The snow, the ice and the cutting wind—they accounted for the frozen-earth smell and explained why her car was cold as a witch’s tit. It also explained why Raine found herself in this ridiculous predicament. Her car had slid on the icy road and, not being trained in stunt driving, she had lost control, spun out and careened off an embankment. Now she was in the ravine off the side of the roadway, out of sight of any potential traffic.
Her car had come to rest upside down. At some point her vehicle had rolled, or perhaps it had rolled more than once, and that was why Raine’s aching head was now pressing against the ceiling light, which had inexplicably turned on in the chaos. For some reason this one detail struck Raine as humorous and she was startled to feel a laugh bubble up from deep inside her belly. She reached up—or was it down?—and searched for the button to turn off the interior light. Darkness blinded her eyes, as sharp as any blade, and the cold of the air seemed to hit her more keenly now without that small point of light to distract her.
She shivered into the cold for some time, losing herself in the howl of the wind, feeling the pull of the white and the gray just beyond the reach of her fingertips.
The odor of hot steel, frozen earth and gasoline burned itself into her sinuses, bringing her back as sharp as a slap to the face. Her skull pounded—a bass rhythm unlike anything she’d ever experienced. A hundred elephants were kicking their feet against the seams of her cranium, or so it seemed. Her brain was trying to escape by way of an internal explosion. The torture was too immoderate to be called agony and she decided it might not be so bad a thing if her brain did fall out of her head. This horrible affliction could not be managed—it was pure distress. She opened her mouth to cry out and bitter, metallic blood spattered out from her parted lips, welling up from somewhere inside her.
She lost a few more minutes, consciousness fading in and out as if some trickster had found a dimmer switch inside her and was toying with it for fun. Raine wished it would stay in the off position—unconsciousness was best.
As if to punctuate that bit of inane truth, Raine heard an inhuman noise strike the gathering gloom and every bone in her body seized with a primal fear.
She couldn’t move as she waited, listening for the noise to come again. For a while there was only the cry of the wind and the groaning of the trees. Raine wondered if she had imagined it, but the rigidity of terror in her muscles warned her she had not. She let out a breath that misted on the air and gave a little prayer of thanks that her eyes had finally adjusted to the darkness when she heard the sound again. There was no way to convince herself it was a phantom noise this time—its volume was deafening.
It sounded again immediately after.
Panic surged through Raine with the rush of an intoxicant.
This bedlam was not the pounding of the blood in her skull, or the stuttering rhythm of her heart. The sound was deep, like the ocean was deep. It was loud, like the Krakatoa eruption was loud. It came from outside the car and it was drawing closer.
What concerned Raine was not that it was a roar outside herself, or that it was rapidly approaching. What concerned her, what struck alarm into the trembling center of her heart, was that she well knew the human ear could only handle approximately eighty-five decibels for so long before sustaining permanent hearing loss. She also knew that the pain threshold for a human ear wasn’t even reached until about one hundred and twenty-five decibels—and this discordant noise went far beyond that approximation.
Raine’s life was sound. It meant everything to her. She would rather lose her eyes than her ears. If the Krakatoa explosion approached the loudest sound in human history, then whatever was approaching Raine now, whatever was making that booming cacophony, was something she must at all costs avoid.
She had to get out of there.
Now.
She still couldn’t make heads or tails of her position in the car. Her seat belt had snarled around her like some insidious tentacle. It was wrapped around her stomach, chest and arms, yet it had failed in its purpose to keep her secured to her seat. The fricking thing had broken from its anchor, which was why she was practically standing on her head on the ceiling of her car. With the racket growing louder, Raine frantically worked at the belt to free herself from its snare, while blindly fumbling for the door handle. The handle broke off in her hand and she roared her frustration in the swelling din. She managed to untangle herself and half-rolled, half-wriggled her way to the passenger side. She reached for that door’s release, only to realize the door was wedged against the trunk of a tree.
She turned again, her body screaming as it discovered new and alarming injuries with each movement. Raine would have to worry about those pains later. She was far more consumed with the threat of the drumming noise as it increased in volume. With awkward motions, she braced herself against her upturned seats and said a prayer to the manufacturers of her care-worn, second-hand combat boots before kicking both feet against the spider’s web that had once been her car’s windshield.
In the movies, this would have worked on the first or second try.
This was not a movie.
“Fuck, fuck, shit, fuck and damn it.” Raine rarely swore, but this situation merited it. And wow, if her big sister could only hear her now, whew boy, would she ever be in trouble. But Emily, who had raised her after the loss of their mother, was far away in New York, not out here in Boston, so Raine felt it safe enough to enunciate each savage kick of her feet against the glass with some variant on all the dirty words she knew, which weren’t that original or inventive.
“Gaaaaarrrrrhhh!” Eventually the mass of her frustration could not be measured in any language known on Earth, but it seemed this nonsensical scream worked some magic because Raine finally felt the windshield give.
After a few more kicks—sans the swearing, as she was fast out of breath and aching from head to boot-clad toe—the window moved in one long, floppy sheet of glass and Raine was able to crawl out through the opening she’d created. “Jesus Christ—I mean, cheese and rice. Okay, no more cussing,” she grunted, struggling free. “I get it now. Lesson learned. My language filter is on.”
Once out in the snow, she collapsed on her back and that dimmer switch in her head turned, making her lose time once again. When she woke, that awful pounding was closer, she was certain of it, though it was so hard to tell, considering how the sheer volume of the raucous sound distorted everything inside her head.
Raine rolled clumsily in the snow, startled to see a long stream of blood drip from somewhere up in her hairline down onto the white slush on the ground. Seeing that crimson splash brought every ache and pain back into crystal focus, but she knew there was nothing to be done about her injuries yet. Right now Raine was in some unnamed danger and she needed to escape that first, only then could she address those wounds and the very real, pressing threat of hypothermia in the wake of what was looking to be a good deal of blood loss.
Her boots slid dangerously a few times in the slush before she made it to her feet, and she had to move with care because the world was spinning so fast it was hard to get a fix on what was up and what was down. The earth and sky were the same dirty-cotton hue, and the air was full of tiny flurries that stung her skin like angry wasps. Raine’s heart was thudding out of tempo with the external pounding noise, but she felt both percussions impact against her chest until she was teetering as if physically assaulted.
Her feet started moving forward in rhythm with the two crashing sensations, but Raine didn’t know if she was heading for the roadside or into the trees that bordered the highway. She couldn’t hear the noise of any other vehicles, but that wasn’t uncommon—most people with half a brain were off the roads now because of the storm.
Raine should have been off the road too.
Steffy had warned her. Her friend had called Raine at work, and Steffy never called Raine at work. Steffy had fretted that a storm was blowing in. She’d told Raine to stay put, to wait it out in the safety of the s
hopping mall. Even though Steffy had something of a witchy way about her, Raine couldn’t let her friend’s behavior spook her into superstitious action. She had spent her whole life fighting just that kind of behavior because of her own unwanted penchant for witchiness. Besides, if it did storm, Raine had reasoned to herself, she was a native New Yorker and had learned to drive in all sorts of weather. She would be fine.
Only Raine wasn’t in New York. This was Boston, this snowstorm wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen, and she wasn’t fine.
So she was an idiot. What’s done was done, and right now Raine needed to focus. She needed to get back to the road, orient herself so that she could flee wildly from the preternatural drumming. Raine heard her own half-mad laugh at this simple yet impossible plan, then gave a sharp inhalation as blinding pain threatened to split her skull as a result. Her fingers went to the laceration at her hairline but they were too numb by now to feel anything there. Her blood was smeared down the side of her face and dripping steadily down her throat, but she only knew this because her blood felt so hot against her chapped skin.
A crack of ice-laden wood exploded from a nearby tree, startling her, sending her reeling. She turned on stupid legs and went down into the dark…ahhh…
Peace.
Quiet.
Release.
Raine floated through space, through darkness and starlight. Stars sifted through her fingertips, the dust of all heavens sliding across her skin like grains of heated glass. The glass cut her in a million different places, causing pinpricks of pain to well with glistening blood. Her blood sparkled like faceted rubies on her skin before floating out to join the cosmic dance of light and shadow, seeding the creation of worlds. The stars coalesced into one enormous corridor and Raine let it draw her in.
Her feet touched an unseen surface and a new world coalesced into being.
Raine was no stranger here—she knew this place. A dead world, filled with spirits. She had been here before and she was not afraid. She couldn’t be. Here, there was no such thing as fear. These ghosts did not inspire dread.
This was the Gray Land. Empty of all emotion save a hollow kind of peace. It was so much better to be here than back in her world of pain and suffering and Raine was glad to find succor in this realm.
She walked easily in the folds of gray-white mist, secure in the knowledge that she was safe and nothing here could harm her. This was a world in constant flux. There was no time for its transient inhabitants to take notice of her. Here, she was free to roam, to observe and to learn. Raine had realized early in her visits that the many souls passing through this realm had much to teach her in their silent ways, if she was patient and paid attention. Through them she learned secrets about the nature of life, death, birth and reincarnation.
Sometimes she even discovered truths about her own waking life, gleaning information about her friends and family. All it took was one soul who knew another soul who had once encountered, met or even known someone close to her, and Raine would suddenly know that her sister was having a hard time at work, or that her mom had lied when she said the family cat ran away because she hadn’t wanted to upset Raine and tell her that it had been hit by a truck. Here memory was traded like stock, some of it worthless but amusing, some of it priceless beyond words.
Raine bumped into something solid. Her mind—eyes—focused and an image emerged. There was a man, flat on his back, a tangle of voluminous black cloth giving him the look of broken wings and ruffled feathers. A dark angel, of course. What other could be so interesting?
Raine felt an outrageous glee and stomped it down before it could surge out of her—emotions did not belong here. They had no place, and if this were indeed some kind of angel, she didn’t want to rile it with poor manners. “I’m so sorry. Here, let me help you.” She reached for him, carefully so as not to startle. “Did you hurt yourself?” Oh shut up, stupid, it’s your fault he fell, you bumped into him. Oh dear, please don’t let him be pissed.
He rose. And rose. Raine was tall but this dark angel was a giant. Her head had to tilt way back just so their eyes could meet.
Oh. Wow. His eyes…
“You can see me?” That baritone voice was a magnificent music. An aria composed with forbidden magic. It reached into her and rubbed all the right places, arousing everything that was feminine to its fullest fertile potential.
She wanted to record that music, loop it and put a sample of it in every song she sang for the rest of her life. If she did, droves of fans would worship at her feet.
Raine ransacked her brain for something clever to say in answer to his question without alerting him to her forbidden knowledge of this world, just in case he was an angel, some unknown watchman policing these hallowed halls for intruders like herself.
Instead, she babbled like a lunatic. “Of course. This is my dream, after all. I control who and what I see. You’re very beautiful, you know.” Shoot, sugary-fire, shit, she sounded like an idiot. Her inhibitions had flipped off the second she’d met his incredible gaze. His eyes were filled with stars…
“I’m glad you’re just a dream because if you were real, you’d knock my socks off.” Oh geez, why didn’t the floor just open up and swallow her whole? She’d rather return to her own world and have to face a hundred car accidents than continue to make such an ass of herself. Was he real? Was he something she’d imagined? Which scenario should she root for? She was acting like an idiot and wanted a do-over, like, now.
He really was beautiful. But there was a deadly serious atmosphere about him. A great and terrible purpose. Raine was trapped by a sense of awe. What was he? Before caution could bloom, she reached up and brushed a long lock of hair back behind his ear. His hair was glossy smooth and cool against her fingertips. It had appeared black until she saw the individual red strands lying against her pale skin. She had never seen hair like his; he really must be an angel.
“You can’t see me here. It’s not possible.” His rich, deep voice made her nipples hard. His masculinity was overpowering. She was wet between her legs and short of breath.
Such magic in that voice, how she wanted to possess it, feel it in her own mouth, just for a moment.
Her nervousness spilled out nonsensically through her lips, “Of course it is. I’m asleep and dreaming this whole thing.” Crap in a hat, why did that sound like a lie? And why was her Bronx accent showing through? She’d worked hard to dampen her accent since starting college. Yet here it was, blunt and alive in her words, despite her efforts. Thankfully it appeared he had no trouble understanding her, unlike some of her ruder peers.
His black-clad arm reached for her and the backs of his fingers trailed over the crest of her left breast. Her nipple hardened further, showing beneath her top, and Raine couldn’t help but rub against him, hungry for more. “That feels really good.” Her voice was unrecognizably husky, ragged with the fever of desire.
And she’d thought this place peaceful.
Stupid! Snap out of it, he’s gonna think you’re an idiot!
“I can make you feel even better.” The way he said this made it seem, to her mind, like a promise. Like he fully intended to do more than just give her a quick fondle.
Oh thank God.
Her knees turned to water and if gravity existed here she might have fallen. His shadow fell over her as he bent his dark head and touched his lips to hers.
Her soul expanded. If she had ever been kissed before, this one erased all others. It was gentle, but nonetheless Raine knew she was forever ruined for any other kiss but his. She moaned into his mouth, giving him her sound when what she’d wanted was his. She tasted his breath on the edges of her tongue, sweet spices that swam through her in a delicious current; flavors she’d never encountered before.
Wait. This dark angel couldn’t be real. The Gray Land had never harbored such a corporeal entity for her to interact with before. This guy was just a product of her imagination. She needed to break free. She needed to get back.
Back? To what?
Her memory wavered as it often could if she wasn’t careful in this place, but Raine knew for certain that the longer she lingered here in a state of heightened emotional distress, the less likely she was to remember why she didn’t belong here. Only peace could reign in this place—it would eventually purge her of any other sovereign attachments.
The nebulous shapes that moved about her were the natives of this realm, not she, and certainly not this seductive beast either. Raine determined to regain some control.
It was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life.
“This is turning into such a delicious dream.” She pulled back from him, even though all she wanted was to crawl up his body and hold tight. “I hope I wake up soon, though, because I think I’m still driving.”
No, that wasn’t right. Couldn’t be right. She’d been outside the car before coming here. She tried to recall the specific details she knew would return her to the real world. Raine had done this many times before. She knew the drill. But this time was different and she was so confused.
“I remember driving home from work and then…” His touch, his kiss, her overwhelming hunger for more of him. “This dream.” She finished the lie weakly.
His strange gaze was hot with lust, his lashes long, sharp spikes against his cheekbones when he blinked. His lips, she saw, were perfectly sculpted and rosy from their kiss. His skin was a warm bronze glow in the white mist that ebbed and whorled around them. She licked her lips and he watched her tongue’s movement.
His eyes abruptly softened. “Go back to your waking world, human.” His melodious words were layered with command and she couldn’t have fought against it had she tried. “You don’t belong here just yet. Go back.”
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