by J. R. Ward
“There’s no hurry. You have your phone. If something happens, we’ll call—but things are really looking up.”
Gareth nodded from his chair. “Yeah, you need some shut-eye.”
“I’ll snag my toothbrush and return right away.”
Her father patted her shoulder. “Don’t hurry. I think we’ve got a lot of time ahead of us now.”
“Me, too.”
Therese got to her feet. Hugged everyone goodbye and pulled on her coat, which she’d left on the floor in the corner. In a daze, she walked out of the patient room, and the unit… and then, after a brief elevator ride, out of a kiosk into the forest. It was bitterly cold, and she huddled into her parka. Before she dematerialized out, however, and in spite of the shock of the winter air on her warm cheeks, she paused and stared up at the sky.
The forest was sleeping around her. The world seemed in repose as well. No sounds of deer mincing over snow-sprinkled brush. No squirrels scrambling up trunks. No birds in flight, seeking far-between and forgotten nuts. Not even a breeze, as if the wind, too, were exhausted from previous efforts.
Silence. Stillness.
Like space.
Standing by herself, she felt alone, and not in the sense that she could not find a crowd of people in which to lose herself. And this specific sort of isolation made her reflect on how, no matter how many hearts had been broken in the great passage of time, when it was your own, it was the first time it had ever happened.
Why, she thought at the heavens.
Except as she asked the question without speaking a word, she wasn’t sure exactly what “why” she was after. Why she had met Trez? Why she had happened to look like his mate? Why he had fallen into a whirlwind romance with her?
Well, she knew the answer to that last one. That, at least, was no mystery.
And as she considered the ins and outs of it all, as she replayed his kisses, his touches… the sex they had had… she came to understand the true nature of her pain. It wasn’t that Trez had fucked her over on purpose. He wasn’t some bastard like that. She had seen the regret on his face when everything had come out, and it had been an honest emotion—not that it had done anything to make her feel better in the moment.
It did keep her from hating him now, however.
No, it was more that she hadn’t been the one to be loved like that. She hadn’t been chosen by him. She had just been a vessel, nothing but a shell. A replacement vase swapped for the one that had been broken.
The sad truth was that she’d been bypassed even as they had been together, face-to-face, skin-to-skin. Invisible, though he saw her. Ether, even as he touched her body.
The pain was because she had felt found, when in actuality she had been nullified.
This was going to hurt for a while. It was also going to color how she saw males. How she interacted with them. How she did—or, more likely, did not—trust them.
It seemed the height of irony to be devastated by the death of someone she did not know and had never met. Yet the loss of Trez’s shellan had impacted her. Permanently.
Closing her eyes, Therese breathed the cold night air and calmed herself. She wasn’t sure it was going to work, and she decided if she couldn’t concentrate properly, she would just go back to the clinic and hang out there.
The next time she looked around, she was standing in the middle of her apartment.
Staring at the crappy furniture, she took another deep breath, and instead of clear Canadian air that was blowing in from the north… she smelled the complex bouquet of nose-death that seemed to emanate from the walls and floors of the flat.
Like everything had been sprayed down with Eau de Crime Scene.
Fates, she just wanted to go back to the ICU. And who’d have thought that would ever be a thing?
Still, instead of quickly gathering what she needed and getting the hell out of there, she walked around the empty space, her mind going places she’d rather it wouldn’t while her body went in circles in a place she didn’t want to be. But see, this was the problem with alone time—and the other reason that made her want to get back to her family.
Okay, she needed to get moving. Grab her toothbrush and an over-day bag. Return to where people she could trust were waiting for her.
Heading into the bathroom, she—
Stopped in front of the mirror over the sink.
Leaning into the glass, she stared at her reflection, and not because she had forgotten what she looked like. Instead, she was mining what was staring back at her for information about Trez’s mate… as if the composite of her own eyes and nose, mouth and chin would tell her anything at all about what he had shared with his shellan, how much they had loved, how hard it had been for them to be parted by destiny.
But of course, there was nothing to be gleaned. And that was the point, wasn’t it.
She had not been who he had thought she was, and that truth had come out as soon as he had met her parents and her brother. After that, there was no more pretending, no way of making the disjointed reality fit with his grief-relief fantasy.
And speaking of fantasies? She had no idea why she had convinced herself he was her shadow lover. In that regard, she supposed she had done a bit of the same to him. Not that the implications were in any way comparable. Besides, she had probably made all that up. Seduced by the sex, her brain had created a connection between him and her dreams.
After all, she’d had the best sex of her life with him—so she’d put it in the only context that had fit. Her shadow mate.
Man, it would be so much easier if she could just hate him, she thought as she looked away from herself.
As she reemerged with her toothbrush and her toothpaste—because she didn’t want to linger in front of the mirror even long enough to use them—her keen vampire ears picked up on an argument across the hall. And then there were the two TVs on either side of her with their sound turned up high.
So it was business as usual in the rooming house.
Taking out her old phone, she triggered the screen and stared at the notifications. There was one from her brother. A random meme. It was funny. Another from her dad, reminding her to take it slow. Two from cousins who had heard about what was going on and had ascribed Therese’s radio silence to worry over her parents. Which had been partially true—
The argument across the hall transitioned up a level, the voices, a man’s and a woman’s, increasing in volume, rising to the level of yelling. As Therese went over and grabbed a change of clothes from the duffel bag that served as her bureau, she knew that the banging and the crashing were going to start next. That was the way things seemed to go, no matter whether it was a couple, a set of roommates, or an entire floor. A lot of it was the drinking and the drugs, the desperation of so many shattered lives being burned off in any direction that was presented.
In that regard, she was no different from the others. In spite of everything, she was utterly depressed at the idea of never seeing Trez again—
As the smell of burning food reached her nose, she told herself to get with the program. She didn’t belong here—and she didn’t belong in Caldwell, either.
So screw just packing up for an over-day. She needed to get all her stuff and move the hell out. Right now.
* * *
Trez’s head blew up about two hours before shAdoWs’s closing.
Which, considering the stress he was under and his history of migraines, was pretty much inevitable.
Unable to stay up in his office alone, because all he’d done was mentally beat the crap out of himself, he’d gone down to the dance floor and stuck to the periphery, watching the humans grind on each other, and wishing… well, wishing all kinds of shit that wasn’t going to happen. He’d also been thinking about Therese. He couldn’t get her out of his mind, it seemed, although he was going to have to get over that. She didn’t want to ever see him again, and he did not blame her.
Standing in the lasers, squinting in the darkness, he hadn�
��t envied the lost souls before him. So many of the men and women were regulars who routinely got drunk and drugged up and made bad choices, and you didn’t do that if you had your shit together. You did that because you were running from something even as you stayed in one place, the toxic swill trapped inside your skin too much for you to handle, the outlet and distraction of the clubbing a Band-Aid made out of arsenic.
But at least they were getting a break from their problems, he supposed.
It was just as this thought was occurring to him that he abruptly noticed that the lasers had changed from piercing purple beams to multicolored sparkles. As he wondered who had ordered the new light show, and what kind of equipment must have been brought in without his approval, he realized that he was only seeing the fireworks in his right eye.
An aura. He was having an aura.
“Motherfucker.”
Glancing around, he motioned to one of the security staff. As the guy came over, Trez said, “I’ve gotta go crash upstairs. Tell Alex to close up tonight.”
“You okay, Mr. Latimer?” the human asked. “You don’t look so good.”
“Migraine. It happens.”
“My sister gets ’em. I’ll tell the boss. You need anything?”
Trez shook his head. “Thanks, man. Just gonna go lie down.”
“Okay, Mr. Latimer.”
As Trez walked over to the stairs to the second floor, he was grateful for the twenty-minute, quiet-before-the-storm part of the headaches. After the light show started, he had just enough time to get himself situated somewhere dark and quiet before the pain came. Of course, since he knew what was coming, his heart always pounded with adrenaline overload, his body’s flight-or-fight response having no real options for expression.
There was nothing to fight, and as for the run-away side of things? Since everywhere you went, there you were, it wasn’t like that was going to help.
Plus, hello, he was going to be throwing up soon, and a brisk jog was not going to be fun with that symptom.
Back up in his office, it was a relief to get out of the paths of all those lasers and away from the pounding music. He didn’t waste time as he shut himself in. Kicking his shoes off, he shucked out of his slacks, and got the little trash can from the bathroom. Stretching out on his leather sofa, he propped his head up with a throw pillow, crossed his ankles, and put his hands over his chest like he was a corpse. He could still see the aura even after he closed his eyes, and he watched it transition from a spot to a less-than sign… after which the bifurcated, sparkling angles flattened out and moved off to the side before disappearing.
Maybe this time the headache wouldn’t hit. The nausea wouldn’t cripple him. The floaty disassociation wouldn’t pull him away.
In the eerie no-man’s-land between the prodromal and the party time, an image came to him. It was of Therese looking up at him in the hospital corridor, anger and hurt darkening her pale eyes.
He had a feeling that memory of her was going to haunt him like a ghost. But before he could dwell on that, a thunderclap of pain lit off in one half of his skull, and—
As he wrenched to the side, and started to throw up that snack he’d had an hour ago, he decided he deserved this.
On so many levels.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was hard to know exactly how long it took Therese to realize something was wrong in her apartment building—and not just minorly wrong. Eventually, though, she stopped shoving things in her duffel bag and frowned. Sniffed the air. Looked to the door to the outside hall.
For a moment, she wondered if she hadn’t lost her mind… if maybe her lack of sleep wasn’t causing olfactory hallucinations. But after having been at the rooming house for so long, she was well familiar with all kinds of food smells, whether they be rot or a case of over-roasting. And this was different. This was… not food.
Going over to her door, she put her hand on the panels, even as she felt like a paranoid fool. Just because part of her life was melting down, and she was taking her doomed romance far too seriously, did not meant her building was doing the same—and what do you know, the flimsy wood was room temperature under her palm. It was fine.
“Come on, now,” she muttered to herself. “You’re losing it.”
A fresh round of shouting across the hall made her refocus and breathe in through her nose again. The strange odor was stronger, and there was a sweet undertone to it, something—
Alarms began to go off, the shrill sounds firing from both ends of the outer corridor. Alarmed—natch—Therese opened things and leaned out. Across the way, black smoke was seeping from the gaps around a closed door.
“What’s going on?” someone said.
Therese looked to the right. A woman with a lit cigarette and sleep in her eyes had come out of the apartment next to the smoke.
“I don’t know,” Therese answered.
All around, other tenants emerged from their units, many of them similarly confused, although whether that was from a disturbance in sleep or an inconclusive assessment as to whether this was real or a drug-induced hallucination, Therese did not know.
“Has someone called nine-one-one?” she asked.
Without warning, an explosion blew open the door across the hall, the impact of the shock waves pitching Therese off her feet and throwing her back into her flat. As she landed, her breath was knocked out of her lungs, but she stayed conscious.
So she saw the fireball that expanded like a great beast, its breadth extending down the corridor in both directions.
And bursting into her apartment.
* * *
From the depths of Trez’s painful delirium, his brain coughed up a memory that made the agony of the migraine seem like a paper cut. He was back to the night he had sent Selena’s remains unto the sky, her physical body set ablaze on the funeral pyre that had been built by his community of friends. He was standing as close as he could get to the flames, the heat so great that the skin on his face tightened and the front of his body roasted to the point of cracking. The blaze, which had caught quickly, burned brightly in the dense darkness of the night, the white smoke curling into the heavens—
It was as he brushed at his eyes to clear the tears of his soul that he realized… this wasn’t a memory.
He was present at the actual scene, returned to the past through some kind of alchemy—no, not magic. This was a dream. This was one of those dreams when you found consciousness within your mind’s subconscious, freedom of choice seeming to present itself in a reality that wasn’t real except for the way it felt.
Why couldn’t he have gone back to a happy time? To when he had rented out Storytown just for him and his queen, when they had danced between the headlights of his car, when he had been able to hold her against him once more?
If he could pretend to be in any scene from their relationship, pretend to feel anything, see anything, be anything, why was it the heat of Selena’s funeral pyre upon his aching body, the sight of her remains being consumed, the mourning cranked up to an acute suffering that took his breath away?
Was this never going to end, this cycle of sadness, loss and pain.
Trez stared at the curling orange and yellow fire, the pyrotechnic monster devouring the food it was provided, the wood, the body, breaking down, becoming the smoke that rose and the ashes that fell. And as the consumption continued, rage and anger became a blaze within his own body, burning him, destroying him, as his beloved was likewise alit, the two of them united for this one last time, both of them in flames.
Unable to hold the emotion in, he started to scream, an explosion of sound propelled out of his lungs by the constriction of his rib cage, the force so great he felt the veins in his neck and his forehead bulge, his arms and his shoulders turn into cords of twisted steel, his legs threaten to propel him into the pyre. He screamed until he was out of oxygen, and then he dragged in the night air. As soon as he had breath in his lungs, he screamed again. And again. And again—
“Lassiter?” he said hoarsely.
The angel’s body was nothing but an outline, only the glimmering wings that rose over his torso seeming to have weight and substance. As wind came up from all four directions, ghostly tendrils of the male’s blond and black hair swirled around.
Catching his breath, Trez wiped his mouth. “What do you want? Why are you here?”
The angel didn’t answer. Didn’t seem to hear him. Lassiter was focused on the pyre, a holy silver light radiating out of his eye sockets.
A feeling of disassociation compelled Trez’s own stare back to the roiling flames and his heart began to pound. The strange wind that swirled around the blaze changed the pattern of the fire, the flashes of yellow and orange coalescing—
From out of the pyre’s pulsing heat and flaring light, Selena’s white-wrapped body rose, the resurrection happening with an inexorable elevation that had Trez trembling from fear and love combined. This wasn’t right. This dream…
It wasn’t a dream, either.
He didn’t know what this was—but he didn’t care.
Selena was risen from both the cold embrace of death and the inferno of the funeral pyre, her arms lifting from out of the wraps he himself had wound round her lifeless body, her torso straightening, her legs standing strong. And now came her hair, the long, dark locks spooling free of the confines that abruptly loosened and fell away into the inferno beneath her feet, revealing her face and her shoulders.
She was of flesh and flame combined, an apparition that called to him without saying his name, that captured him without chains or bars, that held him without laying a hand upon him.
“Selena?” he said desperately. “Selena…”
In the midst of the violent glow, he could see that her mouth was moving. She was speaking to him.
“I can’t hear you,” he called out. “What are you saying?”