Page 63 of Bones

Rightbehind me.

“It worked…Fuuuuck,” he bit out on a rough drawl under his breath, his hands going to my hips for a second before he dropped them and backed away.

I stood upright and spun around to face him.

“To answer your question,” he said like he hadn’t just pulled off an act worthy of a primetime TV special, “I disappeared the other times because you test every ounce of control I have, and if I stayed, I’d have given in and tasted your mouth. Since I wasn’t sure how that would affect our bond, it seemed smart to hold off till we had time to talk. Disappeared this time because I knew you wouldn’t believe a word out of my mouth till I proved it to you.”

“Where’d you go?” I scrutinized the room and him, still trying to work out how he performed the fun little trick.

Magicians have made it look like the Statue of Liberty vanished or their pretty assistants were cut in half. With practice, this was probably nothing.

“Don’t like to do that with anything in my hands, just in case.” He lifted his flannel and gave me a distracting peek at tanned skin, defined muscles, and the exact right amount of dark hair. I might’ve been in the middle of the wildest experience in my life—and that was saying something—but I wasn’t blind. He pulled a book from the waistband of his jeans and handed it to me.

I glanced at it.

And then my legs gave out, and I collapsed onto the couch. “I forgot that at Black Horse yesterday.”

Him.

The part of my brain that I usually wished I could carve out seemed to wake up and stretch. And it stretched toward him. Like it was reaching for Deke. The sensation was even more disconcerting after a week of near total silence—other than the enraging vision of him with the three women.

Not that they were doing anything illicit in the barely formed image. From the little I saw, they were just standing in a kitchen, but so much of it had been clouded with a weird dust.

My history with Ryan had filled in those blanks.

“If…” I shook my head and cleared my throat. “If you were actually gone, how did you know I asked about you disappearing?”

“Could hear it.” He tapped his head. “In here.”

“And the hollowness?”

“Could feel it.” He tapped his chest. “In here.”

“Why?How?”

“Need the backstory to understand that part, baby.” He took a long, silent moment to gather his thoughts. “A thousand years ago, give or take a century, the use of magicks?—”

“Why do you say it like that? Magicks, not magic.”

“Magic is bullshit. Magicks is real. And people had begun to abuse it.”

“Like beaming across town to get a book?” I deadpanned.

“Darkmagicks,” he clarified as he sat. Rather than returning to his spot on the couch, he took one on the coffee table in front of me. His long legs boxed mine in, keeping me in place. “Humans get a body. They get a soul. They get free will. And what they do with all three decides what their afterlife is. It’s part and parcel of the covenant between the heavens and humanity. Forces began to meddle with that format, stealing souls and using them to power dark magicks. Not only did that create an issue of breaking the promised package since stolen souls can’t reach their earned endpoint, it also left an unchecked evil to run rampant. Because Heaven and Hell and everything in between are dependent on balance, the powers-that-be were allowed to intervene to offset that evil. To save the stolen souls. To prevent the apocalypse.”

I was well-versed with the Book of Revelations. It’d been Pastor Gideon’s favorite scriptures to reference. The fear of promised damnation was how he kept his flock in line. It—along with the added threat of violence—was how he ran his home.

After a year living with the Gideons, I’d had the passages practically memorized.

The same dark cloud of doom I’d gotten every Sunday morning began to creep over me. A tension in my stomach. A bad feeling that lingered in the back of my mind to sour my mood even when I wasn’t directly thinking of it. Hopelessness that sank my heart.

Because I knew I was headed for the fiery hell that was described in vivid, horrific detail.

“So you were created to… what?” I prodded past the lump in my throat. “Fight off the Four Horsemen? I always interpreted them as more of an analogy rather than literal beings.”

Deke shook his head slowly. “Aurora, my siblings and Iarethe Four Horsemen.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

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