FINAL GATE (#3 GHOST PORTAL series)

NINETEEN

The enemy of my enemy is my temporary ally.

That was the best way to describe Ada, all along: a temporary ally. Not a friend, much closer to an enemy, but who eerily had the same goals as he did; to save the world. A creature that called herself benevolent, but that was more of a neutral, chaotic being. An individual with a wealth of knowledge but who only revealed minute details of it when attacked, or when guilty.

Ada's energy filled Avery up, drawing strength from unknown places, empowering him for what was to come. Like all other times she'd possessed him, though, he also got an invasive, insecure sensation. With access to all his thoughts, Ada was a menace, and might retain anything that passed through his mind to better use it against him later. Why, he had no idea; every time he pictured Ada she shifted into a malicious monster that was out to hurt him, hurt Jessamine, hurt the world.

But he knew, deep down, that she was the opposite of evil, and even when she lied through her teeth she meant well.

He'd have preferred to meditate before she entered him, this time around. There was too much trauma in his brain, too many events he hadn't properly processed still squirming around within him. No matter her promises to not analyze his mind, he wished she wasn't able to access his thoughts of that stress, those events.

He did his hardest to veil every flash of memories, to prevent them from rolling like a film in his head; but too much had happened. Too much had befallen him, and he was too weak to control his thoughts. Ada would see them all, and if she kept quiet and didn't judge him, then he wouldn't judge her.

He kept seeing Jamie's dead body, on the basement floor. The moments when he was dying, his blood gushing out. And the moments right after he died, as he lay motionless on the concrete, still spilling all over the place. He saw when he buried Jamie, remembered the earthy scent of dirt and the coppery stench of Jamie's dried-up wound, and Jamie's lidded eyes, the skin of his face looking ready to melt off. And then when he'd had to dig Jamie up, to witness all the trauma he'd hoped to shove deep down inside. To view Jamie's spirit bringing the body to life, except there was nothing alive about him—gray flesh, lifeless gaze, a guttural, zombie-like voice. A sense of vacancy in how he stood there, in front of Avery, barely knowing him anymore.

But Jamie wasn't the only one invading his mind. Jessamine was prominent, too, and more so since he'd heard her voice from behind the demon door. Her eyes blared in his recollections; grassy green, then black as the night, then bloody red and leaking. The curves of her body, first with clothes on, then the memory of her naked skin as he held her, as they made love under the faint glow of her bedside lamp. The way she'd bit her lower lip to hold in a moan of pleasure; and how she'd unleashed that moan without much ado, writhing in lust. It echoed through Avery like a pleasurable bass, a harmonious harp.

If it were only his actual memories of her that prevailed, Avery would have blushed and begged Ada to ignore him. But he had visions of what might have happened, too. Recollections of demon-Jessamine's kiss in the basement, and how it had rattled his insides, made him wonder what was real, what was fake, what was forbidden. He couldn't stop envisioning how things would have been had he succumbed to her kiss. Had he grabbed her waist and pulled her against him, to feel how she'd aroused him, how she'd woken up the risk-taking side of him. How would it have been, had he slept with demon-Jessamine?

Fun, he had no doubt, but ending badly. She'd have been the female praying mantis that would have slashed his throat once she'd gotten her pleasure, her fill of him. Yet he couldn't help it—the way she'd tasted, the way her lips had felt on his was weirdly dangerous, appetizingly sensual, and it had unearthed a hidden, repressed fantasy he'd never tell anyone about. A need to breach the barriers of good versus evil, to absorb the flavor of being bad, of being with someone bad.