by J. R. Ward
Duke shut the door before she could say anything else. And then for some reason, as he stepped away, he was suddenly totally and completely anxious—something he did not have much experience with.
He was better with aggressive. Much better.
And he really didn’t want to look at the fear too closely.
As she reversed out of her spot, he walked forward, staying in her headlights, staring through the bright illumination, meeting her in the eyes even though he couldn’t see them.
And then she was gone.
Duke took some deep breaths and pulled it together. A moment later, he went to look at his watch—and was reminded that his Rolex had disappeared. Taking his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans, he checked the time that way.
Damn it. Too early to leave so he had to go back in and face the music.
And gee, what do you know. Big Rob, Silent Tom, and Ivan were still kibitzing, now by Alex’s door.
Duke headed in the opposite direction, back to the interrogation room. Which proved to be a dumb idea. As he went over to that far corner and started to reattach the wires to the monitoring units, the three of them took the opportunity to line up like they were at a zoo and had taken an interest in one of the tigers.
“Don’t ask,” Duke said. “Not one of you ask a single frickin’ thing.”
When he finally had to turn back around to them, he thought, Fucking hell, even Silent Tom, who never took much of an interest in anything, was focused on him.
“She’s not from here,” one of the three—not Tom—said.
Done with his little tech job, Duke pushed his way through the other bouncers. With any luck, there’d be a couple of stragglers in the bar area who he could muscle out the front door—preferably when it was closed and locked.
One thing he was not going to do was discuss with the old ladies on his tail the woman, the hookup, or any future plans.
Out in the club proper, he was bummed. The lights had been cranked up, the chaos of a busy night showing in all the wet places on the floor, and the cockeyed furniture, and the dropped napkins—and the condom wrappers.
How romantic.
As he started to do a sweep, the brigade of boots following behind him proved that gossip wasn’t just for sixteen-year-old girls with Hello Kitty fetishes. Apparently, yoked-up muscleheads could be into it, too.
Duke spun around. “No. No. And no.”
One for each of the nosy bastards.
“You were out of sight for a while,” Big Rob drawled. “So there was a ‘yes’ in there somewhere.”
So not doing this.
As he turned away, Ivan said, “Come on, man, it’s just, you haven’t—”
The voice that cut the guy off wasn’t one he recognized. Then again, Silent Tom hadn’t gotten his nickname for no good reason: “Okay, boys, let’s back off.”
That was all it took.
Maybe the other two hadn’t ever heard him speak either, and were too shocked to keep bloodhounding their other colleague.
Whatever it was, Duke thanked God as he was left in peace—
Stopping in his tracks, he realized … his woman had never given him her name.
At least he had those digits, though.
Chapter
Nineteen
When Jim came awake in a hospital bed, all he could think was, Maybe it had been a dream. Maybe … the whole thing, from meeting Nigel and the other archangels, to the Devina nightmare, to the game itself … had just been a product of the electrocution at the job site.
A fiction created by an overload of neurological stimulation.
And assuming that were true? Well, then, Adrian was fiction, and so was Eddie and the fact that the guy had died. There were also no souls to be saved. No Heaven and Hell, either—at least not that he had to be concerned with.
He had nothing to worry about other than simple problems like paying monthly bills and whether his truck was running sound under the hood.
Shiiiiiiit, whoever didn’t think normal was bliss? Hadn’t lived very hard.
Closing his eyes, he reached over his head and pulled himself into a glorious, full-body stretch, the relief pouring through him. He was free for the first time in his adult life. Free of his shady work as a member of XOps. No longer the puppet of a cruel mastermind. And not now or ever a “savior” tasked with rescuing humanity from a bored Creator and a super-bitch demon—
“You’re finally awake.”
Jim jacked up off the pillows.
Across the room, sitting in a chair, Sissy Barten was alive and well.
Which meant they were both dead. And his reality hadn’t really changed.
“Fuck,” he breathed, easing back down and shutting his eyes again. Wonder how many hours he’d been out? Hard to know. Felt like a while.
“Are you okay?”
Bringing his hands to his face, he rubbed, hard—at least until every pain receptor in his entire body told him to CUT THAT OUT RIGHT THIS SECOND.
Ah, yes. His face had in fact gone through the windshield.
And that meant his truck was wrapped around a tree, his head had sustained a trauma, and his leg was fucked-up. It also meant that somewhere, at this very moment, if not sooner, a police officer was running the plates on the F-150 and discovering that the vehicle was registered to a dead man … who looked exactly like Jim.
“We’ve got to get out of here.” With a groan, he sat up, swung his legs around, and saw, oh, joy, that he had a cast on his left calf.
Nothing he could do about that at the moment.
Redirecting, he started to go to work on the inside of his arm, taking out the IV with practiced efficiency. “Come on—”
As alarms started going off behind the bed, Sissy shook her head. “Oh, no, I’m not going anywhere. The doctor came in with the nurse. You’ve got a concussion and…”
Jim let her keep talking as he got on his feet and tested out his left leg. Sore. Very sore. But thanks to the cast, it held his weight well enough that he could hobble around and look for some clothes. Rifling through the mostly empty closet, all he could think of was the last time he’d done this, in this hospital. That nurse had been a battle-ax, but—
Sissy stepped in front of him. “Get back in that bed. You’re not leaving.”
“Oh, really.” He leaned down so they were eye-to-eye. “Let me clue you in on something. I don’t actually exist in this world, and I’ve learned from experience, you can’t have a foot in both places. It fucks with their heads.”
“Your leg is broken.”
“Doesn’t bother me at all.”
“Then why are you limping.”
“I’m not.”
She glared right into his face. “Do you know the definition of the word?”
“Do you know how fast we gotta get going here?”
Moving around her, he started opening drawers in a shallow, fake-wood cabinet. Nothing. No pants, shirt, boots. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve had much worse and lived.”
“Except for that one time when you died, right.” Sissy went back and sat in the chair. “Whatever, I’m staying. Where you go off to is your problem, not mine.”
Jim cranked around and blinked away his double vision—okay, clearly, he was in a lot of pain, but he was backseating the sensation so completely, he was unaware of anything other than his internal directive to get-the-fuck-out-of-here. “You’re crazy.”
“All things considered, I’d say that’s your diagnosis, not mine—”
“Much as I loathe to agree with him, the fool has got a point.”
The dry English tones brought both their heads around.
“Colin,” Jim muttered. “Nice to see you.”
Not.
The archangel was dressed in whites, but it was his version of same, not Nigel’s—white track pants, white T-shirt, white Converse All Stars. He looked like a Beastie Boy. Or … a hot guy who most women would enjoy looking at.
And for some reason, th
at cranked Jim out—especially as Sissy slowly got to her feet and came forward. For shit’s sake, it would have been so much better if the guy had been decrepit or sported a stick up the ass, like Nigel did. But nooooo, he was nothing but tall, dark and haloed. In short, not Sissy’s type.
At least, not if Jim had anything to do with—
Wait a minute. Was he actually getting jealous here? In a hospital room. When Sissy was doing nothing but simply stare at the slick bastard?
Guess the concussion thing was right enough—and apparently, the sector in his brain responsible for having any fucking sense at all had been shut down by the swelling.
Jim kicked shut the drawer with his bad foot and nearly passed out. “I got this, Colin,” he muttered.
When neither of them paid any attention to him, he put his body in between the two. “I. Got. This.”
Colin cocked a dark eyebrow. “Actually, mate, there’s considerable uncertainty about that—which presents us all with a problem, doesn’t it. You’ve got a lot riding on you.”
“Thanks for the recap. But I’m tight.”
“Then why would you be here on a ward with your head in bandages and your leg—”
“Because shit happens, Colin, okay? Now will you leave—”
“You must take care of your business.” Colin’s stare narrowed. “Before you compound your bad decisions.”
Jim leaned in, even though he was in no shape to fight about things. “I am taking care of—”
“Not that business—”
“Sir?”
Annnnd here was another interruption, this time by a nurse who had thrown the door open. “Sir? Please get back in bed—”
Ignoring her, he focused on Colin. “I can handle—”
“Who are you talking to? And, sir—your IV! You took it out?”
Cue the chaos. Suddenly there were people in white coats and scrubs all over the place, all of them talking at him—while Sissy backed up into the wall, and Colin looked on with a bored expression.
Jim shoved the medical staff away, at least until a six-footer got up into his personal space and announced, “There’s no AMA checkout for you. You’re going nowhere until the police take you down to book you.”
Jim rolled his eyes. “You actually think I’m going to get arrested?”
“It’s called reckless driving. Misappropriation of identity. Assault—remember when you tackled that paramedic? We had to treat him for lacerations, by the way.”
With a curse, Jim tried to collect his shit, to concentrate, to throw out some kind of magic, anything that would help him control this mess. And it should have worked, goddamn it. Ever since Eddie had taught him the how-to’s, he’d been able to take care of things the I Dream of Jeannie way.
Except … fuck, it hadn’t worked back on that street. And as he tried again … and again … and again … and nothing happened … he knew it wasn’t working now.
“Get back in that bed, sir,” the orderly said. “Or I’m going to put you there myself.”
Through his haze of pain and frustration, Jim figured there were two obvious options: Lie down like a good boy and wait for the CPD to crawl up his ass … or let Colin take care of things.
He picked door number three.
Wheeling around, he grabbed the chair Sissy had been sitting in and hauled it at the plate-glass window across the way. Just as contact was made, he took one last go at the magic routine—and things must have come together somehow, at least slightly: The four-by-five-foot section blew outward, exploding into the night and letting the cold air plow into the room.
Jim traded places with the dark breeze.
Diving through the opening, he went into a tuck as he hit a brief free fall. Then he rolled out on the gravel-topped roof of the building that was one story down from where he’d been.
Man, thank God for the jigsaw-puzzle architecture of most medical centers—he’d only guessed there would be a roof to catch him; he hadn’t known for sure.
As he took off at a sloppy run, he had a momentary communion with Adrian and everything that other angel had to deal with. What a painful pain in the ass this broken leg was, the shocks of incredible agony making his heart thunder in his chest and his head go fuzzy. But he refused to let the physical stuff matter. In fact, it felt like old home week as he put aside the problems within his body and gunned hard for the far edge of the building.
He prayed there was something at that end that he could use to get to the ground.
He also prayed that Sissy understood he wasn’t deserting her. Not for long, at any rate. The bottom line, however, was that Colin was with her, and Jim knew that Devina wouldn’t go anywhere near the archangel. He also knew that for all the angel’s annoyance? He wouldn’t leave an innocent to fend for herself; he just wouldn’t.
All Jim needed was enough time to regain some of his power because shit knew he was useless in that sea of humans in his current condition—
Off in the distance, shouts broke out behind him, echoing down from that hole he’d made in the building.
Sorry, fellas. But look on the bright side, that window was one last thing for the cleaning staff to disinfect.
Shuffling along, he headed past some industrial fans and was, thank you, baby Jesus, provided with a way down: Over at the corner, dull security lights illuminated the curled arms of a ladder.
As soon as he got over to the thing, he swung himself up and around and then slid down like he was on a pair of ropes. Landing in a heap, he had to catch his breath, his leg hurting way more than his head, his eyes sweeping around, looking for an opportunity through an irritating haze.
He knew he didn’t have a lot of time. Hospital this size? It was going to have a big security force that was jacked into a central command.
Dragging himself up to his feet, he cut through a rear delivery courtyard, navigating thanks to halogen lamps set up high on the concrete-block walls—
As sirens began to wail, he was willing to bet they weren’t ambulances. Try the real police coming to look for him, too.
Fucking hell, why couldn’t he find a car to break into?
Coming around a corner, a set of squealing tires had him skidding to a halt—just before the heavy steel body of a Mercedes wiped him out.
The passenger-side window went down, and the one female on the face of the planet that he never wanted to see again smiled at him.
“Trouble in paradise?” the demon drawled as she leaned across the leather seats.
“Fuck me…”
“Get in and I will,” she told him with an evil smile. “Otherwise, guess you’ll take your chances with the CPD.”
As Sissy’s hobbling, pissed-off savior launched himself out of the window he’d busted, she bolted forward like maybe she could catch him and pull him bodily back into the hospital room—and she wasn’t the only one with that crazy idea.
Unfortunately, the hospital staff got there first, crowding the view, blocking her out.
Oh, God, if he couldn’t survive a car accident without ending up here? Falling five floors down to the ground was probably going to kill him—
Okay, so maybe he was already dead, but whatever. Angels in the real world could obviously still sustain broken bones and injuries that were more than cosmetic. And maybe there was something she could do to help him—
Frantic, she pushed into the knot of nurses and doctors who were shouting and arguing in front of the gaping hole, forgetting that she wasn’t really there, that she was no longer “human,” that she was—
It was hard to say what happened exactly.
One moment, she was shoving against someone, and the next … she could see out of the window, visualizing the one-story, not five, drop to the roof below.
And that was what she’d been after. The trouble was, it was from a different height. And her sense of color was off. And her body felt really weird.
Bringing up a hand to rub her eyes, she froze…
And then scream
ed.
Instantly, everyone turned to her. “Mary? What’s wrong?” somebody said.
“Move her to the bed. Get her on the bed! For God’s sake, this is how her brother died—”
“I don’t have a brother,” Sissy mumbled.
“Shh,” one of the nurses soothed. “Come here. Sit.”
Sissy lifted that hand again and found that it was still … not her own. Pudgy, wrinkly, with a set of wedding rings that needed to be cleaned, the thing was under her control—she was able to flex the fingers and turn it over to see the palm—but it was not hers.
Looking down, she saw that she was no longer in the loose baggy shirt and rolled-up sweats Jim had given her. Instead, she was wearing a set of blue scrubs and had a pair of laminated IDs on a lanyard around her neck. Picking them off a chest that was about eight sizes bigger than her own, she stared at a picture of a fifty-year-old woman named Mary T. Santiago.
Wheeling around, she confronted the other angel, the one who had come in before Jim had gone out the window. “What am I?”
The Englishman’s haughty, hard face registered a momentary shock. “You are … not supposed to be able to do that.”
“What did I do?”
One of the male orderlies stepped in front of her and there was real fear on his face. “Mary, you’re okay. You’re all right…”
“What did I do!” she shouted around him.
The first of the female nurses addressed her. “Mary, you didn’t do anything. You weren’t even there when he jumped. Mary, oh, Mary…”
As Sissy was encased in a hug, she smelled a faded perfume, and some kind of astringent, and felt … well, mostly an incredible sense of support. Out of reflex, she put her arms—or Mary’s arms, as it were—around the other woman, her mind scrambling to understand how this was possible.
“Just step out of her,” the Englishman said crisply. “That’s the way it works—or so I’ve heard.”
“Step … out …?” she mumbled.
“Shh, Mary, it’s okay.” The nurse started in with some soothing strokes of Mary’s hair—which Sissy felt as clearly as if it were her own. “Just breathe with me.”
For some reason, maybe because she needed a hug and the nurse was damned good at giving them, Sissy closed the eyes that were not her own and gave herself up to the comfort.
