Chapter Nineteen
Lenora
The demon vanishes before Marcus has twitched the last bit of his seed inside me.
I feel the shudder that courses through him and I know the creature has released him. His body slumps over mine, our hearts meeting in an unsteady rhythm between us.
Overhead, I watch my reflection circle his shoulders. My fingers glide through his hair in gentle strokes that earn me the turning of his face into the side of my neck.
It’s so sweet.
So normal.
Watching them makes me think it could be possible to have this. That we could heal together and grow stronger.
Until Julen Duval kills him, too.
I know enough about this world that it never stops. By now, they would have found Etienne Duval. His bloated corpse would be the talk at breakfast. They would assume foul play even though there is no evidence of it.
But no one gets bit that many times in the confines of his bed without a single snake as proof. They would absolutely point fingers.
At Marcus.
No one else wants them dead, they’d say.
I need to kill the others. I need to protect Marcus.
“Mon p’tit?”
I hum quietly in response.
His head lifts and I find myself lost in the silver lakes of his scrutiny. An unruly tendril slips over his brow. Into his eyes.
“Did I hurt you?”
I shake my head.
Toned forearms brace into the mattress on either side of my head. His expression is soft. Thoughtful, but so deep with regret my heart hurts.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop.”
The hands on his shoulder slip to cup his face. “I didn’t want you to stop.”
Heat flares in his eyes before he smothers it behind the kiss he presses into my lips. His palms touch my face, and I exhale for what feels like the first time in days. Even with the weight of him crushing me into the foam, I feel … safe.
But his expression shifts. Wariness creases lines around his eyes and pulls his lips into a thin line. His gaze sweeps over the room like he’s searching for the demon, and I think how fascinating it is that he isn’t scared. He’s not falling into hysterics like most would.
I suppose I hadn’t either. Ames used to tease me that I lacked the part of my brain that registered danger. I simply accepted every new twist with a blindness he claimed was going to get me in trouble one day.
Selling my soul to a demon probably wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, but, also, maybe it was.
Marcus has those sensors.
He’s been part of a much darker world where your senses kept you alive. But he’s so calm.
“Let’s clean up, get you breakfast.”
Maybe he’s embarrassed.
Maybe he’s in shock and doesn’t know what happened or how to process.
Whatever he’s thinking, I don’t question it when I let him pull me to my feet. His hands stay on me, gripping me to him like he’s too afraid to let go. Even when he stoops to scoop up my dress from the floor and drag it down over my head, he keeps a tight hold on my fingers.
“Stay with me.” He says, pulling me along to his closet. I’m made to stand practically on his feet when he dresses quickly. “Let’s go out for breakfast.”
I don’t like that idea.
Every part of me wants to find the demon and demand we get to the next person on my list, but Marcus is a man on a mission. He’s set in his destination when he drags me forcibly from the room at a pace that has me practically running to keep up.
“Marcus, I don’t have shoes,” I protest.
“I’ll carry you.”
“Or a jacket.”
His grip on me tightens. “I’ll buy you one while we’re out.”
It’s insane behavior. Out of character. Even before the boys were murdered, Marcus very seldom agreed to venture out of the house.
Not because he was some creepy shut in, but he never trusted the idea of being out in the open for too long.
In the last seven years, our ‘going out for breakfast’ could be counted on a single finger.
This.
This would be the single raised finger.
“Marcus—?”
His big hand closes around the brass knob and we’re assaulted by a hard slap of Pacific air serrated with knives. I gasp and shrink into Marcus’s side.
But he doesn’t pause. Barely hesitates. I’m scooped up into his arms and marched with long strides across the driveway.
Brittle, gnawing air cuts into every inch of exposed skin. It claws at my hair and scuttles down the front of my dress. I cling to Marcus, face hidden in the curve of his neck. The air sits lodged in my throat. A tight knot of pain as my skin is flayed from the bone.
“Pardonne-moi, mon p’tit.”
I hear the crunch of snow beneath his strides over the howl of the wind. It’s nearly muffled by the violent clack of naked branches beneath the force.
Somehow without losing his grip on me, he yanks open the door to his Escalade and sets me inside. Lovingly, but with a rush that has my backside hitting the seat without ceremony.
The interior is as cold as the frozen world outside the frosted windows. Without heat, I sit bundled and partially naked, watching Marcus rush around the hood to the driver’s side.
“Where are we going?” I pant, clutching my arms around my shivering frame and watching him fumble, stabbing the key into the ignition.
“Away.”
Without elaborating, he twists the engine over and hits the gas.
I try to glance back at the dark silhouette of Usher House gathering like a harbinger against the cloudy overcast, but Marcus has us barreling through the gates at speeds that have me clutching at the door handle.
Tires grind on snow and ice with every sharp turn. His knuckles are white fists around the wheel. It mirrors the hard knot in his jaw, the focus in his eyes. This is not a man eager to get his flapjacks.
“What’s wrong?” I demand, swallowing my yelp when he jerks around a sports car slowing at the lights.
Marcus snaps around him, makes no effort to stop and roars through the intersection.
Horns scream and tires shriek. I want to cover my eyes, but I’m too afraid to move.
To even speak. He continues with this speed, reckless and crazed.
I want to speak, but my heart is in my throat.
A trapped, terrified bird. I can’t look away from the blur of buildings and cars as we tear past them to whatever destination he has in mind.
“You’re safe.”
I blink away from our potential deaths to the man reaching for my bunched hand in my lap.
“I won’t let it have you.”
There is no spit in my mouth for a response when he jerks sideways, pivoting off the main road, through a dingy alley.
The tires crunch a metal dumpster lid and bounce over a mound of collected snow but never slow.
He barely pauses at the entrance before diving through traffic, a salmon forcing his way up stream, cutting off other vehicles and filling the air with the blare of anger.
It does foolishly dawn on me that I’m no longer cold from the winter, but damp with sweat. My muscles coil with terror as he presses the gas and jolts us full throttle around two cars, turning aggressively down a side street lined with rows of tidy homes.
I almost believe we’re about to stop. We have to at some point, I think.
He can only drive for so long before we arrive, get pulled over, or worse, hit someone.
But Marcus doesn’t stop. Doesn’t slow. He’s on a mission that propels us out of the city entirely.
Buildings become fields. Miles of white that vanish into the horizon dotted by skeletal trees.
Morning slips into afternoon that dips into evening. We don’t stop for food. We don’t even stop for a quick rest. The light on the dash keeps blinking, begging for fuel, but he ignores it until I can no longer keep silent.
“Where are we going?”
“Far.”
I steal a peek at the gas light.
“We need to stop for gas.”
Marcus glances at the lit symbol. A quick flick before turning his attention to the road once more.
“We’ll stop soon.”
I want to point out that there isn’t anything and there may not be anything for a while still, but I know he knows that.
“Why are we here?”
He’s silent for too long. We push further away from Usher House and the demon in the basement, and all my chances to finish what I started. The latter sends ripples of frustration coursing through me that bubble in my chest.
I need to go back.
I need to find Sarai Duval.
“That thing back there.”
It’s said so quietly, I nearly jump.
“What?”
Marcus draws in a slow, uneven breath before murmuring, “At the house…” His fingers tighten around mine. “What I saw last night…”
I inwardly wince. “Marcus…”
He shakes his head. “It’s not … it’s not a good thing, Lenny. Whatever that thing is, it’s evil and it wants you. I don’t know for what, but I’m not letting it touch you again.”
Guilt worms up in my throat, a nagging prod to tell him the truth. Confess that I’m the reason the demon is even here. To tell him why we need to turn back.
But Marcus continues to talk.
“I never should have let you leave me last night. I should have pushed for you to stay. It was probably waiting for the chance to get you alone. I just don’t understand where it came from. Why is it here?” He pauses as a thought occurs to him. “Do you think it’s because I brought the boys—?”
“No,” I state firmly, refusing to let him put this on my boys.
Marcus shakes his head. “It has to be something. I’ve lived in that house my entire life and I have never seen that thing. I must have done something to put you in danger—”
“It was me,” I blurt, no longer able to stand the deceit. “I summoned him.”
The back end of the Escalade fishtails on a patch of ice with the hard slam of Marcus’s foot on the brakes.
I pitch forward, caught only by the belt across my chest. The entire vehicle skids to a stop in the middle of the empty highway with only the setting sun and a tiny house a pinprick in the distance as witness when the man in the seat next to me spins to face me.
“What have you done?”
I wait for guilt or even shame, but I meet his murderous gaze with a defiant tilt of my chin.
“What I had to.”
Eyes the gun gray of an approaching storm lift at last and spear through me with a fury that would have made a lesser man cower, but I will not be swayed.
“Why?” The cabin echoes with the smack of his palm into the horn. It blares violently in the silence. “Why would you do something so stupid? à quoi tu pensais?”
My own temper slams through me with the force of a raging bull.
“I was thinking they needed to die!”
“And I told you I would deal with it.” He spears five fingers back through his disheveled hair. “I told you I would do it. But you went behind my back and … what even is that thing?”
My eyes narrow as I stand metaphorically toe-to-toe with the only person left in my world. “That thing did what you couldn’t.”
His head jerks back as if I’d smacked him. “What are you talking about?”
I’ve said far more than I’d meant to. Maybe I feel like I need to justify my actions. Maybe I need to explain myself. Whatever the reason, I find myself telling him the truth.
“Etienne Duval is dead.” I stare up into his stunned expression, fighting back the pride and elation bubbling up my throat with the bitter tang of poison. “He’s dead.”
The horror on his face is there for only seconds. A flicker of shock that quickly returns to fury. His hands capture my upper arms, tight enough to cut bruises, but I don’t flinch.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Maybe!” I snarl back. “One of us needs to be. One of us needs to show them who the Usher Family is. What will happen if they come for one of us.”
“Yes, but that thing isn’t doing this out of the goodness of his heart, Linny. He’s a fucking monster. He’s going to hurt you.”
“He won’t,” I say with an absolute confidence I shouldn’t have. “That’s not how it works.”
I have no idea how it works.
I asked no questions. I simply accepted the conditions I was given, agreed to anything as long as I got what I wanted. But those are concerns for later.
“Petit, tu dois arrêter. S’il te plait.”
His pleading cuts through me, cuts into that fresh wound I’m desperately trying to weld shut. That tiny shred of humanity I don’t know why I’m still clinging to.
“I can’t stop,” I tell him, grind it out through my teeth. Through a wall of tears I hate myself for feeling well up inside me. “I won’t stop. I will die before I let them breathe another day when my … when my boys are…”
I’m pulled out of my seat and across the console into his arms. Into the hard wall of his chest. I’m suffocated and mashed together like he thinks that will fuse my broken pieces back into place.
“Stop. Please. Please, I am begging you,” he growls into my ear in jagged French. “I will do this.” His palms capture my wet cheeks, and he stares into my eyes, his dark with misery. “I will fix this. I swear to you, mon p’tit. Please. No more.”
I break out of his hold. Nails gouge holes into the palms of my hands.
“No.” I sniffle as I bottle back the old Lenora pleading to be let out.
“I love you and I would die for you, but I will not stop. Last night … I watched Etienne Duval die the worst death he could possibly imagine. And I looked in his eyes as he realized why.” I scrub viciously at my cheeks.
“They will all feel that fear. Not die quietly by a gun in some alley. They will scream and suffer.”
Marcus says nothing.
Maybe he doesn’t know what to say.
Maybe he’s too horrified to speak.
“Tonight, I will visit his wife and tomorrow, his brother. I will kill each and every one of them until they become a warning to the world that—”
The doorbell sounds.