CHAPTER 20

I could probably have done it myself, but it would have taken longer and, as the Dagda had pointed out, Jimmy, in this form, didn’t care if he killed me, himself, everyone—if there was anyone—in a fifty-mile radius. He’d enjoy it. While I had to worry about what would happen to the world if I died, if he did, and carry the guilt if Jimmy ripped out the Dagda’s throat and took a shower in his blood.

Jimmy backed up, gaze flicking from the fairy god to me several times. “He won’t like this,” Jimmy said, referring, I assumed, to the Jimmy who waited on the other side of “this.”

“I don’t care.” A lie. I cared, but I had no choice.

Jimmy whirled to run; I tensed to chase. The Dagda threw up one hand like a crossing guard miming stop, and Jimmy crumpled to the ground.

“Hey!” I hurried to Sanducci’s side. “What happened to holding him down?”

Jimmy’s eyes were closed; that didn’t fool me for an instant. I wouldn’t put it past him to fake unconsciousness, then tear out my liver for lunch.

“I thought this was what you meant,” the Dagda said. “You didn’t actually expect me to use my hands when all I had to do was—” He lifted one huge shoulder. “Cuff him and be on your way.”

I hesitated. The fairy god gave an impatient huff. “My magic is not so weak. He will not move until I wish him to.”

I eyed the Dagda. That magic would be handy to have. However, when my gaze reached his codpiece, I changed my mind. Not happening.

My lip curled as I slid the ring over Jimmy’s flaccid penis. Halfway up I checked his face. His eyes were open—just as I’d suspected, not unconscious—and red still flared at the center. White lines radiated from his tight mouth, and tiny rivulets of blood ran down his chin as his fangs pricked his lips. He was furious. I hoped the Dagda’s magic held.

Springy pubic hair brushed my fingertips as the ring reached the base, and the red spark in Jimmy’s eyes went out like the flame of a snuffed candle. His fangs retracted equally fast, though the tension in his face did not dissipate. I recognized sadness instead of madness; the demon had successfully been caged.

“Let him go.”

“Are you certain?” the Dagda asked.

“Release him and leave us alone.”

“Very well.” The fairy god twirled his hand downward, as if executing a fancy upper-class bow, then ducked through the opening in the cave and disappeared.

I figured Jimmy would grab me—hit me, strangle me, or at least try—and I’d let him. Maybe it would help.

Instead, he got to his feet, then moved slowly to the shadows where he bent, picked up his clothes and started to dress.

“Don’t you want to—”

He whirled. “We already did, Elizabeth.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Because he does?”

I started. They were so different, the two Jimmys, yet also very much the same.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“You’re the one who wanted him back.”

“I didn’t want this, and you know it.”

“I know no such thing. You’re the leader. You make the rules.”

“I don’t. You know that too.”

He sighed and put on his T-shirt. A bright, tie-dyed kaleidoscope that advertised Sesame Street. I didn’t even want to ask.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. It’s just—” His hands fell back to his sides like the arms of a puppet whose strings had been cut. “I hate being like that. Until I am and then I love it. The pain, the blood, the fear, it’s . . .” He drew a deep breath, in through his nose, then let it out through his mouth as if he was trying to calm himself, or perhaps trying to catch the scent of the blood, pain and fear. “Seductive,” he finished. “But later I remember. You know?”

I nodded, though he wasn’t looking at me. I knew. Boy, did I know.

“As soon as I’m me again, everything I did and said and—” His voice cracked; he swallowed, coughed, then lifted his hand and rubbed his face, freezing when he saw the streaks of dried blood.

“Shit.” He strode to the tiny basin where water still trickled merrily, and plunged his hands in to the wrists. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay. I’m just like you.”

“You’re a whole lot worse than me.”

I blinked, shocked to discover his words could still hurt. Since he faced away, scrubbing at his fingers like Lady Macbeth—I had a sudden flash of another cave, other water, but the same Jimmy, scrubbing frantically at blood that was already gone—he didn’t see my pain. I waited to speak until I was certain he wouldn’t hear it either.

“How you figure?”

“You’re a vampire and a skinwalker.” He paused momentarily in his scrubbing. “Anything else you’ve become while I was away?”

“No,” I said shortly. “And being a skinwalker doesn’t make me worse.”

“More powerful. That’s what I meant.”

“Sure you did.” He didn’t answer, just kept scrubbing at his hands. “Jimmy, I think they’re clean.”

“I doubt that,” he murmured, but he lifted them from the water and dried them on his pants. I didn’t point out that beneath the shirt advertising happy puppets he also had blood all over his chest. If I did, we’d never get out of here.

Unable to stop myself, I moved closer, and when he saw me coming he tensed.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He rubbed his palm over his chest as if it ached. I knew the feeling. “I miss you.”

“I’m right here.”

He shook his head. “When I look at you I remember the other you. I can’t bear to touch you or have you touch me. It used to be whenever I was tired or sad or sick I could bring out my memories of us and I’d be . . . better. But the bad ones seem to have drowned all the good ones. Now any memories of you make me—” He swallowed

I could fill in the blank. Memories of me made him sick.

“How did you get past it?” he asked. “What I did to you?”

For an instant what he’d done to me was right there—a kaleidoscope of horror. Then I gritted my teeth and I made it go away.

Lifting my chin, I met his eyes. “That wasn’t you.”

He snorted. “It is now.”

We weren’t getting anywhere. We might never get past what he’d done, what I’d done. So many people couldn’t, and they had less to forgive and forget than Sanducci and me.

“We should go,” I said.

“Lizzy,” he began, and I couldn’t help it; my heart lightened to hear him call me that again. “I’m sorry about before.”

At this rate we were going to be saying, I’m sorry, until the day that we died.

“I’m fine.” I lifted my wrist. “Healed right up.”

“I meant earlier. Out there.” He jerked his head at the opening of the cave, and his dark hair flew. “That thing inside me pretended to be . . . me, and I—”

“Your vamp fooled me,” I interrupted, not needing or wanting a replay. “I should know better. Not your fault.”

“You think that makes it easier on me? I can still see myself forcing you—”

“You didn’t force me; I wanted to.”

“You wanted me. This me.” He smacked himself in the chest again. He was really going to have to stop that. “But it wasn’t me.” He choked and stared at the ground where my blood still darkened the dirt. “That’s . . . fucked up,” he finished.

“What isn’t?”

His laughter was harsh, not quite vampire laughter but close. “It doesn’t bother you?”

To my amazement, it didn’t. I had so many other things to be bothered by.

“No,” I said, and his breath rushed out in a huff.

“Then you’re much more forgiving than I am.”

I doubted that. I’d held a grudge against him for a long, long time. Probably would still be holding one if I hadn’t been forcibly taught that there were a lot better issues to be angry about.

I crossed the short distance between us and reached for his hand. He flinched, but I took it anyway, then traced my thumb over the still-fading mark that circled his wrist.

Before I’d left, I’d seen what the Dagda would do to him, and it hadn’t involved any whips or chains. There’d been fire, I thought, perhaps a knife. Pain and blood, nothing was ever easy. But I hadn’t seen this.

I stroked my thumb over him again, breathed in, opened my mind . . . and I didn’t see anything at all.

I lifted my gaze. “What did he do to you?”

“Does it matter?”

It would always matter. There just wasn’t anything I could do about it. What had happened had happened. That I’d let it, that I’d basically ordered it, even if I hadn’t been the one to hurt him, did matter. I’d had the power to stop the horror, and I wouldn’t.

I understood that a lot of Jimmy’s anger, his inability to touch me and let me touch him, stemmed from the knowledge that if we had to do it all over again, I’d do the same thing.

Since I could practically feel his skin crawling beneath mine, I let him go. In this form, there was only so much torture I could stomach.

I had the ability to separate Vampire Jimmy and Dhampir Jimmy; I knew that what the first one did and said had nothing to do with the other. I thought Jimmy understood the same about Vamp Liz and Lizzy. I’m sure he did—in theory.

But men are visual, which is why porn really turns them on, and for women, who are emotional, not so much. So while I could separate the two Jimmys because of the way I felt about each one, even though they looked exactly the same, Jimmy might be having a bit of difficulty getting past his conflicting feelings over what appeared to be exactly the same woman.

The problem was that the Lizzy I’d been, the one he’d fallen in love with, was gone, and I didn’t think she was ever coming back. Which left a woman he didn’t know and one he didn’t like in the same package.

“There are things we have to do that we don’t want to do,” I began.

“You think I don’t know that? I was eighteen, Lizzy, when Ruthie made me—” He stopped and shoved a shaking hand through his sweaty, tangled hair.

“Kill?” I prompted.

He blew air through his lips in a halfhearted Bronx cheer as he dropped his arm back to his side. “I was a killer long before that.”

I hated it when he called himself a killer. I didn’t think dusting Nephilim was killing. However, Jimmy had been on the streets a lot longer than I had, and he’d done things before coming to Ruthie’s that even I didn’t know about. Things I probably didn’t want to know about.

“You remember what she made me do,” he said, referring, I assumed, to his sleeping with Summer. “I knew it would hurt you,” he murmured, “but I did it anyway.”

“Why?”

“It had to be done.”

“There you go.” I threw up my hands. “So why can’t you forgive me?”

“I don’t know. Have you forgiven me?”

I thought of Summer’s beautiful face, her tiny, adorable body, her blond hair and blue eyes and her everlasting, unbreakable devotion to Jimmy Sanducci. “No.”

His lips curved just a little, and I saw again the boy who’d taken my heart and then broken it apart.

“I didn’t think so,” he said.

 

Jimmy was putting on his sinfully expensive Nikes, which he’d probably gotten for free after he took the most recent publicity photo of Venus Williams or Tiger Woods or whoever the top shoe hawker was this week, when he suddenly paused and asked, “What now?”

“We find the Dagda and get out from under.”

“And then?”

Jimmy was a little behind the times. Quickly I told him everything.

“Your mother,” he repeated, seemingly as stunned as I’d been. But what seemed to be true and what was true these days were often two completely different things.

“You didn’t know?” I watched him closely. Jimmy was an extremely good liar. He had to be. I could probably separate truth from fiction if I touched him. However, if I touched him one more time today, one or both of us would probably wind up bloody. Again.

“I thought she was dead.”

Hmm. Voice casual, gaze direct. He didn’t appear to be lying, but I couldn’t be sure.

“You thought she was dead, but you knew she was a phoenix? Or you just thought my mother, whoever she might be, was dead?”

“I choose door number two.” He finished tying his silver-tipped laces and stood.

My eyes narrowed. “Sanducci—”

He held up a hand. “I didn’t know, okay? I thought you were an orphan like me.”

“You weren’t an orphan.”

The past flickered in his eyes, and I was sorry I’d even brought it up.

“I wasn’t,” he agreed. “But I am now.”

“Not necessarily.” His eyes widened, and I held up my hand just as he had. “I’m just saying, parents seem to be coming out of the woodwork lately. Your dad. Sawyer’s mom. And now mine.”

“And they’re all such fantastic finds,” he muttered.

“Yeah, the reunions are a hoot. Although . . .” I paused, thinking. “I haven’t met my mother. Maybe—”

“Don’t go there,” Jimmy interrupted.

“Where?”

“Thinking that maybe she’s not evil, maybe you can have a relationship, maybe things will be different. They won’t be. She rose from the dead, Lizzy. That can’t be good.”

“It was once,” I muttered.

“And once is all we get. Anyone rising from the dead these days is gonna be a problem.”

He was right. Still—

“Sawyer’s other, and he’s not evil.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes!”

Jimmy just raised his eyebrows. My voice had been too loud, the word too emphatic, for him to believe me. Hell, I didn’t believe me.

“Think about it,” he said. “Guy up and disappears.”

“He does that.”

Sanducci stared at me until I squirmed. Everything I said was too loud or too quick and not very believable at all. Why couldn’t I lie like he did?

“Don’t you find it strange that Sawyer can raise the dead and suddenly the dead are being raised?” Jimmy asked.

“He can’t raise the dead, only ghosts.”

“So he says.”

I opened my mouth, shut it again, then said, “What?”

“Someone raised the Phoenix.”

“You think it was Sawyer?”

“Lizzy, I always think it’s Sawyer.”