J.R. Ward - Envy

So yeah, the stakes were high and he hated losing. Especially when it didn’t need to go down like it had.

He was flat-out rip-shit at the game. At his boss, Nigel. At the “rules.”

It was common fucking sense: When you told a guy he was supposed to influence some jackass at a crossroads in his or her life, it kind of helped if you frickin’ told him who was on deck. After all, it wasn’t a big goddamn secret: Nigel knew. The enemy, Devina, knew. Jim? Not so much, people. And courtesy of that informational black hole, he’d focused on the wrong man in the last round and blown it.

So here he was, tied with the bitch and pissed off in a hotel room in Caldwell, New York.

And he wasn’t the only one with a case of the grumpies.

Next door, on the far side of a connector, two deep male voices were doing the back-and-forth, in the key of frustrated-to-shit.

Not a news flash. His wingmen, Adrian Vogel and Eddie Blackhawk, were not happy with him, and clearly the two of them were chewing him out in absentia.

This goin’-back-to-Caldie-Caldie-Caldie wasn’t so much the issue. It was the reason Jim had dragged them all here.

His eyes shifted across the duvet. Dog was curled up in a tight ball beside him, his scruffy fur giving the impression that he’d been heavily moussed and put into a stiff wind, even though he hadn’t. Next to the little guy, there was a computer printout of a three-week-old newspaper article from the Caldwell Courier Journal . The title was “Local Girl Missing,” and off to the side of the text, there was a picture of a group of smiling friends, heads close together, arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders. The caption beneath the pic identified the one in the middle as Cecilia Barten.

His Sissy.

Well, not really “his,” but he’d come to think of her as his responsibility.

The thing was, unlike her parents and family and friends and community, he knew where she was and what had happened to her. She was not part of the countless roster of runaways; nor had she been murdered by a boyfriend or a stranger; and she hadn’t been cut up by that serial killer who, according to the CCJ ’s Web site this morning, was at large.

She had been defiled, however. By Devina.

Sissy was a virgin sacrificed to protect the demon’s mirror, that most sacred possession. Jim had found her body hanging upside down in front of the thing in the demon’s temporary lair and been forced to leave her behind. It had been bad enough to know that she’d lost her life to his enemy, but then later, he’d seen her in Devina’s wall of souls . . . trapped, suffering, lost forever among the damned who deserved that fate.

Cecilia didn’t belong in hell. She was an innocent taken and used by evil—and Jim was going to get her free, if it was the last thing he did.

Which, yeah, was why they’d come back to Caldwell. And the reason Adrian and Eddie were pissed.

But no offense . . . fuck them.

With care, Jim picked up the article and brushed his calloused thumb over the grainy image of Sissy’s long, blond hair. When he blinked, he saw the stuff covered in her blood and hanging down close to the drain of a white porcelain tub. Then he blinked again and saw her as he had the other night, in Devina’s viscous prison, terrified, confused, worried about her parents.

He was going to do right by all of the Bartens. But Adrian’s and Eddie’s yammering was just aerobics for their pieholes: He wasn’t taking his eye off the war, because he couldn’t afford to lose to Devina before he got Sissy out of the well of souls. Duh.

The connecting door broke wide and Adrian, a.k.a. the Tone-deaf Wonder, walked in without knocking. Which was exactly his style.

The angel was dressed in black, as usual, and the various piercings on his face weren’t half of what he supposedly had all over his body.

“You two finished bitching about me?” Jim turned the article facedown and crossed his arms over his chest. “Or are you just having a little break.”

“How about you take this seriously.”

Jim got up off the bed and went nose-to-nose with his soldier. “Am I giving any indication I’m fucking around?”

“You didn’t drag us back here for the war.”

“The hell I didn’t.”

As they faced off, Adrian was undaunted, even though as a former black ops assassin, Jim knew how to drop a heavyweight like the other angel twelve different ways to Sunday. “That girl is not your target,” Ad said, “and in case you haven’t noticed, we’re down one. Distractions are not our friend.”

Jim gave the Sissy reference a pass: he made a point never to talk about her. His boys had been witness to him finding her body, and they’d seen what that had done to him—so it wasn’t as if they didn’t know enough. And there was no reason to vocalize what seeing her in that wall had been like. Or mention the fact that while he’d been used and abused by Devina and her minions during the last round, he feared the young girl might have seen everything that had been done to him.

Shit . . . the stuff on that “work” table was nothing you wanted even a battle-hardened man to witness. An innocent? Who was petrified already?

Besides, in actuality, the violations hadn’t bothered him one way or the other. Torture, in whatever form it took, was nothing more than an overload of physical sensation—but again, no one needed to eyeball that, much less his girl.

Not that she was his.

“I’m on my way to go talk to Nigel,” Jim bit out. “So if you’re finished jerking me off? Or do you want to waste my time some more.”

“Why aren’t you already over there, then?”

Well, because he’d been sitting on that bed, staring into space, wondering where in the hell Devina had taken Sissy’s body.

Except Jim was just that flavor of asshole not to concede the point in the slightest.

“Jim, I know that this girl is a thing to you. But come on, man, we need to take care of business.”

As Ad spoke, Jim looked over the guy’s shoulder. Eddie was standing in the connector between the two rooms, his huge body tense, his red eyes grave, that long black braid of his over his shoulder with the tail end nearly at the waist of his leathers.

Fuck.

Adrian’s loud noise was the kind of shit you could argue with. Or punch—which had happened before. But Eddie’s steady, nonconfrontational routine didn’t offer you a target. It was a mirror that simply reflected your own dumb-ass behavior.

“I’ve got this under control,” Jim said. “And I’m going to see Nigel right now.”

The archangel Nigel was in his private quarters in Heaven when the summoning came through.

It was about time to get out of the bath anyway.

“We are due for company,” he said to Colin as he rose from the scented water.

“I shall stay herein—the bath is the perfect temperature.” With that, Colin stretched in a languorous arch. His dark hair was damp from humidity and curling at the ends, his regal, intelligent face as relaxed as it ever got. Which was not terribly so. “You do realize why he’s coming.”

“But of course.”

Crossing over the white marble and pulling aside the coral-and-sapphire drapery, Nigel stepped out and was careful to resettle the heavy vet-and-damask weight. No one needed to know who joined him in his bathing suite—although he suspected Bertie and Byron had an idea. They were, however, far too discreet to say anything.

Drawing on a silk robe, he did not bother to clothe himself in anything more formal. Jim Heron was going to care naught about his apparel, and given how this was likely to go, returning to the bath was going to be necessary.

With the pass of a hand, Nigel called the angel forth from the earth below, gathering Heron’s corporeal body up and coalescing it here in his private quarters.