He let go of his shirt and dropped his arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay. Where do you want to go next?”
The small amount of joy he’d gotten from messing with Pricilla’s goons had evaporated. “Home.”
“Really?” Nikki cocked her head to the side and considered him. “If that’s what you want.”
Shit, he didn’t know what he wanted. No, that wasn’t entirely true. He knew he wanted to be normal again and not trapped in this weird Freudian nightmare where he was constantly doing insane things like having pleasant conversations with his cousin and saving vicious alley cats. That may or may not have rabies.
His jaw aching from clenching his teeth, he pivoted and stalked toward the GTO. Nikki joined him, and within a matter of minutes they’d left the greasy spoon behind and were halfway to his house.
“Should I have not brought up the cat?”
He kept his focus glued to the windshield. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Are you just saying that because I’m not Cass, and I tend to screw up these kinds of conversations?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Apparently satisfied he was telling the truth, Nikki turned up the radio and flipped through the stations until she found a song she could sing off-key to.
He didn’t even grumble.
Definitely something hideously wrong with him.
Twenty minutes later they pulled into his garage, and he hit the remote. Tossing his keys onto the dash, he shoved the door open and climbed out. He and Nikki walked into the house and were bombarded with the tune of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” at a blasting decibel.
“Aw shit. I must have left my cell on the counter.” Nikki dashed into the kitchen and snatched her phone just as the last few bars of the ringtone blared. “Hey, Cass. What’s up?” Nikki was quiet for a moment before grimacing. “Okay, you can stop reading me the riot act. I wasn’t ignoring you. I accidentally left my cell at Sam’s while we were out driving. Yeah, he’s with me. Why?” Nikki’s forehead scrunched into a scowl. “You know, I’m getting fed up with everyone telling me to get my ass somewhere.” She heaved a breath. “Fine. We’ll be right there. Sheesh.”
Nikki disconnected and clipped her phone onto her belt loop before removing her reaper cuffs and slapping them onto the center island. “We’ve been summoned. Time to hit the teleportal highway, dude.” She snatched his arm and tugged him next to her as she triggered the launch coordinates on the bracelet. An instant later they landed in Marabella’s living room. Marabella was sitting on the couch, her expression perplexed as Cass paced in front of her.
The moment Cass noticed them, she halted and tunneled her fingers through her hair. “Thank God you guys are here. I’ve been going crazy trying to make sense of all of this.”
Nikki crossed to the couch and plopped down onto its arm. “All of what?”
“The fact Marabella is the offspring of Sascha Bahltair.”
It took a moment for Cass’s words to register. Once they did, Sam staggered back a step as if someone had just punched him in the solar plexus. “What the bloody fuck are you talking about?”
Cass ran her hands down her face. “Sascha Bahltair. You know, the freaking brother of the demon king?”
“I fucking know who he is, Cass,” he bit between his teeth. “What I want to know is what the hell you’ve been smoking to make you think she’s his daughter.” He jutted a finger in Marabella’s direction and noticed her face had suddenly turned white as chalk.
“W-what do you mean by demon king?” Marabella whispered. Looking like she was on the verge of hyperventilating, she transferred her stare between him, Cass and Nikki. She gulped. “Are…are you telling me my father was a demon?”
“No,” he answered in a flat voice.
The color slowly returned to Marabella’s cheeks, only to be highlighted a second later by the confusion in her gaze. “I don’t understand. How can one brother be a demon and the other not?”
“Because Sascha was an angel,” Cass offered quietly.
“She means that literally,” Nikki piped up. “Not in the sense of how some mothers call their babies angels when really they’re just tiny people with weird-shaped heads who poop a lot and smell funny.”
Cass rolled her eyes. “Thanks for clearing that up, Nik. Extremely helpful.”
Nikki bobbed her head. “Glad to be of assistance.”
“So…my father was an angel?” Marabella still had that deer-in-headlights look about her. “But that makes even less sense. How can an angel and a demon be brothers?”
“In the Christian religion, it’s believed Lucifer is a fallen angel. In essence, there is some merit to that theory. Demons and angels are essentially opposite sides of the same coin. Where one is light and carries a conscience, the other is dark and…well, we talked earlier about what demons don’t possess.”
They’d spoken earlier about demons? Sam glared at Cass. Why did he have a feeling he came up in that particular conversation? “You still haven’t explained how you were hit with this epiphany about Marabella being Sascha’s daughter.”
“He wrote letters to her mother. Judging from their contents, he was quite in love with Domino.”
Sam grunted, earning Marabella’s frown. Her knuckles whitened as she grasped her knees tight. “Why is it so impossible for you to believe love exists?”
“Because I’m a demon, remember? The word isn’t even in our damn vocabulary.”
Marabella appeared stricken by his answer. An odd twinge of pain cramped in the vicinity of his heart, and he lifted his hand to rub the spot. She straightened her posture and eyed him unwaveringly. “You can think whatever you want. I know my parents loved each other.”
Cass sat next to Marabella and squeezed her shoulder. “You’re absolutely right. I think if Sascha hadn’t been called away to duty, he would have ultimately stayed with your mom and married her.”
Marabella whisked a tear from her cheek. “Duty? I don’t understand. My father died in a car crash. That’s what took him from my mom. From me.”
“No, he didn’t. Many of the angels stood in the front lines of battle in the war waged against the various evils that plague this earth. Sascha was one of them, and it ultimately cost him his life.” She gave Marabella a soothing pat. “I know it doesn’t make up for your loss, but your father was nearly nine hundred years old when he was slain by an evil Wendigo that was terrorizing a small mining community in South America. Nine hundred years was a pretty darn good life.”
Marabella sucked in a shuddering breath. “Nine hundred years old? Wow, that’s…crazy.”
“Angels and demons can have an incredibly long life expectancy. Much more so than the rest of us. And they age different than we do. Kind of at a decelerated pace.” Cass waved a hand toward him. “Look at Sam. He’s one hundred and three, but you wouldn’t know it.”
Marabella gaped at him. “What?”
Well shit. Didn’t that make him feel like an old pervert robbing the cradle. “What can I say? Hugh Hefner wishes he could be me.”
Marabella returned her focus to Cass. “There’s something else I don’t understand. Why was my mom told that Sascha died in a car wreck?”
“To be honest, I’m surprised she was told anything. It would have been a lot simpler for Sascha’s colleagues not to contact her at all. The only thing I can figure is he must have informed them to make sure you and your mom were taken care of in the event anything happened to him. Obviously they couldn’t tell Domino the truth, so they were forced to improvise. My guess is they were also the ones who put the block on your soulprint, to cover up who and what you are.”