Chapter 8

ChapterEight

Ophelia

Kill the Lights - Set It Off

Ihad nothing left. My mind was blank as I felt myself being carried. Soft sinful whispers of praise filtered around me as my head lolled against a hard shoulder. Something cool and wet trailed against my core and I would have shuddered if I wasn’t lingering in limbo. Material coiled back around my thighs and I never even had the energy to open my eyes and see what was happening.

As I wavered in and out of a blissful state, I managed to blink open my eyes only to see the stars pass me by like shots of silver liquid. A low hum vibrated through me and a burly hand wrapped around the top of my thigh. By the time I heard something closing behind me and felt the sensation of being carried again, I was more lucid.

“W-where are we?” I mumbled into his chest, then began to wonder if I had actually taken something because an orgasm that made a girl dwell in a void of pleasure for this long surely wasn’t natural.

Well, the dude is dead so I guessed that wasn’t natural either.

As he carried me up the steps, awareness came rushing back to me. “My house? How the fuck did you know where I lived?” I almost shrieked, the idea of getting away from him now and having a safe haven to hide was long gone.

But truthfully, I’m not sure I wanted to hide anymore. I never killed the priest. There should be no evidence that linked me to the crime and the scum was just that, fucking scum who deserved to die. When Blake returned to the grave—which I was sure he had to do at some point or we would be entering the land of zombie zone and zombie dick which would be just wrong—then all of his crimes must go along with him. Why shouldn’t I dive deeper into my research? Why shouldn’t I see what it meant and what it took to be a killer? Slowly saving the youth of our church one fucked-up priest at a time?

Was it really that wrong when we thought about it?

Morals aside.

Nobody could argue with fucking morals.

Fuck.

My head was spinning. I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to feel or think anymore. I was lost to a warped kind of confusion that had the power to infuse me with strength as much as it had the power to kill me under the weight of the infliction.

I was at war with myself.

The only escape I had was to give over control. After all, I was being held hostage by a dead man.

A dead serial killer.

Would it not be easier to put the blame onto him?

Deluding myself into this being a game of survival and not a game of suppressed desires and curiosity.

You’d be lying if you said you’d never thought about what it would feel like to take a life or to watch one being taken while you stood idly by and took it all in.

Let’s not blur the lines.

Bad men deserved to die.

Sometimes, it really was that simple.

I heaved a breath and looked up at him as he stared forward stoically, not a fracture in that burly and chiseled face of his. “Driver’s license,” he mumbled before he cracked a lopsided smirk and my ovaries squirmed.

“Right,” I uttered.

“I cleaned you back up at the church, then drove us home. You were kind of out of it,” he explained as he got to my front door. I shimmied in his arms in an effort to look for my keys but he held me tighter. So tight, I could hardly breathe as I was melded to his body like we were one, then like it was nothing, he walked through the fucking door and my heart stopped.

I waited for the impact. For my body to bounce off the frame and send my ass tumbling back down the steps. None of which happened. Instead, a coldness crept through me. I felt weightless as if the breeze had caressed my cheek and I had become one with the wind and on the other side, I did what any sane person would do.

I shrieked like a bobcat.

“What the fuck was that!” I hissed, then shivered uncontrollably. “You just walked through a fucking door. With me in your goddamn arms!”

“Okay, Captain Obvious.” He chuckled with a stupid, arrogant look on his sexy as the dead fucking face.

I was far from amused. “I’m not dead, asshole! I’m not made to walk through doors. I feel—I feel… Violated!” I mumbled as I clawed my way free from his arms. He put me down with a dark laugh and I scowled at him.

“After all the things I did to you, Soul Raiser, walking through a door made you feel dirty?”

“Ergh!” I huffed with exertion as I threw my hands into the air. “This is wrong, so very very wrong!”

“Or so beautifully, very fucking right,” he countered with ease like this was just some ordinary day for him.

“You get brought back from the dead a lot?” I questioned with a hike of a brow suddenly thinking I should have asked this oh-so-obvious question before.

“Can’t say that I do,” he singsonged and my ire only grew.

“Why are we here anyway?”

“You need to rest and I need to pick our next victim,” he told me while he moseyed about my living room looking at everything with a keen eye and I trembled, a sensitive chill skating down my spine as he assessed where I was.

He ruffled through the papers on my desk and I hurried over to him, knocking them out of his hand with narrowed eyes. “You are messy,” he stated. “If that doesn’t speak big time author, I don’t know what does.” Then he sent the last piece in his hand floating back down on top of the others.” Go rest, I’ll find our next kill.”

“Next? We are not doing this again.” I chuckled like a crazy person. My sanity fraying as I scoffed in mentally strained amusement.

“Oh, love. We definitely are.”

“Not.”

“Can you go and argue with yourself in your sleep? It will save us time for when we get to our next location. Because we totally are continuing on.”

“Sure, fine. Whatever. I mean, it’s not like you can make me.” I smirked as I stalked toward my bedroom. Before I went to dream of the impossible, I stopped and turned back toward him as he was now searching the photos dotted about with a hint of sorrowed envy in his gaze. “Is the Devil really real?”

“Yes,” he answered without looking at me.

“But God isn’t?”

“Nope.”

“How?”

“Humans, babe,” he sighed in what seemed like soul-deep tiredness and it was so potent, it had me physically stifling a yawn. “It’s in your nature to justify the bad things with something good. They created this being, this thing, to throw their blind faith into not knowing that, in itself, was the true monster. Your very own capability to lie to yourselves.”

I blinked at him, not too sure how to answer that because deniability was a human’s most toxic trait.

He had made a lot of sense tonight and I was not sure if I vibed with it.

Hopefully, by the time I slept off the numb legs and quivering limbs, he would be gone.

No such fucking luck.