The smooth slide of the Demon's fingers into my brain tissue was almost comforting. So close to death, I gave up my usual struggle against the Demon's will, letting it invade my tired mind like a million white-hot needles.
It took control of my limbs without so much as a tussle with me, then dragged me into a jerky climb into the warehouse's scorching rafters. Up, up, up. The Demon wouldn't lose its servant to the Marine Corps, or to fire.
Blistering hot embers singed my beard and burnt trails through the red fabric of my hoodie as I sprang between girders and stairs. The Demon guided my every footfall across the cavernous roof space of the warehouse, taking me away from the attackers below. I slid on slimy white tracks of molten rubber; my sneakers were melting onto super-heated girders, yet the Demon dragged me onward.
My skin riddled with burns, my lungs tarred with smoke, exhaustion tightened its noose around my neck. I couldn't climb anymore.
Why would Alcor be the target of an American military assault? We had no projects in America. Why hadn't her intelligence team known about the ambush? Perhaps they had known. Of course, there were innumerable projects of hers that I didn't know about. I was her lowly servant, after all.
All my men were dead, some engulfed in whirling flames, some suffocated under a blanket of smoke. Hany, Atif, Rashid. The entire team.
Despair overcame me. I crawled across roof beams into ever-thickening clouds of acrid smoke, wondering how much longer I'd be able to evade the last of the Marines below. Uniformed men dragged bodies out between the warehouse's charred beams. Not much longer.
For the first time in my life I contemplated turning myself in to avoid the same fate as my best men. Better that the Marines took me than let myself succumb to flames, or suffer a lingering death at her hand for losing our warehouse and our men. The Demon's grip on my tired mind wavered.
Smoking beams began to crash down from the roof, exposing the burning warehouse to the starry Jeddah sky. A whoosh of embers, and the midnight breeze fanned the flames, sending orange snakes' tongues licking up the rafters.
Was the Demon trying to kill me? Had she instructed the Demon to end me by flame, a fitting punishment for failing my men?
I tumbled down to ground level and threw myself along a meandering path through broken machinery and smoking rubble outside the warehouse. No Marines were within the perimeter fence that separated the warehouse from the forested hinterland beyond Jeddah.
A short run-up, a few excruciating handfuls of barbed wire, and I launched myself over the fence and into the stunted bushes that led forestward. With luck I could still make it to one of our hideouts in the city before the Marines caught me.
Desperate to nurse my wounds, I begged the Demon to let me go. But the frozen needles gripped harder at my mind; the Demon had found a victim.
In the gloom beyond the fence stood a figure. Silhouetted by a waning moon, a slim man crept toward me.
Not a Marine, not a fellow Alcor brother, his face was shadowed in the forest's murk. But I could tell from his serene grace as he closed the distance between us that I was staring at an angel.
The Demon knew it too. Its bloodlust peaking, it dragged my tendons and shoved my bones, eager for an angel to slaughter.
I didn't need to see his face; the angel's beauty shone out of him like summer sunlight, forcing the Demon's icy fingers from my mind.
"Red Demon." His voice was gentle, deeper than I'd expected from such a slender man. "The Marines have you surrounded. Give yourself up. You're making this harder for yourself."
I was so fucking tempted. Surrender wasn't so honorless. Arrest, extradition, interrogation, Guantanamo Bay: it was nothing compared to whatever torture she had in store for me as punishment.
But the Demon clung on. It warned me that the Americans were playing on my allegiances to trick me. It pinched at my throat, reminding me that the Red Demon never ran. The Red Demon never sought mercy at anyone's feet. The Red Demon would resist every enemy.
The Demon had been waiting for a worthy fight, and what could be more worthy of a demon than an angel? Its polluted hyphae burrowed deeper into my gray matter, and a promise fizzled along my neurons; the promise that the Demon would avenge me, and my fallen men.
I attacked.
The angel was strong. I'd expected him to wilt under my punches, but he returned time after time. Each blow he landed was rubbed tenderly by the same tempting words: "You're surrounded, Red Demon. Give yourself up."
Muscles screaming with exhaustion, I lunged at him, throwing all my weight into it. We toppled into the long grass beyond the fence. Immensely strong, somehow he pinned me. The Demon's fury raged inside me, and I burst out from under the angel, whipping my arm around his slender neck before he could pin me again. I squeezed his windpipe into my elbow joint, tighter and tighter.
But he wouldn't pass out.
Too slow to avoid it, I only caught the glint of a tiny knife—a boxcutter—a heartbeat before he plunged it into my arm and ripped downward.
Screaming, blood pouring outta me like a river, I begged the Demon for strength. It answered me, and I held my stranglehold.
The angel slowed and stilled. The boxcutter fell from his fingers. My arm still bubbling in fiery agony, I snatched the knife from the dirt with bloodied hands.
Too slippery with crimson, too weak with blood loss to keep my arm around the angel's neck, I plunged the knife into his chest, twisting until it cut a ragged tear over his heart. Another twist, and the blade snapped off in his flesh.
He fell limp in my arms, both his blood and mine soaking our clothes and pumping onto the forest floor. In the seconds before I slid into unconsciousness, my darkening eyes roamed his face, but his features were hidden in the forest's shadows.
All I glimpsed was a flash of unkempt black hair, a furrowed brown forehead, elegant eyebrows twisted in agony. And the gentlest voice as the dying angel whispered his last words into the Jeddah night.
"Steph."
The purplish blue of María Bay lay spread before me. Container ships sat like cathedrals in the darkening water. Across the park the city's Christmas lights winked on in the last sun of the afternoon. But the only thing that filled my vision was the gargoyle's crumbled claw. Dante's little wooden box had gone from under it.
At some point over the past few days, Dante had stopped his little morning ritual of grieving for Steph. His delicate engraved box that held Steph's engagement ring had left the clock tower.
Like I'd summoned him with my thoughts, Dante swung down in a graceful arc from under-cling to tower. He landed like a cat and folded himself neatly beside me. "Why didn't you call me? I've been texting you all day."
"Did I...hurt you last night?"
"No," he murmured, his eyes locked on some distant point in the bay. "You lay screaming on the bed. Then you slept."
Relieved breaths puttered outta me. The pills were working. No scratches, no wounds, hair artfully mussed after traversing masonry in a strong breeze, Dante looked his usual perfect self. I hadn't hurt him.
"Were you in Jeddah?" I gazed into those beautiful black eyes, praying that he'd say no.
"Jay." A whisper, and the slide of slim fingers up my wrist. "I'm sorry."
I coulda just avoided the cold truth. I coulda let Dante wrap me up and keep me safe, and never mention Jeddah again. But, as irresistible as an eternity with Dante was, I was sick of being the only one who didn't know anything.
I lifted Dante's hand away from me with care and set it onto his knee, my forearm goose-bumping with the absence of his sliding fingers. I knew that it was the last time I'd ever touch Dante again.
My voice quivered, but I pressed on. "What did I do to you in Jeddah?"
"Jay, please don't."
"What did I do?"
"You...you..." Dante sucked in fraught gulps, clawing at his neck like a noose was tightening around his windpipe. Then, he knelt in front of me, his eyes locked to the limestone lintel under his feet. "You did this."
The hem of his T-shirt gripped tightly in his trembling hand, Dante swept the fabric upward in a steady arc. The cotton rippled away over his head. He bundled the shirt in his fists, his eyes cast down.
Dante's beauty knocked the breath from my body. I'd seen his arms so many times before, dusted with cuts and bruises from climbing around the city like the busy machine he was. But the rest of him was new to me, on another level of magnificent.
Tense muscles jumped under his skin. Slender hips tapered to a tiny waist. Silky whorls of hair curled around nearly-black nipples. He was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen. Perfect.
But, something ugly marred Dante's perfection.
I blinked, and blinked again. Right in the middle of Dante's chest sat a long, ragged scar. Puffy and gnarled, like a knife had been thrust in and twisted around agonizingly, the pinkish scar couldn't have been more than a few months old.
Someone had hurt my boyfriend. Someone had sliced at him viciously. I'd find them, and I'd make them pay.
"Who did this to you?" I hissed.
Dante's grip tightened on his T-shirt, his face still turned down.
"You know," he whispered. "I'm so sorry, Jay."
No.
Dante was mixed-up.
He was lying.
His grief, the loss of Steph, the Alcor case, it had all confused him. He wasn't thinking straight.
"No." I shook my head, my hands raised like Dante was holding a pistol to my face. "It musta been the Marines. I'd never...I'd never hurt you. I'd never ever do..." I pointed at the grotesque thing on his chest, "...that to you."
No.
I loved Dante so much. I'd die before I ever hurt him. He knew that.
He was just confused. We'd work things out.
But puke began to bubble and churn inside me. My body knew what I'd done. It didn't lie. So afraid to look, yet somehow my eyes couldn't help gazing at the horror of Dante's chest. Slowly, like a poisonous fungus penetrating my gray matter, the Demon's mocking laugh burrowed into my brain. My head spun with nausea. I scrambled for a gargoyle like I was gonna tumble over the side of the clock tower. My throat rolled with the urge to vomit.
"Cover it up!"
Dante unbundled his T-shirt and dragged it back over his head, shaking so hard that he shoved himself against the masonry to still his limbs.
I grit my teeth until they ground with a screech. "Tell me everything."
Plastered against the limestone of the clock tower, his eyes fixed at his shoes, Dante began in that same tense whisper, like saying it quietly might stop if from being real.
"When I lost Steph, the CIA didn't get any leads. Saudi contacts said it looked like an Alcor warning killing, but they came up with nothing. No suspects, no intel about Alcor's leaders. Sylvia begged them to transfer the case to María PD. The CIA agreed to the transfer only if they got a suspect.
"Then, six months ago the Marines reported to the CIA that they'd received intelligence of an American working for Alcor in Saudi, as part of their main operations team. It was the sign we'd been waiting for. A suspect. And it made perfect sense; he was American, maybe even a double agent employed by Alcor to provide intel on CIA operations. Everyone thought he was Steph's killer. The case was to be passed over to María PD once the suspect was arrested. I was to be the case leader. But I wanted to bring the murderer to justice in my own way. I...I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to feel what Steph had felt when he'd..."
Dante shed silent tears as he spoke, his hands tucked under his arms to keep them from trembling. I wanted so much to hold him. I wanted to run my fingers along his wrist, to chase his pulse and tell him that everything was gonna be OK, and that we could just forget about Jeddah.
But there was no going back now.
"The extraction of the American suspect was assisted by First Sergeant Kate Jones and her Marine Corps brigade stationed in the Red Sea. I hacked the CIA ops team members and found out they'd planned a joint sting operation in Jeddah. So, I went to Saudi. Vinnie found out I was missing and told Sylvia. They flew to Jeddah to stop me from...from..."
"From killing me," I breathed.
I shoulda known. Dante's past year had been all about avenging Steph. Of course he'd showed up in Jeddah to kill the murder suspect. It was exactly the same vengeance I'd planned for Mamá's killers.
"I saw you escaping from the Marines through the forest. There was no way I was going to let you hide. I was going to kill you. I'd blame it on the fire. I'd blame it on the chaos of the Marines ambush. I didn't care if I got killed or imprisoned for it. I'd have gotten justice for Steph."
Dante's eyes were fixed on the reddening horizon, wide and unfocused, like he was pacing warily through a waking nightmare.
"I chased you, aimed my gun at you, but...I couldn't pull the trigger. I couldn't go through with it. I'm just not a killer, Jay. You were panicked, scared. When I told you to give yourself up, for a second it looked like you would. Then, we fought. But your fighting style was so...chaotic. Like an animal. Disordered. Unpredictable. You were impossible to fight because there was no pattern to your movements, like you were possessed. Each time I pinned you down, you managed to get back up. Somehow you toppled me, and started to strangle me. So I...I'm so sorry, Jay."
Before he'd even said the words, my scar lit up in agony. I held my pulsing arm away from me, like it was a rotten putrid thing bent on infecting the rest of my body.
So, I finally knew where my scar had come from. "You stabbed me with your boxcutter."
The Marines hadn't cut me open and beaten me to a pulp in Jeddah. Every time I'd seen a boxcutter sitting among Dante's equipment my scar had throbbed and my guts had squirmed in insane fucking terror. Dante always had boxcutters on him. I shoulda known.
My chest tightened with each dry breath. I grit my teeth, my scar stinging like a boxcutter slicing through flesh. "Keep going."
"Your elbow was at my throat. I couldn't breathe, Jay. I cut your arm to get you off me, but you kept strangling. When I was too weak to hold my knife, you took it."
He pressed a shaky palm to his chest, his breaths coming short and fast, like that night was playing out in front of his terrified eyes.
"You...you stabbed me. I went into cardiac arrest. Sylvia found me. She and Vinnie evacuated me to Medina for surgery. I guess the Marines found you later."
"I messed up your heart. I made it beat weird. I'm the reason your heartbeat is broken."
What I'd thought was a sweet habit, searching out Dante's trippy pulse on his wrist, had been mocking him all this time. My stomach spasmed. I slapped my hand to my mouth, throat muscles straining to keep down my puke.
The sliver of scrubby forest south of Jeddah came alive before my eyes, just like in my dream. The Demon had spurred me on, but it had been me who'd stabbed the angel. It had been my arm tight against the angel's windpipe, trying to take his life away. Dante had been the beautiful angel of my nightmares. I'd tried to murder the man I loved.
"Who knows?"
"Just Sylvia and Vinnie. When Sylvia told him that you were out of jail and cooperating with María PD, he went crazy."
I breathed a sad little chuckle. "That explains the thousand dollars."
Dante's eyebrows twisted. "Thousand dollars?"
"Vinnie tried to give me money to stay away from you. He had every right to hate me. And Sylvia told me so many fucking times to stay away from you. All this time, they were trying to keep you safe from me."
"I'm sorry, Jay."
"You're sorry?" A shrill hoot of laughter burst out from me. "I tried to kill you! How can you even bear to be near me? Why didn't you punch me in the fucking face when we met?"
The number of times I'd congratulated myself on being the one to raise Dante from his grief. I'd thought myself such a fucking amazing guy to move Dante from hating me to loving me in Steph's place. But Dante's hatred of me had never been about Steph.
The obvious question burned inside me. Why wasn't I in jail? "Why didn't you report that I hurt you? Why wasn't I put on trial for attempted murder?"
"There was only a local police report filed in Medina. I told them I was a tourist in an attempted robbery, and that I didn't see the attacker's face."
"Why not? I tried to murder you! I woulda gotten twenty years for attempted murder! I only got five years for smuggling! Why didn't you tell anyone?"
"I needed the case to stay with María PD. If the CIA had found out you hurt me, they'd know I hacked them and went to Jeddah. They'd have jailed me for obstruction and taken back the case. Sylvia begged me to name you as my attacker on my statement, even if I went to jail for obstruction. She wanted to put you away for life. She was so mad at me.
"But when she interviewed you and found out about your blackouts, it was obvious that you weren't the killer. You kept trying to implicate the Marines for cutting your arm. You had no idea what you'd done to me. By then it was too late to retract my statement. Your inside knowledge of Alcor was too valuable to lose the case to the CIA. I forced Sylvia to keep interviewing you, for Steph's sake. I never expected to meet you. Or do fieldwork with you. Or be close to you."
The clock tower, the twinkling city below, the dark bay, all whirled around me. My head throbbed with shooting pains. My stomach threatened to shed its contents.
I didn't fucking understand any of it. How could Dante bear to be in the same room as me? How could he have wanted us to be together? Unless...had I pushed him toward it, frightened him into it? Did he just succumb to me because I already plagued his nightmares, and then his working life?
"Vinnie was right. This is some fucked-up Stockholm Syndrome shit."
Dante bristled, his jaw set hard. "You know that's not true. I used to climb up here every day to look at Steph's ring. To think about her. You know what I think about when I'm up here now? You, Jay. I think about you. I love you."
I didn't know whether to laugh or scream. "This isn't love. How could you love your own murderer? Can't you fucking see what else this means, Dante?"
It had never been just the poor henchmen of rival gangs that had suffered my Demon-frenzies. I'd tried to murder my own boyfriend. And, an even darker accusation remained.
Dante's voice was so quiet I barely heard it over the gusts of wind circling the clock tower. "What else does this mean?"
I pulled at my hair, my face crumpling with tears. "If I tried to kill you, I musta tried to kill Steph. I must be her killer."
"No!" Dante reached shaking hands out to me. "No, Jay. You didn't hurt Steph. I know."
I batted his hands away and inched toward the platform edge. "How do you know? I mighta blacked out and killed her! Can't you see that?"
He scrambled after me. "Where are you going?"
"I'm gonna turn myself in."
"Please don't go, Jay." Dante's voice rattled with tears, his words nothing but broken whispers. "Let's talk about this. Please don't turn yourself in."
"I'm a monster. I belong in jail." I leaped up to catch a limestone crenelation. "Don't ever contact me again."
Dante's sobs rang in my ears long after I'd swung into the darkness below the clock tower.