He bounced up from the bed, and she grumbled at his early-morning verve. “Come on. The bacon is almost ready.”
Well, she could wait to run away. She’d be able to run faster after a good breakfast.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t find a few of the buttons from your shirt.” He pulled a T-shirt and sweatshirt from his dresser drawers and tossed them toward her. “Sorry I don’t have anything in red.”
“I’ll live.” She took the opportunity to grab her glasses and slip them on. With coffee and glasses, certainly she could face the day.
He tilted his head. “Why do you always wear red?”
“It’s one of the few colors I can see clearly.” Of course the tenebrae favored red. Red for blood, rage, conflagration. But she didn’t need to explain that part to him. He already knew.
“If you wore white, maybe you’d draw less attention from the demons.”
She shook her head. “They aren’t fooled. Also, you’re not supposed to wear white in winter.”
“Fashion advice from the woman with a beehive.”
She touched the massed red ringlets that had taken over after their hot shower last night. “Not anymore.”
“I like it curly and soft. It’s… cherubic.”
She gagged on her coffee. “Go flip the bacon.”
After he left, she dressed quickly in his borrowed shirts and her jeans, once she turned them right-side out. The memory of the frantic coupling implied by the convoluted denim made her flush.
He’d said he wanted to forget, but she wasn’t sure she could, not now…
And she only found one bobby pin, damn it, so she had to leave her hair down, but she tucked it ruthlessly behind her ears. So there.
She followed the perfume of bacon down the stairs. The house, white and echoing and bare of almost all emotion, was essentially invisible to her tenebrae senses so she trailed one hand down the banister lest she crash into something.
The curve of the stairs led to the office adjacent to the front door, and for a moment she stood there, disoriented. But a gleam of silver caught her gaze. She drifted toward the big wooden desk and skipped her fingers over the detritus of a working man: computer, printer, various stacks of papers, a cheap ballpoint pen (she would have thought better of him) with the clip broken off (she didn’t doubt he had done that), and a silver photo frame.
To the tenebrae, the photo beckoned. Bella settled her fingers where her imp perception found the psychic imprints of many touches though the engraved silver hearts were scrupulously shining. She studied the image of the woman, not smiling, and the tiny infant in her arms. Here, white meant not innocence but hospital sterility, and the color of death was the pale, pale blue of the baby’s skin.
The glass had been imperfectly cleaned, and a human fingerprint remained hovering over the child’s cheek, leaving a smudge like tears; the glass, so thin, but the loss an impassable barrier.
With a soundless sigh, she returned the photo to its place.
Between his earthly cleaning service and his divine calling, Fane worked so hard to empty the world of its stains and sins. But he would never forget this.
She managed to find her way to the kitchen more by way of the bacon than her sketchy vision. Fane plunked a paper towel-wrapped English muffin loaded with the folds of an omelet in her one hand and slipped a travel mug of coffee into her other. “Half coffee, half sugar and cream, just as you like it. And you already have your boots. Good. Let’s go.”
She had her boots because she’d been planning to sneak away at the first opportunity. “Go? I have things to do today.”
“No you don’t. You were going to wall up in your club and hide from any tenebrae who came caroling.”
“And drink.” She wished that hadn’t sounded quite so pathetic.
“It’s my fault you have no artifacts to safeguard you.”
She had no defenses at all… She curled the coffee mug into her chest, holding its warmth close. His fault, indeed.
“But I’ll make it right.” He gave her a fleeting grin that made her breath catch. “It’s what I do.”
Is this what Saint Nicole had faced? A man desperately trying to do the right thing, armed only with perfectly prepared coffee and that smile? No wonder the poor woman had left.
Even hell itself might not withstand him.
What chance had one lone demon?
Chapter 10
Like a warrior braving enemy armies, Fane marched through the crowd at the Christkindlmarket, leading Bella behind him. Clouds had thickened over Daley Plaza, seeming to come down almost to the top of the decorated evergreen towering over the Picasso sculpture, but the plummeting temperatures hadn’t thinned the last-minute throng at the seasonal open market.
Bella tugged at him. “My hands are cold. I need a Glühwein.”
He let her steer him toward one red-striped tent. Of course she’d see—and smell—that. The spicy scent of the mulled wine had already lured more than a few chilled shoppers who browsed with one hand around the boot-shaped commemorative mugs.
She ordered two and paid before he could pull out his wallet. “Danke,” he said.
They stepped into a space between two tents to get out of the crowds and out of the wind. Bella raised her mug. “Fröhliche Weihnachten.”
“Merry Christmas,” he guessed.
“I can say it in most languages.” She sipped her wine. “I used it as a chant to keep the tenebrae out.”
“Is it only during this season you feel their presence?”
She shook her head. “They are always around. But most of the year, they find plenty of easy fodder at the Coil. My little issues are lost in the crowd. It’s only now, when I can’t help but think about…about what happened that they focus on me.” She looked down at the mug of red wine clutched between her hands. “I must glow like a torch to the demons. Like Mirabel did.”
Fane almost reached over to pull her into his arms, but out in the open, with their big coats and the hot wine in between them, the word ‘demon’ reverberating in his ears, he felt strangely frozen.
She shook her head again, more decisively this time, as if she hadn’t needed any consolation anyway. “If you’ve brought me here to replace the Jesuses, forget it. The defenses are powered by the believers. I can’t do it myself. You need a soul to have convictions.”
He wondered if she realized her certainty she didn’t have a soul was its own sort of conviction. But then, what did he know about souls? He was just a foot soldier in the war against darkness. Fighting for the light had given him no particular insights.
“Instead of stealing other people’s beliefs, you can buy them.”
She grimaced. “Not just any knickknack repels tenebrae. It has to be the focus of someone’s hopes and dreams and…” She slanted a glance at him. “And love. That’s why the baby Jesuses worked so well. Christmas trees too—the emotions children shower on a Christmas tree put all the lights and tinsel to shame—but obviously those are harder to sneak out of people’s houses.”
He coughed on his glow wine. “You tried that?”
“Just once. I ended up with a handful of pine needles and a backside full of buckshot.”
“I can imagine.” He really could, since he’d had his hands on that ass not so many hours ago… He banished the thought. “Well, I know we can find something here with the spirit of Christmas.”
He ducked out the back end of the corridor between the tents and cut over to the farthest trailing vendors. There were fewer shoppers here at the edge, exposed to the street and the wind. One stall, enclosed in thick canvas on three sides, swayed a little in the cutting breeze and a tinkling music like wind chimes rose above the murmurings of the crowd behind them.