The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (25 page)

She realized she was standing. She didn’t remember when she’d gotten her legs beneath her.

It’s you we want. Not him. Not him.

Of course, she thought. Santo would be okay. Abaddon wouldn’t hurt him if she went with his ravens. Abaddon had little use for humans.

Yes, yes yes. . . .

But Santo wasn’t human . . . he was an angel. An angel who’d come to protect her.

She blinked her eyes, looking down at the man who’d fought so hard to save her. What was she doing?
How could she even think of leaving him? The ravens had infested her thoughts, her vision, the air she struggled to pull in.

She took a step away from him.

Good.

The numbness filled her more completely even as a horrified voice inside began to scream for her to wake up,
wake up
,
WAKE UP.
The ravens clicked their beaks, receding another inch and then another. All except the big one with its glittering eyes. It gave her a sympathetic look and hopped forward.

“You can’t win this one, kiddo,” the raven said in a voice that sounded like her father’s. The tone, the inflection. The bird tilted its head, looking so human that it started a quake of terror amidst the upheaval already going on inside her.

“You know I’m right, Roxanne,” her father spoke from the black beak. He sounded so gentle and reasonable, so impossibly alive. “When have I ever steered you wrong?”

“Never, Daddy,” she answered.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to give up?” he said. “Forget this crazy game of hide-and-seek? You’re never going to win it, and people are going to get hurt if you try. Your brothers. Your sister. Why would you put them in danger?”

Every nuance of her father’s voice was just as she’d
remembered, and even though the soulless eyes looking at her didn’t belong to the man she’d loved, the words rang true and the scolding brought tears to her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Do the right thing, Roxanne.”

Beguiled. That was the word for it. Somewhere deep within her mind, she knew it. But she couldn’t break the spell. The raven puffed its feathers, then let them settle again. It smiled at her, black beak parting to flash the pale pink cast of its throat. It lifted its wings high and wide, ridged by long fingers of black feathers. Arms that welcomed her.

“Come home, sweetheart,” her dad said. “We’ll forget about all this nonsense. You’ll be forgiven.”

Forgiveness.
It sounded like salve that would ease her isolation, her loneliness. But what was she being forgiven for? She struggled to reason it out. Had she done something?

Yes, Roxanne, you have sinned.

The raven smiled justly.

She took a step over Santo’s body, while inside her terror squeezed at her heart. How had she sinned? What did it mean? Why did this feel so wrong? She needed to fight it. Fight this hold. Fight
them.

Sweat broke out on her brow and careened down her spine. She was trembling with the conflicting forces within her. The compulsion to obey, to listen to her
father battered against the insanity of doing just that. Her father was dead. If she listened to this imposter, she and Santo would be dead, too.

She took another step, her movements jerky, muscles aching as the waging war took down her motor skills.

STOP, ROXANNE. STOP.

Another step, the ravens dancing back to give her room—all but the one who spoke with her father’s voice. The other birds settled in perches on the curtains, the lamps, the furniture, leaving her and Santo an island of carpet while they seethed like a black tide against a seawall.

A held breath hissed through her teeth, and the big raven hopped back in surprise, eyeing her with wary suspicion.

From a great distance, she seemed to see herself, poised on the edge of a dangerous unknown. Petrified. Tangled in commands she didn’t want to obey.

She took another step and the birds kept up their merry escort, shifting along the curtain rods and furniture to keep pace. The big one took flight, hovering at eye level.

Tears burned her eyes, but rage kept them from escaping. Another step.

“Time to come home, Roxanne,” her dad said.

She pulled in a burning breath, anger blazing in her gut as she forced herself to look away. Santo lay unconscious on the floor, the rise and fall of his chest shallow.

“Santo, help me,” she whispered, even as she moved to the door. Knowing that no matter how she tried to fight it, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from obeying. She’d been summoned, and who was
she
to decline the summons of Abaddon?

Ask better questions, Roxanne.

“Santo,” she tried again.

He didn’t answer.

Peace—though she knew it was a lie—waited for her in the velvety shadows around the big raven. That she could both know it wasn’t real and still crave it stoked the rage in her.

The ravens had grown quiet, expectant. How much time had passed since she’d risen and taken that first step? Seconds? Days? She felt like a radio tuned between stations, filled with disruptive static and intermittent surges of song. These ravens would compel her to her death and she’d go. Afraid.

As she’d been her whole life. She couldn’t stop any of this. She didn’t even know why they wanted her.

She made it to the door, and she knew that if she stepped out, she’d be lost.

She unlocked it.

Her tears overran her resistance, clouding her vision. She could hardly see past them or hear for the frantic screams that echoed in her head.

She turned the knob and opened the door.

A sound came from behind her, a great gust of
breath and movement, and then Santo grabbed her, knocking her off her feet as he tackled her.

It felt like something ruptured inside her—not bones or organs. A fissure splitting with a violent explosion. Her rage turned sharp-toothed mouths up as her fear plummeted down, down to be devoured.

Roxanne lay pinned on her stomach, her feet still inside the house, her body sprawled on the front porch, Santo’s heavy weight across her legs. The birds exploded from the open door. The force of their exit made a sound that hurt her ears. They blotted out the mustard glow of the harvest moon.

The last twenty-four hours played in her mind. All she’d learned. All she still didn’t know. Santo’s voice inserted itself, explaining, teaching, challenging. He’d be so disappointed in her. He’d come to rescue an utter failure.

Roxanne shut her eyes, shutting down. Only the white-hot glimmer of her rage existed now. It burned so bright that it blinded.

Get away,
she thought.
Get away from me.

The ravens had crowded closer, and suddenly they fluttered and took a step back. Not much, but enough that she could breathe. She sucked in a breath and rubbed the knot in her chest, the place that seemed to swell within her. In her head, she heard Santo whisper, “
Shut the door, Roxanne. Come back to me.
”

She looked into the sea of black feathers and lethal claws hovering above her.

But she couldn’t even
find
the mysterious door. How could she possibly shut it? How would she even know it if she’d done it?

Shut it. Shut it. Shut it.

“How?” she asked in a broken voice. “How?”

The answer formed like a rolling snowball, gathering speed and mass as it hurtled to its destination, and she realized that finally, at last, she’d asked the right question.

She shut her eyes and listened as the ravens began to scream.

R
eece sat on the wide front porch he’d admired just yesterday and watched sunset turn the sky into a pink and gold menagerie of hooved clouds and horned doom. It would be Halloween soon.

His day was inside out. His night had come at dawn, his morning with dusk. He was wide awake at a time when he should have been winding down.

His coffee had grown cold and the jacket he wore provided little protection against the desert chill, but Reece didn’t move. Since he’d staggered from his bed and down the stairs to this chair on the porch, he’d been numb.

In his head, he heard April’s words over and over and over.

I didn’t get away. They caught me.

And each time he heard it, he faced the realization anew. April hadn’t been orphaned in Harvey, North Dakota, the day the demons had come and killed her family.

She’d been born. She was one of them now. A demon.

Gary hadn’t ridden in and saved the day when the demons had attacked April’s and Karen’s families. He hadn’t saved the survivors and brought him to sanctuary. No. Because Gary, the man Reece had once thought of as a friend, was the Big Bad of this crazy reality. He hadn’t led the knights in shining armor to the rescue; he’d led an army of demons to attack.

The rest of the story Karen had told him was true. The demons had confiscated the dead bodies and now wore them like new suits. What she’d omitted was the fact that she was one of them. She and April both.

One of many, as it turned out. The compound was nothing more than a nest of demons disguised as humans. And here he sat within their terrible embrace, a human trying to pretend he didn’t have his own monster to hide. It should have been a match made in heaven. He should have felt like he’d finally come home to a place he belonged. But Reece felt only horror.

He heard a noise behind him, but he didn’t turn. He knew the sound of April’s footsteps. Already he knew her scent. Silently, she took his coffee cup and replaced it with a fresh one. Then she curled up on the
swing to his right, pulling the blanket she’d brought tight around her.

“There’s more you should know,” she said softly.

He thought there would be.

With a sigh, he looked at her. Still the beautiful young woman who’d intrigued him with her dark eyes and silence. Still as sweet and fresh and as all-American as the sunrise over the pines. Except she was none of those things. She wasn’t even human.

“There’s something that happens to us,” she said.

Us. Demons. Reece swallowed the pain that came with the thought. Not an hour ago, he’d made love to a demon. He’d felt cleansed by her kisses. Healed by her touch.

“We didn’t know it when we followed Gary out of Abaddon.”

Abaddon. Hell on steroids if he’d grasped the concept.

“Know what?” he asked, when something inside him begged him to keep quiet.

But there was no turning back from this—no pretending it was something he’d misunderstood. He needed to learn everything he could about these
people
he’d come to be allied with. But he had to be very careful. If Gary even suspected that Reece knew the truth . . .

“Wait,” he said, holding up his hand. “Go get dressed. Let’s take a walk.”

A few minutes later they headed out, skirting the inside gates of the compound until they reached the
open pasture where the horses grazed with a scattering of sheep, goats, and cows. Here, the desert crept right up to the fence, taunting the nurtured pasture with its dusty, dry promises.

“Start from the beginning,” Reece said. “Why are you here?”

She took a deep breath, and those dark chocolate eyes that had enthralled him from the first moment he’d seen her grew misty.

“We were considered scavengers before. That’s why we were imprisoned in Abaddon.”

“Things that prey on the dead?”

She nodded. “Before that, we were reapers. Reapers have a higher calling. They reap the soul and see it carried to its proper place in the afterlife.”

“They kill people.”

“No. Not at all.” She looked down, and he could see a dull flush beneath her dark skin. “At least they aren’t supposed to. But scavengers are reapers who can’t get enough of death. They crave it. The fear that humans feel when death is upon them. The pain. The sorrow. The need for it becomes what you would call an addiction.”

He knew she meant
humans
when she said
you
. But Reece felt like she spoke directly to him, confiding something she thought he’d understand. And he did.

“You’re one of them? One of these scavengers who likes death too much?”

Her remorse touched something deep inside him, moving and jarring all at the same time.

“Yes,” she said. “I was.”

He noted her use of past tense but kept silent.

“If reapers are caught abusing their power, inciting terror, they’re condemned to never reap again. It’s like caging a lion and starving it to death.”

He hated the picture she painted. Hated that this soft-spoken woman, who’d touched him in a way no other had before, had experienced it.

Reece couldn’t look at her. “Go on.”

“Reapers were created for one purpose, Reece. When that purpose is stripped away, what’s left is . . . ugly.”

“As opposed to the beauty of death?”