For the Hopeless

Chapter 21: Spawn of Satan

Bailey, Dameon thought, though his lips didn't move. He gazed down at her for a moment, shock and love and longing forming one heavy emotion in his hazel eyes, until he finally pulled her lips to his again. This was nothing like the chaste kiss of before, their lips parting and tongues moving against each other – and Bailey was all for it.

"Is this really the time to be making out with your dead lover's brother?" Tawny muttered bitterly, fists clenched at her sides. The tears began to fall faster, and Hayden was quickly becoming a lost sadness at the back of her mind.

Bailey and Dameon parted after an eternity – or, rather, the few brief seconds that had felt like an eternity. Neither of them said a word, and the devil turned away and started toward the door.

"Where are you going?" Samara asked quietly from where she'd been standing beside the broken door. Her eyes flicked from Dameon, who looked wordlessly after the devil, to Tawny, who watched bitterly from the stairs, then, finally, to Bailey's passing form.

"To do what needs to be done," Bailey answered as she stepped out into the cold.

"That's such a cop-out," Tawny said loudly, her voice heavy with the hundreds of tears she had left to shed, with the rage she was so unaccustomed to showing, and the devil paused just shy of the doorway on the porch.

She offered Tawny a sad smile, and her lips never moved as she thought, I love you, Tawny. Never forget that. And then, she turned and continued on her way across the porch, soon disappearing as she took flight with her dragon-like wings.

Tawny turned toward the living room, and she and Dameon locked eyes across the people-filled space. Anger burned in her gaze, but his stare was sad and happy and just a little bit sorry, all at once.

She couldn't hate him, though she desperately wanted to. She had given Bailey up so that she could go to him, to someone who could protect her and understand her and take care of her like she needed. How could she be angry that things were going as she'd planned?

She went to where her shoes lay beside the broken door and slipped them on, pulled her coat from the coat rack, then headed out into the chill with a soft sniffle. She couldn't let her silly, girly emotions overwhelm her right now, not the ones stemming from Bailey's actions and not the ones caused by Hayden's maybe-good-maybe-bad death. Bailey was obviously up to something that would get her killed – that look in her eyes had told Tawny so – and if Dameon wasn't going to help her, Tawny sure as hell would.

"Tawny!" the werewolf called as she bolted off of the porch, but the girl didn't stop, and soon, she was swallowed up in the quickly falling snow.

-?-

Bailey alighted upon the roof of a small storage building not far from the house, her feet sinking into a thick blanket of snow, though she barely noticed the cold. She stared down at the cell phone in her hand, watching as the puffy flakes of snow landed on the screen and melted to leave wet spots. She'd bought this phone for Hayden when the witch had first moved into their little safe haven; she'd talked to the girl on it dozens of times. But never again...

She swallowed back the growing lump in her throat and flipped the phone open. The background was a picture of Hayden and Madeleine, arms around one another and broad grins on their faces. It came as a bit of a shock to her; Hayden had never seemed to like Madeleine, and Madeleine had never seemed too attached. Yet here was this wallpaper, and at home was Madeleine bent over Hayden's corpse, crying like the day her family had tried to hand her over to the humans.

Bailey had missed so much. They'd had a family, and she'd barely even noticed.

She ground her teeth as she tried to push the memories and the guilt and the current horrors from her mind, and she opened Hayden's contact list. It was bare, with only four names displayed, Bailey and Dameon and Tawny and...Lockley?