Immortal (Fallen Angels #6)(11)
Author: J.R. Ward

“And why did you tell her?” Jim demanded from the doorway. “What the fuck is that all about?”

“Tell her about what?”

“About Devina and me.”

Ad turned around. “I didn’t—”

“Bullshit.”

Ad leaned forward even though his hips let out a holler. “Let me make this perfectly clear—I didn’t say one goddamn thing about you and Devina. You think I want to make this situation worse than it already is?”

Jim stalked into the room, going all caged-animal as he paced around. “Then how did she know—”

“Here it is.”

As Sissy came in with the book, Jim froze and just stared at her—and in the strained silence, the only thing that came to Ad’s mind was … why the fuck couldn’t the bunch of them, at least once, have something go their way. Because the math was looking really bad at the moment: Jim had clearly not said anything about his demon lover. And Ad might be an asshole, but he knew every word that had come out of his own mouth, and he sure as shit hadn’t spilled.

There was only one other source of that knowledge.

“Now, are you going to tell me about Purgatory,” Sissy said. “Or are you two going to try to get through these stereo instructions on your own?”

Jim let off a fantastic string of curses that did nothing to share any information, but did suggest that inanimate objects were in imminent danger of getting thrown.

When the savior finally went quiet, Ad found himself wanting to rub his face with a piece of sandpaper. ’Cause that would be less painful than all this bullshit.

Clearly, the pulpit was his and no one else’s. “Okay, so we have a boss—”

“God,” Sissy cut in.

“No. Although the Creator is a huge part of everything.” Well, duh on that one. “And Jim’s bright idea is to go and bring him back.”

“He’s dead? I thought we were all immortal.”

Hadn’t he come in here to sit down? He picked a sofa and sank into it with all the grace of a knapsack falling off a counter. “Our boss is no longer in existence, how about that.”

“So there is a way out of here? Like, this life—or whatever it is.”

“No.” He thought of Eddie, but decided, given Sissy’s too-intense expression, he was going to keep quiet on that one. ’Nuff to worry about already. “Our boss is in Purgatory, and that’s just a different kind of immortal hell.”

“There has to be a way of doing this without her,” Jim growled in the corner.

Sissy leveled a stare at the guy that could have blown a hole through a bank safe. “You wanna ask your girlfriend? Maybe she can help.”

Jim’s eyes burned across the room. But he didn’t say anything else, the whole by-the-short-hairs thing shutting him up.

Ad shook his head. Man, now he knew how Eddie had felt back in the beginning when Jim and he had gone at each other.

“That book”—Ad pointed to the damn thing—“does it have anything in there about Purgatory? That’s what we need to know. I can’t read it—Jim can’t, either. Eddie could, but he forgot his reading glasses in Heaven.”

Sissy came over and sat down on the opposite couch, putting the ancient tome on the short-legged coffee table. The book creaked as she opened it, and a subtle glow seemed to be released by the parchment pages, like it was its own reading light.

Okay, that was one book that was never making it onto the New York Times list. There was one and only one copy, and it was not supposed to be in the hands of the angels. Made from the skin of sinners, its “ink” supposedly came from the ejaculate of Devina’s minions. Who knew who had composed it. The thing was pure evil, inside and out.

If Devina knew they had the thing? Big fun.

“There’s no table of contents,” Sissy muttered as she idly flipped through. The writing was so dense, it was as if each page had been brushstroked in black, and it made his head hurt just trying to focus that tight. “And there’s no internal organization, either. I’ve spent hours going through it … and I’m not sure how helpful it’s going to be about anything.”

“Frankly, I’m impressed you can read even a word of it,” Ad muttered.

“Well, I took Latin in high school.”

“Is that what it is?”

“Or a derivative of it. The good news is, the longer I stick with it, the easier the going gets.” Sissy looked over at Jim. “So tell me what you want to do, and I’ll see if I can find something on it.”

Jim stopped by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and stared outside. With the morning sun hitting his face, he looked worn-out, instead of refreshed. And that did not bode well for them.

Ad cleared his throat. “I got out only because I was freed by the Creator—thanks to Nigel going to Him.”

“You mean Purgatory?” Sissy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Holy … wait, you’ve been there?” Sissy shook her head. “Boy, all these things I thought were made up … I should have listened more in Sunday school, huh.”

“Like I said, I was freed at the Creator’s will, and I don’t know of anyone who’s gone there and gotten out on their own.” Ad shifted his eyes to the savior. “I will say this—you won’t have a lot of time, Jim. Once you’re over there, you start to get into trouble almost immediately. The true wearing down takes a while, but you begin to lose yourself directly upon entry. By the time Eddie came in, I was nearly a goner. And I later found out I had been there only a short time.”

“Hell was like that for me,” Sissy said quietly. “It was … forever.”

Jim’s eyebrow began to twitch and he brushed at the thing.

“So you’re going there to bring this guy back—why?” she asked.

“I don’t have a choice,” Jim muttered as he patted his pockets. Taking out a pack of Marlboros, he lit up. “Either we get Nigel back or I end up taking his place—and after all this shit? I want to be the one who takes down Devina. Plus it’s the right thing to do.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I killed him. Not directly, but his death is my fault, and even though I’m a professional soldier, it’s one I can’t live with.”

Sissy stared at the man for the longest time. Then she ducked her head into the book and went back to the first page. “Anyone got a pad of paper around here—and a pen?”