“What?”
Adrian hadn’t expected to be off on that one. Clearly he was. “Guess I was wrong.”
Sissy shook her head. “No, yeah, totally wrong. He’s just … he took care of me, that’s all.”
And apparently “took care of” did not mean “banged all night long while we were in his bedroom alone.”
Adrian found himself rubbing his face again. “Sorry. I read things wrong.”
“Jim would never do anything like that … with me … um … ever. Me, neither. I’m not … um, yeah.”
From the blush that hit her puss to the way she fidgeted in her chair, she was obviously not comfortable with the subject, but it wasn’t like he was inclined to push it anyway.
Adrian got to his feet. “Listen, my advice to you is to stay out of as much of this as you can. You’ve already been compromised, and you’ve got a measure of freedom now—that’s as much restitution as anyone can expect in this f**ked-up world.” He looked at the clock over the stove, not really expecting it to be operational—but hey, check it. The thing was working for once. “I gotta crash. Tomorrow the focus needs to be back on the war.”
Limping out, he paused in the doorway and glanced over his shoulder. Sissy was sitting still as an inanimate object, surrounded by the messy surplus he and Devina had chosen for her. Except for that long blond hair, she seemed ancient, the old-fashioned appliances and worn floor new and fresh compared to her aura.
Adrian kept going, pulling himself up the stairs by the balustrade, rounding the half landing by the grandfather clock slowly, taking a breather before tackling the last dozen steps up to the second-story foyer.
He didn’t go to his bedroom.
As he made his way to the attic door and flipped the light switch at the bottom of the steep rise, his left leg was really lagging, and the scent of flowers depressed him to the point that he nearly decided to sleep on the stairwell.
He was getting tired of the constant refrain of, If only Eddie were here…
Unfortunately, he didn’t think it was ever going to be any less apropos than it was right now.
The angel had left his cane behind.
As Sissy got up and started to fold her new clothes neatly, she spied it leaning against the counter by the stove.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t see Adrian’s point. When she had been in Hell, the only thing she had prayed for was getting out. Now that that had been granted, it seemed like a criminal lack of self-preservation to want to run any risks with herself.
But if Jim had thought that way, she’d still be down there.
I thought you and Jim were together.
Oh, God, had he really said that? Thought that?
Jim was the savior for a lot of people. Getting her out of there had been part of his job description—right?
Remembering the sight of him by that bathtub, she thought, Well, it might have been a little more personal than that. But things ended there between them.
Right…?
With the clothes back in the bags, she picked up her load and headed out—only to snag the cane as she passed by, tucking it under her arm.
As she walked through the house, she wondered where Jim was, what he was doing, whether he was fighting or going a diplomatic route in whatever conflict he found.
Probably not diplomacy.
Up in her room, she was surprised to find that when she opened the drawers, a waft of lavender rose up into her nose. The liner paper was bright and fresh as the day it must have been laid down, the flower pattern winding its violet and green way all around the fragrant sheets. With quick efficiency, she filled the dresser, shut everything up tight … reopened things and picked out a pair of yoga pants and a loose T-shirt.
Adrian had not been too far off base on her size. Both were baggy, but they were a better fit than Jim’s gigantic clothes by a mile.
She had no idea where the laundry was in the house, but for all she knew, they washed things in the sink and hung them to dry—
Sissy froze.
Above the bureau, there was an old mirror hanging on the wall, its glass wrinkly, like the ones that had been in her grandmother’s house. And as she met her own eyes in its uneven surface, her reflection was at once stunning and entirely unremarkable—it wasn’t as if her features had changed, or her hair was another color.
There was something way different, however.
Glowing around the crown of her head, like a diadem of subtle candlelight, was a halo.
Just like the one Jim had.
Reaching up, she patted at it and felt nothing, no barrier or resistance. It was there, though. The mirror might have been an antique, but it worked just fine—
Creaking overhead brought her eyes to the ceiling. Someone was walking around up there, the footfalls uneven—either because the path was obstructed or…
Grabbing the angel’s cane, she rushed out. She wasn’t sure where the way up was, but she was damn well going to find it.
So many doors. Into bedrooms. Another sitting room. Bathrooms. She kept going, passing by the main staircase, and finding much of the same on the other side—
Down at the far end, light glowed around the jambs of a shut door, and she knew before going over and opening it that there would be a set of stairs going up.
“Adrian?” she called out.
Abruptly the lights flickered, browning briefly as if from a power surge—and it nearly dissuaded her from going up. When they stayed on, however, she decided to ascend.
“Adrian…?”
Breathing in, she smelled the most amazing bouquet of flowers, the scent a complex, multilayering of fragrance that put to shame those liner papers big-time. And then she heard chanting, soft, repetitive, insistent.
She tiptoed up the rest of the way, peering around the rough-cut balustrade at the top.
The flames of black candles waved lazily in invisible currents, bathing the attic from rafter to floorboard in soft, warm light. Cedar blanket chests and antique Louis Vuitton traveling trunks cast shadows, while hanging rods of old clothes appeared to move in the fluctuating illumination. Cobwebs hung in gossamer strings, undulating as if by the breath of ghosts, and the wind whistled through cracks somewhere.
But none of that really registered.
Halfway down the expanse, Adrian was sitting cross-legged, and rocking back and forth with his eyes closed. Stretched out before him, on a bed of mismatched blankets, was what she guessed had to be a body. A white sheet covered the person from head to toe, nothing showing of what was underneath.
The mourning was obvious in the tenor of the song, the painful tension in Adrian’s face—