"Could you do me a favor while I'm gone?" he asked.
"Anything."
He zipped his jeans and tugged a shirt over his head. A sheen of perspiration made the thin blue sweater cling in all the right places. No amount of fabric could disguise those steel-hard abs.
"Call my mother and ask her to address the council regarding reversing the spell. I want to have their permission so we're ready when I get the grimoire back. I'll leave my phone here." He set a cell phone on the nightstand. "It's pretty simple to figure how to use."
"You think I don't know how to use a cell phone?"
"I'm guessing not."
Dez curled up her legs and toyed with the edge of a sheet. She hadn't told him everything. He didn't need to know it all. Already she felt less, weaker, drained. Himself had to be tampering with her binding agreement in the grimoire.
If Ivan got the book back then she needn't fear for her life. But she didn't want to give him an excuse to go up against his master-no one could win against Himself.
"I don't know how you intend to get the Grande Grimoire, but if you do, and the council agrees, I'm your witch." "It'll happen." He leaned in and kissed her shoulder. A tweak to her nipple, and he bid her good-night and headed upstairs to the attic to make his exit.
"Oh, Ivan Drake." Dez snuggled back into the pillows. "Had you been alive in medieval times, I do believe you would have been a dragon slayer."
Or perhaps a true prince riding rescue to the princess sleeping behind the thorns.
And because she loved Ivan, Dez was torn inside. She needed to be truthful with him, to surrender to her one regret. To step forward and take responsibility.
In doing so, Ivan could get back his soul.
Instead of heading directly to the shower, she eyed the cell phone that Ivan had left on her bedside table. Call his mother?
Dez knew Ravin Crosse. And Ravin knew things about her. Maybe. Dez had never been sure how much the slayer had known about her dalliances late in the nineteenth century. Surely, if she did know, she would have warned Ivan against her previously.
"I can't fool the world any longer."
Decided, Dez grabbed the phone. She hated technology, but the device was pretty enough to entice her to play around with it a bit. It prolonged the inevitable, her nervous touching of the screen, and sliding around the pictures and viewing various screens.
She had merely to touch the icons to operate the thing. "Hardware for idiots. My need to never get a computer must have been waiting for one of these things to be invented. Not bad."
The call list popped up. The first two entries were Nikolaus Drake and Ravin Crosse.
"She had only meant to help." Ravin had been insistent Dez was making a mistake all those decades ago. "And now I'm dating her son. What a strange world this is. Ravin Crosse was the last witch I ever expected would settle down and have a family."
Diving into this relationship with Ivan would make Dez a part of Ravin's family.
To be part of family.
"That's what I've wanted. The connection. I've just been approaching it the wrong way. Family."
It could happen.
If she avoided her truths.
"No. I've got to come clean. Ivan has only given me truths. It's time I gave him mine."
She tapped the entry for Ravin Crosse.
Ravin recognized Dez's voice immediately, but her tone was guarded. Fine with Dez. She didn't want to have a girlfriend chat, because they'd never been girlfriends. And until Ivan told his mom about his new lover, then she wasn't going to spring that salacious bit on her out of the blue.
She relayed Ivan's request that the council approve the spell reversal, which Ravin was eager to do. Yet, Dez wasn't prepared for Ravin's insistent question.
"Have you told him your secret?"
Ravin knew. As all witches did."About the grimoire, yes," Dez answered.
"No, the other. He needs to know."
Yes, that other secret. The one Ravin had tried to stop from happening. But no, she could not have known the details. The truth of Dez's regrets.
"He's my son, Desideriel. I won't suffer the witch who deceives him."
And Dez remembered the first time she had come across Ravin, bent over in an alleyway, long skirts tattered, and legs spread as she leaned over something. Dez had smelled the blood on the air, and she'd heard the cry of the vampire as blood droplets had splattered his face. It had been startling to Dez, at the time, how quickly a vampire could be reduced to ash.
A potent force, Ravin Crosse.
"You're right. I won't lie to your son," Dez said. "Not any longer."
She set down the phone. A shiver traced her arms and neck. Coiling in on herself, she rocked forward and pressed her palms and forehead to the bed. Fingers curling, she dug into the sheets.
No more unspoken truths. You have to help him get his soul back.
And there was only one way to do that.
"Remove my protection. And stop hiding my past."
Dez raced downstairs and out to the porch. She kept a garden spade out there. The plastic-handled shovel leaned against the wall. She grabbed it, and hurried down and around the corner of the house.
"'Bout time," the clacking bone figure said as Ivan landed on the beach about five miles north of Dez's house. "I've been waiting since nightfall."
"Busy." Ivan walked past the skeletal creature he knew common mortals could not see, for it was a death-wraith, a collector of souls. "What's the task?"
"I'm supposed to remind you of the hunt for Himself's bride."
"It's on my list," Ivan said. He toed a pearlescent shell half stuck in the sand. "That all?"
Ivan's body suddenly flew through the air and landed on a rocky outcrop. Arms flung back with the force, Ivan felt his shoulder bones dislocate. Did none of the devil's minions ever do things half-assed? Just a little slack on the pain, once in a while, was all he asked.
"Chill." He snapped his shoulder forward, fitting it into the socket, and wincing at the searing pain. Yeah, it hurt like hell, but what didn't in his pitiful life? "I said I'm on the case."
"This is a bit more urgent than you understand. Himself told me I should give you a clue, since it appears you're far more stupid than a common corpse imp."
To be compared to the zombielike corpse imp twanged at his pride.
Ivan spat into the face of the wraith. Didn't have any effect; his spittle went right through the hole in the skull and exited out the back.
"If Himself wants results, he's going to have to cough up her name."
"I have no name. But I have a location."
"That'll work. So where am I off to?"
The wraith pointed a bony finger up the embankment, toward the village that glimmered like a constellation fallen to ground.
"What? In Willow Cove somewhere?"
The wraith slammed Ivan against the stone. "The witch, idiot! The witch is Himself's bride!"
"No, she's..." Not got stuck in his throat.
Himself and...Dez?
She was one thing only I desired. My desiderata.
Desired things.
Everyone desired. Every...thing. Every demon.
Falling to his knees, Ivan shouted as a means to release the sudden throbbing pain that didn't twist his limbs so much as annihilate his heart.
Chapter 20.
H uffing breaths, accompanied by rhythmic soughing beats directed Ivan's attention from the roof to around the side of Dez's house. He walked wide, to avoid the writhing rose thorns.
A glimpse of pale fabric caught the moonlight. She wore see-through pink silk, yet it clung to her body with dirt at her legs and hips. Her face was smeared with more dirt. She didn't see him come up behind her.
"Dez!"
He made to grab her away from whatever it was she seemed so intent on digging, but a whip-fast rose vine snaked up and snapped at him.
"Ouch! Dez! What are you doing?"
"What I should have done the moment I discovered Himself's wicked game."
Deep in the hole, the tip of the shovel clanked against something. Dez dropped the shovel and fell to her knees. She began digging in the thick dirt desperately. Wildness cloaked her eyes. She grunted as she pried and heaved at whatever was stuck in the ground.
Much as he'd been raging, Ivan pushed back the hurt and deception. Something was terribly wrong with Dez. He'd left her in bed, soft and smiling and with promises of love. And though the world had been dumped on its skull since then, he couldn't care about his own troubles right now.
"Talk to me." This time he grit his teeth and bore the pain of the thorns that coiled about his ankle. He bracketed Dez about the arms and lifted her up from the hole.She kicked and struggled.
The thorns dug in deeply, tightening about his ankles.
"I can save your soul," she shouted. "Let me go!"
A shock of electricity zapped Ivan in the chest. It flexed out his arms, making him drop Dez, and sent him soaring through the air.
The vines ripped from their roots as he landed roughly on the ground. She'd zapped him with some kind of earth magic.
Ivan's fangs descended and he snarled. "Not in the mood for silly magic tonight, witch."
With little effort, he sent a blast of wind forceful enough to topple Dez from her feet, but not strong enough to hurt her.
She wanted to save his soul? Digging in the dirt wasn't going to make that happen. Hell wasn't underground, or deep within the depths, as some people believed. Hell was manifested right here on earth. Himself was everywhere, always.
The shovel soared through the air, missing Ivan's head by a fraction of an inch. Did she mean to harm him? What was wrong with the woman?
Scrambling across the grass, Ivan gripped the shovel. A jab at the ground severed a vicious vine wrapped about his ankle.
Dez brought up something from the hole. A dark, round object crusted with dirt.
Ivan plunged the shovel down on another twisting vine. But he didn't see the vine stab out from the rooftop. He took a thorn to the cheek. It burned through flesh and scraped his gums.
Dez hurled the object toward the cliff. It landed with a thud and broke apart.
"One down, nine more to go," she said, and wrenched the shovel from Ivan's grasp.
He gripped her hair and tugged her to him. Using the force of their connection, he stumbled backward, struggling with the vine that now coiled about his neck while holding Dez less than gently, but securely.
To rip away the vine tore the thorns through his neck. Ivan growled and spat his own blood. He landed on the ground, a wriggling woman fighting him. An army of vines snaked and literally hissed but inches from his heels.
He dragged Dez toward the cliff, putting a safe distance between him and the maniacal plants. Pinning her to the ground, palms to her shoulders and knees to her thighs, he swallowed down his own blood and breathed through his nose.
The healing was slow, and Dez's face was spattered with his blood, but Ivan used the long seconds to steady his anger, bring down his urgency to attack with fangs-for wouldn't the blood make everything better?
"Dez, this isn't right. You've gone insane. Stop struggling. I don't want to hurt you. Please...I don't know how to make it better."
Her struggles had begun to lessen. Tears spilled across her cheeks, plowing pale trails through her dirt-smeared skin.
"I can do it," she murmured.
"Do what, Dez? What was that thing you dug up?"
"A ward against Himself. Oh, Ivan. I'm so sorry."
What he'd just learned. Were they both thinking the same things?