The Taking (33 page)

She nodded.

“Well, maybe it’s not the house or the journal. Maybe it’s Alcroft. Or maybe it’s me.”

Regan stared at him blankly. “Why would either of you be a conduit for the spirit of a woman who died a hundred and thirty years ago?”

Felix stared at her steadily, his hand twitching on hers. “Because Alcroft and I both knew Camille.”

And with those words, he shattered the last of her calm.

“What? That’s ridiculous! How could either one of you have known Camille?” Camille was dead long before Felix had been born.

“Because I’m immortal.”

Regan fought the urge to throw up, her heart hardening at the realization that the man she loved was lying to her in an insulting and bizarre way when she most needed him to be rational with her.

Felix took a deep breath and thought carefully before he spoke again. Regan was breathing hard, her expression incredulous. He knew he had to tell her the truth—the whole truth—so that they could protect her from whatever it was Camille was trying to do. He also wanted no secrets between them, not about something so important as his whole existence, his history, his punishment, his future, because Felix wanted a real relationship with Regan for as long as it was possible. But there was no easy way to tell someone you were immortal, a product of Hell, and blurting it out had obviously been a mistake.

“What you are about to hear is going to sound fantastical, but it is the truth. Remember that I love you, and I want to be with you, and that I’m telling you for that very reason and because I want you safe, okay?”

She didn’t answer, just stared at him with wild eyes.

Felix forged ahead. “I was born in 1851, the illegitimate child of a free quadroon woman named Louisa Leblanc, and her French Creole lover Jean-Paul Arminault. I was named Felix after my father’s father, a triumph of my mother over Jean-Paul’s wealthy wife. She gave Jean-Paul a son first, and while an illegitimate first son didn’t merit my father’s last name, I did receive his father’s Christian name.”

Regan said nothing, but she had shifted slightly away from him on the edge of the bed, her face devoid of color and emotion except for two bright spots of pink on each cheek.

“I had a pleasant childhood,” he said, determined to spit it all out before she bolted from the room. “My parents loved each other, we had a house, money. I was apprenticed to a banker since I could pass for white and because my father had friends in high places. I had a love of fine things, and a burgeoning resentment of the doors that were shut to me because of the circumstances of my birth. I was materialistic, petulant. When my father died, we found ourselves without a home, and I lost my job. My mother saw her only recourse as serving herself up on a platter to whichever wealthy man would take her as his mistress. At her age, with a grown child, and no one to protect her, only the deviant or the infirm or the abusive were going to want her, and I knew this, yet was powerless to stop it.”

Felix still felt the shame and anger of that night, the horror of knowing he was a man finally, yet he could not take care of his own mother the way she had cared for him. That he had to stand there and let her be used and tossed aside by cold and uncaring men. It had been a bitter tonic on his tongue that night and it still was. “I hated myself for not being able to fix it. I hated that the ache of hunger in my belly was distracting and all-consuming and that I thought of it even more often than I thought of my mother, who was subjecting herself to the rejection and ridicule of men with too much money and too little compassion. So when a man approached me with warm bread and the promise of talent and charm that would guarantee my personal wealth, how could I say no?”

Rubbing the ring on his finger, back and forth, back and forth, Felix smiled at his own stupidity. “They say if something is too good to be true, it usually is. So I was given charm, elocution, access to rich, bored ladies who would pay most handsomely for my voodoo spells and potions, and simply for the privilege and titillation of doing something ‘beyond the pale.’ I had enough money to buy a beautiful house, to furnish it well, to set my mother up for life, to dress to the nines, and drink the finest wines. But what I didn’t realize was that by accepting that piece of bread and that man’s offer of all the advantages of immortality, of a life without death, that I was sentencing myself to an eternity of servitude to a man cast out of Heaven and residing in the very bowels of Hell.”

Regan still wasn’t speaking and it was starting to unnerve Felix. He’d expected that she would either interject a comment or protest or just run out of the room.

“A demon. You know, a fallen angel,” he added. “That is what Alcroft is, and I am bound to him, demon servant to demon master, until the world ends.” He held his ring up to show her. “Bound by my own greed.”

Felix paused, wanting a reaction of any kind.

After a second, Regan gave him one. “You know, when most people feel guilty for past behaviors, they have a few sleepless nights and vow to do better in the future. I think you’re the first man I’ve encountered who has attributed his flaws to a demon. I can see why you’re such a good tarot reader. You spin quite a story.”

Felix gritted his teeth. “It’s not a story. I know it sounds insane, but it’s the truth.”

“There is no such thing as immortality, and I love how you cast my ex-husband as the villain in your tale.” Regan scoffed. “Here I was wondering about my sanity. Yours is nonexistent and I want you to pack your bags and leave.”

“Wait a minute.” Felix tried to fight his irritation, but a sharpness crept into his voice. “You can believe what you just saw on that videotape—you can accept that a dead woman can come back after a hundred years and enter your body—but you can’t believe that demons exist or that immortality is a possibility?”

“That’s crazy, yes, but I saw it, I’ve felt it. And a ghost is, I don’t know ... normal. A spirit that can open a door is a hell of a lot different than you telling me you’re sitting here in the flesh, living and eating and breathing like anyone else and yet you’ll never die? That’s nuts.”

Felix jumped up off the bed. “Do you want me to prove it? Is that what you need? Physical proof? I can slice myself open if you’d like and you can watch me heal.”

He wished he had the demon ability to let people into his mind, or the ability to levitate. Something, anything, that would prove to the woman he loved he wasn’t a complete lunatic.

“If you slice yourself in front of me I’m calling the cops.”

Damn. That would not be good. “Wait. I have a picture,” he said, frantically patting his back pocket for his wallet. “It’s me and my mother. I laminated it a few years ago and I carry it with me. My father had it taken for my eighteenth birthday.”

Pulling the picture out, he held it in front of Regan.

She took it reluctantly and eyed it. The spots of color disappeared on her cheeks and her lips pursed. Setting the picture carefully down on her lap, avoiding the dried blood on her knee from where her nails had dug in while watching the video, she swallowed hard. “This could be fake. Photoshop. Or it could be your great-grandfather or something.”

Felix sighed. She wasn’t going to believe him. “Don’t you want to hear the rest of the story?”

“What I really want is for you to leave. If you feel you need to tell me the rest of the story before you go, I won’t object.”

Ouch. He hated that tone in her voice, that cold, distant look on her face. It wasn’t what he had ever received from Regan, and he couldn’t believe that after finding what he had craved so desperately, a woman who would love him, truly love him, he was going to lose her.

“Thank you,” he said, falling into the formality she had imposed on the conversation. “I’ve never told anyone the truth of who and what I am before. I realize it’s difficult to accept. But it is the truth.”

Pacing back and forth so he wouldn’t have to see that stone-cold look on her face, he said, “So the greedy young Felix got everything he wanted. The money, the house, the ability to care for my mother until the day she died, and the adoration of women. If it meant I had to give a portion of my riches to Alcroft as a kickback, it didn’t matter. And I could ignore the feeling of being owned ... it was a loose ball and chain and I was heady with the power, the attention, the money. Until I met Camille.”

He took a deep breath, still not daring to look at Regan. “I knew that Alcroft, who was known as Mr. Tradd in those days, was interested in Camille. He spoke about her possessively, confident she would be his wife. But after her family died, Camille had no interest in him. She was only interested in voodoo and me. Really what she wanted in me was a partner, someone who wouldn’t say no to the improper things she wanted to do, someone who would encourage her interest in making contact with the dead.

“We were a frighteningly perfect fit, both selfish, both greedy, both insolent and bratty. I almost never told her no, despite how outrageous her requests were, and she relished that. In return, she provided me with stacks and stacks of money, and a companion to straddle the societal fence with. It was a lonely position to be in, caught between two worlds, and Camille’s behavior had shoved her outside of proper circles as well. I suppose, in an odd sort of way, you could have called us friends. I never meant for her to die that night. It was an accident. She fell off the balcony ... she thought she saw her mother and she reached for her, and before I could even react, she was on the ground.”

Felix stopped talking, the pain of failure, of loss, suddenly overwhelming. He wasn’t explaining this right. It sounded absurd, and Regan clearly didn’t believe one word of what he was saying. She was just staring at him, tight-lipped. Humoring him until she could get him to leave. Hell, she was probably frightened of him, wondering if she should call for help to escort the crazy man out of her bedroom.

God, it hurt. This was by far the worst punishment he had ever received. To have tasted happiness, genuine love, so briefly, then to have to it taken away, it was torture. Worse than the hanging darkness he had suffered through after Camille’s death.

That had been maddening.

But this was heartbreaking.

This reached deep inside and shattered him, stripping him of his hope, his future, his dignity, his last remaining sense of purpose in a pointless life.

He hardened himself against the hurt. What had he expected, right? A happily ever after?

There was none for him, and he knew that. Might as well walk away before he sunk to the floor and begged her to understand.

He still had too much pride to do that.

And maybe Regan was his final lesson. Wasn’t the ultimate greed wanting another person? He had certainly wanted Regan as his, only his, day in, day out, for the rest of her life.

Possession of another person was the basest of sins. “I’ll just let myself out,” he said, when the silence drew on. “Here’s your key back.” He fished around in his pocket and retrieved it. Setting it down on the chest of drawers that had stayed the one constant in this house for a century, Felix balled his fist and hit the marble top with a sound of frustration.

Turning to leave, he made the mistake of taking one last look at Regan.

That cold, emotionless face made him sick.

“Where did you get your ring?” she asked him as he moved past her.

“Excuse me?” Felix stopped, confused.

“The ring you always wear. The silver one. What does it mean to you?”

There was no reason not to tell her the truth. “It’s my binding ring. It holds me to Alcroft. It has the same inscription your ring had.
Ego own vos.
I own you.”

“Why don’t you just take it off?” she asked. “You even wear it in the shower.”

“It doesn’t come off.” Felix held out his hand and showed her by tugging on it. It didn’t budge a millimeter.

She frowned and reached out with her delicate, long fingers and touched his ring. Then she pulled.

And it came off.

Just like that.

After an astonished second to process what the hell he was looking at, Felix ran his other hand over his bare finger and laughed. Horrible irony. That all it took was someone else sliding it off him? All this time and it was that simple. He couldn’t quite believe it.

Regan looked inside the ring and frowned when she saw the inscription. Then she merely handed him his ring back without saying a word.

“I never had a chance,” Felix murmured, his heart shredding at he watched Regan shut down emotionally, close him out, withdraw inside herself. “Greed always makes you reach for what can’t be yours ... and I knew you were too good for me. I knew you could never be mine, yet I wanted you anyway. It seems I haven’t learned a damn thing in all this time—over a hundred years and I still let greed rule me.”

Her mouth opened as if she were going to speak, but then she closed it, her head shaking slightly from left to right as she remained stoically silent.