Was this a mirage?
All he could do was wait to find out, and yet even still, he knew this was real—and the sight before him brought true tears to his eyes. Against common sense and self-preservation, Jim Heron had arrived in the desolate landscape, looking as if he were single-handedly capable of reversing the domino effect Nigel had put into motion with a crystal dagger and been questioning ever since.
It was possible, he thought, that he had in fact chosen well.
“Nigel!”
As Jim hollered that name again, the yelling was wasted energy—it wasn’t like the guy was going to get up and run away. Hell, it looked like the archangel could barely move. And yet Jim was afraid this was a lie … or part of the torture.
If the latter was true? Well, at least the shit wasn’t monotonous and gray.
As he came up to the colored silk robing, that rhythmic beacon quieted as if its job were done, and for a moment, all he could do was stand there and try to get his breath back.
But it was the archangel. Although, damn, the guy was a shadow of his former self, a pathetically small bundle in this endless wasteland, weakened and cowed. And staring down, Jim found that this was yet another outcome he would never have predicted.
Why couldn’t they be surprised by good news?
“Ah, shit, Nigel.” There was a temptation to fall to his knees with the guy, but he couldn’t afford to risk getting trapped in that position. “How you doing?”
Dumb-ass question if there ever was one.
“Why ever have you come,” the archangel whispered hoarsely. The English accent remained, but the hauteur was gone—and Jim found that he missed it.
“I gotta get you back, my man. You don’t belong here.”
He braced himself for an argument. Something along the lines of the-rules-are-this-and-that, or I-am-my-own-destiny.
“Thank you, blessed savior.”
Jim closed his eyes briefly. This was bad, very bad, if Nigel was going the gratitude route.
Snapping into action, he looked around—and then wondered why he bothered. Just the landscape and nothing else—no structure for shelter, no relief from the monotony. The only thing he could do was get Nigel moving, and he feared that was simply masturbation for their feet.
Clearly, the archangel didn’t have a bright idea for getting out of here, or he wouldn’t have ended up on the ground like this. Or accepted the help. Such as it was.
“Come on.” Jim bent over and grabbed hold of the archangel. “Let’s get you up.”
With a burst of strength, he pulled Nigel off his ass, and had to groan—which was what you did when you tried to lift a piano: The archangel wasn’t a fatty, but he offered worse than no help: His bones were snapping as his position was forcibly altered, the breaks like the cracks of twigs under feet while, against his chest, Jim felt Nigel jerk and gasp in pain … but the hard-headed bastard didn’t put up any kind of protest.
When they were finally on the vertical, Nigel clung to him, and for an instant, Jim just held on to the guy. But he couldn’t waste much time with the softie shit.
“Come on, walk with me.”
Okay, that was not going to happen. Nigel couldn’t even keep himself upright, his legs a disjointed tangle that flopped in the wrong places. Fucking hell—
The first clue that something was wrong was that the wind abruptly stopped blowing around them. Then the cold began to dissipate.
Jim shifted Nigel’s deadweight to his left side, freeing up his right hand to fight if he had to. After however long in this gray landscape of WTF, he knew better than to think any change was going to work to his advantage.
And that was before the swirl in the sky appeared directly over his godforsaken head: High above the ground a circle formed, the pattern demarcated by movement, slow at first, then gathering in speed.
“We gotta get the fuck out of here,” he muttered.
But there was no running to be had. The fluffy, dusty ground didn’t offer good traction, and keeping Nigel from becoming a flower bed in the shit was requiring all the strength he had.
A crack of thunder was so loud it made him wince, and he did the best he could to protect the archangel. Fucking A, he’d asked for a break in the monotony and what did he get? A tornadic supercell. Great improvement. Thanks, Mother Nature—
There was another momentous clap overhead and then the utterly inexplicable happened.
From out of the center of the storm, a large object was birthed from the sky, falling free from up above and landing with a great mushroom cloud of that ash.
“What the…” Jim rubbed his eyes in case he’d lost his mind or his vision.
Nope. It was, in fact, the Victorian couch from the parlor. And right after it? The huge rug. Books. The velvet sofa and the coffee table and the candlestick Sissy had brained Colin with …
“It’s our fucking ride home!” he yelled. “Jesus Christ, they did it!”
He offered a quick prayer of thanks to the Creator—after all, it was kind of hard not to believe in the guy, considering Jim had met Him and this was, or at least had the potential to be, a frickin’ miracle.
Except how were they going to—
A sense of lift grabbed him by the hair and shoulders, and he could feel a sudden buoyancy in his body, that super-heavy gravitational hold easing up its drag coefficient on his bones. And abruptly, Nigel’s weight wasn’t so heavy either.
As the levitation began to take serious hold, Jim looked into the center of the hurricane and wondered how this was going to work. But then the suck zone kicked up big-time, the inward flow becoming undeniable. Dust came with him as he was lifted from the insufferable ground, and he held Nigel in a death grip—literally.
He wasn’t going to lose the guy, especially as they started to spin.
Jim kept his eye on where they were headed until the particles in the air stung so badly he couldn’t keep his lids open. Then it was a case of faster and faster with the turning until his hair peeled back from his face and the silk robing Nigel had on slapped at them both.
Jim began to lose his grip. “Hold me!”
The archangel dropped his hands instead. Like he’d passed out.
Closer to the vortex they rose, faster and faster they spun, until Jim’s empty stomach revolted and he thought seriously of hurling.
And then he didn’t think of anything at all, because, like Nigel, he lost consciousness.
Chapter Thirteen
In the suck zone of the parlor, Sissy went horror-movie, clawing at the floorboards as she was pulled on her belly feet-first toward the energy swirl. Bracing herself for being ripped apart, she knew that whatever had happened to all those pieces of furniture, wherever they had gone, was going to—
Except then everything went haywire. Okay, more haywire.
The explosion was so great, her body went into a tumble, arms and legs flying through air or space or wherever the hell she was. Pain lit up over every inch of her skin, like she was being flayed alive, and when she went to scream, something entered her mouth and stung like bees.
Except she wasn’t getting sucked in.
She was being thrown free. Violently.
The impact of her hitting the wall was so great she went loose and cascaded to the floor. Her shoulder hurt so badly it had to be dislocated, and God only knew how much other damage had been done. For a moment, all she could do was lie there, but the sudden quiet in the room seemed as dangerous as all the noise had been.
With a groan, she rolled over onto her back and coughed. Her nose and throat were irritated, and as she blinked her vision clear, her eyes felt like they had sandpaper for lids. Gradually, she became aware that there was the strangest sound in the parlor, and it took her a moment to figure out what it reminded her of: sleet. It was just like a subtle chorus of sleet falling inside the house, a hundred million tiny particles hitting the floor.
Sissy pushed herself over onto her side and forced her vision to get with the program. Unbelievable, she thought. The maelstrom Colin and Devina had created was gone as if it had never been, and—bonus!—there was no new national landmark or body of water in its place. The parlor’s windows had all been blown out, however … and there was, right in the center of the room, a boulder-like mass that was covered with some kind of volcanic ash.
As if maybe all of the furniture and objects that had been sucked into the vortex had been chewed like gum and spit out.
Considering God only knew what it really was, she checked for the others in case there was more fighting to do: Colin was slumped where he had been originally thrown against the wall. Devina was crumpled in the corner on the floor, her anti-gravity thing not having outlasted the explosion. And Adrian was actually upside down on his head, his legs propped up against a stretch of molding like a drunk trying to do a yoga pose.
Nobody was moving—
No, wait … that mass in the center of the room was. And as it turned around itself she realized … it wasn’t solid at all—and it wasn’t made of rock. It was an orb of light that was covered in ash. And as it writhed, the gray dust fell from it, revealing something close to a three-dimensional shadow.
Two shadows. Twisted around each other.
Like two people who had had to hold on to each other.
All at once, Sissy’s brain came back online. Her body was slower to get with it, but she had enough coordination to crawl across the now-bare and dusty floor.
“Jim…” The tears that sprang to her eyes helped get rid of some of the grit. “Jim!”
At the sound of his name, half of the light separated, pulling free of the undifferentiated mass—and then with a sizzle of electricity, it beelined for Jim’s remains … and found home.
The animation was immediate. Jim’s body jumped, arms and legs flopping, that chest expanding as a great breath was taken—
Jim tried to sit up so fast it was like he had jumper cables hooked to his feet—but the dagger Colin had stabbed through his shoulder kept him down.
“Fuck!” he barked, grabbing that side of his pecs with his free hand like he couldn’t figure out why things hurt or were stuck. “Fuck!”
His curse was so loud, it woke up the other people in the room, but he didn’t look around. Those eyes of his went to hers and stayed there.
“Oh … God…” he whispered. “You’re back.”
“No,” she croaked as her strength gave out from relief. “You are.”
Gritting his teeth, he palmed the hilt of the weapon that impaled him and had kept his body from disappearing. Then he yanked the blade free not only of the floor, but his own flesh.
In spite of all he’d been through, and a now bleeding wound, he scrambled to her and grabbed her so hard, she had to groan—but she didn’t care. He could crush her as much as he wanted.
She crushed him back.
It seemed impossible that she was holding him. That he had returned.
Jim pulled back and cupped her face between his palms. “Sissy…”
Her heart was hammering so much, there was no opportunity for it to beat faster—even though she had the sense that he was going to kiss her. Hell, considering everything that had just happened, the fact that his stare shifted down to her lips and his strong arms maneuvered her into position seemed … like a pretty damned good idea.
Because she wanted it, too. She needed to feel him up close and all over—like that was the only way her mind could grapple with the fact that he was actually here.
“Sissy.” His voice was almost too deep to register. “I’ve gotta tell you something—”
“Get the fuck away from him,” the demon bit out.
In spite of the fact that the parlor was powdered with gray dust, Purgatory’s existence and any experience over there disappeared completely as Jim stared into Sissy’s eyes.
The vow he had made, the realizations that had come to him, stuck around, however.
Cupping her face, he got choked up not because he didn’t know what to say, but because there was too much to get out—and he said her name a couple of times while he tried to direct traffic in his brain.
In the end, he decided to lead with the big one … even though the only woman he’d said those three words to had been his mother—so he was beyond rusty.
Except he didn’t get that far. Just as he started speaking, the one person he never wanted to see or hear from again piped up.
“Get the fuck away from him.”
As he looked across the parlor, the extent of the damage they’d done registered dimly—the place was trashed, great holes in the lineups of the bookshelves, windows broken, drapes shredded. Plus ninety percent of the furniture was somewhere else, natch. But none of that mattered as he watched Devina get to her feet.
The fact that the demon was in the house at all was a surprise, given the additional protection spell he’d put up—then again, maybe the thing hadn’t survived his second “death.” Oh, wait, make that third. And yet, even though her presence wasn’t a good thing, it was amusing to see her look so disheveled, her brunette hair a ratty mess, her leather pantsuit smudged with ash, streaks of oozing black on her face and shoulders from where she’d been cut.
What was not a shocker or funny at all was how pissed off she was. Those shark-like eyes of hers were glowing in an unholy way, and her talon hands were curled into claws. She wasn’t looking at him, though.
She was focused on Sissy.
And what do you know, that was a match to his ignition, lighting him up from the inside. Shuffling his woman behind him, he got to his feet and faced off with his enemy.
“What the fuck are you doing here, demon.”
Her eyes swung over to his. “I’m the reason you’re out, asshole.” She pounded on her chest. “So show some respect.”
All he could do was wait to find out, and yet even still, he knew this was real—and the sight before him brought true tears to his eyes. Against common sense and self-preservation, Jim Heron had arrived in the desolate landscape, looking as if he were single-handedly capable of reversing the domino effect Nigel had put into motion with a crystal dagger and been questioning ever since.
It was possible, he thought, that he had in fact chosen well.
“Nigel!”
As Jim hollered that name again, the yelling was wasted energy—it wasn’t like the guy was going to get up and run away. Hell, it looked like the archangel could barely move. And yet Jim was afraid this was a lie … or part of the torture.
If the latter was true? Well, at least the shit wasn’t monotonous and gray.
As he came up to the colored silk robing, that rhythmic beacon quieted as if its job were done, and for a moment, all he could do was stand there and try to get his breath back.
But it was the archangel. Although, damn, the guy was a shadow of his former self, a pathetically small bundle in this endless wasteland, weakened and cowed. And staring down, Jim found that this was yet another outcome he would never have predicted.
Why couldn’t they be surprised by good news?
“Ah, shit, Nigel.” There was a temptation to fall to his knees with the guy, but he couldn’t afford to risk getting trapped in that position. “How you doing?”
Dumb-ass question if there ever was one.
“Why ever have you come,” the archangel whispered hoarsely. The English accent remained, but the hauteur was gone—and Jim found that he missed it.
“I gotta get you back, my man. You don’t belong here.”
He braced himself for an argument. Something along the lines of the-rules-are-this-and-that, or I-am-my-own-destiny.
“Thank you, blessed savior.”
Jim closed his eyes briefly. This was bad, very bad, if Nigel was going the gratitude route.
Snapping into action, he looked around—and then wondered why he bothered. Just the landscape and nothing else—no structure for shelter, no relief from the monotony. The only thing he could do was get Nigel moving, and he feared that was simply masturbation for their feet.
Clearly, the archangel didn’t have a bright idea for getting out of here, or he wouldn’t have ended up on the ground like this. Or accepted the help. Such as it was.
“Come on.” Jim bent over and grabbed hold of the archangel. “Let’s get you up.”
With a burst of strength, he pulled Nigel off his ass, and had to groan—which was what you did when you tried to lift a piano: The archangel wasn’t a fatty, but he offered worse than no help: His bones were snapping as his position was forcibly altered, the breaks like the cracks of twigs under feet while, against his chest, Jim felt Nigel jerk and gasp in pain … but the hard-headed bastard didn’t put up any kind of protest.
When they were finally on the vertical, Nigel clung to him, and for an instant, Jim just held on to the guy. But he couldn’t waste much time with the softie shit.
“Come on, walk with me.”
Okay, that was not going to happen. Nigel couldn’t even keep himself upright, his legs a disjointed tangle that flopped in the wrong places. Fucking hell—
The first clue that something was wrong was that the wind abruptly stopped blowing around them. Then the cold began to dissipate.
Jim shifted Nigel’s deadweight to his left side, freeing up his right hand to fight if he had to. After however long in this gray landscape of WTF, he knew better than to think any change was going to work to his advantage.
And that was before the swirl in the sky appeared directly over his godforsaken head: High above the ground a circle formed, the pattern demarcated by movement, slow at first, then gathering in speed.
“We gotta get the fuck out of here,” he muttered.
But there was no running to be had. The fluffy, dusty ground didn’t offer good traction, and keeping Nigel from becoming a flower bed in the shit was requiring all the strength he had.
A crack of thunder was so loud it made him wince, and he did the best he could to protect the archangel. Fucking A, he’d asked for a break in the monotony and what did he get? A tornadic supercell. Great improvement. Thanks, Mother Nature—
There was another momentous clap overhead and then the utterly inexplicable happened.
From out of the center of the storm, a large object was birthed from the sky, falling free from up above and landing with a great mushroom cloud of that ash.
“What the…” Jim rubbed his eyes in case he’d lost his mind or his vision.
Nope. It was, in fact, the Victorian couch from the parlor. And right after it? The huge rug. Books. The velvet sofa and the coffee table and the candlestick Sissy had brained Colin with …
“It’s our fucking ride home!” he yelled. “Jesus Christ, they did it!”
He offered a quick prayer of thanks to the Creator—after all, it was kind of hard not to believe in the guy, considering Jim had met Him and this was, or at least had the potential to be, a frickin’ miracle.
Except how were they going to—
A sense of lift grabbed him by the hair and shoulders, and he could feel a sudden buoyancy in his body, that super-heavy gravitational hold easing up its drag coefficient on his bones. And abruptly, Nigel’s weight wasn’t so heavy either.
As the levitation began to take serious hold, Jim looked into the center of the hurricane and wondered how this was going to work. But then the suck zone kicked up big-time, the inward flow becoming undeniable. Dust came with him as he was lifted from the insufferable ground, and he held Nigel in a death grip—literally.
He wasn’t going to lose the guy, especially as they started to spin.
Jim kept his eye on where they were headed until the particles in the air stung so badly he couldn’t keep his lids open. Then it was a case of faster and faster with the turning until his hair peeled back from his face and the silk robing Nigel had on slapped at them both.
Jim began to lose his grip. “Hold me!”
The archangel dropped his hands instead. Like he’d passed out.
Closer to the vortex they rose, faster and faster they spun, until Jim’s empty stomach revolted and he thought seriously of hurling.
And then he didn’t think of anything at all, because, like Nigel, he lost consciousness.
Chapter Thirteen
In the suck zone of the parlor, Sissy went horror-movie, clawing at the floorboards as she was pulled on her belly feet-first toward the energy swirl. Bracing herself for being ripped apart, she knew that whatever had happened to all those pieces of furniture, wherever they had gone, was going to—
Except then everything went haywire. Okay, more haywire.
The explosion was so great, her body went into a tumble, arms and legs flying through air or space or wherever the hell she was. Pain lit up over every inch of her skin, like she was being flayed alive, and when she went to scream, something entered her mouth and stung like bees.
Except she wasn’t getting sucked in.
She was being thrown free. Violently.
The impact of her hitting the wall was so great she went loose and cascaded to the floor. Her shoulder hurt so badly it had to be dislocated, and God only knew how much other damage had been done. For a moment, all she could do was lie there, but the sudden quiet in the room seemed as dangerous as all the noise had been.
With a groan, she rolled over onto her back and coughed. Her nose and throat were irritated, and as she blinked her vision clear, her eyes felt like they had sandpaper for lids. Gradually, she became aware that there was the strangest sound in the parlor, and it took her a moment to figure out what it reminded her of: sleet. It was just like a subtle chorus of sleet falling inside the house, a hundred million tiny particles hitting the floor.
Sissy pushed herself over onto her side and forced her vision to get with the program. Unbelievable, she thought. The maelstrom Colin and Devina had created was gone as if it had never been, and—bonus!—there was no new national landmark or body of water in its place. The parlor’s windows had all been blown out, however … and there was, right in the center of the room, a boulder-like mass that was covered with some kind of volcanic ash.
As if maybe all of the furniture and objects that had been sucked into the vortex had been chewed like gum and spit out.
Considering God only knew what it really was, she checked for the others in case there was more fighting to do: Colin was slumped where he had been originally thrown against the wall. Devina was crumpled in the corner on the floor, her anti-gravity thing not having outlasted the explosion. And Adrian was actually upside down on his head, his legs propped up against a stretch of molding like a drunk trying to do a yoga pose.
Nobody was moving—
No, wait … that mass in the center of the room was. And as it turned around itself she realized … it wasn’t solid at all—and it wasn’t made of rock. It was an orb of light that was covered in ash. And as it writhed, the gray dust fell from it, revealing something close to a three-dimensional shadow.
Two shadows. Twisted around each other.
Like two people who had had to hold on to each other.
All at once, Sissy’s brain came back online. Her body was slower to get with it, but she had enough coordination to crawl across the now-bare and dusty floor.
“Jim…” The tears that sprang to her eyes helped get rid of some of the grit. “Jim!”
At the sound of his name, half of the light separated, pulling free of the undifferentiated mass—and then with a sizzle of electricity, it beelined for Jim’s remains … and found home.
The animation was immediate. Jim’s body jumped, arms and legs flopping, that chest expanding as a great breath was taken—
Jim tried to sit up so fast it was like he had jumper cables hooked to his feet—but the dagger Colin had stabbed through his shoulder kept him down.
“Fuck!” he barked, grabbing that side of his pecs with his free hand like he couldn’t figure out why things hurt or were stuck. “Fuck!”
His curse was so loud, it woke up the other people in the room, but he didn’t look around. Those eyes of his went to hers and stayed there.
“Oh … God…” he whispered. “You’re back.”
“No,” she croaked as her strength gave out from relief. “You are.”
Gritting his teeth, he palmed the hilt of the weapon that impaled him and had kept his body from disappearing. Then he yanked the blade free not only of the floor, but his own flesh.
In spite of all he’d been through, and a now bleeding wound, he scrambled to her and grabbed her so hard, she had to groan—but she didn’t care. He could crush her as much as he wanted.
She crushed him back.
It seemed impossible that she was holding him. That he had returned.
Jim pulled back and cupped her face between his palms. “Sissy…”
Her heart was hammering so much, there was no opportunity for it to beat faster—even though she had the sense that he was going to kiss her. Hell, considering everything that had just happened, the fact that his stare shifted down to her lips and his strong arms maneuvered her into position seemed … like a pretty damned good idea.
Because she wanted it, too. She needed to feel him up close and all over—like that was the only way her mind could grapple with the fact that he was actually here.
“Sissy.” His voice was almost too deep to register. “I’ve gotta tell you something—”
“Get the fuck away from him,” the demon bit out.
In spite of the fact that the parlor was powdered with gray dust, Purgatory’s existence and any experience over there disappeared completely as Jim stared into Sissy’s eyes.
The vow he had made, the realizations that had come to him, stuck around, however.
Cupping her face, he got choked up not because he didn’t know what to say, but because there was too much to get out—and he said her name a couple of times while he tried to direct traffic in his brain.
In the end, he decided to lead with the big one … even though the only woman he’d said those three words to had been his mother—so he was beyond rusty.
Except he didn’t get that far. Just as he started speaking, the one person he never wanted to see or hear from again piped up.
“Get the fuck away from him.”
As he looked across the parlor, the extent of the damage they’d done registered dimly—the place was trashed, great holes in the lineups of the bookshelves, windows broken, drapes shredded. Plus ninety percent of the furniture was somewhere else, natch. But none of that mattered as he watched Devina get to her feet.
The fact that the demon was in the house at all was a surprise, given the additional protection spell he’d put up—then again, maybe the thing hadn’t survived his second “death.” Oh, wait, make that third. And yet, even though her presence wasn’t a good thing, it was amusing to see her look so disheveled, her brunette hair a ratty mess, her leather pantsuit smudged with ash, streaks of oozing black on her face and shoulders from where she’d been cut.
What was not a shocker or funny at all was how pissed off she was. Those shark-like eyes of hers were glowing in an unholy way, and her talon hands were curled into claws. She wasn’t looking at him, though.
She was focused on Sissy.
And what do you know, that was a match to his ignition, lighting him up from the inside. Shuffling his woman behind him, he got to his feet and faced off with his enemy.
“What the fuck are you doing here, demon.”
Her eyes swung over to his. “I’m the reason you’re out, asshole.” She pounded on her chest. “So show some respect.”
