by C. L. Parker
“Where would we go?”
“Back to the beginning.”
Tori thought about what he said, and it made sense. If she was the one calling the demons, she could save everyone, the entirety of mankind by going away, thereby taking the demons with her as well. Maybe that was her role as the Guardian of Mankind. Maybe that was how she was supposed to protect them, maybe she was the threat. By removing herself from the equation she would save them from a life of hiding from the demons she unleashed onto the earth.
“You’re asking me to give up everything I know.”
“Hasn’t everything you’ve known been a lie? I’m offering you a chance to finally see the truth, to learn about who you really are, where your soul originated, to see the dawn of man, Tor. We’re twin flames. You and me, reunited once again. Just as it was always meant to be.”
“We were together before?”
“Yes, and we were very happy. I worshipped you, and you worshipped me. We were in love, made for each other. It could be that way for us again. Simply say the words.”
Dominic and Kerrigan had told Tori about past lives. Was it true? Could she and the man from her dreams have been lovers in a past life, twin flames? Maybe that was what she had witnessed in the vision she saw between the mystery woman and the man before her. Maybe the mystery woman had been her all along. The woman had wanted him, longed to be connected to him with a primal need that eclipsed every sensibility. But she had warred with that need, hadn’t she? She had begged Tori to send him away before it was too late.
What was right and what was wrong? Why was Tori faltering in her most recent stance to not make a decision at all? It was because everything seemed to be crumbling down around her and no one, not even herself, would have an ounce of sanity left if she didn’t choose one way or the other. Him or the house of cards that had become her life? Which way did she go? Which was the lesser evil? What would be best for all involved? And why was all this pressure put on her frail shoulders to begin with?
Damn the universe and all its sick, twisted games. Could no one just tell her what to do already?
“I can’t make a decision right now. I need time to think about this,” Tori told him, her mind reeling with all the new information she had learned and even more so by the impossible questions that information had presented.
He smiled, but she could see the smidgen of hope in his eyes, even though the sag of his shoulders showed his disappointment as well. “Of course. But it’s uncertain how much time we have left. We’re down to the final hour here, Tor. Eventually, this must come to an end, as all things do. The demons—horrid, insatiable beasts—are more than a bit antsy. I’m not sure how much longer you can contain them here, and if your physical body remains wavering somewhere between life and death for much longer, I fear your defenses will weaken to the point that your indecision will effectively be your decision. What you want will no longer matter.”
“No pressure, huh?” she asked with a weak smile.
“Or just the perfect amount.”
Right. There was no such thing. Pressure sucked. Or, really, when enough of it was applied, it rendered one immobile, which seemed like a more apt description considering how paralyzed Tori felt.
What to do? What to do?
Dante’s heart was broken, shattered into smithereens.
Alone and sitting on the corner of Tori’s bed at her feet, he watched her slumber peacefully, completely unaware of his presence. His breathing matched her steady inhale and exhale as he studied her features for any sign that she might be rousing.
Nothing.
For the hundredth time, he sat forward and wrapped his hand around her neck, making sure the pads of his fingers rested on the mark at the hairline on the back of her neck. He pulled from his Light and forced its energy to his fingertips and into her. Shaking with the effort, a strained, “Please . . .” pushed past his lips.
He refused to give up, but took a moment to catch his breath. Leaning over Tori, he pressed gentle kisses to each of her eyelids, her nose, and then finally, a firmer kiss to her unresponsive lips.
Exhausted from yet another failed attempt, he pressed his forehead to hers. “Wake up, Angel,” he whispered with his eyes closed, willing her to hear his words.
Moving along her jaw, Dante used his nose to skim the sensitive skin of Tori’s neck to inhale her scent, an intoxicating mixture of lemongrass shampoo and a crisp summer’s day. His lips brushed back and forth across the shell of her ear. “I have no purpose without you. Please, come back to me.”
A tear trickled out of the corner of his eye and down his cheek to land in her hair. Dante pulled back to wipe his face and caught sight of a leather-bound book perched on top of the nightstand. Tori’s journal. He reached his hand out and let his fingers whisper across the worn edges. Her constant companion, that journal held all of her most personal thoughts.
Maybe it even held a clue or two of how they might help her. The entire household had been poring through Drew’s exclusive Guardian library looking for an answer, but they had come up empty-handed so far. Perhaps there would be something in Tori’s journal that would at least point them in the right direction, give them an inkling as to what they should be looking for.
Dare he invade her privacy without permission again?
Dante picked up the journal and held it in front of him. Such an innocent-looking thing to potentially hold the power to save the world, too light in the palm of his hand to carry so much weight.
He kept the book in his hand, crossing his arm across his lap and leaning in to trace her bottom lip with an index finger in a practiced move. “I’m sorry, Angel, but if you don’t want me to read this, you’re going to have to open those gorgeous eyes and start yelling at me. Slap me. Knock me on my arse. Hell, just call me a fucking bastard with no concept of personal space. Anything. Otherwise, I’m diving in.”
Silence.
The door opened abruptly and Colton came sweeping into the room. Dante hid the journal off to the side, never turning it loose.
“Anything?” Colton asked.
Dante shook his head.
“Hmm.” Colton pulled his penlight out of his pocket and approached the bed, prying one of Tori’s lids open. “You look like you could use a break, kiddo,” he said to Dante. “You’ve rarely left her side since we got her home.”
“I don’t want her to be alone when she wakes up. She doesn’t like to be alone.” Dante looked down at his lap when Colton stopped and studied him for a breath longer than what was necessary. “Besides, I left her this morning when you came in.”
“Yes, but only to take a shower, which we’re all thoroughly grateful for, by the way.” Colton grinned and then went back to lifting Tori’s lids to shine the light in her eyes. “What little bit of sleep you are getting is right there in that position. It can’t be comfortable.”
“She’s sleeping enough for the both of us. Besides, we’ve only just got her back. My comfort will come from knowing she’s okay, and that won’t happen until she wakes up.”
Colton regarded him again with a knowing look. “You love her, don’t you?”
Dante nodded, his fingertips rubbing the smooth leather of her journal behind his back.
“Does she know?” Colton asked.
“I’ve told her. I don’t know that she believed me, though. She was so angry with me.” Dante’s head fell back as he looked up at the ceiling. “I really mucked things up between us.”
Colton put his hand on Dante’s shoulder. “I’m sure she knows, Dante. I might not have much to say—mostly because after more than twenty-one years with Gabe I’ve learned it’s best to keep my mouth shut—but I do observe from a distance. I’ve seen the two of you around each other. There’s no doubt in my mind that you love her, and I didn’t even have to hear you say it. The same goes for her where you’re concerned. She loves you. Don’t lose sight of that. Who knows, it might just be what pulls her through whatever this is.”
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nbsp; Dante nodded again, wishing he could be as confident as Tori’s uncle. There was no doubt in any part of his body that he was madly in love with Victoria Cruz-Grayson, but he wasn’t so sure she felt the same way about him. He’d thought she did, but that was before she found out he had tried to invade her privacy, and there he was, about to do it again.
He could hand the journal over to his father or Dominic and Kerrigan, but he knew in the deepest part of all that he was that every nuance of Tori, her hopes, dreams, nightmares, and very personal musings, had been written in those pages. Barring his unrelenting curiosity and his obsessive desire to know all the inner workings of her mind, he knew she wouldn’t want her thoughts on display for a household of people.
Even if he kept it to himself, he knew she’d likely never speak to him again. But if he couldn’t figure out how to help her, that would be a moot point. He could handle her eternal silence as long as she was alive and shunning him by choice, and not because she just couldn’t wake up to do so consciously.
“Man, you really are zoning out,” Colton said, looking over his shoulder at Dante as he gently laid Tori’s wrist back down to the bed. He must have been taking her pulse again. Colton stood and gave him a look somewhere between that of a father figure and the practiced doctor he was—one wasn’t really much different from the other.
“Listen, I know Kerrigan and Gabe were planning on coming up here to give Tor a bath, and I wouldn’t say a word about you hiding out in the corner while they did so. I’m pretty sure Dominic would kick my ass and theirs for allowing you to stay. So why don’t you go take a walk, grab a bite to eat or, hell, just get a breath of fresh air? It’ll do you some good. I’ll stay here with her until Kerrigan and Gabe show up.”
“Yeah, okay,” Dante said, hesitant, but almost grateful for the forced eviction so that he could hunker down somewhere more private to delve into the journal. “You’ll make sure someone finds me if she so much as bats a lash though, right?”
“Absolutely,” Colton reassured him.
Dante stood from the bed and Colton backed up, turning his back away and pretending to busy himself with absolutely nothing at all. It really didn’t matter if he was paying attention or not; Dante wasn’t about to leave the room without reassuring Tori that he’d be back just in case she actually could hear him.
He leaned over her still body once again and whispered into her ear. “I won’t be far away, Angel. Never far away.” He kissed the spot below her ear, savoring the warmth of her skin against his lips, and then he backed away reluctantly with one final glance.
Keeping the journal out of sight, he made his way down to the garden, somehow managing to avoid everyone else. Dominic and Drew were still poring over the texts in Drew’s library while Kerrigan and Gabe prepared Tori’s bath and Sinclair worked feverishly in the kitchen, preparing enough food to feed an army.
Settling on the bench in the center of the garden in front of the statue, Dante’s shaky hands unbound the journal. Ironically, it fell open to a page that held a very familiar face looking back at him. His face—and his body—perched atop the bed made of foliage in his fairy mound. It wasn’t anything like looking back in a mirror, but if he’d had a mirror that day he knew he would have seen the same expression of his feelings written all over his face when he had looked at her. He wondered if she had known what that look was all about, that he had wanted nothing more than to kiss her soft lips, and he had.
Just under the sketch, he found her words written in a slightly sloppy script, but still beautiful in its own right.
He kissed me, this stunning creature, and I fail to find the words to describe the experience. The sensation of his lips moving against mine was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. It was our first kiss. My first REAL kiss. There was something there, something bigger than me or him, bigger than the meaning of life. That’s it. He made me feel alive for the first time since I’d come into existence. I can still hear his words, and although I’d never admit it to him, he was right. I want to kiss him again, as many times as he will allow me. Because the moment our lips met, all I could imagine was that it must have been a kiss exactly like ours that sparked the makings of an entire universe. I wonder . . . did God have someone to kiss as well? Or maybe it’s possible that the creation of the world we now know was a result of two heavenly bodies undeniably drawn to each other, and when their lips touched, the resulting supernova ignited and gave life. Was this the real definition of the Big Bang Theory? And if so, have Dante and I been responsible for creating some magnificent world in an alternate universe?
Ironic that his kiss had prompted Tori to question how the world had been created when she had quickly become the center attraction of his own world. Dante had to agree with her theory. After all, that kiss had felt pretty monumental to him as well, even though the word seemed stale by comparison.
He turned a couple of pages over, finding another drawing of him lying on his back with his eyes closed. It was from the day in the park, right after he’d collected his reward and brought her to orgasm with his touch. She’d written about that as well, and by the time he was done reading her thoughts on the matter, Dante’s ego was so inflated he thought it might burst. His ego wasn’t the only thing that had inflated. He shifted in his seat and made a mental promise to touch her every chance he got if she would just wake up.
On several pages, she had drawn his eyes, and only his eyes. And there were even a few sketches of his chest from different angles. She must have really liked his chest. Not that he hadn’t already figured that much out. She hadn’t liked him very much when she had first met him, but she had been intrigued nonetheless. She had swooned over her very first orgasm, bragged about her victories during their training sessions, raved over his experienced touch, and had described her observance of his physique and personality in detail.
Dante smiled to himself. Perhaps he’d commission her to write a biography about him someday. Surely no one else could make him look quite as good as she had.
And then there was the passage she had written after they had made love. Her recount of the experience put Dante back in the moment and his chest swelled with the love and adoration he’d felt for her, his need to consume, to be consumed. But he nearly floated off into the clouds when he read her final words.
I love him. I love Dante Dickens, and he loves me. But I couldn’t say the words out loud for fear I’d lose myself and drown in a sea of only his existence, and my own existence would cease to matter at all. Where would that leave my soul?
Dante wanted to pencil in the answer under her question. Thriving somewhere between all that I am and all I ever want to be. Because that was exactly the way he felt about his own soul where she was concerned. It belonged to her. No doubt about it.
But not everything written and drawn in Tori’s journal was as heartfelt. In fact, the words she had written about Dante and the feelings they shared were completely out of place given the nature of her other entries.
She had written about a darkness that festered inside her. About how it was a part of her. About her shame being too great to disclose that fact to her family. She wrote about her sanctuary in vivid detail and had even included several sketches. But always present was a wall that didn’t look like it belonged. She told about how it had a life of its own, how it oozed evil goo and destroyed everything in its path. It was disturbing how she had no control over its existence—she couldn’t recall creating it, nor could she will it away.
Gruesome depictions of horrid beasts littered the pages, each one with a title beneath it that had been given by Tori herself. Nightmares were recapped in gory detail, frightening enough to read, let alone to experience. Good Lord. That’s what she had been plagued with for all her life? Every member of her family had been murdered in every way possible, and some were quite inventive, to say the least. Dante read about the murder of his own parents by a totem demon and his stomach churned. He also came across the nightmare she’d had r
egarding him and a gang of shadow demons. But her notes at the end of that one questioned how it was that the demons never got to reap their murderous intentions, how it was that Dante was able to wake her from her sleep before they’d had a chance to mutilate him in the worst way imaginable when it had never been possible before. Dante shuddered. To be forced to experience even one of those nightmares would be torturous enough, but Tori had been forced to live them over and over again.
And then there was the retelling of the nightmares she had begun to have whilst she was awake: the cemetery, the park, the passersby on the walkway just in front of his own home. It was little wonder Tori hadn’t gone mad.
She thought she was mad though. It was a constant statement in her journal. Maybe she was. Not discounting the demons of her nightmares and their abhorrent torture on her psyche, before each one, she wrote of an encounter with a man. A man no one but she knew existed. A man who had been very real to her. In fact, the pictures and notes she had scribbled showed he had grown as she had. But they had been kind words of endearment. It broke Dante’s heart to read about her feeling for this other man. She loved him also, and he had been there for all her life. This man had protected her from the demons, loved her unconditionally, but he had never told her his name. The journal was full of drawings of him as well. As Dante studied them, a nagging feeling in the back of his mind told him he’d seen his depiction elsewhere, not in the pages of Tori’s journal, but somewhere else long ago.
A stiff breeze blew across the pages of the journal, and in Dante’s attempt to hold it in place, he nearly dropped it. When he finally regained control, he looked down at the page before him. It was a drawing of his statue—the one relic from his forefathers that he couldn’t bear to part with once he had been granted permission to redesign the garden. He looked from the drawing back up to the statue in front of him and then back to the drawing again. Tori had sketched the statue in a way that was visually exact, but she had added an ambiance that cast the woman in an entirely different light. She managed to capture and suspend the air about the woman that Dante had always felt, but would never be able to effectively express with mere words. Dante cocked his head to the side as he regarded the artwork, visions of another’s face taking shape over the page, becoming one with it.