SEVENTEEN
“You don’t mind?” I asked Zane, as we stood near the weapons cabinet. I cast a look back toward Rose, who was watching videos in Zane’s office.
I remembered what Clarence had once told me about possession. About how human bodies were frail and couldn’t take it for long. And I was afraid, desperately afraid, that by the time I got the relics and dangled them in front of Johnson in exchange for my sister, it would be too late, and the sister I would get back would be irreparably injured.
If I got her back at all.
“You’re sure?” I repeated, since Zane hadn’t yet answered me.
“You are off to hunt this night?”
I shook my head. “The pub,” I said. “And then I’m going out with Gracie.” I looked down at my feet, suddenly embarrassed, as if it were foolish for an über assassin-chick to care about such things. Clarence, I was certain, would think so.
Zane, however . . .
Zane only smiled, then moved toward me, making the air between us fizzle and pop. He took my hand, and I almost looked into his head, wanting to go deeper than I had once before.
When I’d peeked in before, I’d seen only sadness, but I’d broken away quickly, afraid he would feel me poking around in there. I knew now that the sadness was the weight of eternity bearing down upon him. A weight that I would eventually come to know, but which right then didn’t feel real to me.
To Zane, though, it was beyond real. Alive forever, and yet confined to this small basement. He’d made a deal, he’d once told me. Train the warriors, and his mortality would be restored. Train, and eventually he would be allowed to die.
The real hell for him, though, was that after so long being alive, the reality of death now terrified him. And he was trapped between a desire to end his tenure on earth, and his fear of what he would face once gone.
As for me, my fears about immortality were more practical. I was terrified of being alive forever and yet trapped like Zane was. Maybe I could survive in a pimped-out basement with television and the Internet, but what I really feared was being dismembered and left in small pine box. My arms removed. My legs taken. And only me and my thoughts for all eternity.
I shivered.
If Zane noticed my discomfiture, he didn’t say so. “It is good that you are going with your friends, ma chère.” He stroked my cheek, the simple touch making my senses fire. Zane was sexuality personified, an immortal incubus, whose essence I’d absorbed, and the call of like to like was making me tingle. Making me burn. I wanted him. Wanted his kiss, his touch.
And yet I didn’t, because I knew it wasn’t real. It was the thrall of the incubus, that heady sensual cloud that I cast over the men I squeezed up against at dance clubs. A fake lust, a pretend infatuation.
I didn’t want pretend. I wanted the real thing, and my mind was filled then not with Zane, but with Deacon. A man I still didn’t trust but who set my body to melt even so. I was, perhaps, a fool to crave him so desperately, but I was powerless to escape my own emotions.
“Zane . . .”
“I know, ma petite. He calls to you still, this other man. This one you will not name.”
I licked my lips. Wanting to tell him. Wanting to tell him everything and learn if what I was slowly coming to believe about this man was true—that he had no more loyalty for Clarence than I did. That if he knew my true battle, he would help me even more.
Those weren’t words I could say, though, and so I simply smiled. “I’m not going with him tonight. Just Gracie. Just friends.”
“And again, I say that is good.” He twirled a strand of my hair between his fingers, and the sadness I saw in his face about broke my heart.
“I wish you could come, too,” I said.
“Ah, chérie, so do I. So do I, indeed.”
I left him to his melancholy, knowing that he would watch over Rose, and confident that Johnson would stay well buried in Zane’s presence. But as I moved through the hallway toward the door that led to the dank alley that accessed Zane’s basement, I realized I wasn’t much in the mood to go out with friends. Instead, I was in the mood to go kill something. To feed the darkness and the sadness growing inside me.
I couldn’t even do that, though, because I had to go to the pub. Had to go be Alice and put together the pieces of the real life I’d adopted when I’d slipped into her skin.
The Bloody Tongue was somber when I arrived, Egan’s death hanging over the place. The demons were frustrated that their source for innocent girls had been so soundly removed, and the human patrons were merely expressing their condolences for a family that had lost its patriarch.