The Mephisto Covenant (9 page)

His lips traveled across her face, kissing her forehead, her
100
nose, her temples. “Yes, you should.” She didn’t.

They stood together, arms wrapped tightly, listening to the wind through the pines while snow fell softly all around. This was one of those moments in life she knew she’d never forget.

He moved his head so that his lips were close to her ear. “Run, Sasha. If you can do it, run like hell and don’t look back.”

Her breath came in short little gasps. “I don’t want to run.”

He kissed her again, holding her so closely, her heels lifted from the ground. She felt his desperation, knew that whatever was happening wasn’t a simple guy and girl thing. It scared her, but she felt so alive and in the moment, she was hyperaware of everything around her—a bird calling from overhead, the soft crunch of snow at their feet, the way his body moved beneath her palms, the taste of his mouth, even the warmth of his breath.

When he lifted his head and looked down into her eyes, she nearly drowned in the emotions rolling over her. His eyes made her feel like she was someone else, as if she knew things it was impossible for her to know.

“You didn’t run. Does that mean you’re going to give me a chance?”

“If I do, will you tell me who you are? Why your eyes are so different?”

“I’ll tell you.” He released her and stepped back. “Just give me a week and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Part of her wanted to know right this minute. Another part didn’t want to know ever. But she nodded anyway and said, “Will you tell me how you know about the Anabo thing?”

He bent to pick up his shades and slid them back onto his face. “I’ll tell you everything.”

While they stood there staring at each other, a terrifying scream carried across the mountains in an echo, startling her. “That sounded like . . . someone falling.”

His expression grim, Jax nodded toward the run. “Let’s go.”

Ten minutes later, when they reached the base, she saw a crowd gathered close to the cluster of buildings that made up Mountain Village. Skiing to the edge of the group, Sasha asked a woman if she knew what happened.

“Someone went off Devil’s Ridge. The ski patrol just radioed that she broke her neck.”

A tremor of premonition slid down her back. “Who was it?”

“A senior at Telluride High. Reilly O’Brien. So sweet, such a great kid. It’s awful.”

Sasha heard a familiar voice and turned just as Brett and East skied to a spot several yards away. They were grinning, and she stiffened when they knuckle bumped.

“What’s wrong?” Jax asked from just behind her. “Did you know Reilly?”

Turning around, she leaned close and whispered, “No, but she’s the reason my cousin ditched me up there. He skied after her, and she was looking over her shoulder at him like she was afraid. Now look at him. He’s smiling.”

“Are you saying you think he had something to do with her accident?”

Sasha looked up at his mirrored shades, at her distorted reflection. “Would you think I was crazy if I said yes?”

---

Jax took her to a nearby restaurant, and they were eating dessert before he finally coaxed everything out of her. She told him about her mom being deported, about the Ravens and Alex Kasamov, about meeting Mr. Bruno, and about what Brett had said to her on the way up the mountain that morning. The idea off her sitting down to dinner with a Skia scared the hell out of him, but he kept calm. She trusted him, and he needed to protect that, but he also needed to protect her. He would tell her as much as possible without revealing anything that might scare her off.

He decided to start with Anabo. “So what you’re wondering is if Brett thought Reilly was Anabo, and if that’s why he maybe pushed her over the edge.”

“I know it sounds ridiculous, but he believes this Eryx guy is where it’s at. He said he gets credits if he gets people to join, so maybe he thought he’d get credit if he killed somebody he thought was Anabo.”

“Why would he think that about Reilly?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she was scared to death of Mr. Bruno, like I was afraid of Alex Kasamov. Alex said that was why he suspected about me.”

Jax knew Reilly wasn’t Anabo. He’d seen her around town.

So had his brothers. She was gorgeous, and if she was Anabo, they’d have known.

“Or, maybe Brett hit on her,” he suggested, “and she blew him off and he was pissed enough to kill her. Maybe he didn’t mean to shove her off. Maybe he didn’t do it at all.”

“You’re right. I’m jumping to conclusions, I guess, because I’m still so freaked out about what happened in San Francisco.” She dropped her gaze to the table, a world away. “It doesn’t seem real. I don’t know how they could hate me enough to want to kill me.”

Jax was still worried about his inability to clear her memory, mystified that it had worked before but not today. “You say you passed out and when you woke up, it was early morning and they were gone. If they meant to kill you, why didn’t they?”

“I think they must have thought I was dead.” “And no one checked to make sure?” “It seems stupid, now I think ab
out it. If you’re going to kill
somebody, then leave her alive, she’s an eyewitness, right? Why weren’t they worried about me going to the cops?”

“Maybe because it would be your word against theirs. You said you had no wounds, no bruises.”

Her expression became more confused. “I don’t get that, Jax. I didn’t dream it, wasn’t hallucinating or anything, because when I woke up, there was blood all over the floor, and those rocks . . .” Her eyes widened. “I did dream about it last night, but it was weird, like dreams usually are. All the Ravens froze in place, and

this guy showed up, out of nowhere. He stabbed Alex, then he heal—” She stopped and stared at him, seconds ticking by before she finished. “He healed me.”

Jax took another bite of cheesecake, pretending not to notice her pause, or the way she was looking at him. “What did the guy in the dream look like?”

“I don’t know. His face was blurry, and his voice was muffled. He was dressed all in black.”

It was there, the memory of him that night, waiting to surge to the forefront of her mind. For whatever reason, maybe because she was Anabo, her memory couldn’t be erased like other humans’.

He had no way of knowing when she’d remember, but until then, he’d stick to the plan of telling her everything in a week. He didn’t know if he could make her fall in love with him if he had a year, but all he had was one week. Unless she remembered sooner. Then all bets were off. Courting Sasha would be difficult, the hardest thing he’d ever done, but it’d be a million times harder if she knew what he wanted from her. “What else did Brett tell you about Eryx?”

“He wants people to pledge their souls to him, because when he has the majority of humans following him, he can take over Hell. Ordinarily, I’d think Brett’s a lunatic, but after what happened in San Francisco, and now, meeting you . . . with your eyes . . .” She tilted her head and studied him, the wheels in her mind turning so fast he could almost see sparks.

Before she could ask if he had been in that old warehouse, if he had saved her and healed her, he set down his fork and said, “Just for the sake of argument, suppose Eryx isn’t a nut job. The girl who took you to the meeting said people who join the Ravens give up God and pledge to follow Eryx. If he’s not about God, he’d see anything that is about God as a threat, and Anabo is as close to God as a human can be.”

She looked across the table at him, curiosity all over her beautiful face. “You know the truth, don’t you, Jax?”

He kicked himself again for taking off his shades before he kissed her. “I don’t know the truth about your cousin, if that’s what you mean.”

“You know that’s not what I meant. Just tell me, is Eryx who Brett thinks he is? Is any of this real?”

“What if it is? What would it change? If you find out Eryx really is an immortal who collects souls, if he already has your cousin’s and your aunt’s, what can you do to change it?”

Her expression was stunned. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, “it is true.”

“I didn’t say that. I said if it were true, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I could keep other people from pledging. Mr. Bruno was nagging my other cousin, Chris, to go to the meeting last night.” “If you knew for sure, and told people, hoping to keep them from going through with taking
the oath, they wouldn’t believe
you. They’d think you were the nut job.”

“Maybe you’re right, and maybe I can’t change anything at all, but if I knew the truth, I’d understand why the Ravens tried to kill me.”

Sitting back in his chair, he glanced around the busy restaurant, watched waitresses scurry back and forth between the tables and the kitchen, saw a family laughing while they ate spaghetti, noticed a young couple holding hands across the table. Everything was all so normal. This was Sasha’s world, what she understood. It seemed the greatest sin to drag her into his world, to show her what existed on the other side.

He turned his attention back to her, studied her lovely eyes, her anxious expression, the way she tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth. He wished he had what it took to get up and leave and never see her again, to let her live a normal life.

But he didn’t have what it took to leave her alone. He couldn’t even stop staring at her. He wanted her, and the first step to having her was raising the curtain, bit by bit, giving her glimpses of the world she’d live in if she became Mephisto.

With a deep, heavy sigh, he ripped away the first layer of her innocence. “Yes, Sasha, it’s all true.”

Deep down, she’d known, but she wanted it to be a lie: the Ravens, a cult begun by a Satan worshipper with an ego as big as the universe; the Anabo, only the wayward imaginings of some crazy Italian guy, back in the day. “How do you know, Jax?”

“I thought you were going to give me a week.”

“You could tell me how you know without telling me who you are.”

He tossed a few bills to the table and stood, holding out his hand for hers. “Let’s get on a lift.” They walked out into the cold and snow and put on their skis. There was a line at the lift, so they waited, and as they moved forward, he looked down at her. “What do you like to do?”

“I love art. I like to go to museums. Sometimes I sketch what I see.”