I still wasn’t sure that coating-her-kids-with-her-own-blood detail could be labeled “happy.”
Aunt Zoe beat me to answering Natalie, explaining what had happened when the lidérc in our family’s history had attached to each Executioner. While the two of them had their heads together, I turned to Cooper, who was drying the silverware now. “Natalie told me that right after I went under, the real ghost of Jane showed up in her usual gruesome glory.”
He nodded, frowning at his reflection in the kitchen window. “I fucked up tonight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I should have known from the start that the first apparition I saw wasn’t the real Jane. The glitching was a dead giveaway.”
“Dead giveaway?” I grinned. “Nice pun, Detective.” When he didn’t crack even a tiny smile in return, I scowled at him. “How could you have known the glitching was a clue ahead of time, Cooper? This was a new experience for all of us.”
He opened the silverware drawer, his movements abrupt as he tossed the utensils into their slots. “This ghost-seeing business is so fucking baffling. I don’t know how Nyce handles it without wanting to shoot something.”
Yeah, me either. Personally, I was feeling the need to let loose my internal juggernaut and beat the living hell out of something—preferably that Hungarian devil, but Rex would do in a pinch.
I focused on Doc, who’d returned with two beers from the fridge. He opened them both, and set one on the counter next to Cooper. “Violet’s right,” Doc told him.
I grinned. “I like the sound of those two words coming from your lips, Candy Cane.”
Cooper glanced at Doc. “Do I want to know why she calls you that?”
“Nope.” Doc leaned against the counter next to me, and met my smile with a lined brow. “I agree with your aunt. You need to talk to Dominick.”
Sighing, I shook my head. “He’s not going to let me back out of our deal and you know it. Not unless I find someone of equal worth to Aunt Zoe I can offer in her place.” Based on my past conversations with Dominick, there was nobody else who could fill my aunt’s shoes at the moment.
“Give the bastard your sister,” Natalie threw out, her forehead furrowed. Aunt Zoe’s tales of old appeared to have agitated her some. Heck, they’d sure made me squirm.
“He doesn’t want my sister any more than I do,” I told her.
Besides, Susan was still down on some Caribbean island trying to untangle me from a fake marriage to a dead guy. I sort of needed Satan’s concubine to live long enough to fix her fuckup so that I was free to marry somebody else eventually. I looked at Doc. If the option ever surfaced, of course.
When he returned my stare, I glanced down at my hands. Then again, I could be dead before that happened and none of this marriage business would matter anymore.
Why me? Why the hell did I have to be the one to do this killing crap?
“I didn’t say anything about backing out of your deal,” Doc said, taking a long draw from his beer.
“Then why would I need to talk to Dominick?”
“To tell him you need more time. This devil of his is tricky. We need to plan how to catch it without losing another Executioner in the process.” His mouth tightened as he searched my face. “You came too close to the cliff’s edge tonight, Killer.”
“But I made it back.”
“With help,” Aunt Zoe clarified.
“Exactly. We’re a team, remember?” I looked from my aunt, to Natalie, to Cooper, and then Doc, holding the longest on him because that “team” idea was something he’d been trying to drill into me for months. “Together, we will persevere.”
Aunt Zoe scoffed. “Perseverance in this case is just the courage to ignore the obvious wisdom of turning back.”
“Past a certain point, it’s really just self-delusion,” Cooper added.
Natalie scowled at both of them. “Come on, you two. Perseverance is the ability to climb out of bed every day knowing a surefire ass-kicking awaits you.” She pointed at me. “Vi does that, which takes cojones made of titanium, right, Doc?”
He chuckled. It was the first time he’d cracked a smile since I’d come back from the Hellhole. “Don’t get me started talking about Killer’s cojones. I could pen many sonnets about them, especially after hearing about the devils she faced at the other end of that tunnel.”
From what Natalie told me earlier while we waited in my SUV for the guys to close up Calamity Jane Realty and join us in the parking lot—well, not Cornelius, who was still worn out from his post-Prudence high and had wanted to go back to bed instead of joining us at my aunt’s—shit had gone haywire in Jerry’s office as soon as I’d gone into the dark, starting with the closet door slamming shut.
Doc had come out of his medium trance almost immediately after the door closed and rushed over to me. He’d told the rest of them that I’d gone completely off radar, cursing up a storm about the fact, and then he’d tried to get me to come back.
Officially, I was still sitting in the chair in the center of the floor lost somehow in my own head, but Natalie said that from their side of my “thick skull,” it was like I was in a coma. No amount of calling my name or prodding me to return could lure me back.
Cornelius had rushed upstairs to his apartment at that point to see if he had some sort of paranormal tool in his voodoo toolbox that might help Doc find me in the dark and bring me back. As a
