Lover Arisen, page 22
Which, of course, she couldn’t. But she got the gist of things just fine.
Turning to her collection, she had to smile.
It was so fucking remarkable, and yet completely apt, how perfect the spell was for her. Then again, over the course of eons, she had come to understand the way the Book worked. Between those covers, in all those infinite parchment pages, was a portal that opened in a different way for whoever it chose to serve, as if each soul who approached it had a separate key for a specific unlocking. And as for the written words themselves? They were infinitely transmutable, all the languages ever spoken or read within its grasp, an endless horizon of power available, expressible in an incalculable number of ways.
Always on its terms, however.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she murmured as her eyes caressed her clothes, her accessories, her shoes. “But you really do know me, don’t you.”
Her spell was the absolute tailored fit for who and what she was, and what she had to do to follow its recipe struck her as magnificent. The second and third readings had been unnecessary. She had known immediately what she was going to use for what had been prescribed.
And for once in her immortal life, she was going to follow instructions.
As desperate as she was for the outcome, she was unhurried as well, the sense of anticipation like a delayed orgasm, something that was a delightful, burning frustration. So she was slow and easy on her wander, zeroing in on her destination in a roundabout way that took her on a review of all that was precious to her, all that she had chosen and curated with care… all that she loved.
Walking by the racks, she put her fingertips out and encountered all manner of fabrics, from blue jean and cotton to satin and silk. Sequins, too. She even paused to pull out a set of Stella McCartney velvet hip-huggers. They were from the Fall/Winter collection a couple of years before.
Annnnnnnnnd now Devina was finally in front of her Birkins, the Lucite stands making her think of that book room back at the Commodore, where the Book had been and been determined to stay. But as she thought about its obstinance, she wasn’t going to get pissy with the thing. Hell, for what it was giving her tonight, she’d be kind and generous to it for the rest of eternity.
Maybe even get it a tufted pillow instead of that trash bin to rest on.
Her eyes lifted to the summit to her Mount Everest of Hermès. That pinnacle display position had remained barren, the stand empty as if a vital organ had been removed, but no transplant was available.
As she summoned back the little coffin, she thought it was so ironic. She’d been in this exact spot, laying to rest her most beloved, figuring it was gone forever and of no more use—and now she was back, finding a purpose for the thing even though it was ruined.
In fact, the ruination was key.
“Who’da thought,” the demon murmured as she opened the casket’s lid.
Reunions with the dead were always sloppy affairs, assuming they were your dead, and as her eyes teared up, she hated the weakness. The resurrection was stinky, too, the scent of the burned leather making her nose wrinkle. Yet she clasped the purse with gentle hands, as if it were pristine, as if it were alive.
Planting her stilettos, she held the Birkin out in front of her. The spell was so simple, so obvious, that she might have been able to guess it herself—or ignored it for being so uncomplicated. But she had seen firsthand the power of the Book’s commands.
And she was choosing this totem wisely.
According to the words meant for her, she was to take a precious object, something that was personal to her, something that had great meaning, and behold it as if she were the lover she sought and the object was her. As she trained all of her adoration and her attention on what she picked, all her wants and desires, her hopes and dreams, her love was the summoning agent, and she would, in the words of the spell, get as she regarded.
The more she projected love, the more love she would receive.
So she decided that, among all her beautiful things, she needed to choose the one that was most like her… and that was the burned shell of the most expensive handbag in the world. Beautiful and ugly by turns, functional and broken at the same time, engendering sorrow for what had been lost and joy for what had once been, it was a contradiction that challenged standards and tested love and loyalty.
Yes, it was hard to admit that she was ugly, but goddamn it, she had value—and parts of her were fucking pristine.
Bottom line, she was done with males flaking off because they saw something in her they didn’t like. Full disclosure was here in her palms, the stand-in for her exactly what she was—and yet she could, she would, love the ruined purse as she had never loved anything else.
And thereby be loved like she deserved.
See? She had made progress. That therapist had once told her she needed to be accurate in her “personal inventory.” Fucking fine. She was being super accurate now—and she could fit a cell phone and a wallet into her fucking effigy to boot.
Oh, and who the hell would have thought that that idiot female who had burned the Birkin had done her a roundabout favor. She’d have kissed that Mae if she could have.
Taking a deep breath, Devina cradled the bag to her breasts. The smell of the singed hide was strong in her nose, but she told herself it was perfume, it was the very best fucking perfume she had ever smelled. Then she unfurled her arms and stared at the bag.
“You are beautiful,” she said, “in every way. You are everything I’ve ever wanted or needed. I will never, ever leave you. Ever…”
As she repeated the words over and over again, a little audible she was adding to the spell, she traced the scales that were still in good condition with her fingertips, feeling the gentle undulations of the texture, noting the subtle changes in coloring. Moving up to the spangle, she turned the touret and pulled free the blackened diamond plates. Even through the soot, the fine gems gleamed, and she cleared some of the residue off with her thumb. It was a struggle to free the flap, one side of the twin handles especially compromised. But then the inside was exposed.
“Yes…”
The inside was positively immaculate. Fresh as the day it had left the workstation of its craftsman. Resplendent.
Just like her. Sure, there were some superficial issues, but under the bullshit, she was perfection.
Sheer fucking perfection.
Devina remembered everything about buying the Birkin, how she’d felt as it had come out of its herringboned bag in the private room at the store. How her whole body had tingled with orgasmic joy, how the rush at seeing it and knowing it was hers had made her head spin, how her heart had pounded and she’d let out a giddy sound. She was careful to recall how the S.A., who she’d worked with for a couple of years, had stood back and watched in total approval.
Devina had taken herself out to dinner at Astrance that night because she’d wanted others to see what she had—
It was as she pictured herself walking into the tiny, then three-star Michelin restaurant that it happened.
The bag became a window she could look through, the precise line of its form containing a bottom-out that revealed…
An unearthly landscape. Which was not gruesome or particularly unearthly. She just knew within her being that what she was shown was not upon the earth: White marble floors and white walls with candles on stanchions throwing yellow light that did not move in any drafts.
A sanctuary and yet… a place of evil.
Like a camera lens shifting focus, something was pulling out of the white landscape… a bed. A bedding platform—
She gasped.
There was a male lying on it. He was naked and sprawled on white sheets, his blond hair gleaming, his body absolutely magnificent.
Her thought was he was just like a Birkin, lying on its tufted, contoured tissue, inside the white interior of its orange box.
The camera-like angle changed again, swooping around to zero in on a patrician face with high cheekbones and sensual lips, his arched brows arrogant even in his repose, that pale hair so thick and gently curling. And then the visual altered once more, shifting to his shoulders, going across his well-developed pectorals, floating down over his abdominal muscles to his—
“Holy fuck.”
Yeah, that’ll do just fine. Yup. Juuuuuuust fine.
And then she was back up at his face.
It was all perfect, what she would have asked for if she’d had to check off what she’d thought was attractive. And she had the strangest feeling that this was like a virtual shopping trip—and she got to choose whether or not to buy him.
Devina stared at that face. The masculine beauty of it was on a par with what she saw in the mirror any time she checked her makeup, and she liked that high standard. But could she look at this for an eternity?
“I want to see his eyes,” she demanded.
There was a rustle, and at first she thought it was the sheets, as if a plane of sound had opened within the connection. But no, it was the Book.
She looked across at where the tome floated in the air. “His eyes. I need to see them.”
The ruffle was a clear “nope,” although she’d have been hard put to define exactly how she knew that.
“Please?” What the hell, she figured, the polite route had gotten her this far. “Pretty please with sprinkles on top?”
Wasn’t that a human saying?
When the Book just repeated the same ruffle of pages, she cursed under her breath and stared back into the Birkin-window. The male was perfect—and he would adore her, just as she had adored the bag. What did she care about his eye color?
“Fine,” she announced, “I’ll take him.”
Having made the pronouncement, she set the Birkin back on top of its stand and sent the little coffin away. For this service, she would keep the bag permanently in its place, ruined or not: Finally, after so much heartache, she was going to get what she had always wanted, what she deserved.
A male who loved all of her unconditionally.
And they were going to live happily ever after.
Or she was going to beat his ass.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Talking.
Super-fast talking, right above Nate’s face. Also… some beeping… electronic beeping that reminded him of the old-fashioned video game that one of the staff at the lab had taught him to play, the one where the black screen was cut in half by a straight vertical line and two slashes volleyed a dot back and forth. Except this beeping was rhythmic and even—
Oh, God. The smell. It was just like the lab, an antiseptic waft in the air, and layered on top of that the saltiness of tears and a copper tinge that suggested someone had been bleeding.
Yup, he was back in the lab. He was having one of his lab dreams where he…
No, wait. He had been bleeding. He was the one who’d had blood shed.
His brain was slow on the uptake, but then it all came back: Being at the club with Rahvyn and telling her they could go. Her pulling a yes-please. Them heading out the door.
Andthenacarhadscreechedaroundthecornerandsomeonehadshot—
Nate popped his eyes wide, jacked right up, and threw both hands out in front of himself.
Like that could stop the bullet from hitting him in the stomach.
Except… he instantly realized he wasn’t out on the street, and there was no car, and he wasn’t shot—
Arms were suddenly around him, hugging him, holding him close and comforting him. Two people. One on either side of him. Tears, now, lots of them.
His parents? What were they doing in the lab?
Wait, this wasn’t the lab. This was a hospital room.
His awareness struggled to catch up with it all—until he breathed in deep and smelled his mom’s shampoo, the Pantene kind that she liked and always used.
“Mom?” he said hoarsely, because he was still so confused.
His human mom, the one who had adopted him along with his new father, put her face in his. She looked—well, she looked awful, her cheeks blotchy and slick with tears, her breathing rough like she was about to pass out.
And then his father’s visage was right next to his own, too. In contrast to his mom, his sire was paper white. Murhder had been crying, too, though. Was crying now—
“Am I okay?” Nate blurted. Then he looked down at his stomach.
Okay, so he had actually been shot: Beneath a staining of orange and some dried blood, there was a small round hole over to the left of his belly button. It didn’t hurt. In fact, nothing in his body felt bad—other than a damp patch at the small of his back, which he instinctively took to be where he had bled out.
His mom put her hands on him, patting at his arms, his shoulders, now his cheeks, as if she couldn’t believe she was touching him. And she was talking to him, his father, too. He could hear them pretty well, and he supposed their words made some sense. But he really couldn’t track anything—
“Rahvyn!” he shouted abruptly. “Where is Rahvyn?”
What if she’d been hurt—
“She’s…” His father couldn’t seem to go on.
“Amazing,” his mom finished.
For some reason, this brought out a fresh round of emotion from them both, their hands clasping his, their words rushing out faster.
“Where is she?” He glanced around and saw all kinds of clinical equipment, but nothing else. Not even a chair for someone to sit in. “Is she all right?”
Okay, yeah, sure, fine, they’d kind of answered that—he seriously doubted that anyone would use the word “amazing” if she’d had a bad injury. But he’d feel better if he could just see her.
“She saved you,” Murhder choked out. “I don’t know what she did… but you were… gone.”
“Gone where,” Nate asked. And then he licked his lips. “Can I have something to drink—”
He barely had the request out and his mom was lunging across to a stainless steel sink like if he didn’t have a cup of water in the next two and a quarter seconds, his internal organs were going to fail on him and ooze out the back of his gunshot wound.
As she went to bring a white plastic cup to his mouth, she spilled some on the blue sheet that was draped over his lower body. His hands were steadier than hers, so he helped hold things, and after he finished what was in there, he stared down at his abdomen.
And half expected to see a little arc of H2O coming out of his second belly button.
When he seemed to be water soluble—no, wait, that was the wrong word, and “water resistant” wasn’t right, either—he held the cup out to his mom. He didn’t even get to the first syllable of the request for a little more. She rushed back at the sink, and this time, her hands shook less during the handoff.
He drank three cupfuls, and the taste was magical. Cool and pure. No chemicals.
“Water retention,” he announced. “Or maybe retentive, if that’s a word.”
His parents looked at him in a way that made him wonder if they’d be less surprised if his head spun around.
Patting his tummy, he said, “I’m holding water. No leaks.”
His mom sniffled and wiped her nose with a paper towel. “That’s right. No more leaking.”
“We thought we’d lost you,” Murhder whispered.
Meeting the stare of his father, Nate had a thought that he didn’t really grasp or appreciate what had happened to him. It was as if his parents had been watching a different movie: His had been on cable, where there were commercial breaks that were kind of boring, and a storyline that had a little drama, but nothing that knocked your socks off or was all that revelatory or surprising.
Theirs had been a raw documentary on war atrocities that had won an Oscar for Worst Heartbreaking Thing on Film Ever.
“Are you okay?” he asked, looking back and forth between them.
“We are now,” his father said. “Now… we’re okay.”
It was at this point that he could finally see them properly. His adoptive sire was still so menacing-looking in all that leather he always wore outside of the house, his red-and-black hair sticking straight up as if he’d been pulling his hands through the stuff and nearly ripping it out. His mom was smaller, but no less strong, even if her normally direct honey-colored eyes were watery and her I’m-a-scientist clothes were rumpled.
“I feel all right,” he told them. Mostly because he was trying out the response in case, consciousness and lack of pain to the contrary, somehow he wasn’t. “I really am.”
On the floor, all around the table he was on, there was bloody gauze and discarded medical equipment. Clearly, someone had saved his life—and worked hard doing it.
“I really am okay.”
Nate hugged both of them—and then wondered how long he had to wait before he could ask to speak with Rahvyn. He didn’t want to be insensitive to his parents, but he had to see her. He just really wasn’t going to believe anyone but himself when it came to making sure she was all right—and not just in a not-been-shot sort of way.
If he’d seen her almost die in front of him like that? Even if she wasn’t that into him, it would be terrifying. Especially as he knew she’d had trauma in her previous life. Lots and lots of trauma.
“Thank God Rahvyn called for help,” he said, by way of easing into a discussion that would involve leaving them and finding her. Or them breaking up this family moment by including her. “I mean, quick thinking, right? Did Dr. Manello operate on me out in the field? Because it happened outside of the club?”
As he glanced back and forth again, he saw their expressions change, subtle tension replacing the open love and powerful relief.
“What,” he said. “Did someone else patch me up?”
When they still didn’t respond, he cleared his throat. “Listen, I’m worried about Rahvyn, okay? She must be so freaked out. Can you just… can you bring her here?” He looked around. “Wherever ‘here’ is? I really need to make sure she’s not in shock or something.”
“You don’t have to worry about her,” Murhder murmured. “Ever.”
Nate frowned, some instinct flaring, not that he could exactly decipher what it was trying to tell him.
