Where Winter Finds You

by J. R. Ward

  In a panic, he tried to close the distance, but the heat was too great, a barrier even his love and need for her could not help him cross.

  “What are you saying?” he yelled again.

  When he couldn’t hear her, he turned to Lassiter, but the angel was gone. Maybe he’d never been?

  Wheeling back toward the blaze, Trez was terrified Selena, too, might have disappeared. But no, she was there, still yelling for him, still trying to get her message across the pyre and through the strange wind, her growing frustration and fear killing him.

  Just as he had the thought that he would jump in there with her and join her in the flames, even if he was destroyed, she stopped, crouched, and held her arms up as if to protect herself from something that was falling on her. Then the funeral pyre seemed to explode, sparks and heat pushing out at him so that he had to cover his head and bow away also, even with his desire to get in there with her—

  Trez jerked upright with a strangled cry, sure as if his physical form had to be ripped free of whatever thrall had captured him.

  Covered with sweat, panting like he’d run for his life, lost in the dreamscape he’d been in, he looked around and tried to ground himself.

  His office. At the club. Except there was no noise down below, no thumping of music that would indicate things were still open, no smattering of talk that would tell him it was just after closing and the staff were—

  His keen hearing, made even more sensitive because of the headache, picked up the howl of sirens outside of the club, and it was the distant, quiet persistence of them that made him realize that everything at shAdoWs had been wrapped up for the evening and the staff had gone home.

  What the hell time was it, anyway?

  Getting to his feet made him aware that he still had the headache, but considering the sharpshooter behind his sternum, that ouch in his gray matter was a drop in the fucking bucket. His phone was facedown on his desk, and he picked it up, hoping for…

  But of course Therese hadn’t called.

  Why would she?

  As more sirens sounded out, from a different quadrant of the city than the first set, he entered his password and went into the call section. You know, just in case—

  All at once, the image of Selena yelling out for him from the pyre, and then crouching down to protect herself, took over everything.

  Like a movie inserted into his conscious mind, it was all he could see, and all he could smell, too, the stench of burning wood flooding into his nasal passages until he sneezed as if it were real.

  “Fucking migraines.”

  The headaches had made him go weird places in his mind on occasion, and olfactory hallucinations were not uncommon, although, from what Doc Jane had told him, they were usually prodromals rather than active symptoms of the neurological event. She’d even said that some people smelled bananas or citrus instead of experiencing an aura.

  Who fucking cared.

  As still another round of sirens lit off and streaked right by the front of the club, he put his phone down and went back to the couch.

  Must be some fucking fire somewhere in the city tonight, he thought as he lay back down and closed his aching eyes.

  All those fire trucks, from different districts.

  It sounded like a whole city block was on fire.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  As Therese lifted her head, flames were everywhere around her, the explosion’s incandescent core having retreated from its advance, leaving greedy subsidiaries in its wake. Part of her wall was fire. The rug was smoking. Molding at the ceiling was curling with flames. But none of that compared to the origin of the blast.

  That apartment across the hall was engulfed with deadly fire.

  Dizzy and disoriented, she sat up and was aware of a ringing in her ears—unless it was the fire alarms? What had happened? What had exploded?

  Who cared, she had to get out—

  Across the corridor, something emerged from the source of the blaze. It was on fire. It walked and swung its arms, but it was made of fire. And it was screaming as it fell to its knees and landed facedown on the worn carpet.

  “No!” Therese yelled as she jumped to her feet.

  Her first thought was to help whoever it was, but then the heat registered properly, her higher verticality bringing her into a force field of intense hot air that was thickening with toxic smoke. Coughing and covering her mouth, she couldn’t imagine how that person was suffering and she had to do something. Bending down and looking around, she knew the slipcover on her sofa was her best bet, and ill-fitting as it was, the heavy fabric came off the ratty superstructure underneath without much effort. Dragging it out into the hall, Therese covered what turned out to be a writhing woman—and desperately tried to ignore the smell of cooking meat as she stayed in a crouch and attempted to get the flames to die.

  “Help!” Therese yelled out through the heat and the smoke. “I need help!”

  No one was paying any attention to her. Like rats escaping floodwaters, humans were pouring out of their apartments, all but trampling the burning woman in their rush to get to the stairwells.

  Except there was no chance to save the woman, anyway. Death claimed her, the body beneath the slipcover falling still—

  A creak directly overhead made Therese look up. Flames were licking out of the doorway in front of her and clawing at the corridor’s ceiling, eating away at the plaster and the studs beneath, the heat doubling and tripling; the more the fire consumed, the more powerful it became.

  Just as she started to back away, something let loose and swung free, coming at her. Raising her arm to protect her head, she reared back from the origin of the blast, but she didn’t get far with that. She bumped into something, someone, and couldn’t get out of range. The flaming weight hit her hard, crushing her to the floor by the body that was under the slipcover, still alit, still smoking.

  Dazed, Therese’s sense of survival took over as her brain faltered, her arms shoving her out from under, fast as a blink. Damage had been done, however. Her back was stinging, and one shoulder refused to move. Frightened, she half-dragged, halfcrawled back toward her apartment door. Phone. She needed to get to her phone. She had to call her brother. He would help her—

  A second explosion came from somewhere else. Maybe it was the original apartment, maybe it was another one—but it was definitely behind her instead of ahead of her.

  No time for phone. No time for purse.

  She had to get out of here if she was going to live. The pain in her back and the panic of the situation meant dematerializing was out of the question, but she could damn well use her legs. Planting her hand on the wall, she hauled herself to her feet and started to run—but she didn’t make much progress at all. She stumbled, landing badly on her knee. When she tried to get up again, she couldn’t understand why her balance was off—

  It wasn’t her balance. Her ankle on the left side was unable to bear her weight.

  She was going to have to use the wall to steady herself.

  As she pulled herself back up, she took a hit from behind, somebody banging into her and sending her to the rug again, before another fleeing human stepped on her bad arm. Yelling out in pain, she curled in a ball, protecting her head and her torso, bracing herself for more impacts from some kind of stampede. When none came, she risked a glance around.

  Smoke had filled the hallway and was crowding out the usable oxygen, the deadly level descending fast, leaving only a couple of feet of visibility.

  Yanking up the front of her shirt, Therese covered her nose and mouth and started to crawl, but that proved to be inefficient. She needed both hands, and that shoulder was a problem. Dropping the hem, she moved as fast as she could, keeping her head down and trying to control her breathing. The noxious chemical swirl above her made her cough and her eyes watered so badly it was as if she were crying, but she wasn’t.

  Shock. She was in shock.

  Totally disorientated, she was grateful for t
he worn pattern of the runner. She knew if she followed it, she would get to the staircase eventually—

  She came up to the first body some thirty feet later. It was that of a man, and his clothes had been burned off his back and legs, his skin charred, the smell the kind of thing that made her want to vomit. He was facedown and not moving, and as she came up to his head, she looked into his wide-open eyes. They were fixed and dilated, unblinking because they were lidless, and his mouth was open, the lips peeled off yellowed teeth from the pain.

  With a strangled sound, Therese kept going, especially as a fresh rumble vibrated up through the floor and made her terrified the whole building was collapsing. Faster, she tried to go faster. But it was not fast enough. As the smoke continued to get lower and lower, she lost visibility, only her elbow on the wall leading her at all, and soon her lungs started to burn so badly, she was coughing more than she was inhaling.

  More rumbling. Someone screaming. Another body she had to crawl over.

  All she knew was that she had to keep going or she was going to die.

  * * *

  Back at shAdoWs, Trez sat up on his sofa and looked to the observation wall behind his desk with a frown. Something was tapping on the glass, the knocking sound repetitive, insistent. Annoying as fuck in the quiet.

  Getting up, he walked over and turned on the lights down below from the control panel by his office phone. One by one, the banks of fluorescent lights made noontime out of the club’s darkness, the black dance floor with all its scuffs and stains illuminated with the kind of clarity that did its wear and tear no good whatsoever.

  No one was down below. Nobody hovering in front of the glass.

  And it was too soon for the housekeeping staff to come in. Besides, humans couldn’t levitate without wires.

  What the hell had he been hearing?

  Under his skin, something was itching at him, and he ran his blunt nails up and down the backs of his arms. An unbearable sense of restless adrenaline flooded his veins, and without a lot of options, he walked back over to his bathroom. Inside the black marble jewel box of a loo, he ran the water and kept it cold, splashing his face. As he straightened and turned to the black hand towel, he looked through the water dripping into his eyes at the blinds that covered the tall, narrow window. Wiping his face with one hand, he used the other to twist the rod.

  The view that was exposed between the tilting slats was of the long-and-low rooftops of the buildings between him and the river. Beyond them was that water. That icy, sluggish water that had previously called his name, but which was now silent—

  Trez frowned.

  The amount of smoke drifting across the Hudson and tangling in one of the span bridges’ arches was enough to obscure the far side.

  Huge amount of smoke. Billows of it.

  Trez’s brain was not working very well, the migraine dulling him up, that horrible disturbing dream making things even slower. And that was what made the lickety-split conclusion he came to as to the source both impossible and arguably irrational.

  But it was just… if he triangulated the direction from which the wind was taking all that smoke, and the sound of the sirens that were still calling out into the night, and the glow off in the distance… there was only one place the fire could be.

  No, that can’t be right, he told himself. It can’t be Therese’s rooming house.

  Okay, it could be, but there were dozens of buildings, large and small, between him and her. It could be any one of them—

  She was there. He could sense her.

  Because she had taken his vein, he knew exactly where she was… and she was in that building.

  But was she in a fire?

  Trez’s heart rate tripled, another conclusion reached with the kind of certainty that facts did not support and his instincts could not deny. Closing his eyes, he dematerialized through a seam in the panes of glass, traveling through the cold night air across many, many roofs, passing by many, many buildings, flying over many, many streets.

  He re-formed in the freezing wind on the roof of an apartment building directly in front of the blaze, and what his eyes focused on took his breath away. It was her rooming house. It was the three floors in the middle. It was on the side that Therese’s flat was located on.

  And she was in there. Goddamn it… he could sense her.

  For a split second, his mind spun out of control, his senses over-heightened by urgency and panic, his body braced to pounce, his blood racing. There was just too much to assess: the ten fire trucks that were parked around the inferno, the arcs of water being trained by human firemen onto the blaze, the ambulances arriving, the crowd gathering in the cold and husbanded by cops.

  But he couldn’t afford to be scattered.

  Scanning the front of the rooming house, he saw people streaming out of an exit at street level on the far side of the building. She was not among them, and he knew this without being able to see faces or bodies clearly.

  No, he knew where she was. And her location terrified him.

  Closing his eyes, he forced himself to calm down and then ghosted forward, entering the building through the last set of blown-out windows on the left-hand corner on the third floor. It was an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing to do, given that he could have killed himself if he’d re-formed in the middle of a bed or a sofa. But he lucked out. He was dead center in a shallow living room with an open door, the tenant having clearly escaped the apartment.

  Not that he could see much of anything.

  The smoke was so thick he had to bend down, and as he headed for the open doorway, he grabbed what turned out to be a baseball shirt to cover his nose and mouth. Its smell of marijuana, embedded in the synthetic fibers, was quickly eclipsed by the stench of melted plastic and steaming metal, and goddamn it was hot. He was sweating already, and all he had on was his silk shirt.

  Out in the hall, he looked both ways and saw fuck all. The smoke was down to the floor and coming in waves, the heat wafting it to and fro.

  She was close by. He could sense her. But he couldn’t see a fucking thing.

  “Therese,” he called out.

  If he could sense her, she had to be alive. She just… had to be.

  The water from the hoses of the firemen was pounding on the outsides of the building, creating a din that was impossible to hear through, and that was before you added in the alarms that were going off throughout this floor as well as the ones above and below. And the fire itself was loud, the crackling and hissing, the hot breath of the flames forming a background noise level that was going to drown out his voice.

  “Therese!” he yelled anyway. “Therese!”

  In the back of his mind, he knew no one could survive in this hallway, not without protective gear and a breathing apparatus—and even with that kind of equipment, it was going to be dangerous.

  “Therese!”

  The heat was all around, even though the fire was still ahead of him, his body flushing, sweat breaking out across his chest, under his arms, down his back. As the skin on his face tightened, he thought of the funeral pyre. Of the dream that had woken him up.

  This was the sensation he had. Exactly the sensation he’d had.

  As he forced his way forward, his mind played tricks on him. Sometimes what was ahead was the fire in the rooming house. Sometimes it was the fire Selena was calling him from.

  Either way, he had the bizarre sense that he was trying to save both of his females.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Therese had known heat before: Steamy August nights when there hadn’t been any air-conditioning or breeze in her parents’ house. Fevers from the occasional virus to which vampires were susceptible. Hearths that were over-enthusiastic, and also the hot flashes associated with her needing.

  Nothing came close to this.

  As she lay facedown on the hallway’s worn runner, her hands cupped around her mouth and nose, her head tucked in against her collarbones, her breathing labored and wheezy in
between coughing spells, she felt like she was in an oven. There was no sweating, even. That had stopped a while ago. She was crisping on the outside, her skin crackling up… her muscles cooking on the inside.

  This is how I die? she kept thinking. This is it?

  In Caldwell, in a shitty rooming house, on a cold night in December, in a fire?

  Determined not to have that fate be what separated her from her family, from her life, from the future years that she felt like she deserved, Therese got herself moving again. But the momentum didn’t last long, and she didn’t make it far. She was running out of strength, and her thinking was getting muddled—

  -ese! Therese!

  The sound of her name, repeated over and over above the fire’s beastly temper, had her lifting her head. Except how could she be hearing this? Who would be here for her? It must be a hallucination, a last-ditch effort in her mind to—

  A ghostly apparition appeared before her, coalescing from the smoke. It was a female, with dark hair, just like her own, a face… just like her own… and a body… just like her own.

  This is me, Therese thought. This is what I was.

  The conviction made absolutely no sense, so she focused on the strange white robe, and the fact that whoever it was was utterly unaffected by the flames and the lack of oxygen. And she was impossibly ethereal. The female was positively glowing in the midst of the horrible, billowing smoke, an angel straight from the Fade.

  No… not an angel, Therese thought. She is me.

  So great was both her confusion and her certainty—the two poles of cognition existing in the same moment about the same thing—that for a split second, Therese forgot all about the fire’s deadly heat.

  Oh, wait, so she must have already died, she decided. That must be herself risen unto the Other Side, her soul looking down upon the broken body it had had to disinhabit.

  Just as this thought occurred, a flood of memories deluged her mind, all the images and sounds making no sense, yet being totally familiar: She saw an all-white world that turned colorful, grass becoming green, tulips becoming pink and orange and yellow, a forested rim now verdant instead of dressed in shades of pearlescent cream. And there were people in the sanctuary, females in white robes, and males who were warriors. And there were temples and loggias made of white marble, and seeing bowls that showed the history down on the earth below, and quill pens that recorded the events on parchment, and a library of leather-bound volumes detailing narratives collected and cherished as the history of the race.