Devina was vaguely aware that she was breathing heavily, and that, tragically, Jim was not focused on her heaving br**sts.
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 f**king 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.