For a moment, all he could do was stare at her. And think of that first time he had seen her, in Havers’s old clinic. She had come into an examination room to check him into the system, and he had been . . . obsessed from the start—
Ehlena turned and smiled. “This is such a nice surprise!”
Wordlessly, he walked over and took her into his arms, gathering her up and out of the rolling chair. Closing his eyes, he held on to her.
“Are you okay?” she said as she stroked his back through the mink. “Rehv, what’s wrong?”
“I just had to see you.”
“Did something happen?”
How did he answer that, he wondered, without alarming her. And he wasn’t thinking about the Book, or magic in the wrong hands, or what might be in any of those coffins. No, he was thinking about whether or not love actually survived even the cold hand of death. Ask any romantic and they’d say it was true—hell, if you believed in the Fade, it was true. You got your forever with your soul mate. But if you were a skeptic?
“No, nothing happened. I just wanted to see the female I love.”
“You can talk to me,” she murmured. “You know that, right. You can tell me what’s going on.”
“Like I said, it’s nothing.”
Well, nothing except for the fact that skeptics, generally speaking, didn’t like to see coffins. They were a reminder that life ended, and he could not bear the thought of losing his shellan.
He literally did not know what he would do without—
Rehv jerked back as the image of that female at the parking garage—and her grid—shot into his mind.
“Oh, my God,” he blurted. “She wants to bring someone back from the dead.”
Ehlena shook her head. “I’m sorry, what—”
“A nice, normal civilian going after something evil? The only reason they’d do it is if someone they love is dead and they can’t live with the pain. Her brother. It has to be her brother—it’s the only person left in her family. I’ll bet you something happened to him.”
Sahvage rematerialized off to the side of the garage Mae had just parked her car in. As the panels started to drop back down, he glanced over his shoulder. Looked to the front of the one-story house. Checked what he could see in the back. He did not want her to get out of that fucking vehicle until things were safe—
And she didn’t. She waited until everything was closed up.
“Good girl,” he said softly. Even though she wouldn’t have approved of being called a girl.
Sticking to the shadows, he got out of his pack what he had stolen from the cottage when she’d been taking Tallah to bed: Morton’s un-iodized salt. Although he’d have taken it with the iodine. Didn’t matter.
With a steady hand, he popped the top, and he was lucky on two parts: The container was almost full, and the seventies-era ranch wasn’t big. Still, he was careful to ration the stuff. He only poured it on the ground in front of the doors and the windows. He’d have preferred to do the sealing all the way around, but he couldn’t risk running out with any of the job left undone.
After he’d covered the ground floor, he materialized up onto the roof. No chimney, but there were two pipe vents, probably for the bathrooms, and he poured the salt on the shingles around them on a just-in-case.
Then he sat his ass on the mid-beam of the house and kicked his legs out in front of himself on the easy slope. He wondered what the female was doing beneath him, maybe grabbing something to eat, going through her mail. She would head back to the cottage for the day, though. She wasn’t going to want that old female left alone.
Cursing himself, cursing Mae, he scanned the yard and the neighborhood with not just his eyes, but every sense and instinct he had.
He wasn’t sure he believed in the salt. But it was something Rahvyn had always sworn by, and that was as good a recommendation as he was going to get in this nightmare.
God, he wished his cousin were here. She would know what to do.
Hell, maybe she could have talked Mae out of this madness—
The first thing he noticed was the stars disappearing overhead. But not because of clouds. It was as if a black shroud had been pulled across the sky directly above the ranch.
“Fuck.”
Getting to his feet, he outed both of his guns, and eyed the neighborhood, which was suburban-tight and suburban-peopled: Both houses on either side, as well as the ones across the street, had humans in them, men and women winding down in bed, watching TV, having midnight snacks. The last thing he needed was a bunch of forefingers dialing 911 when he was trying to save that female’s life.
“Fuck.”
With grim purpose, he walked down the roof incline to the gutter and jumped to the ground, landing with a boom. Turning to the front door, he was going to bang on it—except he stopped himself.
The garage. He hadn’t sealed the garage door.
Shoving one of the guns into its holster, he ripped the Morton’s back out, and ran for the tiny seam between those retractable panels and the concrete lip of the garage slab. The salt needed to be down on the ground before whatever had shown up at the cottage turned up again—
“You don’t actually think that’s going to work, do you.”
The voice was female, and seemed to be coming from every direction. But as much of a shocker as it was, he refused to be diverted. He kept pouring, the lightness of the container freaking him out as he closed in on the far side of the broad entrance. Faster. Faster. Fasterfasterfaster—
Sahvage all but threw the goddamn container at the corner formed by the house’s edge and the concrete—on the theory that the salt was still in place, even if there was a cylindrical cardboard container wrapping around it.
It was as he looked up that he saw the leg.
The very shapely leg . . . that was plugged into a shiny black stiletto with a red sole.
His eyes followed the dainty ankle to its delicate calf—and went farther up to a very lady-like knee. After that, there were the thighs, the incredibly smooth thighs that were set on display by a black miniskirt that gave both “skintight” and “short” new meaning. And Jesus . . . the top half of the woman more than lived up to the bottom part. Between the black push-up bustier, and all that brunette hair, and that face . . .
“Hi,” the woman drawled as she leaned up against the house, right over the salt container. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Her eyes were jet black and gleaming like they were backlit, and her lips were blood red, and she was as beautiful a woman as he had ever seen.
And her malevolence made him want to get his other gun back out. So he fucking did.
“Now, now,” she said, “is that really necessary. We haven’t even been properly introduced. If you’re going to shoot me, shouldn’t we at least shake hands first?”
With a graceful bend, she picked up the Morton’s. Meeting his eyes, she ran one blood red fingernail around the open metal spout.
“Just so you know, I’m totally resisting the urge to make some ‘you so salty’ jokes right now.” That finger continued to play with the opening. “I’ll say it again, do you really think you can keep me out of anywhere?”
In the pool of light thrown by an exterior fixture, she was an all-wrong trying to pull off perfectly-normal: The shadows under her body moved even when she didn’t, and then there was her aura. A pitch-black shimmer tinted the air around her.
Because she radiated evil.
She tossed the Morton’s over her shoulder, and the container bounced away like it was running from her. “You’re going to need a lot more than shit for seasoning French fries to keep me out. But enough about entrances and exits, tell me something, does this skirt make my ass look big.”
Pivoting around, she struck a pose and stared over her shoulder—as her hand took a stroll down the tuck of her waist to the perfectly proportioned swell of her hip.
“Hm?” she prompted in a throat purr. “What do you think of my ass.”
Sahvage blocked his thoughts by picturing a closet, a closet that had shelves running up its walls from floor to ceiling. Inside his closet, the shelves were empty, the bald overhead light revealing all the absolutely-nothing in there. When he was sure he could see the details clearly, from the wood graining on those vertical boards to the little string hanging from the bulb, he shut the closet door. And locked it.
As the woman stroked her rear assets, he held that final image foremost in his mind: A stout door, a thick door, a reinforced door that was dead-bolted, protecting a closet with nothing in it.
The woman chuckled. “Look at you, with the parlor tricks.”
Say nothing, he told himself. You give nothing out loud.
“So protective of the female under this roof, you are.” The woman—“woman”—glanced at the house. “You must care deeply for her. Or are you just making sure she lives long enough so you can fuck her?”
Sahvage stared forward and barely blinked.
“I’m right, aren’t I.” The woman smiled as she turned back around to face him. “You haven’t fucked her yet. But you want to, don’t you. You want her naked under you and you’re going to mark her as your own—like that means anything these days. Haven’t you heard that monogamy is out of style?”
Her voice was low and seductive, backing up her body, her lips, her hair. She was such an enticing package, but once you got that ribbon off? Ripped free the wrapping paper?
“Or maybe there’s more to you two.” She extended an elegant hand and pointed her blood red forefinger at the center of his chest. “Does she have this? What beats in here . . . has she taken your heart?” There was a pause. “Already . . . wow. I’ll have to take some pointers from her. She’s not much to look at, but her game is evidently on fire.”
I give nothing, Sahvage thought. I give nothing, Igivenothing, IgivenothingIgivenothingIgive—
Her eyes gleamed with menace. “You know, you make me want to get inside of you. I think it would be fun—for me, at least. And for you, for a short while. But hey, sometimes in life, all you get are short little funs, right? Itty-bitty funs. So what do you say, fighter. How about we fuck and I show you a really good time.”
From out of the blue, a thought came to him, like a paper airplane sailing into his line of sight.
This woman, who was not a woman at all but something else . . . was his ticket off the planet.
After all these years, his death, which he had so often wished for, and too many times been denied, had finally crossed the threshold of his inner house and sat down in a chair.
To wait for the right moment.
The woman smiled, her blood red lips pulling into an expression of evil satisfaction. “You’re going to be mine.”
• • •
The rush of the ice bouncing off Rhoger’s immobile chest and falling into the sides of the tub was the kind of thing Mae was going to hear in her nightmares forever. And the tinkling sounds, so soft, so gentle, reminded her of how unhinged she had become. Even as she was able to dress herself properly and eat her meals and drive her car without disaster, she was chaos barely reined in, the undercarriage of all her seemingly a-okay really ten thousand volts of fucked-in-the-head.
“It’s going to be fine,” she told her brother as she crumpled up the dripping, empty bag.
Reaching for the next one, she tore through its plastic skin and then realized she’d forgotten to bang it on the floor first. It was a solid frozen chunk.
“Damn it.”
Grabbing a towel off the rack, she wrapped the bag up and dropped the thing on the bath mat a couple of times, the shattering inside too close for comfort.
Now the chips poured out, though.
When she was finished refilling things, she sat back on her heels and propped her hands on the slick rim of the tub. Staring at her brother’s face through the tesserae’d ice, she couldn’t recognize his features. But she wasn’t sure she would have anyway.