Demon Bound (42 page)

“That's your fault,” Grace said, still smiling as she took a sip from her mug. “He'd been coming around Great-Grandma's since I was a baby, but Mom thought he only came out of obligation, because he'd been your friend—and Dad thought she was still hung up on you. So it took them a while to figure it out.”

Jake could only shake his head and grin stupidly.

“You aren't hung up on her.” There might have been relief in her voice.

“No.” He met her gaze. “I did love her. But not the way a man does when he wants to spend his life with a woman.”

Her eyes sparkled with sudden interest. “There is someone.”

“Yes.” And he'd happily spend a hundred lives with her. “Did Lindsey say anything about the Wicked Witch?”

“She did. Then she said you both disappeared.”

“We did.” Jake thought about giving a demonstration, decided it might be too much right now. “Why aren't you freaking out? That chair isn't really enough of a reason.”

Grace opened the flat box, pulled out a yellowing envelope, and paused. “Do you want this stuff?”

A folded flag and a medal lay inside. Jake shook his head. “Those are meant for family, not for me.”

She dug beneath the flag, pulled out a small flint arrowhead. “What about this? Great-Granddad said it meant something to you.” She stopped. “He . . . I was about eight. Great-Grandma was the year after. Both went easy.”

“Good.” Jake fought the stinging at the backs of his eyes, reached for the arrowhead. Yeah, it meant something. He'd come across it in one of their fields when he was ten, and within two years had read every book on archaeology that the local library owned. Then reread them, because there hadn't been any other option.

He closed his hand around it. “Thank you.”

“I'm glad I had it.” She pushed the box aside. “So. When I was fifteen, this guy shows up here with a letter for me. Only, he didn't have my name—just Mom's maiden name—so it took a while for him to track us down. Because Mom had taken on your last name after you died. You know, to make it easier, even if it wasn't really legal.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said quietly. In a town like this, at a time like that—it was better to be seen as a widow than an unwed mother.

“And because she said when you told her you'd marry her, she considered that as good as a ring.”

“As far as I'm concerned it was. I'm just sorry I couldn't give her a real one.”

“She knew that. And it wasn't so bad. Hard, sometimes, but Dad was always there.” She took a deep breath. “So, this man comes, and he has this letter you wrote me.”

“Pinter?” Jake laughed to himself, shaking his head. The fucking new guy had made it out.

“Yes. And then he says he's got this story about how you ended up writing it.”

“Oh, no.” Nosferatu, a slaughtered village, and tortured soldiers. “He did
not
tell that to a fifteen-year-old girl.”

“He did.” Her face paled a little, and she licked her lips. “And, yes, Mom thought he was crazy. So many who came back were. You didn't hear much about it here, but in the cities . . . and that was where he'd come from. So she tried to get him to leave, but he stayed until he told it all. Until he told us about the white light, and the man with wings who took you with him.”

Jake rubbed the bridge of his nose. So Pinter had seen his transformation. He remembered that light, how it had surrounded him, blazed through him.

“They never sent your body home. And it's always been in the back of my mind, so when Lindsey tells me that you've slain the monsters under her bed, and suddenly she knows who made her blue quilt, and an antique chair appears in her room that she says is from France, even though she has no idea what France is ... I start thinking, ‘Maybe.' ” Her eyes were direct. “Now I'm wondering if our family should be afraid of those things Pinter talked about.”

“Nosferatu? Probably not.” He called in a card with SI's phone number, and then wrote his own cell and e-mail address on the back. “But you can always contact me if there's something you're unsure of, or if something threatens you. And demons . . . well, you probably won't know what they are. Mostly, you just don't let them tell you you're less than what you are, or that you aren't worth anything, or make you believe something that you feel in your gut isn't true.”

He pushed the card across the table, then sat stock-still when she pressed her fingers to her eyes. They were callused, he saw. A few tiny scars lined her fingers. She wasn't a stranger to working with her hands. “What'd I say?”

She did that waving thing in front of her eyes again, flapping the envelope like a fan. “Just . . . You told me exactly the same thing in this letter. About never letting anyone put me down. So I never have.”

“Good.” His throat was thick as hell. “Listen, do you need anything? I can't be your dad, but—”

“Yes.” She was already nodding. “Yes. There is one thing.”

 

There was no reason to delay her flight to the Archives. Jake could find her anywhere; it didn't matter if she was in her quarters. But Alice waited for several hours, finding tasks to occupy her, reading an erotic manual and picturing herself and Jake in every sketch, until she simply had to accept the obvious.

He wasn't returning.

And didn't that sound so very dire? She amended her conclusion as she strode into the Archives and toward the rear corner that she liked to think of as her own.

It wasn't that he wouldn't return. Something was keeping him away.

Or perhaps not. Alice drew to a halt, her lungs feeling very tight.

Jake was
here
. He sat at her worktable, sifting through photographs.

She couldn't return the smile he sent over his shoulder. She wondered why he attempted that welcoming expression at all; it was too false, strained.

And why had he not come to find her? “Have you been here long?”

“A little while.”

“I see.” She did not look at him as she picked up an unfamiliar aerial photograph. She couldn't focus, but she recalled that they intended to look for Anaria. “The Dardanelles?”

“Yep. I'm hoping these and the topographical data will give us a head start, a few possible locations. I'll have satellite images by tomorrow.”

“Then shall we begin?” Dear God, let them begin. She needed desperately to leave this place, to fill her mind with something other than: he hadn't returned.

“Nope. The sun doesn't set for another six hours. We'll need to be flying around as we're looking.”

And they couldn't risk humans glancing up to see them. Or, she supposed, teleporting in and out to specific sites. Stiffly, she moved around the table. “Very well.”

“You'll have to carry me tonight. My wings won't be ready.”

She gave a short nod, but he wasn't looking at her.

It was very odd, but he was still examining the same photograph he'd had when she'd come in. When had he become so slow?

And his breathing, she thought, was too steady. His face too still, his voice too even.

She had asked the wrong question. This was not about how long he had been here, but
why
he hadn't returned to her quarters.

It only now occurred to her that she wasn't the reason.

“Jake,” she said softly. “Where did you go?”

“Kansas. Then SI. Then I took Pim to Malaysia to see her brother. Then back to SI. Then Baghdad. Then here.”

So many jumps, but the first was the key. “Did you not find your family in good health?”

“They're fine.” He swallowed with, she thought, some difficulty. But the wry humor in the glance he flashed at her was genuine. “All things considered, they've probably been better off without me.”

“No.” Alice sat, her back straight, her hands in her lap. Her gaze did not leave his face. “That is not the way to phrase it.”

He stared at her for a long time. But not, she imagined, for as long as he'd been sitting here, trying to balance the relief of finding them well against the ache of witnessing how removed he was from their lives.

Men made life far too difficult when they insisted on neatly categorizing their emotions. When emotions became complicated, they brooded and struggled so mightily in an attempt to simplify them again—when, given time, everything would sort itself out and slide into its place.

As rational as Jake was, he'd have known his family would have moved on—but that knowledge was likely at emotional odds with the sense that he was unnecessary.

And he'd had forty years to prepare for it, but only hours to accept it. Surely he must know it would take more time than this.

Or perhaps he was only now realizing it.

Alice watched the tension ease from his body, and he finally said, “All things considered, everything worked out in the best possible way for them.”

“And for you, too.”

“Well, yeah. But considering I ended up a Guardian, and a couple of hours ago you had your legs around me, that goes without saying.”

Alice smiled, vanished her boots, and curled back into the chair. “You met your daughter, then? Did you like her?”

His expression softened. “Yeah. And look—she gave me this.”

Alice reached out to turn the heavy wooden book podium that appeared on the table. Apostles marched around the base in bas-relief, their features and robes exquisitely carved. “This is lovely. Did she create it?”

“Yep. She builds custom furniture by trade, but makes these on the side and sells them online. They're for displaying family Bibles. But I think we could use one of the illuminated manuscripts around here.”

“In the Archives? You don't want it for yourself?”

“She said she was making me a personalized one. This was just something to take with me.”

“So she plans to see you again.” The painful threads wrapping around her chest loosened. Relief, for his sake.

“Yeah. I've got a standing invitation to Sunday dinner and under-the-bed monster slaying. And if you've got a few free hours one of these upcoming Sundays, I'll be taking Lindsey to see the pyramids at Giza. You want to come?”

“Oh, but surely I cannot—” She touched her fingers to her lips, halting the automatic response. She
could
.

What she could not do was recall the last time she'd made any plans that were more than a couple of hours in advance. She'd always feared that Teqon would reappear in her life, disrupting it entirely. And there were many reasons not to make plans now—Khavi's warning foremost in front of them.

But how many years now had she lived in fear, expecting her life to shatter around her at any moment? Far, far too many.

Even if that Sunday never came to pass, she would not let anything prevent her from looking forward to it.

“Yes, I would like to go,” she said, and her heart tumbled over when Jake heaved a great sigh of gratitude and muttered about the energy of four-year-old girls. “How on Earth did this arrangement come about?”

“Grace asked me to make a point of telling Lindsey the places I've been, so that she'd grow up knowing there was a bigger world out there than a little town in Kansas.”

How serendipitous. And utterly perfect. “So you told her you could do better than that,” Alice murmured.

“Yep. And I'll see if I can talk Grace into a few jumps, too. Since we've come back from Hell, I haven't had a problem controlling them.”

She had to laugh. “Except for—”

“Hey, now, that doesn't count. That was a higher power, kicking my ass to Kansas.” His grin told her he didn't believe that any more than she would believe they'd opened a portal over her bed and he'd been yanked through it. “But—except for that—when I intend to jump, I've been going where I want to.”

“Was it because of Hell?”

“I have no clue. But, yeah, maybe jumping there drove the point home. Or maybe it was just knowing that if I fu—
messed
it up again, you'd be hurt. And that I couldn't go back and fix it.”

She looked away from him, waiting for the powerful emotions swirling within her to fall into place so that she could name them. They would not.

“So,” he continued after a moment, “all things considered, everything is pretty darn swell.”

He could not be serious.
All
things considered, “swell” was a gross understatement. She glanced at him from beneath her lashes. How unfortunate that he was not just attractive, but so incredibly appealing. There was nothing about him she did not like, so much that she admired, and everything drew her to him. He left no part of her untouched and unengaged; not her mind, not her emotions.

And not her body.

Oh, dear. Even now, as the result of a single glance, her breasts seemed fuller, her nipples tighter. Warmth spilled through her womb, and her mind was returning to the incredible pleasure she'd felt in his arms.

But surely it hadn't been
so
very good. Surely she hadn't been so completely lost and overwhelmed. Surely her surprise had blown her memory out of proportion to the reality.

Surely, in time, she would be able to go more than one or two minutes without remembering how agonizingly wonderful it had been, or thinking about taking him inside her again.

“Alice?”

The line of concern between his brows told her it hadn't been the first time he'd said her name. She snapped upright, placed her feet on the floor. “My apologies. I was not attending.”