Crave (Fallen Angels 2)

He had no clue whether she could hear him and there was no response. Just an eerie, molten sound . . . no doubt the souls trying to get free of their prison.

He hated the idea that his girl was trapped in there.

Hated that she had seen what he'd looked like.

At that thought, pain bored into him as surely as if he'd been stabbed with a crowbar. Oh, God . . . that poor child . . .

A sudden surge of emotion fell upon him in a tidal wave: Naked and broken and filthy, Jim curled onto his side and wept in great heaving gags, his tears hot and salty on the broken skin of his face.

He had never cared about any damage to himself. Ever. But his failings . . . his failings were unsupportable. And now there were two women he had not been able to save, his beloved mother and Sissy. . . . Both times, he had walked into a room too late; both times the damage had been done before he'd arrived.

With horrid acuity, he saw his mother on their kitchen floor at the farmhouse, all but slaughtered . . . and Sissy over the tub.

Sissy just now as well, trying to ward off the demon.

It was too much to bear, the weight of his failures too great for him to withstand, much less go on fighting--

The sound of his name opened his eyes and slowed the raw sobs.

With vast effort, he turned his head and looked up.

Far, far, far above, a galaxy away from where he lay, a pinpoint of light gathered and grew stronger, starting first as the tiny flicker of a blinker on a Christmas tree . . . and then growing to a twenty-five-watt, then a sixty-watt, then a hundred-watt bulb.

The illumination drifted down to him with all the speed and efficiency of a feather falling through still air . . . of dandelion puffs blown from a child's mouth . . . of milk-weed caught on a gentle breeze. . . .

The disconnect between his epic despair and the delicate path of the light was a span too great for his mind to straddle. Closing his eyes, he stopped watching and gave himself over to the random shudders of his beaten body.

"Jim."

A male voice. Above him.

He cracked his lids to see that the light had become a dark-haired man with magnificent golden wings.

Colin.

The archangel. Nigel's number two.

"Hey, mate," the guy said as he knelt down. "I've come to get you out of here."

From somewhere, God only knew where, Jim called up enough energy to speak. "Take her instead. Leave me . . . take her instead. Sissy. The girl . . ."

"That I can't do. I shouldn't be here even now." The angel leaned forward and gathered Jim's broken form into his arms. "But you're going to need some recovery time before you can so much as sit up, much less drag ass out of here. And the war is proceeding without you."

No argument there on his energy level, but God, he'd rather have Sissy a million miles away from here.

"Leave me," he moaned.

"Not on your life. You want Sissy free? You beat Devina. That's how you unlock this nightmare for your girl."

As they began to levitate, Jim's head lolled to the side and he watched as up, up, up they went, past yards and yards--hell, miles--of the black walls. Along the way, Colin's glowing form illuminated the shifting, churning surface, and faces pushed against the opaque, liquid barrier, as if those trapped were trying to see them, get to them, join them in the escape. From every direction, hands reached out, contouring into grotesque shapes as the tensile strength of the prison proved too hard to get through.

Where was his girl? His beautiful, innocent girl who . . .

Jim's brain ran out of gas, the weave of his thoughts unraveling, consciousness giving up the ghost and going in for a deep lie-down in the hard-walled crib of his skull.

As he passed out, his last mental missive was a prayer--that Sissy would remember Dog in this hellish place and hold on until Jim could get to her.

Chapter Thirty-three

Down in the wine cellar, with Jim Heron's picture staring up out of a dossier, Isaac was pretty damn sure both Childes had lost their minds.

"He's not dead." Isaac glanced between father and daughter. "I'm not sure what you saw or what you heard--"

"He was in my room." Grier shook her head. "That's how I knew you were having the nightmare. He pointed the way so I would go to you. I thought it was a dream, but why would I have pictured his face so clearly?"

"Because you saw him. Last night at the fight. He was with me."

"No, he wasn't."

Right. The guy had stood directly in front of her. "You said he was an angel."

"Well, it appeared as if he had wings."

It was theoretically possible that Heron had paid her a visit--but with the security alarm, you'd have to assume that if he had, he'd merely been on the far side of her French door. In her disorientation from waking up, she'd no doubt only thought he was inside. And that had been just a coincidence with Isaac's nightmare. . . . As for the wings? Jim Heron had been no saint, much less an angel. Whatever she'd seen had to have been reflections in the glass. Had to be.

Grier's dad spoke up. "I'm telling you, he's dead. I keep alert tracers on the Internet on the names of the operatives I know of--and he was shot in Caldwell, New York, four days ago."

Isaac rolled his eyes. "Don't believe everything you read. I spoke with the guy in the back garden here at nightfall. Face-to-face. Trust me, he's alive, and we need him." Isaac got to his feet. "His buddies are watching this house as we speak, and personally, I think Heron's declared a vigilante war on Matthias--so I'm pretty damn sure we can get him to work with us--assuming they haven't killed him already. I believe he's MIA at the moment."

"I hope he turns up then because the more you have to go on, the better." Childe tapped the dossiers. "You should plan on reviewing all of this tonight, filling in the blanks, trying to piece together what you know--even if you don't want to turn in your fellow soldiers, it may aid your own recollections. I'll go upstairs into the hall bath and use my secured phone there to make some calls and get things set as fast as I can."

"Roger that. But I want you to stay away from the windows and not leave the house."

"I'll be careful." Childe glanced at his daughter. "I promise."

As Grier's dad disappeared up the stairs, Isaac checked the Life Alert. The transistor was still showing that the signal had been sent, but there was no answer yet. Which meant either he was too far underground in this wine cellar to receive it . . . or Matthias was taking his own sweet time getting back in touch.

He looked at Grier. "I'd better stay aboveground for a while in case they're trying to reach me."

"What are you going to do? If they want to meet with you right away?"

"Until I turn myself in, I've got a little leeway. But your father needs to work a couple of miracles fast." And please, Lord, let Jim Heron be okay--and show up soon.

She stroked the dossiers with her elegant hand. "He's good at miracles. It's actually his specialty. You should see him in negotiations." Her eyes went down to the file. "I'm going to stay here. I want to see which if any of these men I recognize. There were a number who came to the door when I was growing up and I always wondered who they were."

As she fell silent, he took a step forward. And then another. Around the table he went, until he was by her side.

When she looked up to him, he carefully brushed back a strand of hair from her face. "I'm not going to ask if you're okay, because how could you be."

"Have you ever felt . . . like you don't know your own life?"

"Yeah. And that's what got me to change."

Well, that had been the first step. He was starting to believe that she was the second. And between her father and Jim Heron . . . three was the magic number. God willing.

"You know what?" she said. "I'm really glad I met you."

Isaac recoiled. "How in the good Lord's name can you say that?"

"You were the key that unlocked the lies." She went back to staring at Jim Heron's picture. "I feel like without you it would never have come to light. Only something so shattering . . ."

As she let that drift, he stepped back. "Yeah. That's me."

She nodded absently, turning the page and getting lost in the faces of men who were just like him . . . men who had ruined her family.

Shattered it.

Were the operatives who had killed her brother in there? With notes?

Somehow he doubted her father would put her through that.