Soulless (The Heartless Series Book 2) (20 page)

I’m holding her.

I won’t let her go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

GRACEN

“
I
T’S A DREAM.”
I
KNOW IT
instantly. I can tell now. The trees have a sepia tint to them, and the wind is blowing so hard my hair is whipping around my head, my dress around my ankles.

Hart is there in his old fashioned clothes, looking mighty handsome, and very young. He looks like Hart. The real Hart. Not Sam. This dream world is closing in on us. I can feel it. One of the drawbacks of power.

“I meant for this to be nicer.” It seems difficult for Hart to stand as the wind makes the grass around us blow in waves. A tornado is coming. There has to be. The sky is dark. The clouds are rolling.

A woman is yelling at it from the cabin by the pond. She’s too far away for me to understand what she’s saying. She doesn’t seem happy. She’s pointing behind us—behind me. Except the only thing behind me is…

I turn around.

Hart’s eyes are open wide as he falls to his knees. Blood drips from his nose and pools on the ground. I fall beside him and hold him up so I can check out the damage. I didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. What the hell happened?

Hart is lifeless against me, and his entire body is dead weight on mine. He’s not saying a word.

“Hart!” I yell through the wind. Thunder is clapping overhead, and lightning is streaking through the sky. “Hart, wake up.”

His eyes roll in his head.

“Look at me. Focus on me.” I demand. It’s taking every bit of my strength to hold him up. He’s falling. He’s dying.

I can’t let him die.

I won’t.

He was a victim like the rest of us. I won’t let him go to Hell again for something he couldn’t control. Seth manipulated him. He manipulated us all.

Hart is on his knees in front of me. I hold up his chin with my hand to get him to look at me, get him to focus.

A river of blood falls from his lips onto me, onto the dirt.

“Hart.” I shake him, willing him to fight this. “Stay with me.”

His lip curls slightly. His eyes roll back into his head.

Then my world collapses.

M
Y EYES FLY OPEN
, and I try to sit up. I can’t. Something’s holding me down, and I use every bit of strength I have to push it away.

There is a thud and then a grunt. Then nothing.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t think.

What the hell sort of dream was that?

It’s dark, and I don’t know where I am. On a bed, obviously. I can feel that. Everything else, though… It’s dark. It’s scary. I want out. I want out…

My heart is pounding in my ears, and that old familiar red is tunneling my vision. I refuse to let it take control this time. Refuse. There has to be a good reason for this. A reason for the dream, the nightmare.

What is it telling me?

What am I supposed to do?

“Sweetheart, are you all right?” Hart’s voice is coming from the direction of the floor.

I turn on the lamp next to our honeymoon, queen-sized bed. It doesn’t take long to find Hart. He’s stuck between the nightstand and the window, crumbled on the floor. His legs, those long things that helped him in football, are thrown up in the air and his back is on the floor.

I have to admit, he looks kinda funny. Like a cross between an overstuffed chicken and garden gnome.

Despite everything—the dream, my Aunt Willow being possessed, the world ending, and everything I should be thinking, worrying, praying about—I laugh.

I laugh.

Seeing Hart like that, with his legs all sprawled and stuck, makes me giggle. I put my hand over my mouth to stop it because… rude. Still, the laughing won’t stop.

I think I’ve lost my mind.

Then, the strangest, most unusual thing happens, Hart starts to laugh too. The harder he laughs, the less he can move, which makes him laugh harder, which makes me laugh harder.

It’s pitch black outside.

The only light in the room is a lamp.

In a few hours, we might both be dead.

But I don’t think either of us cares at this moment. We need it. To let go of some of the crap buried deep inside us. I know I do, or I’ll lose it. I’ll be an even more lost cause than I am now, and I’m pretty far lost as it is.

I’m not sure how long we sit there and laugh, well, I sit and laugh. He’s still all slumped on the floor. “Guess your demon powers are useless against furniture.” I snort.

“Seems that way.” He tries to push the side table away. He fails and starts laughing again. “Can you help me?”

“Awww… admitting defeat? Taken down by the end table?”

“Nightstand.” He corrects. He’s stopped fighting and is now just lying there with his legs in the air, turning his ankles in round little circles to kill the time.

I should probably help him. It would be the right thing to do, the human, the kind thing. Instead I fall back on the mattress, cover my eyes with my arm, and laugh some more.

It doesn’t take long for the neighbors in the room next to us to beat, loudly, on the wall and yell at us to be quiet.

“It’s the honeymoon suite!” Hart yells back from his small little prison. “We are getting our money’s worth!”

“Must not be too good if she’s laughing that much!” the dude on the other side of the wall yells back. He needs a life.

“You must not know much about sex.” Hart answers. I moan, for the hell of it, to sell Hart’s story.

“Get a room!”

“Got one. Thanks. And, no, you can’t join.” Hart wiggles enough for one of his legs to fall to the ground in a big thud. I play along because why not?

“Yes!” I groan like those women do in those movies I’ve watched once or twice. I’ve never actually had sex. Doesn’t look like I will. Makes me a bit sad. I used to lie in my bed at night, listening to Sam snore down the hall, and wonder what was wrong with me. Why he didn’t want me? Why he turned me down every time I tried to be intimate with him?

Now, I know it was because Sam was a demon. I had to be pure. And that meant no sex.

Sad as it is.

I must do something right because the man next door doesn’t answer. For all I know, he’s lying there listening, jerking off. Not something I want to think about.

I get off the bed, making sure to make it squeak as I do, and go to help Hart who has one leg down, one leg up, one arm above his head, and his head crammed against the wall. Looks painful.

“Need help?” I whisper. Don’t want nosey neighbor to get any ideas that Hart is anything less than wonderful in our honeymoon activities.

Not sure why I care, but I do.

“Sadly,” he whispers back. Apparently, he doesn’t want the dude to think Hart’s not good at what he’s doing either. Something we have in common.

Such a weird thing to have in common.

Stone one of our beautifully weird and screwed up relationship.

The nightstand has been attached to the wall by the strongest thing on Earth and won’t budge. I’m probably the strongest thing in the world right now, and even I can’t budge it. Some serious super glue up in here!

My next option is to move Hart. He’s gotta get out. We’ve gotta get on the road, as much as I don’t want to get on the road. For all I care, we can stay here. In this room. Safe. Forever. We’d drive each other crazy, but we’d be crazy together. And we’d be away from everybody else. That’s the important part. As long as I’m with Hart, and only Hart, I can’t hurt anybody else. I don’t want to hurt anybody. Never. Not again.

I want to be good.

Do I even have any good left in me?

Does it matter if I do?

“Just… get me out of here. My foot’s going to sleep.”

I stifle a laugh. Not something you expect the demon in your head to say.

I move his foot one way. His other leg another way. Help him scoot back, then pull him up.

Simple.

Easy.

I could’ve probably done that about fifteen minutes ago. It was well worth the wait.

Once he’s free, Hart stretches and winces as he tries to get his knee to straighten. “I’m getting too old for this.”

“Ah… you don’t look a day over two hundred.” I wink. I actually wink at him. It seems to surprise him as much as it surprises me.

“I’m not that old.” He rolls his eyes and eases down on the bed. “A little over a hundred and seventy if I’m a day.”

“Ah, well…. Then I’m sorry. You don’t look a day over a hundred and seventy.”

“And this body is, what, twenty? Figure it could take more than this.”

I’m pretty sure he actually means it. He thinks this body should be able to take a licking and keep on ticking. “We were just in a car accident yesterday.” I remind him. His little trip over the nightstand has made a mess. He knocked everything off but the lamp. Papers and pens, doodles of… doodles for all I know… are scattered all over the floor. While he sits on the bed and contemplates his aches and pains, I start to clean up his mess.

One particular piece of paper catches my attention. A symbol drawn about fifteen times. It’s a circle with two lines through it and one down the middle. Strange. I’ve seen it before, or I think I have. I can’t place it, though. While Hart is working out the kinks in his young body, I discretely place the paper in my pocket for later. I’ve seen it somewhere. I know I have.

The other papers have words, doodles, things I don’t recognize on them. I pick them up quickly and, for a half second, catch Hart’s gaze on me. His brows are raised and what my Aunt Willow used to call a worry line nearly cuts his forehead in half.

He says nothing.

I say nothing.

He seems very curious about me but averts his eyes like he doesn’t want me to know he’s watching.

I don’t want him to know that I know he’s very curious about me and averting his eyes to throw me off the trail, so I avert my eyes from him too, just to be on the safe side, and throw the paper in the trashcan next to the little table on the other side of the little wooden heart, spindle dividers which
class
up the room. If he saw me keep the one small piece of yellow sticky note, he doesn’t say anything. If he thinks I know something, he ain’t saying.

If he’s reading my mind, he’s not showing it. I haven’t had any demon blood since last night. It should be easy to get inside my head. He doesn’t flinch, and I can’t feel him in there.

Not now.

Not like I did in the dream.

The dream.

The nightmare.

Hart died in my arms.

The jovial mood of the last few minutes is gone.

I go around the bed and sit where I had been previously. My back is against the headboard. I throw a pillow on my lap and hug it tightly. Why would I dream something like that? What does it have to do with anything?

Is there any way to keep from going to my mother’s? Is there any way to keep her safe?

“Promise me,” I say before I change my mind. I don’t want to talk about the dream or Seth or Lucien or even the rude guy on the other side of the wall. I want to talk about what we’re fixing to do, the suicide mission I’m on because I know, one way or another, by this time tomorrow, I’ll be dead. If I’m lucky…

“Promise you what?” He doesn’t face me. He keeps his hands on his knees, and he’s looking at his fingers like they hold all the answers to the universe.

“You know.” Please don’t make me say it.

“I know nothing.”

He’s going to make me say it. After everything we talked about last night, he’s going to make me say it. “Promise me that you’ll protect my mother from me. Promise me that you won’t let me hurt her.”

“I already promised you that.”

“Promise me again.” I need to reassurance if there’s any hope to get through the day. I need to know that I can trust Hart, even though I don’t trust him. He’s never really given me a reason to trust him. Still… he’s all I got. All I can trust. The only ally I have against Amelia and the darkness inside me.

“I won’t let you hurt your mother.” Hart answers without missing a beat.

“Hart, I mean it.”

“So do I.” He gets up and limps toward the sliding glass window. The first rays of sunlight—all orange and yellow and pink and purple—are coloring the horizon beyond the trees of our little hotel paradise. It’s daylight. Tomorrow. The day it all ends.

The day I either save the world or kill it.

Just a normal Monday.

“That dream…” I say but don’t know how to continue. That dream hurt me. It hurt my heart. Scared me. Made me realize I would miss Hart if he were gone, and that realization makes me question my sanity. For years I took medicine to keep him away, but now—not that I’ll ever tell him this, or that I ever want him to know—I have no idea what I would’ve done without him. He kept me alive this long. If not for him, I would have offed myself at home, to save the world. Every minute, every second I breathe now—before I have to be stopped—is a bonus. It’s extra time that I never thought I’d have. Extra time I don’t deserve.

I have Hart to thank for that.

It wasn’t his fault that my father slept with my mother and I was made. It wasn’t Hart’s fault that he trusted an angel. The torture, yeah, part of that was on him. The need for revenge. Yes. That was him. But he wasn’t to blame for everything.