Wherever She Goes (Psychic Seasons, ReGina Welling [novels to improve english TXT] 📗

“Take Finn out and get to know him. He’s going to be part of the family soon. Maybe Tyler and Reid would like to go along. Play some pool.”

So he’d gone, and look what happened the minute his back was turned.

Mixed with anger and fear, chagrin at being duped reddened his face and fed the glut of emotions. Foot jammed on the brake; he skidded the cruiser into place, shoved it into park and was out the door almost before it came to a complete stop.

Tyler, Finn, and Reid right behind him, Zack rounded the corner of the house and bolted toward the source of the light, his heart beating so hard it sounded like a metronome.

What he saw when he got there stopped him in his tracks. A huge dome of light, generated by the angel’s outstretched arms arched across the flat lawn still covered with dead winter grass. From her eyes, twin beams of light converged into one shaft of pure white that grew to encompass the man Zack had been hunting for all these months.

In the center of the circle, Logan lay, pinned by that light. He was surrounded by the four women he had come to protect and it looked like they didn’t need him at all.

Zack felt the tingling sensation when every hair on his body lifted and stood on end as though touched by static electricity, felt a hum start to vibrate at the back of his throat. He swallowed heavily and chanced a look his future brother-in-law only to see the same grim expression on Finn’s face that he was sure was pasted on his own.

The air around him crackled and sparked as the sharp tang of ozone flared his nostrils. Logan snarled, Billy’s face superimposed over his own, gathered the darkness to pit it against the light. Inky blackness formed closely around him. It was enough to let him start to pull himself up from the ground. Slowly, head bowed with the effort, Billy raised Logan’s body to its knees.

Zack knew he had to do something to help but he only managed one step forward before Galmadriel’s sharply barked, “No,” stopped him. She spared him little more than a glance but Zack had no choice other than to obey when the angel spoke directly into his mind, “This is not for you.”

Billy sneered and spoke, “Not much of an angel, are you? Getting a bunch of women,” the word was spoken as an epithet, “to do your dirty work.”

“Want me to kick him in the danglies again?” Gustavia asked. Galmadriel spared her a smile, barely a quirk of the lips.

“Not much of a specter are you?” Kat allowed scorn to color her words, Billy was more likely to lose his hold on Logan if he lost control of his emotions. “Getting a mortal to do your dirty work. I guess you didn’t have it in you to go up against an angel and a bunch of women on your own.”

Goading Billy might make him withdraw from the not-quite-innocent man whose body he now controlled. “But then, you’ve always been a coward, haven’t you? A sneak, a cheat, and a liar. You will not win. Your kind never does.” The words spat like knives—aimed at his ego—slapped at his control, pushing Billy past the edge of anger. They needed him off balance and he was heading there fast.

_,.-'~'-.,_

Once they had Billy distracted, the real work could begin.

For Galmadriel’s plan to work, each woman needed to have a strong reason to help Logan. Considering his actions, both before and after Billy had taken him over, finding that desire was a challenge.

The blackness in his heart had been the very thing that had created enough fertile ground for the earthwalker to plant his seeds. Having an ancestral connection to Billy just made his hold over Logan all the stronger.

To get herself into that mindset, Julie cast her memory back to the early days of their relationship. She found it difficult since the past was now colored by the knowledge that he had cold-bloodedly selected her as an easy target, a mark. For that and for everything he had done to hurt her since, forgiveness seemed impossible.

“Even the most hardened criminal can earn redemption. There were times when he showed you the spark of his truest self. Find that spark and use it.” Galmadriel’s words evoked a slide show of memories that flowed with enhanced clarity through Julie’s mind.

There had been a moment on their third date when he had gone quiet, serious. Maybe it had been a ploy; maybe it had been a genuine emotion when he had said to her, “I don’t deserve to be involved with someone like you.”

At the time, she had found his self-deprecation flattering but in hindsight, she knew he had, at that moment, spoken truth and that the regret in his eyes had been real.

Clinging to that memory, Julie allowed herself to fill up with the desire to nurture the tarnished pieces of his soul into something bright and shining. Golden light filled her inside, then spread from her to mingle with the purity of Galmadriel’s brilliant whiteness and arrowed toward Logan.

The biggest surprise came when she felt an answering glimmer. He was still in there somewhere. She poured everything into helping the man she had once known so he could push back against the force inside him.

Even swallowed up by the earthwalker, Julie was aware when Logan responded with gratitude.

Billy shrieked his rage, an inhuman sound that produced the same reaction as nails on a chalkboard—a house-sized chalkboard and the nails of dragon.

Gustavia had no good memories of the man; she had known from day one that his intentions were hurtful even if she had not been able to make Julie believe. He could burn in hell for all she cared.

Yet, at Galmadriel’s suggestion, she remembered how in the one moment he had come back to himself, he