Possession (Fallen Angels #5)(20)
Author: J.R. Ward

“Actually—” Jim had to clear his throat. “He’s everybody’s.”

She didn’t hear him, though, and that was okay. She was murmuring to Dog, soothing him—and likely, by extension, herself.

Jim scrubbed his face. In his negotiating with Devina, he’d never thought beyond the deal—hadn’t considered what would happen if Sissy actually was sent back.

“Do you want some food?” he asked.

She didn’t answer him, her attention solely on the animal.

“I’ll go get you some …” Well, probably not eggs, no. But maybe he could get something delivered—it was before midnight. “I’ll be right back.”

Ducking out, he—

Ran right into Adrian. The other angel was standing in the second-story foyer, his face grim, his eyes sharp.

The rise of one of his brows was all the comment that had to be made: Your bedroom. Really.

“It’s not that,” Jim growled. “For f**k’s sake, she’s a goddamn child.”

All that got him was the second brow hitting that dark hairline: Uh-huh. Right.

“Fuck you, Adrian, for real.”

If that angel wanted to make up shit in his head, there was nothing Jim could do about it. He knew where he stood with Sissy—he’d rescued her, and now he was going to take care of her until the war was over. After that? Hopefully he won, and she could go live in the Manse of Souls, where she belonged.

That was all there was to it. He might have murdered for a living, might have violated a thousand different laws in the process, might have had sex with whores and prostitutes and women who were capable of cracking skulls and killing blindfolded … but he’d never been with a virgin, and he sure as hell was not starting now.

And certainly not ever with Sissy.

God knew, she had already been through enough—

Dimly, he wondered why he was lecturing himself on the topic. Like any of that sort of thing could ever be a reality.

“Do you want food?” Jim asked the other angel. When all Ad did was shake his head, Jim shrugged and headed down for the kitchen, where he’d left his phone.

As he jogged along, it dawned on him that Sissy was going to have a lot of questions.

If he were smart, he’d start working on the answers now.

Shit. This was going to be another long night.

Chapter Nine

Mornings were always the best for working.

As Cait sat in the sunshine, the light fell across her drafting table from over on the left, the illumination so much better than anything that came from a lamp. In its crystal-clear glow, the red of the little chocolate Lab’s collar was ruby brilliant, and his brown coat seemed made of velvet, and the happy green of the blades of grass under his paws was bright as an emerald.

No more seasonal affective disorder for her—no matter how bad or long the upstate winter got, since she’d moved in here, she’d been free of the January blues.

And the light meant warmth, too. Although it was just before seven a.m., and the morning temperature itself was in the mid-forties, the all-season porch she worked out of was tropical-toasty, the three sides of floor-to-ceiling windows giving her a nice view of her shallow backyard with its bushes and budding trees.

Reaching out blindly, her palm found her stainless-steel mug, and she took yet another deep drink of her coffee. She hadn’t slept much over the course of the night, those two men circling in her head, images of what they’d looked like, and sound bites of what they’d spoken, and close-ups of the way they’d stared at her, going around and around and around. She’d finally given up hope of anything REM-ish at five, and had gotten out of bed to make the first of two pots of coffee. Fortunately, solace had come as soon as she had sat in her padded chair.

Leaning back into the paper, she completed the finishing, colored ink touches on the puppy’s eye, giving him a lift to his cocoa brow, and tiny dark lashes that flared, and a little flash of silvery white around the edge of his iris.

Done.

But she double-checked anyway, capping the pen and returning it to its set before reviewing every inch of the two-foot-by-one-foot drawing. The puppy was in the process of sniffing at a bird, his tail in the air, his triangle ears pricked, his chubby legs ready to rear backward if the robin in front of him turned out to be foe rather than friend. The text was going to be mounted above his back, so she’d left a six-inch square blank space in the pale blue sky for the words.

“Good,” she said, as if she were her own student.

Unfastening the four corners, she carefully took the sheet and carried it over to the six-foot-long portable tables she’d set up on the solid-wall side of the room. This was page twelve of the book, and she put it at the end of the lineup.

Yup, this layout thing was a critical part of her process, she thought. It gave her a far more complete vision of the work—inevitably, she unconsciously reverted back to certain poses, spatial orientations, expressions, nuances. This way of measuring the project as a whole, all at once, helped her avoid repetitions that probably only she noticed, but which were defects nonetheless.

God … she loved children’s books. The simplicity of the lessons, the clarity of the colors, the rhythms of the words … there was something to be said for a child’s binary grasp of the world. Good was good. Bad was bad. Things that were dangerous were stoves, open flames, and light sockets—all easily avoided. And the bogeyman in your closet was always your summer camp sleeping bag wedged into a corner—never, ever something that could really hurt you.

From out of the corner of her eye, the messed-up copy of today’s Caldwell Courier Journal loomed even though it was lying flat on her coffee table. She hadn’t gone very far into it to find the information she’d been looking for—the article on Sissy Barten’s funeral was below the fold on the first page. Services were at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with burial at Pine Grove Cemetery immediately following.

She’d be there at the mass, of course.

Pushing her hair behind her ears, she turned back to her workspace … and took a moment to mourn the fact that Sissy would never enjoy another morning like this—and if her parents and family ever did again? It was a good decade away. At least.

She’d met the mother and father at parents’ weekend back in the fall, when Sissy had brought them to the art department’s facility and showed them her wonderful pencil drawings.

It was so eerie to think back to when Cait had shaken those hands and smiled and offered sincere praise. In that moment, if someone had told her the girl would be dead six months later? Inconceivable.