Immortal (Fallen Angels #6)(48)
Author: J.R. Ward

“What happened to your hood ornament?”

“Happy accident.”

She gave him a wave, and a moment later she was gone, easing on down the road, maybe to Hell … maybe to a sale at Neiman’s.

“Goddamn bitch.”

Ad limped over to one of the other sheets of plywood by the Explorer and muscled the thing over to the next window. Probably was a bad idea, pulling a DIY on a house like this—what with the whole architectural-integrity/historic-building thing going on. But he had to do something to improve their situation. As it was, all he did nowadays was creep around and complain about the aches and pains he’d taken on.

So this was what eighty felt like for humans, huh.

Shit, he could only hope Matthias was putting the sex drive he’d given the guy to good use—

With a feeling of abject dread, Ad stopped what he was doing and looked through the opening into the parlor. Over on the dusty, bare floor, the book that Devina had supposedly written was right where Sissy had left it.

Oh, God, he thought. What if …

Propping the heavy sheet up, he followed a horrible instinct and stepped through the opening with a grunt. His boots crunched on broken glass—not from the windows as they had blown out onto the lawn, but because of the mirrors and lamps that had cracked from the change in pressure before being consumed by the portal.

Bending down, he picked the book up and leafed through it. The sentences were utter nonsense to him, but that wasn’t what got him worried. The letters … the words … didn’t look even remotely Latin—and though he wasn’t multi-lingual in the slightest, he should have at least recognized some prefixes or suffixes that were common to English words.

Nothing. Hell, it was more symbols than alphabet.

And yet Sissy was reading it just fine.

As he started to wonder how that was possible, warning bells rang in his head.

Stretching his palm out across the kitchen table, Jim knew Sissy was lying to him. Something had happened between their little excursion out and her bolting to come home alone. But whatever it was seemed less important than getting her to believe what he was telling her.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I wish I were Bryan Reynolds or Stanley Tatum. I’m not.”

There was a heartbeat of silence and then she cracked a smile. “You mean Ryan Reynolds or Channing Tatum.”

“Yeah, whoever they are.”

The lift to her lips didn’t last long. “I don’t know wh— er, what to believe.”

“You don’t have to make up your mind now. You don’t have to make up your mind at all.”

Another long pause. “How did they … what happened with your mother?”

His heart skipped a beat and every molecule in his body screamed for him to get up from the chair and walk out of the room. Instead, he took a sharp inhale on his Marlboro and retracted his hand, using the thing to bring the ashtray he was using closer to him.

Even with the TO, he had to clear his throat. “We lived out on a farm. My mom and I worked it, and we made a pretty good living. I was in school, but summers, early mornings, late nights … I helped as much as I could. One thing about rural places: not a lot of money around. People tend to scrape by and that’s okay, as long as there isn’t an external imperative to do otherwise. Like drugs.”

Every time he blinked, he saw flashes of that horrible afternoon when he’d walked into the kitchen and found his mother in the process of dying a horrible death. Click—a close-up on her ashen face, her mouth struggling to work. Click—blood on the linoleum. Click—ripped clothes. And the shit came with the worst sound track imaginable, his mother’s voice nothing but a weak rasp, her breathing a wheeze. And the smell …

Fucking hell, it had been the potato-and-copper smell of fresh meat and blood, like when he’d taken the pigs in for slaughter.

“I didn’t stay to watch her die. She told me to run because they were still in the house. I didn’t want to leave her … she made me go. I ran out to the truck and flew down that fucking dirt road. They came after me, but I got away. Went to the cops. When I finally came back, she was gone. Her body was cold.”

“Oh … my God.”

“The guys who did it went into the court system, but they got out on bail. I figured out who they were—it wasn’t hard and I knew what to do to them even though I was young.” He shrugged as he tapped his ashes off the tip of his cigarette. “When you live on a farm, you learn about death. How to make it happen. I used her favorite kitchen knife and a saw I’d cut firewood up with. Plus a few other things I found at the three different scenes.” He leveled his eyes at her. “I made them suffer just like she did. And I will never be sorry for that. Never.”

Jesus Christ, when was the last time he’d spoken about this…?

Interview process for XOps, he thought. When they’d given him the psych screening—to make sure he was a good little sociopath.

“I’m so sorry,” she said hoarsely. “I can’t imagine what that was like.”

“Yeah, you can. I only lost her. You lost your whole family—and you saw them suffer, too. You were at your own grave site.” As she ducked her eyes, he cursed. “It’s because of what happened with my mother that I just couldn’t let you fucking go when I found you in that bathtub. I tried to save you. I tried to … get you to breathe … they had to peel me off you. I didn’t want you to die.”

As his eyes actually got teary, he curled up a fist to remind himself that he was a man, goddamn it. And that mostly worked.

“Jim, I—”

“All I want is for you to be safe and stay that way,” he said in a tight voice. “That’s it. That’s why … just don’t take off on me again, ’kay? You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack.”

“Do you still want me?” she blurted.

Okaaaaay, cue the coughing on his side. And not because he’d taken a bad drag. “Sissy, I—”

“Considering everything you just told me, I think you can afford to be honest. And I need … I need to know. One way or the other, even if it’s no—”

“Yeah, I fucking want you.”

Off in the distance, he heard nails being hammered, and sorry, he wasn’t feeling guilty at all about not helping his gimp-ass buddy go home-improvement. This had been a real ball-squeezer of a convo, but he was making headway with her. He could feel it.