by Jasmine Walt
53
Alisa
My head's spinning after spending nearly every waking minute with Noe, talking long into the night and barely retiring to my room long enough to doze off with my arms around Reza, who seems to have decided it's preferable to be a dog. Maybe it's simple jealousy, or maybe he's not up for talking and is warning me off, subtly. I don't fully understand his moods.
But it's a pleasure listening to Noe talk about those of my family he's known, tell me those secrets of theirs he was privy to. I don't like the way he looks at me—it's a little too predatory for my tastes, though I don't doubt that he's aware that both Reza and I would come down hard on him like a sack of bricks, if he so much as tried holding my hand. It's just the look of a practiced flirt, one who's so accustomed to playing the sex object that he doesn't quite know how to relate to people without the soulful looks and entendres. It's strange thinking that, at one point, I played that role in some small way.
When Noe finally takes off, insisting he has some work to do, I almost skip back to our room, determined to finally have some time with Reza.
I'm not gonna close myself off. I'm not gonna let him hold his distance. I made my choice to be here with him, same as he made his choice to share his world with me. The words are the only thing left, and they're past due.
I scratch canine-Reza's head and thump his ribs. “Come hang out with me.”
He looks up, and his features stretch and distort before settling into those of the man I've come to love. “You and Noe are all caught up?”
“Yeah, I think so. He said he'd be back later to talk with you. I guess you two have unfinished business?”
“You could say that.”
“Nothing violent, I hope?”
“No, Lis. Just helping him with some information for an endeavor of his own.”
I take a deep breath, reminding myself why I'm not just picking up a book and sitting near him, basking in his presence. “Look, Reza—”
His brows knot together, as though he expects the worst.
“Oh, no—don't take it like that. Just, I know I'm not good at this shit. I'm good at playing a role, but I'm not good at being myself. If I was gonna try to tell you I love you because you needed to hear it, I'd have no problem. But saying it because I feel it should be said…it's different.”
He raises an eyebrow, letting me twist on the hook. I should have known that that manner of side admission wouldn't be enough. “I love you.” I come out and say it, marginally relieved at how confident my voice sounds. He won't know that I'm quaking in my boots. “I came with you because I love you. And I'm staying because I love you. Even if it's taken me this long to say it.”
Reza's eyes light up. “Promise me, Lis. You're not just my lover, you're my mate. My Packmistress. My family.”
“I am.” My heart swells in my chest at the pride and possessiveness in his smile. A second later, a disturbing thought hits me. “So long as I'm not gonna have to carry any puppies, anyway. I'm not birthing any puppies.”
His grin turns reckless and elated. “I promise. Human ankle-biters only.”
He sweeps me into his arms, and his lips chase all doubt from my mind.
54
Epilogue: Reza
Forty years later...
Alisa lies grey-faced in our bed. It's been ten years since we reworked the magic to put the room on the ground floor, when her joints got so achy that I feared she'd take a tumble if she wasn't careful. The past decades have flown by, for me at least. Three kids and the end of a war later, everything has changed but our bond. “I think I see one,” Alisa quips. “Finally.”
“What?”
“A gray hair. I've been dying for you to get one so I wouldn't feel so—”
“Distinguished?”
“Old.” She sighs.
I've kept the promise I made so many years ago. I've built the life I wanted with her and savored every moment. And as much as it pains me to admit, I can't pretend that it won't be long now. Even the best medical care can't change the fact that human bodies wear out. Gene helps with the kids more often than not because some days it strains Alisa too much to even play tag with them. And with Eren's kids in the picture, too, Gene's got her hands full.
Dread's my daily companion, but also relief. We've lived the way we chose, and if she's reborn as someone who chooses not to love me, I'll still have our litter to remind me of her. Seeing her eyes in our daughter's face, her mischievous smile in our sons' laughs…it's the only thing that can salve the wound I'm bracing myself for.
“Are you gonna come to bed yet? The lamp's bothering me.”
“Sure.” I curl around her, draping an arm over her chest. She wiggles closer to me with a badly hidden wince.
Halfway through the night, my fears are realized. I wake up to her cool skin and the knowledge that her chest is no longer rising and falling. She looks peaceful; she went fast. At least there's a benediction in that.
Footsteps sound on the floor near me, and numbly, I look up.
Gene and Abel are there, Gene with one kid clinging to her leg and another in her arms. She glances at Abel, her eyes dark and sad. My heart races. How did they know?
“We felt it,” she says, her voice hoarse. Abel approaches hesitantly and reaches out to shut Alisa's eyes. His hand comes away with a black stain. Our eyes meet for one frenetic moment as I realize exactly what that means.
Thank God. At least there's hope yet.
Abel salutes me. “Don't wait up for me. You can't come on this trip, and it's liable to take a while.”
“You're—”
“Taking her home. She's one of the first of a new generation of incubi to know true freedom. In time, she'll rejoin the world.” Rejoin the world. Not me. He knows the truth as much as I do.
I bow my head and hold my hand out to him. He puts his own shadowed palm into it, and for a moment, I can almost hear Alisa's voice. My eyes fill with tears, but I refuse to let them fall. Whether or not she returns, whether or not she becomes someone different, I'll still love her. Even if I have to do it in silence as she lives out her second life.
Wordlessly, Gene offers the kid in her arms to me, our second-born child, Lila. She teeths on my finger with canine fangs; she'll be transforming before too long and will be even harder to keep from escaping.
Alisa's body's gone, unmade to give her spirit strength for her transformation. She's safe in Abel's care. It's a relief and a horror all in one. My eldest son, Coram, comes to sit on the bed next to me. He's not a big talker, but he knows when something's wrong. He shifts into a little golden retriever puppy and headbutts my hand until I put it on top of the back of his neck and pet him.
“I'll get you Sy, too,” Gene says, walking through the empty doorway on her way to the remaining child's bedroom. Abel's long gone. She returns with the infant and passes him to me. Infant is perhaps deceptive, since he's twenty or so in human years. “You guys should be together. I'm gonna walk with Abel. I think that one of the others might want to come, too.”
I can hardly focus on her words, can hardly pinpoint that she's speaking of the new rituals the incubi have been working to establish now that they are free to pursue a kinder society of their own. She must mean that Noe or one of the other incubi who sometimes passes through will want to walk with Abel and Alisa.
It's an honor. Through the dark days of the war and all of those who fought, lost, and sacrificed, the incubi have become fast friends to us. Had Abel not been able to carry her spirit to Limbo, she'd still be an honorary incubus.
There's nothing to do but wait and care for the family she's given me. It's out of my hands.
In time, a phalanx of incubi pours through the gate into the Well. Abel's at their head, flanked by several others. They all nod at me with mute congratulation and condolences, and I can hardly smile to return them. I'd rather keep my mind on my children. Coram butts his wolflike head against Gene's calves, plainly saying he missed her. She scoops him up, fluffi
ng the fur on his belly as he squirms.
His fur is now the color of Alisa's dark hair. My hands tremble.
No one says a word to me, recognizing that there's nothing to say. What happens next will happen. Nothing will speed it up or make it unfold differently.
“How is she?” I ask Abel quietly.
“She survived the trip, and survived it well. You picked a fighter.” He bows his head. “We took a shorter path, so it shouldn't take her a century to put herself together. Not like the rest of us.” He offers a self-deprecating grin. “We don't know how long it'll be, but your girl has the blood. That's all we—”
“Could have hoped for. I know.”
Eren presses a flask into my hand and pours drinks for the others. He squeezes my shoulder and raises his shot glass. “To Alisa.”
They all murmur, “To Alisa.”
Perhaps time will heal the wound, but the awareness that Alisa's still out there helps far more than distance ever could. Two, then five, then seven years trickle by as I drown myself in the day-to-day work of raising our kids. I even take Eren's off his hands, leaving the brunt of the maintenance of the Well to him. If I have to raise a ward, I'll remember raising them with Alisa, designing the spells that have kept our brood safe and built the Well into an even more solid fortress.
It brings me some measure of peace to see our children playing, to finally feel like we've carved out a space in the world safe enough for us to protect each other. So long as I have Lila demanding I look at the fur she's just learned to sprout, and Coram learning to howl, I can breathe past my own pain every morning I wake up without Alisa.
The air in the Well changes, pulsing with excitement. I look up, old instincts that never faded demanding I sketch a sigil to add strength to the protective wards.
But it's a lone woman stepping through the gateway. Her hair obscures her face, but even without seeing her, I know who she is. The Well knows who she is.
She tips her chin up, her hair falling away from her face, and I'm drowning in her familiar eyes.
My heart races; does she know me? None of the incubi have passed on anything, no doubt assuming it would be less painful than hearing that she still couldn't recall me.
The stranger carries herself with serenity and the same dancer’s gait that Alisa prided herself in until the arthritis stole it. My gut twists, and my breath catches.
Her eyes are knowing. I approach her hesitantly, praying that I'm not simply reading into it. I reach for her, smoothing my thumb over cheeks that should have fine lines and wrinkles from a lifetime laughing. But there's no lines there, and as my fingertips pass over the slight crows' feet at the corner of her eyes, those, too, fall away.
She pulls my face to hers with trembling hands. Her cheeks are wet, as are mine.
Alisa's home. She's returned to us. She'll be here watching her children grow up, watching the world change, and striving to change the Well with it. I haven't lost her.
She kisses me, though she must taste our tears.
She's still mine. For eternity.
The End.
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USA Today Bestseller K. de Long lives in the Pacific northwest, realizing her dream of being a crazy cat-lady. As a kid, she flagged the fade-to-blacks in every adult book she encountered, and when she began writing, she vowed to use cutaways sparingly. After all, that's when the good stuff happens. And on a kindle, no one asks why there's so many bookmarks in her library. K. de Long also writes contemporary romance, romantic suspense, and dark romance under Katie de Long.
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Brooding City
Brooding City, Book One
Tom Shutt
Brooding City © copyright 2015 Tom Shutt
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
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About the Book
Brooding City
A human lie-detector homicide cop must take down a violent drug lord.
Cursed with the supernatural ability to know when others are lying to him, Arthur Brennan, homicide detective with Odols Police Department, sees deception everywhere he looks.
Following a betrayal at the hands of fellow Sleepers several years ago, Brennan has left behind the life of a clandestine dream-stalking assassin and taken up a silver detective’s badge. The eyeless corpse of a dead pharmacist sets Brennan on the hunt for a ruthless madman, one whose product is leaving its own mounting body count.
Meanwhile, young Jeremy Scott suffers a grisly head wound in the valley his family owns outside the city, and his own power suddenly awakens. He’s not sure he likes ‘downloading’ other people’s memories on touch, though, and when the memories he gains begin to unravel family secrets, it’s all he can do to save everyone he holds dear.
1
The tabby had a complete and utter disregard for the sanctity of the crime scene.
It avoided the still-damp bloodstains closest to the body, but its tail flicked and papers fell as it jumped to the desk and then the wardrobe, from the top of which it watched the entire room through half-closed eyes.
A steady rain muted the light of the ever-burning streetlamps, its pitter-patter a comforting background noise that drowned out the sounds of the city. It was as if a shade had fallen around the ramshackle apartment.
The corpse reclined on a large, brown leather sofa facing a wall-sized plasma screen. Hooked up to the television were a set of studio-performance stereos and one of the latest generation gaming consoles, an unassuming black box with only a single cable connecting to the screen. A controller lay on the floor by the dead man’s feet. His clothes were thoroughly soaked through with red, and a shallow pool of blood had collected in the seat of the leather cushion.
Detective Brennan flashed his badge to the officer standing guard and carefully ducked beneath the yellow tape that blocked the doorway, balancing two brown cups in one oversized hand as he entered. He replaced the badge in his jacket while he looked over the crime scene, casting a critical eye at the body and frowning at the perched cat. He tried to ignore the strong metallic odor that hung in the air, but it left a coppery taste in his mouth. His partner of several months, Noel Bishop, beckoned him to join her in the kitchen.
“Arthur, over here,” she said.
He nodded in greeting. “Bishop,” he said, handing her one of the coffees. At an easy six-five, Brennan towered over her by nearly a foot.
She took a long sip from her cup and sighed, the tension visibly easing out of her as she drank. It had been a long week for both of them, and Brennan realized that she had probably been on the verge of sleep when the call dragged her from home.
Brennan drank from his own cup and rolled his shoulders. Several joints popped in place. “What do we have here?” he asked.
“Zachariah Nettle. Body was found about an hour ago by the landlord, who was responding to a noise complaint from the tenant downstairs. Time of death is placed at around 10 p.m. No sign of forced entry.”
“So he knew the person, or someone sneaked in.” Brennan rubbed at his scalp. “That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”
“He was sitting down when it happened,” Bishop said, “and the television was still blaring loud when we got here. It’s possible he never heard it coming.”
“All right, then I’m leaning toward a sneak. And he was playing a video game?”
“Right.”
“Imagine that would be difficult without eyes.” Brennan frowned and walked toward the body. The tabby hissed from atop the wardrobe as he passed. He crouched in front of the corpse; it smelled worse from up close. He looked at the pale face of the late Zachariah Nettle. Rivulets of dried blood trailed from the empty eye sockets. There was some kind of irritation around the dark, sunken holes, and the mouth was agape in a frozen scream. Noel was speaking from somewhere behind him.
“Multiple stab wounds to the chest punctured the heart and both lungs,” she said.
“So why take the eyes afterward?”
“Maybe the killer has a thing for collecting trophies,” Bishop suggested. “A knife wouldn’t cause that kind of irritation around the eyes unless it was coated with something.”
“Did the forensics team find anything?”