All the Rules of Heaven (All That Heaven Will Allow #1) - Amy Lane Page 0,120

still not safe.”

She offered her hand again, and he took it and rose, touched her face with trembling fingers. “I’m so sorry, honey. He was… he was in my head, and it was so ugly.”

Her smile through her tears was a thing of beauty. “Josh Greenaway, your heart has never been anything but pure. Today’s going to fade away, but your love? I will never doubt that. Do you hear me?” Her bra was still unfastened, poufing up the front of her shirt, ignored, and Tucker felt a surge of love and admiration for the two of them that almost brought him to his knees.

Josh nodded, still destroyed, his face showing the marks of the terrible struggle that had occupied his body for so long, even in the long shadows of the setting sun.

“Oh holy fuck,” Tucker muttered. “It’s almost sunset. You guys, get the fuck out of here.”

Rae grabbed Josh’s hand and pulled him around the still-glowing silver-blue of the trap. They got to the other side, and Rae stopped. “Tucker, what are you going to do?”

Tucker smiled grimly, his vision going gray for the umpteenth time. He wondered if he was bleeding into his brain, if his ribs were bruised, if the agony in his wrist would somehow cause cardiac arrest.

“I’m going to tell his story,” Tucker said. “Angel? Angel, where—”

“Please don’t,” Angel said, and Tucker looked up. Angel was hovering above Conklin, glaring at him, keeping him pinned in place like a hawk would keep a rabbit, with his gaze alone.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do what you’re thinking of.” Angel looked away from Conklin, and Tucker saw something so broken inside Angel, so frightened, that he was surprised Angel could still hover there like a ghost. He had to be human, didn’t he? Ghosts weren’t that afraid for another soul, were they?

Except James Beaufort had been. He’d been worried about his sister.

And Conklin—that level of hatred often sprang from fear.

“Angel?” Tucker said, voice trembling. “You’ll call me back, right?”

Angel shook his head and shrugged. “They’re all broken—the rules. The ones I used to keep you safe last time. I don’t know how to fix them, Tucker. What if I can’t?”

Tucker looked into the trap, saw Conklin’s ghost pacing like a tortured animal. “Then kill me and wrap me in the wire,” he said, thinking at least the pain would be gone. “Conklin’s spirit can rot with mine, and the world will never know him again.”

“Tucker, no!” Angel screamed, and Tucker took three careful steps into the pentagram.

Monsters

ANGEL WATCHED Tucker step inside the pentagram and right into Thomas Conklin’s soul.

And then his terror for Tucker, his fear for his injuries, his aching dread for Tucker’s battered soul, faded, and in its place was the same thing that had sustained him through all of those years with Ruth.

The story of the dead.

He saw, from his position above, Conklin remember being a child, riding a horse, excited because of the freedom, the power of the great animal, the joy of a successful lesson.

He wielded the whip with precision but not cruelty. This child was entitled but controlled. He was wealthy but not sadistic.

Not yet.

“Did you see, Meeks? Did you see me ride?”

The handsome young groom who took the horse as he approached the stable did not look excited. He nodded and grunted, pushing his blond hair from his blue eyes while saying the appropriate words: “Ya rode well today, young master.” But he eyed the child with loathing that twisted his pretty pale features into something awful. Thomas didn’t see.

“Thank you, Meeks. Would you like my help with the horse today?” The words sounded schooled, as though the boy was not naturally polite but was trying very hard.

“Naw. Is not fer yer grace to be getting filthy in the stables, is it?”

Young Thomas’s face fell. He had no idea what he could have done to irritate this man, but the man was an employee with a grudge. “I would like to help,” he said, smiling prettily. He was young, just out of puberty but not yet considered a man, and the look Meeks gave him was… unpleasant.

The unpleasant, covetous look of the groom was the only warning Angel and Tucker got before the memory changed.

Young Thomas was on his hands and knees in the straw and fetid horseshit, and the thing happening to him—the pain being driven through his rectum—was excruciating.

Tucker screamed, his body feeling every tear of flesh, and Angel dropped from his hover, landing in the center of the pentagram