Devina's taunt ricocheted around Vin's inner pinball machine, triggering all kinds of evil bells and anti-bonus points: Jim and Marie-Terese had been alone...in her car...going back to his studio...

"You know everyone you've been with?" Devina said to Marie-Terese. "You must have an incredible memory. But right now only one of those men matters - isn't that true, Vin?"

This was a crossroads, he thought, a place of choosing one or the other way to go.

And he had the crystal clear sense that if he let what Devina was saying sink in, he was lost forever - yet there was a side of him that found what she was saying inescapable: Marie-Terese had been alone with Jim, and she had been with men for money, and if those the pair of them had been together sexually, that was something he wouldn't be able to get over.

Devina's voice dropped low. "You were always afraid of turning into your father. And here you are, getting played by a whore."

Vin took a halting step toward her and away from Marie-Terese. Played by a whore...

Images of his father and mother were amplified by Devina's words and the reality of what Marie-Terese had done for a living.

Played by a whore...

He focused on Devina, really seeing her...

"You're so right," he whispered, the truth revealed to him.

Abruptly, Devina's face and eyes changed, sympathy warming her features and draining out the anger. "I don't want this for you. Any of it. Just come back to me, Vin. Come back."

He walked forward, getting closer and closer, and she lifted her arms out to him. When he was in front of her, he reached up and brushed one of those dark waves back from her ear. Leaning in, he put his mouth close and tightened his hold on her hair.

"Vin...yes, Vin." His name was spoken with relief and triumph. "This is the way it needs to be - "

"Fuck. You." When she started to yank back, he held her in place by the skull. "You're the whore."

Trez had called it. Back at the Iron Mask, the guy had said that a moment would come when he'd have to believe what he knew of Marie-Terese instead of what he had always feared would be true about a woman he cared about. "You're not welcome here," he said, releasing Devina with a shove and going back to Marie-Terese. As he grabbed onto his woman's arms and held her behind him, he wished he were in the master bedroom, because his gun was there. "Get. Out."

All at once, the air around Devina warped, as if her fury were causing a molecular disturbance, and he braced himself for impact. Instead of lashing out, though, she seemed to gather herself.

With an eerie control, she walked over to the windows, and his first thought was sending Marie-Terese from the room. Unfortunately, the distance between the view and the open door was short enough so that Devina could close it easily - and the bitch was staring into the glass, effectively giving herself eyes in the back of her head.

"You can't rescind the pact, Vin. It doesn't work that way."

"The hell it doesn't."

Devina turned around and wandered over to the bed. Bending down, she picked up his boxers and looked over the rumpled duvet and the tossed-around pillows.

"Messy, messy. Do you want to tell me exactly what you did to her, Vin? Or should I use my imagination? She's had so much practice, I'm sure she satisfied you."

Devina deliberately rearranged a pillow, returning it to a spot against the headboard. With her attention briefly distracted, Vin moved fast, pushing Marie-Terese backward into the bathroom and slamming the door shut. When the lock was immediately turned, he took a deep breath even though it was clear that Devina had no problems getting through Schlage's best dead bolts.

Devina's black orbs flicked up. "You do realize if I wanted to get in there I could."

"You'd have to go through me first. And somehow I don't think you can do that, can you. If you were going to kill me or her right now, you'd have done so the second you walked in here."

"You just tell yourself that if it makes you feel better." Leaning down, she took something off of the twisted duvet. "Well, what do you know. I believe I have - "

Devina froze in midspeech and swiveled her head around so that she looked out the windows. Abruptly, her brows screwed down over the black holes of her eyes, and the features of her face morphed briefly, showing a flash of what he'd seen of her real side: For a split second, all that gorgeous beauty was replaced with rotted, gray sheets of flesh, and he could have sworn he caught a whiff of dead meat.

Shit, maybe it should have freaked him out more, but he knew from experience that the unexplained and unexplainable were no less real for their being crazy. More important, Marie-Terese was on the other side of a thin door, and he was going to fight to the death to protect his woman - no matter what the fuck it was coming at her.

Human...demon...combo of the two. Definitions didn't matter.

Devina looked back at him. Slipping something into the pocket of her coat, she said in an oddly echoing voice, "I'll be seeing you both very soon. I have business elsewhere."

"You're going to get a facial?" he said. "Good call."

With a hiss, like she wanted to claw his eyes out, she dissolved into a gray mist and ghosted out of the room, boiling across the carpet and down the stairs.

Vin jolted forward, slammed the bedroom door, and locked it, even though he had a feeling that in that form she could just gust right under the thing. Whatever, it was the best he could do.

He went right to the bathroom and knocked. "She's gone, but I don't know for how - "

Marie-Terese threw open the door. She was white faced and scared to death, but her first words were: "Are you okay?"

It was at that moment that he knew he loved her. Plain and simple.

There was no time to go into that shit now, though.

Vin kissed her quickly. "I want you out of this place. In case she comes back here."

And as soon as Marie-Terese was safe, he was going to call Jim. He needed one hell of a wingman, and he couldn't think of anyone better than a son of a bitch who'd already beaten death once and didn't seem freaked out by shit that would make most guys take a crap in their Calvins.

Abruptly, she wobbled. "I¨CI think I'm going to pass out - "

"Put your head down - come on, kneel for me..." He laid his hand on her bare shoulder and gently eased her onto the floor. Then he bent her over so that her long hair touched the marble and her hands fell to her ankles. "Breathe nice and slow."

As she took a couple of inhales and her body shuddered, he wanted to peel his own skin from his bones. Goddamn him, he was worse than her ex-husband. Much more destructive.

Even though his heart was in the right place for the first time in his adult life, what he had exposed her to was more horrifying than anything the mob could pull out of their back pockets.

And it wasn't like that bunch of sleep-with-the-fishes types were nancies.

Marie-Terese glanced over at him. "Her eyes...What the hell did I just see?"

"Vin! Yo, Vin?"

At the sound of the muffled holler, he leaned around the doorjamb and called out, "Jim?"

"Yeah," came the response. "I'm here with reinforcements, as they say."

"In that case, come up." This was perfect. There was a back exit on the second floor they could get Marie-Terese out of - and wouldn't it be great to do that with some cover.

"I'm going to run across and get some clothes on," he told her. "How about you get dressed, too?"

When she nodded, he kissed her, went and gathered up her clothes for her and then closed the bedroom door on his way out.

As heavy boots hit the stairs, Vin went to his room, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and got his gun out of the bedside table - all the while hoping like hell that the "backup" was along the lines of Jim.

And what do you know, they were. The two big bastards were the ones who'd been at the hospital after Jim had been electrocuted - and in spite of the fact that the pair were dressed as civilians, they had the stares of fighters.

Jim, on the other hand, had the glassy, hollow eyes of someone who'd been in a bad car accident. Clearly, he'd had some bad news recently, and yet his voice was still strong and level as he nodded to the one on the left first.

"This is Adrian. And Eddie. They're our kind of friends, if you know what I mean."

Thank fuck, Vin thought.

"Your timing couldn't be better," he said, shaking the guys' hands. "You wouldn't believe who just left."

"Oh, I bet we would," Jim muttered.

"So I got some questions for you," the one with the piercings said. "We know your girlfriend. Very well, unfortunately."

"She's not my girlfriend."

"Well, she's not out of your life yet, unfortunately. But we're going to try to take care of that. Our boy Jim here says that when you were seventeen, you performed some kind of ritual. Can you describe it?"

"It was supposed to get rid of what's inside of me."

Naturally, Marie-Terese opened the guest room door at that moment. Dressed in her jeans and fleece, she had pulled back her hair and tucked her hands into the front pockets of her pullover. "What's inside of you?" she asked.

Vin rubbed his face and glanced back at the men. Before he could figure out how to shade the truth appropriately, Marie-Terese cut off his mental gymnastics. "I want to know everything, Vin. The whole deal. And I deserve to know now that I've seen her up close - because frankly, I'm not sure what I saw just now."

Shit. As much as he wanted to keep her out of things, he was hard-pressed to deny her reasoning. But man, he wished like hell he didn't have to have this conversation.

"Gentlemen, will you give us a minute alone?" he said without looking away from her eyes.

"You got any beer around here?" Adrian asked.

"Fridge by the wet bar in the living room. Jim knows the way."

"Good call. Because he's the one who needs it. You two come down when you're ready - and don't worry, we'll make sure Devina doesn't get back in here. I'm assuming you have salt in your kitchen?"

"Ah, yeah." He glanced over with a frown. "But why do you need - "

"Where do you keep it?"

After he shrugged and told the guy to go to the dry-goods cupboard, the men hit the stairs again, and Vin ushered Marie-Terese over to the bed. He couldn't stay put, though, and took up pacing around.

Going over to the view, he wondered why life had brought him to this point. Wondered why he'd started where he had. Wondered...how it was all going to end for him.

Looking down at the highway by the river and seeing the cars traveling in their prescribed lanes, he envied the people behind those steering wheels and in those passenger seats. It was a good bet the vast majority of them were doing normal shit, like going home or heading out for a movie or struggling with weighty decisions like what to have for dinner later.

"Vin? Talk to me. I promise I won't judge you."

He cleared his throat, and hoped like hell that was true. "Any chance you believe in..." Well, now, just how was he finishing that one? By listing a bunch of crap like Ouija boards and tarot cards and black magic and voodoo and...demons...mostly the demons? Great. Fabulous.

She broke the silence he couldn't bear to fill. "You mean about the episodes you get?"

He rubbed his face. "Listen, what I'm about to say isn't going to sound real - shit, it's not even going to sound plausible. But can you please not leave until I finish? No matter how weird it gets?"

He kept looking out at the view because he didn't want her to see the weakness he knew was in his face, and at least his voice sounded halfway normal.

The headboard of the bed creaked, indicating that she'd sat back even farther on the mattress. "I'm not going anywhere. Promise."

Another reason to love her. As if he needed one.

Vin took a deep breath and threw himself off the proverbial cliff: "When you're young, you think whatever is going on with you, around you...inside of you, is normal. Because you don't know any different. It wasn't until I was five and went to kindergarten that I learned the hard way other kids couldn't move forks without touching them or stop the rain in their backyards or know what was going to be for dinner without talking to their mothers. See, my parents couldn't do any of the things I could, but I felt totally different from them anyway, so I didn't think it was weird. I just thought they weren't the same because they were parents, not a kid."

He refused to go into the various ways he'd learned he wasn't like other kids - and what those little shits did to punish him because he was out of the ordinary: The details of getting pounded on a regular basis by groups of boys or sneered at and laughed at by girls were not going to change whether or not she understood or believed him. Besides, pity had always given him a case of the scratch. "I figured out pretty damn quick to shut my mouth about what I could do, and it wasn't hard to hide. Basically, I just had parlor tricks at that point, nothing that got in the way of life, but that changed when I was eleven and I started to pull that on-my-ass babbling crap. That was a big problem. It happened whenever and wherever it wanted to. I had no control over it, and instead of growing out of it, like I did all that manipulation and small-scale clairvoyance stuff, it got worse and worse."

"You were gifted," she said, with no small amount of awe.

He looked over his shoulder. Most of the color had come back into her face, which was more than he would have hoped for, but he did not agree with her assessment.

"Cursed was the way I saw it." He went back to staring out at the lines of tiny cars far, far below. "As I grew up, I got bigger and tougher, so getting harassed was less of an issue, but the episodes didn't stop, and I was getting more and more frustrated by feeling like a freak. Finally, I decided I had to talk to someone, so I went to this psychic downtown. I felt like a total fucking fool, but I was desperate. She helped me, told me what to do, and even though I didn't believe in it, I went home and did what she said...and everything changed."

"You stopped getting the seizures?"

"Yeah."

"So why are they back now?"

"I don't know." And he didn't know why they'd started, either.

"Vin?" When he glanced back at her, she patted the bed. "Come and sit down. Please."

After he searched her face and saw nothing but warmth and empathy, he went over and lowered his ass on the mattress beside her. As he braced his fists on the duvet and leaned into his shoulders, her hand landed lightly on his back and she rubbed him in a slow circle.

He drew incredible reserves of strength from her touch.

"After the seizures stopped, everything was different. And in a totally unrelated weirdness, my parents died accidentally soon thereafter - which really was not a total surprise, because as violent as they were with each other, it was only a matter of time. As soon as they were gone, I dropped out of school and went to work for my dad's boss as a plumbing assistant. I'd turned eighteen by then, so I was legal to work in the trade and I made it my business to learn everything. Which was how I ended up on the contracting side of things. I never took a vacation. I never looked back, and ever since then, life has been..."

Funny, up until a couple of days ago he'd have said great. "Life has been really good-looking from the outside, since then."

But he was starting to think that all he'd done was slap a shiny, pretty coat of paint on a rotting barn. He'd never been happy, had taken no joy out of the money he'd made...had deceived honest people and raped countless acres of land, and for what? All he'd done was feed the tapeworm in his gut that had driven him. None of it had nurtured him.

Marie-Terese took his hand. "So...who is that woman? What is she?"

"She's...I don't know how to answer either of those questions. Maybe those two guys who came with Jim can." He glanced at the doorway and then looked at Marie-Terese. "I don't want you to think I'm a freak. But I won't blame you if you do."

As he dropped his head, for the first time in a long, long while, he desperately wished he was someone else.

Words were better than nothing when it came to explaining things, but that didn't mean they went nearly far enough in some situations.

This was one of them, Marie-Terese thought.

In her life, things like what Vin was talking about happened in the movies or in books...or they were whispered about when you were thirteen and on a sleepover with your friends...or they were lies that were advertised in the back of cheap magazines. They were not part of the real world, and her mind was fighting the adjustment.

The trouble was, she'd seen what she had seen: a woman with black holes for eyes and an aura that seemed to taint the very air that surrounded her; Vin collapsing and speaking words he didn't seem to hear; and now...a proud man, hanging his head in shame for something that was neither his fault nor his wish.

Marie-Terese kept stroking his shoulders, wishing there was more she could do to ease him. "I don't..." She let the sentence drift.

His reserved gray eyes flicked over to her. "Have any idea what to make of me, right?"

Well, yes...but she wasn't about to put that thought into words for fear it would come out wrong.

"It's okay," he said, reaching out and giving her hand a squeeze before rising from the bed. "Believe me, I don't blame you in the slightest."

"What can I do to help?" she asked as he walked around.

He looked at her from over by the window. "Get out of town. And maybe we shouldn't see each other. It may well be safer for you and that is the single most important thing to me right now. I'm not going to let her get you. No matter what I have to do. She is not going to get at you."

Staring up into his face, she felt a stirring down deep as she realized he was her real-life fairy tale: Standing before her, he was willing to do battle for her, on whatever killing field the war took place...He was prepared to accept wounds and make sacrifices for her...He was the dragon slayer she had looked for when she was younger and had lost faith in ever finding as she'd aged.

And just as important, when it would have been easier for him to believe the lies that woman had said, when he could have listened to Devina spinning that total fallacy about her having been with Jim, he had chosen to think more of her, instead of less. He had had faith in her, and had trusted in her, in spite of her past and his.

Tears stung her eyes.

"Look, I should go downstairs and talk to them," he said roughly. "You might want to leave."

But she shook her head and rose to her feet, thinking that two could play at the knight-in-shining-armor game. "I'll stay, if you don't mind. And I don't think you're a freak. I think you're..." She tried to choose the right words. "You're just fine exactly the way you are. More than just fine - you're a wonderful man and a great lover and I just...like you." She shook her head. "I wouldn't change anything about you and I'm not scared of you, either. The only thing I might wish were different...is that I met you years and years ago. But that's it."

There was a long stretch of silence. "Thank you," he said hoarsely.

She went to him, and as she wrapped her arms around him, she murmured, "You don't have to thank me. It's how I feel."

"No, it's a gift," he said into her hair. "You always should thank the person who gives you something irreplaceable, and to me...acceptance is the most priceless thing you could ever offer me."

As she choked up against his chest, he spoke three little words: "I love you."

Marie-Terese's eyes popped, but he pulled back and held up his hand to keep her from stammering. "That's the way I feel. That's where I am. And I don't expect any kind of response. I just wanted you to know." He nodded to the door. "Let's go down and face the music."

When she hesitated, he tugged her gently. "Come on."

After he kissed her, she allowed herself to be led from the room. And considering the way her head was reeling, she was impressed that her sense of balance was good enough that she made it down the stairs and into the living room without falling over.

Even as they joined the others, she felt she should say something back to him, anything, but he honestly didn't seem to be waiting for reciprocation or even an acknowledgment.

Which made her feel honored in some strange way - probably because it meant that his gift to her was unconditional.

The men had obviously found the beer, as they all had bottles in their hands, and Jim introduced the two who'd come with him to her. For some reason, she trusted them all - which was very unusual given the way she usually felt around big, muscle-bound members of the opposite sex.

Before any of them could speak, she said loud and clear, "What the hell is she? And how worried do I need to be?"

The men all stared at her as if she'd grown two heads.

Eddie, if she heard the name correctly, was the first to recover. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his jeans-clad knees. After a moment of concentration, he just shrugged, like he'd tried to find a way to sugarcoat things and decided to give up on the lie.

"A demon. And very concerned barely covers it."

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