she’d had yards and yards of surgical gauze, there was no stemming this.
No saving him.
His blue stare locked on hers as he began to list to the side, his massive torso giving in to gravity, his immortal life slipping away right before her very eyes.
Tears speared into her vision as a frantic
not now! not ever!
clogged up her brain: As much as she had been livid at him this morning, she was now terrified of the thought that she had lost him forever.
A chance not taken.
A door unopened.
A destiny unrealized.
And that loss felt worse than everything that had happened to her. Even Hell itself.
“Don’t leave me, just stay with me, don’t leave me…”
His mouth kept moving, and she realized he wasn’t trying to breathe—he was trying to say something to her.
“What?” she croaked. “What are you…”
Those lips, stained with silver, moved more and more slowly, the pupils in those eyes expanding as if they were trying to compensate for a lack of light.
Sissy knew the instant he died. It wasn’t when his mouth stopped or when the eyes rolled back. It was when the scent of a bouquet of flowers filled the air, choking the inside of her nose and thickening the back of her throat.
It was just as they had told her in Sunday school when she’d been young: When a saint died, you smelled flowers.
Jim … the savior … was gone.
Chapter
Seven
Collections were a good thing.
Of course, hers was probably a little out of control, Devina thought as she stepped free of her office building’s elevator.
And how fucking great was that.
Stretching out before her, in a basement that was nearly the size of a football field, rows and rows of antique bureaus filled with a millennium of taking souls were hidden and safe. It was the kind of sight that made her take a deep breath for two reasons: one, they were still where she’d left them; and two, they were hers, all hers.
Her high heels made a clipping noise as she strode over the bare concrete floor. From time to time she paused, put her little bag with the box of new Loubous in it down, and pulled out a drawer. Whether it was a cluster of pocket watches with their gold chains, or a tangle of nineteenth-century spectacles, or a jangle of keys, every single object was cataloged in her mind—she could remember who had owned it, how she’d gotten it from them, and the exact circumstance when she had taken over their soul and put them into her wall. But this wasn’t just a happy trip down memory lane. Anytime she touched a metal button or an earring or a keepsake coin, she could feel the person’s very essence.
These inanimates were her connection with her children down below, her way of communing with her captives, her tangible tie to her immortal life’s work. Millions of objects—and yet, it so wasn’t enough. Her hunger was a worm that never stopped turning, and didn’t that make the war so much more real to her.
Shit, to think of the fun she and Jim could have.
He could also help her protect all this. Anytime she went away, there was always an undercurrent of fear that something would happen, that she’d get in that elevator, hit the
down
button, and find those doors opening a moment later to a whole lot of nothing. And this was even though she had the best security system in the world: At the moment, it was thanks to a twenty-two-year-old computer programmer from Neuvo-Tec, a company she had “hired” to come here to her “human resources firm” to configure “banks of servers” to properly support her “intranet.”
Or some shit.
In reality, she’d created all that fiction just to get the poor virginal sonofabitch and his pathetic pocket protector on her premises. Whereupon she’d metaphorically knocked his socks off with a gold Prada pantsuit and a mile-high pair of Manolos—and then literally knocked his block off by coming at him from behind and overpowering him as he’d checked out the illusion of a computer system. After that, there
No saving him.
His blue stare locked on hers as he began to list to the side, his massive torso giving in to gravity, his immortal life slipping away right before her very eyes.
Tears speared into her vision as a frantic
not now! not ever!
clogged up her brain: As much as she had been livid at him this morning, she was now terrified of the thought that she had lost him forever.
A chance not taken.
A door unopened.
A destiny unrealized.
And that loss felt worse than everything that had happened to her. Even Hell itself.
“Don’t leave me, just stay with me, don’t leave me…”
His mouth kept moving, and she realized he wasn’t trying to breathe—he was trying to say something to her.
“What?” she croaked. “What are you…”
Those lips, stained with silver, moved more and more slowly, the pupils in those eyes expanding as if they were trying to compensate for a lack of light.
Sissy knew the instant he died. It wasn’t when his mouth stopped or when the eyes rolled back. It was when the scent of a bouquet of flowers filled the air, choking the inside of her nose and thickening the back of her throat.
It was just as they had told her in Sunday school when she’d been young: When a saint died, you smelled flowers.
Jim … the savior … was gone.
Chapter
Seven
Collections were a good thing.
Of course, hers was probably a little out of control, Devina thought as she stepped free of her office building’s elevator.
And how fucking great was that.
Stretching out before her, in a basement that was nearly the size of a football field, rows and rows of antique bureaus filled with a millennium of taking souls were hidden and safe. It was the kind of sight that made her take a deep breath for two reasons: one, they were still where she’d left them; and two, they were hers, all hers.
Her high heels made a clipping noise as she strode over the bare concrete floor. From time to time she paused, put her little bag with the box of new Loubous in it down, and pulled out a drawer. Whether it was a cluster of pocket watches with their gold chains, or a tangle of nineteenth-century spectacles, or a jangle of keys, every single object was cataloged in her mind—she could remember who had owned it, how she’d gotten it from them, and the exact circumstance when she had taken over their soul and put them into her wall. But this wasn’t just a happy trip down memory lane. Anytime she touched a metal button or an earring or a keepsake coin, she could feel the person’s very essence.
These inanimates were her connection with her children down below, her way of communing with her captives, her tangible tie to her immortal life’s work. Millions of objects—and yet, it so wasn’t enough. Her hunger was a worm that never stopped turning, and didn’t that make the war so much more real to her.
Shit, to think of the fun she and Jim could have.
He could also help her protect all this. Anytime she went away, there was always an undercurrent of fear that something would happen, that she’d get in that elevator, hit the
down
button, and find those doors opening a moment later to a whole lot of nothing. And this was even though she had the best security system in the world: At the moment, it was thanks to a twenty-two-year-old computer programmer from Neuvo-Tec, a company she had “hired” to come here to her “human resources firm” to configure “banks of servers” to properly support her “intranet.”
Or some shit.
In reality, she’d created all that fiction just to get the poor virginal sonofabitch and his pathetic pocket protector on her premises. Whereupon she’d metaphorically knocked his socks off with a gold Prada pantsuit and a mile-high pair of Manolos—and then literally knocked his block off by coming at him from behind and overpowering him as he’d checked out the illusion of a computer system. After that, there
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