by Nicole Thorn
“Morning, Pet,” he said before he kissed me.
I shoved him back, and said, “You pretended to be sleeping?”
He propped himself up on his arms, and nodded his head.
“Rude,” I told him. He ignored my comment and started taking advantage of his position. He may have had the upper hand, but that couldn’t last forever.
Ezra buried his face in my neck and bumped his hips against mine, reminding me of his lack of pajamas, and my non-lack of pajamas. Damn. I decided to wrap my legs around him anyway.
“So, what are we doing today?” I asked.
He cocked his head to the side. “Hmm. We have lots of options. We are both between assignments. There are many things we can do.”
“I’m open to suggestions.” He got a thoughtful look on his face before he bent down to kiss my chest. He came back up with a frown. “I really need to get you to try my version of pajamas. Much less… in the way.”
I squeaked in surprise when he pulled my shirt off me. “Halfway there.” His lips went back, and he attempted a second try. I would’ve been keener to play with him, but my head felt like a mess.
He noticed.
“Something wrong?” He hovered above me.
I nodded.
Ezra sat up and moved from me. After he threw on his boxers and a pair of pants, he got back into bed, and pulled me over to him. “Tell me.”
“Something just feels wrong.”
“With you?”
“No. Everything should be calm now. It should feel… over. But something’s off. Don’t you feel it?”
His forehead wrinkled, and he stayed quiet for a minute or so. “Maybe. It could just be that you’ve been under so much stress that you feel antsy. Like you’re not used to being in an okay place.”
“That’s not it. I can’t really describe it.” I smiled a little, “It’s like a disturbance in The Force.”
Ezra smiled back. “There’s your answer, Pet. I can’t feel it because it’s not mine to feel.”
I understood what he meant. Maybe it had something to do with my powers. Maybe they weren’t taking to this new body.
I got ready for the day as I tried to pinpoint what bothered me. It didn’t feel like something inside of me had gone wrong. It felt like something inside of me tried to send out a warning.
We spent some time sealing up the boxes that I brought over the day before. We’d be bringing them to the house in Scotland soon, and it would be easier if stuff didn’t fall out. Ezra said that we could hold them and teleport through Hell with them. Much cheaper than flying. Not that money was an issue anymore. The Devil gave me a credit card for work and a debit card attached to a bank account in my name. It had an unbelievable amount of money in it. “All right.” Ezra held his hands together. “Let’s try and teach you to teleport.”
“Yay!” I smiled.
“It’s not that hard. Just close your eyes and focus on Hell. The smell, what it looks like, what it feels like to be there.”
“Are you coming?”
“Not this time. You need to learn to do this on your own. I’ll be right here when you get back.”
Super… I might just get trapped in Hell.
I shut my eyes and tried to think of the bus stop, the smell of dust and sulfur, the dry air, and the gates.
I felt something shift and it made me open my eyes. I gasped a little when I saw that I stood in a crowd. A familiar crowd. One I’d been a part of, once.
They all murmured in fear and panic. None of them understood what happened to them.
I walked a little ways from the bus stop, and looked back at the pigeon that harassed the dead people. Someone took a swipe at him, and he flew up and away.
I heard a bus approaching, and waited for it to show up. Then all of the people would leave, and I could go back to the loft.
“Annie!” a feminine voice screamed once the bus parked. Caroline ran from the bus, shoving at the souls and making her way to me. Her little driver’s hat started falling off and she held her hand to her head to keep it on. She slid to a stop and threw her arms around me. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Hi, Caroline.” I hugged her back and we parted. “When I died again, I asked if I could see you, but then a lot of stuff happened.”
“I know.”
“How?”
She smiled a little. “I knew that Ezra had your case and his boss is one of my brothers. My dad filled him in on everything, since he’s your boss now too.”
“You know I’m a hellion?”
“Yup.” She bounced up on the balls of her feet. “I’m glad that everything worked out.” Her smile got wider, and I knew I was in trouble, “I heard that you and Ezra are a thing. I knew the second he met you, he’d be a goner. Your attitude is just what he needs to balance the complete lack of empathy that he has. I think you go well together.”
“Thank you. I agree.”
“I believe my ears are burning.” I looked to see Ezra glaring at the souls as they shuffled onto the bus.
“Speak of the Devil…” Caroline put her hand on her hip. Ezra closed the distance between us and rolled his eyes.
“I wasn’t sure if you were having trouble, so I thought I’d check on you,” he said as he put his arm around my shoulder. “But I see that my wife has just been kidnapped by a little ginger.”
Caroline kicked his shin and he didn’t react. “Her eyes grew huge and she looked at me. “Wife… you guys are married?”
I said no at the same time Ezra said yes. Caroline just looked confused.
“We’re legally married,” I explained.
“So… married?”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Only if it still counts even if I didn’t have any say in it.”
She shrugged. “Kinda.”
“Ya see.” Ezra held me tighter as he spoke to Caroline. “She loves me, but not enough to call herself my wife.”
That one stung. “That is not it. I love you,” I said to him. “More than anything, but we didn’t choose to be married.”
“Anna, do you want to be married to me or not.” He didn’t seem angry with me. Frustrated, sure.
I had no doubt in my mind that I wanted to be with him forever, but the title of wife didn’t matter. At least not to me. It seemed to matter to him.
“Yes. I want to be married to you, but I want us to be the ones to decide that. Not Lucifer, and not because the paper work was convenient.”
He took a deep breath. “I understand that. I couldn’t care less about the paperwork. I consider you my wife, because I love you with all of my being and I will until the end of all things.”
Goddammit.
I heard Caroline sniffle and I looked to see her wiping her eye. “That’s so sweet.”
Ezra ignored her and spoke to me. “If I asked you to marry me, what would you say?”
I didn’t need to think about it. “I would say yes.”
He smiled. “Good to know.”
I didn’t know where that left us, but I knew that we were together. That mattered more than anything else. The only thing that really mattered.
“All right.” Caroline pulled herself together. “That was nice to see, but I have to get back to work. See you soon.” She hugged me and then Ezra before going back to her bus.
“Home?” I asked.
“Not yet. We’ve got more practice to do.”
We spent the next hour or so going from the bus stop back home. We saw Caroline one more time, and a double-decker bus. I couldn’t tell who drove that.
“How much longer?” I whined when we popped back home. We stood by the kitchen, and I contemplated teleporting to somewhere he couldn’t find me.
“Hmm…I suppose that we could take a break. If you absolutely insist.”
“I do.” I narrowed my eyes.
“Maybe we should go for a walk. The cool air may do you some good.” He took my hand, and we went down the elevator and out the building.
> The second the cold air hit me, something felt wrong again. Like something tugged on my brain and the beacon sounded off, drowning out everything else that existed.
I let out a scream, and my whole body shook.
Glass shattered all around us from every car on the street. The windows exploded, and Ezra grabbed me, pulling me to his chest to keep the glass from hitting me. Or to stop the screaming. I didn’t know.
I covered my ears as they rang out. Ezra said my name, but it the ringing muffled it. He had been right. Something felt wrong inside of me.
When I stopped, everything in the world became quiet and clear. My head and throat throbbed with the agony I just put them through, but it didn’t matter.
I knew what I was supposed to do.
I pulled my hands off of my ears. “I…” I blinked and looked up from the concrete. “I need to go.”
Ezra’s eyes looked panicked and afraid. “Where?”
I didn’t know the answer to that. I just knew I needed to start walking.
***
Once I figured out where my body was taking me, my blood turned to ice inside of me. Ezra followed quietly behind. He’d learned by now that sometimes there was no rhyme or reason to how this worked. I just needed to trust my instincts.
I pushed past the familiar iron gates and walked through the neatly manicured grass of the cemetery. I went straight to my grave.
I stood at the edge of the dirt that I’d once crawled out of, and looked down at the prison inside of it. My coffin had split down the middle, and it sat at the bottom of a half-filled hole.
No one tried covering it after I’d crawled out. I doubted it the investigation had anything to do with it. It must have been because my parents didn’t ask anyone to fix it.
Why would they? Their daughter’s body had vanished. This place didn’t mean anything anymore.
I felt Ezra’s hand on my hip. “Anna.”
I didn’t answer him. There was nothing to say. I knew what he thought. He was worried I’d have another panic attack. Or just pass out maybe. He thought I was afraid.
Because I was.
Not of the grave. Of what it meant, my body bringing me to it.
“I don’t understand,” I finally whispered. “Why am I here?” The beacon didn’t sound off anymore, so I knew this was where I was supposed to be.
Yet the tugging remained. A dull threat in my head. Something in me moved just under my skin. Like it was trapped, but trying desperately to get out of me.
“I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together,” he said softly. He looked worried, but like he tried to hide it.
I thought hard about what this could mean. “Clearly it’s about me. My death. The first one.”
I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he winced. “Okay. We know how you died. Do you know anything about how you came back?”
“Only that my friends murdered three people,” I said with a flat and cold voice.
“Elisa,” he said simply.
I turned my head to the side, so I could see him. “What?”
“Elisa did it herself. When I was doing surveillance on Poppy and Benjamin, I heard them talking about it. She was mad that they wouldn’t help, so she did it herself.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course she got pissed. She was always snippy with the witch stuff. Any time one of us got a little squirmy about a spell, she’d get real bitchy about it. Even the day I died. It was the biggest spell we’d ever tried. The only one with blood. The only one that worked.”
His eyes became calculating again, and I watched the cogs turn. “The only one?”
“The first one,” I shrugged. “The night I died, they all got powers. Me too, I guess.”
He took his hand off of me and put one on his own hip. “Do you know the spell that killed you?”
“Sorta. Elisa found it. It’s in a book that we got from the library. She sent us to go get it.”
“Show it to me.”
***
We went back to the loft to get the motorcycle, and I directed him to the library. We walked inside, and I hid in my leather jacket so the librarian wouldn’t see me. I couldn’t be sure if she knew I died, but I did know the woman.
I took Ezra to the occult section, and started searching for the old book. I ran my hands over the books until I found the one I looked for. I pulled it down and started flipping through it.
“Most of the book isn’t in English, but I know what spot the spell is in,” I said while flipping the pages. I could never forget the ancient script at the top of the page.
Once I found it, I walked over to the empty corner of the library and sat down at a table. Ezra sat beside me, and I laid the book out.
He pulled it to him and glanced at the page before quickly looking at a few others. “It’s Celtic and Gaelic.”
“All of them?”
“The ones I’ve seen.” His eyes studied the words on the page and he looked over at me. “Is this blood?” There were small drops of dried blood all over the open pages. I knew why.
“Yeah. Mine.” I watched his expression darken. “I, I was coughing up blood… before I…” I stopped. He knew.
His eyes went back to the page, and I waited for him to finish reading the spell. He trailed the words with his finger.
His face turned grave, like nothing I’d ever seen from him. I heard his heart racing and I watched the blood drain from his face as his breathing quickened.
“Ezra…” I said quietly.
The fear turned to anger in a split second and he looked at me. “She knew.”
My eyebrows went up. “What? Who knew what?”
“Elisa. She knew you’d die.”
Chapter Thirty-Four: Illusions
Ezra
I went over the words a half a dozen times to make sure that I had it right. It couldn’t be denied. It was all here in black, white, and red. “You were a sacrifice,” I said to Anna as gently as I could. The rage in me reached a crescendo, and I didn’t know how much more I could take before I just went to kill the bitch.
That would happen no matter what. She’d stop breathing because she did the same to Anna.
Anna wore a blank expression, but her eyes looked confused. “No. Not possible. She wouldn’t do that.”
How do I do this? How to I break this kind of thing to the girl I love without crushing her and everything she believes in.
“Anna.” I made my voice soft. “I’m sorry. The instructions are clear. The person whose blood is spilled into the earth gives up their life in exchange for the power.”
“Maybe she didn’t know it said that. Maybe she could just read it, not understand it.” The desperation in her voice and eyes hurt. She wanted so badly to believe it wasn’t true. I didn’t have any doubts. That little witch was selfish and power hungry. No surprise that she’d kill for more.
But I needed Anna to believe this herself.
“I’ve known Elisa for more than five years. She isn’t a killer.” The second the words left Anna’s mouth, she realized her mistake. “Okay,” she held her hands up. “She killed people, but it was to bring me back. Why would she do that if she killed me?”
“Maybe she killed you because she thought she could bring you back, once she had her powers.”
It made sense. All of it. So clear and so obvious. Anna didn’t want to believe a word.
She stood up and grasped the table with her hands. She shook so hard that the table trembled.
Then she vanished, evaporating into the air.
I stood and picked up the book before I focused on Hell.
I stayed a second or two before going back to the loft, but she wasn’t there. I called her name just to make sure, but I got nothing in return. I had no clue where Anna could’ve been.
I dropped the book on our bed and tried again. This time I went for her bedroom at Poppy and Benjamin’s apartment.
The room was empty, but her scent surrounded me. I walked into the living room. The t
wo of them stood in the kitchen, cooking something I didn’t care enough to try and recognize.
“Ezra?” Poppy jumped in surprise. “Where the Hell did you come from?”
I walked further out until I reach the other side of the counter. “We need to talk.”
Benjamin turned around and went to Poppy’s side. “What?”
I paused before I spoke. “Anna and I found something out today,” I started. “That spell that you used to gain your powers, I need you to tell me everything you know about it. Leave nothing out.”
Poppy swallowed in fear. “We don’t know much. Elisa told us where to find the book. We brought it to her, and chanted what she told us to chant. I didn’t even know what we were saying.”
“Anna showed me the spell, and I read it. It said very clearly that the person whose blood is spilled would die. Their life is forfeit the second the blood hits the ground, and in exchange, you get power.”
Their mouths dropped, and misery filled their eyes.
“Our power… we only got it because Annie died for it?” Poppy was on the edge of a sob.
“She didn’t just die,” Benjamin said through clenched teeth. “Elisa murdered her.” He didn’t appear to be surprised in the least. I didn’t think he’d believe me so quickly. It made me think that he had some suspicions of his friend before I showed up.
“Oh God.” Poppy covered her mouth. “But it’s Elisa. She wouldn’t…”
“Pop.” Benjamin looked at her with sympathy and certainty. “She did. She found that spell. Do you really think she didn’t know what it said?”
“But she loves Annie. She killed three people to bring her back.”
I told her my theory on that.
Her green eyes filled with tears. “I don’t wanna believe she could do that to our best friend.” Benjamin put his hand on her back, and she fell to his chest as the sobs started.
“I don’t know where Anna is,” I said. “I told her about the spell, and she teleported herself somewhere.”
Poppy turned to me, but stayed attached to her boyfriend. “She left?”
“Yes.”
“I might know where she went.”
