Made for Sin (16 page)

Ardeth pressed a plastic cup into his hand as soon as he sat down in the passenger seat of the Dart; she was driving again, because once again he couldn't do it. “Whiskey. It seemed to help before.”

He downed it. Warmth trickled back through his limbs, not much, but some. Enough to make him feel a little more alive again. Not enough to sit up, but better; he could keep his eyes open, watch the city roll past. “Thank you.”

“Don't mention it.”

He sighed. Any second now she'd ask the question. Any second. And he was going to have to answer it. He couldn't refuse, not after what the beast had done to her, the way it had grabbed her. She deserved to know.

And suddenly he wanted to tell her. He watched a strip mall go past, all sandy stucco in the high bright sun, and thought about the people in the stores, the people around them in their cars. All those lives. All so isolated. He didn't want to be isolated at that moment, not then. He wanted something more than that. Something he'd never had, and he wanted it with her.

“It lives in my head,” he said, without realizing he'd actually made the decision to speak. “The beast. The demon, I mean—it's a demon, but that's all I know. It won't give me its name.”

“How did it get there?” She was so calm, it seemed. At least, he didn't detect any sort of anxiety or excitement, even, in her voice. And the beast had blessedly gone back to sleep once Speare had gotten it away from the body parts and angry men. It needed more time to recover, too.

“I don't know. I don't know if I was born with it, or what. I only know it's there.” He was suddenly glad she was focused on the road, and that he still had his sunglasses on. It was easier to talk without her looking at him, watching him; easier to talk when he didn't have to look at her, when he could just stare out the window or down at the whiskey in his cup, or close his eyes and watch the memories play like movies against his eyelids. “I started hearing things, feeling things, when I was about thirteen. It started moving in my head, and I felt that. I still do. It got louder and louder, it put images in my head, horrible images. Then one night I woke up—I came to—downtown, with blood on my hands and no real memory of how I got there or what I was doing, and I could hear it laughing at me.”

“God.” She still didn't sound scared…but for all he knew, she was frantically planning what to pack in her getaway bag so she could take off for good, and never see him again. “You must have been terrified.”

“It wasn't fun.” That was an understatement. He
had
been terrified. He'd been terrified when the beast started putting fantasies in his head, too—dark, twisted fantasies of violence and sex he still had to fight off sometimes in his dreams.

And now he could be free of it. He could get rid of it, and he could tell her—in this conversation that felt so important, that felt like stripping himself naked—that he was going to be free of it.

Except he couldn't. He was not going to start counting his demons before they were exorcised. He was not going to let himself jump at the idea of freedom so recklessly, so eagerly. He'd done that before. He'd allowed himself to hope so much that the hope started to become reality in his head; he'd allowed himself to hope so much that it became a poison in his veins when he inevitably found that the only things he'd managed to lose were money, time, and—usually—a not-inconsiderable quantity of his own blood. Feeling that hope shatter like a truckload of plate glass windows hit by a locomotive hurt more every time.

He couldn't do that again. He wouldn't let himself do that again.

So he was going to keep his fucking mouth shut, and his fucking hands off. Because that was what he was thinking, wasn't it? Yeah. It was. And he didn't even want to imagine how he'd feel if he let himself entertain
that
little fantasy and it crashed. It would make the pain currently turning his body into an inescapable medieval torture device feel like lying in a hammock made of velvet and breasts, or something.

The beast had already taken his freedom from him, years before. No way was he letting it take anything else, even if that meant not allowing himself to have anything it could take.

“And you don't know why it's there. Like, why you.” It wasn't a question.

“Nope. I used to wonder if my father was like this and it got passed down to me—I know what everyone assumes there, but I don't think my mother knows for sure who he was. It might be a spell or I touched the wrong thing at the wrong time or…” Another drink, a longer one. “Who knows. I guess we all get what we deserve, somehow.”

“I don't think that's the case, all the time,” she said. “Not always.”

Yeah. Easy for her to say. He knew better. He hadn't asked for the beast and the need to sin, but he hadn't been forced to spend so many years enjoying it, either.

And he knew what the beast thought. How it felt that he was the perfect vessel. It had made that very clear over the years, that it wouldn't have been so comfortable and happy in anyone else's head, that something about him made them perfect for each other. “Anyway. One day I was out wandering around and I was hungry. My mother had been gone for a couple of days, working or whatever—she didn't usually do that, but every once in a while she'd just sort of disappear. She wasn't cruel, you know? Just forgetful, and she figured I could take care of myself by then.”

“Sure.”

“I didn't have any money but I was hungry, so I went into a 7-Eleven and stole a bag of corn chips.” He could still taste those corn chips, too, and how scared he'd been when he took them, how good they'd been. “And it stopped. I mean, it didn't stop, but it stopped for a while. The sounds in my head, the feeling of it moving around, it all went away. It was still there—I knew it was still there, it's always there—but I could ignore it. I could feel almost normal.

“At first I thought it was corn chips that made the difference,” he went on, and was surprised, and pleased, when Ardeth laughed with him. “I mean, I ate like three bags a day. But it wasn't the food itself. It was
stealing
the food.”

They passed a Laundromat, a Mexican restaurant. A vacant lot, fenced in with construction signs; the city growing, rising, around them. “That was what did it. The sin. It still does. If I want to keep it quiet, if I want to keep it from busting through like it tried to do today…and I always want to keep that from happening…that's what I have to do, is sin.”

She was silent for a few minutes, absorbing that. He dared to glance at her and found her absently chewing on her thumbnail, thinking, as she watched the road through her sunglasses and the sun turned her hair into a halo of deep fire.

“I've been all over the world,” he said, when it became obvious she was waiting for him to go on—or she just had nothing else to say. Either way, he wanted to finish. “Trying to find answers. Occultists, sorcerers, priests, witches, you name it. Nobody can get rid of it—it won't let go of me, and trying to kill myself just makes it laugh.”

This time her brows flexed, her lips turned down. Maybe he shouldn't have said that last part. No, he definitely shouldn't have said it. Damn it, why was he running his mouth so much? Why the hell did it seem so important to tell her this, to give her so many details she hadn't asked for?

He didn't know. He only knew that it did seem important, that he couldn't seem to stop himself from laying it all out before her. From feeling like she needed to know it.

She probably needed to know about the mirror, too, and about what it could mean for him. How for the first time in a long time, he was facing the real possibility that he could get rid of the beast. He ought to tell her about it, see what she thought. Aside from anything else—any of the ideas in his head that he was refusing to allow to form more than halfway—she knew things he didn't. Her opinion would be valuable.

But he couldn't seem to find the words to tell her. He couldn't seem to think of a way to explain it that wouldn't sound like…well. He couldn't think of a way to say it that didn't sound too personal.

“Is that why you left military school?” she asked, interrupting the swirling mass of his thoughts. “Why you turned down a chance to test for the Secret Service?”

Jesus, she knew about that, too? Maybe she knew every way the beast had destroyed his life, then, every painful loss he'd suffered because of it. “Yes.”

“This is how you knew there were guys waiting outside your house last night. It told you.”

It was barely one o'clock. He had things to do. He shouldn't be taking another healthy swig from the cup Ardeth had filled to the brim for him.

But he was. “Yes.”

“That's how your wound healed so fast.”

“Yes.”

“And why you didn't think we needed to wrap your hands when we got in the car. They're already fine, aren't they?”

He inspected them. Only thin, jagged lines of shiny reddish skin showed where the knuckles had torn open. “Pretty much.”

“Must be nice,” she said.

“Yeah…not really worth it.”

“Oh, right.” She kind of laughed. She could laugh about it? How was this not a huge deal to her? It was odd how that actually made him feel better, like his problem was minor. Like it was a trick knee or something that just had to be worked around. “I guess not. Sorry. Again.”

“Don't worry about it,” he said. It was what he ought to say—the polite response to someone's obviously innocent but unthinking comment, no offense meant and no harm done—but he realized he was glad she'd said it. Glad she'd laughed about it. Maybe that was why he felt so much better than he had ten minutes earlier, at least mentally. Physically he still felt pretty shitty.

The quality of silence changed; he heard Ardeth shifting positions in her seat, making herself more comfortable. Or perhaps mentally preparing to run, or squirming because of what she was about to ask or say. Perhaps his feeling better was premature.

She sighed. “So…what made it happen? I mean, today. Is it—does it come out, or take over or whatever, at some kind of regular interval?”

“Not if I can help it,” he said, aware they were almost at her place and that once they reached it he'd find out what she planned to do. “I can usually stop it. Sinning—that feeds it, keeps it happy so it doesn't try to break through. But—”

“Any kind of sin.”

“Mortal sins are the best,” he said, knowing damn well what she was thinking. “It likes those the best, I mean.”

“Like stealing.” She paused. “Or sex.”

“Any mortal sin.”

A longer pause. “I'm sorry, Speare. I didn't know.”

“Don't worry about it.” Shit, he couldn't handle her sadness, her regret, too. Especially when it wasn't her fault; what was she supposed to think? “He must be feeding a demon in his head” wasn't really anybody's first response when considering why a guy would live like he was trying to outscore Wilt Chamberlain. “It doesn't matter.”

“Oh.” It was almost a whisper.

They rode in silence for another minute or so. He closed his eyes. One more thing to say, one more question to answer, and maybe an answer to get from her. “Something—Nielsen had something in his study, that room he took me into. I don't know what it was, but that's what did it. That's what brought it out. It was powerful, whatever he had in there, and it called the thing—the beast—forward. It roughed Nielsen up, a little.” That was a lie. “Um,
I
roughed him up. Sorry. I needed answers fast, I had to get out of—why are you laughing?”

“You sound so guilty. You don't need to be. He's been roughed up before. Anybody in our line of work knows it might happen, and sometimes it does. Part of doing business.”

That woke him up a little. “You? Who went after you?”

Another light laugh. “Not usually me. They just threaten me, and there are very few secrets I'm willing to take a beating for. Unlike Nielsen. You must have been really convincing—he's a tough old bastard.”

He hadn't seemed like it. He'd given up his information awfully fast, actually, once Speare grabbed him.

He was about to tell her that when she pulled into her driveway and shut off the car. “Come on. Let's get you inside.”

The interior was cool, and dim once she closed all the curtains and shut all the blinds without him asking her to. Dim enough that he could take off the sunglasses; she was a shadow moving through the room, taking shape when she got close to him.

“Do you want to go lie down?” She refilled the cup he still held, looking up at him through opaque eyes. “I could run you a bath.”

He managed a smile at that. “I'm part demon, not part woman.”

Her answering smile, as wry as it was, sent a bright stab of—of something—through him. “It might really help, honest. Stiff muscles, heat…people do it for a reason. I'll even put Epsom salts in to make it more manly. Just hang on.”

“You don't have to—” But she was gone. Practically running to escape him.

Or maybe she was just trying to help. He was too beat to care. He stood in place, swaying gently in a breeze that seemed to come from inside him, while the sounds of water running and cabinets being opened barely penetrated his semi-fugue. It was almost pleasant, standing there, not caring where he was or what was happening. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt that way. Had he ever felt that way?

Some time passed. Maybe a few minutes. Maybe half an hour. What difference did it make? None. What mattered at that moment was only Ardeth's hands around his wrist, tugging him through the blurry white haze of her living room and down the narrow, tilting hall, around a fuzzy corner and into her bathroom.

The scent of salt—she'd really put Epsom salts in there; he'd thought she was kidding—mingled with steam and melting wax from two fat white candles that provided the room's only, blessedly nonpainful, light. Below those were the fragrance of the soap she used, of that delicate, warm, slightly spicy perfume she wore, and, more faintly still, of the contents of various bottles and jars along the edge of the deep, wide bathtub and the long countertop covered in spring green tiles that matched the floor. Her bathroom, he realized. Not the bathroom attached to the guest room where he'd slept, but her own private bathroom.