At first he thought the twist of her lips was self-deprecating. But when he parsed her tone, he decided she only meant she hadn’t bought them at all. What sort of evil person would steal baby Jesuses right out of their mangers?
He took a hard step toward her, letting his boot heels ring on the floor so she would hear he was pissed. “Let me guess. This is some sort of theme party you’re planning, something so sacrilegious you had to close the club so you could invite only the worst sort of pathetic deviants.”
“No.” She crossed her arms, plumping up her breasts into the deep scoop of her long-sleeved shirt. The red and orange stripes bowed and the front buttons bulged under the pressure of her agitated breathing. He might have thought she was mocking his own similar stance except he knew she couldn’t see him. “There’s no party. No one else is invited.” She tilted her head, making him pointedly aware he was included among that no one.
Since a sick house party was the only reasonable explanation, he was left with nothing. To think, he’d wanted to stop by and see her, to see how she was doing after…after their encounter, and to thank her for passing his message to the talyan through Nanette and sharing the tip on Sera’s demon-sensitive father. He rather suspected the suggestion had mellowed the talyan toward him, for no good reason but he appreciated the opportunity and wondered how she’d known that little trick.
But now here he was, facing a more twisted mystery. If only he’d been content with the one-night stand.
“Walk away.” Her low voice seemed to thrum in his chest, almost an echo of his thoughts. “Just leave.”
He wanted to, he really did. But though he’d lost his abraxas and the sphericanum had revoked his warden rank, he still shared himself with a divine presence. He couldn’t let this outrage pass.
He took another step toward her. “You know I won’t go. This is a mockery, not just of the symbols but the spirit of a holy season.”
“I wasn’t mocking. I needed them.”
“No one needs a couple dozen Jesuses.”
She sniffed. “More than a couple dozen branches of Christianity would say you are being sacrilegious.”
Through clenched teeth, he emphasized, “You can’t steal Jesus.”
“Actually, I stole a bunch of them.”
“And you’ll be taking them back. Get your friend in here and start loading them up.”
She wrinkled her nose, making her glasses lift and shine the blinking baby’s light at him. “What friend?” She looked as confused as he felt.
“Your wheel man, whoever helped you carry off the statues.” Fane steeled himself against a ridiculous surge of jealousy. She had asked someone else for help when he’d been here only a few nights ago. Of course, he wouldn’t have helped her steal from nativity scenes, but she hadn’t even bothered to hint she had more sins in mind than what they’d shared.
Bella shook her head. “There’s nobody else here. No friend.”
The bitterness in her tone rang true to the unpleasant spite he struggled to subdue. Which meant… “You drove yourself? Then you’re not…”
She turned away. “I don’t know where you all got the idea I was blind.”
He closed the distance between them in three strides and yanked her back around, the slender muscles of her arm tight under his fingers. She kept her face averted, but the blinking light caught the clouded white cataracts in her eyes. “We thought it because that’s the impression you gave us. You’re a thief and a liar?”
She lifted her chin finally. “I don’t know where you got the impression I was anything but.”
“You’ve been helping the talyan.”
“Will you leave me alone about this? I don’t see things the way you do—”
Frustration and disappointment jolted through his muscles, making his restraining grasp spring open. His lip curled. “Clearly not, if you think what you’ve done here is in any way justifiable.”
Rather than escape, she swung toward him. “Oh, so tonight you want to get on Santa’s nice list?”
The reference, even oblique, to their previous encounter made his face flush—his whole body, really—and knowing she could see it only mixed his embarrassment with anger.
“We’re taking them back, all of them, to wherever you stole them,” he snarled.
She straightened, her jaw set, even though her red fuzzy slippers rather undermined the intensity of her resistance. “I won’t.”
“I’ll make you.”
“You can’t.”
“Watch me.” He marched around her and headed toward the blinking baby Jesus.
“No!” Bella grabbed his arm, but her slippers had no traction on the dance floor and he hauled her onward. “You can’t!” This time, her tone was less refusal and more desperation. “I need them. It’s almost the solstice.”
She’d said that before. “If you want Christmas decorations, you can buy your own. I’ll loan you the money. You can repay me…” Well, that came out of him a little more suggestively than he’d intended.
But she didn’t taunt him, just hauled more urgently at his arm. “It won’t be the same. These have meaning, they’ve been given meaning.”
“Yes, meaning for other people. And you can’t steal sentiment. You have to make your own connection to the heart and soul of the season.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t.”
The way she’d sounded when she’d said she had no friend made him hesitate. He glanced down at her as she stared up. Her lips were slightly parted with her distress, her fingers a warm insistence on his arm, and her eyes glinted. Maybe just a reflection of the burglarized blinking baby, but maybe tears.
He stopped. “I can help you find the way.”
“You?” She laughed, shrill, like a needle skipping on a record, and let him go. “You and your angel? Without your lighted sword?”
He stiffened at the disbelief in her tone and the tinge of loss he felt as the sensation of her touch faded. “With or without the abraxas, I’ll make sure you do the right thing.”
“You can’t.” She spun around him to block his way toward the statues and held out one hand, her slender fingers spread like a pale star against the darkness behind her.
Her insistence held a note of panic that gave him pause, but he had already drifted once from the path with her. Without his abraxas, he was vulnerable—in more ways than one. “The right thing is what I do.” And it was all he had.
Bella shook her head violently, threatening to bring down the red tower of her hair. “You can’t take them. They are the only wall holding back the demons coming for me!”
Despite his heavy wool coat and the flush of his anger, a chill rippled across Fane’s skin, seeming to enter where her touch had left. “If demons are coming, we’ll stop them. You have to deny them, not give them a place in your soul—”
“Soul?” Her whisper fell with hollow despair. “I don’t have one.”
The chill sank deeper, through his skin, past his bones, into the indiscernible place where the angel dwelled. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t have a soul.” On the last word, her voice dropped lower, breaking into eerie double octaves: demonic harmonics. “I am one of them.”
Chapter 5
“I am one of them.” The confession—demonically spoken—tore at Bella’s throat.
She grimaced at the need for truth. It tasted like blood. She was being a bit melodramatic; the old-copper-penny tang was merely the demon damage done to her human tissue. But if she didn’t tell him, he would take the Jesuses and she would have nothing to hold back the longest night.
In ominous silence, Fane reached out to her. Maybe he meant to grab only her chin, but with his big hand, his fingers overlapped to her neck, his thumb pressed hard to the point of her jaw. The charge of conflicting energies made her wince at the new pain, but she didn’t pull away. With his angel roused, he could very well kill her.