Devil May Care (24 page)

“Did you think I wasn’t?” I asked, confused.

“I wasn’t sure.” She shook her head against my shoulder and squeezed tighter. “After everything that’s happened I’ve been worried about you.”

“I’m fine.” I patted her on the back for a second before disentangling her arms from around my neck.

“Faith,” Harold said and tried to wrap his arms around me. He didn’t manage it of course but the sentiment was still appreciated. “I’ve been worried about you. Did you hear about Dr. Cosgrove?”

“Yeah.” I shifted away from him and tucked my hands underneath my armpits. “I’m sorry that they basically convicted the wrong guy for your murder and you’ll never actually get justice. If you want to smite someone for it, I’m sure we can tie Tolliver down and let you mess with him a bit. Give him ghostly wet willies or something.”

“I don’t need justice. I forgave you and Lisa for my death weeks ago.” Harold narrowed his eyes at my uncle. “But I still don’t think using a good man’s moment of weakness was the right way to go to fix things. We could have found another solution.”

“Right, good, thank you for forgiving me. That really does mean a lot to me.” I stepped away from him, avoiding everyone’s gazes. “Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I need to check on Matt.”

The living room fell silent, and I made my way down the hall, knocking on the door that used to belong to Lisa.

“Yes?” Mom called out from the other side of the door.

I pushed the door open. Mom was sitting in my desk chair, reading aloud from what looked like an old school bodice ripper—complete with naked man chesticles and a fuchsia background, while he rested on my bed. “It’s just me.”

“Oh.” Mom dog-eared her page—which would have killed Matt if he’d been feeling better—and smiled at me. “Faith, you’re here to sit with Matt. That’s wonderful. Super, in fact. I’ll just go…well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll come up with something.”

Instead of waiting for either of us to answer she hurried out of the room, taking the kitchen chair with her, leaving Matt and me alone, and for the first time since we’d met completely at a loss for what to say.

Chapter Twenty-Six

I looked at the door and then at Matt. My heart clenched at the sight of him. He was bare-chested, my comforter drawn up to his waist, and he was rocking a serious case of bed head. If it weren’t for the heavy bags under his eyes he would look sleep rumpled, charming, and absolutely drool-worthy. Considering the fact that he’d died and been brought back to life this week I’d say he still looked amazing.

“Hey,” he said. His eyes widened, like he was surprised to see me, and then he gave me a shy smile as he tried to push himself upright, his arms trembling. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

“I’ve been worried about you, too,” I said, leaving out the part about how he wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for me.

“So…” I smiled, my lips trembling and my stomach rolling with tension at the thought of being alone with him. I shoved my hands in my pockets and shuffled my feet against each other. Yeah, because that made me look cool and confident. Right.

“So…” He shrugged and plucked at the hem of the sheet.

“How are you?” I glanced around my bedroom, knowing there was nowhere besides the bed to sit down, but not trusting myself to be so close to Matt. I sank further into my thirteen-year-old girl lameness.

“Tired.” Matt patted the bed beside him. “Are you going to sit down?”

“I don’t know if I should,” I said, scooting closer to the wall. “I don’t want to jostle the bed or make you uncomfortable. I…don’t want to hurt you.”

“I don’t think you can hurt me. Not physically, at least.” He held out his hand for me. His eyes were soft and I could see his vulnerability. “Whatever the Alpha and Jesus did to me it managed to heal everything. Even my tonsils grew back.”

“Okay, that’s interesting in an odd sort of way. I mean I know Dad always said that Resurrection is like the Celestial version of a system reboot for the body. But growing your tonsils back? That’s just weird.” I tugged at my ponytail.

“Will you please sit down?” He motioned toward the mattress next to his hip. “All the fidgeting you’re doing is making me nervous.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, moving to perch on the edge of the bed.

“I said sit,” he said. When I didn’t reply he shifted closer to me and dragged me into the bed beside him, then buried his head in the side of my neck, planting a tender kiss behind my ear. My skin tingled under his lips and little jolts of electricity shot through me. I breathed in with relief at the fact that I could touch him, that he would let me touch him and not shrink away in disgust for what we’d done to him. I breathed deeply against his neck, trying to capture the scent of cookies. But there was nothing. No sunshine smell in his hair. No cookie scent lingering on his skin. No natural, guy scent every man I knew had. Every man I knew except for three. And now Matt was the fourth.

My stomach sank. All that relief I’d been feeling a moment before fled, and the hole it left filled with dread.

I pulled away and settled beside him, leaning against the headboard. We sat silently, our fingers interlaced, trying to find the words to make this change between us okay. Trying to find a way to make us okay. What was I supposed to say? Thanks for saving my life? Sorry you died? Good thing we knew a couple of guys who could pull off a resurrection?

“So, how long are you on bed rest?”

Stimulating conversationalist I was not.

He shook his head and smiled. “You’re trying to throw me out already? The Alpha said I should try to stay in bed, supervised, for as long as I could manage. But if having me here and not being able to ravish my broken body is too much for you, I’m sure your mother won’t mind nursing me to health at my place.”

I rested my head on his shoulder, trying to ignore the flight instinct inside me telling me to run like my tail was on fire, as I not so covertly reveled in the comfort his touch brought. “I’m getting concerned about all the time you’re spending alone with my mother. Does Dad have anything to worry about?”

“Hardly.” Matt chuckled. “She’s only here because I can’t do anything for myself yet without getting dizzy, and we all knew you were exhausted so I wouldn’t let them wake you.”

“So you’re on bed rest until you get your strength back?” I ignored his comment about how even in the middle of a resurrection he’d been concerned about my welfare.

“And until we can get things finalized.”

“Finalized?” I asked.

Matt pulled his arm off my shoulders, and hugged his stomach. “Jesus called work for me this morning and claimed to be my doctor. He told them I was in a pretty serious car accident and had fallen into a coma. Now we don’t have to worry about them expecting me back anytime soon.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t even thought about how they were going to explain his absence from work. Hell, I hadn’t even thought about his job this past week. None of us had. We’d just walked all over him while we tried to solve our own problems, not caring about how he was chipping away at his vacation time while we tortured him.

Matt shrugged and picked at the loose thread on my comforter, not meeting my eyes. “J told them I’d fallen asleep at the wheel coming home from work. He’s going to call back next week and tell them I didn’t survive.”

“Why?” I took his hand and laced our fingers together. I brought it to my mouth and kissed the back of it, noticing that instead of being rough it had become smooth and unblemished.

“Look at me,” he said, sighing. “I can’t go back there like this. Not with what I am.”

“The changes you’ve gone through are all so subtle that the human eye won’t register them. Or if they do they’ll see that something is different but they won’t be able to figure out what.”

“
I’ll
register them,” he said. “I’ll know that I’m different and I can’t explain why, but that matters to me. Besides, I think everyone knows that I’ve got bigger things to deal with than my law career. Your uncle didn’t just bring me back because he’s nice. He doesn’t do that. Remember?”

I stilled and considered his words, the tension in my gut shifting instantly into a giant knot of dread. He was right. My uncle didn’t do things to be a nice guy. “Then why did he do it?”

“The Angale can’t live on their own,” he said. He moved so that our foreheads were pressed together and our lips were only centimeters apart. “They can’t be out in the normal world and interact with people. I’d love to tell you that they can, and that it would just take a little work on their part and they’d acclimate. But we all know they won’t. They can’t.”

I froze, and the entire world turned to ice around me. The ball of dread in my stomach careened upward like a cannonball, smacking into my heart broadside and shattering it into a million tiny pieces. How could they decide such a thing? How could he agree to it?

“My uncle wants you to lead the Angale? He wants you to be the leader of a cult full of bloodthirsty nephilim? Or
you
want this?”

“They can change,” he said. “They
will
change. I won’t lead people like my mother did. But the most important part is if I’m in charge I can keep you safe.”

“So you’re going to lead an army of Celestial beings that want to kill me and it’s for my own good?”

“Biloxi has been compromised. We’ve found a place near Greensburg where I can create another home for them. That way I can stay right here with you. Plus, your father and uncle will be able to help me manage them, and they’ll help me try to integrate those who want to live out in the world.”

“It won’t work.”

He held the sides of my face, forcing me to look up at him. His eyes swirled with passion and a type of haunting intensity I’d never seen before. “It has to. I refuse to let it
not
work. You could have died and I wasn’t able to protect you. I won’t let that happen again.”

“No.” My knees were trembling, and I had to fight the urge to run out of the room crying. He wasn’t supposed to be so supportive. So caring. He was supposed to be angry and resentful. Instead, here he was acting like he needed to protect me. Why couldn’t he be decent and act like an asshole? Just this once?

“Let me protect you. Let me keep you safe. I love you, Faith. Let me show you that by trusting me to take care of you.”

“I can’t.” I looked down at the comforter, refusing to meet his eyes. “You died and then they wouldn’t let me help save you. They made me go outside and you were here and I was so…so…”

“Scared?” he asked. I nodded, and he squeezed my hand. “I was scared, too. I have been so scared because there were times I thought everything I knew had never taken place. That you weren’t real. But then, there would be these moments where my mind would clear, and it would all make sense again. I would make sense again. We would make sense again and I wasn’t scared anymore.”

I tried to think of something to say that would make this better. Some way to save what we had. For both of our sakes. The problem was, I loved Matt. I adored him. He was the key that made everything else in my life make sense. But he had died trying to save me. And now he was going to give up everything he’d fought for in some desperate attempt to keep me safe. How could I love him and let him do that?

“About your mom.” I started in my usual, utterly tactless manner. I didn’t want to bring it up, but at the same time I couldn’t let Valerie’s elephant-sized absence stifle us, either. Not with everything else we had to face.

“She tried to kill you. She kidnapped a demon. All of it was part of some grand plan on her part to set up my father as a false God with herself as his prophet. The Alpha said my father is claiming he had no idea what she was doing, but there’s a pretty heavy cloud of suspicion hanging over him. Two attempts by his followers at a Celestial power grab in less than two months makes him look incompetent.”

“Well…” I bit my lower lip. He wasn’t acknowledging she was dead. Okay, so he knew she was guilty of what could have become some pretty terrible things, but did he realize Lilith vaporized her on his couch? “I just wanted to say I was sorry about what happened to her.”

“Why are you sorry?” he asked. “Lisa told me what happened. Mom managed to slip free of her bindings because of all the weird energy flowing through the building during the whole
Bringing Me Back to Life
thing, and she attacked you. If it would have been me there instead of Lilith, I would have killed her, too.”

“What Lilith did wasn’t a heat of the moment, kill or be—”

“Lilith killed her to protect you. My mother was determined to keep after you until one of you was dead. She got what she wanted, just not the way she wanted it. She’s not the first person to have that particular outcome happen when they messed with your family.”

Right, Levi. When the Alpha caught him trying to steal power from other immortals, starting with me, He’d put him in a pocket of Purgatory and granted him the powers of a pure Celestial Being. He was a god among men. Then, before Levi even got the chance to enjoy his new powers, the Alpha pushed them just beyond his reach and cut off his access to them for all time.

Now we had been forced to deal with a potential uprising by a group of psycho nephilim and Matt had almost died. No, scratch that—he had died.

“We can’t see each other anymore.” I blurted out.

“Excuse me?” Matt looked at me, his face stunned and his mouth hanging slightly open.

“You keep getting hurt because of me. I’m like a Celestial danger magnet for you. Your brother blew up your car. Your mom almost had you killed by garden sprites. The risk is just too high.”

“
My
half-brother blew up
my
car,” he said, pointing at his chest. “
My
mother sent
me
to die by garden sprites.
My
family members are the ones who keep trying to kill
me
.”

I turned away from him and shoved my hands under my armpits so that I wouldn’t lose my nerve and fall into his arms like some weak-willed girl having her first lover’s tiff. “You’re only in their sights because of me. If you lived anywhere else but next door to the Devil’s youngest daughter, they wouldn’t have had any idea where to find you. You’d be safe right now.”

“I am safe right now,” he said. “I’m here, you’re here, your father has an entire legion of demons on call and waiting for the moment I’m not safe. Besides, all things considered, your uncle’s little parlor trick has made sure that I’m invincible. So I can’t imagine a world in which I’ll ever not be safe again. I promise you Faith, I’m fine. We’re fine. You just need to trust me.”

“He’s sending you to lead a group of crazy nephilim into a new life. Just because they can’t kill you doesn’t mean they can’t find a way to hurt you.”

“So what? We’re through? Is that what you’re telling me?” Matt threw back the sheets and stood. I tried to keep my eyes focused forward and not stare at his naked butt. They’d even managed to cure the scar on his back from the bike accident he’d had in college. The Alpha was thorough. “Right now, what you’re doing to us is hurting me more than anything that I’ve been through in the past three days.”

I squeezed my eyelids shut, trying to keep from getting distracted. “I think it would be safer for you.”

“This isn’t about me being safe,” Matt said. I peeked at him through slitted eyelids. He was pacing at the foot of my bed, his wings extended and his hands tugging at his hair. “This is about you being scared.”