Dhara hoped to get her friendship with Bellamina back on track and regretted exposing her friend to what was going on in her house. It had been a moment of desperation for validation. She turned her chair around, the look on her face stopping Bellamina in the doorway.
“Are you okay?” the small woman asked, studying Dhara.
“Not at all,” Dhara said, trying to keep her voice steady. “I’m not even close to okay.”
Bellamina walked into Dhara’s office and closed the door behind her, a serious look on her pretty pixie face. “Did you call the agency I told you about?”
“Yes.” Dhara gave a harsh laugh. “Yes, I did.”
“And?”
She shook her head, looking away from Bellamina. “It did not go well. Four days and a hotel room later, I don’t have any answers that make sense to me, apparently I’m the one at fault for the haunting to begin with, and to top it all off, the investigator seduced me then ran out of the room without a word.”
Bellamina’s jaw dropped, and she sat down in the empty chair across from Dhara’s desk, shaking her head. “You have to be kidding me.”
“Not even a little bit.” Dhara looked across at her, her lips set in a hard line. “How did you hear about them? Have you used them?”
“No. A friend of a friend had something strange happening. I don’t know the details, but word got around that Connolly Security fixed the problem.” Bellamina twisted her fingers together in her lap. “I thought it was a good recommendation when I gave it.”
Dhara sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I don’t doubt that. But it’s been such a disaster that I don’t even know where to begin. I almost want to sue them, but how do I explain all of this in court? I can’t! And I can’t get into my house. And I don’t trust any of them now, so I can’t even go over the investigator’s head. If all of that isn’t enough, I also have this fear that Kean was right—that I’m possessed and all of this is going to come back and find me, no matter where I go.”
Bellamina bit her bottom lip, worrying it with her perfectlywhite teeth. “I wish I could help more, but all of this …”
“I know,” Dhara said tightly. “I know. It’s not something anyone wants to be associated with.”
“Particularly not someone in my field,” Bellamina said quietly. “If it gets out around work that you think you’re possessed or that your house is haunted …”
“I’m aware,” Dhara said, standing up and closing her laptop. “I can only hope that it doesn’t get out around work.”
Bellamina stood too. “They won’t hear it from me, but I can’t be part of it either. I hope you understand.”
“I do,” Dhara said, giving the woman a tight nod. “Don’t let me keep you.”
“Dhara …”
“No, really,” Dhara said, cutting her off as she gestured toward the door. “Let’s just forget this conversation ever happened.”
Bellamina seemed to know better than to continue to argue, and she nodded, walking over to the door and letting herself out. When the office door closed behind Bellamina, tears sprang to Dhara’s eyes. She was genuinely and totally alone. All of her friends were out in California, her family was in India, the one friend she had made at work was completely turned off and wanted nothing to do with her, and the man who had sworn to take care of her and whom she had felt such a genuine connection with had betrayed her.
She could still close her eyes and see Kean jumping from the bed as though he had been bitten. He’d left so fast that half of his things remained in her hotel room, and she’d still been breathing hard from her orgasm. What kind of man, no matter how callous he was, seduced a woman so thoroughly and then left before anything had even finished? They’d only just begun when he had suddenly run away, and though she was now glad she hadn’t had the opportunity to actually sleep with him, she didn’t understand his thought process.
In some ways, she wanted him to call her and explain himself. However ludicrous the explanation was, at least she would have some sort of information. But more than that, she just wanted to never have to speak to or see him again. He had hurt her so much the night before, not just with his actions but because of the realization that she had felt so much, so fast, for a man who wasn’t at all who she had thought he was.
Dhara packed up her work things into her bag, slinging it over her shoulder. It was long past time to leave the office, so she needed to go, even if she had nowhere to go to. She didn’t want to go back to the hotel room with those memories from the night before, and she knew that it was a terrible idea to go back to her house.
At least, practicallyspeaking, it was a terrible idea.
It was also exactly what she was going to do.
Shouldering her bag, Dhara slipped out of the dark office, took the elevator down to the ground floor of the building, and walked out into the chilly evening air. Her house was just over a mile from the office, so she walked, her low black heels clicking against the sidewalk. As she walked, she didn’t allow herself to secondguess her decision. As a general rule, Dhara wasn’t one to make impulsive choices, particularly when she had absolutely no control over the outcome. She preferred to remain carefully in control of her life.
But that was a concept so far gone at this point that it seemed unimportant to continue to pay lip service to reasonability when whatever she did next was going to have to be extreme. She couldn’t keep living in limbo, and she couldn’t just walk away from the situation, crossing her fingers that Kean hadn’t been right about the spirits being connected to her rather than to the house.
If he was right, then it was only a matter of time before the spirits came after her again anyway. So what difference did it make?
The moment Dhara stepped onto her street, she could feel something shift in the air. It was like the four days that she had been gone had only somehow added power to the spirits haunting her home and possibly her body. The paranormal power crackled around her, the sound barely perceptible. The few people walking the sidewalks with her didn’t seem to notice anything strange, and Dhara pressed on, her eyes fixated on the house that loomed less than a block away from her.
Angled roof, red brick, dark shutters, and deceptively adorable wrought-iron fence. Nothing had changed from the day she had bought it, and yet everything had changed.
She stopped outside the gate to the fence, staring up at the innocent-looking structure, and then she closed her eyes. The reading she had done had introduced her to the concept of opening her mind and herself to connect with a nearby power, something she would never have dreamed of before. There was no scientific reason that closing her eyes and letting her thoughts relax would have any impact on what she could or couldn’t perceive. No real scientist would conduct any experiment with their eyes closed and their thoughts slack.
And yet that’s what she did, abandoning her training and taking a risk. Anything that would bring her answers was worth it.
As she stood there, her fingers wrapped around the spokes at the top of the fence, her eyes closed, her lips parted, and her mind as open as she could manage, she reached out with her thoughts, inviting whatever spirit occupied her house to speak to her.
Tell me what it is you want. Tell me how to make you leave. Why are you doing this to me?
She got no response, and she began to feel ridiculous, standing there on the sidewalk, face upturned as though she was waiting for some missive from an inanimate structure. An anger so intense that it took her breath away came over her, settling low in her gut and spreading throughout her whole body. It was such a powerful emotion that it made her take a step back from the fence. She could feel her skin flushing and her heart pounding, and she wondered if so many months of fear and stress were suddenly hitting her at once.
Her fists were balled at her side, but she hardly even realized it. She felt as though she was caught in a panic, her whole being trying to shatter apart and clinging together all at once. Her chest was heaving, and she was starting to
sweat, and then, out of nowhere, a scream erupted from her that caused everyone nearby to come to a sudden halt, staring at her.
Their gazes only further enraged her, and she turned toward them, screaming out again. She couldn’t help herself. She was so angry—angry at the world, at her circumstances, at Kean, and at herself. Dhara was shaking, and she fell to her knees there on the sidewalk, suddenly sobbing with such intensity that she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to stop. The tears flowed, but they did nothing to dissipate the anger. Passersby milled around her, some trying vainly to help, some on their cell phones, concerned, and some just staring. One, Dhara suddenly realized, was recording her on his cell phone, and the rage within her lashed out. She shoved to her feet and lunged at the man, knocking his phone out of his hand and sending it crashing down onto the concrete where it smashed into pieces.
“Go away!” she shouted at him. “Just go away! All of you! Leave me alone!”
His response was to lunge back at her, and then someone was between them, holding them apart and shouting, “Someone!Call the police!”
As he shouted, Dhara saw an image in her mind, like a flash of a vision, of a pregnant woman sitting in a kitchen, rubbing her stomach and staring at a computer screen filled with banking information. The woman was a complete stranger to her, and Dhara had no recollection of ever seeing the room before. She had no idea why it suddenly popped into her mind, but it was a fleeting image, no match for the seething anger that was still dominating her.
She pushed back against the man who was trying to keep her contained, and when he tried to contain her again, she threw him to the ground. Only when she was staring at him lying there on the sidewalk, staring up at her in shock, did Dhara start to regain some of her own mental faculties back.
Horrified, she took a step back, but it was too late to run away from any of it. There was a circle of pedestrians around her, all looking at her like she was a monster, and she had nowhere to go and no excuses she could make.
She had nothing.
Chapter Fifteen
Kean
“Mom, please stop,” Kean said, sighing slightly as she once again walked over to him, rubbing his back. He was at her house, sitting on the back porch in one of the deck chairs she’d had for years, and she meant well. She knew he was upset. But she kept hovering around him, and all he wanted to do was sit there and stare out at her backyard, trying to figure out what had happened to him in the past twenty-four hours.
“I just want you to talk to me, puddin’,” Colleen said, dragging a chair over to sit beside him. “What happened? Was it with your little girlfriend?”
Kean looked over at her, arching an eyebrow. “Mom, you know I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Your special friend, then.”
“If you mean Dhara …sort of,” Kean admitted. “I really don’t want to talk about it, okay? I just want to sit here and stare, like I did when I was younger.”
“Well, when you were younger, you lived here and you didn’t have real responsibilities,” Colleen pointed out, getting nice and comfortable in her chair in a way that told Kean she was going nowhere anytime soon. “Now, it’s different. You’ve been sitting out here all afternoon.”
Kean rubbed a hand over his forehead and came to grips with the fact that he was going to have to talk to his mother or walk out of the house, and he wasn’t about to walk out on another woman with no explanation. The fact that he had done it the night before had haunted him all day.
“Fine,” he told his mother, crossing one ankle to rest against the opposite knee. “But I’m not sugarcoating any of it, okay? It’s all just going to come out.”
Colleen nodded. “Thank God for that.”
“Dhara’s problem is way worse than I thought. I’m relatively certain that she’s haunted and potentially possessed by a Jinn spirit, which, in some ways, makes her a paranormal being for the moment. I’m also unreasonably attracted to her, which is a problem regardless, but particularly if she’s also paranormal, considering there’s no way to know how we’ll react to each other. And, last night, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t touch her, we got … involved. Before we got all that far, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to stop my transition,so I left the room with no explanation.”
He paused, and Colleen reached for the cold drink she had placed on the table beside them. “Wow.”
“I’m not done,” he told her. “I transitioned and was flying around on my own, then Siobhan joined me. She wouldn’t leave me alone, so we got into a little bit of a competition. Racing, I guess. I don’t know. We were out over the Atlantic—far out. It was deep water, and I just wanted to be in it. I dove in, and I was down in the depths of the ocean …I don’t know for how long. Maybe a while. When I resurfaced, she was furious with me, and now she’s not speaking to me either.”
“Why?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I scared her, I guess. She said I was gone for over an hour. I don’t think it was that long, but I was at the deepest levels of the ocean, so maybe I don’t know. She lost her connection with me, and she thought I was dead. When I tried to explain to her what happened, she just got angrier because she thinks I’m risking all of us by being so invested in Dhara.”
“So, basically, everybody hates you right now.”
“Except you.”
“Well, I’m on the fence.”
He rolled his eyes, knowing she was joking. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Well, honestly, sweetie, you’re being a little bit of a dick,” she said, sipping her drink. “If you ask me. Which you didn’t. But I’m your mom, which means I don’t have to wait to be asked.”
“Apparently.”
Colleen was unperturbed by his short tone. “Listen, you can’t just sit around here forever, so you have to deal with this eventually, right? We might as well deal with it now. Have you talked to Ronan?”
“He’s out of town on some project.”
“Well, that’s inconvenient,” Colleen said. “I guess I’ll have to step in then. It’s not unusual, sweetie, for you to be getting caught up in your feelings about this girl. She’s beautiful and intelligent, and she seems to have a very sweet personality. Of course you’re attracted to her. And it doesn’t help that we’re having to wait longer and longer to get the younger generations mates these days, given how few of us are around. You and Moira and Siobhan are almost literal siblings—not just clan siblings. They can’t mate with you.”
Kean’s whole face scrunched up. “God, Mom. Please don’t ever say their names and the word ‘mate’ in the same sentence again. That’s disturbing.”
“My point is, it’s not natural for men to be thirty years old and not be mated up.”
“I hate to break it to you, but it’s not like I don’t have sex,” Kean said dryly. “I’m not exactly a starving celibate, you know.”
She gave him a pointed look. “It’s not about sex, dear. It’s about connection. Mating is about both a physical and emotional connection, and one day when you do get your dragon mate, you will feel utterly fulfilled.” Tears appeared in the corners or her eyes. “Like I was with your father.”
“Mom.” Kean reached over and took her hand. “Don’t cry.”
“Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine,” Colleen said, pulling her hand away and waving it in the air before dabbing at her eyes. “I just mean, don’t panic just because this girl is special. She might be very special, but she’s not your one.”
“What if she is?”
“She’s not.”
“There are only so many dragons left in the world,” he reminded her, staring out over the backyard again. “Eventually there aren’t going to be enough of us to keep breeding.”
“Well, we can’t breed with humans. You know that.”
He did know that, and it frustrated him. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees, his hands propping up his chin. “I want to tell her about us, Mom. I know that’s crazy and wrong and could get me in
a lot of trouble with everyone. But there’s no way for me to explain to her why I ran out on her last night, and if I can’t, then she’s never going to forgive me.”
“And that’s a good enough reason to risk all of us?” Her voice was serious now, and when Kean looked back at her, he could see the gravity in her eyes.
“I don’t want to risk anyone. I just don’t want to lose her either.”
“You need to cut her out of your life, Kean,” Colleen said, shaking her head. “If this is the effect she has on you, then you can’t be around her. We have survived too many years under the radar for you to ruin it now. You understand that, don’t you?”
Kean looked away from her again. “I know that. I just can’t explain why I have this need to tell her. To be with her.” He sighed. “It doesn’t matter. She’s never going to speak to me again.”
“Maybe that’s for the best.”
“Given that she’s still got her haunting issues, it’s really not,” Kean pointed out. “If she won’t talk to me, then who’s going to help her with that?”
“Give her to Moira or Eamon.”
It was a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem, and Kean knew that he should have one of them call her and pick up where he’d left off. Except he wasn’t ready to let go of her. Everything practical and reasonable told him he should stay as far away from her as possible, and everything instinctive and emotional begged him to run back toward her, take her in his arms, and protect her from everything that might want to hurt her.
He was stuck, sitting there in his mother’s backyard, trying to decide what to do with himself, and every moment that passed was just another moment that Dhara was in danger with no one who she would trust to help her.
Kean’s phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket, glancing down and seeing that it was Siobhan. He sighed, dreading the conversation. She was still angry with him for scaring her the night before and because, in the aftermath of it all, he had tried to explain to her how important it was for him to be able to be honest with Dhara. Because Siobhan wasn’t speaking to him, he knew that her call must be something significant.
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