form of reassurance despite, or maybe because of, how rawly vulnerable I felt. This nauseous cocktail of emotions inside me, this yearning for…something from him, while at the same time my anger snapped at me like a snarling beast, demanding I snap and snarl at him in turn…it made me feel caught between implosion and explosion.
The touch of his hands on mine startled me. I still didn’t look at him, too furiously stubborn, with myself, with him, with all the new, messed-up information I couldn’t yet quite put in context.
With infinite patience and gentle strength, he unfolded first one clenched fist of mine, then the other. Rubbing his thumbs over my palms, he said in a halting tone of measured calm, as if trying out a sentence in a newly learned language, “I’m sorry for the hurt this caused you.”
I looked back at him, surprise arresting my breath for a heartbeat. His expression sincere, he held my gaze as he brought my left hand up to his mouth and placed a kiss in the center of my palm, then did the same with the other.
I drew in a shaky breath. Something flipped in my stomach, my throat growing thick.
“If I could do it over,” he added, his voice an intimate murmur, “I’d do it differently.” The quicksilver in his eyes heated. “I’d do a lot of things differently.”
I swallowed hard. “Okay,” was all I had the wherewithal to get out. That cocktail of emotions in me had just gotten more complicated.
He stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. “Are you ready to go?”
“I guess.”
“Close your eyes and lean back. I will help you separate your soul from your body.”
Anxiety clenched me in its grip. Now that I was about to do it, this whole separating-soul-from-body thing suddenly seemed a lot more dangerous.
“Will it hurt?”
He tilted his head, his expression contemplative. “Define hurt.”
“What?” I’d begun to lean back, but now I snapped upright again like a loosened catapult.
His sly smile tipped me off.
“Don’t do that again,” I snarled.
He had no business looking so boyishly charming with that grin of his. “Deep breath in, deep breath out. Close your eyes.”
I did, though not without giving him a good glower first.
“That place where you just felt anger, tap into it. Feel it. Soul is emotion. It’s the force beyond our senses—”
“If you’re telling me to search my feelings and levitate an X-wing next, I’m going to call you on your bullshit.”
He nipped at my fingers. “Focus.”
“Okay, okay.”
I leaned back and followed his instructions on how to find the core of my soul. Much like meditation or deep relaxation, it involved getting to a place of ultimate introversion with the tricky part being not to fall asleep. Instead, I had to sort of slowly peel off the purely mentally feeling aspect of myself from the physical, as if pulling a sticker from a wall without damaging either the sticker or the wall.
As he’d promised, he helped me, which was at the point of last contact of the soul with the body. A weird, dream-like feeling had taken a hold of me, the world falling away for a moment.
“Open your eyes.”
I did. I was standing in front of the armchair, my hands—looking just slightly translucent—clasped in Azazel’s...and my body was slumped in the chair. Right there. In front of me. The surreality of it messed with my mind.
I could see my own chest rise and fall slightly. “I’m still breathing?” I asked. My voice sounded superimposed, like a voice-over for a movie, without any of the echo or other sound interactions that would normally occur if spoken in a room.
“Your physical body is in a sort of coma right now,” Azazel replied. “It will remain functioning until either your soul returns to it and you keep on living, or the link gets severed.” He snapped his fingers. “Vengeance.”
The hellhound was awake and on her paws in the next second, all three heads focused on Azazel.
“Guard her.” He pointed at my body.
With a wag of her tail, Vengeance trotted over to the armchair and lay down at my comatose body’s feet.
“It’s highly unlikely any harm would come to your physical form here,” he said, “but your hound is extra insurance.”
I nodded and crouched in front of Vengeance. “Good girl.” I ruffled the fur on one of her heads...and felt it. Turning back to Azazel, I raised my brows. “How do I—”
“It’s because she’s part of this realm, like me. As long as you’re in