by J. R. Ward
He nodded out to the dining room. “You see that blond guy?”
Relieved to have anything else to focus on, Therese glanced toward the hearth. “Yes?”
“You take that table. He’s a great tipper.”
“I don’t want to cheat you out of—”
“No, you take it. And don’t worry, I’ll handle everyone else that comes in. I’ll make it up.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Trust me,” Emile said dryly. “You’re going to need the extra time with him. Even if he eats alone.”
CHAPTER FIVE
And still the cold waters of the Hudson River beckoned.
As Trez pulled his car into his reserved space behind shAdoWs, he killed the engine and just sat there outside of his club, watching the snowflakes clutter up the windshield that no longer was swept clean by the wipers. When it dawned on him that he’d turned things off with the blades halfway up the arc of their path, he reignited the electrical system and brought them back into their proper place, all tucked in under the lip of the hood, a pair of twins put to bed. It felt good to set something, anything, into alignment, and the fact that the best he had to work with in that department was the wipers on his car?
Well, beggars, choosers, and all that shit.
He should head inside. See whether anyone had shown up either for work or for boozing and sex. Check in with Xhex.
He stayed where he was.
Meanwhile, the snow continued to fall, the heavy congregations of individual flakes making him think of people jumping out of airplanes and banding together on the descent, arms linked, bodies close. The impacts of the crystalline formations were utterly silent, and that was one of the things he had used to love about winter’s version of a rainstorm. Unlike what happened in warmer months, there was no sizzle as things fell and landed on objects and people, no dripping off gutters and rooflines, no speckling tap dance on windshields.
Silence. Utter silence.
Funny, now he hated that about snow. Staring at the dapples that were closing ranks, as if his car, his club, the whole of Caldwell, was a puzzle the storm was filling in with pieces, the holes locked in, corners completed, the outside rim already done, he found that he couldn’t breathe.
When he had been at his queen’s deathbed, in the Brotherhood’s clinic, there had been machines monitoring her body as it failed. How he had hated them. The alarms had been a countdown to her extinction, and as they went off at closer and closer intervals, he had wanted to take a baseball bat to them—or maybe a wrecking ball. But it was worse when they were switched off. The silence had been awful. Then again, medical staff only monitored patients when there was something to keep track of. Some kind of change that they could watch out for and counteract. Some course correction that could be undertaken.
When the scales tipped irrevocably to death, there was nothing to watch over anymore.
After the medical machines had been turned off, he had stepped in and become Selena’s monitor. He had stayed by her side and tried to care for her. As she had been paralyzed from head to toe at the end by the Arrest, he had set up a communication system where she blinked once for no, twice for yes.
It was strange the things he remembered afterward, and that system was one of them. He had suggested one blink for the nos because he was most concerned that he understand what was not working for her. Can you breathe? No. Are you okay? No. Can I help you?
No.
Are you ready to go? Yes. Do you want help to go?
Yes.
He’d felt as though he had to choose which answer would be more important, more critical, her yeses or her nos, because at the end, she had had so little strength that he had wanted to save her any effort if he could. One for no. Two for yes. But as if it really mattered?
Waiting for the death to occur had provided him with a new facet of torture. After what was both an eternity and a split second, the ultimate silence arrived. No more breathing from her. No more beating of her heart. No more blinking.
Gone.
Returning to the cold present, Trez exhaled as the last vacancies on his windshield were filled, a whiteout in front of him now, the view of the back of his club obscured. He had a thought that the inside of his car was probably close to freezing, but he couldn’t feel anything. His mind was too far back in the past, his body left behind here in the current time, the connection between the two cut once again.
The final moments of Selena’s life were something he had relived a thousand times since they had actually occurred. The constant replay was like a new part of him, a second torso, another arm, another leg. He couldn’t decide whether his evidently compulsive need to go back to that exam room’s bedside, that instance where her life ended and she took him along with her off the planet, was rooted in his brain or his heart. He also wondered what the purpose of the retreading was. Did he think that if he reviewed the ending enough in his mind that the finale would change? That somehow, if he just went back over those moments again and again, he might get a different result, as if maybe reality would forget? Or maybe like the past was an old-school LP record and the needle would skip at just the right place and resume the song on the far side, as if nothing had ever been wrong.
Presto! She was alive.
And so was he.
Okay… he really needed to go inside before he turned into a Popsicle.
Instead, the endless replay started again, and, as it always did, the sights, the smells, the sounds, eclipsed the world that was before him, sure as if they called his name in a command he had to follow.
The Brotherhood’s training center had a clinical area, one that was dedicated to helping the fighters and members of the household through everything from cuts to concussions, birth to broken bones. They’d never handled a case of the Arrest before Selena. Then again, the disease was not only very rare; it was only found among the Chosen, those sacred females who served the Scribe Virgin. Selena had been well aware she suffered from it, and she had watched a couple of her sisters die from being turned into figurative stone. She had also known it was terminal and there was nothing to be done. Her body was going to fall into a rigid paralysis state that was incompatible with life.
She had been out of time long before he’d ever met her.
There were a lot of things about his life he would change. Meeting her was not one of them, however, even with all the pain that had come.
At the end of it all, when he’d been sitting beside her and holding her hand, he could remember thinking that he would have traded places with her in a heartbeat. He had always wanted to be the one to suffer instead of her, and after she was gone? He’d realized his wish had been granted. Her agony was over—either because the bullshit Fade actually existed or because she was just plain dead.
And his was permanent.
So he’d gotten what he’d prayed for.
Rubbing his eyes, he tried to pull out of the suck zone. He failed. He always failed. He didn’t know why he bothered to fight it, other than the fact that each time he went back to that moment in his life, in hers, it hurt every bit as much as when it had happened.
He could picture the exam room like he was standing in it, the table in the center, the stainless steel shelves, the chair he’d been given. After the medical folks had turned the monitors off, he’d asked his queen if it was time, if she was ready to go, if she needed help. She had blinked twice at all of it. Yes. Still, he’d had to ask her again, just to make sure. It was the kind of thing he needed to get right. When he was sure of what she wanted, Dr. Manello had done the duty with the syringes, giving her the drugs that would ease her as death came and claimed her. Trez didn’t understand then, and couldn’t fathom now, what it was like to have all your mental faculties intact, but be locked into your body, unable to move, unable to communicate, unable to do anything but wait as your breathing and your heart rate slowed… and then stopped. The terrifying thing was that Selena’s version of paralysis had not been
like that of a quadriplegic, where the person felt nothing. With the Arrest, bastard disease that it was, all her nerves had functioned properly and continually. She felt everything, all the pain, all the suffocation, all the repercussions of the organ failures.
Before things had gotten acute, they had talked about what she wanted. His queen had said when it was time, she wanted help. She wanted the drugs that would bring the end a little faster and easier. He had made sure she had received them.
And then he had held her hand as his brother had held his, and he had repeated, over and over again, “I love you forever.”
Over and over and over again.
He had known the instant her soul had left its broken corporeal host. He still had no clue how he’d known, but he’d felt it in his gut. And quick on her essence’s departure had come unto him a crippling, shattering pain, the likes of which he had never felt before.
Selena had come to visit him once since then. Or at least his brain had coughed up a pretty damn good illusion of her, one that had basically told him everything he would have wanted to hear from her after her death. And he supposed he had gotten a measure of temporary peace from that. But it wasn’t the same as having her back. Nothing was the same.
And she hadn’t come again unto him. Which was how he had lost his faith in the afterlife.
Surely, if she were somewhere in the universe, and she could come see him once, she would do it again. His shellan wouldn’t have deserted him in his suffering. No way.
So there had to be nothing of her left.
Staring at the snow-covered windshield of his BMW and being able to see nothing on the other side made him think of Therese. He had had no real reason to go to the restaurant tonight. He had no reason to try to see that female, ever—especially now that she had drawn such a firm line about getting out of that rooming house. He needed to leave her well enough alone.
Physical similarities amplified by grief did not a relationship make.
And besides, his grief was like the snow on this car. Blinding him to what was all around, rendering him cold and sightless as to the truths he was living in. He was just starting this journey of grief, the death still so fresh, and there were no easy exit ramps off the highway he was on. From what Mary had told him, he just needed to proceed with the belief and understanding that it does get, if not better, per se, then at least more easily tolerated.
Not that he found “more easily tolerated” something to look forward to.
He didn’t find anything to look forward to.
And seeking out that waitress did not count as optimism. It was a compulsion that bordered on being psychotic.
He needed to cut that shit out.
* * *
Back at Sal’s, Therese crossed the main dining room with a pitcher in one hand and a damask napkin in the other. As she approached the male vampire who was sitting by himself in front of the hearth, he looked up, and she nearly tripped on the carpet.
Which was what you might expect when someone saw a unicorn. Out in the wild. About to have dinner at a four-top by himself.
The male was so unusually handsome that her eyes had trouble processing the full sight of his facial features. His coloring. His incredibly big body. He had blond hair that was thick and seemed natural, not colored. His cheekbones were high and hard, balanced by the blunt cut of his chin. And she refused to even look at his lips, her peripheral vision providing her with enough of an idea of what they were like that she felt as if, were she to get a full view of them, it would be akin to staring at a naked ass that was spectacular.
“Hi, my name is Therese.” As her voice squeaked, she cleared her throat. “I’ll be your server tonight.”
She leaned over his table, put the folded napkin on the rim of his water glass, and tipped the pitcher so that a deluge of ice and water went tumbling in. The manager, Enzo, required that all servers do the napkin trick, and at first, she’d thought it was incredibly pretentious. A couple of pours in, however, and she was grateful for the splatter shield.
“Are we waiting for others to join you?” she said as she straightened. “Perhaps a cocktail for you to pass the time—”
Therese froze and stopped talking. Her one customer of the night was staring at her with wide eyes, like someone had slapped his incredible face with a cold fish.
She glanced over her shoulder in case the good-looks police were coming to take back some of his handsome as a violation of the natural order. Or maybe it was a demogorgon from Stranger Things. Nope, no one was behind her. Maybe there was something wrong with her uniform? She looked down at herself to make sure everything was in proper place still, not that any kind of untucked could explain the expression of shock he was showing.
Refocusing on her customer, she held her pitcher closer to her body. “Is there something wrong?”
The male shook himself. Looked away. Looked back. Continued to stare.
Okay, so this guy might be a good tipper, she thought, but he was going to make her earn the extra money just being around the weirdness—
“I’m sorry,” the male said in what was, of course, a gorgeously rich and deep voice. “You just—you remind me of someone I know.”
“Oh?”
There was no reason to get braced for some kind of pickup line. For one, he was too extraordinary to need them. She was quite certain he could sneeze and women and females would come running just on the outside chance that he needed a tissue. For another, going by what he looked like, you could roll every supermodel from Dovima to Gigi Hadid into a single, incandescent vision of femininity, and a guy like him would probably only muster a casual hi-how’re-ya.
The male blinked a couple of times. “Yeah, sorry. It’s uncanny.”
“Well, there are a lot of females around with long dark hair?”
“Yeah.” Abruptly, he smiled, as if he were determined to change tracks in his head. “I’m Rhage.”
As he put out his hand, Therese stared at it. Then, thinking of tips and her desire to move out of the rooming house on her own nickel, she figured, what the hell.
Shaking what he offered, she said, “Therese.”
“You work here long?” he asked as they dropped palms.
“Just a little bit.”
“You from Caldwell?”
“Nope. Moved here recently.”
“Where’s your family?”
“Back home.” She cleared her throat. “So are we waiting for some more people? Or are you eating alone?”
The handsome male shook his head. “I’m waiting for my shellan, actually.”
Okay, wow, Therese thought. Two beautiful people on his level in this dining room? They were liable to collapse gravity and suck everyone in the restaurant, maybe this whole part of town, into a black hole full of Tom Ford suits and Stella McCartney dresses.
“Well, would you like a cocktail while you wait?”
“Just this water will be—”
His unbelievably blue eyes shot to the side, and the smile that came over his face transformed that which had been gorgeous into something that defied any description with any infinite number of words. And it wasn’t just his face that was affected. His big body got up as if it were operating independently and without his knowledge, his knees bumping into the lip of the table, rattling the glasses, sloshing the water that had just been poured.
Therese shored herself up as she turned to see what the shellan looked like. Undoubtedly, the female was going to be the kind of thing that made other carbon-based life forms of the ovarian persuasion feel like shutting themselves in a room in the dark with absolutely no mirrors and seven thousand pounds of Hershey’s chocolate—
Therese recoiled. What had entered the dining room, and was taking off a rather practical wool coat, was… normal-looking. Like, not unattractive, but not knock-your-socks-off gorgeous. The female was small, with brown hair that was sensibly cut, and she had an open, makeup-less face that, even without knowing a thing about her, made Theres
e feel like she could be trusted with anything and everything.
And she wasn’t a vampire. She seemed sort of human, and yet there was something else going on, although it was hard to suss out what exactly it was.
Taking a step back, Therese watched as the beautiful male walked forward and enveloped his mate in his massive arms. As he curled his body around her, you would swear they had been separated by a decade of wartime.
“I missed you,” the male said.
“I just saw you an hour ago,” the shellan murmured with a laugh.
“I know. It’s been hell.”
Therese dropped her eyes out of respect as the two of them said quiet things to each other and sat down at the table. The male took his shellan’s hand and just stared across the glasses, the china, the silverware. It was clear that he didn’t know where he was and didn’t care, because wherever she was was his home. And his love transformed the quiet, calmly attractive woman into something even more beautiful than he was.
Therese watched them for a moment, struck by what love can do. How it could transform. How it could connect. How it could elevate even those with the best looks and the purest hearts.
She had never thought much about matings. Lifelong relationships. Males in particular. And not because she was a born cynic. She’d just been too busy living life to spin fantasies about her future. Now, though, she had the sense she was staring at a miracle.
And the only thing that came to her mind?
That Shadow.
Which made no sense whatsoever—
Abruptly, she became aware that the shellan half of the couple was staring up at her with exactly the same surprise that Mr. Perfect had.
Therese looked back and forth between them. Then she half-heartedly raised her hand in greeting. “Um, hi. I’m Therese, I’ll be your server?”