Phoenix Fallen (14 page)

Abruptly the boy stopped. His head swiveled from side to side. Daimen straightened, a smile on his lips as he watched avidly.

A shudder wracked the boy from head to toe. The child he carried shifted on his back, her voice sleepy. "What is it, J? We're gonna get left behind."

The boy shook himself. "It's nothin', Simmy. Hush. Everythings fine. You 'un go on resting. I'll catch us up."

He started walking again, much faster than before, his feet slapping into the damp earth in a quick march. But Rissa saw his head turn back once, his liquid black eyes narrowed at the cypress tree before he disappeared around a bend in the road.

She also saw the gleam of Daimen's fangs unleashed when he smiled and whispered to the others, "That one's mine. You all leave that boy alone. I
want
him."

Icy water was dripping in her eyes, over her lips. There was a hard voice muttering low in her ear. "
Wake up.
Wake the
fuck
up, damnit."

Rissa sat up with a snap, the washcloth falling from her face with a plop into her lap. Her heart was racing impossibly in her chest, so lifelike it didn't feel like muscle memory. It felt all too real.

She turned her head to see Jules crouched by the bed. His liquid black eyes blank and dark as swamp water.

"You were there. I don't remember seeing a redhead, but you were there,
weren't you
, Rissa?"

She swallowed hard. Lifting a shaking hand, she wiped her face. "Jules, I—"

"Don't lie."

Rissa took a breath and turned to face him. "I wasn't going to. Yes, I was there—"

Jules lunged to his feet. The floor shook. A low, vicious growl rumbled from him that seemed to shiver down to her very bones. He was still clutching the picture frame in his hands. She wished he'd let go of the damn thing. Just throw it, or smash it. She didn't care.

She couldn’t stand the sight of the thing in his hands, knowing the pain he had to be experiencing, seeing Daimen's face over and over….

"I
was
there. But I ran …I ran before… Jules, that was the night I left, don't you see?" Her eyes closed and her lips trembled before she opened them again. "The night I left him. He went after you. Your family." Rissa's voice caught, but she forced the words out. "And I …ran. It was my chance. The chance I had been waiting for. He was so intent, so distracted. By you in particular…"

"You saw us then?" Jules' voice was choked. He was turned half away from her. She could see his face in profile, the tic in his jaw going in and out.

Rissa blinked up at him, her throat closing. She could only nod.

The face of that last child in line was etched forever in her mind. The skinny boy with the bare feet, broad shoulders and the toddler in the faded red dress clinging to his back, her thumb in her mouth.

That boy had been Jules. She remembered him looking back at her. Those dark eyes wide and still, listening as if he sensed something in the trees. As if he had felt the vampires there under the Spanish moss.

She'd never forget the sound of Daimen's voice.
That one's mine.

Rissa swayed in the bed, her hand pressing against her tummy as nausea roiled inside her. So Daimen hadn't got that skinny little boy after all, but he'd gotten everyone else. Jules' whole family.

God.

Jules' fingers tightened again on the picture frame. For a moment there was only the silence between them, stretching into thin, gossamer strands through the room. Prickly and cold, piercing through Rissa like ice.

Without warning, Jules whipped the picture into the wall and everything shattered.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her hard. "Why? Why
you?"

She couldn't have answered him, even if she tried because her mind was screaming the exact same question.

Reflexively, her hands came up to cover his, to try and make him stop whipping her back and forth. She didn’t think he would, but he let go of her immediately, as if the touch of her skin on his made him ill.

He withdrew again. Going quiet. Standing over her, impossibly tall, his hands clenched at his side.

"Tell me about him."

"What?
Why?
Jules…for god's sake—"

"He murdered my family!
Don't you get that yet?"
Rissa fought back a whimper at the fury in those eyes boring down at her. "I
never
knew his name. Never could get a clear picture of him in my head, or the rest of them. Just flashes. Even Mags and some of the other telepaths tried to help me, but they said I'd shut it out too hard. Do you have any idea how many times I wanted to look for that bastard? But I didn't even have a clue where to start. There were so many vamp killings, killings of all sorts at that time. So many shades went wild before the conflicts and the Laws of Retribution came down. My family was only part of hundreds, no one cared about
them."

"I went to an orphanage and then the Cleaners came. I never had a proper shot at finding him. Not then, or even later. I did
try
when we took out the Cleaners. Oh, I tried like hell then." His teeth ground together as he stared at her. "But it’s hard to trace down a ghost when you can't
quite
remember his face.

"I have that face now. And you're gonna give me the rest, Rissa. Right fucking now."

"Okay." Her voice was quiet. Tiny after the sound of his rumbling bass. She wouldn't refuse him, even though she knew he wasn't going to like it. He needed this from her and she would give him what he needed. It was the least she could do.

Rissa talked forever it seemed like. She told him about Mardi Gras, circa 1941. Her death. Laureen. The in-between years when she's been half in a sleep-walking stupor, trapped by her fear of Daimen and Docie May's watchful eye. Then she told him about Daimen's powers.

“He’s a fucking
what
exactly?” Jules snapped at her when her voice faltered after the second or third time he made her go through it all.

“An empath, a pathokinetic para, you would say.” Rissa’s stare was blank. Jules could see she was mentally exhausted, swaying slightly in the bed she hadn’t moved from in almost two hours. He didn't care.
She
didn't matter anymore.

He couldn't
let
her matter anymore.
Not now.

And he needed to hear it again. To understand this madness. “He’s a very strong one, Jules."

“But that, that …” Jules’ mind was reeling. Empaths, a broad term encompassing those paras who could read emotions and thoughts, or induce them in various ways, or a combination of both, were almost always
good.
Seeing inside other people’s minds and memories seemed to be a straight path to well …,
empathy.
You heard of empath kids living hard using their talents in nefarious ways to survive, but generally paras with any kind of empathic power grew up to be kind, generous and warm.

Like Fannie. Even Mags, who was definitely a slippery sort, was nonetheless one of the best people Jules knew.

An
evil,
psychopathic empath? It made no damn sense. And a pathokinetic, at that.

Jules felt sick.

Pathokinesis was basically the power of emotional manipulation or, given the subject’s pliability, even absolute emotional control. A para with Daimen’s powers would be used at Phoenix in areas like hostage or treaty negotiations, mediation and other instances where reducing anger and conflict was of utmost importance.

As with all para talents, Daimen’s would depend to a degree on the psychological make-up of the person he targeted. Each human had varying degrees of susceptibility when it came to the different para influences. The stronger the para, the less individual resistances mattered, though people could be trained to strengthen their ability to shut empaths out.

But if this bastard were as strong as Rissa said, he would be able to influence almost anyone to do almost anything.

“What did he do to you?” For the first time in this very long conversation, a horrendous possibility occurred to him.

Rissa gritted her teeth, but refused to drop her gaze. “Whatever he goddamn well wanted.”

It hit him like a sucker punch, Jules actually felt the pain slam into his body. At what she must have endured, for years…
fuck!

He couldn’t take it in. Unwillingly, sympathy and a possessive rage seized him as he thought of that demented bastard having Rissa under his control.

Jules put a hand to the wall, steadying himself as his world swayed.
“Jesus, Rissa.”

She shrugged wearily, even though he could see the tears gleaming in her eyes. “It was a long time ago. And I got away. I was one of the lucky ones.”

"Does that make me a
lucky
one, too? Since
I
got away?"

He couldn't conceal the agony in his voice, he was too far gone to care. Jules watched as slowly Rissa got up and made her way to him. She put a tentative hand on his arm, her fingers feather light on his bare skin. "Jules, don't do this to yourself.
Please.
You couldn't help what happened and neither could I. Don't you see that?"

For a moment, he couldn't move. Despite everything he knew, he wanted to seek comfort in those slender arms reaching out to him. He even wanted desperately to comfort her
,
to push away the sickness of her past and his and just
be.
The way they had been last night…

The way he had thought they were going to be forever. The promise of that getting him past the damn vampire thing. He had been able to see them getting better and better; her showing him how to cope, him breaking down her barriers, knowing Rissa would eventually see what they could have together if she would just let him in.

But now he knew exactly why Rissa had all those trust issues, didn't he?

Jules pushed her away from him in the end. Harder than he'd meant to.

Rissa stumbled and went down, her legs scattered under her on the hotel room floor. Jules stood there, hands curled into fists, a muscle in his lean jaw ticking in and out as he stared down at her. Fighting the urge to help her up, to apologize, to somehow, someway make it all better.
But no one could make this better.

No one and nothing.

"I'm sorry, Jules. I didn't know. I had no idea that you were that little boy.
God.
You have to know I couldn't have stopped it. Nothing could have stopped Daimen that night.
You don't know what he was like."

"
Wrong.
I know exactly what he was like. I know what it was like to have him hunt me through the night, following the scent of my baby sister's blood on my clothes. I know what it was like to hear him ripping out my mother's throat and laughing as he called out to me. I've had that bastard's voice in my head along with my family's screams every night of my life.
Every
night, Rissa. Until the night I slept with you. The night I thought I finally found someone who could silence the screams and make me whole again."

The tears stung as they rolled down her cheeks, her chest hot with pain as she looked up at him. With a look of helpless disgust she would never forget, Jules almost spat at her. "I was so stupid. So fucking stupid. Vampires are killers, cold-blooded, stone-cold psychopaths. I should have never forgot that. There's no hope for any of us. From him to you, to me."

"No. Jules, you're nothing like Daimen.
Nothing.
"

His big shoulders rolled as he bent and pulled on his shirt. He didn't reply. Rissa tried again, her voice high with strain as she got to her knees, her hands outstretched.

"You know that's not true. What about Miles?"

He only laughed once; a hard, brittle sound that hurt the ears.

"
Kelsey?
For god's sake, Jules. She's your best friend.
"

He shook his head, standing back up. Jules closed his eyes then as if he couldn't stand the sight of her. "Maybe there's hope for her. There's always an exception to the rule. But you're not it. I'm not it." His tone had gone quiet now, emptied of the rage and disgust. Emptied of everything, especially hope.

"It's not that I blame you, Rissa, really I…don't. You
couldn't
have stopped him. I know that. But we're…" he swallowed hard. "This thing between us… that's
done.
It's over. How can I even look at you? Knowing
he
made you, that part of him is inside you? Every time I look at you, I’m gonna see him. There’s no coming back from that. Not
ever
.
Good-bye, Rissa." His eyes had opened but he didn't look at her again.

He just left.

The door shut behind him and Rissa fell forward on her hands, moaning softly, her fingers curling in the thick carpet.

It hit her like a fall of cascading rocks, first one sting and then another and another until she was buried under the weight and the crushing pain. She loved him. She did.

She loved him so much, but now Jules didn't love her.

And he never would again.