The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (17 page)

Her head snapped up and she stared at him.

“I don’t know what it means,” he said before she could ask. “I can’t even swear the two are connected, but my guess is they are. I think that’s why the hellhounds came for you tonight.”

She shook her head. “I’m not following.”

“The scavenger demon knew what would happen when he killed your brother. Shooting him wasn’t a chance thing he did in the heat of the moment. I watched him. He meant to pull that trigger. I would say your brother is how the scavenger got here in the first place. But I don’t think he knew about you.”

He paused, wishing he didn’t have to say it.

“Now he does.”

She grew quiet again after that, and he was glad.
The conversation had left him troubled for more than one reason.

He’d been driving back roads, looking for a good place to dump the van and steal a less recognizable vehicle. Now he pulled into the parking lot of a busy Denny’s restaurant and circled around to where the lot connected to a Days Inn hotel. He inched the van into a tight space behind a row of dumpsters and made his way through the dark to the sedan he’d spotted. Older model, peeling paint and cardboard over the back window made it easy pickings. Roxanne would probably protest that the poor slob who drove it couldn’t afford to have his car stolen, but Santo didn’t care. Humans found ways to cope with adversity. It was their nature.

While Roxanne waited in the van, he got the car going and pulled it around. She gave their new vehicle a sullen look but climbed into the passenger seat without protest. She winced, though, and made a stifled, pained noise that tore at something inside him.

He reached for the opened water bottle the car’s owner had left in the cup holder and shrugged out of his T-shirt, turning it inside out and dampening it to wipe the blood that had dried on her face. She sat quiet and still as he worked, moving over her brow, her cheeks, her chin and throat. After he’d cleaned her arms—carefully avoiding the angry furrows from claws and the deep punctures left from teeth—he rummaged in the duffel he’d tossed on the backseat and found
another T-shirt for her and one for him. He cleaned his own face and hands before donning it. A baseball cap lay abandoned behind the front seat and Santo fished it out and put it on. Silently, he took their bloodied shirts and tossed them in the trash.

Let the forensic team that pulled this investigation make what they would of that.

Before closing her door, Santo reached in and touched her cheek, cupping her face and turning it so she had to look at him. But once he held her gaze with his, he couldn’t think of what to say. She looked so hurt, so broken. He didn’t know how to respond to that.

Sensing that anything he said would be the wrong thing, he got behind the wheel without a word. As he drove away, he glanced at the dumpsters in his rearview. They made a perfect camouflage for the van. If he was lucky, no one would discover the van tonight and the owner of the car wouldn’t notice it was gone until morning.

With the new wheels, he could breathe easier, and he headed for the one place he knew they wouldn’t be turned away.

“Where are we going?” Roxanne asked.

“Someplace safe,
angelita
.” At least for a while.

“Don’t call me that,” she muttered.

He smiled at the bristling command, taking it as a good sign. He didn’t know what to do with the silent, morose woman beside him, but feisty Roxanne he could handle.

“I’m going to stop and get some bandages and antiseptic. After we get you patched up, you’ll feel better.”

“Something tried to eat me tonight. It’s going to take more than a Band-Aid to make me feel better.”

He shot her an amused glance.

“I want to call home,” she said, wiping the humor from his face.

“That’s not possible.”

“Either you make it possible or I jump out of this car, Santo. Take your pick.”

He hid his grin this time, knowing she’d be infuriated by it. She was deadly serious, he could see that, but having her fight back filled him with dizzying relief.

“And where will you go,
angelita
?” he taunted softly.

“To hell. I don’t care. Ryan and Ruby have to be worried sick about me. That clerk, he filmed what happened, Santo. Filmed
us
. How long do you think it will take for the footage to be on the news?”

Santo shook his head. “You’re mistaken.”

“I saw him doing it with his cell phone. If they couldn’t see those . . . things . . . the hellhounds, what do you think will be on that footage? You, shooting. Me, screaming. Chidi thought you were hurting me. Kidnapping me. The rest of the world will think the same thing.”

She paused, peering at him expectantly, but he didn’t know what to say. The opinions of the world mattered little to him. Keeping the female beside him alive, though, that had become a pressing concern.

“They suspected you of abducting me from Love’s before. Now they’ll have it confirmed. For all we know, they’re accusing you of murder, too. There’s going to be a manhunt. You of all people should know that.”

“Any medical examiner who looks at those bodies will know that bullets didn’t kill them,” he countered.

The blood drained from Roxanne’s face. Even in the dark interior of the car, he could see it.

“If there are any bodies to be found,” she answered.

Excellent point. She didn’t need to remind him of the people who’d been missing after the attack at Love’s. He still hadn’t worked out why, though. What were the demons doing with the bodies?

Roxanne said, “I want a phone, Santo. I want to call home.”

Reluctantly, he nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

A half hour later, Santo entered a drugstore in a strip mall on the corner of
deserted
and
nowhere
with his head down, brim casting shadows over his face, and hands tucked in his pockets. He got in and out as quickly as possible, opened the door and tossed three bags onto Roxanne’s lap, then reversed out of their parking spot.

“No troubles?” she asked as she rummaged in the sacks until she found the plastic-encased cell phone. She released a small sigh that told him she hadn’t believed he’d follow through. Her lack of trust would have hurt him, but he felt like he’d finally gotten a handle on the human inside him, and he refused to let it.

“Thank you,” she said, and something tightened smugly in his chest, mocking his idea of control.

“You can charge it at Louisa’s.”

Louisa was his dead wife’s godmother. A sweet, recently widowed woman whom Santo Castillo, the human, had loved like a mother. Roxanne had given him a quizzical look when he’d told her he planned to take them there tonight, but she hadn’t disputed the idea. An accepting Roxanne was novelty enough to take as a good sign.

Merging back onto I-10 headed north, he kept his speed at a steady sixty-eight, when he wanted to floor it and fly. It wouldn’t do to get pulled over for a traffic violation and be forced into killing someone innocent in order to get away. Roxanne would never forgive him, and for reasons he chose not to examine, he cared about that.

After a while, she said, “You seem pretty sure that Louisa will let us in, Santo. If she’s been watching the news, she might not.”

“Louisa is like family,” he told her. “She’ll let us in.”

“She’s not, though. Related, I mean. Not even to your wife.”

“No. But she and Jorge raised Marisella. When we got married, it was Jorge who walked her down the aisle. I never knew my own father. Jorge was that to me.”

“Will the police be looking for you there?”

He shook his head. “There’s no legal tie, as you say.
And I haven’t seen or spoken to Louisa since we buried Jorge last year.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged, but the gesture couldn’t counteract the lump that suddenly formed in his throat. “Too much pain, for both of us.”

“Will going there put her in danger?” Roxanne asked, ever concerned with innocents she hadn’t even met. “Can the . . . demons track us there?”

Santo shot her an affronted look. “Do you think I’d put an old woman in danger?”

She thought about that before answering, which annoyed him to no end.

“No. I don’t.”

He didn’t want to analyze the relief her simple answer gave him. It made his voice more brusque than he’d like when he said, “Why don’t you try to sleep? We’ll be there in about an hour.”

He glanced at the clock on the dash. It was barely two in the afternoon, yet it felt like the day had lasted forever and it should be the wee hours, the witching hour, as humans called it. Roxanne said nothing more as she hunched against her door. She might have closed her eyes, but he doubted she’d sleep. Her soft heart wouldn’t be able to let go enough for that, and she would fear the nightmares. He knew it without being told.

He pulled up to Louisa’s house at three fifteen, and Louisa did, indeed, let them in.

Her brown, weathered face creased in a surprised smile when she opened the door, her features so familiar that they hit him like a punch in the gut, toppling all his arrogant disclaimers that he controlled the emotions inside. She pulled Santo into a bear hug, standing on tiptoes to embrace him, and her scent rolled him into memories so sweet and poignant that they drew blood.

Holding him tight, she whispered words in her native tongue, telling him how much she’d missed him, how she’d always known he’d come home. He answered in Spanish, and said that he was sorry. And he was. Sorry that Santo had ignored her when she’d needed him. Sorry that the man she embraced so warmly was only an imposter. Sorry that he’d come here, blithely taking advantage of a woman who would be heartbroken if she knew the truth.

Roxanne hovered in the tiny entryway, watching with her heart in those luminous eyes. She didn’t need to understand the words to feel their meaning, and her empathy added another link to the complicated chains binding him.

At last Louisa pulled away, but she kept a frail hand on Santo’s arm, like a mother with an errant little boy in a busy marketplace. “And who is this,
mijo
?” she asked, eyeing Roxanne with widened brown eyes. Louisa’s gaze took in Roxanne’s disheveled appearance, the oversized T-shirt, the baggy black sweatpants that fortunately hid the blood, and her sneakers, which didn’t.

To her credit, Louisa hid the shock she must have been feeling, but when her gaze returned to his face, she looked uneasy.

He’d planned all along to lie to her, but now he surprised even himself. “Louisa,” he said, “I’m in trouble.”

“
Sí,
” Louisa answered, frowning. “I watch the news. They say you attacked two men at a hotel? You take them. And a woman. You shoot and kidnap all of them.”

“It’s not true,” Roxanne said before he could find the words. “Santo saved me, and he tried to save those men, too.”

Louisa looked like she wanted to believe it. She really did. But she said in a weary voice, “Someone films the whole thing.”

“But it never shows Santo hurting those men, does it?”

“You,
niña
, were screaming.” She covered her ears and shook her head. “And the blood.
Dios mío
. You were covered in blood.”

Roxanne paled. “Santo and I were attacked, and he protected me. He was trying to give the men time to get to safety, but they misunderstood what was happening. It was dark. Very dark.” The last came on a whisper.

Louisa looked uncertainly between them. “This is truth, Santo?”

He nodded, moved by Roxanne’s quick defense.

Louisa let out a huge sigh. “I am happy to hear this.
I couldn’t believe my Santo would hurt someone for no reason.”

“He wouldn’t,” Roxanne said. “Have you heard . . . are the two men from the hotel still alive?”

“No one knows. They disappear.
Poof.
”

“Just like at the bar,” Santo said.

“
Sí,
” Louisa said. “Is what they say on the news. Just like before. Gone.”

Santo looked grim. “I’m sorry to show up like this, Louisa,” he said, “but I didn’t know where else to go.”

These words seemed to cleave Louisa’s heart in two. With teary eyes she embraced him once again, muttering furiously in Spanish that he’d done the right thing, coming to her. When she released him, she said, “Tell me. What you need? I give.”

She would, too. Yesterday he would have been bewildered by it. Today, he was only grateful.

Louisa waited for an answer. With an uncertain smile, he asked, “Showers? Clothes? A place to sleep tonight?”

“Food?” she asked hopefully. “I make
carnitas
. I must have known you were coming,
mijo
. You go. Shower. I cook.”

Before he could do as she ordered, she grabbed him up in another hug and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “My angel,” she said.

And the reaper inside him passed out cold.

R
oxanne followed Louisa down the hall, aware of a brooding Santo right behind her. Their sweet hostess grabbed clean towels and pointed out the bathroom on one side and what appeared to be the lone spare room with its queen-sized bed on the other. Roxanne took a tentative step inside, trying not to look at the bed or think of sharing it with Santo.