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She was beginning to refer to the being in front of them as something other than McCord. Matt wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“It was all thanks to you.”
“Me?” Gina echoed.
“When he kissed you and you told him you’d never love him that way, he escaped into the night and there I was.”
“All he ever wanted was me,” she whis
pered.
The thing that was now Jase McCord smiled. “So I promised him just that.”
CHAPTER 24
A sudden chill made Gina wrap her arms around herself and hold on. “You can’t have me any more than he could.”
“We’ll see about that,” the Nahual murmured, gaze on Teo.
Gina didn’t like what she saw in that gaze at all.
“You think I’ll let you touch me? You’ve been buried in the ground for centuries. You were bones, dust, smoke. You aren’t really alive now. You’re a parasite. You’re living off his body.”
Jase’s shoulders shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a body now, thanks to you.”
“Stop saying that!”
The Nahual laughed, and the chill deepened. That wasn’t Jase’s laugh anymore. It was the laughter she’d heard on the wind, in the trees, and echoing through the mountains for nearly half her life.
“You’re right,” he said. “Alive isn’t the right word, since I’ll never die. But without sacrifice, without blood, I lose form.”
“He becomes smoke,” Teo murmured.
“Only death can bring me back.”
“Which is why the werewolves watched but didn’t kill us,” Teo continued. “Until he’d gained form, stolen a body, recovered his magic,” Teo kept his gaze on the monster that inhabited Jase’s skin, “he needed all the murder juice he could get.”
“Like I said, Moldy’s not so moldy,” the Nahual repeated. “The more willing the death, the more murder juice I get.” He switched his attention to Gina. “How do you think I had enough oomph to call your name all these years?”
Gina swallowed thickly. “You killed my parents.”
“I was confined. I was smoke,” he mocked. “I didn’t even have a body.”
“That didn’t stop you from killing Mel and Ashleigh.”
“It didn’t, did it?”
He was maddening. “What did you do to my family?”
“I gave them a choice.”
Gina’s chill increased along with her understanding. “Me or them.”
“A sacrifice freely given.” He breathed in and out again. “It was wonderful.”
“And all the other deaths that happened on that land?”
“Guilty.” He spread his hands. “I needed some form of sustenance.”
