“Mr. Sampson?” His name was a breathy whisper that made my bottom lip quiver. “You need me to help you cross over,” I said.
I took a tentative step toward the man whom I had known so well—who had been more like a trusted confidante than a boss to me for so many years, who had given me my start at the Underworld Detection Agency. The man whom I had watched being tortured until he finally disappeared, news of his death reaching me months later.
I reached out in front of me, fingers shaking and outstretched, willing myself to touch him, knowing that all I would feel would be a cold burst of nothingness of the displaced molecules that should have been a living, breathing human form.
I stuck my index finger in his right nostril, my thumb brushing his bottom lip.
“Oh, gross!”
“Sophie! What the hell?” he snapped.
My hand recoiled back in near-boogered terror. “Oh my God! Mr. Sampson! You’re alive!”
My heart slammed against my rib cage and every fiber of my being seemed to expand with joy. I crushed myself against Pete Sampson, feeling his wonderful heart thudding against my chest, relishing the human feeling of his tender, warm skin against my own.
He shrugged me off—gently—and held me at arm’s length. “You look wonderful.”
“You’re alive.... You’re alive.” I mumbled it dumbly again and again until my eyes could focus on the stiff reality under my fingers. I massaged Mr. Sampson’s arms, feeling the ropey muscles flinch underneath his soft flannel shirt, my fingertips working down his forearms until I found his bare skin, his pulse point. I paused, counted.
“You’re not dead at all. You’re really, really alive.”
A smile cut across Sampson’s face—a smile that went up to his milk-chocolate eyes that crinkled at the corners and warmed me from tip to tail. I stiffened, shook his hands off, and slapped him across his chest, anger and betrayal walloping me.
“How are you alive? You’re dead. You were dead! I mourned for you! And Alex,” I huffed, a sob choking in my throat, “and Will.” I sniffed. “And I’m the Vessel. . . .” Tears flooded over my cheeks, dripped from my chin as I hiccupped and quaked. “Will’s my Guardian.”
Sympathy, with just the slightest tinge of amusement, flitted across Mr. Sampson’s face as he took me by the wrist and offered me a stiffly starched hankie. I held it in my hand, my fingers working the burgundy stitching—the letters P and S embroidered elegantly against the white cloth.
“You look so different,” I whispered.
The Mr. Sampson whom I had known was always freshly shaven and dressed impeccably in tailored suits that highlighted his powerful build. He kept his sandy brown hair close-cropped and slicked back. This man sported a three-day beard peppered with gray stubble and looked unkempt and disheveled in a wrinkled flannel shirt that was unbuttoned over a plain white T-shirt. His hair was beginning to thin, but still slightly shaggy. He wore a pair of jeans that were a combination of broken-in and over-worn, but as I held the handkerchief to my nose I smelled the faint scent of the Mr. Sampson I used to know—a scent that was spicy, familiar, with just the slightest hint of salt and pine.
Sampson pulled me to the couch and I sat down next to him, leaving just enough space to let him know that despite his heavenly return from death, all was not forgiven.
“What happened to you?” I managed to say.
It was then that I noticed the easy laugh lines that had sat like commas on either side of Sampson’s mouth were hard etched now; it was only then that I noticed the latticework of worry lines between his eyes, the thick frown line that cut across his dark brow. A thin streak of gray sprouted at his hairline, peppering his too-long hair with a washed-out sheen.
“I’m sorry I never contacted you.” Sampson shook his head and stared at his hands in his lap. “I wanted to; the last thing I wanted was to have you—you and everyone else at the UDA—worry about me. But if you knew I was alive, that’s what would have happened. You would have worried.”
He offered me what I assumed was supposed to be his appeasing smile, but it only served to stir up a hot seed of anger in my belly.
“You could have let us decide whether or not we worried about you,” I spat. “I thought that the chief killed you. That’s what Alex said—”
I stopped, the words going heavy and bitter in my mouth.
Alex.
Alex was the fallen angel who had the annoying habit of popping into my life at inopportune moments (think bathtub) and the even more annoying habit of making my knees weak and my nether regions wanting, bathtub or no. He was fallen, but good; wickedly sexy, but moral.
And now I knew that he had spent the last year lying to me about one of the most important people—and the most intensely painful situations—in my life.
I felt my eyes narrow, and knew that I was holding my mouth in a hard snarl. “Did Alex know? Did he know this whole time?”