Immortal (Fallen Angels #6)(57)
Author: J.R. Ward

She went for it before she knew what she was doing.

Picking the blade up, she felt its weight in her right hand, and turned to Jim.

“—me get some clothes on, okay?” he was saying. “Sissy? Can you hear me? Let me just get dressed, all right?”

He wheeled around as if looking for a pair of pants.

Something registered in the back of her mind, but she didn’t give it even one brain cell of thought. There were none to spare. That rage had taken over everything in her and around her.

“I can’t believe you fucking lied,” she said. “You bastard.”

Jim put those hands in front of himself again and backed up even further—until there was a crash like he’d knocked over a lamp, although she didn’t pay any attention to that.

“Sissy, you got this wrong—”

“You fucking bastard!”

All at once, everything that had happened to her since she’d gone out to that Hannaford supermarket came back to her—as she stalked Jim, all of the unjustness of each succeeding horror was made manifest in him. The pain and terror of death. The centuries of quasi-time suffering in Devina’s well. The raw mourning of her family and her lost life.

It was the perfect storm that created the super-wave in the ocean.

And that wave was going to come crashing down on Jim Heron.

Right now.

As if destiny agreed with her, he took one final step back and came up against the bar. He was still talking to her, and he twisted around as if attempting to judge which side to try to get around.

That Grim Reaper tattoo of his was yet another reminder of why he needed to die.

The rage lifted her arm up, the blade flashing in the candlelight.

She was going to kill him. Even though he was bigger and stronger, she knew that if she made one stabbing motion … it was going to be game-over.

Her fury was that great.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Jim watched through the eyes of another as the end of the war happened right in front of him. And there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it.

Trapped in Devina’s illusion of herself, frozen to the chair in the position she had arranged him in, he was roaring—but only on the inside. Outwardly, he was imprisoned and mute and unable to move, and as he watched with horror, he knew exactly how this was going to play out. Sissy was going to take that kitchen knife, lift it high over her head, and drive it right into Devina’s chest—and that demon was going to make sure there was a good target to hit.

As soon as that blade made contact with the demon? The war was over, and Devina won. After all, it was the choice that counted; it was the intent, not the outcome of actual death that mattered. That knife wasn’t going to do shit to the demon, but it was everything that counted: Sissy’s crossroads, even though engineered by Devina, was the test she was going to fail. That rage and hatred, the shit Nigel had been talking about, were carved into the tight lines of her face and her body, and she wasn’t just going to give in to them.

They had taken her over.

Ad was right; she was possessed.

Nooooooo, he screamed inside his prison of flesh. Sissy, no!

Devina leaned backwards over the bar, like she was scrambling to get out of the way and struck with indecision over which direction to take, but he knew better. She was giving Sissy every single opportunity in the world to score a kill shot.

God, he couldn’t believe this was how the demon got everything … the quick and the dead, the angels and the archangels, the Manse of Souls and Heaven above … all hers.

His vision became wavy from tears as his failure came home to roost. His mother … Sissy … Adrian and Eddie and the archangels …

It was all over.

And Devina knew it. From her contorted position at the bar, she shot him a look out of his own face with a sly, knowing wink.

Abruptly, time slowed down until Sissy all but froze in position, everything becoming hyper-focused—

Except … wait.

The slow-mo wasn’t a perception issue. Sissy really had stopped with the knife over her head, and her body poised to strike—and she stayed that way.

Devina frowned using Jim’s face, like her dance partner had missed a beat and stepped on her foot.

Sissy pivoted, still keeping the weapon up. Her eyes were hollows of what he knew them to be, but they were not completely insane. Especially as they narrowed on him.

“What are you doing?” Devina demanded in his voice.

Sissy lowered the blade and turned fully around—at the very moment one of the tears in his eyes slipped out and traveled down the illusion of Devina’s smooth cheek.

“What are you looking at,” Devina growled.

Sissy took a step forward toward him. And then another.

All he could do was try to communicate through the pupils that were not his own, begging her to see through the lie.

“What the fuck are you doing?” his voice demanded.

Sissy ignored Devina. Instead, she reached out with her free hand and seemed to touch the air above his head. Then she went down further and he felt her brush against the skin of his neck.

“Sissy,” Devina said. “Are you really this stupid?”

Please, God, he thought. Whatever you’re seeing, stick with it.

Sissy straightened abruptly and looked at Devina. “How did you do it?”

Jim watched the illusion of himself cross his arms over his chest. He was still naked, but his cock was no longer hard as a rock—apparently, Devina had lost her own arousal.

“I came here,” his voice said, “took her clothes off, and got ready to fuck her.”

Sissy glanced back and forth between them. And then she countered levelly, “No. You didn’t.”

As Sissy lowered the knife, she looked over at Jim—who was not, in fact, Jim. She wasn’t sure how she could explain the fact that every detail about him was correct, from the cowlick on the left side of his hair by the temple to the flecks in his blue eyes, from the tattoo on his back to the power in his chest—and yet it was not him.

Jim, the real one, was sitting in the chair. In spite of the fact that he appeared to be every inch the demon.

There were just two tiny details Devina had gotten wrong. Two things that, however accurate the demon’s imitation of him was, she had failed to nail.

The shaking hit Sissy the same way the fury had, rocking her from head to foot, making her feel as if the world were spinning even as she was pretty damn sure the hotel was on solid ground. And it was shortly after the blender routine took over that she realized she had a fucking knife in her hand.