He nodded and took a long drink.
“She hadn’t gone home for Christmas in years. She’d just broken up with the last in a long line of shitty boyfriends who’d stiffed her on the rent. She had nowhere to be and no one waiting for her. So she swallowed all the pills, chased them down with half a bottle of vodka. And then she used her box cutter.” Bella dragged up her sleeves and tilted both forearms toward him.
Slowly, he approached. His thigh bumped her knee, and she inhaled the sweet scent of the Drambuie she’d poured him. He ran one finger down the raised scar on her left arm. “No hesitation marks. This wasn’t a cry for help. She was done.”
Bella shivered, at his touch or his words or the memories, she wasn’t sure. “If she’d ever cried out, only the demons noticed. And we drank her misery like it was last call.”
She hurled her glass. It hit the wall beside the reliquary and shattered.
“Fuck,” she said, apropos of nothing.
Fane did not even twitch when the glass sailed by his ear. “But you’re here. Which means she didn’t die.”
“She did. The imp watched while her eyes misted, as if the escaping soul was clawing free of the body, like a diamond scarring glass. The imp—I—wanted more. I wanted all of her agony. I wanted to dance in the light fading from her eyes. I got too close. As her soul left, I felt the emptiness sucking at me. The imp tried to flee, but it was too late. It sucked me right in. And I was born into her. I was born, dying.”
She shuddered. “The imp got misery in spades that night. I puked up the booze and pills. I wrapped my arms in bar rags and staggered downstairs. You can imagine the mayhem. Joy to the fucking world.”
“And so Mirabel became Bella.”
“I took everything of hers: her body, her memories, her speech patterns, her fashion sense, her wheat allergy. I even took her last loser boyfriend so I could give him a taste of the demon tongue, though he barely heard his long litany of sins over his screaming. After all I took, I thought I should at least leave her name.”
“Nice of you.”
She flinched. “I am a monster, a monster in a dead girl’s clothing. But the one thing Mirabel didn’t give me, the one thing the imp brought with it, is this: I am not going back to hell.”
Fane inclined his head. “Not unless I send you there.”
Chapter 6
Fane refused to let her sudden blanching sway him. Poor Mirabel had needed help and sympathy. This creature before him deserved none of that.
Slowly, Bella slid off the counter. Since he did not move back, she stood toe to toe with him. In her slippers, the top of her red beehive barely reached his nose, and she had to tilt her head to look up at him. “You won’t have to do a damned thing to me. The tenebrae are coming, like they do every year on the darkest night. If you take my defenses, I am worse than dead.”
It had always been a point of curiosity to the sphericanum that the tenebrae—for all the demons decided lack of repenting—fled from their dismal realm into the human world at any opportunity. Even demons didn’t want to live in hell. But he supposed they wouldn’t want one of their own living the good life either.
He stared down at her with grim foreboding, his whole body tight with shock, as if waiting for another blow.
She was tenebrae. How could he have been so blind? The irony of the thought did not escape him, but even knowing what he did now, his angel couldn’t find the demon in her eyes. He saw only the blue-white shine of the cataracts. “How can the tenebraeternum be worse than death?”
“Is an angel-man even allowed to ask?” The defiant set of her shoulders wavered. “For a while, I hoped Mirabel’s history would erase the imp’s recollections of its own realm, but in some ways, the two were so similar: the emptiness, the desolation, the conviction it would always be that way. Mirabel used the booze and drugs and cutter to escape her own version of hell. The imp fled the tenebraeternum into the space she left behind.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Now I have both their memories. And it’s worse this time of year.”
He focused on the religious mayhem behind her, anything to avoid looking at her as he struggled to come to grips with this unwelcome truth. He tightened one hand into a fist until he remembered the feel of the fine bones of her neck under his fingers, then his hand sprang open of its own accord. “All the spiritual artifacts. You use them to repel the tenebrae.”
“This body protects me from the effects of the artifacts, but my cousins still hate the flavors of hope, joy and love.”
That was the sanctuary the artifacts offered her? A wall of joy and hope? He’d never thought of his abraxas in such a way. A warden’s holy relic was always a weapon, an object of carnage and terror. Love couldn’t hold a killing edge.
He stalked away from her and prowled the room, stopping at the window where another baby Jesus looked out into the night, much as Mirabel must have done.
He stared down at it. “It’s just plastic.”
From behind him, Bella said, “I’ve heard it’s the thought that counts.”
“People say so only because they got you a shitty present.”
“You know better. People imbue objects with their beliefs. Which is why I can’t use Santas to guard the way. I don’t want the tenebrae coming for me as their gift.”
He turned his glare on her. “But Jesus died for our sins, so you don’t have to?”
She lifted her chin. “That is one aspect of their faith, yes. What’s so wrong about that?”
“Let’s ask Mirabel.” He grabbed the statue and headed for the next one.
“You can’t take them!” Bella rushed around the edge of the counter toward him.
He lifted one hand—the one without the baby Jesus tucked under it—and forced his angel to rise in a glow of gold around his knuckles. “You took them. I’m taking them back.”
She skidded to a halt, her mouth twisted. “You want me to die, don’t you?”
“No. But I won’t let you lie and steal either. If you want to atone for the imp, you start now.”
“The longest night of the year is coming, the night she died. The tenebrae will come.”
“Let them come. We will stand against them.”
She lowered her chin, doubt obvious in the tight pull of her mouth, but she didn’t back away from him. “One imp in the body of a dead girl and one angel in exile?”
He did not bother explaining how he would soon retrieve his abraxas. Yes, he was going to have to make some compromises, but only for the greater good. “We aren’t alone. The talyan—”
She laughed, and he had to admit, claiming common cause with the league was rather absurd. “The only ones who hate the tenebrae more than the sphericanum are the teshuva,” she reminded him. “They followed us to their doom and now they repent with our slaughter.”
“You aren’t tenebrae,” he shot back. “Not anymore.”
“At least they still want me. The talyan certainly won’t.” She sidled closer to him. “But maybe you want me again. Is that the concession you’re looking for?”
He tightened his jaw at her sideways smile. “I’m not looking for anything.”
“You didn’t just happen to drive through this neighborhood.” She reached out and popped open the top button of his shirt. “And you are not wearing anything underneath this time. I wonder why when it’s so cold outside.”