Page 32

Indy

We took my car, where we propped Sully in the passenger seat and I squeezed in the back, huddled up and trying not to cry.

Or cry. Go ahead. It made no difference, anyway.

Nothing I did could help and, even if I could muster a few tears, they wouldn’t wash away the images seared into my mind.

Whitney was dead. Gutted and reduced to ash.

Sully didn’t know it yet, but Loren did.

His face reflected in the rearview mirror, dotted with broken blisters and slowly healing.

He stared ahead at the street as it flashed by, and he didn’t speak.

I wasn’t sure he even breathed.

We unloaded at the Urban Easel, bypassing the boarded-over business entrance in favor of the residential access door on the side.

Loren carried Sully, and I followed with my head hung and shoulders drooping, feeling more and more useless by the moment.

Inside the apartment, Loren took Sully to her bedroom while I stayed in the living area.

I didn’t want to be there when she woke up.

Didn’t want to explain…

any of this.

A held breath left me as I surveyed the apartment that was so different since the hounds had arrived.

Messier, but cozier too.

Lived in. Full. Or it should have been.

Now it was devastatingly empty.

We left them behind.

We abandoned Dottie, Gunnar, and Abigail with a pack of hell-sent hounds and an angel who had burned them with heavenly light.

He might have incinerated every sordid soul in the bowling alley, and we left them to that fate.

An hour ago, I’d been ready to celebrate that Loren and I had friends for the first time in a century.

Now, it was back to the way it had always been: Brooklyn, Loren, and me.

And Sully. But I couldn’t think about her right now.

Her relationship with Whitney was new, but it had been promising.

So hopeful for them both.

Considering how she would react when she found out her hellhound had been destroyed forced me to think how I would feel if I suffered the same loss.

If the angel hadn’t appeared and stopped Loren from engaging in a battle he couldn’t win.

If he had died for me…

A sob crept up my throat.

I needed him. I needed to be snatched up, held close, and squeezed until all the bad thoughts were wrung out.

Lurching into motion, I angled toward Sully’s room, ready to invade and latch onto Loren the way he’d latched onto me when he’d been scared and sad because now I was both of those things and more.

Too much more, and I wanted to be less.

After taking two steps forward, I stopped.

I wanted to feel less, or differently, and Loren could help with that, but he was grieving, and I didn’t want to selfishly interrupt.

But was it more selfish to remember the pills I’d given Sully last week?

The ones she’d stowed in her kitchen drawer so we could dispose of them together?

Since we hadn’t done that, I could only assume they were still there.

In fact, I counted on it as I skirted around the island and opened the drawer I’d watched Sully drop the baggie into days ago.

There they were. Bright and green with apples stamped on them.

Like the fucking forbidden fruit.

How had I never made that connection before?

They were temptation.

Small, sinful things that had led to my downfall over and over again.

Palming the bag, I stuck it to my sweaty skin then closed my fist around it.

I could take one. Just enough to blunt the sharp edge of all this hurt.

To make the world beautiful again for a little while.

Or I could take them both.

Go on a ride to the peak of ecstasy and remember what it felt like to fly…

My hand trembled, and I thought about Travis.

Clean for eighteen months and why?

His everything left and stayed gone.

Fed up.

Defeated.

Resigned .

I used to think disappointed was the worst thing a person could be in me, and I had certainly disappointed Loren more times than I could count.

Most recently in my previous life when I overdosed and left him thinking I’d killed myself on purpose.

I said it was an accident, but was it really?

Completely? Was it accidental to do something while knowing the risks and disregarding them?

I hadn’t meant to die.

I enjoyed living, but I took every one of those pills with intent.

That same intent sat in my hand right now, and I wondered about my story.

The one I never told in rehab because I didn’t remember, but I knew it now.

Opening my fingers, I unzipped the baggie and dumped the green apples into my palm.

All it took was a quick toss, one direction or the other.

Down Sully’s sink drain or down my throat.

When I talked about this at my next NA meeting, I would say it was easy.

Best decision of my life.

A real pivotal moment.

But the truth was I gritted my teeth and grumbled a whole string of swear words as I flung the pills into the sink and flipped on the garbage disposal.

The sound of the disposal blades grinding was incentive enough for me not to dive in after them.

I cranked the water on full blast and turned it to hot, hot, hot.

It ran, the disposal churned, and I wanted to cry.

Then laugh. Then, fuck all, I didn’t know because it was a shitty night, and Whitney was dead, and Sully was hurt, and I was clean.

And I thought maybe—finally—I would stay that way.

The sink racket lured Loren from the bedroom.

He wandered out into the living area frowning, then squinting at the running water and the disposal putting out what must have been a roar to his sensitive ears.

I turned both off, and he seemed to relax while we looked at each other.

His face was fully healed and dry, but the whites of his eyes were squiggled with red.

He broke our visual connection and raked his hand through his hair, combing the coffee brown locks over one shoulder.

“I got rid of them.” I motioned to the sink.

“Sully had my pills. She was holding onto them for me, and I…” I trailed off, realizing how much I sounded like a high school pothead in denial, then sighed.

“I didn’t take them.”

Loren’s brows knit together.

It took longer than it should have for him to process, or maybe I needed his approval more than I realized because I found myself holding my breath until he said, “Good.”

It was rare to get much from him, and he must have been choked with a thousand things that had nothing to do with me or my addiction and seemingly small victory over it.

I was a long way from sixty days, after all, and he had every right to be skeptical.

And distracted. And too full of his own troubles to have room for mine, but I asked anyway.

“Are you proud of me?” My voice softened as I added, “I want you to be proud of me.”

His expression went slack, like the thread of tension inside him had snapped.

Typical for me to ask for more than he could give.

To want or need things I hadn’t earned.

Like approval. Or forgiveness.

After too many seconds, he finally croaked, “Indy, I…”

A knock on the door cut him short.

Hope swelled inside of me.

The hounds were back.

They’d escaped. Survived.

It was a miracle. Possibly the second one we’d received tonight.

I sprinted toward the door, ignoring Loren’s call to wait.

Flinging it open, my jubilant grin drooped when relief collided with surprise, then slid swiftly into disappointment.

Rather than Gunnar, Dottie, and Abigail, our visitor was none other than the heavenly beacon of a man who had sent the hellhounds scurrying at the bowling alley.

Evander stood on the other side of the entry, and I was tempted to slam the door in his face.

But I didn’t, and neither did Loren when he arrived beside me.

He didn’t growl or even glare.

He simply hung at my side and stared at our uninvited guest with an increasingly vacant expression.

“Lorenzo. Indigo.” The angel nodded to us each in turn.

“I presume you know why I’m here.”

The last time I’d seen this fucker, he tried to abduct me.

He’d spouted nonsense about my heavenly home and how safe I would be in the clouds with a harp and halo.

I thought I’d made it clear how opposed I was to that idea, but I couldn’t fault the guy for his tenacity.

“Not interested,” I said then did, in fact, swing the door toward closing.

But Loren’s long arm stretched over my head and caught it.

I looked up, then back, frowning hard.

Loren turned aside, full of avoidance—and shame?

—while Evander stepped through the open doorway.

Staggering back, I ducked from under Loren’s arm so I could retreat into the open area.

The air had a strange charge to it.

I couldn’t recall a time I hadn’t seen Loren snarling or snipping at the angel and, considering Evander had just Human Torched the shit out of every demonic entity at the bowling alley, Loren should have been wary.

But he wasn’t.

I backed all the way into the kitchen island, then stalled.

It felt wrong to be at odds with both of them.

Worse still to see Loren siding with the angel, reluctant and remorseful though he appeared to be.

It was almost like he endorsed this man’s invasion and whatever came from it.

Evander glanced at Loren.

“Didn’t you tell him?” he asked.

Loren’s eyes fluttered closed, freeing twin tears to streak down his face.

After all that had happened, why was he crying now ?

My stomach churned. “Tell me what?”

Rather than answer, Evander continued to Loren with an exasperated sigh, “I assumed you would take the time you were given to explain. It would have been kinder than this.” His gesture toward me made my skin prickle, and I stomped my foot.

“Explain what?” I asked.

I would have accepted an answer from either of them.

Evander watched Loren, waiting for words that didn’t come.

This was another thing my boyfriend had clearly chosen to suppress rather than say.

That meant it wasn’t easy.

Wasn’t good.

After a pause and another noisy breath, the angel shook his head.

“What I suppose I must.” His features grew severe as he rounded on me and said, “Indy, you’re dying.”

It was the kind of statement people usually prefaced with a warning.

Like, “Are you sure you want to hear this?” or “Maybe you should sit down.” I got no such courtesy and was, subsequently, left reeling.

But not in denial. As a person quite practiced at dying, this seemed different.

It was like the sense I got when Nero tore through Whitney: palpable finality.

“I tried to tell you before,” Evander carried on, “but you weren’t prepared to accept it. Your time on Earth is over. The phoenix’s flame is extinguishing. For good.”

I didn’t argue because I’d felt it, recently more than ever.

That cold, sparkless sensation, like my very soul was empty and dark.

Dead or soon to be.

I turned toward Loren, who reluctantly raised his eyes.

They were full of tears, overflowing, and I remembered how cathartic it could be to cry.

I wondered if he felt better letting out what he had been keeping in; I certainly didn’t.

“You knew about this?” I whispered.

Loren fixed his gaze on the floor, and my body flushed with heat.

“You knew I was… dying?” I stumbled over the word and the realization that followed.

“Is that why the museum? And the piano bar? And bowling ?”

Every question rang out like a judge’s gavel slamming down.

How many times had we done this?

How many lifetimes had I spent waiting for him to tell me something?

Anything . How long had I lived in ignorance and fear and feeling so incomplete because the person who knew all my secrets just…

kept them?

And now, when I thought I was finally free of that, able to decide for myself who I was and look back on where I’d been, I was still somehow caught in the dark.

“Goddamn it, Loren!” I shouted.

He flinched, and I wanted to stop.

I really did. It hurt me to hurt him.

To scare him. To make him sad.

But the anger—or was it fear now?

—spilled over, rolling like a wave that crashed into us both.

“You’ve been gaslighting me for how long?” I asked.

“ Days ? I thought we were better, but you were just playing nice!”

Damn, that hurt.

And it made me feel stupid.

I’d been blindly optimistic and so eager to accept that we could somehow be all right in the middle of this epic disaster.

That love really did conquer all.

Like we weren’t already defeated.

“Even death row inmates get to pick their last meal,” I said.

“I didn’t get to pick anything because I didn’t fucking know!” I rambled and paced while Loren and Evander looked on.

Well, Evander was looking.

Loren was studying his damn shoes or the texture of Sully’s rugs or some shit.

He was here, but not.

If he could have run, he would have.

Maybe he should have so I couldn’t keep yelling at him.

“And now you’re gonna ship me off to Heaven?” I blurted.

“Are you that eager to get rid of me? That fucking relieved ?”

All this time, I’d stood apart from him, and my bones ached from the distance.

It was a chasm that had been opening deeper and darker for weeks, and now I was too scared to cross it.

I slammed my foot onto the floor again, jarring my body with the impact.

“Say something!” I shouted.

Loren’s arms came up like he needed to hold me back.

Like I wasn’t already so far away.

“I can’t,” he whimpered.

The stupid angel was lurking.

Observing like this was a tennis match with words being volleyed back and forth.

But with Loren, there was no volley.

Just me serving aces and feeling like a bully berating him and breaking his heart.

But I couldn’t stop.

“No.” I stormed over to him, and damn if that man didn’t cringe like I was much bigger, stronger, and meaner than I was.

Like he didn’t tower head and shoulders over me and have the claws and teeth of a devilish beast at his disposal.

But, in all our years together, the hellhound soul never seemed to completely settle in his skin.

It was as stifled by Loren’s meek demeanor as he was strained by its savage urges.

I was the most vicious thing in the room right now, leaning into Loren’s personal space and scowling so hard it felt like the wrinkles in my forehead might get pressed in permanently.

“You don’t get to go quiet on me this time.” I stabbed my finger at him.

“You don’t get to shut down because it’s too hard or you’re too sad.” Sucking a breath, I turned that finger toward myself.

“ I’m the one who’s dying, Loren. If anyone gets to check out of this situation, it should be me.”

“But you won’t die,” he said, too quietly to be convincing.

“We’re saving you?—”

“No, you’re not.” I jerked my thumb toward Evander.

“I’m not going with him. I’m not going to Heaven. Everything I have is here.”

The same skittish feeling I’d had racing through Brooklyn’s streets twisted my heart.

I could have run now, but that felt wrong.

I would never run away from Loren.

I craved him like he was a drug all his own.

A fix I sought out incarnation after incarnation.

My pulse spiked when I imagined the absence.

Dumping Ecstasy down Sully’s garbage disposal was bad enough, but quitting love?

Abandoning my partner, my protector, my peace in human form?

Impossible.

“You really think I would float off to some fucked up paradise and leave you behind?” I reached for Loren, placing one hand on either side of his face so I could catch my fingers in his hair.

“Lore, baby,” I cooed.

“ You’re my paradise. My forever.”

He met my gaze, and the utter defeat in his eyes chilled me.

“Nothing’s forever, Doll.”

My lips fell apart, but I couldn’t yell anymore.

Not at him. Not at the sense of loss that had chased me for lifetimes.

Memories, powers, and people, they all went away.

“Don’t say that,” I rasped.

“This is regrettable,” Evander said, “but it may be the only way any of you will survive.”

Of course.

Nero and the hounds were looking for me .

Hunting me . If I was gone, they would leave, and Loren, Sully, and the others would be safe.

I was the problem, and I wanted to be the solution.

But not like this.

I held Loren’s face and searched his dark eyes.

“Can you come, too?” I whispered.

“If Moira could ascend, then maybe…”

His head shook the answer I already knew.

Moira used my tears.

A fucked up little miracle I could not recreate.

But angels did miracles, too…

I glanced at Evander but didn’t get a word out before he, too, shook his head.

“No…” The word I’d said with such vehemence earlier now came out as a broken cry.

I knotted my hands in Loren’s hair while fighting the sudden weakness that threatened to take me to my knees.

“Baby, no.” I looked at him, begging.

“Don’t make me go. I don’t wanna leave you…”

I’d stay with you forever if I could.

Loren’s arms fell away, and I crashed into him, burying my face in his chest and daring Evander or anyone else to pull us apart.

I was leaving. Always going, decade after decade like the goddamn disposable thing I was.

I wanted nothing more than to stop that cycle of love and loss because I knew it was destroying us.

Destroying Loren, like a piece of him went with every iteration of me.

But, if I didn’t leave, he wouldn’t survive, and I couldn’t—I wouldn’t —watch him die.

I barely felt Loren holding me, so consumed with burrowing into him, imprinting him on my body and mind, to think of anything else.

But his hands were warm on my back, and his lips were soft when they pressed against the top of my head.

He didn’t say anything and, for once, I didn’t want him to.

All that remained was goodbye, and I couldn’t say that, either.

“I love you,” I said, crying dry and half-strangled.

“I’ve loved you every time. All the time, baby. I’ll never stop. Not even in Heaven…”

Promises and professions tumbled out, one after the other, until I was breathless.

In the pause between gasps and shudders, a new hand touched my shoulder.

I clung onto Loren with my eyes squeezed shut.

Denying. Delaying. I became most aware of his grip on me when it loosened.

“They’re coming now,” Evander said from behind me.

“We have to go.”

Slowly, I pulled back from Loren and faced the angel.

His visage was a blur to my aching eyes.

“The hounds?” I sniffled.

“They’re coming here?”

Evander nodded.

Visions of the wrecked gallery returned, beautiful things rendered ugly and smeared with swaths of inky black blood.

Because of me.

“But if I leave,” I began.

“You’ll survive,” Evander said.

The assurance soothed my raw nerves, but only until I realized I’d misheard.

“ Me ?” I asked, my voice swiftly returning to full strength.

“What about Loren?”

Loren, who was standing beside me, mere inches away.

At least, he had been, but now he seemed distant and out of focus.

I cast a sweeping glance around Sully’s apartment and found it all fading.

“Wait!” I exclaimed, kicking my feet in the empty air.

Evander alone grew clear and his grip on me turned immovable as the room and its contents blanked in a blinding flash of white.