CHAPTER 21
Five minutes after Seth left, I realized I'd made a mistake. Not about refusing him—that was the right thing to do. But I shouldn't have let him walk out like that. It was no way to end a fight.
I was still angry after all these years that Andrew had died helping those people. I was still pained by his loss. To this day, I believed my stand in the garden had been correct, but nonetheless, I'd always regretted the separation that followed. Anger and pride had come between us, keeping us apart until it was almost too late. Even disagreeing with each other, we shouldn't have stayed away. We should have talked and tried to find some compromise.
I refused to let this fight foster more bad communication and confusion between Seth and me. I wouldn't let it take away from the time we could have together. I had to fix things. Resolved, I grabbed my coat and purse and headed out the door after him.
I half-walked, half-jogged down to the bookstore, where he'd left his car, but it was gone. I'd missed him. I stared at the empty parking lot for a few moments and then went inside. I'd finally bought Carter's stupid Secret Santa present and had left it in my office earlier. But when I went back inside and stuffed the gift in my purse, I found I didn't have the will to head back out. Instead, I sank into my chair and buried my face in my hands. How had things gotten so muddled with Seth and me? Had the shooting really given him such a new perspective on life? Would this have happened anyway?
Yasmine's signature suddenly filled the room, and I looked up just in time to see her and Vincent materialize in front of me. Immediately, Seth left my mind.
'Hey, Georgina,' Vincent said. 'I got your mess—'
'I know about Nyx,' I blurted out.
Astonished silence hung in the air. I couldn't say for sure with nephilim, but I knew angels were rarely caught by surprise. Yasmine clearly had been.
And, being an angel, she didn't try to deny anything about Nyx. She simply asked, 'How?'
'Because she's using me to do her dirty work.' Their looks of amazement grew. 'Only…I'm not exactly sure how she's doing it.'
The two of them glanced at each other, then back at me. 'Start from the beginning,' said Yasmine. 'That's usually the way to go.'
And I did, first telling them about the dreams and the energy loss. After that, it was on to my weird knowledge of tragic events and the residual feelings of Nyx's activities. Finally, I explained how Erik and Dante had pieced it all together, linking what was happening to me with all of those unfortunate news stories.
Yasmine sat down in a folding chair, tipping her head back as she thought. It was kind of like what Vincent had done in the hospital while ruminating. I wondered if it was one of those unconscious gestures couples sometimes picked up from each other. 'Hmm…brilliant. That's how she's doing it without us finding her.'
'I never would have even thought of that,' agreed Vincent, pacing. 'Which, of course, is the point.'
'You know what she's doing to me, then?' I asked eagerly. The not-knowing was killing me.
'Yep,' said Yasmine. 'But let's get the others first.'
'The other—'
The question faded from my lips as three figures materialized in the room: Carter, Joel, and Whitney. Angelic auras crackled around me. I couldn't help a little envy. It might take me days to hunt down higher immortals, but Yasmine could do it with a thought.
Carter smiled when he saw me. Joel looked outraged. Whitney looked confused.
'What's going on?' Joel demanded. He seemed as angry as the last time I'd seen him. It was a good thing he was immortal, or he probably would have died from high blood pressure ages ago. 'Why have you brought us to this…this…place.' You would have thought he stood in an opium brothel, as opposed to a tiny office with badly painted walls.
Yasmine leaned forward in the chair, hands clasped under her chin and elbows on her knees. Her dark eyes sparkled with excitement. 'We've got her. We found her—or rather, Georgina found her.'
Joel and Whitney appeared flabbergasted. Carter didn't. From the look on his face, I felt like he'd been expecting it.
'I can't believe it took you this long to figure it out,' he joked.
Whitney was not amused. 'Explain this.'
Yasmine did, and when she was finished, the others were as impressed as she and Vincent had been earlier. Even Joel looked a little less pissed off.
'Ingenuous,' he murmured. 'Every time she escapes, she always thinks up a new way to elude us.'
I looked from face to face. My emotions were raw after the blowout with Seth, and I was really low on patience at the moment. 'Will someone finally tell me how I fit into this?'
Carter walked over to me. He wore a beat-up blue flannel shirt and a Mariners baseball cap that looked like it had been put through a wood chipper. He was still smiling.
'You must know by now that Vincent's a psychic. He's attuned to our world and in some ways has a higher sensitivity to supernatural activity than some of us do. It happens with humans sometimes.' It was true. Angels weren't omnipotent and didn't possess all gifts. I nodded along, not letting on that I knew Vincent was actually a psychic nephilim. 'Normally, he'd be able to find her trail pretty quickly. When she runs amuck feeding off mortal chaos, there's a kind of, I don't know…magical residue left where she's been. The energy she steals only sustains her; it isn't actually enough to obscure her. Someone like Vincent can…'
Vincent helped him out. '…sniff her out. I'm a paranormal hound.' Yasmine snickered.
'He hasn't sensed anything so far,' Carter continued, 'which is why we were having to do more mundane searches, like looking for telltale patterns in the news.'
'So…she was hiding her trail.' I shrugged. 'How do I fit in?'
'She was using you to hide it. In a couple different ways. Kind of a fail-safe, really. In taking energy from you and human victims, she was able to double her stash. It made it easier to hide from us. When her power dipped, I think she was actually…hiding in you.'
'Ew.' I suddenly felt violated. 'How is that possible? Is she…is she there now?' I glanced down at my lower body, as though I might actually see something.
He peered at me. 'No, I don't think so. She's probably got enough energy to run loose for a while. As for how she does it…well, life and energy move in and out of you, and at some level, she's both of those things. You're a conduit for those forces.'
'I wish people would stop calling me that. It makes me feel like a machine.'
'Hardly. The merging she does with you is how you occasionally get a sense for what she's been doing. Some of the details of her mischief leak into you, though she goes to great pains to hide it—and herself.'
'How?'
'The dreams,' said Vincent. 'She's distracting you with them. Happy, consuming dreams that you're starting to obsess on. Your subconscious is so enmeshed in them at night that you don't notice her leaching the energy while you sleep.'
I leaned back in my chair, dumbfounded. I'd dealt with a lot of weird shit in my life—an exceptional amount of it occurring in the last few months, actually—but this was shooting to the top of the list. My skin crawled, and I had the surreal sense that my body was no longer my own.
I was also kind of bothered by the fact that my dreams had been red herrings, meant to throw me off the path of what was going on. They were so sweet…so powerful. I treasured them, yet it seemed they were nothing but lies. Illusions created by a monster to hide her parasitic control of me. That knowledge cheapened the beauty of what I'd seen. I loved the little girl. I wanted to believe in her. I wanted her to be real.
'Well,' said Joel brusquely, narrowed eyes fixed on me. 'We've got to use the succubus to lure Nyx out.' He gestured to me. 'Go. Go out and seduce some poor soul, so Nyx'll come back.'
I flinched. Yasmine glared at him. 'Can't you see she's upset? Show some compassion.'
'Denizens of evil deserve none,' he muttered.
Across the room, Whitney stood by the door. She'd spoken little, so her voice startled me. 'All creatures deserve compassion.' I looked up and met her eyes. They were dark and bottomless, filled with power and emotion.
