The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (23 page)

“Is he using Roxanne for bait?”

Gary shook his head. “No. She has a purpose of her own.”

Reece’s stomach made a greasy roll. Lost, he shook his head. “What purpose?”

“How many times have you died, Reece?”

He shrugged, as if he’d lost count. “Four times. Almost five, because of you.”

The other man smiled and Reece’s doubts about whether Gary had deliberately run him off Graybel’s Pass and into that gully evaporated. He still remembered the pain when he’d hit rock bottom, the agony as he’d fought for his life.

“I’m sorry about that,” Gary said with no hint of apology in his tone. “I had to test my theory before I could be sure.”

“So you tried to kill me?”

“Yes. But you didn’t die, did you? I still can’t believe it.”

Reece looked at Gary coldly.

“Get to the point, Gary.”

“How many times have you and your sister died together?” he asked.

“All of them,” Reece said grudgingly.

“So you don’t know if it feels different, if you died all alone?”

“Look, Gary. Either you stop talking in fucking riddles or I’m gone. You got that? I’m sick to hell of you and—”

“You don’t even understand what you are, do you?”

“I’m pissed off, that’s what I am.”

“You open the door, Reece. But Roxanne . . . she closes it.”

Reece shook his head.

“She is the light to your dark. Hasn’t it always been that way?”

Reece’s mouth felt like it had been filled with chalk. But the truth rolled over him like the tide.

Gary said, “Do not underestimate how much this demon wants that door to stay open. He wants to fill this world with his army. But to do that, he must destroy your sister and make
you
his slave.”

Dread became an anchor Reece couldn’t release. It kept him from drifting away even as it pulled him down, down under that rolling truth and into the nightmare Gary illuminated.

“You understand,” Gary said gently. “You can see yourself caged, waking, dying, waking, dy—”

Reece raised a hand for him to stop. Surprisingly, Gary did. Reece wanted to escape the other man, escape this conversation. He turned and walked to his room without another word, but Gary followed.

“I’ll think about what you said,” Reece told him. He stood in front of his closed door without opening it in case Gary wouldn’t take the hint and thought he was invited in. “But I need some shut-eye right now.”

Gary’s pause felt staged, but he didn’t press. Thank the fucking Lord.

“Sure, and don’t I understand that? Sleep on it. But think about this, Reece. We need you on our side. And you need
us
on yours.”

R
eece opened his door and stepped into the darkness of his room, apprehension crowding in with the shadows. Christ, could he believe what Gary had told him? How could he not after what he’d seen this morning?

He stripped down to his briefs and climbed into his bed without turning on a light. He’d seen too much this morning, and if something waited for him here, well then, hell. Let it have him. He couldn’t take any more. His exhaustion felt like a friend, and he welcomed it in and begged it to make itself at home.

He’d just started dozing when he heard the click of his door. Instantly awake, he watched it swing inward and shut again. A willowy form parted the curtain of
gloom as it moved to his bed. His heart stuttered for a moment before he realized who it was.

April
.

She wore an oversized T-shirt that ended at her knees and nothing else. Against the drab color, her skin looked darker than the shadows. Silently, she pulled back the covers and slid in beside him, her flesh warm and silken against him. He inched over, making room for her.

Neither one of them spoke as he pulled her against his chest and held her. It didn’t seem necessary, questions or explanations. Just the opposite. For the first time since he’d opened his eyes in this place, Reece felt the tight knot in his chest ease.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

He shrugged, not exactly sure what he’d apologized for. Only certain that he owed her one.

“I’m sorry for your pain.”

A taut quiet trailed his husky response. Thick and accusing, though he couldn’t say if it came from within himself or from April.

“My pain,” she whispered. “I deserve my pain.”

“No.”

She shifted, her bare legs moving against his as she pressed closer. Softly rounded and innately feminine, she felt good against him. Real in a world that had become so cockeyed he no longer recognized it.

“Why are you here, April?” he asked, but his arms tightened on their own, making sure she understood that he didn’t mind. Not at all.

“I heard what Gary told you,” she answered softly.

Reece stiffened, but she only wrapped herself around him more completely.

“So you know I’m the reason the world is all fucked-up.”

She laughed, a low sound that warmed the sharp chunk of ice that had settled around his heart. “Yeah. It’s all you.”

He leaned back, peering at her through the dark. “Why aren’t you scared of me, then?”

She turned her face into his chest, breath warm against his skin. He felt her inhale, taking in his scent even as he caught himself with his nose against her hair, doing the same. She was quiet for so long that he wondered if she’d refused to answer. Maybe she’d fallen asleep. God knew she had to have been as weary as he.

“When they came . . .” she began in a broken voice. She cleared it and tried again. “They came in the morning when we were all getting ready for the day. A normal day. Mom worked, so we didn’t do a big breakfast. I remember scarfing down a piece of toast as I got my books together. I’d just started college. My little brother was annoying me. He hid my calculus book and then tattled when I smacked him. My older brother was yelling at me to hurry. He used to drive us both to school.
Daddy had just shouted at us all when the first one busted through the door.” She let out a puff of air. “Isn’t it funny what you remember?”

Reece pressed his lips to her temple. “Yeah,” he said. Because as she talked, a background movie played in his head. One of Gary charging through the kitchen door, gun already drawn. An old song by .38 Special had been blaring on the radio. “Caught Up in You.” Manny loved that song. But then Gary shot Manny for no reason. No goddamned reason at all.

“They killed carefully,” she said. “Like surgeons.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked up then, her chocolate eyes glimmering in the dark. Her lashes dammed the tears she seemed determine to deny. From the October moonlight edging the curtains, he saw so many things. Anger. Terror. Defiance. Remorse.

And he understood every last one of them.

“They didn’t just kill my family. They did it carefully. So it wouldn’t show. They took them, Reece.”

He wanted to be incredulous. He wanted to ask naïve questions.
Took them how? Like hostages? But you said they’d killed them . . .

Instead, he said, “The demons took their bodies?”

Her sigh held so many emotions that he couldn’t begin to sort them. “I saw one break my mother’s neck. I
heard
it snap, Reece. I watched the life go out. Like a snuffed candle. She looked like a rag doll when she hit
the floor. Her eyes were open the entire time, and I saw it all. The fear, the pain . . . the death.”

A few hot tears broke ranks and slid down her cheek. He felt them against his chest.

“A minute later, she stood up again and those eyes weren’t hers anymore. I’ll never forget the horror on my daddy’s face when he saw it. When he realized . . .” She swallowed hard. “He fought them. He tried to protect us kids, but they kept coming. There were too many.”

“What did they look like? The things we fought this morning?”

She shook her head. “Some were already . . . they’d already taken bodies. But the others . . . they were just shadows, shades of nothing that hissed across the floor, over the ceiling. They were everywhere, just looking for a way in.”

She pressed nearer, as if she couldn’t get close enough. What she’d seen could never be unseen. What she’d survived would never be forgotten.

“They possessed my family, Reece. All but the little ones—they just killed my baby brother and sister. Right now, those demons are walking around pretending to be my mother and father, pretending to be my older brother. Committing crimes—doing
unspeakable
things—dressed as my family.”

Her words blew through him like a sour wind, churning up dust devils of superstition and fear. Demons, possessing humans. Turning average, everyday
citizens into monsters. Gary had said it, but April made him
see
it.

They’d done this to her family. And now she’d dedicated her life to seeing them banished.

He moved at last, tucking her into the curve of his body and holding her tight. She gripped his shoulders as she finally released the rest of her tears, sobbing against his chest while he rubbed her back, murmured words of comfort in her ear, smoothed her hair away from her face.

His mind felt numb, his thoughts sluggish. His sense of self, of reality, battled with this vista she painted so skillfully. He felt like he’d missed something key in her story, but the images he’d retained were too vivid to allow him to focus elsewhere.

Gary’s tales of demons joined April’s narrative looping in his head.

Demons.

Possession.

Monsters roaming the land, dressed like Mom and Dad.
Families
who would commit
unspeakable
crimes.

And at the crux was Reece. The reason it happened. The way in.

April’s weeping eased and the harsh, painful sobs subsided until she was silent in his arms. She sniffled and turned those wet, brown eyes up to look at him.

“I’m sorr—”

He kissed her before she could utter those words.
Because she had nothing,
nothing,
to be sorry about. Reece should be on his knees, begging her forgiveness.

She froze at the first contact, before her arms went up and around his neck and she pulled him closer still, kissing him back with fire and passion that seared away all thoughts, leaving blessed redemption in its wake.

She pressed herself to him eagerly, her response so unaffected that it touched deep inside him. She wasn’t acting. She wasn’t role-playing. She didn’t kiss him because she’d been told to, as Karen had. She’d come because she’d needed the solace they could give each other.

Reece had been with a lot of women. But he’d never understood the difference between fucking and making love. Until now with this woman he barely knew.

Afterwards, she lay curled in his arms as the sun crested the roof and moved to the other side, leaving them in cool shadows. Her breathing evened out as she began to drift off, and the sheer trust of that—of her willingness to sleep with him, to depend on him to keep her safe—filled him to overflowing.

In that moment, he swore that he would protect her, no matter the cost. But as he began to drift off, the question that had circled in his brain as April had told her tale, that niggling doubt that had moved so fast it had evaded his attempts to see it, finally slowed and came into focus.

“April,” he whispered.

“Yes?” she answered, her voice soft but alert.

She hadn’t been asleep, and some sixth sense told him she’d been waiting for him to ask that missing question.

Reece swallowed hard, wishing it back even as he spoke.

“How did you get away, when they came? How did you escape?”

Her pause held the weight of a mountain, towering, unstable and immense.

“I didn’t, Reece,” she answered in a tone filled with anguish. She tilted her face up so he could look into her eyes, so he could see the truth he doubted he’d heard.

“I didn’t get away from them. They caught me.”

I
n the moments since Santo had seen the first raven, more had joined. Hundreds of them, by the sound of it. Their wings created a thundering symphony. They cawed and shrieked and flew wildly outside the house. The melee melded with the shadows and stretched the harsh noises into chaos. A tangled, torturous tension gripped them all.