Had he seen it, too?
The fire that forever engulfed him surged, the heat blistering. It licked over my skin and caused the most explicit sensation. All thoughts of the being fell away as a tendril of desire coiled inside me.
When he turned back to me, his expression was still granite hard. It bit into me, tugged at my overheated core. His burnished irises dropped to my mouth, and he took a minuscule step closer. If Bobert hadn’t interrupted, I would have jumped his bones right then and there.
Yes, near me was a dangerous place for Reyes to be.
“Are you okay, pumpkin?”
I tore my gaze off the object of my most humiliating fantasies and melted into Bobert’s embrace. Cookie joined us for a threesome. Score!
“That was crazy,” I said, suddenly realizing we’d just survived an earthquake.
“Yes, it was.”
I pulled back. “Have you ever been in an earthquake before?”
They exchanged glances, hedged a little, and then Bobert said, “Yeah, in a way.”
Cookie nodded. “A couple. You know, little ones here and there. Nothing major.”
“Well, screw that.” I took the carafe and headed for the coffeepot. “I, for one, am never moving to California.”
Erin and Cookie swept up broken glass as several of the customers went outside to assess the damage there. Fire trucks pulled up, but there didn’t seem to be any smoke. Francie cashed out a couple of customers, then went to help Dixie with a stack of files that had fallen over in her office.
Stepping out of the circle of warmth created by Reyes’s presence, I started for the kitchen to see if I could help with anything there. A departed woman stepped into my path, drawing me up short. The top of her head barely reached my chin. She had on a plain blue dress and a gray sweater. Her graying hair was mostly hidden by a floral headscarf, and deep grooves lined her soft brown eyes. I looked back to see if Reyes saw her, too. He gave no indication that he did. His unwavering focus was still on me, so I couldn’t talk to her there.
“You are the light,” she said. In Portuguese! I knew another language. What were the odds?
I nodded toward the restroom and had every intention of going there in hopes that she would follow me. Instead, she stepped forward as though she were going to go through me. I didn’t have time to tell her she couldn’t do that. I was solid to the departed, and they were solid to me. Or they had been up until that moment, because instead of bumping into me and bouncing back, she passed right through. That was new.
I’d assumed it would be like when a departed passed through any one else. She would just pass through me as though I weren’t there. But that didn’t happen. When she stepped forward, something magical happened. I saw a light swallow her just before she disappeared. And then I saw… everything.
Her childhood. Her death. I saw everything. I felt everything. All at once. All of the emotion. All of the heartbreak and triumph. All of the joys and sorrow. They hit me like a tidal wave.
Air disappeared. The world fell away. And Ana’s life literally flashed before my eyes.
She was from Barrancos, a small village that lay on the border between Portugal and Spain, where they had their own language, Barranquenho. She knew five languages, in fact, even though she grew up very poor.
Her mother was a seamstress, and Ana followed in her footsteps. It was how she met her husband, a famous cavaleiro, a horseman bullfighter, Benito Matias. He’d been knifed in a bar fight in her small village one night. When they found the medical clinic closed, his friends had taken him to her, begged her to stitch him up so his father wouldn’t find out.
She did, and it was her memory of him that drowned me. That intoxicated me. He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. And judging from the way he’d gazed at her that night, Benito felt much the same way. They fell in love, and she found herself in the middle of a real-life Cinderella story.
He took her to his family’s estate, where she ended up designing all of his mother’s clothes as well as many of the other family members’. She became famous in her own right. They had three sons and one daughter. Then a wave of heartache punched me in the gut. Knocked the air from my lungs. They lost their youngest son to scarlet fever. The agony of that loss ripped through me, the wound still fresh somehow, as though the concept of time became meaningless in this place. We were floating in the space between dreams and reality, between memories and emotion. Sorrow choked me. Clawed at my heart until we slid past the heartache to more jubilant times.
Her other three children grew up healthy and happy. There were bad spells, of course, but her love for Benito never wavered. That was why she didn’t cross when she’d died of breast cancer three years earlier. She was waiting for the love of her life, Benito. He’d died just moments before she sought me out.
And then I understood. I was a portal of some kind, and Ana knew it. She literally crossed through me to where Benito – to where her whole family – awaited her. How was such a thing even possible?
When the world materialized around me again, it was spinning much faster than it had been before. The floor tilted, rocketed toward me, and I lost my balance. Either we were having another earthquake or I was about to face-plant.
A microsecond before I played tonsil hockey with a square of cracked linoleum, steely arms encircled my waist and plucked me out of the tumbling air. Fire rushed over me. Heat enveloped me. Unable to stop the world from spinning at dizzying speeds, my head fell back against a wide shoulder. Darkness began to settle around me, and as though from a distance, I heard my savior’s deep voice say one word: Dutch.
6
I have seen things.
Awful things.
Empty coffee cup things.
—T-SHIRT
Voices. Angry voices. That was the first thing I heard when I swam back to the glittering edge of consciousness. One voice belonged to tall, dark, and deadly. I’d recognize that smooth tenor anywhere. Surprising since I’d only heard it a few times. I couldn’t place the other’s, but it seemed familiar.
“She could have destroyed the entire block —” the male voice I didn’t recognize said.
“She could have destroyed the entire planet,” Reyes countered.
“— but she didn’t,” the other one continued. Osh, perhaps? “This doesn’t change anything. We stick to the plan.”
Someone else spoke then. Another male, but younger. Hispanic. “Aye, dios mío.” Angel. He was the first departed I’d actually talked to after Day One, and I only talked to him because he wouldn’t leave me alone until I did. I was in denial at the time, and pretending he didn’t exist kept me in my happy place. But he harped on and on about how he could give me the best night of my life and swearing that once I went cold, sex never got old.
Seriously. He was thirteen. He told me. I told him I had a really strong gag reflex. He pretended to be offended but continued to hit on me every chance he got. I wondered if exorcists charged by the hour. If I saved up my tips…
“You two are like cheerleaders,” he said, “fighting over the quarterback.”
There was a silence that I suspected was filled with glares before Angel continued.
“Mira, I get it. You’re afraid she’ll ascend. Scared she’ll come to her senses and leave your ass.”