Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (29 page)

He took a deep breath and lowered his eyes, because he didn’t want to admit the truth to her—that reclaiming control from the Eidolon that morning had taken all of his strength, all of his will.
And God help me, I don’t know if I could do it again.
“I think it would be better, safer for you, if you weren’t around me anymore.”

After a moment’s pause, during which he suspected she was waiting for him to deliver a punch line to whatever little practical joke he might have been playing on her, her frown deepened. “No way.”

“Sam…” Jason sighed heavily, forking his fingers through his hair.

“Damn it, I said no,” she snapped. “You’ve no right to ask me that, to say that to me. Not now. Not after all of this.” Motioning widely with her hands, she indicated the room around them, and more generally, the clusterfuck that had become their lives.

“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “You don’t—”

“What? Understand? No, Jason.
You
listen. Because
you’re
the one not understanding.” She stood, fists balled. “I bought you a new suit when we buried you. It was really nice, navy blue wool, with a white shirt, a maroon silk tie. You would have hated it because it was expensive, but I thought you’d look handsome in it.”

Stricken, he stared at her.

“You were shot once in the chest, then again in the head. The funeral home didn’t want me to see you like that. They told me they could use makeup and some kind of wax to try to hide what had happened, but…”

In the yellow lamp light, her eyes had taken on a glossy cast. “They did that with my dad, and it didn’t even look like him when they were done. I didn’t want that, to remember you that way. So we did everything closed casket. I picked out a mahogany one for you. It had a memory drawer in it, so I bought this little photo album and put pictures in it—you and your parents, pictures of us, different things. I thought you’d have liked that. I had you buried with your parents. They have this way of doing it where your casket goes in the ground stacked on top of theirs.” Her voice faded, and again she looked away.

“Sam,” he said, because he could see it pained her; it damn near killed her to talk about it, and he realized that in all likelihood, she hadn’t, not with Dean or Bear—not with anyone—since his funeral. “Sam, I…”

“I went through your things, cleaned out your apartment, your closet,” she said. “I had to pack up all your clothes and I could still smell you in them, your cologne…” At last, her voice broke, ragged and hoarse and she looked away, clamping her arms about herself in a brittle embrace.

Jason stood from the couch and moved to hold her, but she shrugged away from him, her brows narrowed.

“You don’t know how hard it was to tell you good-bye,” she cried. “To give up our life together, the things we’d wanted and wished for, everything we’d hoped and planned. To wake up every morning after having dreamed about you only to realize that’s all it was—all it ever would be—just goddamn
dreams.
”
She sniffled, swatting at her tears as if they infuriated her. “You don’t know what it was like to miss you or…or how it felt to see you again, to be with you. And then you left, and it was all my fault and I knew I couldn’t do it! I couldn’t learn to survive somehow without you all over again.”

“I just don’t want anything to happen to you,” Jason pleaded. “Listen to me. I don’t know if I can keep you safe. Hell, I don’t know if I can keep
myself
safe.”

“I don’t need you to keep me safe,” Sam exclaimed. “I just need
you
! I’ve already lost you once. I’m not going to do it again—not without a fight. I love you too much to let you go. Never again, Jason.”

She caught his face between her hands and cut short any further protest he might have offered with a kiss, pressing her mouth fiercely to his, her tongue tangling against his. His need for her was sudden, desperate, basic and raw. His hands trailed from her face to her throat, sliding down her shoulders, and she uttered a soft moan as they fell against her breasts.

“Stay with me,” she whispered, reaching between them, fumbling to open his fly.

He nodded, relenting as she shoved his jeans away from his hips. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered back, reaching for her, jerking at her waistband. “Not ever, Sam. I swear to God. Not without you.”

She eased him backward and he sat down against the sofa. She straddled him, her thighs enveloping his hips, and she lowered herself atop him, pushing him into her in a single, swift moment.

He groaned her name, kneading her breasts, feeling the bullet points of her nipples hardening beneath his fingertips. He jerked at her shirt as she tugged at his own, and within moments, they were pressed belly to belly, skin to skin.

“Don’t stop,” she pleaded, rocking against him.

“I won’t,” he promised breathlessly, shaking his head as he cradled her hips, thrusting himself more deeply into her.

Her fingers tightened in his hair, and her breath grew sharp, ragged against his ear, and as he moved his hips to match her sudden, fervent rhythm, Jason felt more alive than he’d felt in his entire life. He came hard, arching his back from the seat of the couch and jerking against her. She climaxed with him, tightening against him in a taut, shuddering spasm. Her body went rigid in his arms, her nails dug into his skin and in the aftermath, she huddled against him, trembling.

“I love you, Jason,” she whispered, nestled against him, her words vulnerable and earnest.

Turning his cheek, he kissed her ear through her dark, tangled hair. “I love you too, Sam,” he breathed.
God above, more than anything, I love you.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jason had placed Gabriel’s pistol on the living room bookshelf. He and Sam had curled together, side by side, on the cramped sofa until her breathing had grown slow and steady from beside him, her fingers slipping laxly away from his own as she slept.

Moving slowly, careful not to disturb her, he’d slipped away from her side, grimacing as the springs in the old couch had creaked with his shifting weight. Leaving her to rest, he stole to the bookshelf and took the gun down.

Cradling it sideways in his hand, he ejected the clip, then checked the cartridges inside to confirm what the priest had told him earlier, that the bullets were indeed marked with the trefoil design of the triquetra. Thus satisfied, he slapped the clip home again, sparing a glance at the couch to make sure the noise hadn’t bothered Sam. Then, as he walked slowly toward the bedroom door, he thumbed off the safety.

He’d turned off the lamp when he’d left the room earlier. The only light now came from a narrow oblong spilling in from the living room, and the faint glow of streetlights from beyond the windows. It was enough to glisten in Gabriel’s eyes as they opened when Jason pressed the muzzle of the pistol to his forehead, squarely against the bridge of his nose.

“I want some answers,” Jason seethed. His voice shook, as did his hand, and he hoped the shadows draping the room, along with the priest’s murky degree of consciousness, helped disguise this fact.

“I imagine you do,” Gabriel croaked, squinting blearily at him.

He thrust his hand up, his fingers splayed wide, and sudden brilliant fire lanced out of his fingertips like bolts of lightning. With the distinctive stink of ozone, it struck Jason like a runaway freight train, knocking him backward and off his feet, slamming him into the far wall. It pinned him here for an agonizing moment, searing through his body, making all of his muscles spasm and contract in excruciating unison; then he disappeared, shifting into shadow form in a desperate attempt to escape. He coalesced across the room by the desk but immediately crumpled to his hands and knees, choked for breath, still jerking uncontrollably from the electrified charge.

“Please,” he gasped, looking up, his vision blurred as tears streamed down his cheeks. Gabriel staggered to his feet, his body enveloped in a hissing, crackling shroud of energy, just like Nemamiah had been in the Seattle alley. He lurched toward Jason, his fists bared, his hair standing nearly on end.

“Wait,” Jason pleaded, cowering. The gun had fallen from his hand when he’d hit the wall. He could see it across the room, on the floor beneath the window, well out of arm’s reach. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill your friend!”

“No,” Gabriel conceded. “You didn’t. That goddamn shadow demon inside you did. And if it was up to me, I would rip it out of you with my bare hands and send it back to the bowels of the Netherworlde, to whatever wretched, stinking hole in the ground it crawled out of.”

Jason dissipated into shadows again, reforming beside the fallen gun and snatching it in hand. Panicked, he shoved the business end at Gabriel, his finger against the trigger, his hand still badly shaking. “You can do that?” he asked, seized with sudden, desperate hope. “You can get it out of me?”

The light surrounding Gabriel, so brilliant it was nearly painful to look at him, abruptly vanished, plunging the room into relative darkness, leaving Jason blinded, swinging the pistol back and forth wildly.

“No,” Gabriel said. Jason heard a soft
snict!
as he turned on the lamp, sending a spill of yellow glow in a small circumference across the floor. The priest leaned heavily against his desk, his hand pressed gingerly against his wounded midriff as he gasped for breath. When he looked at Jason, his eyes were solemn, nearly sorrowful.

“I can’t get it out of you,” he said, and at this, Jason idiotically felt dismayed tears well in his eyes, and his breath hitched as he struggled to contain them.

“It’s a part of you now,” Gabriel said, limping to the fridge and pulling out a bottle of beer. Propping the door open with his hip, he slipped a bottle opener with a magnet affixed to the back from the side of the refrigerator, then popped the cap with an audible hiss. He titled his head back and drew the Heineken to his lips. His Adam’s apple bobbed steadily as he proceeded to gulp down the beer.

When he was finished, he gasped, a mixture of satisfaction and the need for air. Drawing his hand to his mouth, he glanced at Jason and blew a soft burp against his knuckles. “Where’s Samantha?”

“Mei went to the hospital,” Jason said. “The doctor who helped you, removed the bullet from you, he said for us to come, he’d give us some antibiotics for you.”

“Antibiotics?”

“You’re hurt,” Jason said. “The bullet perforated your intestine. He was afraid you might develop some kind of infection.”

For the first time, Gabriel managed a smile, a quick chuckle. He knocked back the last of his Heineken, then tossed the empty bottle into a nearby waste can. He reached into the fridge and pulled out another bottle, tossing it to Jason. “Here.”

He took another for himself, let the door swing closed, then shuffled toward the living room. “Come on,” he said. “It’s time for Letterman.”

****

Jason carried Sam into the bedroom at Gabriel’s instruction, laying her gently against the mattress. She stirred groggily at this, but drifted off again within moments after Jason smoothed her hair down and offered her a reassuring kiss.

After that, he sat with Gabriel on the couch and watched
The Late Show
as if it was no more than an ordinary evening and they were no more than a couple of ordinary guys hanging out together, drinking beer. Gabriel seemed relaxed enough, laughing through a stupid-tricks segment, listening with what seemed like interest to an interview with one of the show’s guests, a pretty young starlet Jason had never seen before, who was promoting her latest movie. It felt so normal, so
ordinary—
it was anything but, and Jason found himself cradling the beer bottle idly between his hands, rolling it back and forth between his palms, more so than drinking from it.

When the program was over, Gabriel leaned forward, remote in hand, and thumbed off the television. He settled back against the couch again, his face twisted with obvious pain, his breath bated for a long moment between clenched teeth.

“It’s not the worst I’ve ever felt,” he said finally in a strained voice, opening one eye to glance at Jason and force a smile. “But it’s damn sure not the best. It’s been a long time since I was last hit by a talisman. I forgot what it feels like.” Almost ruefully, he added, wincing, “Going to have to work harder to remember from now on.”

“Talisman?” Jason asked and Gabriel nodded.

“That’s what we call weapons marked with the triquetra,” he said. “You know what that means?” When Jason nodded, he added, “Well, we actually call them…”

For a moment, his eyes rolled back in his skull, turning not only over to the whites of his cornea, but to that same white fire that had surrounded him earlier. As it filled his eyes, Gabriel tilted his head and opened his mouth, uttering a shrill screech, a piercing series of vibrato sounds that left the window panes rattling across the room. Jason clapped his hands over his ears, wincing.

The sound cut off as Gabriel closed his mouth and Jason lowered his hands hesitantly. “Of course, you can’t walk around talking like that, not unless you want to deafen everyone around you,” the priest said. “So we use filter speech. The listener hears us in whatever dialect is native to them. You’re officially multilingual now.” He clapped his hand against Jason’s shoulder, then grimaced again as he rose slowly, carefully to his feet. “Multi-
multi-
lingual,” he added. “We’re regular walking Rosetta Stones.”

He shuffled toward the bathroom and closed the door behind him, staying here long enough for Jason to start to worry that maybe he’d passed out or something. He started to get up, meaning to go and knock on the door, check on Gabriel, when the priest came out again, walking slowly, holding his hand gingerly over the panel of bandaging taped across his lower abdomen. Rather than return to the couch, he leaned heavily against the wall, gazing over the top of a lamp at Jason.