wouldn't have…lived this life of mine at all?”
The silence was the answer, wasn't it. “Oh…fuck me.” And then it dawned on him. Devina had said that she had given him everything…did that also mean she'd taken things away as well? “Oh, my God…even the deaths? You're saying…I'm the cause of the deaths, too?”
“Which deaths?”
“My parents'. They died a week or so later.”
Eddie looked over at Adrian. “That depends.”
“On whether I ever wished them dead?”
“Did you?”
Vin stared at Marie-Terese and hoped that as he answered, she saw the regret in his eyes as he spoke. Shit, his parents had been horrible to each other and worse to him, but that didn't mean he wanted to be the cause of their demise.
“There were two things I wanted when I was younger,” he said harshly. “I wanted to be rich and I wanted to be out from under their reign of terror.”
“How did they die?” Eddie asked quietly, like he knew this was tough stuff.
“After I., did what I did up there in my room, I just went about normal life, you know? School—well, kind of school, because I skipped out a lot. I never thought it worked, and then I didn't really think about it all. It wasn't until it dawned on me that I hadn't collapsed in a full week that I started to wonder if I might have fixed what was wrong with me.” Vin went over to look out at the view, but instead ended up staring down at a stain on the carpet. It had been made by the broken bourbon bottle, and the dark round mark was the kind of thing no rug cleaner was going to get out. “I remember coming home from working my father's shift, which I used to do when he was too fucking drunk to stand. It was about midnight. I put my hand on the doorknob and I glanced up at the full moon and I was psyched as I counted all the days that had passed. I was like, Huh, you don't suppose I'm okay now? And then I walked into the house and found the two of them covered with blood at the bottom of the stairs. They were both gone—and it had probably happened because one of them had pushed the other and gotten pulled along.”
“You are not the problem here,” Eddie interjected.
Vin braced his palms on the window and dropped his head. “Fuck me.”
For no good reason, and probably because it was the only thing that could make him feel worse than he did at the moment, he thought of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. A specific one. The only one that had been made for him by his father.
The two of them had come home from a job late and there had been no dinner on the table. Which made sense, because the only person who could have made it was passed out on the couch with a cigarette having burned to ash in her hand.
His father had headed for the beer in the fridge, but had broken with tradition by taking out the bread and the jam and the peanut butter on the way there. He'd lit a cigarette, laid out four slices, hit the strawberry and then the Jif. After grabbing a Miller, he'd tossed one of the sandwiches at Vin and walked out of the kitchen.
There had been black fingerprints on the white bread because his father hadn't washed his hands.
Vin had thrown the sandwich in the trash, used the sink and the soap, and made himself a clean one.
For some reason, he regretted now that he hadn't eaten the damn thing.
“What did you do?” Eddie asked. “What was the ritual?”
“The psychic told me…” Vin ricocheted back in time.
After having collapsed in front of the school at a fucking pep rally, he'd had it—and had gone to the newspaper looking for psychics because he figured if they saw into the future like he did, then maybe they'd know how the hell to
Saturday morning he'd gotten on his bike and ridden all the way down to the riverfront, to a bunch of ratty little storefronts with cheap neon signs that said things like “Tarot Here!”, “Astrology Readings!”, and “100 % Accurate! $15!” He'd walked into the first door that had a palm with a circle on it, but there had been a line. So he'd gone to the next one and found it locked. The third one was the charm.
Inside, the dark place had smelled like something he couldn't recognize. Dark. Spicy. Later he learned it was no-holds-barred, grown-up sex.
The woman had come out from a beaded curtain and she'd been dressed in black, with black hair and black eyeliner—but instead of a caftan and a wig and wrinkled lids, she'd been in a catsuit and looked like something out of
He'd wanted her. And she'd known it.
As the echo of meeting her rippled through him, he shook himself back to the present. “I told her what I wanted and she seemed to understand immediately. She gave me a black candle and told me to go home and melt it on the stove. When it was liquid, I was supposed to pulled out the wick and put it aside, then—” He glanced at Marie-Terese and wished like hell he had another story to tell. “Then I was supposed to cut some of my hair and put it in, along with some blood and…ah…something else…”
Vin was so not the kind of guy who minced words or stuttered. But admitting to a peanut gallery and a woman he wanted in his life that whacking off had been part of the deal was not the kind of admission he was in a big hurry to make.
“Yeah, okay,” Eddie said, saving his ass. “Then what.”
“So I was supposed to cool the wax, re-form it with the wick, and go upstairs. Get naked. Draw a circle with salt. Ah…” He frowned. Weird, the first part was so clear; precisely what he'd done next was not. “It's fuzzy from then on…I think I cut myself again and dripped the blood into the center of the circle. I lay down, lit the candle. Said some words—I can't remember what they were exactly. Something like…I don't know, calling things to lift burdens or some shit.”
“Which was actually bullshit,” Eddie said with a hard tone. “But then what happened.”
“I don't…I can't remember precisely. I think I just fell asleep or something, because I woke up like an hour later.”
Eddie shook his head grimly. “Yeah, that's a possession ritual. The wax she gave you had parts of her in it, you added your half and that was how the door was opened.”
“You're saying…that was Devina?”
“She comes in a lot of forms. Male, female. She can be an adult, a child.”
Adrian piped in. “We don't think she jumps to animals or inanimate objects. But the bitch has tricks. Big-time. Is there any chance we can get access to that house? Or are we going to have to break in?”
“Actually, I own it still.”
The two guys took a deep breath. “Good,” Eddie said. “We're going to need to go there to try to get her out of you. We've got a better chance of success if we return to where the ritual was performed.”
“We're also going to need to get your ring back,” Adrian added.
“The diamond?” Vin asked. “Why?”
“That's part of the binding. Jim said he thought it was set in platinum?”
“Of course it was.”
“Well, there you go. Noble metal, and a gift from you to her.”
“But I didn't give it to her. She found it.”
“You bought it for her, though. Your thoughts and feelings when you purchased it are embedded in the metal. The intent is transformative.”
Vin eased off his hands and stood up properly. Both of his palms left prints on the slick, cool glass and he watched them fade. “You said she steals souls. Does that mean she's going to want to kill me?”
Eddie's voice was low. “But we can try to stop that.”
Vin turned around and looked at Marie-Terese. She was subdued as she leaned against the archway into the room, and he went to her, taking her into his arms. As they embraced, he was amazed and grateful once again that she accepted him…even after another layer of the onion had just been peeled back.
“What can we do to keep Marie-Terese safe?” he asked. “Is there anything she can do to protect herself? Because Devina just left here after having seen us together.”
As the guys considered his answer, her eyes flashed up and then slid over to Eddie. “I'm leaving town tonight—for reasons other than all this. Will that help? And are there any…ah, spells, or…?”
The hesitation spoke volumes about both her disbelief and her resignation that all this freaky shit had just put
