Chapter 12
My hands are trembling, and I clench them into fists at my sides to make them stop. “Impossible. I’m human. Mostly.” I shake my head, still backing away from Devon. “I can’t be—”
“Or, more accurately, you will be Death. One day,” Devon adds, as if that makes it better.
My back connects with the edge of the doorframe at an awkward angle, sending a sharp snap of pain through my spine. I straighten up, grateful for the reality check. I don’t know what Devon is talking about, but I do know a thing or two about the Old Ones.
“The Old Ones are immortal,” I say. “Or close enough. So they don’t need successors. Why are you trying this bullshit?”
“It is rare,” he admits, sitting forward on the couch. “But they can choose to fade, to pass along their powers to a successor.” Devon speaks with a certainty that I’ve never felt about anything related to the Old Ones.
I laugh a little too loudly. “And I’m just, what, supposed to believe you? About this made-up thing I’ve never heard of that would derail my whole life? Please.” I fold my arms across my chest. “Who sent you?”
He closes his eyes in seeming weariness. “No one sent me. What reason would I have to make this up?”
“Why do any of you do anything?” I throw my hands in the air. “Because it entertains. Because you’re bored and you’ve lost what little humanity you ever had to begin with.”
Devon is on his feet, moving toward me, closing the distance between us in two strides before I even realize what’s happening.
His green eyes are cold and laser focused on me.
“I recognize that you don’t know me and therefore have no idea what it has cost me to hang on to the humanity you’re so beguiled with,” he says, his tone icy and clipped.
“But I beg you not to assume what I will or will not do based on what others have done. My life would have been so much easier if that were the case.”
I’ve offended him. By accusing him of not being human enough. Interesting. If anything, I would have guessed it would go the other way. No one wants to be considered too much like prey, like food.
“All right.” I hold my hands up in silent surrender of the point, and after a moment he relaxes, his body returning to its deliberate casual stance.
I wonder, then, how much this lazy, unaffected, sexy-king-of-all-I-survey posture is an act.
“It hasn’t happened in recent history, but we have stories of Old Ones choosing to fade in the old records,” Devon says, resuming his position on the couch as if nothing happened.
We who? But I’m caught more by this second reference to choice.
“That’s how I know you’re wrong. My father would never voluntarily give up power,” I say flatly. “He enjoys it too much.”
In this moment, I’m eight again, back on Navy Pier, staring up at the Ferris wheel. The smell of cotton candy and funnel cakes fills my nose, along with the faint fishy scent in the breeze off the lake.
My father’s hand is warm and reassuring on my shoulder, and it helps relieve the pinching dread in my stomach at what my mother will say when she finds out I’m not where I’m supposed to be.
Mrs. Greeley, our neighbor, is supposed to keep an eye on me until my mother gets home from teaching.
But my father was waiting, leaning against the front door of our house as soon as the bus pulled up.
He crouches beside me, and points. “The gondola right at the top.”
“The what?” I ask, confused.
My father laughs. “Here, let me show you.”
He lifts his hand, like he’s anticipating a ball being thrown to him. But then I feel the pull of his power and then the responding warmth of the life force flowing from the people in the carts above, like the wind from a car passing too close on a hot day.
But it is the expression on his face that is forever burned in my brain. The joy, the pleasure, the … fulfillment.
It made me squirm with discomfort at the time—it seemed too intimate. Not that I had the words for that at that age. I wouldn’t see anything like that again until the first time I had sex with Jay Ellings, my senior year in high school.
Trust me, that is not a realization you want to have about a parent, even if you’re not connected or related in the traditional parent/child way.
My father would have taken lives even if he didn’t need to to survive. He would take them—does take them, presumably, still—because he revels in it.
So, no, he’s not voluntarily giving that up. And even if he did …
“He certainly wouldn’t choose me as a successor,” I add.
I told you. Those were the only words on an otherwise blank sheet of creamy stationery left on my pillow, when I finally got home from the hospital and then the police station when I was fourteen. After “the incident.”
My father despises my decision to survive on scraps. No, more than that, he despises me. Sees me as weaker for it.
“You’re Death’s daughter,” Devon says, with more gentleness than I would have expected. “His only direct spawn.”
In other words, his only choice.
Suddenly the air feels too warm to breathe. I stumble deeper into the room, tripping over discarded game controllers, toward the window on the opposite wall. I yank up the lopsided blinds, but the window latch won’t move. “Come on, damnit,” I say, panting.
From behind, Devon reaches around me suddenly, flipping the stuck latch with ease and pulling the window open. His chest bumps against the back of my head as he does. He is just as tall as I thought.
He steps away, and I lean forward to suck in cold air, curling my fingers on the window frame and pressing my forehead against the dusty screen. Little bugs, desiccated roly-polies and lightning bugs, have collected in the corners. For some reason, I can’t stop staring at them.
Death. Me, the new Death? I don’t even know what that would mean. Would I have to hang around cemeteries and hospitals and old sites where ancient people once made human sacrifices? That’s how he met my mother, after all.
Actually, that’s not true—I do know what being Death would mean. If Devon is telling the truth, then this is the end of any hope for a normal life. Staying at Beecher to finish out my degrees. Having friends.
Not killing people.
It’s all over. Everything is over.
“I never agreed to this. I never said yes,” I manage, struggling to draw air into my lungs. Shit. I can’t … I can’t …
The whisper of movement warns me of his approach just a second before Devon’s palm, warm and solid, rests reassuringly between my shoulder blades. A reminder that I’m not alone.
“Just keep breathing,” Devon says. “It’s a panic attack.”
I jerk my head to give him an annoyed glare, one that is severely tempered by my current inability to slow the explosive rate of my heart. My hands and feet are tingling. “I … know.”
I’m a psych major, I want to add, but my lips have just gone numb.
This is also not my first panic attack. The last time, it landed me in a hospital emergency room, on a tranquilizer drip and handcuffed to a bed while the police waited outside.
“Will you let me help you?” Devon asks.
I want to say no, to tell him I can manage it myself, but find myself nodding frantically instead. Anything to make this feeling go away.
He pries my hands from the window and turns me to face him. “Just look at me, keep your eyes on me,” he instructs, green eyes serious. “Breathe in for a four count, then hold it for four.”
“I know … box breathing.” And I know that it won’t be enough. Not right away anyway.
“How lovely for you. Hush.” He smooths my hair away from my face, his thumbs running over my cheekbones. His gaze holds mine, and it feels like falling into him. His even white teeth sink into his lower lip in concentration.
The heat from his hands caressing my face seeps into me, and the tension in my shoulders eases, the muscles going loose like warm honey. My heart rate slows, steadies, and my breathing, though still too rapid, smooths out.
But the heat continues to spread through my body, down my arms and through my core, until … it changes, flips a switch inside me.
My breath catches in my throat, but not like before.
Arousal swirls through me, heady and electric.
I want his hands slipping beneath my clothes, worshipping my bare skin.
Those warm palms sliding up over my ribs to cup my breasts, to catch my nipple in a pinch that rides the line between pleasure and pain …
Devon lowers his hands and steps away. Automatically, I start forward to follow him, to chase that sensation, but stop myself, barely. I am in control. Hot, bothered, but not out of my mind with either lust or panic.
So it worked. But now embarrassment rises up to obliterate everything else. He can’t make me feel anything; we established that last night. So my reaction was a very clear indication of my own willingness.
There are all kinds of ways to have power over someone.
I clear my throat, face flushed. “That’s a handy trick.”
But instead of the triumph or even eagerness I expect to see, Devon’s expression is grim, unhappy. “I find it works well as a distraction.”
It does, but the deep lines on either side of his full mouth suggest that he would rather it didn’t.
“So you came to Beecher because of this succession talk.” I refocus the conversation for his sake. And mine. Also, because all the talk about allegiances in Happy’s last night suddenly makes more sense.
“It’s slightly more complicated than that, but yes, essentially. I’m here. I want to help.” He crosses his arms over his chest, the curve of smooth muscle rising in his biceps.
I stare at him. “Why?” I ask. I suppose that might make me cynical as fuck, but “help” in the world of the Old Ones is rarely what it seems. At best, it’s self-serving; at worst, it’s an opening for betrayal.