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“Jack, I-I’m going to be the thing that kills him,” I sobbed.
“What?” Shado asked. “Why would you do that?”
I wiped the tears from my eyes. “I won’t. I won’t do it. No matter how many times I see it. I won’t hurt him. I’ll never let it happen.”
“Well, duh,” she said. “You love him. Killing him doesn’t make any sense. Is this vision why you kicked him out of the house and filed for divorce?”
I nodded and dropped my head into my hands.
“Oh, come on Rebekah. We both know you’d never hurt Jackson. Why are you so scared?”
“Because every time I touch a living person, I see their death. You know that. What you don’t know is that when a person’s circumstances change, the vision changes. I only see definitive events when I touch the dead.”
“So?”
“Every time I touch Jack, I get the same vision. It never changes. I don’t know when and I don’t know why, but one day I am going to kill Jackson Sinclair. I’m going to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until he passes out, and then I’m going to stab him in the heart. I don’t want to, but that is what I see every time. Every goddamn time.”
She pressed her lips into a thin line. “You ruined your marriage over a vision that can’t possibly be true. Are you nuts? It’s gotta be this shapeshifter using your face for that too. I know you, Rebekah. You’d move Heaven and Earth to protect him.”
“You don’t understand,” I snapped. “I don’t see my visions from the perspective of the person I touch or from the perspective of what kills them. But when I touch Jack, I am in the place of the killer. It’smyhands wrapped around his throat.”
She deflated. “What did he say when you told him?”
“How do you tell the man you love that all you can think about when he touches you is killing him? How do you tell him that you dream about wrapping your fingers around his throat and watching the light drain from his eyes? It’s better that he thinks I don’t love him anymore.”
She swatted my shoulder with her hand. “Rebekah Ann Devereaux. You have to tell him.”
“Tell who what?”Jackson asked, appearing around the edge of the table behind me. I looked up at him in mute horror. He had a bottle of water in one hand and a bag of cookies in the other.
Suddenly, I felt like I was going to be sick again. He had the heightened senses of a werewolf. There was no way he hadn’t heard at least some of what I said.
“Why are you looking at me like I’ve got three heads?” He frowned. “Is everything okay?”
I shook myself out of my funk and stood up off the floor. “Yeah, I’m fine. We’re fine. We were just talking about what happened. About the thing that was in Nadia’s body.”
“What? What about Nadia’s body?” Shado asked, doing a double take as she carried my basin of vomit to the sink.
Jackson arched an eyebrow at me and sniffed. “You’re a bad liar, and she’s even worse. I can smell the adrenaline in your blood.”
“It’s nothing. We were just talking,” I said.
“No, seriously. What about Nadia’s body?” Shado repeated. “I just finished my case notes on her. Is there something I missed?”
I gaped at my cousin. “You mean she’s still here?”
“Uh, the dead don’t usually get up and walk out of here. What are you talking about?” She marched past me to the wall of refrigerators and yanked Nadia’s drawer open. A foul smell billowed into the room and I gagged.
Jackson recoiled and covered his nose. “What the hell is that?”
“What the hell happened to my body?” Shado shrieked.
She pulled the slab out and revealed the source of the stench. The table rolled to a stop and a glob of skin dripped to the floor. Something had reduced Nadia’s body to a gooey mess. Instead of the woman we’d seen only hours before, nothing but piles of black ooze, seared flesh, and bleached bone remained.
My stomach turned and I ran to the sink, retching until there was nothing left in my stomach to expel. Behind me, I heard Shado slap her gloved hands together. She muttered a few words I couldn’t hear, and I felt magic kick to life in the air. There was a beat of silence and then a wave of clean, fresh, and ultimately odorless air wafted around the room.
“I need to call the cleaners,” Jackson said as I turned back to them.
“No,” Shado shook her head. “I will. You two need to gather your things and get out of here before someone ties you to this.”
