by Jessa Slade
She grimaced at the need for truth. It tasted like blood. She was being a bit melodramatic; the old-copper-penny tang was merely the demon damage done to her human tissue. But if she didn’t tell him, he would take the Jesuses and she would have nothing to hold back the longest night.
In ominous silence, Fane reached out to her. Maybe he meant to grab only her chin, but with his big hand, his fingers overlapped to her neck, his thumb pressed hard to the point of her jaw. The charge of conflicting energies made her wince at the new pain, but she didn’t pull away. With his angel roused, he could very well kill her.
By tradition, that’s what angels did to demons.
He turned her chin from one side to the other. His gold-sparked gaze sparked in her demon-compromised vision; demons might not see every aspect of the mortal realm clearly, but they were well adapted to recognize—and fear—angels. “You are not a talya,” he said at last. “I would know.”
As if having been buried balls-deep in her cunt gave him some special insight?
She decided not to say that aloud. “I am not teshuva. There are other kinds of demons.”
The horde-tenebrae came in many flavors—malice, feralis, salambe, djinni—each darker than the last. But he knew that. His grip tightened until she felt her carotid pulse banging against his fingers. “Then what are you?”
She opened her mouth and the word came out in a curl of frozen air. To the divine presence possessing him, she knew it was a nasty, craven sound, and her heart curdled to say it. To the human ear, the meaning was simple: “Imp.”
“Imp,” he repeated. Somehow, he managed to make it sound even worse. His thin, masculine lips—which had been so hot and possessive all over her skin—twisted in disgust.
She coughed a little, from the strangling power of his grip and the wounds in her throat. A spot of blood stained the white cuff of his shirt poking out beyond his coat sleeve.
He recoiled, letting her loose.
She wiped her mouth but didn’t try to run. Where would she go? The longest night was almost here, and this was the only place she could barricade herself.
“Why did the talyan not see you for a demon?” he demanded.
She touched the corner of her glasses and blinked over the cataracts occluding her corneas. “My eyes. Windows to the soul, you know. Well, my windows are dirty. No one can see in.”
“But you are human. I felt you…” To her demon senses, the blood flowing through his cheeks was unmistakable and tantalizing.
“The body is human. I am…not. Not exactly, not anymore.”
“Explain.”
“I…” She sighed. “Can we go up to my apartment where it’s more comfortable?”
His bark of laughter echoed through the shadows. “By all means, let’s get comfortable now.”
Dread—and his no-doubt furious glower—tightened the muscles between her shoulder blades as she led the way to the back staircase. Two identical baby Jesuses flanked the doorway, and she flinched at Fane’s explosive curse. There were two more—twins again, though in a different style—at the top of the stairs. She couldn’t stop herself from touching the hard ringlets of their plastic hair; she needed their protection a little earlier than she had expected. But—except for the fact their arms were already up, reaching in the classic baby Jesus pose—they probably wouldn’t lift a hand to protect her from an avenging angel.
She led Fane into her apartment, the last place she’d wanted him. There was a reason she’d fucked him on the bar counter. The addition of another dozen Jesuses only made the profusion of religious and spiritual paraphernalia more insane looking.
Russian icons plastered the walls between Tibetan prayer flags interspersed with fragments of ancient Torahs. Small figurines of Christian saints shared Wiccan altar space with Hindu gods and Kachina dolls. Islamic prayer rugs covered every inch of the floor and softened her steps. The bed, half hidden by a freestanding Buddhist triptych, was plumped with grandma-style throw pillows embroidered with quasi-religious affirmations. The open loft extended half the space of the bar below, though it looked smaller crammed with all the holy crap.
In the middle of the room, he turned a slow circle, hands on his hips.
She didn’t want to see his expression, not even the little details her altered vision granted her. “Do you want a drink?”
“No. Not after the last one you poured me.”
“Well, I need one.” She headed for the galley kitchen with its eating bar overlooking the living space. At the sink, she rinsed out her mouth and spat out pink froth. Not for the first time she envied the talyan their strong teshuva demons that healed as often as they hurt. An imp had nowhere near such power. Not that she deluded herself into thinking an angel would overlook her merely for her insignificance.
She mixed herself a cocktail from the mini bar she kept stocked from the bar’s supplies. She tossed back the first drink, cringing at the alcohol sting in her throat. Then she mixed another.
“You drink a lot,” Fane said, a grudging note in his voice, as if he couldn’t stop his angelic nature from commenting even on her little sins.
“I have good reasons. Or bad reasons, I suppose.” She hitched herself up onto the kitchen counter and crossed her legs.
He shifted his jaw, no doubt remembering the last time she’d been up on a counter. He kept his attention focused across the room, like maybe it’d be harder to slay her if he had to think about their evening together. Well, fuck him.
Oh, wait. She had.
She took another drink.
Finally, he turned back to her. “An imp is a lesser incorporeal tenebrae. It doesn’t have the possessive power of a teshuva or djinni. How did it take up residence in your body?”
Thanks to the sphericanum, he’d know enough about demons that she wouldn’t have to explain every stupid detail. How convenient. “This is not my body,” she said. “I am only the imp. There’s no soul here. Elvis has left the building.”
“How?”
She clutched the drink until the faceted edges of the glass grated against bone. “I killed her.”
A long, slow breath whistled from him, like the sound a descending fiery sword might make as it aimed for her neck. She supposed she should be glad Thorne had taken Fane’s abraxas. She could only hope to appeal to the compassionate angel inside him.
Just the thought almost made her laugh. Or cry. Crying had been the first thing she’d done in this body.
She swallowed more of the drink. “No, I guess that’s not quite true. The imp didn’t kill her. She intended to kill herself, and the imp was one of the horde drawn to her anguish.”
“Why didn’t you…” Fane fell silent.
“Why didn’t I stop her? I had no ‘I’ then. Just the imp, and it had no thoughts as you would understand them. The tenebrae are only ravening hunger and fury and obliteration. Of course they—we—were drawn to Mirabel and all the pain and grief gouging her. We yearned for a place to be, a place where we could hide from the tenebraeternum, and she had such a vast emptiness inside her.”
Fane was quiet a moment, then he said, “I want that drink now.”
Bella reached behind her for the open bottles and poured. He stood as far away from her as he could and still reach the glass. She tried not to let his distance hurt. She was a monster, after all.
“It happened up here,” she said. “This was a storage room at the time, and Mirabel was a waitress downstairs. It was on the solstice—the bar stayed open all through Christmas back then—and she had bruises from one guy who kept pinching her ass, but he tipped really good. That’s one of my first memories…” She stared down at her drained glass.
“What happened?” Fane’s soft question loosened her tongue more than the alcohol.
“I…Mirabel had come up here to restock the booze and to take a pain pill. She kept her drugs hidden behind a loose board over there.” Bella jerked her chin toward an old reliquary tucked into a wall nook. “She wanted to sit down for
a minute, to rest her feet, but her butt cheeks were sore. So she stood, looking out over there—” She gestured toward the narrow, mullioned window. “It was snowing a little, maybe enough for a white Christmas, maybe not. Out of nowhere, she decided to take the whole bottle of pills.” Bella paused. “No, not out of nowhere. The tenebrae—we—had been focused on her for awhile.” She forced herself to look at Fane. “And you know what the tenebrae presence does.”
He nodded and took a long drink.
“She hadn’t gone home for Christmas in years. She’d just broken up with the last in a long line of shitty boyfriends who’d stiffed her on the rent. She had nowhere to be and no one waiting for her. So she swallowed all the pills, chased them down with half a bottle of vodka. And then she used her box cutter.” Bella dragged up her sleeves and tilted both forearms toward him.
Slowly, he approached. His thigh bumped her knee, and she inhaled the sweet scent of the Drambuie she’d poured him. He ran one finger down the raised scar on her left arm. “No hesitation marks. This wasn’t a cry for help. She was done.”
Bella shivered, at his touch or his words or the memories, she wasn’t sure. “If she’d ever cried out, only the demons noticed. And we drank her misery like it was last call.”
She hurled her glass. It hit the wall beside the reliquary and shattered.
“Fuck,” she said, apropos of nothing.
Fane did not even twitch when the glass sailed by his ear. “But you’re here. Which means she didn’t die.”
“She did. The imp watched while her eyes misted, as if the escaping soul was clawing free of the body, like a diamond scarring glass. The imp—I—wanted more. I wanted all of her agony. I wanted to dance in the light fading from her eyes. I got too close. As her soul left, I felt the emptiness sucking at me. The imp tried to flee, but it was too late. It sucked me right in. And I was born into her. I was born, dying.”
She shuddered. “The imp got misery in spades that night. I puked up the booze and pills. I wrapped my arms in bar rags and staggered downstairs. You can imagine the mayhem. Joy to the fucking world.”
“And so Mirabel became Bella.”
“I took everything of hers: her body, her memories, her speech patterns, her fashion sense, her wheat allergy. I even took her last loser boyfriend so I could give him a taste of the demon tongue, though he barely heard his long litany of sins over his screaming. After all I took, I thought I should at least leave her name.”
“Nice of you.”
She flinched. “I am a monster, a monster in a dead girl’s clothing. But the one thing Mirabel didn’t give me, the one thing the imp brought with it, is this: I am not going back to hell.”
Fane inclined his head. “Not unless I send you there.”
Chapter 6
Fane refused to let her sudden blanching sway him. Poor Mirabel had needed help and sympathy. This creature before him deserved none of that.
Slowly, Bella slid off the counter. Since he did not move back, she stood toe to toe with him. In her slippers, the top of her red beehive barely reached his nose, and she had to tilt her head to look up at him. “You won’t have to do a damned thing to me. The tenebrae are coming, like they do every year on the darkest night. If you take my defenses, I am worse than dead.”
It had always been a point of curiosity to the sphericanum that the tenebrae—for all the demons decided lack of repenting—fled from their dismal realm into the human world at any opportunity. Even demons didn’t want to live in hell. But he supposed they wouldn’t want one of their own living the good life either.
He stared down at her with grim foreboding, his whole body tight with shock, as if waiting for another blow.
She was tenebrae. How could he have been so blind? The irony of the thought did not escape him, but even knowing what he did now, his angel couldn’t find the demon in her eyes. He saw only the blue-white shine of the cataracts. “How can the tenebraeternum be worse than death?”
“Is an angel-man even allowed to ask?” The defiant set of her shoulders wavered. “For a while, I hoped Mirabel’s history would erase the imp’s recollections of its own realm, but in some ways, the two were so similar: the emptiness, the desolation, the conviction it would always be that way. Mirabel used the booze and drugs and cutter to escape her own version of hell. The imp fled the tenebraeternum into the space she left behind.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Now I have both their memories. And it’s worse this time of year.”
He focused on the religious mayhem behind her, anything to avoid looking at her as he struggled to come to grips with this unwelcome truth. He tightened one hand into a fist until he remembered the feel of the fine bones of her neck under his fingers, then his hand sprang open of its own accord. “All the spiritual artifacts. You use them to repel the tenebrae.”
“This body protects me from the effects of the artifacts, but my cousins still hate the flavors of hope, joy and love.”
That was the sanctuary the artifacts offered her? A wall of joy and hope? He’d never thought of his abraxas in such a way. A warden’s holy relic was always a weapon, an object of carnage and terror. Love couldn’t hold a killing edge.
He stalked away from her and prowled the room, stopping at the window where another baby Jesus looked out into the night, much as Mirabel must have done.
He stared down at it. “It’s just plastic.”
From behind him, Bella said, “I’ve heard it’s the thought that counts.”
“People say so only because they got you a shitty present.”
“You know better. People imbue objects with their beliefs. Which is why I can’t use Santas to guard the way. I don’t want the tenebrae coming for me as their gift.”
He turned his glare on her. “But Jesus died for our sins, so you don’t have to?”
She lifted her chin. “That is one aspect of their faith, yes. What’s so wrong about that?”
“Let’s ask Mirabel.” He grabbed the statue and headed for the next one.
“You can’t take them!” Bella rushed around the edge of the counter toward him.
He lifted one hand—the one without the baby Jesus tucked under it—and forced his angel to rise in a glow of gold around his knuckles. “You took them. I’m taking them back.”
She skidded to a halt, her mouth twisted. “You want me to die, don’t you?”
“No. But I won’t let you lie and steal either. If you want to atone for the imp, you start now.”
“The longest night of the year is coming, the night she died. The tenebrae will come.”
“Let them come. We will stand against them.”
She lowered her chin, doubt obvious in the tight pull of her mouth, but she didn’t back away from him. “One imp in the body of a dead girl and one angel in exile?”
He did not bother explaining how he would soon retrieve his abraxas. Yes, he was going to have to make some compromises, but only for the greater good. “We aren’t alone. The talyan—”
She laughed, and he had to admit, claiming common cause with the league was rather absurd. “The only ones who hate the tenebrae more than the sphericanum are the teshuva,” she reminded him. “They followed us to their doom and now they repent with our slaughter.”
“You aren’t tenebrae,” he shot back. “Not anymore.”
“At least they still want me. The talyan certainly won’t.” She sidled closer to him. “But maybe you want me again. Is that the concession you’re looking for?”
He tightened his jaw at her sideways smile. “I’m not looking for anything.”
“You didn’t just happen to drive through this neighborhood.” She reached out and popped open the top button of his shirt. “And you are not wearing anything underneath this time. I wonder why when it’s so cold outside.”
Rampant heat rushed through him: mortification—how had she known when he hadn’t realized the inference, not until this very moment?—and lust. Her finger stroked the notch of his throat, and he swal
lowed.
So close, the perfume of her made his head spin, a potent tease of vodka, womanly flesh and—so his angel warned him—a hidden peril like a hint of smoke. She hooked her finger through his second button and leaned in to press her lips over the pounding of his pulse.
His lips parted, against his will anticipating her caress, but he would not lower his head.
She undid the second button and kissed the bare skin above his heart. “How about one orgasm for each Jesus, hmm? Seems fair.”
“Actually, that seems impious.” He reared back, grabbing her wrist when she sneakily tried to snatch at the statue under his arm.
“Impious? Oh, you’re a laugh riot.” She lunged at him. “Damn it, Cyril. Give it to me!”
“No.” He stiff-armed her. “You told me people give meaning to their artifacts. That body you wield with such insolence is your reliquary now. So make it mean something.”
She stood staring at him, her hands fisted, her muscles drawn so tight the scars on her exposed wrists writhed. Finally, she said, “I can’t.”
He turned his back on her and began collecting the Jesuses.
Her demonic double-tongued wail of despair followed him downstairs and dogged him out to the Porsche where he tried to stack the infants neatly, but after several trips he still ended up with something like a holy midget clown car. What the hell was he going to do with them all?
He hadn’t prayed since his abraxas was taken, but he reminded himself not to speed since getting stopped by a cop would result in some awkward explaining.
He belted himself in and stared up through the sunroof to the upper window of the bar. Dark and empty. He dragged his hand over his mouth to erase the phantom sensation of the kiss she hadn’t given him.
He revved up the engine—the only thing getting any action tonight—and slammed the Porsche into gear.
And just as quickly slammed on the breaks.
Lit by the bright headlights, Bella all in red shone like a wayward flame.
Fane closed his eyes for a moment and tried to find the divine stillness within. He was an angelic possessed minus his abraxas, cut off from the guiding hands of the sphericanum; could he trust himself to know a right choice even if it was standing right in front of him?
