Sin Eater (35 page)

“She appears to have flu symptoms, but it seems awfully severe,’ he was saying as he came
into the room. Just as he did, Iola let out a keening scream, gripping the edge of the sheet with both hands and pulling at it while her neck strained with the force of her hollering.

“Holy fuck,” Claudia muttered, just as Iola threw the sheet back again, winding
herself up in it as she continued the whole body-writhing ritual.

Damien was frozen as he watched her, and Claudia couldn’t even get mad at him because Iola was naked. Her chanting was insistent and desperate, and she … she really wasn’t herself.

“Let’s leave her,” Claudia said quietly, turning him out of the room and shutting the door. Damien lowered the phone as they stood in the hall.

“He’ll be here in twenty minutes. Longer if there’s a lot of traffic.” Damien said
quietly, and Claudia nodded.

“Thank you.”

Claudia’s worry for Iola must have been very obvious, because Damien wrapped his thick arms around her tightly, and she turned her face to the side to rest her cheek on his bare skin. His breathing was very steady, she could hear it echo through his thick chest. His pulse was an even thumping in her ear as well.

“Have you ever seen anyone that sick?” She asked, her voice small.

There was a pause as he rubbed circles on her back with his free hand. “No,” he finally said. “Never
that
sick.”

Claudia didn’t know why, but she felt that if Damien
had
seen this before it would make her feel better. Which was ridiculous; after all, they had a doctor on the way.

Essum was worried about his protégé. He’d managed to get the guy checked
into a hotel by convincing the clerk to charge it all to the credit card of the man that checked in ahead of them, and now Jasper was lying prone on the bed, covered in sweat and convulsing in apparent abdominal agony.

Essum was working without a script, and Jasper did
not
look good at the moment. All this work, waiting for the right time … and the
decipio
was all fucked up.

How
did
one circumvent the effect of an unknown metal composite made up of unfiltered evil on the skin of a tool from the side of lightness and good? Fucked if he knew. This kind of thing wasn’t online, and the Poison Control Centre wouldn’t be much help, either.

Use your head,
he thought.
What is pure and good … something to heal a soul of heaven.
Something untainted. Something to inspire Jasper to fulfill his ultimate destiny. Although, he wasn’t into the whole “recognizing your full potential” line of work. Essum’s time on the planet had consisted of finding the worst dregs of society and cutting them off at the knees before sending them back to meet their makers.  Not getting out his pom-poms and shouting “You can do it!”

Jasper started moaning loudly, and it took Essum a moment to pick out that he was moaning words in Latin, chanting an old incantation that took him back a few centuries.

“
Ego tribuo
otium
quod sileo iam ut tu carus vir. Adveho non
eo ire itum
vel in nostrum pratus. Quod pro thy pacis Ego pignus meus animus. Amen.
”

Voro must have held that amulet back when he would say the words that would earn him a goblet of wine, a piece of bread and maybe even a meal. The
Oryx
was almost like a hand-held tape recorder crossed with a mind-melding telephone. It held memories the Sin Eater made a point of sending to it, and it could also transmit messages to other Sin Eaters, or just to the person or being that held the thing. Just like it probably helped the Claudia woman get rid of Jasper. Voro must have sent her a little extra Gatorade to get the job done, so to speak. And Jasper still needed to learn more self-control, which is the only reason the damn thing had worked in the first place. Essum had even had to use his once when he was being robbed in his human form …

How had they gotten the better of him again? Oh yes. He’d just seen Daphne.

He rubbed his eyes. He had to stop thinking of her … but this incident had been the one that caused him he most pain. Not even her death had stung as much as seeing Daphne take the hand of the handsome man that had come to call on her at the request of her father. He was a strapping lad, dressed to the nines, smelling and speaking like the kind of man that
should
be with a lady as well-bred and perfect as Daphne.

In short, nothing like Essum. So of course, he wanted to kill the guy at first sight.

He was watching from the woods like a criminal, and Daphne took the young man on the same walk she’d had him on through their elegant gardens. But this young man stopped and invited her to sit with him a while on a stone bench. Their body language was welcoming to each other. She liked the looks of this man and he definitely liked the looks of her.

Essum was seething, even before this new lothario put his paw out, and Daphne took off her white glove before allowing her pale palm to touch his, allowing the man to kiss the back of that delicate hand. She watched him with great admiration as he did this, and he kept his lips to her skin for a moment longer than good manners would have allowed. This made her chest heave as she inhaled, and he looked up
into those eyes … those beautiful green eyes that Essum saw in the face of every woman he encountered after meeting her. The eye contact was hot, electric; he could feel the pull of it from where he stood, across the enormous garden.

His hands clenched
into fists, he wanted to beat something to a pulp. The stuffy blow-hard in the sharp outfit would have been perfect. Essum was so mad he couldn’t even get in the guy’s head and make him do or say something so terrible that Daphne would bar him from the premises and her company for good.

But since he couldn’t act, struck paralyzed by blinding anger, the couple continued on their walk to the front of the house where Daphne’s mother met them and invited their guest in for afternoon tea.

Essum would have never been invited in for tea. Or allowed to call on their daughter. He wasn’t good enough for her.

Funny, after all this time the thought still nearly had him in tears. But while distracted by that anger he’d been jumped by a group of four beggars that lived in those very woods where he’d been hiding. They took his pocket watch as they beat him, and it took him a moment to get his bearings. One had grabbed at the
Oryx,
and that’s when his strength came back to him. He sent a jolt of hellfire through the chain, which made the man reel back and hit the ground unconscious. Essum could smell his flesh burning as the other three hit the dirt, writhing and holding their heads as he popped the tops off their internal common sense receptors, rendering them mentally incompetent for the rest of their lives. His damage went deep into gray matter when he was really pissed, and he showed those men no mercy whatsoever.

Now as he looked at
Jasper, he thought he might have an answer to what could help him.

“Ego tribuo
otium
… quod sileo iam ut tu … carus vir. Adveho non
eo ire itum
… vel in nostrum pratus … Quod pro thy pacis Ego pignus meus animus … Amen.”

Voro had to close his eyes against the mumbling of those words through Iola’s bedroom door. It sounded like gibberish to Claudia, but he knew damn well what she was saying. God knows he’d said it plenty, too.

“I give easement and rest to thee, dear man. Come not down the lanes or in our meadows. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul. Amen.”

Again, there were no instruction manuals or guides to dealing with this stuff. You were thrown in the water and told to swim, and Voro had no fucking idea what was going on. He knew it wasn’t the flu, though, because for the first time, he smelled evil coming from Iola. Not through something she’d done, but it was … osmosis, maybe? Something else stained her.

Voro thought back to the guy that had attacked Claudia, and how his skin had burned at contact with Voro’s
Oryx
amulet. It was made with metal not found above ground, or anywhere below it. It came from the same place Voro did, and apparently it stung anyone that wasn’t human, or wasn’t like Voro.

So … if this Jasper guy was the
decipio
he was linked in many ways to Iola, since the
decipio
and
frustro
were paired up … could one of their contacts be a mental link that transferred his pain to her?

Maybe. Even though that seemed awfully unfair. The
decipio
was the bad guy here …

Voro rubbed his forehead and kept an arm around Claudia as they walked down Iola’s hallway to the living room. He was an idiot. The
decipio
wasn’t the bad guy,
he
was. He kept forgetting. And if his amulet had caused this, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself –

“Hey, are you okay? I hope there’s not something really nasty going around this building,” Claudia said as he swayed on his feet. She stopped so he could gather himself
together.

Claudia worried about him; he read it from her mental blueprint. How strange to have someone actually concerned for him. He hadn’t felt this in … well, six hundred years.

She helped him ease down onto Iola’s sofa, and as they did so, they were enveloped in the scent of jasmine and vanilla, and Voro had to close his eyes at the heady assault. He was getting that chest ache again, and he knew this one was born from concern for his
frustro
. The being that was created
only
to destroy him.

Voro pulled Claudia to his chest, dropping an arm across her shoulders. She snuggled
into his side without complaint, letting her eyes close as she warmed him. He let his mind slide into Claudia’s for just a moment, and her sense of security and happiness and contentment were so comforting. Maybe it would help him think if he could just hop into a happy, balanced mind.

Before long, he realized Claudia had dozed off on his chest, her breathing soft and steady on his skin. He watched her face, slack in its relaxed state, looking a couple years younger without any stress or worry to deepen any li
nes that might be there. It struck him again how truly beautiful she was. He stroked her dark hair, as much a comfort to him as it might be to her.

That’s when he heard a noise in the hall, and he raised his head, his heart thrusting against his chest wall suddenly as he realized he was looking at Iola, naked in the hallway. Her eyes looked lucid … but she couldn’t be. She was staring at him, unaware she had nothing on. That surely couldn’t be normal behaviour.

He said nothing. He just stared at her, taking in her thin legs, her flat stomach, her long and delicate arms, her sleek neck. Her small but perky breasts. He wanted to take her. He
needed
to stand up, walk to her and penetrate her right where she stood. Roughly, animalistic.

He blinked, and she took a step closer. That’s when he smelled the chocolate.

She still wasn’t talking, and now that he noticed, she hadn’t blinked once yet, either. He eased Claudia to the arm of the sofa, not even having to convince her to stay sleeping. She was exhausted.

He stood and walked to Iola, who looked up at him with wide eyes and parted lips, expectant. His brain was screaming at him to stop, this was a trap, this might kill him and then Essum would win. But his cock was also leading the way, and it was much,
much
louder.

He reached out to put a hand to her shoulder, and waited. Nothing. No burning, no stinging.

Holy hell. Whatever was wrong with her, it was clouding the transmission to protect her from him. He didn’t doubt really why he had
that
figured out so quickly, but another part of him was screaming at him to get inside her.

He put a hand to each side of her face, the skin so tender it made him want to cry. She kept those eyes on him, and even though he knew she had no idea what was happening to her … he nearly kissed her.

He wanted to. Satan’s Wrath, how he wanted to taste her. This touch alone made him believe he could stroke her tongue with his own, maybe even more. But he dropped his hands from her, leaned back.

Her eyes were vacant … those beautiful, eerie green eyes looked at him as though he could have been any man and she would have behaved this very same way.

As he broke contact she moaned, trying to push against him again. He held her back by the arms, trying to be tender, even as she was licking her lips and gnashing her teeth at him.

Holy shit.
Iola was definitely not home at the moment.

There was a knock on the door, and the animal in him was ready to fly to the portal, confront who was there and take their head off with his bare hands because his body was still dying to appease her. But when he caught a whiff of pure worry and concern wafting from under the door … a proverbial bucket of ice was dumped on his back, because it was her doctor on the other side of that door.

Iola grabbed his hair in two fistfuls, trying to put him back to work, but he took her wrists in his hands, then let go, lest the burning start again. When she rose up on tiptoe to try to kiss him and he caught her hands again, holding her at a safe distance.

“Go to bed,” he said softly, and as he did so, something … flickered in her eyes. Like she’d tuned back in. Or just … woken up.

He could smell her confusion now. She was likely wondering why he was here … and then she realized she didn’t have anything on.

She covered her breasts, and she started to panic. In her confusion she also knew she was aroused, and she didn’t know where that had come from, either. But his presence was only making it worse. So she darted back down the hall.

He took a moment to rearrange himself in his jeans. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so that might be interesting to try and explain, but whatever.

Voro opened the door, and when Veneratio looked up at him in confusion and …
hurt
, Voro felt like the biggest asshole ever.

“We met earlier,” he reminded Vinnie lamely without further greeting.

Vinnie just nodded, and Damien stepped aside to let him in. As he closed the door he was saying, “She’s in her room. We were hoping she’d fall asleep but …”

He didn’t finish, because as soon as the doctor was through the door he was down the hall and closing Iola’s bedroom door behind him.

Voro went back to the living room and looked down at Claudia. He couldn’t touch her right now. He had Iola all over him, and it felt … beyond dirty to put his hands on Claudia. He went to the kitchen sink to wash his hands with dish soap. He couldn’t be sure that awful burning wouldn’t start again after a few moments.