As his voice drifted off, there were so many more words clogging his throat, jamming up his mouth, twisting his mind, but they were simply variations on what he had just spoken. Still, there was a temptation to give in to the torment, to keep talking and talking in hopes that something would change the position he had put them both in.
But Colin hated wasted time, and the justification, such as it was, had been made.
Dropping his eyes, Nigel got to his feet and found that he was unsteady and fairly well close to fainting. Especially as he turned away and began to walk out of the water closet and across the vast emptiness of the loft Devina had once inhabited.
The barren expanse seemed such an apt metaphor.
“I do not believe you understand what it was like.”
At the sound of Colin’s voice, he turned so fast he had to throw his arms out into the thin air. With a thundering heart, he said, “Tell me.”
Even though this was going to kill him.
As he stood in the loo’s doorway, Colin’s face was drawn in lines of anger. “I stood over your body. I cried … over your body. I picked you up and carried you to the river’s edge and I sat beside the fire that consumed you. It burned for hours.”
Nigel closed his eyes and put his hands up to his face.
“No,” Colin snapped. “You do not get to do that. You do not get to shield yourself from your actions. There was naught that I could do with your aftermath—you left me to deal with that alone, without knowing … goddamn it, without knowing why you had done what you had. So you can damn well be present in this moment.”
Nigel lowered his arms and refused his eyes the permission to go anywhere else—even though his chest was so tight he could not draw breath. “I am so sorry. I am so very sorry…”
Colin’s dark brows drew tightly together. “Do you think I do not know you.”
“No, you know me better than all.”
“And that is why I am offended anew.” Colin crossed his arms over his chest. “Did you think … dearest God, Nigel, did you think I did not know what was ahead of us at that moment in the war? What you were facing and what choices you would believe you had? With Jim in failure as he was, tied up within the destiny of that innocent, Sissy, giving wins away, do you think I did not recognize all of that and…”
When Colin did not finish, Nigel cleared his throat. “And what?”
“Do you think, no matter how much it destroyed me, that I would not have let you go?”
Nigel returned his hands unto his face, and this time Colin said naught about the veil of palms over his eyes.
“I would have let you go,” Colin said roughly, “because that was the best thing to do, the only pathway that we had in this forsaken war. Someone else needed to be the savior at that point, and the only way to get Jim out of the role … was to do exactly what you did.”
It all seemed so freshly devastating, Nigel thought in the silence that followed.
Colin exhaled a curse. “I would have made the sacrifice, too. But you either didn’t trust me enough to do that or worse, mayhap, you do not really know me that well, after all. I am a soldier, and as such, I do not forgo logic to feeling. Even if the emotions are … overwhelming.”
Nigel was aware the moment the other archangel left, even though there was not a sound or further movement taken. Instead of following Colin back up to Heaven, however, he found himself sinking unto his knees in the middle of the emptiness.
He had no practice with regrets. He had hitherto lived his immortal life with deliberation and self-control—and had curried no small amount of superiority because of it.
Now, though, he felt connected unto humanity at a whole new level.
Compassion was easier to proffer if one had suffered.
Chapter Forty-one
“Did you get enough to eat?”
As Jim sat beside her on the front steps of the old mansion, Sissy took yet another deep breath. She’d been doing it a lot since they’d all come back here, eaten five large pepperoni pizzas between the four of them, and gone their separate ways.
Which was to say, Ad and Eddie had headed up to the attic.
And Jim had come out here with her.
After a day of on-and-off rain, the night was cool and damp and smelled of good earth and growing things. Smelled of Jim’s aftershave, too, she thought as she pulled his leather jacket closer around her.
“Sissy?”
“What—oh, sorry. Yes. God, yes. I don’t think I’ll ever eat again.”
Shoot. Maybe she shouldn’t phrase it like that.
Down at the far end of the lane, a car turned onto their street and proceeded carefully toward them. For a moment, her whole body stiffened—except it was not a big black Mercedes-Benz that was missing a hood ornament.
She relaxed the instant she recognized it as a Lexus.
“It’s so weird,” she murmured. “I feel the absence more than I noticed the presence.”
“Of what—oh, that.” He cleared his throat like he didn’t want to give the thing a name. “What’d gotten taken out, you mean.”
“Yeah.” She put her hands over her pizza-filled stomach and rubbed back and forth. “I had no idea it was there and controlling me. But now that it’s gone, I feel … myself. Which doesn’t mean that I’ve, like, forgotten everything that was done to me or what I lost. I still feel the same things I felt before. It’s just … the foundation is different. More solid. More … me, I guess? I’m babbling, aren’t I.”
“Not in the slightest. Makes perfect sense to me.”
She looked over at him as he took a drag on his cigarette and the tip burned bright orange. “I swear, that is one of the things I like most about you.”
His brows popped. “What is?”
“You always understand me.”
“You’re pretty reasonable. Pretty damned smart, too.”
He leaned in and put a kiss on her mouth—and it seemed like the most natural thing: the soft brush, the giving and receiving, the warm thrill that came with the contact. And when she didn’t want him to move away so fast, all she had to do was put her hand on his massive arm and he stayed right with her.
As if he once again knew what she needed.
Laying her head on his upper arm, she stared up at his face as he resumed looking out ahead of them both. And sadly, the preoccupation that bled into his features was a reminder that this moment between them was the exception, not the rule.
The war was still ongoing.
“What happens now?” she asked roughly.
“With you? Nothing. You’re clean.”
“I mean with Devina.”
Those brows went down hard and stayed there, and the coldness that gleamed in his eyes was a reminder that he was a soldier, not just a lover.
“You don’t have to worry about that.” He leaned in and kissed her again. “You’re safe. You’re free.”
Not as long as you’re still fighting, she thought.
It felt like a crime to contaminate this quiet time between them with talk about the last round. But she figured that was where he was in his head, too. Had to be. He had to be thinking about where the next soul was going to be found, and what Devina was going to—
“I really wish you’d met my mother,” he said roughly.
As Sissy jerked back, he looked over at her. “Did my smoke get in your face? Shit, I’m sorry—lemme put this out.”
“No, no, not at all.” She stopped him. “Honestly, it’s okay. I’m getting used to it now, and it’s funny, it kind of smells nice to me.”
Probably because the scent of tobacco was coming to remind her of him.
“You just surprised me,” she murmured.
“About my mother.”
“Well, yes. And I would have loved to have met her, too.” God, the more she thought about it, the more … “I really would have liked to meet her.”
“She would have loved you.”
Sissy blinked a couple of times. Coming from a man like him? That was the best compliment she had ever received.
“What was she like?”
Jim took a long inhale and made smoke rings that drifted up into the light that bled out of the house.
The night was so much less dark when you were not alone, she thought. And there was never a more connected feeling than talking with him like this.
Well, except for the sex part.
And they were going to get to that later on.
“She wasn’t super-tall,” he said eventually. “But she was strong. Oh, fuck, she was strong. Most farms out there, the women labor in the house, you know—and that’s a lot of work. Farmers are going from before sunup to after sundown, and they need food … need someone holding down the fort with the kids and the bills and the other stuff, too. My mom, she did both sides of it. I once saw her chop up a hundred-year-old oak tree. Tornado knocked it down in the front yard. Took her two school days to do it—but we had firewood all winter just from that beast alone.”
“Do you miss her? I guess that’s a dumb—”
“I miss all of it. I miss the life and the land, and her.” He rubbed his eyebrow with his thumb like he was trying to hide a weakness from her. “I thought that was where I was headed. You know, after I got out of the military. I was going to work here in Caldwell only long enough to make sure Matthias wasn’t going to be a problem.” He glanced over at her. “I was not going to bring that shit out west. No way. A farm in Iowa was going to be my slide into middle age. My final resting place.”
“I guess your life didn’t turn out as you thought, either.”
“No, it didn’t.” He stared at her. “I met you, though.”
She smiled and kissed the curve of his triceps. “There you go again, making me blush.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
He made a sound that was somewhere between “Mmmm” and “Wait’ll I get you upstairs, woman—then we’ll see about blushing.”
But soon enough, he was back to staring out in front of him.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
God, she hated to ask this. “What happens next.”
Apparently, Jim was a Neanderthal. Not a surprise, really, considering how brutal he could get. But it didn’t exactly make him a contemporary hero. The reality was, however, that as Sissy put that question out there, all he could think of, as he tried out various gloss-shit-over explanations in his head, was that he didn’t want her anywhere near any of this.
It made him remember something he’d heard about parachutists, the guys who jumped out of planes into war zones. The military commissioned a psych study on them, and one of the interesting things that had come out of it was that a huge majority of them never felt any fear at all in the regular course of their work. None. An issue of self-selection? Probably—after all, you didn’t get into that kind of work unless you had an adrenal gland that was asleep on the job.
But that hadn’t been the data point that had struck him: Nearly one hundred percent of the men said that the only time they did get scared? Their last jump. It was as if they knew they’d rolled the dice and come out on top too many times—and they expected the odds to regulate on their finale, like the universe was going to reach out and grab them at that point because it was its last shot.
And that was exactly how he felt now.
Sissy had squeaked by not just once, but twice. He didn’t want to gamble on a third try.
And as he considered the danger she’d been in? Naturally, he had to think about Devina—and all at once, an unholy anger coiled in his gut, one that was so powerful, it wiped out even any thoughts of Sissy. Fuck the war. Fuck the souls. Fuck everybody and everything.
Devina was going to go down—and not just because she lost the Creator’s little game.
The bottom line was that for him, watching Sissy in that bathroom today had been the final nail in the coffin. She had suffered yet again, been tortured … yet again. And something inside of him had snapped: Even as he sat beside her here, and smoked like he was normal, and was ready to take her upstairs and make love to her like he was normal, he was a beast.
Inside his skin, he was an unhinged, vicious sonofabitch on the knife edge of insanity.
And until he brutalized Devina? He wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on anything else.
“Jim? What happens next?”
He cleared his throat and twisted away from her—ostensibly to stab his cigarette out in the ashtray he’d brought with him, but also because he hated that he was lying to her.
“Same as always.”
“What does that mean?” she pressed.
“I find the soul, somehow, and go to work.”
“Are you worried about the last round?”
“No, not at all.” At least this was the truth, and he turned back around toward her. “I feel great. I feel strong. I’m ready to shut this game down in the right way.”
And that was also the God’s honest. The rage in his bones was a great clarifier, a figurative Windex wash of the filter he had on the world and the war and himself. With it around? He could see everything clearly, what he needed to do, where he needed to go. His target set, he was able to tune out all background noise and movement, zeroing in solely on discharging a kill shot.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you all right?”
He tucked her in tighter against him and kissed the top of her head. “Never better. I’ve never been better.”
The shiver that went through her made him frown. “It’s cold out here,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
But Colin hated wasted time, and the justification, such as it was, had been made.
Dropping his eyes, Nigel got to his feet and found that he was unsteady and fairly well close to fainting. Especially as he turned away and began to walk out of the water closet and across the vast emptiness of the loft Devina had once inhabited.
The barren expanse seemed such an apt metaphor.
“I do not believe you understand what it was like.”
At the sound of Colin’s voice, he turned so fast he had to throw his arms out into the thin air. With a thundering heart, he said, “Tell me.”
Even though this was going to kill him.
As he stood in the loo’s doorway, Colin’s face was drawn in lines of anger. “I stood over your body. I cried … over your body. I picked you up and carried you to the river’s edge and I sat beside the fire that consumed you. It burned for hours.”
Nigel closed his eyes and put his hands up to his face.
“No,” Colin snapped. “You do not get to do that. You do not get to shield yourself from your actions. There was naught that I could do with your aftermath—you left me to deal with that alone, without knowing … goddamn it, without knowing why you had done what you had. So you can damn well be present in this moment.”
Nigel lowered his arms and refused his eyes the permission to go anywhere else—even though his chest was so tight he could not draw breath. “I am so sorry. I am so very sorry…”
Colin’s dark brows drew tightly together. “Do you think I do not know you.”
“No, you know me better than all.”
“And that is why I am offended anew.” Colin crossed his arms over his chest. “Did you think … dearest God, Nigel, did you think I did not know what was ahead of us at that moment in the war? What you were facing and what choices you would believe you had? With Jim in failure as he was, tied up within the destiny of that innocent, Sissy, giving wins away, do you think I did not recognize all of that and…”
When Colin did not finish, Nigel cleared his throat. “And what?”
“Do you think, no matter how much it destroyed me, that I would not have let you go?”
Nigel returned his hands unto his face, and this time Colin said naught about the veil of palms over his eyes.
“I would have let you go,” Colin said roughly, “because that was the best thing to do, the only pathway that we had in this forsaken war. Someone else needed to be the savior at that point, and the only way to get Jim out of the role … was to do exactly what you did.”
It all seemed so freshly devastating, Nigel thought in the silence that followed.
Colin exhaled a curse. “I would have made the sacrifice, too. But you either didn’t trust me enough to do that or worse, mayhap, you do not really know me that well, after all. I am a soldier, and as such, I do not forgo logic to feeling. Even if the emotions are … overwhelming.”
Nigel was aware the moment the other archangel left, even though there was not a sound or further movement taken. Instead of following Colin back up to Heaven, however, he found himself sinking unto his knees in the middle of the emptiness.
He had no practice with regrets. He had hitherto lived his immortal life with deliberation and self-control—and had curried no small amount of superiority because of it.
Now, though, he felt connected unto humanity at a whole new level.
Compassion was easier to proffer if one had suffered.
Chapter Forty-one
“Did you get enough to eat?”
As Jim sat beside her on the front steps of the old mansion, Sissy took yet another deep breath. She’d been doing it a lot since they’d all come back here, eaten five large pepperoni pizzas between the four of them, and gone their separate ways.
Which was to say, Ad and Eddie had headed up to the attic.
And Jim had come out here with her.
After a day of on-and-off rain, the night was cool and damp and smelled of good earth and growing things. Smelled of Jim’s aftershave, too, she thought as she pulled his leather jacket closer around her.
“Sissy?”
“What—oh, sorry. Yes. God, yes. I don’t think I’ll ever eat again.”
Shoot. Maybe she shouldn’t phrase it like that.
Down at the far end of the lane, a car turned onto their street and proceeded carefully toward them. For a moment, her whole body stiffened—except it was not a big black Mercedes-Benz that was missing a hood ornament.
She relaxed the instant she recognized it as a Lexus.
“It’s so weird,” she murmured. “I feel the absence more than I noticed the presence.”
“Of what—oh, that.” He cleared his throat like he didn’t want to give the thing a name. “What’d gotten taken out, you mean.”
“Yeah.” She put her hands over her pizza-filled stomach and rubbed back and forth. “I had no idea it was there and controlling me. But now that it’s gone, I feel … myself. Which doesn’t mean that I’ve, like, forgotten everything that was done to me or what I lost. I still feel the same things I felt before. It’s just … the foundation is different. More solid. More … me, I guess? I’m babbling, aren’t I.”
“Not in the slightest. Makes perfect sense to me.”
She looked over at him as he took a drag on his cigarette and the tip burned bright orange. “I swear, that is one of the things I like most about you.”
His brows popped. “What is?”
“You always understand me.”
“You’re pretty reasonable. Pretty damned smart, too.”
He leaned in and put a kiss on her mouth—and it seemed like the most natural thing: the soft brush, the giving and receiving, the warm thrill that came with the contact. And when she didn’t want him to move away so fast, all she had to do was put her hand on his massive arm and he stayed right with her.
As if he once again knew what she needed.
Laying her head on his upper arm, she stared up at his face as he resumed looking out ahead of them both. And sadly, the preoccupation that bled into his features was a reminder that this moment between them was the exception, not the rule.
The war was still ongoing.
“What happens now?” she asked roughly.
“With you? Nothing. You’re clean.”
“I mean with Devina.”
Those brows went down hard and stayed there, and the coldness that gleamed in his eyes was a reminder that he was a soldier, not just a lover.
“You don’t have to worry about that.” He leaned in and kissed her again. “You’re safe. You’re free.”
Not as long as you’re still fighting, she thought.
It felt like a crime to contaminate this quiet time between them with talk about the last round. But she figured that was where he was in his head, too. Had to be. He had to be thinking about where the next soul was going to be found, and what Devina was going to—
“I really wish you’d met my mother,” he said roughly.
As Sissy jerked back, he looked over at her. “Did my smoke get in your face? Shit, I’m sorry—lemme put this out.”
“No, no, not at all.” She stopped him. “Honestly, it’s okay. I’m getting used to it now, and it’s funny, it kind of smells nice to me.”
Probably because the scent of tobacco was coming to remind her of him.
“You just surprised me,” she murmured.
“About my mother.”
“Well, yes. And I would have loved to have met her, too.” God, the more she thought about it, the more … “I really would have liked to meet her.”
“She would have loved you.”
Sissy blinked a couple of times. Coming from a man like him? That was the best compliment she had ever received.
“What was she like?”
Jim took a long inhale and made smoke rings that drifted up into the light that bled out of the house.
The night was so much less dark when you were not alone, she thought. And there was never a more connected feeling than talking with him like this.
Well, except for the sex part.
And they were going to get to that later on.
“She wasn’t super-tall,” he said eventually. “But she was strong. Oh, fuck, she was strong. Most farms out there, the women labor in the house, you know—and that’s a lot of work. Farmers are going from before sunup to after sundown, and they need food … need someone holding down the fort with the kids and the bills and the other stuff, too. My mom, she did both sides of it. I once saw her chop up a hundred-year-old oak tree. Tornado knocked it down in the front yard. Took her two school days to do it—but we had firewood all winter just from that beast alone.”
“Do you miss her? I guess that’s a dumb—”
“I miss all of it. I miss the life and the land, and her.” He rubbed his eyebrow with his thumb like he was trying to hide a weakness from her. “I thought that was where I was headed. You know, after I got out of the military. I was going to work here in Caldwell only long enough to make sure Matthias wasn’t going to be a problem.” He glanced over at her. “I was not going to bring that shit out west. No way. A farm in Iowa was going to be my slide into middle age. My final resting place.”
“I guess your life didn’t turn out as you thought, either.”
“No, it didn’t.” He stared at her. “I met you, though.”
She smiled and kissed the curve of his triceps. “There you go again, making me blush.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
He made a sound that was somewhere between “Mmmm” and “Wait’ll I get you upstairs, woman—then we’ll see about blushing.”
But soon enough, he was back to staring out in front of him.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
God, she hated to ask this. “What happens next.”
Apparently, Jim was a Neanderthal. Not a surprise, really, considering how brutal he could get. But it didn’t exactly make him a contemporary hero. The reality was, however, that as Sissy put that question out there, all he could think of, as he tried out various gloss-shit-over explanations in his head, was that he didn’t want her anywhere near any of this.
It made him remember something he’d heard about parachutists, the guys who jumped out of planes into war zones. The military commissioned a psych study on them, and one of the interesting things that had come out of it was that a huge majority of them never felt any fear at all in the regular course of their work. None. An issue of self-selection? Probably—after all, you didn’t get into that kind of work unless you had an adrenal gland that was asleep on the job.
But that hadn’t been the data point that had struck him: Nearly one hundred percent of the men said that the only time they did get scared? Their last jump. It was as if they knew they’d rolled the dice and come out on top too many times—and they expected the odds to regulate on their finale, like the universe was going to reach out and grab them at that point because it was its last shot.
And that was exactly how he felt now.
Sissy had squeaked by not just once, but twice. He didn’t want to gamble on a third try.
And as he considered the danger she’d been in? Naturally, he had to think about Devina—and all at once, an unholy anger coiled in his gut, one that was so powerful, it wiped out even any thoughts of Sissy. Fuck the war. Fuck the souls. Fuck everybody and everything.
Devina was going to go down—and not just because she lost the Creator’s little game.
The bottom line was that for him, watching Sissy in that bathroom today had been the final nail in the coffin. She had suffered yet again, been tortured … yet again. And something inside of him had snapped: Even as he sat beside her here, and smoked like he was normal, and was ready to take her upstairs and make love to her like he was normal, he was a beast.
Inside his skin, he was an unhinged, vicious sonofabitch on the knife edge of insanity.
And until he brutalized Devina? He wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on anything else.
“Jim? What happens next?”
He cleared his throat and twisted away from her—ostensibly to stab his cigarette out in the ashtray he’d brought with him, but also because he hated that he was lying to her.
“Same as always.”
“What does that mean?” she pressed.
“I find the soul, somehow, and go to work.”
“Are you worried about the last round?”
“No, not at all.” At least this was the truth, and he turned back around toward her. “I feel great. I feel strong. I’m ready to shut this game down in the right way.”
And that was also the God’s honest. The rage in his bones was a great clarifier, a figurative Windex wash of the filter he had on the world and the war and himself. With it around? He could see everything clearly, what he needed to do, where he needed to go. His target set, he was able to tune out all background noise and movement, zeroing in solely on discharging a kill shot.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you all right?”
He tucked her in tighter against him and kissed the top of her head. “Never better. I’ve never been better.”
The shiver that went through her made him frown. “It’s cold out here,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
