Save My Soul (A Paranormal Romance: Preternaturals Book 2) Read online

  They went through the obligatory how have you been since your father passed questions, as well as the polite platitudes about what a good man he was. Anna regretted how she and her father had parted and was glad when that portion of the conversation was over.

  Inevitably the discussion turned to Anna’s new house.

  “I can’t believe you forgot about the ghost stories,” Cece said, leaning forward in her seat.

  Anna shrugged. “I think I was practicing selective memory techniques since I wanted the house so much. You know how much I loved it.”

  The old woman chuckled. “Indeed. I wasn’t surprised when you bought it. I was just thinking the other day about a dream I had about that house when I was in college. You’ll never believe what a party girl I was.”

  Anna somehow doubted Cecelia Townsend had ever partied a day in her life. Seeing her expression of doubt, the woman became more animated.

  “No, I was! There was this one time I remember. I was a senior, and I met these two girls at a bar. They were seniors too, except in high school. They’d snuck in and had been getting older men to buy them drinks. We got hammered and danced on a couple of tables.” She blushed and let out a girlish giggle at Anna’s expression.

  “I must have passed out because when I woke up, I was in my dorm, and the girls I met were gone. I was just thinking about that because I still remember this odd dream I had. A lot of it’s fuzzy, like it started out a nightmare . . . I think . . . The girls were in it and they died or something. But then there was this gorgeous man and . . . ”

  Charles cleared his throat, and she blushed again. “Well, that’s not really the point. What I was going to say was . . . the dream was inside your house. Or well, you know Beatrice’s house back then. And ever since then I’ve always wanted to know if the house looks the same on the inside as it did in my dream. I mean I know it’s a silly thing to wonder, but we used to talk about going in there and checking it out when you were little.

  “I should have gone by and looked at it myself one of those times it was up for sale, but I never did work up the nerve. It was hard back then with Bea gone. Anyway, curiosity has finally won out, and I’m rudely inviting myself over to get a look at your house.”

  Anna had dropped her fork the second the older woman mentioned dreaming. Once she was sure Cecelia was talking about what she thought she was talking about, she almost choked on her roast.

  “Are you all right?”

  Anna coughed before finally swallowing enough sweet tea to cause the food to go down. “Fine. It just went down wrong.”

  ***

  “Luc!” Anna bellowed, as soon as she got through the door. “Luc!”

  Karen was curled up on the couch watching TV. “He’s in the library,” she said, not taking her eyes from the screen. “He’s been holed up in there ever since you left.”

  Anna ran down the hall, not slowing as she slammed into the library. “The dreams have to stop.” Her eyes narrowed when she saw him working his way through a bottle of brandy. Something on the grocery list he hadn’t mentioned?

  He put the alcohol down on the side table and closed his book. “What happened?”

  “Cecelia Townsend happened. You know the dream I had the other night?”

  He didn’t have to be told which dream she was talking about. He took another drink.

  “Well, take a wild guess at who you managed not to kill.”

  His eyes lit up. “Cecelia? Really?” He let the name roll over his tongue as if testing it. “So she’s okay, then? Alive and not crazy?” His voice was so hopeful, for a moment Anna forgot about being mad.

  “Are you kidding me? She’s a bastion of mental health. This is the best, kindest, most together woman I’ve ever known and I’ve seen her twenty-year-old self naked. Cece has been like a mentor to me. Like a second mother or grandmother or whatever . . . and now I’ve seen her naked! The dreams have to stop.”

  She knew the naked part was the wrong part to focus on, but she couldn’t bring herself to think about the fact that Luc had put Cece under a thrall, had sex with her, and nearly killed her. Suddenly the things the demon had done were coming into sharper focus. They weren’t abstract notions and random women she didn’t know anymore. They were friends.

  “I knew she was strong,” Luc mused. “Cain didn’t kill her. I’d always wondered but was afraid to ask.”

  “Can we please focus on my problem here? I can’t deal with this anymore.” Anna didn’t say that what she couldn’t deal with was the fact that everywhere she went, Luc was there in one form or another. Infecting her dreams, seeping into her fantasies. She needed a break from him. She felt smothered.

  “How did you come to discover this?”

  “She remembered part of the dream,” Anna said, making air quotes with her fingers. “She was curious about the house, which she recognized, by the way. And she wants to come over and see it.”

  Luc visibly paled. “Surely you told her that was impossible.”

  At least his thoughts on the matter meshed with her own. “I sort of choked on my pot roast. After that I changed the subject. So I’m safe for a while. But we need to figure out how to make the dreams stop.”

  “I’ve been looking into that.”

  She hadn’t expected him to actually be searching for something to help her.

  Luc led her to the large oak table on which he’d laid out several books that looked eerily similar to the volume Father Jeffries had shown her. She wasn’t surprised they were all in English.

  “It might be hard for you to accept this but these books come from . . . ”

  “Other dimensions,” she finished for him, not sure she could handle a re-run. She’d been fighting back the nervous breakdown the first time she’d had it all explained to her.

  Luc looked at her oddly.

  “What? I know stuff. Tam’s a witch.” No sense mentioning how she’d really learned about it.

  “That makes this easier to explain, then. Cain used to bring me copies of the books from the libraries where most of the information about our kind is housed. I found a footnote mentioning the bond a few days ago but I didn’t have enough information to bother you. While you were out, I found more in another book.”

  Why did she feel like he was stalling? “How do we make the dreams stop?”

  He hesitated as if judging whether he should tell her anything at all. “This is the part you aren’t going to like. I promise when I did it, I didn’t realize. It wasn’t as if I had an ulterior motive. I just wanted to protect you from Cain and knew a simple mixing of blood would do that, would temporarily mark you as mine and protect you.”

  He was pacing now. The act made the hairs on the back of Anna’s neck and arms stand up in agitation.

  “Well?” she said.

  “The mark. It connects us, gives you dreams about me, makes you more sympathetic to me. Although, it’s very uncommon for an incubus to start having dreams about someone he’s marked,” Luc said thoughtfully.

  “Maybe we’re soul mates,” Anna quipped. She didn’t like the soft look Luc got when she said it. Like he wished it could be true.

  At least he wasn’t lying to her about the purpose of the dreams. If he had, she might have had to bludgeon him to death with one of the musty old books.

  “It makes you more likely to want to complete our mating ritual . . . the soul transfer.”

  “No! Absolutely not. Undo it. Make the dreams stop.” Her voice was shaking with rage and a bit of fear. She didn’t like what this was doing to her. Father Jeffries had been right.

  “The dreams will stop if you give me your soul.” At her stormy look, he rushed to continue, “Or . . . it’ll just wear off. If the ritual isn’t completed it will wear off. The scar will eventually fade and the dreams will cease.”

  “How long?”

  He looked away.

  She moved in front of him, forcing him to meet her eyes. “How long, Luc?”

  He sighed. “Fiv
e or ten years. There isn’t an exact time given, but that’s the average.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ll be tied to you and these psychotic mind-fucked dreams, possibly for the next decade?”

  “Or there is the other option . . . ”

  “I’m not giving you my soul.” She held her hands out like scales. “Hmmm, five to ten years or eternity. Which sentence is less? Math was my worst subject, but even this isn’t hard for me. I’ll take the five to ten, thanks.”

  A tiny voice in her mind reminded her of the third option Father Jeffries had presented. Luc didn’t have that book, but there was a ritual that could end it, and she wouldn’t have to be stuck with him for another confusing several years. She pushed down the flutter in her stomach at the idea of being with Luc forever. That could never happen. She couldn’t give him her soul.

  Her hand started itching. She scratched furiously around the scar. “And what is up with this? The scar tingles, it burns, it itches . . . ”

  “It is dependent on your feelings.”

  “So my hand is a mood ring now? Unbelievable.”

  Luc moved to her, taking her hand in his. The itching stopped. She looked into his eyes, fathomless pools of bright green. No man had eyes like that. She could feel herself falling into them.

  She looked up helplessly at him. “What are you doing to me?”

  “Nothing. You want me. But you fight it, and I don’t understand why. Why is giving your soul to me so frightening? You know me. You’ve seen who I am––more than anyone else has. You know I would never harm you.”

  She pulled her hand away and tried to look bored, something difficult to accomplish with his primal maleness hovering right over her, smelling dark and delicious.

  “Try to get over yourself. Have you ever stopped to consider that I’m just not ready for that type of a commitment? I mean, come on. I’m young. A lot of women my age aren’t even ready for marriage. I’ve known you a week, we haven’t even slept together, and you’re talking eternity.” It had to be the bond making them both feel this way.

  His face fell, but he shook it off quickly. “No,” he said, his eyes so assessing and intense she almost lost her breath. “It’s something else. I don’t know what, though. And I’m not sure you do either.”

  “Luc, put yourself in my position. Your kind is known for deceiving women, telling them what they want to hear and then killing them. I’m supposed to believe that a demon wouldn’t turn on me once he had my soul?”

  “No, but I wouldn’t. And you know that.”

  “Do I?”

  She pulled a pack of cigarettes and lighter from her pocket. Her hands were shaking. She hated that. She didn’t want him to see how nervous he made her.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “Are you my mother now?” She cringed at how she was snapping at him, unable to stop the bitch train once it pulled out of the station. She tried unsuccessfully to flick the lighter, but her hands were shaking too badly.

  Luc took it from her, and Anna leaned in, thinking he was going to light the cigarette like some gentleman in an old Humphrey Bogart film.

  “Take it outside if you must smoke it. Not in the house with the antiques.”

  She wanted to argue. It was her house, no matter who had been there the longest. But she gave in because being in his presence another second was likely to end with her flat on her back, feeding him.

  She grabbed a pack of matches from the kitchen junk drawer on her way outside. Somehow developing a chain smoking habit seemed like the least dangerous thing she could do right now.

  Anna savored the nicotine as it curled into her lungs, and the artificial calm washed over her. She wanted to push the rewind button on her life and redo it all. This house was going to be the death of her. She just knew it.

  The sound of boots crunching over gravel jolted her out of her self-pity. She looked up, startled to find five smarmy-looking men standing in front of her. She wasn’t big on profiling, but you knew these were thugs from two hundred yards away. The ringleader stood out in front, pointing a gun at her.

  “Where are our girls, bitch?”

  Anna let out a hysterical peal of laughter. She was snapping. She could feel the little places in her brain that held her sanity together bending and buckling under the strain of the past week.

  “Are you laughing at me?” the ringleader asked. “We’re here for our girls. You took them. We’re here to take them back where they belong.”

  “Yeah, sure thing,” Anna said. The pimps couldn’t have picked a better time to arrive.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The ringleader wrapped a meaty hand around Anna’s throat. “Move, bitch!”

  “Luc!”

  “Shut up. One man can’t help you.”

  The harem stood behind the cooking island, a frozen tableau of horror. They’d been gabbing and eating chips and salsa when Anna and the pimps busted through the back door.

  “Luc!” she shouted again.

  “I said shut up. Maria, get your shit. We’re leaving.”

  Maria nodded, eyes wide, and scampered from the room. The other pimps just looked at their girls, sending them scurrying. Then it was just Anna alone in the kitchen with five nasty guys in desperate need of a shower and shave.

  “You know,” one of them said idly, touching the side of Anna’s face, “We could bring you back with us. Put you to work.” The leer he gave her caused bile to rise in the back of her throat.

  “That one is mine.”

  Luc leaned in the doorway, a disturbingly calm look on his face. Anna breathed a sigh of relief. She knew that tone. That tone meant death. It sounded pleasant enough, but that was only until you were getting your guts ripped out. He strode purposefully into the room while the girls fanned out behind him.

  “Maria came for me. I’m sorry I didn’t hear you. I was in the wine cellar.”

  “We have a wine cellar?” Why hadn’t that been on the tour?

  “Trap door in the library under the rug. I didn’t want you drinking my wine.” He turned his attention back to the thugs who had formed what they probably thought was an intimidating semi-circle around Anna. It only seemed to further piss him off.

  The ringleader held out the gun in warning. “Don’t come any closer. She’s ours now. There are five of us and one of you.”

  Luc stopped a few feet short of the man wielding the gun and smirked at the barrel pointed at his chest. “I don’t think you boys know how to count. I see six girls and me. So that’s seven against five.”

  “The girls don’t count.” The pimp pulled the hammer back.

  “Hmmm,” Luc said. “I’ve lived a very long time, and I can tell you, girls will surprise you sometimes.”

  The ringleader seemed tired of idle chit chat, ready to take the harem back along with the newly-acquired bounty. If Anna hadn’t been so confident of her safety now that Luc was here, she’d be more upset.

  He pulled the trigger, then gasped when the bullet went straight through the demon and hit the back wall. Luc turned toward the bullet hole.

  The thug’s eyes widened as he looked as his gun then at the incubus. “Wh . . . what are you?”

  Luc whirled to face the gunman, the mask of calm long forgotten by his face. “Someone very pissed off that you just put a hole in my wall.”

  “Oh, gee thanks. I’m feeling the love,” Anna said. He could be calm about the smarmy cretin touching her, but put a hole in his wall, and it was all over except for the screaming and dying.

  “Sorry dear, but it goes without saying I’m pissed these criminals threatened you.”

  Anna tried not to let the way he casually called her dear get to her. She failed. Of all the times to have warm, fuzzy butterfly feelings in her stomach, this was the worst. Luc knocked the gun out of the man’s hand and grabbed him by the lapels, moving him away from Anna.

  He could kill a man easily, but like a cat, Luc preferred to play with his prey, holding bac
k his strength, letting them believe they had a chance. While he pounded on the gunman, Anna ran across the kitchen and took a cast iron skillet from a rack hanging over the island. She hauled back and hit one of the pimps square on the jaw, forcing him to stumble back.

  The rest of the harem, shaken out of their complacency, seized pots and pans of their own in a re-enactment of every cartoon featuring wives chasing deadbeat husbands around.

  Anna was only partly focused on the fight; the other half of her attention stayed on Luc. It wasn’t that they didn’t deserve death, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about him killing willy nilly right in front of her. She wasn’t going to try to stop him from beating them to a pulp, but she kept watching to make sure that was all he was doing.

  When he got bored with his prey, he locked eyes with him and spoke. “When you wake up, you will forget why you came here. You will never seek out Maria or any of the other girls again. You’ve never even met them. Do you understand me?”

  The man’s eyes were unfocused and glassy. “Yes.”

  “Sleep.”

  Luc caught the man when he fell and went to the front door to toss him out onto the lawn.

  “Who’s next?” he said, when he returned, rubbing his hands together in boyish glee.

  The harem was doing a commendable job themselves. Anger, confidence, and cookware made for an intimidating combo. Maria’s pimp had been the only one with the foresight to bring a weapon. They must have thought it would be easy.

  Luc grabbed a second thug and repeated the process while the harem got their kicks out on the remaining three. Anna moved out of the way to watch. Aside from her initial shot with the skillet, she let the girls get their rage out at the men who had tried to keep them helpless and dependent.

  The second man was put under and sent on his merry way flying out the front door. Anna sincerely hoped they woke up quickly and got out of her yard. The last thing she needed was to give Bitsy and Mimi another reason to harass her. Five smelly guys on the lawn was just the kind of thing that would make the front page of the Golatha Falls Gazette.