As she watched him speak, she noted the age on his face . . . the wrinkling around the far corners of the eyes and the mouth, the slight droop of the jawline. He was still a handsome man and yet he’d never remarried. Was it because of the mess he was in? Probably.
Definitely.
Those signs of aging on him were not just a matter of time passing. It was stress and heartache and . . .
Shifting her focus to Isaac, his narrow and laserlike stare was intense, his pale irises positively glowing with a go-to-war light. Funny, he was nothing at all like her father in terms of background, education, exposure, experience. And yet they were identical in so many ways.
Especially united in the common mission to do right.
“Grier?”
Shaking herself, she glanced at her father. He was holding something out to her . . . a handkerchief? But why—
When she felt something hit her forearm, she looked down. A silver tear was collecting itself after the fall from her eye, coalescing into a little shimmering circle on her skin.
Another one dropped and messed up all its effort—but then the pair joined forces and the critical mass doubled.
She took the handkerchief and dried her tears.
“I’m so sorry,” her father said.
She mopped her face and refolded the fine linen, remembering him doing exactly the same when upstairs in the kitchen.
“You know what,” she murmured. “Apologies don’t mean a thing.” She laid her hand on the file he’d put on the table. “This . . . what you two are doing . . . this is everything.”
The only thing that could have made any of it right.
To cut off the conversation, she cracked open the cover. . . .
She frowned and leaned in. The first page was a printout of four mug shots. All men. All of whom looked like different ethnic versions of Isaac. Underneath the pictures, in her father’s handwriting, there were names, dates of birth, social security numbers, last sightings—although not every one was complete. And three of them had DECEASED across the bottom.
She flipped to the next page and the next. All the same. So many faces.
“I want to bring Jim Heron in on this,” Isaac said. “The more who come forward, the better—”
“Jim Heron?” her father said. “You mean Zacharias?”
“Yeah. I saw him earlier tonight and the night before. I thought he’d been sent to kill me, but it turns out, he wants to help me—or so he says.”
“You saw him?”
“He was with two guys. I don’t recognize them, but they look like they could be XOps.”
“But—”
“Oh, my God,” Grier whispered, moving one of the sheets closer. “That’s him.”
As she pointed to one of the pictures, she heard her father say, “Jim Heron is dead. He was shot in Caldwell, New York. Four nights ago.”
“That’s him,” she repeated, tapping at the picture.
Isaac’s voice sounded confused. “How did you know? Grier . . . how did you know?”
She looked up. “Know what?”
“That’s Jim Heron.”
Moving her finger aside, she saw the name Zacharias below the picture. “Well, I don’t know who he is, but that’s the man who showed up in my bedroom last night. As an angel.”
CHAPTER 32
This was not working.
Deep down in the anus of Hell, where her captured souls were kept in flypaper walls, and the still air echoed with the oily moans of her servants, Devina was suffering from a serious case of buzz kill.
Which was why she’d sent everyone away.
Hanging back, she regarded the piece of meat wired to her table. In the candlelight, Jim Heron was Jackson Pollocked with blood and black wax and other liquids of various descriptions, and he was having trouble breathing through his swollen, cracked lips. On his stomach, there was a road map of carvings she’d done with her own claws, and his thighs were marked as well with her name and her symbols.
His cock had been used until it was as raw as the rest of him.
And yet he hadn’t cried out or begged or even opened his eyes. No curses, no tears. Nothing.
She wasn’t sure whether to be pissed off at herself and her minions for not working him hard enough . . . or to fall in love with the bastard.
Either way, she was determined to get a piece of him. The question was how.
She was well aware that there were two ways of breaking someone. The first was from the outside in: You whittled away at the individual’s skin and bones and sex until the physical pain and exhaustion and shame annihilated their inner mental core. The second was the inverse: Find the fissure inside and tap it with a proverbial hammer until everything crumbled.
For her, usually the first was enough, given all the tools at her disposal—and it was also more fun and therefore always where she started. The second was trickier, although no less satisfying in its own right. All people had keys to open their interior doors; she just needed to sort through and find the one that got her inside a given individual’s head and heart.
In Jim Heron’s case . . . well, it was clear he was going to make her work for it. And didn’t that give her Adrian some competition for Favorite Toy.
What to choose, what to choose . . .
His mother. His mother was a good one, but Devina wouldn’t be able to get ahold of the real thing, and he might just be smart enough to figure out she was faking it.
Fortunately, there was another solution that happened to be under her control.
Outside of the pools of candlelight, trapped in her viscous walls, the souls of those she’d captured writhed. Hands and limbs and feet and heads made undulating appearances that never quite broke the surface of the suspension, the tortured ever searching for a way out.
The satisfaction of seeing her collection distracted her, but also made her hungry: She had to have Jim in and among her trophies. Was desperate to get him into her. At first it had been merely a case of the game; now, after this session, it was so much more than that.
She wanted to own him.
Refocusing on his face, she found his calm expression nearly impossible to comprehend. How a man could have gone through so much . . . and there wasn’t even a grimace. And no fear of what was to come, either.
She would fix that, however.
And she liked to think this power in him came from that portion of his makeup that was hers. Those bleeding-heart angels with their holier-than-thou morals and strictures—weak, so weak. To the point where she didn’t want to lose the game against Nigel not only because she could rule the earth and the heavens and all that was betwixt the sun and moon . . . but because what an ass slap to be bested by that bunch of pussies.
Jim, however . . . he was better than that. He was more like her at his core.
What a tragedy that he had to be sent back up to Earth soon; but play, after all, had to be resumed. Before he went, though, she was determined to make an imprint on him, give him more of a taste of what their Hell Ever After was going to be like. After all, the cuts in his skin were relatively shallow. Marks on the mind, however, went far, far deeper.
And immortals were especially satisfying in this regard because, as the brain persisted, so did memory—and that meant she could leave eternal scars in her wake.
Glancing at her wall, which stretched upward for miles, Devina thought of her therapist and the work they were doing together. This was one domain that was off-limits to her “recovery” and this situation with Jim was proof yet again of how her little hoarding problem came in handy.
You never knew what you’d need.
Extending her hand, she pulled down from the upper reaches one of the more slender shapes, moving it in and around the other souls, calling it to her. When it was by the floor, she summoned forth the soul and clothed it in the corporeal form it had worn on Earth.