Immortal (Fallen Angels #6)(10)
Author: J.R. Ward

Nigel hadn’t lasted, either—and the fact that he had quit was a fall from grace Colin struggled with as much as he did all the rest of this tragedy.

Had there been signs he’d missed? he wondered. Some tip-off that Nigel had reached a turn in the journey he could not navigate?

It was impossible not to blame oneself … not to feel as if his own hand had been on that dagger when the silver blood of his beloved had been shed.

More than half of him was gone now. The very best part of him was gone.

And the Creator was not prepared to intervene. God had been the first place Colin had gone in desperation. The second had been Nigel’s French marble-topped bombé table with its silver tray of fine liquors upon it.

Colin took another deep draft from the bottle, the razor-sharp taste slicing down the back of his throat and fanning the flames in his gut.

His eyes went to the vicious tip of the dagger. Heaven’s ambient light entered the clear blade and refracted off its facets in a rainbow of glorious flashes.

He had wiped the silver blood off in Nigel’s tent. God knew, in that silk-strewn palace of an abode, there had been plenty of stray cloth from which to choose.

And then he had stripped a bolt of crêpe de Chine from the wall and wrapped the body up.

Fortifying himself with another pull from the neck of the bottle, he twisted ’round and felt tears come to his eyes.

The funeral pyre was a meter and a half off the ground and constructed of an ancient oak that Colin had chopped down in the woods. A ragged trail had developed between where the tree had been felled and where he’d done the building, the path gouged by his dragging the massive limbs and trunk over. To cleave the wood, he’d used the dagger in his hand and the strength of his upper body, and the nails had been harvested from a shed behind the Manse of Souls, old-fashioned, square-shanked strips of metal that he’d banged into place with a rock.

The pyre was not a work of art, especially not when compared to the fine antiques that Nigel had surrounded himself with. Indeed, the archangel had had a preference for things of beauty, a reason, he had often said, for his attraction to Colin.

This was no fitting end for the archangel. No fitting end a’tall.

Colin sat for a time, drinking and thinking. And then he roused himself and went over to his lover. The silk he’d chosen to wrap Nigel up in was a soft French blue—and he’d picked it mostly because he’d hoped the silvery stains from the blood wouldn’t show overmuch.

He’d covered Nigel’s face. He simply couldn’t look at it, because the features and the coloring were too close to health for comfort. It was too tempting to think that if he just waited long enough, and said some combination of words, his other half would sit up and reply to him.

Folly. And that ridiculous impotent optimism had to be put aside.

First, the disposition of the remains. And then he had work to do.

Colin reached over and tucked a fold of the silk in tighter under the body. The concept of prayer, for an angel, was foreign. For one thing, he could make entreaties directly to the Maker, so sending up wishes or hopes upon the air was not necessary. For another, prayer was typically rooted in helplessness or despair, and historically neither was something he’d ever felt.

Tipping the bottle over the body, he poured the clear liquor Nigel had favored out in a steady stream from head to toe; then he took a long drink, put up his palm, and summoned heat. As he cast the energy forth, the super-charged molecules combusted in a burst of white flame, the silver blood and the gin creating an ignition platform.

He stepped back. Kept drinking.

Smoke the color of snow wafted up as Nigel was cremated, and as Colin watched, he thought that the billowing white waves were a kind of prayer—or at least the closest he would ever get to one.

He ended up on the ground, sitting with his legs crossed. The consumption was taking longer than he had thought, and he would not leave until there was nothing left but ashes.

And then he was going to settle this score with Jim Heron.

With the very dagger Nigel had used upon himself.

Chapter Five

“We need her. What do you want from me?”

As Adrian waited for Jim to respond, he shifted his weight on his feet, trying to find some distribution of tonnage where his bad leg didn’t feel like it was in a meat grinder. No luck.

Jim glared up at the stairs Sissy had just put to use. “I don’t want her involved in this.”

“Yeah. You’ve said that.” Adrian glanced around at the total absence of chairs and sofas in the front foyer. “No offense, but I gotta take a load off.”

Limping across the shallow space, he headed for the parlor over on the left side of the house. When they’d first moved in—how long ago was that? A week? Fifteen years?—the house had been entering the final throes of age-onset molting: Wallpaper had been curling up in the corners of rooms, ceilings had been stained and flaking, old Victorian Orientals had been threadbare and unraveling.

Now? As he entered the sitting room, the velvets on the sofas, the silk of the drapes, the molding around the bookcases and the tops of the varnished tables were all pristine—as if he’d walked into a carefully preserved museum piece of life in the late eighteen hundreds. The same was true of that kitchen they hung out in¸ the forties-era appliances suddenly working like a collection of brand-new GEs, the Formica gleaming showroom-fresh. Upstairs was the same deal, too, all the lace in the privacy curtains and the girlie bedspreads magically filling their own holes and fixing their frays. Creepy shit—at first he’d assumed it was because someone, not him, was cleaning stuff. But no Dyson job could restitch a rug, repair the hem of a chair, replaster a wall.

There was so much else to worry about, though.

As he breathed in, the lingering stench of smoke sharpened the air, and he looked to the hearth. The charred detritus in and around the burned logs looked like paper, as if someone had tried to burn up an old set of encyclopedias. But nah, it wasn’t that. The shit was the remains of all the sheeting that had been draped over the old furniture. Sissy had been the one who dragged everything over to the fireplace and lit the match.

Can you say Phhhhhu-mp!

The smoke damage had charred the walls around the hearth, and that forty-by-twenty-foot rug, even though it was doing the Oriental carpet version of Botox with the anti-aging, had been toasted but good in a semi-circle.

They’d probably lost their security deposit, thanks to her.

And hell, maybe Jim had a point. If Sissy was already lighting things up … this recon trip Jim was about to head off into wasn’t going to help her mellow out.