Glimmer

by Vivi Anna

  He grinned at that.

  I felt something warm begin to flow inside. Heat swirled in my stomach and threatened to venture lower if I didn’t put a cork in my carnal thoughts. This was extremely difficult with an incredibly alluring naked man standing in front of me smiling.

  “You have a beautiful smile.”

  My heart picked up a few extra beats. “Thank you.” God, I was scared out of my mind, but at the same time desire flared over me. A strange combination.

  He nodded. “You’re a nurse.”

  His words weren’t a question.

  “Yes,” I said, my voice cracking. “How do you know that?” And my thoughts flitted back to the moving shadows on the rooftop by the hospital.

  He gestured with his hand. “Your scrubs.”

  I glanced down at myself. I had on my light blue hospital scrubs still. They were pretty distinctive. “Oh, right. Yes, I work at St. Paul’s.”

  “It suits you. You give off this healing vibe.” He continued to stare into my eyes.

  I should’ve felt unnerved but I didn’t. I liked his intensity. Which was strange because I usually didn’t like people looking at me for so long. Hiding was harder when someone’s trying to stare right through you.

  I stared back at him, letting my gaze drift slowly down his body. That was when I noticed the long red gouges on his chest.

  “You’re hurt.” I had the sudden urge to reach out and touch him, to soothe the angry looking cuts. I wondered where he’d gotten them. During his prowling about town?

  “Just a scratch. It’ll be gone in a couple of days.” He touched the swelling marks, pushing on them as if to prove his point. “We have remarkable healing capabilities.”

  “Yes, I know. I saw you on Breakfast Television talking about some of your…ah, differences.”

  He just continued to eye me, as if in consideration of something, making me nervous and fluttery in odd places. By the flash in his eyes, he knew what he was doing to me.

  “What were you doing in this neighborhood? Not a likely place a university professor would hang out,” I asked, still curious about his injury.

  “I had business nearby.”

  I eyed him, not quite sure what to make of him. I wasn’t one hundred percent positive that he wasn’t a danger to me in some way. Because he was dangerous. No doubt about it.

  “You weren’t over at St. Paul’s earlier, were you?”

  A few seconds passed before he answered. “Why would you ask?”

  “Because a woman came in with a gut wound and marks just like those.” I gestured to his chest. “She died on the table before we could stitch her back together.”

  “That’s unfortunate. I’m sorry to hear that she died.”

  “You followed me, didn’t you? From St. Paul’s? I saw you on the rooftops.”

  He nodded. “I heard about the attack and I had to follow up on it. My job is to keep the werewolf community in check.”

  I shivered again from his intensity. This man had a lot of power, it radiated from him. I sensed that if he knew who’d been responsible for the attack on that woman, he’d take care of it. With his own type of justice I suspected. It made me curious how werewolves punished their own.

  “How did you know that I was even involved? We get tons of trauma patients in every night.”

  He tapped his nose. “I could smell the attack on you.”

  I had no idea what to say to that.

  After a few more moments of staring at one another, he bowed to me. Which I found extremely odd but pleasant. “I must take my leave but first if you would grant me your name.”

  “It’s Nina Decker.”

  “Nina.”

  The way he said my name made me think of someone sampling a delicacy and finding it extremely pleasant. My belly and lower clenched in response.

  “Stay safe.” With a last nod, he turned and walked back across the street toward the shadows along one old building.

  I had to admit I watched every swagger of his tight ass.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he said, “I hope to see you again, but this time under different circumstances.”

  Speechless, I remained glued to the spot and watched as he disappeared into the night. I don’t know how long I stood there, but by the time I turned and got back on my bike, my legs were sore from standing in one spot on the pavement for too long.

  ***

  Chapter 3

  On the drive home, I thought about Severin. It was difficult not to—the man was unforgettable. And I had to admit I knew more about him than probably was normal…or safe. I’d spent a good two hours Googling him after the first time I’d seen him on TV. For curiosity sake, of course.

  I managed to find an article he’d written for the Scientific Journal about the evolution of wolves. He’d discovered a recessive gene in one of the species—a gene closely related to humans. In response came a few articles debunking his theories and work. I kept those too.

  The man was a triple threat—intelligent, ambitious and devastatingly gorgeous. And probably not someone I should be thinking, or daydreaming, about. Or anything else of the kind. He was of a different species. One I knew nothing about. It was one thing to get into a relationship with a man you didn’t know, but with a werewolf…

  Who knew what came with that.

  And speaking of alternate species, I thought about how my hands had seemed to glow earlier in the lamp light. I glanced in my side mirror at my face. Moving right and left, I examined the skin. It didn’t appear as if I was glowing. I was certainly pale, like fine-boned porcelain, someone had once told me, and add the fact that my hair was as black as ink. Despite that I didn’t think I was actually glowing. At least, I hope I wasn’t. Now that we were a brave new paranormal world, something that bizarre would make someone want to do tests on me. If werewolves existed, what other legends were true? I had no doubt plenty of people wanted to find that out. I was not prepared for that to happen. Ever.

  A half hour later, after parking my bike in my garage at home, I flipped on the light in my kitchen, tossing keys and my canvas bag onto the granite counter. In the sink were a dirty plate and a pot half-submersed in greasy water. Shaking my head, I pulled them out, rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher.

  I hadn’t even closed the dishwasher door when the sound of footsteps brought my head around.

  “Kinda late to be coming home, don’t you think?”

  Instantly, I relaxed. “I had a twelve-hour shift.” I finished closing the door, latched it and turned the knob. “Would you like some tea?” I opened the cupboard and took out two tea cups knowing he would say yes.

  Nodding, he pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and lowered his frail frame into it.

  As I filled the teapot with water and set it on the stove, I looked at him, my heart breaking every time.

  He was tall and gangly, all long thin limbs with no substance. I remembered a time when he wasn’t like that. He’d been strapping and handsome, full of vigor, up for anything at any time. We had some good times together, laughing, and playing. Jason Decker, my father, had always been one for games.

  Now he was old and withered, looking and feeling ancient beyond his sixty-two years. And there was nothing I could do but watch him slowly fade. My mother was to blame. She’d sucked the life and joy out of him, and left without a second thought to his welfare. She cared only for herself and her own selfish pleasure.

  “What did you do tonight, Da?” I asked as I put chamomile tea bags into our cups.

  “Sat by the garden.”

  He did that just about every day. All his days consisted of now were napping, sitting in the garden, and painting. He had a little studio off the living room where he spent hours creating portraits of my mother. Whether he used charcoal, oil-based paint, or watercolor, every single painting was of her in some form.

  Some paintings were lovely, with exquisite attention to detail and eye-appealing color, and some were so dark, so violent
and twisted, I even had trouble looking at them. And I knew that was what his soul looked like, a mixture of beauty and darkness, twisted together. Light and dark in conflict. Always in conflict.

  That was what being fae-struck did to a person. Made them fractured, disjointed, with a mind barely able to hold onto reality. And an aging withered body to match.

  That was my legacy, my secret and my curse. My mother was from the realm of the dark fae, a place steeped in darkness and mystery. I was born to it, but would never see it. Never wanted to either.

  The fae were an ancient race of people cloaked in magic and mayhem. Some had even been worshipped as gods and goddesses during the time of the Celtic people. Fairy tales had been invented to describe them, but in reality, there was nothing whimsical about them. They were a dark and dangerous species that I had worked all my life to forget existed.

  Fae blood may have flowed through my veins, but I was human—mind, body and soul.

  The teapot whistled and I poured the hot water into our cups, taking them both to the table. I set his in front of him with a spoon. “I hope you wore a sweater. The air was a little cool earlier.”

  “I saw some pixies playing in the lavender.”

  I dunked the teabag up and down in my cup, trying not to look into his expectant face, set it on a napkin on the table, then picked up my spoon to stir. “Da, I told you to ignore them.”

  He banged his fist on the table, rattling his spoon. “I don’t want to ignore them, Nina. I like to watch them. One even talked to me for a spell.”

  I rubbed at my forehead where a headache was starting to take hold. I really didn’t want to have another conversation like this, not at one in the morning. “Why don’t you take your tea to bed with you? You should get some sleep.”

  “Don’t treat me like a child, A’lona.”

  Sighing, I reached across the table and squeezed his withered hand. “I’m not her, Da. I’m not A’lona. I’m your daughter, Nina, remember?”

  At first, his eyes were clouded over when he looked at me, but after a turn, they seemed to clear and he smiled as if truly seeing me for the first time.

  I returned his smile, overjoyed that he was lucid. He had days where he had no idea where he was. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s. We’d had all the tests. I knew what it was but he didn’t want to admit the truth. He didn’t want to accept that my mother had done this to him.

  “I know who you are, my darling.” He squeezed my hand tight. “You just look so much like her, so much like your mother.”

  I know he was paying me a compliment. My mother, A’lona, had been breathtakingly beautiful with lustrous dark hair, spring green eyes, and luminous pale flawless complexion. But because of my anger toward her, I hated being compared to her in any way. I hoped and I prayed that I wasn’t anything like her and would never be, no matter what life threw at me.

  “Yeah, well, unfortunately I can’t seem to help that. Genetics and all.” I gave him a quick sardonic smile and sipped my tea.

  “One day you’ll have to forgive her.”

  “Why?”

  Picking up his cup, he sat back in his chair and regarded me. “Because some day you may need her.”

  “I can’t see that day ever coming, Da. Not when I have you.”

  He sipped his drink then set it down on the table. “I won’t always be here, Nina. You know that. Your mother will be around a lot longer.”

  “Yeah, well, that can’t be helped either.” Standing, I took my tea to the sink and dumped it. I was no longer in the mood for a nice cup of soothing tea. Talking about my mother had that affect. Anything that comforting or joyful faded when I thought about her.

  She had abandoned me when I was ten and I had yet to forgive her. Nor did I see that ever happening. In the past seventeen years, I’d seen her only twice--both times on my birthday, once when I was turning sixteen and the other time when I was turning twenty-one. She’d arrived unexpectedly on the doorstep, bearing gifts for both Da and I. As if expensive presents could make up for her abandonment.

  For my sweet sixteenth, she gave me a glass globe. Inside was a tiny village made out of porcelain nestled in a wooded glen beside a tall mountain. When you shook the globe, tiny glowing stars would dance around. Quite beautiful. She told me it was the realm of Nightfall where she had been born, the place she had left us for. Every time I shook it, she said, she would know that I was thinking of her.

  Without thanking her for it, I had smashed it into a thousand pieces on the hard wood floor in our living room.

  Da had yelled at me and told me how ungrateful I had been. All the while, I glared at A’lona, wishing her to vanish into mist. She had just returned my look, but there had been no anger in her gaze or malice. Just understanding. That had angered me the most. Because if she had truly understood, she wouldn’t have left me in the first place.

  I remembered spending the rest of the day in the room, crying and tearing apart all my pretty things. Later, tired and hungry, I had snuck out of my room to the kitchen to snag a piece of my birthday cake. As I crept past my father’s room, I had heard them together. The realization had angered and disgusted me, and I had almost burst into the room to drag her out of the house by her hair. But I didn’t. I couldn’t do that to my father.

  After only a day, A’lona had once again disappeared, and my father sunk into a depression, sobbing until his throat was hoarse. For days after, he’d refuse to eat or go to work. A week later, the depression broke and he was back to his normal happy self.

  So on my twenty-first birthday when she showed up at the door again, bearing gifts, I had thought for sure that Da would tell her to go back to Nightfall and leave us be. But he didn’t. Once more, he had welcomed her in with open arms.

  I understood then why it was that way. He’d been fae-struck and he’d always love her, no matter what and no matter how long she’d leave him for. Humans were cursed to love the fae forever. That was just one of the reasons I wasn’t in a serious relationship. It just wouldn’t be fair to the other person.

  That time she had given me an exquisite bracelet made from amethyst and moonstone. Real moonstone, not the beads that pretend they are made from the lunar rock. I had thanked her, kissed her on the cheek, then that night when they had retired to my father’s room, I sneaked outside and buried it in the garden.

  Moonflowers grew in that spot now, encircling a small pond where two toads have taken up residence. Every night their dark blue petals unfurled to soak up the moon’s rays--the exact spot where Da always saw the pixies playing. Pixies from Nightfall, the place where my mother was born and lived.

  Movement stirred behind me. I hadn’t heard Da move up behind me. He set his empty cup on the counter and placed his quivering hand on my shoulder. I leaned into his touch.

  “You have to stop hating her, Nina. It will only eat at you from the inside out.”

  I shook my head. “Why should I? What has she done to deserve my forgiveness?”

  “She can’t help what she is. Would you fault a wolf from hunting and killing its prey to feed itself?”

  Thoughts of Severin instantly filled my mind.

  “Its nature is to do what it must to survive.” He squeezed my shoulder again then let his hand fall. “So it is with your mother. She does what she does to survive.”

  I didn’t look at him even when he pressed a quick kiss to my cheek and said, “Goodnight, darling. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Night.”

  I waited until he’d left the kitchen before I rinsed and set our cups in the dishwasher, his words mulling around in my head. I didn’t want to consider that A’lona had valid motivations for what she did. To me, there couldn’t have been any reason to abandon a child at the tender age of ten. No reason to leave her without any explanation to be raised by her father. I could never have done that.

  I stood at the sink and stared out the big window toward the backyard garden. The moonflowers were in full bloom. Dark petals fluttered
in the light breeze as the stamens glowed like fireflies dancing in the moonlight. If I squinted, I knew I would see the buzzing of wings around the pond. Full dark was the perfect time for pixies to play.

  Instead, yawning, I turned from the display, clicked off the light in the kitchen and took the stairs to my bedroom. I was too tired to deal with those from Nightfall. I had my own supernatural being to deal with in this realm.

  Severin’s sexy rugged face and exquisite naked form planted firmly in my mind as I shed my clothes and slid under the covers. There went my good night’s sleep.

  ***

  Chapter 4

  Trying to hide another yawn behind my hand, I nodded to the elderly man telling me about the pains he’d been having in his bowels. Thankfully, I was halfway through my shift. I hadn’t slept well and was having a difficult time keeping my eyes open. Dreams of Severin kept me involved for most of the night.

  I finished taking the patient’s blood pressure and marked down the numbers on his chart. “Okay, Mr. Goldman, the doctor will be in right away to see you.”

  With the chart in hand, I pulled back the sunny yellow curtain and returned to the triage desk to enter information onto the huge whiteboard on the wall containing room numbers and patient names. As I was writing, Diana slid up in next to me.

  “Feeling better?”

  I nodded, and then yawned.

  She looked me up and down. “Uh-uh. You didn’t get any sleep, did you?”

  “I got some.”

  “Yesterday get to you?” Without waiting for a reply, she said, “Yeah, that woman’s death got to me too.” She stroked her fingers over the stethoscope wrapped around her neck.

  She did that when she had something on her mind.]

  “Everyone’s still buzzing about it. Wondering if there are going to be more werewolf attacks.”

  “Do we really know that was one?” I asked stiffly as I turned and walked back to the triage desk to grab another patient file.

  Diana followed. “Hey, what’s with you?”

  I rolled my shoulders, feeling the tension cramping my muscles. “Nothing.”