Possession fa-5

by J. R. Ward

  “That’s it. I know this is hard…”

  Dimly, Sissy was aware of some others arriving in the hospital room—blue-uniformed officers who had security badges on their sleeves. She then felt herself get inched away so that she wasn’t anywhere near the black hole in the room.

  As she breathed a little easier, she became aware of a psyche other than her own. It was in the background, thoughts and feelings and memories of another person, suppressed by God only knew what.

  Step out? she thought. How was that going to work? If she had any impulse to move, the other woman’s body responded.

  “Will yourself free,” the Englishman said. “Just decide to separate.”

  Sissy listened to the command like she had the ones her coaches had given her in field hockey, ordering herself into an action that was more interior than exterior.

  As she broke away from the nurse, she watched as the shorter, older woman she had just inhabited went down like a stone, fainting dead away. Immediately, Sissy lunged forward to catch her, but her arms had no substance, and Mary Santiago slid onto the linoleum floor, going through Sissy’s attempt at throwing out a hold like water through thin air.

  Sissy backed away until she felt the far wall come up against her back.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” she said, panic twitching her face, shaking her hands. “I don’t … know where I was. How I got in there. Why I got out.”

  She looked at the man in white. “I need answers.”

  It was an accusation—as if he knew, and was deliberately keeping her in the dark just to piss her off.

  The man—angel, whatever—drew a hand through his black hair. “Bugger. Fucking … bugger.”

  “I’m not sure what that means exactly, but if you think this all sucks? Then I’m right with you—and while we’re bonding? Do you have any idea where Jim went?”

  The Englishman crossed his arms over his sizable chest and glared at the broken window. “Don’t get me started on him right now.”

  As he stayed silent in the midst of the chaos, anger boiled deep inside of her again, sharpening her tone. “Okay, well, how about you help me with myself, then.”

  When he transferred that narrowed stare to her, she noticed that his eyes were a color she’d never seen before—and wasn’t that a good reminder that she was dealing with something way outside of normal. Maybe something dangerous.

  For a split second, she thought about backing down—except then she reminded herself that she had nothing to lose: She’d already been in Hell, and her life as she’d known it here on Earth was over.

  So what the good goddamn could he do to her.

  “I’m waiting,” she snapped.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  “You know, I’m more than willing to nurse you back to health.”

  When Jim didn’t reply, Devina glanced across the seat. The angel was steaming pissed, big-time banged-up, and in the most pathetic excuse for a hospital johnny she’d ever seen—and he was still captivating in a way that made her think of her OCD.

  She wanted him that badly.

  “You could come and stay with me for a while,” she said.

  He glared over at her, the glow from the strips of blue lights that ran down the Mercedes’s doors making him seem deliciously evil. “I already have roommates. You killed one of them, remember?”

  She batted that stupidity away. “Please. Eddie should have seen that coming, and because he didn’t, he got what he deserved. How is the dear boy, by the way? Still smelling like a rose?”

  Jim just looked out the front windshield, that jaw clenching, his hand curling into a tight fist.

  Yummy.

  Coming up to a stoplight, she began to get excited. They were together again, alone at last, and how could all kinds of dating scenarios not go through her mind? Maybe they could head back to the dirty part of town, park the car, and go see some after-hours porn? The strip clubs were closed, which was a bummer—then again, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be around him while he was looking at naked women. She was liable to kill the bitches.

  Yeah, seeing porn movies in public sounded like a great idea—with some live action between the pair of them as a chaser. With that annoying vestal virgin around, she wanted to filthy him up. Get him nice and nasty so that when he went home and little Sissy-Two-shoes looked up at him with those big blue eyes, he felt ashamed of where he’d been and what he’d done.

  On that note, maybe she should just pull over and blow him?

  When he kept quiet, she checked him out. The angel was still sitting there, looking incredibly bangable—as well as hostile. And wasn’t that the perfect combination. For her, aggression and hatred were Molly and oysters, baby.

  And she wasn’t the only one who was into that shit. Jim liked it, too—in fact, she thought fondly of their last private time, down by the river, in that boathouse. The two of them had been so pissed off and sexed up. So hot. So fucking hot…

  Try giving him some of that, Sissy Barten.

  “I’m surprised you got in the car,” Devina said in a moment of weakness.

  “This way I know where you are.”

  The demon put a hand to her collarbone. “I’m touched.”

  “Don’t be.”

  Oh, wasn’t that his way, she thought with a smile. Fighting the inevitable with everything he had—even though he had to know he was going to give in, in the end, and let them have what they both wanted.

  At least … she had to believe that he would, even with that girl in his possession.

  Surely that wasn’t going to change things.

  Right?

  Abruptly unsettled, Devina drove around the junkie part of town, passing by abandoned houses, and storefronts that were boarded up. Her Benz got noticed, the humans who were lying against the buildings and propped up at the bases of cracked stairwells looking over as she went by—and not just because hers was the only car on the street.

  Jim still wasn’t saying anything.

  And that made her feel unstable.

  “There’s a knife in my purse.” She nodded at the Gucci sack between them. “If you’re feeling like you have to let something out.”

  Some hard-core foreplay was probably just what the doctor ordered for the pair of them—oh, yeah, she was getting hot just thinking about it—

  “I’m not going to kill myself over you.”

  She glanced back over. “I was thinking you might like to come at me—or in me, even better.”

  “Never going to happen.”

  Devina bore down on the steering wheel. “You know, you don’t treat me very well.”

  The laugh he let out was a curse if she’d ever heard one. “You’re fucking incredible.”

  Devina smiled. “Why, thank you.”

  “Not a compliment.”

  “I’ll take it any way I choose.”

  She stopped at a traffic light and thought, Hmmm, maybe if they went classy, she’d have more success.

  Hitting the directional signal, she doubled back and headed for the world-famous Freidmont Hotel. Located in the heart of Caldwell’s business district, it was the grande dame of downtown, a place where the old ways were still preserved: the doormen wore white gloves, the concierge was available at his desk in the lobby twenty-four hours a day, and the tub in your suite’s bathroom was deep as an Olympic swimming pool.

  Romance. She could use some romance. And she’d still have her knife with her if they wanted to get a little kinky.

  Ten minutes later, she pulled up to the regal facade.

  Jim looked over. “What’s this for?”

  “I thought we could get a room.”

  “For what.”

  Devina frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t actually think I’m going to fuck you.”

  Feeling like she’d been slapped across the face, Devina had to blink her vision clear. “I don’t understand what the problem is.”

  “You act
ually think I’m going to spend the night with you—”

  “I just want us to be together—”

  “Then you are totally delusional, bitch.”

  Losing her temper, she spat, “I’m trying to make this work, Jim. Even after everything you’ve done to me!”

  “What exactly have I done to you? Other than save your sorry ass with that trade we just did.”

  Devina was vaguely aware that she was breathing heavily, and that, tragically, Jim was not focused on her heaving breasts.

  Talk about criminal. Her bustier was red as blood and fit more perfectly than the skin she was in. How could he not look?

  At that moment, a uniformed doorman came around to her.

  Not wanting to be rude, and hoping that there was still a date possibility open somehow, she put her window down. “We’ll just be a second.”

  The guy seemed confused—oh, right, Jim wasn’t showing himself.

  Devina smiled. “I mean, I’ll be a moment.”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  As the doorman went back to his station just inside the entrance, Jim leaned into her, but not for a kiss. “Listen up, sweetheart. You and me? We don’t have a relationship, and we’re not fucking anymore. Ever. No matter what you do, or where you take shit, or how this cocksucking game shakes out? I’m not tapping that again.”

  Devina recoiled. She’d seen him in a lot of moods over the last four rounds, but never like this. He wasn’t being pissy or showing off or playing hard to get.

  Bedrock. In his eyes, there was nothing but granite.

  He went for the door handle before she could hit the locks, and then he was out of her car, limping along with that cast, his hospital johnny opening from the back and flashing his ass.

  The motherfucker didn’t look back. And he was going home to…

  The demon’s stiletto slammed on the accelerator without her being consciously aware of it, and she aimed the Mercedes right at him, her headlights becoming gun sights, her car a bullet.

  Her target, seen only by her.

  As Jim wrenched around, his face showed nothing. It was as if he were already dead—duh.

  In the instant before impact, he closed his eyes, but not in a bracing kind of way: He was trying to concentrate himself out of there.

  It worked. Tragically.

  Just before he disappeared, there was a bump, like she’d hit a pothole—but then he was out of her sight … ghosting away to his other life, the one that pitted him against her.

  Devina hit the brakes, and her car behaved perfectly, coming to a complete stop just before she hit the curb. Yanking at the handle, she shoved the door open and got out. Someone whistled at her—and God help them, literally, if they decided to follow through on any of that goddamn shit right now. She was liable to eat them alive.

  Coming around to the front of the Mercedes, she checked out the grille. Not a mark. Both headlights were totally intact and functioning. No dents in the hood.

  She’d hit him, though. Surely, she’d—

  Yes, she had. The iconic circular symbol of the carmaker was ever so slightly crooked … and when she snapped the thing free and examined it in the bright white glow of her high beams, she saw there was a red stain on the stainless steel—but it was simply a surface imperfection, nothing more.

  So she hadn’t hurt him.

  Infuriated, she hauled back to throw—

  Devina stopped. Retracted her arm. Focused on what she held.

  The symbol was heavy in her hand, heavier than it would have been if she’d weighed it—because the angel had left something behind in the metal…

  Thanks to the hood ornament having clipped some part of his body, probably his leg.

  Well, well, well … wasn’t this a bright spot on the horizon.

  Objects, particularly metal objects, retained part of their possessors, and even though there had only been a split second of connection, the pain the impact had caused Jim, the raw mental state he had been in, the weakness of his corporeal form … all of that meant that something of him had been fused into what was now a very, very valuable commodity to her.

  Extending her tongue, she licked his blood off the outer rim and smiled.

  Inadvertently, he had given her the key to his castle.

  Chapter

  Twenty-one

  When Sissy opened the door to Jim’s house, it was a cliché that the thing creaked. And as she shut herself in and looked around, shades of seventies horror movies, the kind she’d watched with her sister on Sundays, came back to her.

  Stalling out in the front receiving hall, she didn’t know what to do. The Englishman had dropped her off here in the same way Chillie had tossed the paper onto the porch—except the angel’s aim had been better. She’d made it to the front door on the first try.

  And now, left to her own devices, her anger, her sense that destiny was for shit and fate just another word for “screwed,” made her feel as though someone had their hands around her throat and was squeezing.

  What was she going to do now? She had no idea where Jim or his roommate were, and no clue what she could do, if anything, to help them…

  Surrounded by the colossal old mansion, with all of its decayed luxury, her mind retreated from the present and sought shelter in memory, her thoughts going back to happier days, when the week had had a reliable rhythm of work and time off, when her family had been something she’d had the luxury of taking advantage of, when her goals had been things like graduating from Union and finding a job … and maybe meeting a guy she could marry.

  Sundays had been all about Vincent Price for her and Dell.

  Those horror movies she and her sister had been into had been the “safe” sort of scary-scaries. Nothing gruesome, like the Saw series, but old-fashioned stalwarts like The Abominable Dr. Phibes and The House of Usher and The Innocents. It had been an arguably strange tradition, she and Dell impatiently waiting until family dinner was finished and their homework done before raiding their father’s DVD collection and snuggling up in the basement in the dark. They had watched one or two before bed every week during school.

  It had been the best way to chill out and get ready for the six-thirty alarm clocks of Monday and the pressure of the M-T-W-R-F ahead.

  Mom had maintained that they were sick in the head. Dad had been so proud that he was raising the next generation of movie appreciators. She and Dell had just liked being together.

  Haunted by the past, Sissy walked into the parlor and turned on one of the glass lamps. Its shade was probably a single season in the sun away from total disintegration, the creamy yellow a function of age-staining rather than any decor choice.

  Boy, her sister would love this place, the furniture all a mystery because it was shrouded, the faded Oriental rug big as a lawn, the dark wood molding carved so deeply it was like a horizontal statue running around the high ceiling.

  From what she’d seen, the entire house just offered more of the same.

  It was the kind of fancy living that people wrote books about, but this version had been distilled through the grinder of a reversal of fortunes, a case of history not translating well into the present thanks to a lack of funds.

  Pity.

  Crossing over, she lifted up one of the sheets. Underneath, a faded green velvet sofa with all kinds of curlicues looked orphaned.

  She ripped the covering off. Went on to the wing chair next to it and did the same. Kept going around the parlor, moving faster and more violently, until dust hung thick in the air and a pile of dirty laundry took up most of the middle of the room.

  At least she’d gotten to the bottom of something.

  Not her issues, though. Not in the slightest.

  The angel who’d escorted her here from the hospital had magically transported her across town, but it had been without explanations—he’d told her nothing about herself, her situation, or exactly how he’d pulled off the relocation. He’d also left alone things like how he was tied to Jim,
and why he’d come to them, and what his role was.

  Just more black holes to add to her collection.

  Pacing around, she followed the oval pattern on the carpet because it seemed like the only clear path open to her. That anger that had taken root earlier was rising again, making her feel trapped in spite of the fact that the door she’d come through was not locked, the house had dozens and dozens of rooms, and unlike in her previous life, she had no one she had to answer to—no parents, no teachers, no roommates at Union.

  She was free.

  So why the hell did she want to scream.

  Hard to know what exactly started it, but before she knew what she was doing, she was frantically searching the fireplace’s mantel, going up high on her tiptoes in those borrowed sneakers, patting the cobwebbed shelf around the candelabra and the—

  The little box rattled as she brought it down, and yup, there were matches inside.

  Moving in a jerky frenzy, she ripped a sheet off the pile, shoved it into the fireplace, and struck up a flame.

  Holding the teardrop-shaped glow to eye level, she stared into the yellow heat, and the fury in her expanded even further, flowing through her body, changing the shape of her, growing deep within—sure as if it were cultivating in her soul, finding crevices to root among and take over from.

  Dropping to her knees, the cold marble bit into her skin through the sweatpants, but she didn’t care—she brought the tiny fire to the tangled wad and held it there. Smoke rose first, a tendril forming and then quickly thickening into a rolling river.

  Proper flames appeared, flaring up, licking at the sheeting, consuming the cotton fibers with increasing greed.

  Unable to look away, Sissy reached behind herself, stretching out until she connected with the soft pile she had made. Dragging more forward, she fed the heat, pushing the sheets into the blaze, feeling the burn on her hands, her wrists, her arms, her face.

  In her head, a string of curses was like the fire she was creating, flaring to life, consuming—