CHAPTER EIGHT
Shattered.
The world exploded, blinding light like a billion prisms in the sun, and then pain roared through my body, so excruciating I was certain I could not survive it.
Fractured.
I came to consciousness in fragments, every nerve ending in my body screaming in agony.
Splintered.
Pieces of me lay scattered like shining splinters of crystal. I gathered them frantically, scooping up great heaps of razor-edged shards of Suzanne, patting them into place with bloodied hands.
But parts were missing. Nothing fit right. Essential portions of me had been crushed into fine, shimmering flakes and set to drift on otherworldly winds.
"Suzanne."
No, no time to talk. I had to put me back together, splinter by splinter, like a jigsaw puzzle from hell. One sliver at a time, each drawing blood, until the floor ran slick with it, a river of red carrying away important chunks. I snatched at them, sobbing desperately, only to lose others to the flood.
"Suzanne." The voice prodded me, insistent this time. I turned, and the river of blood carried away yet more of me. "Wake up."
I opened my eyes to stare into eternity. Flares of color drifted through the gem-like depths. And then it moved away, resolving into two orbs like windows into heaven. Eyes. Angel eyes.
"Can you understand me? We have little time." An arm beneath my shoulders lifted me from the floor. I struggled in protest, not wanting to slosh through the blood. He persisted, gently haranguing me until I sat upright, gasping and shaking.
There was no river carrying away splinters of me. There was blood, both Ian's and mine, and shards of broken glass and shattered drywall. But I still felt like parts of me were missing, and now, staring up at him, I knew what parts those were. The bindings that had tied me to the malakhim were broken.
"Oh God, I—" I choked on the words. "I killed him!" The world spun and it was only with great effort that I managed not to throw up.
"Yes." He crouched before me, staring at me intently. "How did you know which one of us to kill?"
I shook my head. The details were still so muzzy. "I don't … it was just … " I tried to think, pushing aside the persistent memory of my splintered, bloody dream. "He worked too hard to convince me you were the killer. And there's the fine line between killing and murder, a line he wanted to pretend wasn't there."
"I'd have thought him taking you to a cemetery rather than a church for the shielding would have clued you in. Did I teach you nothing, Suzanne?"
I shrugged weakly.
"And then his taking you through our realm on a six-week starvation trek should have been enough to convince you of his guilt." Raum grinned a little, folding his legs under him to sit yoga-style in front of me.
I smiled, surprised that I could do so and relieved that it felt good. "There's that, too." My smile faded. "Why did he choose me?"
His grin faded too. "He's been after you for quite some time. In fact, the night you saw me on the roof—the night we met—he was poking around, trying to find a way around our defenses."
"Our defenses?" I repeated.
"With a demon like Icarus after you, you don't think I was the only one protecting you, do you? I'm just the only one you saw, because I wasn't being careful enough."
I frowned at the thought of being completely oblivious to a stalking demon—and to my heavenly guard. "It's because of what I did to Zanna, isn't it? That's why he noticed me."
His smile was kind. "Like you're the first one to make a mistake, Suzanne. He probably would only have tormented you a little, prodded you farther into immoral behavior, but for me."
"Mortal enemies?"
"Immortal enemies," he corrected. "We'd been friends. I was there when Michael cast them from heaven. I chose not to rebel, and he's been needling me ever since. When he realized I was your guardian, it increased his desire to get to you."
I digested this silently. To think of another realm of unseen beings able to interact so closely with mine, able to persuade and lead us astray without our ever suspecting their influence, was disconcerting.
"It is not your fault that Zanna is dead," he said quietly. "It's mine."
"Wasn't anyone protecting her?" I couldn't help my accusatory tone.
"We tried," Raum said sadly. "But she was so deep in her bitterness, and making very bad choices, that there were more of them around her than there were of us."
"But he already had you—why did he wait so long to get me? You were out of the way."
"You had other protectors, so you had to go with him willingly. Once he shielded you, no one could find you. He had to lay the trail—the other murders—and he had to lay it carefully so you would believe I was the killer. He's a patient fellow, but he's also somewhat stupid. It never occurred to him that you would have regrets about stealing Ian from Zanna; it meant he had to work a little harder. And remember—three years is barely any time for us. He probably had to scramble to get everything in place in that short a time."
I thought I understood now. "So he weakened me by the long journey, dumped me off on Ian, and then lured me up to the attic where he tried to convince me to kill you for him."
"Precisely. That would have changed things dramatically. With the strongest of your protectors out of the way, with you having murdered an innocent being, you would have been easy pickings."
"He would have killed me slowly, you mean."
Raum shook his head, his mouth tightening. "He almost certainly would have killed Ian right away—or made you do it. I don't think he would have killed you for many years. But it would have pleased him to drive you farther and farther away from forgiveness and redemption after how hard we worked to protect you from him."
Strangely enough, that made perfect sense to me. But Russ was dead now, and my need for protection not as pressing. "What now, Raum?"
He looked down at his hands, clasped together and dangling in the space between his folded legs. "Now I put things right. Well," he amended. "I can never put things right, really—too many people have died. But I can put things as right as I can—for you and Ian, anyway."
I stared at him, remembering something Russ had said. When it's all settled and he's dealt with, I can take away the memory of all of this.
"You mean you'll make it all go away. You'll take away the memory of … of everything."
"Not quite. I can't completely take away the memories—too much has happened outside of our little trio here. Zanna, for instance." His eyes flicked to Ian, who lay in an unconscious sprawl beside me. "There are scars, both physical and emotional, that can't be totally erased."
My hand drifted up to right breast, where his mark still scarred my flesh. "It won't go away?"
"His bond canceled mine as soon as you accepted it, and you broke his bond when you killed him. You're free of us," he said gently. "The physical scars will never go away, but your memory of how you got them will change."
"Maybe I don't want it to. Maybe I'd rather live with the memories."
"It doesn't work that way. Love has to be strictly human for you, Suzanne. Those are the rules."
"And love for you has to be—?"
"Strictly divine." His smile was somewhat sad, but behind the sorrow was a transcendent joy I knew could never be matched with a human relationship. "Are you ready?"
"Wait," I said quickly, wanting to hold onto him for just a few minutes longer. "I know I won't remember any of this, but I want to know—where did Russ's body go?"
"No body," he replied promptly. "We're nothing but energy, forced into a shape." I arched a brow. "That's all you are too, you know, just energy, but in a different way than us."
"So all those times we … er … "
His smile blossomed. "Electrifying, yes?" I couldn't help but laugh. "Now is the time to say goodbye, Suzanne. The police will want through that door—" He motioned to the attic stairs "—and I'm expected to resume my duties as your guardian. And nothing more." He frowned s
ternly, as though I had suggested something indecent.
I could do this. Hadn't I proven I was brave? I'd just spent the last six weeks in the presence of a lethal fallen angel, after all, and struck him down when he would have killed me. But it was truly a slice of heaven being with Raum after so long, to drink in his face, to fall into those eyes that were so like verdant green meadows.
My voice quivered and tears spilled from my eyes as I said, "All right, then. Goodbye, Raum."
"Ah, Suzanne," he murmured and leaned forward, rocking up on his knees to press one last kiss on my lips.
Pain and light everywhere around me. Voices shouting, fingers prodding, hands lifting. Suffocating. I was suffocating. Gasping. Swirling blackness with tiny sparks of light. Then … nothing.
My hand flailed and clawed at the plastic oxygen mask. Cool fingers firmly grasped it and brought it to my side, strapping it down. Voices sang out numbers, words, that I couldn't comprehend in any sensible manner. An annoying wail rose above it all, shrieking and waning and shrieking and waning and…
I gave up trying to figure it all out, and let go of consciousness again.
When I next opened my eyes, it was to pale green walls and an IV drip in my good arm; the other was heavy with a plaster cast. A nurse in Marvin Martian scrubs bustled around my bed, changing the bag of fluid and taking vitals. She smiled when I opened my eyes.
"Well, look who's awake," she said soothingly. "Do you know where you are?"
"Hospital?" I posed it more as a question than an answer.
"Indeed. You've been through a lot, dear, so you just rest and don't worry about a thing."
You've been through a lot.
"What … happened to me?"
She goggled at me, and then realization dawned. "But you've been unconscious for a couple of days—head injury. Of course you wouldn't remember."
More than happy to fill in the blanks, she told me of my ordeal: kidnapped off the street by a serial killer, held in some unknown location for six weeks, starved and dehydrated, until I somehow escaped and walked in a complete daze to Ian's house—unaware that my captor had followed me. He got the jump on both Ian and me, and after an altercation in the attic, where he'd taken us—undoubtedly with the intent of murdering us—the police had shown up. Our attacker fled the scene, and Ian and I had been transported to the hospital with numerous injuries.
Well, that was my nutshell version; her version actually took much longer to tell, and not a lot of it made sense. Some of those gaps were filled in later when the police came to take my statement—such as they'd shown up at the penultimate moment because they were coming to ask me some follow-up questions from their interview two days before the last attack, an interview I didn't remember at all.
Since I'd sustained a concussion during the attack, the nurse assured me, it wasn't uncommon to lose the memories of several days or even weeks before the event after a head injury. I tried not to worry about it, but something felt wrong about the whole story. The pieces didn't fit quite right, but I had nothing else to fit in their place, so I accepted what I was told and tried to move on.
Ian was less complacent about the whole thing. He was released from the hospital the day after we were admitted, and after making sure I was going to be fine, he took a leave of absence from work and retreated to the depths of his Queen Anne, disconnecting both the phone and the doorbell. I suppose I couldn't blame him; there he'd been, minding his own business for the last five years since our break-up, and I show up on his doorstep out of the blue after having been missing for over a month, trailing mayhem and misery in my wake.
Not exactly the best way to get back into a man's good graces.
He asked me one question before leaving that even now, a year later, I still hadn't figured out how to answer.
"Why did you come to me, Suzanne? When you escaped, you could have gone to the police. You could have gone anywhere. So why did you come to me?"
In other words, why did you bring this crap to my doorstep?
I stared out across the park toward Puget Sound, frowning a little. The police had asked me the same question, and the only answer I could give was I hadn't been thinking clearly in my traumatized state.
The real answer was "No idea." And the question no one had thought to ask but which haunted me day and night was: how had I found Ian's house? I'd had no clue where he lived, and yet I walked there when I escaped.
Some questions had no answers. I would have to be content never knowing precisely what happened to me, and find a way to live with the gaping holes and the disquiet they caused.
The bank welcomed me back with relief. An extra security guard was hired for the main purpose of making sure my assailant never had another chance to nab me. The fact that he'd never been caught worried them greatly, but me—well, something deep inside me said I'd seen the last of him.
I still felt that essential pieces of me—of the me I'd known before all this happened—were missing, but maybe they weren't bad pieces. One day a subordinate remarked, "You seem different, Suzanne. Stronger, more at peace." She studied my face for a long, uncomfortable moment and then added, "And not as sad as you used to be."
Perhaps, but I couldn't explain why—because I didn't know. I rather suspected the reason lay within those missing pieces.
I turned away from the Sound to resume my jog, and for a second I saw from the corner of my eye what looked like a man made from a pillar of light. My heart leapt. It was—it was—
But I had no way to finish the thought. A second later, the man moved off to the east and I realized the sinking sun behind him had set him ablaze and made him appear to be made of light.
Laughing a little, I turned and began jogging back up the trail toward the parking lot. A small child, squealing with laughter, darted in front of me, followed by an older sibling, and I swerved around them to avoid a collision. My foot plunged into a hole more than likely dug by those same kids, and I crashed to earth, taking with me another jogger whose path had intersected mine at an inopportune moment.
"Oh, God," I said, rolling onto my rear. "I'm so sor—"
He raised his head, saw me and groaned, and flopped back onto the ground. "You'll be the death of me someday, Suze."
"I'm really sorry, Ian. I tried to avoid the kids and fell in a hole I'm sure they dug with the sole purpose of killing me."
His chuckle became a rolling laugh, and soon he was fairly howling. I smiled, a little puzzled, but by the time he'd gained control of himself, I was giggling a little myself.
Ian pushed himself to his feet, looked at me for a long moment, squinting against the sun, and then reached down to haul me upright. He brushed the dirt and grass from his clothes and his bare legs.
"Come on," he said, grinning with a hint of his old charm. "Let's go get a drink."
He started off toward the parking lot, and I fell into step beside him. Halfway there, his hand swung back and bumped against mine. Our fingers twined.
A peculiar feeling of déjà vu crept over me, the first of many, but I pushed it aside. Too much trouble to chase it down, and it would lead to a dead end anyway. I let it go.
And finally, I knew peace.