The Sinner

by J. R. Ward

  Slayers could lose their humanity. Their soul. Their free agency. But not that cardiac muscle they didn’t need any more to exist.

  “No, it is the heart,” Butch said as he headed to the next bucket. “This one has it, too.”

  “Guess the Omega’s getting sloppy. Or wearing out.”

  As Butch turned back to his roommate, he did not like the expression on the brother’s face. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what.”

  “Like I’m the solution to it all.”

  There was a long moment. “But you are, cop. And you know it.”

  Butch walked over and stood chest to chest with the male. “What if we’re wrong?”

  “The Prophecy is not ours. It is the property of history. As it was foretold, so it shall be. First as the future, then as the present when the time is nigh. And after that, with recording, it shall be the sacred past, the saving of the species, the end of the war.”

  Butch thought of his dreams, the ones that had been waking him up during the day. The ones that he refused to talk to his Marissa about. “What if I don’t believe any of that.”

  What if I can’t believe it, he amended.

  “You assume destiny requires your permission to exist.”

  Unease scurried through his veins like rats in a sewer, finding all kinds of familiar paths. And meanwhile, as freely as the anxiety roamed, he became trapped. “What if I’m not enough?”

  “You are. You have to be.”

  “I can’t do any of it without you.”

  Familiar eyes, diamond with navy-blue rims, softened, proving that even the hardest substance on earth could yield if it chose to. “You have me, forever. And if you require it, you can take my faith in you, for as long as you need it.”

  “I didn’t ask for this.”

  “We never do,” V said roughly. “And it doesn’t matter even if we did.”

  The brother shook his head, as if he were remembering parts and parcels of his own life, routes taken by force or coercion, dubious gifts pressed into his unwilling hands, mantles tossed over his shoulders, heavy with the manipulations and desires of others. Given that Butch knew his roommate’s past as well as he knew his own, he wondered about the nature of the so-called destiny theory Vishous spoke of.

  Maybe the intellectual construct of fate, of destiny, was just a way to frame all the shitty fucking things that happened to people. Maybe all the proverbial bad luck that rained down on the heads of essentially good folks, all that Murphy’s Law, was actually not luck at all, just the impersonal nature of chaos at work. Maybe all the disappointment and injury, the loss and alienation, the chips off the soul and the heart that were inevitable during any mortal’s tenure upon the ashes and the dust to which they were doomed to return, were not preordained or personal in the slightest.

  Maybe there was no meaning to the universe, and nothing after death, and no one driving the metaphorical bus from up above.

  Butch fished through damp cashmere to grip the heavy gold cross hanging from his neck. His Catholic faith told him otherwise, but what the fuck did he know.

  And on a night like tonight, he wasn’t sure what was worse. The idea that he was responsible for ending the war.

  Or the possibility that he wasn’t.

  Putting his hand on V’s shoulder, Butch moved down the heavily muscled arm until he clasped the thick wrist above the glowing curse. Then he stepped in beside his brother and lifted that deadly palm, the leather of V’s jacket sleeve creaking.

  “Time for cleanup,” Butch said hoarsely.

  “Yes,” V agreed. “It is.”

  As Butch held up the arm, energy unleashed from the palm in a great burst of light, the illumination blinding him, his eyes stinging, though he refused to look away from the power, the terrible grace, the universe’s mystery of origin that was inexplicably housed within the otherwise unremarkable flesh of his best friend.

  Under the onslaught, all traces of the Omega’s evil work disappeared, the structure of the maintenance building, its comparably fragile walls and floor and rafters of the roof, remaining untouched by the fearsome glory that reclaimed the humble space that been horribly used for as evil a purpose as ever there was.

  What if the Prophecy itself is not enough, Butch thought to himself.

  After all, mortals weren’t the only things that had a shelf life. History likewise decayed and was lost, over time. Lessons forgotten… rules mislaid… heroes dead and gone…

  Prophecies dismissed when another future comes along to claim the present as its victim, proving that that which had been taken as an absolute was in fact only a partial truth.

  Everyone was talking about the end of the war, but was there ever really an end to evil? Even if he succeeded, even if he was, in fact, the Dhestroyer, what then. Sweetness and light forever?

  No, he thought with a conviction that made his spine tingle with warning. There would be another.

  And it would be the same as what had been defeated.

  Only worse.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The woman—she liked to call herself that, needed to, really, her true identity aside—stood in the crowd of bodies, the scents of those around her a once-tantalizing blend of humanity’s sweat and blood and mortality. Music united them all through their ears, the beat stringing them one by one onto an audio-gasm garland that draped around the dance floor, the links swinging as hips rolled, backs arched, and arms swung in slow, sensual motion.

  She was unmoving and unmoved as she sipped her fruit and alcohol alchemy through a metal straw, tasting none of the sweetness, feeling none of the buzz.

  Closing her eyes, she yearned to find the metronome of the music, the penetration of the bass, the tickle of the treble. She wanted a body against her own, hands that palm’d down her waist to her hips, fingers that gripped her ass, a cock pressing against her skintight skirt. She wanted a mouth at the hollow of her throat. A tongue to lick into her between her legs. She wanted the beast with two backs, the down-and-dirty, the hard pound.

  She wanted…

  The woman was unaware of giving up again. But as she bent down and set her half-finished drink on the floor, she realized she was leaving. Again. With grace, she walked forth, turning to one side and another and then back again as she navigated between the men and the women who breathed and schemed, lived and died, chose and denied. She envied them the chaos of their free will, all those repercussions that would find them, good and bad, all the illusive goals never to be scored, all the distant horizons that would e’er be out in front, precious for the never-captured nature of their sunsets.

  As much as she knew about damnation—and that was a lot—it turned out that a land of unwanted plenty was a fresh kind of hell, and she had a feeling the dogged, low-level malaise she suffered from was all about accessibility. If everything was within reach, nothing mattered, for the obtainable was a meal already gorged upon, the appetite ever-slaked creating a bloated, sickly feeling that disinclined one to ever dine again.

  While the woman passed through all the shoulders and torsos, many eyes stared at her, double-taking, or never looking away in the first place. Lids popped wide, and jaws lowered ever so slightly, the impact of her presence jumping the wait line of so many chemically altered senses, barging its way into those brains ahead of other kinds of feedback.

  When she had first returned here, to Caldwell, she had looked back at them, all of them, not just the ones in this club, but those striding on the sidewalks of the city, and stuck in traffic jams in their cars, and filing in and out of shops and offices and homes. With fervent expectation, she had searched for a response within herself to any of the unspoken invitations, a yes, a harmonizing drive to complete the chord, a brick to add to a collective wall, a penny of her own to make the dollar whole.

  It had not come.

  Lately, she stayed out a shorter time each night. And now, she did not venture out in the day at all.

  The club’s rear
exit was tattooed with a warning in red letters that it was to be used In Case of Emergency Only. The woman pushed the bar and stepped out. As the alarm started going off, she walked away down the alley, lifting her face to the spring rain that fell from storm clouds above.

  Is it cold? she wondered. It had to be cold after she had been in that oven of body heat.

  Her stilettos clipped over the dirty pavement, and kicked up puddles, and, on occasion, failed to find suitable purchase on the uneven ground. And when she lowered her head, wind swept her hair back, as if the night wanted to see her properly, as if it wanted to regard her sadness as a kind friend would, with pity, with concern.

  The shouting bass of the club faded in her wake, replaced by softer conversations created by rain dripping off fire escapes, and windowsills, and the fenders of abandoned cars. A stray cat howled and received no reply for its throaty efforts. A cop car sped by, in pursuit of a felon or perhaps, in a rush to save somebody from one.

  The woman walked with no destination, although an empty berth of sorts found her when she sensed someone following her. Looking over her shoulder, she thought she might have been mistaken. But then… yes. There it was. A figure with long legs and broad shoulders, the man emerging from the shadows into the disinterested peach glow of the city’s illumination halo.

  The woman didn’t vary her pace, but not because she wanted to be caught.

  The capture soon occurred, however, the man closing the distance to come beside her, the erection in his pants and the testosterone surging in his veins making some kind of intersection between their bodies a foregone conclusion in his mind.

  She stopped and looked up to the storm again. The rain tiptoed on her cheeks and forehead, a thoughtful guest that did not want to overly disturb its host.

  “Where you at, girl,” the man said.

  Righting her head, she cranked a stare in his direction.

  He had an almost-attractive face, something about the slightly-too-short distance between those dark eyes and the pinch of his too-thin lips robbing him of true handsomeness. And maybe the latter was why he’d gotten that tattoo on his neck, and why he greased his black hair back. He wanted to refute the priggish tint to his features. Probably also explained the way he stuck that blunt straight-out from between his uneven teeth, like it was an extension of his arousal.

  “Now why you gotta be like that.” He took the blunt away. Spit on the wet ground. Put the thing back. “What’s your problem.”

  Neither were a question, so she did not answer that which he was not actually asking. She just stared into his greedy, gleaming black eyes, sensing his heartbeats even if they were something he did not notice.

  Taking an inhale on the weed, he blew the smoke right in her face. And as she coughed a little, he looked down her body like she was an object to be taken off a shelf. As if he had a right to her, but hoped she fought him. As if he intended to hurt her and was looking forward to the pain he was going to cause.

  “I’m giving you one chance,” she said in a low voice. “Go. Now.”

  “Nah, don’t think so.” He flicked the blunt away, the lit tip flashing orange as it end-over-end’d into a run-off stream flowing to God only knew where. “I’m a nice guy. You gonna like me—”

  She knew exactly when he was going to move and in what direction. He went for her long brunette hair, grabbing ahold of it like a rope and yanking her off balance, something that was easily done given the height of her heels. As her back twisted, and one of her ankles bent wrong, she resented the inelegant manner in which she fell.

  And that was all on him.

  Given the easy way he caught her, with a strong arm around her breasts, and a knife to her throat, she had the sense that he had perfected this over many attempts and successes, his best practices and training leading him to drag her out of what little light there was to the dense darkness of the alley’s flanks.

  Yanking her back against his body, he said, “You scream, I cut you. You give me what I want, I let you go. Nod, bitch.”

  She shook her head. “You really want to release me—”

  The knife bit into the side of her throat, cutting her. “Nod, bitch—”

  Devina took control of the situation by freezing the human where he stood, with that arm of his around her, that knife up to her jugular, that weight tilted back on his tailbone. Then she disappeared from his grip, and re-formed in front of him. Without her body where it had been, he looked like he was dancing with himself. Or about to slit his own throat.

  Gathering her hair, which had been dislodged by his rough handling, the woman smoothed the gorgeous brunette lengths as if she were calming a skittish horse, and then she pulled the waves over one shoulder, where they were promptly content to rest in a profusion of beauty. With a steady hand, she put her fingers up to the wound he had made and collected the blood that welled from where the blade had dug into her neck. Looking down, she regarded the red gloss sadly.

  Only an illusion. Part of the “clothes” she covered her true essence with when she wanted to pass. She wished it was real—

  A strangled moan brought her eyes back up. The man was having a lot of trouble understanding the current turnabout, his mouth gaping, the shock and dismay on his face making him seem like a teenage boy who’d lost his bluster in the principal’s office.

  “I told you,” she said softly. “You should have left me alone.”

  Leaning forward, she marked his lax lips with her blood, giving him a nice splash of lipstick to go with those beady eyes and that prissy little mouth.

  “Wh-what-what—”

  She slapped him with her open hand, hard enough to stun him. And then she slapped him again, drawing his own blood as he bit the inside of his cheek.

  Putting her face in his, she whispered, “I’m going to make you pay for all the things you’ve taken that were not yours.”

  Then she kissed him, putting her mouth to his, sucking his lower lip in between her teeth—at which point, she bit through and pulled back, ripping a chunk off him. As he started to scream, she spit the flesh out into her hand and then rubbed the chunk in his face, smearing him with his own blood.

  “You don’t like this?” she gritted as he tried to move out of the way of his lower lip. “You don’t like being forced to kiss when you don’t want to?”

  After she threw the piece of his mouth at him, she flicked her hand and sent him flying back through the air, slamming him into the damp, soot-stained bricks of the building he had intended on raping her against. Splaying out his arms and legs by force of her will, he reminded her of a turkey about to be trussed for Thanksgiving.

  Even as his blood flowed down those make-me-tough neck tattoos, leaking out of his mouth that, courtesy of her remodeling, was now plenty big enough for his face, he was too shocked to scream. But he got over that when she put her palm out and sent the energy into him.

  Sure as shit he made a noise then, the high-pitched call that of an animal impaled.

  But she wasn’t stabbing him. That sound was annoying, however.

  With her opposite palm, she threw a spell at him, a transparent bubble forming around his head and containing the scream, sparing her ears the inevitable ringing that would persist long after he no longer did.

  Devina split his skin down the center of him and tore it away, everything peeling off the muscle and bone underneath, his flesh falling from him as his now-useless clothes did, in two piles on either side of his feet.

  Splayed wide, glistening in the rain, the man was still breathing and now there was very little blood, only lymph fluid oozing off the tendons of the toes. Things were twitching, though, hands and feet, mostly, but also the pec muscles. And then he lost control of his bowels.

  Incontinence was so unseemly.

  Disgusted, she called the bubble back to her palm and let him drop into a disjointed pile of joints. As she walked away, she went LeBron on the silencing spell, dribbling it at her side, the smacking on the alley’s
pavement echoing around, a beat of her own creation in which she had no more interest than those created by others piped in through speakers at the club.

  When she got to the alley’s dead end, some blocks to the north, she heard a commotion back where she had been and imagined the human had been found by someone. Sure enough, sirens began to sing in concert.

  Although Caldwell at night spawned them like a replicator spell gone haywire, so perhaps it was another kind of emergency.

  The woman stopped dribbling, capturing the bubble and standing it up on her fingertips.

  The rain was falling even more tentatively, as if it couldn’t decide whether to recline into a state of fog or not—or perhaps she had scared it? Nevertheless, as the infinitesimally small drops hit the bubble and slid off, they weaved a rainbow of color in their wake and made her think of the inside covers of old books with their swirls of watermarks. She further considered how long she had been on the earth and then of her relatively recent captivity, a problem she had solved with no small amount of ingenuity. However, she worried. When she had first escaped the Well of Souls through a resourceful seduction, she had expected the father of everything, the Creator, to chastise her and remand her back to the below, re-punishing her with an even greater sentence of isolation.

  But the longer she was permitted to roam the streets of the city, the more that winter transitioned into spring, she was coming to realize her freedom was to be trusted. Yet the longer she was here, and the more she trusted her freedom, the more she realized that she was, autonomous ambulation aside, still in captivity. Still imprisoned. Still weighted by chains, though she could see them no better than she could visualize the bars that penned her in.

  Surrounded by potential lovers and endless possibilities for consumption on all levels, she mourned the loss of her one true love and grieved the unprecedented separation that marked the end of their relationship. Jim Heron, the fallen angel, was in Heaven now, forever apart from her—and forever not alone. He was with that little, irrelevant girl, Sissy, who he stupidly gave a shit about, and his eternity with that mealy-mouthed pathetic made Devina want to destroy the earth itself. And then start on the rest of the galaxy.