The Taking (Seven Deadly Sins #3)(61)
Author: Erin McCarthy

But Felix spoke first. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

That was never a good start to a conversation. Regan stared at him. “Yes?”

“You know how I said that maybe the house or the journal is a conduit for Camille to enter this world from the spirit world?”

She nodded.

“Well, maybe it’s not the house or the journal. Maybe it’s Alcroft. Or maybe it’s me.”

Regan stared at him blankly. “Why would either of you be a conduit for the spirit of a woman who died a hundred and thirty years ago?”

Felix stared at her steadily, his hand twitching on hers. “Because Alcroft and I both knew Camille.”

And with those words, he shattered the last of her calm.

“What? That’s ridiculous! How could either one of you have known Camille?” Camille was dead long before Felix had been born.

“Because I’m immortal.”

Regan fought the urge to throw up, her heart hardening at the realization that the man she loved was lying to her in an insulting and bizarre way when she most needed him to be rational with her.

Felix took a deep breath and thought carefully before he spoke again. Regan was breathing hard, her expression incredulous. He knew he had to tell her the truth—the whole truth—so that they could protect her from whatever it was Camille was trying to do. He also wanted no secrets between them, not about something so important as his whole existence, his history, his punishment, his future, because Felix wanted a real relationship with Regan for as long as it was possible. But there was no easy way to tell someone you were immortal, a product of Hell, and blurting it out had obviously been a mistake.

“What you are about to hear is going to sound fantastical, but it is the truth. Remember that I love you, and I want to be with you, and that I’m telling you for that very reason and because I want you safe, okay?”She didn’t answer, just stared at him with wild eyes.

Felix forged ahead. “I was born in 1851, the illegitimate child of a free quadroon woman named Louisa Leblanc, and her French Creole lover Jean-Paul Arminault. I was named Felix after my father’s father, a triumph of my mother over Jean-Paul’s wealthy wife. She gave Jean-Paul a son first, and while an illegitimate first son didn’t merit my father’s last name, I did receive his father’s Christian name.”

Regan said nothing, but she had shifted slightly away from him on the edge of the bed, her face devoid of color and emotion except for two bright spots of pink on each cheek.

“I had a pleasant childhood,” he said, determined to spit it all out before she bolted from the room. “My parents loved each other, we had a house, money. I was apprenticed to a banker since I could pass for white and because my father had friends in high places. I had a love of fine things, and a burgeoning resentment of the doors that were shut to me because of the circumstances of my birth. I was materialistic, petulant. When my father died, we found ourselves without a home, and I lost my job. My mother saw her only recourse as serving herself up on a platter to whichever wealthy man would take her as his mistress. At her age, with a grown child, and no one to protect her, only the deviant or the infirm or the abusive were going to want her, and I knew this, yet was powerless to stop it.”

Felix still felt the shame and anger of that night, the horror of knowing he was a man finally, yet he could not take care of his own mother the way she had cared for him. That he had to stand there and let her be used and tossed aside by cold and uncaring men. It had been a bitter tonic on his tongue that night and it still was. “I hated myself for not being able to fix it. I hated that the ache of hunger in my belly was distracting and all-consuming and that I thought of it even more often than I thought of my mother, who was subjecting herself to the rejection and ridicule of men with too much money and too little compassion. So when a man approached me with warm bread and the promise of talent and charm that would guarantee my personal wealth, how could I say no?”

Rubbing the ring on his finger, back and forth, back and forth, Felix smiled at his own stupidity. “They say if something is too good to be true, it usually is. So I was given charm, elocution, access to rich, bored ladies who would pay most handsomely for my voodoo spells and potions, and simply for the privilege and titillation of doing something ‘beyond the pale.’ I had enough money to buy a beautiful house, to furnish it well, to set my mother up for life, to dress to the nines, and drink the finest wines. But what I didn’t realize was that by accepting that piece of bread and that man’s offer of all the advantages of immortality, of a life without death, that I was sentencing myself to an eternity of servitude to a man cast out of Heaven and residing in the very bowels of Hell.”

Regan still wasn’t speaking and it was starting to unnerve Felix. He’d expected that she would either interject a comment or protest or just run out of the room.

“A demon. You know, a fallen angel,” he added. “That is what Alcroft is, and I am bound to him, demon servant to demon master, until the world ends.” He held his ring up to show her. “Bound by my own greed.”

Felix paused, wanting a reaction of any kind.

After a second, Regan gave him one. “You know, when most people feel guilty for past behaviors, they have a few sleepless nights and vow to do better in the future. I think you’re the first man I’ve encountered who has attributed his flaws to a demon. I can see why you’re such a good tarot reader. You spin quite a story.”

Felix gritted his teeth. “It’s not a story. I know it sounds insane, but it’s the truth.”

“There is no such thing as immortality, and I love how you cast my ex-husband as the villain in your tale.” Regan scoffed. “Here I was wondering about my sanity. Yours is nonexistent and I want you to pack your bags and leave.”

“Wait a minute.” Felix tried to fight his irritation, but a sharpness crept into his voice. “You can believe what you just saw on that videotape—you can accept that a dead woman can come back after a hundred years and enter your body—but you can’t believe that demons exist or that immortality is a possibility?”

“That’s crazy, yes, but I saw it, I’ve felt it. And a ghost is, I don’t know … normal. A spirit that can open a door is a hell of a lot different than you telling me you’re sitting here in the flesh, living and eating and breathing like anyone else and yet you’ll never die? That’s nuts.”