Page 8 of Falling (Scared Sexy Collection #2)

Catalina tilted her head. “No. Because I don’t believe you’d kill me.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.” She shrugged. “My turn.” Brigan nodded, and he felt the way her heart gave a heavy, anxious thump before she said, “You already know what my fourth question is.”

“I do,” he said, “but I want to hear you ask it anyway.”

She pulled her lips between her teeth, drawing in a deep, steadying breath. “What exactly are you? I mean, what do you call your kind?” Brigan laughed. “I can’t believe I’m actually saying all of this aloud.” Catalina lifted her hands, dragging them down her face.

What am I?

He’d never been given a name, although some aspects of his form were obvious—at least to him.

Naturally, in the course of this unending existence, he’d stumbled upon others.

Only a few. He didn’t know where the term had come from, whether another one of his kind had made it up or whether it had been proclaimed by some celestial being he hoped to someday meet.

“I am a Fallen,” he said, and lifted the scotch to his lips, letting the heat of the liquid coat them. “I am one of a handful like this.”

“Fallen like an angel?” she asked very, very quietly.

“I suppose.” Brigan nodded slowly, carefully, waiting for the curse to tighten around his vocal cords, keep him from veering too close to describing himself, asking her what she saw to make her guess that word so specifically.

“I was very naughty, a very long time ago, and a very mean lady put a curse on me.”

Catalina huffed out a shocked breath. “A curse?” He nodded and she said, “Tell me about the curse?”

“I’m doomed to walk the earth, alone and immortal, until my beloved finds me and rescues me.

” He said it very dramatically because it was, in fact, very dramatic.

But the entire story only made him tired anymore.

He no longer held much hope that there was an end in sight for him, a return to the ability to love and breathe and sleep and exist inside this shell of a body that hadn’t felt like his in so long.

Her voice was soft, teasing but not mocking: “And how will your beloved rescue you?”

“Apparently, she will simply see me,” he said, staring into his glass.

“ I see you.”

He laughed sadly at this, not able to correct her that it meant something very specific.

“What did you do to make her curse you?”

“I slaughtered a corrupt king’s family.” It had been so long since he’d said this aloud; the words felt stiff and sharp, cutting his tongue as he spoke them.

Her dark eyes went wide. “Oh. That’s ... that’s deep.”

“Oh, darling, that is only the very tip.” He winked.

Because she hadn’t asked, and because he knew, ultimately, he wouldn’t be able to say the words even if he wanted to, he’d left out the most important details.

Details like how he’d paid for these crimes first by having to watch the murder of his wife, his soul, his beloved.

How he’d watched Annora tied to the stake and burned to death.

And then he’d been killed too—at least, in a way he had.

A sword had been decisively slashed through his heart, his blood had spilled in great pools, staining the palace courtyard. His heart had stopped beating.

But as he’d felt the life drain out of him, the king’s sorceress had hovered nearby, those long, crooked fingers with twisted black fingernails pointing at his bleeding corpse as she spoke the curse that kept him alive but alone to this day.

In shadows draped with feathers night,

A fallen soul awaits the light.

Eternal dusk, your heart’s refrain,

Break this spell, remove your pain.

Immortal chains, your tethered plea,

Only when found, will you be free.

Brigan had stumbled through the next several weeks, his unfamiliar body sore and unwieldy, his devastation and guilt over the loss of his wife as raw and exposed as the festering hole he swore had been put in his torso but which had immediately sealed up to reveal nothing but a perfect, unmarred chest.

He had hurled himself from the top of a cliff, thrown himself in front of a stampede. He had paid a man to shoot an arrow through his neck, swallowed a vial of poison. And nothing had ended his misery.

You shall see her again, a fortune teller had assured him after he’d dropped five stolen coins into her palm, months after Annora’s murder and Brigan’s subsequent purgatory, when he crawled, disoriented and confused, feeling like he might go out of his head trying to interpret the sorceress’s riddle.

But it will be many lifetimes before she finds you.

So, he’d waited those many lifetimes. First two, then three, and after five interminable centuries, he had finally given up.

Time passed, time that could be measured in generations, where he wandered the world growing increasingly bored and impatient, amassing wealth, bedding women, and feeling nothing but physical sensation, filling his body with every drug and concoction meant to make him forget—though none of them did—until the very last time he’d tried to be found, only a handful of decades ago.

Moving pictures had been invented, and a tiny well of hope had bubbled up inside him.

Brigan had walked into the MGM offices and compelled the security guard to take him to the executive offices. He’d compelled the president’s secretary to let him in to see the president. He’d compelled the president of MGM to cast him in his biggest project to date.

And so he had.

Brigan had acted beautifully, he thought—and Hollywood apparently agreed: He’d been awarded an Oscar.

Posthumously, of course, since only three months after the film came out to enormous commercial success, Michael Minnow had died.

Which is to say that Brigan had faked his own death and vanished back into obscurity, waiting with certainty for that one person to emerge, the one person who would see the film and see him.

For decades he’d gotten scores of passersby stopping him in the street, telling him, “You, sir, has anyone ever told you that you look just like that old actor Michael Minnow?”

But for all the millions of humans who had seen the film, no one, not a soul in nearly seventy years, had ever publicly declared, That is no mortal man! Does no one else see what I see?

And he only needed one soul to wonder it aloud, one soul to see him, and the curse would be broken: His heart would shake off the eternal winter and begin to beat, his blood would run hot in his veins.

The clock on his life would commence mercifully counting down, the way it was always meant to.

He would no longer live forever, but he would never be alone again.

“Well, that is a perfect Halloween story,” Cat said, bringing him back to the present.

“Quite.” Brigan drained his drink and set the glass down. He met her eyes. This had been, without question, the best night of his existence. He hadn’t heard his own laugh in centuries. And he had to let it all go. “My darling, now is when I leave you.”

She quickly shook her head. “But I have one question left.”

Brigan held up five fingers, ticking each down one at a time.

“How old am I, what powers do I have, what did I try to compel you to do, am I going to kill you, what manner of monster am I.” Remembering three more, he lifted his thumb, index, and middle fingers.

“What is this pesky curse, how will my true love rescue me, what did I do that was so naughty a sorceress doomed me to lonely immortality. That’s eight questions, love. ”

Catalina’s hazel eyes flared with frustration. “Some of those were follow-ups or just conversation or just, like, concern for my life .”

“Were they not still questions, my sweet lamb?”

“ You still have three,” she insisted.

Brigan stood, dropping a bill on the table. “Ah, but you were right: I asked you four when we arrived, so I’ll play fair. Come. Let’s get you home.”