“Yes,” Faith said thoughtfully. “I mean, no. No, we don’t have that kind of time.” She looked out to the front of the truck and then frowned. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”
“What? Why?” he demanded to know. “It’s not like we’re taking a leisurely Sunday drive here. Weren’t you the one that just said we had to go?”
“I know,” was all she said before alighting from the truck. Leo watched in irritated bafflement as she began to walk away.
Man she has a nice ass, he found himself thinking almost immediately as he watched the way her body moved beneath the dress she wore. While the skirt itself had a soft flowing movement to it, the h*ps of it had been tailored snugly against her, accentuating the rounded shelf of her backside. Had that part of his personality and masculine cravings still been alive, had he just been in a bar looking across the way at her, he would have made his way over to her based on her booty alone. He readily admitted that he’d always had an itch where fine ass was concerned. And as pretty as she was, the albinism wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference to him.
And while he was thinking about it, she was curvy in all kinds of other places, too. It wasn’t the first time he was noticing and it wasn’t likely to be the last, even if he tried to lecture himself about how she wasn’t a real woman. It was a damn shame she wasn’t a real woman. Not a human one anyway. Certainly not by any stretch of his imagination. She was one of those things. A Nightwalker. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
Faith came to a halt about ten feet in front of the truck and promptly began to…
…talk to herself. Or, wait, not herself but the empty air. She didn’t seem like she was babbling inanely, however. It looked as though she were having a conversation with someone, a gentle conversation, a persuasive one, if he was reading her body language right. And if there was one thing he prided himself on, it was his ability to size up a situation and the people in it with rapidity and uncanny accuracy.
Except for when you fell for Chatha’s ruse.
Leo’s hands clenched tighter on the steering wheel when the thought slipped snidely by. It always felt like he was on the tipping point of complete and utter rage lately. He kept needing to rein himself in, kept finding himself clenching his fists while he fantasized about doing violent harm to something…anything.
Faith smiled then and reached out as if to touch something. And just like that, in a brilliant shimmer of blue energy, he saw who she was talking to come luminously to life. It was a woman, with gaunt features and troubled eyes. She looked to have black hair, but it was hard to tell as it was filtering through blue light. But what really shocked him was that she was wearing some sort of costume, including a corseted bodice that accentuated her figure and a full-length dress with a skirt that ended in a flounce of petticoats.
Leo stared. Even though he knew he’d look like a rude sort of a moron, he couldn’t help himself. As he watched, Faith took the woman’s hand in hers, clasping it with warmth and vehemence up against her breastbone, all the while talking, petting, and making the woman smile.
After a minute Faith dropped the woman’s hand and the moment she did so the woman disappeared, as though her visibility were completely dependent on Faith’s touch. Faith turned back toward the truck, her long fingers absently smoothing back that invisible strand of hair again, even though nothing had yet escaped the tight knot. She opened the door to the truck and climbed back in.
“Okay, we can go now,” she said.
Leo gaped at her.
“We can go? That’s it? No explanation of who that woman was and how you did…what you just did?” he said with incredulity.
Faith sighed softly and then turned her body to face him. “When we die, we move our spirits from one plane to the next. It is a plane of peace and comfort that provides anything that is needed. I guess you might call it heaven, in your religion. It’s called many things in many religions, but the principle is the same. And there’s a reason for that. It’s because instinctively we know there is another world beyond this one, and that it is a place without pain or disease or abuse.” She hesitated, her clean white teeth worrying the plushness of her bottom lip as she seemingly debated what to tell him next. “When we die we immediately get sent to this place. Except…sometimes something happens and it keeps us from going. It traps us here.” She looked down, watching herself smooth wrinkles out of her dress by running soft, slow pressure along the length of it. “Without getting into too much detail, what I do is…I help them find their way.”
“So that,” he pointed toward the hood of the car, “was a ghost? Is that what you’re telling me?” He could hear himself sounding more and more shrill, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
“Not at all,” she said, “she’s a soul.”
“What the hell difference does that make?” he demanded of her.
She stopped all her fidgeting and went severely serious in the next moment, meeting his accusatory stare with an aggressive one of her own.
“It makes a hell of a lot of difference to the person trapped here, I assure you,” she bit out. But then she seemed to rein her temper back in. “If you’ve learned anything about the Nightwalker world, you know nothing is what you might expect or assume it to be. Souls get trapped here in two ways. One, they won’t let themselves go. They fight death so hard, resist the natural process for so long, that they miss their opportunity to cross. Like, say, a boat in the water that needs to go past a drawbridge to get to its destination, but instead of going forward with the current they throw the engines into full reverse. Eventually the drawbridge closes and the boat has missed its opportunity.”
“And two?” he asked, feeling somehow disturbed by the concept of a trapped soul, a stupid sort of empathy that made him very uncomfortable.
“Someone or something purposely holds them here. There are spells and such that can achieve that. But there are also…there’s another force that can do it very easily. They are called Wraiths. If they kill someone and are touching that person at the time of its death, they will trap the soul and use its pain and torment to fuel themselves, to fuel their power. It takes someone like me, a Night Angel, to lead them through portals that only we can find. The wind…” She trailed off. “I guess you don’t really care about all of this.”
Leo wished he could say that he didn’t. But he did. In spite of himself he was eaten up with curiosity as to how things in this other world worked. Actually, she made him curious. Maybe because she was a Nightwalker in a pretty, bearable package, or because listening to her made him want to know more if for no other reason than to continue hearing the soft sweetness of her tone of voice. She was strong and vibrant when needed, but moments like this, when she turned gentle and almost a little sad…it made him lean in and want more. More of…something.
“The wind?” he prompted after a long moment.
She looked at him sideways through the corner of her eyes, her brow wrinkling a little bit as she tried to decipher his intent. He kept his expression carefully neutral, nothing discouraging and nothing encouraging. He hoped that whatever she could see on his scroll didn’t interfere with her responding to him. But there was nothing he could do about that, so he just let her decide how to dictate the moment.
“The wind blows over everything. There’s nothing it doesn’t touch, almost no corner it can’t get through to. Angels can get the entire topography of an area for miles around in any direction just through our sense of the wind. But it also allows us to feel the cusps. The cusps are small alcoves in the edge of normal perception…and they are the thinnest point between here and the next plane. We can find them and lead the trapped soul to them.”
“Is that what you did? You led her to the afterlife?”
“No. I merely promised her that, if she remained here, I would come back for her and help her then. I realize time is of the essence for Jackson, and this soul has already been here for over one hundred years. She can wait a little bit longer. I will come back and I will take care of her,” she said with determination.
“But why not now? How long could it possibly take?”
“Not long at all, actually,” she said. “But I can’t help her like this.” She indicated her appearance.
“You mean…because you’re in sunlight?”
Faith nodded.
Then, for a bright and shining moment, he really understood that this state of being was very unnatural for her. That in its own way it troubled and hurt her.
“Are you all right like this? Is…is this going to cause you pain?” he asked, unable to keep himself aloof. He wasn’t that much of a prick…was he?
“Eventually, if I stay in daylight long enough…yes, it will become increasingly more painful. Physically as well as…well, it’s very painful to see a tortured soul like that and know I can’t help her. Leaving her behind where she isn’t really safe disturbs me.”
“I don’t doubt that in the least,” Leo said thoughtfully.
Not even realizing he was going to do it, he reached out and brushed a thumb over the powder-soft cheek closest to him, momentarily marveling over how dark his Hispanic complexion was in contrast to all of that white…and yet, when she was out of sunlight, she would return to her black coloring and then it would be he who would seem paler than she was.
But coloring was not what compelled him to touch her, and when she startled at the contact and looked at him questioningly, he should have snatched his hand away. He didn’t want to engender a sense of connection between them, a sense of camaraderie. He wasn’t in this to make a new friend, only to save what was left of an old one. But the more he felt the fragile softness of her, the more he wanted to stay in contact.
What the hell is wrong with you? he asked himself meanly. Keep your goddamn head on straight.
What she had told him only proved what he’d been thinking all along. These things were dangerous and they were carriers of their own unique brand of absolute power. Power that could crush humans by the hundreds—perhaps even thousands—if they put their mind to it. And he knew he and every other ignorant son-of-a-bitch human out there was going to get caught in the crossfire and there was nothing they or he could do about it.
Soft to the touch she might be, but he had seen her powerful side. She was strong, self-assured, and did not need someone to point her in a certain direction and give her instructions on what to do next. She just rolled up her sleeves, turned her brain on to maximum and began to plow through one moment at a time. Being a mercenary, when a plan went south, it forced him to work off the cuff and…well, that was his forte. He could appreciate the skill for what it was. But it was easy to dive right in if you’d been born with the power to back it up.
Or…at least he thought she’d been born with it. When it came right down to it, he didn’t know anything at all about any of them, and that really kinda scared the piss out of him. Being out here, chasing more Nightwalkers down with only her for backup…yeah, it really did scare the piss out of him.
Leo pulled away from her, though not as quickly as he probably should have, his fingertips lingering just a moment or two too long. It was hard to pull away from something that soft and, well, comfortable. That was the word for it. In the face of all her strangeness, there was just something about her that made him feel comfortable.
And comfortable was the last damn thing he needed to be around any of her kind.
He threw the truck into gear and moved them down the road. Faith was glad to have his focus and his hands pointed in another direction. There was no way of explaining how much his touch, as unexpectedly tender as it had been, had disturbed her. The brush of his thumb had swiped a streak of heat across her cheek, the sensation startling. It was all she could do to keep herself from touching the still-tingling spot. She’d never been touched by a live human being before. They’d always been souls…apparitions with no corporeal state. And while she’d met her share of Bodywalkers before, this was somehow different. He didn’t have half the ability they had, but he did have something incredibly dynamic about him. And it wasn’t just the anger and rage he kept bludgeoning her with. It was…indefinable, really. He just seemed so alive.
“Better grab your belt.”
“My…?” Faith looked down at the dress she was wearing. It didn’t have a belt. She hadn’t seen the use for it.
He abruptly leaned toward her, one muscular arm shooting out so close to her face that she pressed farther back into her seat and drew a startled breath. But instead of hitting her which, she had to confess, she’d thought he was about to do, he grabbed hold of the seatbelt over her right shoulder. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, he used the other to drag the belt across her and snap it in.
“What? Why?” he demanded to know. “It’s not like we’re taking a leisurely Sunday drive here. Weren’t you the one that just said we had to go?”
“I know,” was all she said before alighting from the truck. Leo watched in irritated bafflement as she began to walk away.
Man she has a nice ass, he found himself thinking almost immediately as he watched the way her body moved beneath the dress she wore. While the skirt itself had a soft flowing movement to it, the h*ps of it had been tailored snugly against her, accentuating the rounded shelf of her backside. Had that part of his personality and masculine cravings still been alive, had he just been in a bar looking across the way at her, he would have made his way over to her based on her booty alone. He readily admitted that he’d always had an itch where fine ass was concerned. And as pretty as she was, the albinism wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference to him.
And while he was thinking about it, she was curvy in all kinds of other places, too. It wasn’t the first time he was noticing and it wasn’t likely to be the last, even if he tried to lecture himself about how she wasn’t a real woman. It was a damn shame she wasn’t a real woman. Not a human one anyway. Certainly not by any stretch of his imagination. She was one of those things. A Nightwalker. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
Faith came to a halt about ten feet in front of the truck and promptly began to…
…talk to herself. Or, wait, not herself but the empty air. She didn’t seem like she was babbling inanely, however. It looked as though she were having a conversation with someone, a gentle conversation, a persuasive one, if he was reading her body language right. And if there was one thing he prided himself on, it was his ability to size up a situation and the people in it with rapidity and uncanny accuracy.
Except for when you fell for Chatha’s ruse.
Leo’s hands clenched tighter on the steering wheel when the thought slipped snidely by. It always felt like he was on the tipping point of complete and utter rage lately. He kept needing to rein himself in, kept finding himself clenching his fists while he fantasized about doing violent harm to something…anything.
Faith smiled then and reached out as if to touch something. And just like that, in a brilliant shimmer of blue energy, he saw who she was talking to come luminously to life. It was a woman, with gaunt features and troubled eyes. She looked to have black hair, but it was hard to tell as it was filtering through blue light. But what really shocked him was that she was wearing some sort of costume, including a corseted bodice that accentuated her figure and a full-length dress with a skirt that ended in a flounce of petticoats.
Leo stared. Even though he knew he’d look like a rude sort of a moron, he couldn’t help himself. As he watched, Faith took the woman’s hand in hers, clasping it with warmth and vehemence up against her breastbone, all the while talking, petting, and making the woman smile.
After a minute Faith dropped the woman’s hand and the moment she did so the woman disappeared, as though her visibility were completely dependent on Faith’s touch. Faith turned back toward the truck, her long fingers absently smoothing back that invisible strand of hair again, even though nothing had yet escaped the tight knot. She opened the door to the truck and climbed back in.
“Okay, we can go now,” she said.
Leo gaped at her.
“We can go? That’s it? No explanation of who that woman was and how you did…what you just did?” he said with incredulity.
Faith sighed softly and then turned her body to face him. “When we die, we move our spirits from one plane to the next. It is a plane of peace and comfort that provides anything that is needed. I guess you might call it heaven, in your religion. It’s called many things in many religions, but the principle is the same. And there’s a reason for that. It’s because instinctively we know there is another world beyond this one, and that it is a place without pain or disease or abuse.” She hesitated, her clean white teeth worrying the plushness of her bottom lip as she seemingly debated what to tell him next. “When we die we immediately get sent to this place. Except…sometimes something happens and it keeps us from going. It traps us here.” She looked down, watching herself smooth wrinkles out of her dress by running soft, slow pressure along the length of it. “Without getting into too much detail, what I do is…I help them find their way.”
“So that,” he pointed toward the hood of the car, “was a ghost? Is that what you’re telling me?” He could hear himself sounding more and more shrill, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
“Not at all,” she said, “she’s a soul.”
“What the hell difference does that make?” he demanded of her.
She stopped all her fidgeting and went severely serious in the next moment, meeting his accusatory stare with an aggressive one of her own.
“It makes a hell of a lot of difference to the person trapped here, I assure you,” she bit out. But then she seemed to rein her temper back in. “If you’ve learned anything about the Nightwalker world, you know nothing is what you might expect or assume it to be. Souls get trapped here in two ways. One, they won’t let themselves go. They fight death so hard, resist the natural process for so long, that they miss their opportunity to cross. Like, say, a boat in the water that needs to go past a drawbridge to get to its destination, but instead of going forward with the current they throw the engines into full reverse. Eventually the drawbridge closes and the boat has missed its opportunity.”
“And two?” he asked, feeling somehow disturbed by the concept of a trapped soul, a stupid sort of empathy that made him very uncomfortable.
“Someone or something purposely holds them here. There are spells and such that can achieve that. But there are also…there’s another force that can do it very easily. They are called Wraiths. If they kill someone and are touching that person at the time of its death, they will trap the soul and use its pain and torment to fuel themselves, to fuel their power. It takes someone like me, a Night Angel, to lead them through portals that only we can find. The wind…” She trailed off. “I guess you don’t really care about all of this.”
Leo wished he could say that he didn’t. But he did. In spite of himself he was eaten up with curiosity as to how things in this other world worked. Actually, she made him curious. Maybe because she was a Nightwalker in a pretty, bearable package, or because listening to her made him want to know more if for no other reason than to continue hearing the soft sweetness of her tone of voice. She was strong and vibrant when needed, but moments like this, when she turned gentle and almost a little sad…it made him lean in and want more. More of…something.
“The wind?” he prompted after a long moment.
She looked at him sideways through the corner of her eyes, her brow wrinkling a little bit as she tried to decipher his intent. He kept his expression carefully neutral, nothing discouraging and nothing encouraging. He hoped that whatever she could see on his scroll didn’t interfere with her responding to him. But there was nothing he could do about that, so he just let her decide how to dictate the moment.
“The wind blows over everything. There’s nothing it doesn’t touch, almost no corner it can’t get through to. Angels can get the entire topography of an area for miles around in any direction just through our sense of the wind. But it also allows us to feel the cusps. The cusps are small alcoves in the edge of normal perception…and they are the thinnest point between here and the next plane. We can find them and lead the trapped soul to them.”
“Is that what you did? You led her to the afterlife?”
“No. I merely promised her that, if she remained here, I would come back for her and help her then. I realize time is of the essence for Jackson, and this soul has already been here for over one hundred years. She can wait a little bit longer. I will come back and I will take care of her,” she said with determination.
“But why not now? How long could it possibly take?”
“Not long at all, actually,” she said. “But I can’t help her like this.” She indicated her appearance.
“You mean…because you’re in sunlight?”
Faith nodded.
Then, for a bright and shining moment, he really understood that this state of being was very unnatural for her. That in its own way it troubled and hurt her.
“Are you all right like this? Is…is this going to cause you pain?” he asked, unable to keep himself aloof. He wasn’t that much of a prick…was he?
“Eventually, if I stay in daylight long enough…yes, it will become increasingly more painful. Physically as well as…well, it’s very painful to see a tortured soul like that and know I can’t help her. Leaving her behind where she isn’t really safe disturbs me.”
“I don’t doubt that in the least,” Leo said thoughtfully.
Not even realizing he was going to do it, he reached out and brushed a thumb over the powder-soft cheek closest to him, momentarily marveling over how dark his Hispanic complexion was in contrast to all of that white…and yet, when she was out of sunlight, she would return to her black coloring and then it would be he who would seem paler than she was.
But coloring was not what compelled him to touch her, and when she startled at the contact and looked at him questioningly, he should have snatched his hand away. He didn’t want to engender a sense of connection between them, a sense of camaraderie. He wasn’t in this to make a new friend, only to save what was left of an old one. But the more he felt the fragile softness of her, the more he wanted to stay in contact.
What the hell is wrong with you? he asked himself meanly. Keep your goddamn head on straight.
What she had told him only proved what he’d been thinking all along. These things were dangerous and they were carriers of their own unique brand of absolute power. Power that could crush humans by the hundreds—perhaps even thousands—if they put their mind to it. And he knew he and every other ignorant son-of-a-bitch human out there was going to get caught in the crossfire and there was nothing they or he could do about it.
Soft to the touch she might be, but he had seen her powerful side. She was strong, self-assured, and did not need someone to point her in a certain direction and give her instructions on what to do next. She just rolled up her sleeves, turned her brain on to maximum and began to plow through one moment at a time. Being a mercenary, when a plan went south, it forced him to work off the cuff and…well, that was his forte. He could appreciate the skill for what it was. But it was easy to dive right in if you’d been born with the power to back it up.
Or…at least he thought she’d been born with it. When it came right down to it, he didn’t know anything at all about any of them, and that really kinda scared the piss out of him. Being out here, chasing more Nightwalkers down with only her for backup…yeah, it really did scare the piss out of him.
Leo pulled away from her, though not as quickly as he probably should have, his fingertips lingering just a moment or two too long. It was hard to pull away from something that soft and, well, comfortable. That was the word for it. In the face of all her strangeness, there was just something about her that made him feel comfortable.
And comfortable was the last damn thing he needed to be around any of her kind.
He threw the truck into gear and moved them down the road. Faith was glad to have his focus and his hands pointed in another direction. There was no way of explaining how much his touch, as unexpectedly tender as it had been, had disturbed her. The brush of his thumb had swiped a streak of heat across her cheek, the sensation startling. It was all she could do to keep herself from touching the still-tingling spot. She’d never been touched by a live human being before. They’d always been souls…apparitions with no corporeal state. And while she’d met her share of Bodywalkers before, this was somehow different. He didn’t have half the ability they had, but he did have something incredibly dynamic about him. And it wasn’t just the anger and rage he kept bludgeoning her with. It was…indefinable, really. He just seemed so alive.
“Better grab your belt.”
“My…?” Faith looked down at the dress she was wearing. It didn’t have a belt. She hadn’t seen the use for it.
He abruptly leaned toward her, one muscular arm shooting out so close to her face that she pressed farther back into her seat and drew a startled breath. But instead of hitting her which, she had to confess, she’d thought he was about to do, he grabbed hold of the seatbelt over her right shoulder. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, he used the other to drag the belt across her and snap it in.
