Authors: Emma Weylin
That was so Bryna. It had been adorable then, and now…It made his chest hurt. “Maybe you should pay attention to driving.”
She glared at him and snapped her mouth shut for the remainder of the trip to her home. He’d wondered about that from time to time. Felix hadn’t allowed him to find anything out about her, even when he’d been allowed to find out his mother had also been a time walker. He said it could sabotage the mission, and before, he’d handed Vincent a line of crap about needing to come to terms with his own death. He was beginning to wonder if the terms he’d come to were the right ones.
Bryna was one fucked-up chick. He faced demons and monsters and vampires and all kinds of crazy scary shit, but none of them quite hit the fear factor in the way she was doing right now. Marks were usually easy to protect. They wanted to live and actively helped in their own survival. He wasn’t sure Bryna was going to help him. His stomach lurched, and he had to fight to keep from getting sick. Goddamn it! She’d killed him, and she didn’t even bother denying it. Even the guilty could feel guilt, so why the hell did he feel like a huge bastard for rubbing it in? He clenched his hands into fists at his side.
“Dude!” she snapped at him. “You’re shaking my car.”
He forced his muscles to relax. The power inside a time walker could cause an external physical reaction at times of high emotion. Bryna wanting to die played all kinds of hell on his system. He’d have to watch it, or he’d shake the beat-up old sedan to pieces. “Sorry to inconvenience you with having to live.”
She whipped into the parking lot of a grungy-looking building and parked in the space furthest from the door. She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel for a full minute before she turned and glared at him. “It comes and goes. Today is Vincent’s birthday, and that makes me particularly neurotic. I help people. Did you know that? Do you care?” She got out of the car. “No. I don’t think that you do, and I don’t care that you don’t. Save the world from the apocalypse, but can you please just stop being a jerk? I didn’t do anything to you.”
His brow winged up, and his laugh had a bitter twist. He got out of the car and looked at her over the roof. “If you say so, sunshine.”
For a moment he thought she was going to come over the roof after him. “Don’t call me that.” Her voice went into a scary monotone. “Don’t you ever call me that.”
“Where are we?” He changed the subject because he really didn’t want her finding out who he was. This could get real bad real fast if she did. Damn Felix.
“My apartment building. Isn’t it pretty?” Her grin was so plastic she could have been recycled.
He looked at the run-down building. Twenty years of dirt covered the cracking stone walls, and mortar was missing. The building sign hung on one nail to the side and swayed in the faint breeze. “You live here?” Hell, he’d had a better place when he was on his own at sixteen.
“I don’t hold jobs very well, and I quit my last one last night.” Good thing he was already dead or the venom in her words would have killed him.
“Why?” And then he winced because at this point he really should have known better.
“Um, how about so that when I went missing no one would care?”
“Missing? What the hell are you—”
“Hello? A ghost kidnapping me. Or did you suddenly come back to life and decide you weren’t going to cart me off to save the world?”
He was looking like the ass again, and he didn’t like it at all. He snarled at her. “Let’s get you inside. Vampires aren’t the only thing you need to worry about.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she bit out as she headed for the door with her backpack. “Demons are some pretty freaky things, aren’t they?”
His blood vessels iced. “You’ve fought demons before?”
She looked over her shoulder and smirked at him. “Yeah. Funny that, huh? Come on. I’m hungry.” She walked right into the building without having to unlock any doors.
“Holy hell, woman, this place is not safe.” He glared at her as they walked down the hall to get to her first-floor apartment.
“It isn’t?” Sarcasm twisted her infinitely kissable mouth. “Jeez, Wraith, I would have never guessed if you hadn’t pointed it out.”
“Don’t be a bitch about it.”
She flipped him off and stopped at her apartment. She peeked behind her at the door across the hall. Then she was frantically trying to get her door open. “Stupid stuck lock,” she growled at the door. “Open.” She turned around and grinned when Peggy’s door swung open and Peggy stepped out, with an umbrella in hand and the tiny menace she called a dog yapping at her feet. Bryna moved in front of him and caught the umbrella before it could hit him in the chest. “Hi, Peggy. You were right. My boyfriend is back, and I’m in trouble. As it turns out, he’s not happy with the guys I’ve been seeing while he’s been away. We were out talking last night for hours.”
Peggy’s face scrunched up with suspicion. She jerked her umbrella out of Bryna’s hold and tried to poke Vincent with it, but he moved. “You better look worse than what you really are,” she warned in her frail voice. “Without Bryna here there are a lot of us who’d—”
“That’s enough,” Bryna said quickly and started shoving Vincent toward the door of her apartment. “Um, Wraith and I have a lot to catch up on. Thanks for your concern. If Darby gives you any problems, please don’t hesitate to call. Thanks.” She shoved him hard and glared up at him. “Move, damn you!”
His brow quirked up in amusement. What the hell was she trying to hide now? He moved into her apartment and closed the door behind her. “What do you do for the elderly people of this building?”
She dropped her bag by the door and headed into the kitchen. “I make sure they have rent control.”
He moved through the sparse and stark space. It ran a chill up his spine. Again he was faced with the unnerving difference of the woman who killed him and the woman standing in front of a yellow refrigerator looking at her options. “Do you eat?”
“No. I’m dead. How do you help control the rent?”
She rested her arm on the top of the open refrigerator door and arched her brow up at him. “Does it matter?”
“What happens to these people if something happens to you?” he demanded.
She snorted at him. “I can’t live forever, and I won’t always be twenty-five.”
“What does that mean?” She was purposely trying to twist his brain.
Her laugh was a low, mirthless sound. “You nailed it right on the head last night. Since you don’t eat. I don’t have to worry about feeding you, but I am famished. And I need coffee.”
Vincent settled in against the wall and watched her. Many times in the past he’d done the same thing, only now, the vision of her doing domestic things hurt. The silence ate him up. “So you’ve killed demons before?”
“Yep,” she said as she washed out the coffeemaker and started a fresh pot.
“Care to share how a human does that?” He was getting annoyed. There weren’t many beings, alive or dead, with that ability. Felix said it had something to do with the circumstances of his death, but Vincent had never been good with classes. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but he was able to kill a demon, even if Felix didn’t allow him the pleasure very often. The only downside was they also had the ability to send him to Oblivion. A place Vincent figured was supposed to be worse than hell. Otherwise there was no reason for Felix to deny him the pleasure of sending demons to Oblivion.
Bryna fixed her cup of coffee and sat down at the table with a plate of American cheese and dill pickles. The first time he’d seen her eat that he’d panicked that he’d gotten her pregnant, but apparently, it was just one of those odd combinations of food she enjoyed. He didn’t question it after his embarrassing freak-out. “Well?” He probed for the answer again.
She shrugged. “They don’t give you a lot of information, do they?”
“Usually they give me a lot, but I think I am supposed to be learning a lesson with this job. How do you kill a demon?” His irritation caused a slow tic in his jaw.
She scowled at him. “Ask Vincent. It’s the same way I killed him.” Then she got up and dumped her plate of unfinished food in the sink before she left him standing dumbly in the kitchen.
The fuck?
He leaned forward and watched as she went to work rearranging what she had in her backpack. She called them up, demanding they go and save her ass from vampires so they’d walk into a trap? That didn’t sound exactly right in his head. No, if she had the ability to kill demons that would explain why Felix thought she needed to live to prevent an apocalypse.
There was something she’d physically done that night which caused her guilt in his death. Making her think she’d been the one to pull the trigger, so to speak. He growled as he moved into the living room and crouched down five feet away from her. “How did you kill him?”
“Oh, please, like he didn’t tell you. I thought we weren’t talking about Vincent anymore. He messes me up something fierce, and you kind of need me to live.” She didn’t look at him and continued with her project. Which he noticed included various different weapons to kill several types of nefarious things.
“You’re a demon hunter,” he said, knowing he was stating the obvious.
“Nope.”
His teeth gritted together. “Do you even know what half of that stuff does?”
“Yes.”
Now they were reduced to her giving one-word answers. “But you can kill demons.”
“Yes.” She rammed another vampire stake into the bag and turned to look at him. “I can kill those things, and they like to find me. I don’t go hunting them. I’m not Buffy the Vampire Slayer or anything like it. I just have a misguided sense of self-preservation.”
“And you kill demons…how?” he tried again.
She let out a soft sigh and zipped up the backpack. “The same way I killed Vincent. I don’t mean for it to happen. It just does when I am afraid or about to die. Which really sucks.”
Something raw settled hard in his gut. She believed her guilt in his death was because she thought she’d done the deed and not lured him out for a gang of vampires to mutilate. It looked like if he wanted any kind of straight answer from her he was going to have to reveal himself. Great. Then she really would have a hysterical fit, and he knew he wasn’t equipped to deal with Bryna reacting to him standing in front of her. It was possible she wouldn’t recognize him. His features weren’t exactly the same as when he’d been alive. Felix had gifted him a corporeal body when Vincent agreed to work for him, but there was enough of a resemblance of his old self she might be able to figure it out.
“Why can’t you just tell me?” He kept his tone as soft as he could. Suddenly the thought of making her feel as guilty as he possibly could wasn’t as appealing as it had been the night before.
“Because you’re a world-class jerk, and I don’t like talking to you.” Her response was blunt. She got up and went to a cabinet by the front door to collect up more weapons.
“You need the weapons to kill them?” he pressed, trying to ignore the sting of her words.
“No.”
He snarled. “Then what’s the point of having them?”
She turned around and pinned him down with those emerald eyes framed in smudgy black makeup. “Because I didn’t learn my lesson about not running with scissors, and I keep hoping I might fall the right way one day.”
“I am beginning to think your death wish is for shock value and nothing else,” he bit out.
She snorted at him. “Right. I exist for the sole purpose to annoy you.” She turned an impish grin on him. “Speaking of which, can you have sex? Or are you not operational in that department since you’re dead?”
Yeah, he was in hell, and she was his tormentor. He knew she’d said that just to get a rise out of him, and goddamn it. He was going to give it to her. “As a matter of fact, I frequently fuck the women I protect.”
Her face blossomed into a warm smile. “Great. Then I don’t have to worry about going without for the next week. Taking matters into my own hands isn’t nearly as fun when I can have a partner.”
“So my assessment of whore was correct,” he snarled out. He stood up and backed away from her. He hadn’t had these kinds of dark thoughts in his head for the last one hundred and fifty years. In no way should his Bryna be this casual about sex.
“Bingo,” she said as something flashed in her eyes, but it was gone before he could figure it out.
“Lucky I don’t have to worry about disease, then, huh?” he shot back.
She looked at him with those green eyes. “Do you try to be hurtful, or was that just a talent you died with?”
He took a step toward her. “How many men have you fucked?”
She made a disgusted sound. “None of your business.”
“Did you fuck the first one before or after his body was cold?” Vincent snarled.
She stilled and then went into the kitchen and turned on the faucet.
He followed her. “I asked a question. I would like an answer.” If it wasn’t fair, he didn’t care. She was supposed to have been his. Of course what she decided to do with her body wasn’t really any of his business, but some warped and disturbed part of him needed to know.
“Why? So you can report back to Vincent that his living girlfriend cheated on him after he died?” She scrubbed a plate harder than was needed.
“Yeah. I think it might help him find some peace to find out what you really are.”
Her body went rigid, and then she whirled around and stared at him. “He’s not…Oh my God.” Her face turned a funny hue of green, and she swallowed several times like she was trying to fight back rising bile. “He’s in whatever limbo you’re in?”
“He prefers to think of it as hell, but yeah. He didn’t quite make it to the pearly gates.” As soon as the retort past his lips he wished he could pull it back. He wasn’t exactly sure what was wrong with him. He’d planned to make her feel the guilt she deserved to feel for his death, but she had that on her own in spades. Where the rest of this venom was coming from he didn’t know, but it wasn’t right. He needed to figure out how to stop himself. Damn Felix.
Her face had lost all color. She turned around and retched into the sink.
She stood with her arms braced on the counter for a long couple of minutes, before she reached into a cabinet for a toothbrush and paste, cleaned her mouth, and cleaned out the sink. Her entire little body shook viciously. Her voice was a scary monotone when she finally said, “You’re sure this end-of-the-world business is over in a week?”