The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (12 page)

But now that he’d held her in his arms and sampled the feast that humans called life, everything had changed.
He’d
changed.

He didn’t like it. He didn’t want to
become
something new. Yet he sensed that he would do everything possible to have more of her. He’d been changing with each ticking second, and now the deceptive grip that Santo seemed to have on the reaper morphed into a full embrace and the floodgates that kept him separate eroded completely. His identity, already abraded by Santo’s, roiled and twisted in the flotsam until even
he
couldn’t determine where one ended and the other began. The line of demarcation between the two vanished in the torrent. In the beginning he’d had one single goal. Reap Roxanne Love. Now he only wanted to finish what they’d begun in this room.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, willing her to give him a sign of how to proceed. She kept her eyes averted and shook her head.

“I wish I’d called in sick last night,” she muttered.

And never met him? Is that what she meant? He
swallowed, hating the hurt that coiled in his gut. At last she looked up. Her eyes looked huge and anxious in her drawn face.

“Are you really from this Beyond place, Santo?”

He nodded, wishing for the first time that his answer was different. Would she be repulsed by him now?

“And what does that mean, exactly? What does that make you? You’re not a monster, like the others?”

It tore a hole through him that her voice lilted in question at the end. Was he a monster? Was he worse than a monster? He was death, the end of all things. The fire that incinerated them, the ash that blew away.

He chose his words like footsteps near quicksand. “More than demons live in the Beyond,
angelita.
”

“Heaven, hell, and everything in between,” she parroted his words, eyeing him cautiously.

Did she expect him to sprout fangs and claws?

“So if you’re here to help me . . . If you were sent to protect me . . . Does that mean you’re like an angel?”

He’d been braced for the worst, certain she’d see the grim reaper just beneath Santo’s skin. But he should have known she’d find a more acceptable explanation. Hadn’t she told him that faced with something they didn’t understand, humans saw what they wanted to see? And she wanted an angel watching over her. Not death breathing down her neck.

An angel. She thought
he
was a fucking angel.

“Is that what you are?” she asked again and now a note of hope filled her voice. “An angel?”

At once appalled and relieved, he stared back and answered the only way he could. He lied. “Yes.”

She gave a faint laugh. “An angel from Flagstaff.”

It just got crazier by the second. The smile he forced felt wooden. “What is it with you and Flagstaff, Roxanne?”

“I don’t know,” she said with another small laugh. “I just never pictured it being a mecca of the supernatural.”

He shrugged, seeing Santo’s memories, his impressions of the wholesome mountainous city where he’d grown up. She had a point.

From outside, another chilling howl drifted across the miles. Was it coming closer or moving away? The desert warped the sound so he couldn’t tell. But he could guess. Roxanne gave the curtained window a worried look.

“What do they want?” she asked.

“I don’t know. They let you go last night. I don’t think they knew who you are.”

“And now they do?”

“It would seem so.” He took a deep breath and pushed on. “I get that you don’t want to face it, but the fact is, there are demons coming for you. Somehow, your brother is involved with them. Now so are you. You can’t pretend they don’t exist.”

“You’re not here just for me, though, are you?
You’re here to hunt them. To send them back where they came from.”

Again, she spoke with hope. Again, he gave her the answer she wanted.

“I have to destroy them to protect you,” he said.

“You know how to do that?”

Her lack of faith offended him. “Yes.”

“Is that why you’re helping me find my brother?”

“Roxanne, creatures of the Beyond can’t cross over into your world at will. They have to be invited.”

“Were you?”

“A billion prayers are made every hour. Angels are always invited.”

“I wasn’t praying.”

“Weren’t you?”

The question made her eyes round and her lips soften. He knew he’d hit upon something secret, something she never shared. What prayer had she kept hidden just for herself? What plea had gone unanswered for so long that she’d forgotten she’d asked?

“So you’re saying that for these demons to be on earth, they had to be invited in.”

“In a manner of speaking. When your brother died, I felt a pressure in the air that I couldn’t explain. I think it was a door opening in the Beyond.” He paused. “A second later, the hellhounds came in.”

She’d grown very pale but she kept her chin raised, her eyes steady on his face. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I understand it either. But we don’t have time to talk this out now. They’re coming.”

He could feel their approach. They emitted a dark pulse of power that hummed like an electric line coursing with energy.

“I know someplace we’ll be safe until we figure out what to do. But first we’ve got to lose
them
. They’re watching the lot. They know what car we came in.”

“They,” she repeated softly. “Scavengers. Hellhounds. Demons.”

There was no derision to her tone; no skepticism lingered at all. Intrigued, he nodded and said, “We need to get out of the room, circle to the back of the building, and find another set of wheels.”

“Find? You mean steal?”

The innocent umbrage in the question cut through his tension and made him smile. “Yes.”

She grimaced at her bloodstained shoes but quickly put them on. The bedside lamp did little to chase away the gloom, but he could still see the fear gleaming in her eyes.

He lifted his duffel with one hand and took her icy fingers in his other.

“Trust me, Roxanne,” he said, his voice husky with all that entailed.

Doubt clouded her expression, but she nodded. He tugged her hand, urging her forward and toward the
door. He paused before he opened it and looked down at her face.

She gazed back, eyes wide. Her long, gold-tipped lashes cast feather-light shadows on her cheeks. The color had drained from her face, giving her an ethereal look that made something inside him clench.

She thought him an angel.

What would have happened earlier if he hadn’t heard that baying in the distance? If reality hadn’t knocked on the moment and demanded attention? Would he be lost inside her, even now? Delving in the heat of her, taking what she offered? Basking in the exciting and forbidden? He’d wanted things he’d never even imagined.

He wanted them still.

He leaned closer and she swayed in response. He took the infinitesimal motion as an invitation and his lips found hers without blunder, without hesitation, a skill that must have come from the human who’d kissed a thousand times or more. But for the reaper, it was still new. The taste of her on his tongue. The surge of power that came from knowing he could make her go soft and hungry with his touch.

Her mouth was lush, her breath sweet. The feel of her lips couldn’t be measured. In all the eternity of his existence, he’d never been jealous of humans. But that was before he knew the curve of this woman’s body,
the softness that felt like mink against his brawn. The breathy sounds she made when kissed just so, touched her, right there. The sensations turned him inside out and consumed him. He parted her lips like he’d been doing it his entire life and let his tongue slide against hers. A tremor went through him as the need to have her urged him to ignore the danger lurking outside and take her now. He wanted to pull her to his bed—yes,
his bed
—and lay with her, touch her, explore her. Make her call his name.

Outside, another long, eerie bay careened across the silence, mocking him. Warning him. Definitely closer now. Coming this way.

Reluctantly he pulled back, feeling raw and overwhelmed as her incredible eyes opened and focused on him with a dazed, yearning look that nearly incinerated him.

He forced himself to turn away.

“Stay with me,” he said in a tone so desperate it pained him.

He waited for her softly spoken “I will” before he opened the door.

R
oxanne’s insides felt scrambled, her thoughts a jumbled mess. His kiss lingered on her lips, tripped up her senses, tangled her emotions. Her fear made her numb.

“Let’s go,” he breathed.

She could smell them before she even stepped over the threshold. A thin but noxious odor that stank of graves and sulfur and violence. It slammed into her with the power of a memory. The same rankness had been present last night, but she’d managed to forget—
deny
—it. Just as she’d managed to convince herself that what had come through the kitchen door at Love’s couldn’t be what she’d thought.

But now her eyes were open. There would be no more denial.

A silent walkway with a rusted metal railing ran outside each floor. To the left, she could see the stairwell they’d come up, to the right a pattern of doors and windows, all shut for the night. Large pillars ran at even intervals the whole way around. The walkway ended at a sharp corner.

Santo gave her hand a light squeeze before he slipped out, pulling her along as he quietly shut the door behind them and moved to the first pillar. They paused there, waiting for sounds of discovery, but all they heard was the roar of traffic in the distance and the loud tapping of a woodpecker in a nearby palm tree.

Her heart thudded in her chest as she tried to stay calm, but with her fear came the questions that preyed upon her composure. Santo followed the cracked concrete walkway from pillar to pillar as he headed toward the nearest stairs and the elevator that led to the parking lot. Roxanne followed, as silent as a shadow. Up ahead, she saw an alcove with an Exit sign. A mechanical hum announced the elevator rising. It
ding
ed on the floor below.

Santo paused, considering their options. She could tell he didn’t like the idea of getting into the elevator, where they’d be trapped and vulnerable while the doors slid open and shut. But the stairs were well lit and exposed on all sides. They’d be targets the whole way down.

He leaned back and whispered in her ear. “When the elevator stops on this floor, we get in.”

She didn’t have a better plan, so she gave him another reluctant nod, trailing behind him as he crept through the predawn shadows and hit the down button.

She could feel the shuddering vibration as the elevator resumed its climb, but it didn’t come close to matching the trembling inside her.

“What will they do if they catch us?” she asked.

He turned those dark eyes on her, unreadable in the gloom. An air of power and threat that was as much a part of him as the black hair and broad shoulders surrounded him. He looked so badass it was hard to picture him as the gentle, caring,
passionate
man he’d been earlier.

“You sure you want to know?” he asked in a low voice.

“Yes.”

“They’ll rip out your soul and feed on it.”

Oh
.

He brushed her cheek with his knuckles. “But they have to get through me, first. And that’s not going to happen.”

Another blood-chilling wail lifted from below, and the reassurance his words had given her vanished. She didn’t know what they were up against. In a battle between scavenger demons, hellhounds, and an angel, who would win? Which one had the greater power?

“Do they always make that sound?” she asked. She’d never heard anything so frightening.

“Not when they’re dead. I hope.”

She didn’t think she could be more scared, but terror of a new kind seeped into her bloodstream, an incurable disease that ran rampant through her system. Her heart was pounding so hard that it hurt. Her fingers and toes stung as adrenaline and cortisol flooded her system.

Dark humor moved through Santo’s black eyes. “
Angelita,
quit thinking.”

His words took her right back to those moments on the table, when all she’d known was his hands, his lips, his tongue.

The sound of dragging footsteps coming up the other stairway—the one behind them—echoed just as the strident bell of the elevator
bing
ed ahead. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to. She could sense the creature on the stairs. Could it sense her, too? Did she carry a scent that demons could sniff out? Was the one on the stairs testing the air even now and asking,
Where are you?

The elevator opened and a laughing man and woman emerged. Santo gave her hand a short, reassuring squeeze, then the two of them sidled in behind the exiting couple.

Inside she punched the number 1 over and over, as if it would make the doors respond faster. Stupid, but she couldn’t seem to stop. Santo watched with hooded eyes until finally the doors closed and the elevator jerked as it began its creeping descent.