Rampant heat rushed through him: mortification—how had she known when he hadn’t realized the inference, not until this very moment?—and lust. Her finger stroked the notch of his throat, and he swallowed.
So close, the perfume of her made his head spin, a potent tease of vodka, womanly flesh and—so his angel warned him—a hidden peril like a hint of smoke. She hooked her finger through his second button and leaned in to press her lips over the pounding of his pulse.
His lips parted, against his will anticipating her caress, but he would not lower his head.
She undid the second button and kissed the bare skin above his heart. “How about one orgasm for each Jesus, hmm? Seems fair.”
“Actually, that seems impious.” He reared back, grabbing her wrist when she sneakily tried to snatch at the statue under his arm.
“Impious? Oh, you’re a laugh riot.” She lunged at him. “Damn it, Cyril. Give it to me!”
“No.” He stiff-armed her. “You told me people give meaning to their artifacts. That body you wield with such insolence is your reliquary now. So make it mean something.”
She stood staring at him, her hands fisted, her muscles drawn so tight the scars on her exposed wrists writhed. Finally, she said, “I can’t.”
He turned his back on her and began collecting the Jesuses.
Her demonic double-tongued wail of despair followed him downstairs and dogged him out to the Porsche where he tried to stack the infants neatly, but after several trips he still ended up with something like a holy midget clown car. What the hell was he going to do with them all?
He hadn’t prayed since his abraxas was taken, but he reminded himself not to speed since getting stopped by a cop would result in some awkward explaining.
He belted himself in and stared up through the sunroof to the upper window of the bar. Dark and empty. He dragged his hand over his mouth to erase the phantom sensation of the kiss she hadn’t given him.
He revved up the engine—the only thing getting any action tonight—and slammed the Porsche into gear.
And just as quickly slammed on the breaks.
Lit by the bright headlights, Bella all in red shone like a wayward flame.
Fane closed his eyes for a moment and tried to find the divine stillness within. He was an angelic possessed minus his abraxas, cut off from the guiding hands of the sphericanum; could he trust himself to know a right choice even if it was standing right in front of him?
He cracked one eye. She was still standing right in front of him.
The wild blaze of her against the white streaks of sleet only quickened the furious thud of his heart. He wanted to help her. And he wanted her. The conflicting impulses warred in him. Would the right impulse win? As likely as a snowball’s chance in Chicago in August.
Without a word, they followed the maps she’d printed and marked up with cryptic notes. At each stop, they got out, she selected an infant, and they returned the missing messiah to his adoring and apparently oblivious worshippers. At first, Fane didn’t believe she could match them all, but each scene was a little different from the others and each baby perfectly fit. Plastic or wood, ceramic or inflated, each found their home.
“Last one,” he said after hours had passed.
She bent over the final page of her printouts and scrawled an X before handing it to him; obviously it had been an unscheduled stop. He took the map, noted the address, and rolled his eyes. “You stole from the nursing home?”
She stared out the side window without answering.
He tried to hold onto his outrage, but it was late. And at least she was here: sullen and silent, but here. “You can’t fight off evil by being bad.” He imagined Mirabel’s deadbeat ex-boyfriend, facing the imp’s guilty fury; that was less a measure of justice than a shot of revenge. And Bella’s occasional assistance to the league was self-serving at best. He refused to wonder how his own involvement with the talyan might appear to the impartial observer. “We have to hold the line. It’s all we can do.”
“The only thing we can do.” Her low voice sounded raw, hurt. “I notice you don’t say it’s a good thing.”
He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, wondering if he should be pleased she’d said we. “Only thing, good thing, whatever.”
“Whatever.”
He wondered if the doomed Mirabel had spoken that same word in that same hollow tone. Guilt nipped at him. As an angelic possessed, he was supposed to show the way to salvation. Before, he’d mostly hacked a path, machete-style. But he didn’t have his sword now.
“You have a unique opportunity here,” he told her. “The teshuva and the djinn don’t really communicate with their hosts. No one knows why the demons lend all their powers but none of their knowledge. You may be the only ex-tenebrae in existence with a voice.”
“I have nothing anyone would want to hear.”
“Maybe that used to be true, but the Chicago talyan are different from any league that has come before. They are willing to take the fight beyond what this world has known, and they could use all the help they can get.”
She faced him, her jaw off-kilter with rebelliousness. “Even from an imp?”
“Their demons are repentant, remember? Which means they were wrong first.”
“I’ve tried to give them hints where I could, tell them what I’ve seen of the tenebrae.” She tugged at one of the loose curls of red hair hanging beside her cheek and coiled it around her finger. He realized the boldness was only a frail mask over her anxiety, as distracting and delicate as her antique glasses. “Obviously I can’t tell them I’ve seen too much since their task is to eradicate monsters like me.”
“You are not a monster.” The words came out more harshly than he intended.
She flinched, but the hard set of her chin didn’t waver. “The imp I was swallowed more darkness than every winter night you can remember times a thousand. You might be angel-ridden, but you have no inkling how bad evil can be.”
Silence returned.
The nursing home was dark, closed up tight, when they drifted to a stop at the sidewalk. The spitting snow had gone, but the cold seemed more bitter for it. Fane hunched into his coat and strode around the front of the car to let Bella out. She already had the last statue.
For an instant, the sight of her cradling the infant with its upraised arms—Madonna and sinner in one—froze him in his tracks with a memory colder and more bitter than even the Chicago winter wind.
Bella glanced up when he did not move out of the way. She frowned. “Cyril?”
The dead shine of her eyes and his name on her lips, wary and miserable, went through him like a sword of ice. He took a step back, slamming his spine into the edge of the door.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” His voice sounded hoarse, shaken. He swallowed hard. “It’s three in the morning and I’m un-stealing religious statuary with a demon. A demon I fucked. What could be wrong?”
She tucked her head down and slipped out of the car, avoiding him. The power cord dangled behind her like a severed umbilical.
He turned away, bracing himself on the frame of the car. The breath caught in his throat, freezing and jagged as the ice floes shoved up on the lakeshore by the relentless wind. He closed his eyes.
Through his tight-clenched eyes, a pale glow intruded. Reluctantly, he glanced over his shoulder.
In the middle of the plastic nativity set, Bella had plugged in the baby Jesus, and the off-white light blinked. She knelt to adjust the controller before tucking the infant in, and the light steadied. Fane averted his gaze from her bowed red head, the only color in the ghostly tableau.
“Fane.” Her soft call stiffened his shoulders.