
Dammit. If he repulsed her before, she was gonna hate his guts now. “Is it permanent?”
“It is unless M can convince Lucifer to reverse it, and you can guess the odds of that happening. He wants her to be Mephisto more than you do.”
“I doubt that.” This was blowing his mind. “What if she really does hate me? What then?”
“If she decides to remain human, she can walk away, Lucifer will return her to what she was before you kissed her, to pure Anabo, and she won’t remember you or anything she learned about Eryx and the lost souls. Lucifer will be furious with you for failing, but it’s not like he can do anything about it. Women don’t always do what you want, even if you’re Lord of the Underworld.”
Jax headed for the weight room, housed in what used to be the creamery.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve got to come up with a new plan. Right now, she can’t stand the sight of me.”
Ph
oenix fell into step beside him. “She must like you a little, or she wouldn’t have kissed you.”
“I kiss girls all the time, and it’s not because I like them.”
“Yeah, but you’re a guy. It’s different for girls. They don’t kiss guys as a prelude to sex.”
“It’s not like I kissed Sasha for sex.”
“Right. Same goes for her. She’s freaking on everything you told her, Jax, but let her get used to it for a few days, and she’ll be more open to seeing you again.”
Sighing heavily, Jax ran a hand through his hair and stopped before he made it to the weight room. “I just can’t figure out why I told her so much, Phoenix. It was like I started yapping and couldn’t shut up.”
Phoenix shook his head. “Don’t go there, Jax. What’s done is done, and trust me on this—you’re not done doing it wrong.
We’re immortal sons of Hell, but end of the day, we’re just like every guy out there. We can control every move we make in basketball, but get us around a girl we want, and all bets are off.”
“We’re doomed to screw it up?” “Yeah, pretty much.”
---
Two hours into upping his bench press weights until he was shaking with effort, Jax was wrung out and exhausted, but no closer to a plan. He had no clue how he could approach Sasha again. He told her he’d leave her alone, which he realized now had been hasty and stupid, but it was way too late to take it back.
He showered and dressed, then got on the Internet, looking for anything that might help him. He felt superlame, but he Googled “romance,” “how-to,” and “what girls like.”
In the middle of an article about matching flowers to a girl’s zodiac sign, which he found as unhelpful as the article about how to make the most of meeting a girl’s dog or cat, someone knocked and he was glad for the interruption.
Key came in, looking serious like always. Jax quickly closed his laptop and watched his brother take a seat next to the fire. “What’s up?”
“I came to ask how it went today.”
“You can crow all you want, because I screwed it up, just like you said I would.”
Settling back in the chair, Key rested his elbows against the armrests and steepled his fingers. Jax hated when he did that. Made him look so pretentious, as if what he was about to say was of great importance. It didn’t matter that this was usually the case. It still bugged the hell out of him. “Say whatever it is you have to say, then leave me alone.”
Key stared into the fire. “Phoenix’s plan for Sasha’s cousin, the Easter kid, his girlfriend, and any other young ones who pledge between now and the takedown is to stage an accident on that old mine road between Telluride and Ouray. He says we’ll wait for a heavy snow, they’ll go up there to party, get drunk, go off the road, try to hike back to town, become lost in the snowstorm, and freeze to death.”
“I wish it could be sooner, like tonight. What about Bruno and Sasha’s aunt?”
“Melanie Shriver will freeze to death while she’s searching for Brett.” Key raised his gaze to Jax’s. “As for Bruno, Xenos has had a Lumina tailing him since last night to get a line on his habits, find a way to stage his death that’ll be logical and not subject to speculation.”
Jax waited. “And?”
“It’s easy enough. Zee says he’s a closet smoker and eats garbage. If he wasn’t Skia and immortal, he’d be a heart attack waiting to happen, so we’re going to give him one.”
It sounded like a decent plan. A simple one. Capturing him might be a little tricky, but he lived alone, so a surprise attack would work.
Why, then, did Key look so serious? So worried? “I’m waiting to hear the downside.”
Key leaned forward again. “M says Bruno’s been Skia almost two hundred years—the oldest we’ve ever found. I was curious to know more about him, so I had Zee check him out. He and Brody hacked into his computer last night and found hundreds of photographs and all sorts of documents, like letters and memos, credit card statements, and pages from personal journals. All of it’s incriminating, and every bit belongs to people in the government. It’s huge, Jax. Congressmen, senators, even a Supreme Court justice.”
He thought of the lockbox in Geneva, with all kinds of incriminating information about important people all over the world. Alex said his boss wanted it, but Jax realized now, he didn’t mean his boss in Moscow. He meant Eryx. “Not all of them will take the oath to avoid exposure.”
“No, but some will. Can you imagine what would happen if people with power and influence, who actually run the United States, lost their souls to Eryx?”
It was depressing and disheartening, but cleaning up the government would have to wait. “Let’s concentrate on Washington after Bruno and the others are gone. As long as they’re around, we run the risk of their finding out Sasha is Anabo.”
“Why leave her in unnecessary danger? Bring her for a visit and don’t take her back.”
“Great idea, Key, except she can’t stand the sight of me.” “Did you tell her?” “Not everything, but just the part she knows was enough to scare her off.”
“Maybe later she’ll feel differently.”
“It’s a big maybe.” Nice girls, even if they were Anabo, didn’t go out with sons of Hell. “The forecast calls for lots of snow next week. Let’s get this done so Sasha can move on and not worry about Brett and Melanie, or Mr. Bruno.”
“We can’t,” Key said, his expression grim. “Not yet.” Cold dread settled in his gut. “Why?” Key stood and went to the fire, stoking it with the poker.
“Zee found some notes Bruno made about a Skia meeting. He couldn’t find anything about a date, or a location, but sometime soon there’ll be a large group of Skia, all in one place. It’s a perfect opportunity for a huge takedown, something we can do in less than a day that would otherwise take months.” He set the poker back in its stand and turned to look at Jax. “We need Bruno around until that meeting, whenever it is, so he can lead us there. You’re still planning to start school on Monday, right?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good. We need you to keep an eye on Bruno and find out what you can about his plans. He may mention a trip, or something that would give us a clue.”
Great. Not only did he need to find a way to approach Sasha again, he needed to play I-Spy for the Mephisto.
Key walked toward the door. With his hand on the knob, he looked over his shoulder at Jax. “By the way, I’m not crowing over your failure. I want this to work out with Sasha, but I’m just as clueless how to go about it as you are. I admire you for trying.”
Then he looked embarrassed and was gone before Jax could reply.
---
After Jax disappeared, Sasha spent the next few hours skiing by herself, trying hard not to think about him. Didn’t work, but at least she got a little better at skiing.
Back at the base, she realized Brett had left her. In the parking lot, holding Melanie’s skis over one shoulder, she walked all around, looking for his yellow Hummer, but it was gone. Part of her was glad; another part wondered how she was going to get back down to Telluride; and the last part wished she could get on that bus to Colorado Springs and never look back.
“You look lost,” a tall, dark-haired man said, standing on the driver’s side of a black Mercedes. “Is something wrong?”
He was an older guy who looked like a movie star, he was that handsome. Maybe he was a movie star. He looked really familiar. Afraid he’d offer her a ride if she told him her dilemma, she managed a smile and shook her head. “Just waiting for my cousin to take me back to town.”
He nodded and returned her smile. “If you get tired of waiting, you can take the gondola.” He pointed behind him. “It’ll take you a block from Colorado Avenue.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” He got into his car and drove away, waving as he went. She noticed he had vanity plates with only one letter, an M.
As soon as he was out of sight, she took off for
the gondola; thirty minutes later, she was walking down the main street of Telluride, headed for the Shrivers’. In no hurry to get there, even though it was past four and already starting to get dark, she looked in all the shop windows at the Christmas displays. The street-lamp posts were wrapped in garland with twinkle lights, and the little insets of the sidewalk with park benches were decorated in red bows and ribbons. A thick blanket of snow covered the ground, turning Telluride into a holiday greeting card. If things were different, if she were here with Mom, staying in the hotel across the street, or in one of the pretty condos, shopping for Christmas things, maybe buying a tree, she’d think this was about as awesome as it could get.
But Mom was a million miles away, and Sasha was staying in a ratty house with the most dysfunctional family in America. Melanie was a lost soul, so the chances of there being a Christmas tree at the Shrivers’ were slim to none.
She was standing in front of a gift shop when her cell rang. Figuring it was Tim, she almost didn’t answer. Then she wondered if it was Mom and hurriedly pulled the phone from her jacket pocket to answer.
“Sasha,” a deep voice said, “this is Phoenix DeKyanos.”
Blinking, she leaned forward until her forehead was resting against the wooden edge of the shop window. “Why are you calling me? Where’s Jax?”
“He’s gone out. I’m calling because my brothers and I are concerned for your safety, so we’ve come up with a way to protect you. If you look to your right, you’ll see a dog on a leash, tied to a park bench. His name is Boo. Do you see him?”
He was the ugliest dog she’d ever seen, medium-sized, with a patchy gray coat and a face only a mother could love. He was looking at her, tongue and tail wagging. “I see him.”
“Take him home with you, remove his leash, and leave him outside. When you’re in your room, say his name and he’ll appear. Don’t worry about feeding or walking him. When you leave the house, he’ll be outside waiting for you. Don’t go anywhere without Boo. Take him to school with you and leave him outside. If you find yourself in a situation that calls for help, say his name, and he’ll be there.”
