“He’ll have to get used to it,” I said quietly. “It was his idea to bring me along.” That Sebastian had sold the house without consulting me and interrupted my slumber still irked deeply. “I was…resting.”
She snorted. “You were sulking, my friend.”
A deep growl reverberated through my chest. “My heart shattered over the love of many lifetimes stripped away by the sort of demoness this world has seen only once before.”
“We all have broken hearts to suffer. Do you think you are the only one to be besotted by the devil and made a fool by him?” Tifa asked softly.
I glared at her for making a pun of both her bar’s name and my plight. Minette’s fate, though three hundred years had passed in these people’s time, was still too fresh in my own. “How long have you been in this place?”
The witch shrugged one shoulder. Elegance exuded from every movement. I wondered if she hadn’t been a dancer in her previous life. “Near fifty years. I have seen New Orleans change. Not from the muddy pilchard it was when you first arrived, the fledgling port struggling to survive when the firstfilles à la cassettearrived.”
“Gisella.” My heart panged at the thought of first Sebastian’s wife, then her daughter. Both losses long past, like my Minette. The betrayal that I now flirted with another woman, held her in my arms, breathed her warmth in … It grew too much.
Heat of my own burned within me. Not bright like Ash’s, but a low, cold smolder of self-hatred that would never go out.
Minette. I miss you.
I loved you.
“Hell, I love you still.” My voice cracked as I stared blindly at the wall behind the bar owner’s head as though I could bring back the woman I had loved and lost by lack of willpower alone.
But nothing could bring her back now, and I was left with nothing.
Sebastian had moved on. He’d brought me here with the express purpose of creating a new life, and I hated him for it. For moving me from my fixed place, taking me from the garden and away from her grave where I should have rested beside her for an eternity.
Forever, as I promised her when I last turned to stone in that place.
And now I was here, living again. Fascinated with life.
It felt…right.
And yet so wrong.
Fury built within me at Sebastian’s trickery as memory assailed me. The anger I'd kept inside turned on the witch hiding in plain sight right in front of me.
“Be glad she dispatched the evil so your kind don’t have to ever deal with it,” I snapped, slamming the base of my glass onto the counter.
Cracks formed along the sides even as I clamped my palms around the tall glass to prevent the inevitable. As it had the night before, the glass shattered, though this time it slopped its contents on the bar top.
Tifa sighed, sweeping a cloth that soon waterlogged as she cleaned the remnants of my mess from the scarred wood. “That’s two you owe me. I keep a tally,” she reminded me.
I nodded and held out the phone.
“I’ll take payment when you bring her back. The one who isn’t what I think she is.”
Damn bar witch.
Her laugh swirled around my head as I left The Devil’s Fool, heading for our accommodation. I wanted to clean up before I sought out my strange little fallen star.
She should almost be awake by now, and despite my self loathing, and the penance I heaped upon myself, I had a promise to keep.
CHAPTER FIVE
ASH
The stone man stood outside my crypt for a second time as darkness blanketed the graveyard. And for a second time, I didn't tell him to leave.
Or flash fry him again.
