Mine, page 25
“Tell me something,” she said. “How are you so good to me?”
“I’ll put that right back on you.” She felt his fingertips on her forehead, her cheek… the side of her neck. “My wolf.”
“Will you come to bed with me now? I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep, but I’ll bet we can figure out how to pass the time.” When he hesitated, she said, “Please. I need to be with you.”
“That’s all you gotta tell me.”
As he retracted from her, she closed her legs and got to her feet. “Oh, crap, it’s dark in here. I have no idea where my leggings are…”
There was the sharp sound of a zipper and then—“Wait, I think I’ve got them.”
As she felt something soft and springy get passed into her hands, she performed some contortion moves to get the Lululemon back in place—and probably put them on backwards. The sweater was easier. She just pulled it down, then moved her foot around the carpet in search of her shoes.
After they were once again ready for prime-time viewing, so to speak, Daniel walked into the void and she heard his hands tapping at the books on the shelves.
“Found the exit.”
When he opened one of the doors, the light that flooded in blinded her, but as she went over to him, her retina recovery was fast—and as soon as she stepped out, she checked her clothes situation.
Well, what do you know. Everything was front-facing, and properly arranged on her body.
Walking side by side, they went all the way down the hall, and at the end, he stepped ahead and opened their bedroom door for her.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said. “Care to join—”
She stopped as she caught him making a discreet grab for the doorjamb to catch his balance. After the last six months, he’d gotten good at hiding any lulls in his energy level, but she knew his tricks well.
“You need to go warm the bed.” She forced a smile. “I won’t be long.”
Daniel nodded and cleared his throat. “I’m good with that. And don’t be long.”
As he wagged an eyebrow, she thought that maybe, this once, she’d misjudged him. Maybe he was okay and she was merely looking to find weakness because it terrified her.
“I’ll just shower,” she repeated for no good reason.
Heading for the bathroom, she was almost inside the marble enclave when she glanced back—and froze where she was. Daniel was inching over to the bed, his face tight with pain—or maybe he was having trouble breathing? And when he got to the edge of the mattress, the way he gingerly turned himself around and slowly lowered his body down made her chest ache.
As he stretched out and put his head on the pillow, his eyes closed and he released a long breath. The cough at the end was like a curse.
She knew she should turn away so he didn’t catch her staring at him with what was undoubtedly a worried expression. Except he didn’t look at her.
He just lay there, breathing.
“Daniel…?”
His lids whipped open. “Wha—what, are you all right? Lydia—”
All of a sudden, he struggled to sit up, his hands paddling at the duvet, his face going pale as he started to pant and try to catch his breath.
Then everything went haywire. The coughing spell came on him in a series of full-body spasms, like he had been holding it in and couldn’t control the reflex any longer.
The blood went everywhere, speckling his gray sweatshirt, the splatter so dark against the fibers it was as if the void back in that library was something he had taken down into his damaged lungs—and had to expel.
“Daniel.”
THIRTY-THREE
LONG AFTER NIGHT claimed the Adirondack Mountains, Xhex went to a set of double doors that had been handmade and set in their frame in 1874. Behind her, a crackling fire set on maple logs threw out heat not just from its flames, but from the massive lake stone hearth that ran up half the entire wall of the great room. There were lamps throwing out calming light in the corners, including one that had a taxidermied porcupine posed on a stump as a base, and another that was made out of a woven basket. There was also an old desk with a strip of Persian rug as a blotter, and a collection of antique glassware gleaming on shelves that were mounted around a center window of leaded panes.
Not that she could see out of the hand-blown panes. Heavy velvet draping covered every portal to the outdoors.
The Victorian-era Great Camp had been built by humans hell-bent on escaping the summer heat in New York City—and also because it had been de rigueur for a certain class to own wilderness getaways. She had heard the stories from Rehv, about how there had been steamboats that came up from the base of the long, thin lake, carrying people and supplies to their recreational locations, and before that, the waterway had been one of the strategic military routes used by the French and the British during the battles for control in the mid-eighteen hundreds.
As she threw her back into the effort of opening things, she braced herself for the cold—and that was a smart move. The air was so dry and frigid that her sinuses burned and she hurried to put on gloves even before she re-closed the heavy painted panels to keep in the heat.
The porch that faced the lake was a good forty or fifty feet long, and in the warmer season, it was furnished with wicker seating areas. Now the expanse was bare of everything: chairs, tables, and even that plastic goose lamp that glowed like a ghost.
There had been good times on this porch, she thought… back when she and John Matthew, and some of the other Brothers, would come up here and hang out with Phury, Cormia, and the Chosen. She’d particularly liked it when Zsadist had brought his guitar and sung during the moonlit August nights.
“Voice like an angel,” she murmured.
As she tried to remember her favorite tune, the one that he always closed with… something by Sting? Or was it U2?… those evenings seemed so far away that it was as if they were stories told to her by someone else as opposed to something she had lived.
How had everything come to this? she wondered. Turning in her weapons. Taking herself out of Caldwell for the safety of others.
“Fucking mess.”
Walking down the porch, she stared out to the lake. There was a moon just cresting over the mountains to the east, and its illumination drew a line on the water, the stripe flickering on top of the waves.
John Matthew had left first, because she had insisted he go out into the field. What else was he going to do? Sit and stare at her?
She wasn’t dying.
Besides, where she was going… she wanted to be alone.
Stepping off the porch, she walked across the lawn. The grass was nothing like the lush, chemically enhanced carpets down in the Caldwell suburbs. Up here, the blades were thin as needles, and just as fun to sit on. The lack of rain, but mostly the regular frosts that had started up in late October, had pulled the green out of everything, so all you had was a pale five o’clock shadow on the hard clay ground.
She paused at the head of one of the stone walkways that wound down to the water. The house had been set up on a cliff, because back when it had been built, prospective homeowners had had the pick of the lots—and man, had they called this site. The view was a dramatic, perfectly centered framing of the mountains that dropped down to the basin of clear water, like an artist had carved the landscape just so Hudson River School painters could have both realism and symmetry.
The vista really should have calmed her.
She needed a number of deep breaths and shoulder rolls before she could dematerialize, and as her molecules scattered, she had a vague worry that there would be no reunion of her components. Then again, even if she was fully corporeal, she wasn’t all together, was she.
When she re-formed, she was at the base of Deer Mountain, on the main trail. The fact that she didn’t bother to hide herself behind a big tree, but instead popped out of thin air right in front of anybody who’d been around? Not good. And as she got to hiking, she told herself the protocol slipup had been intentional because the temperature was north of a meat locker, and who the hell would be out here? But that was bullshit. She hadn’t even thought about some human who might be hardcore-ing for their wilderness YouTube channel seeing her poof! into existence—and recording the damn thing.
It was the one rule that the vampire species and the Lessening Society agreed on.
No human involvement, unless it couldn’t be avoided. And then if it couldn’t be avoided, you needed to clean that crap up.
Xhex glanced around.
Then again, considering everything else she was fucking up lately, this was a minor infraction. Besides, no one was actually out here.
Nobody human, that was.
As a shiver went through her, she crossed her arms over her chest, her leather jacket creaking from the cold. Without her usual holsters on, there was too much room inside her coat, the sartorial equivalent of clipping your nails, she supposed.
“I’ve got a journey, huh,” she muttered as she scanned the trees that crowded up to the cleared trail. “So here I am. I’m starting. I’m walking.”
With visions of Dustin Hoffman in a white suit pounding on a taxicab hood, she trudged onward, ascending at first gradually and then with greater angle. She remembered the first time she had done this—and John Matthew had been forced to reveal himself.
There was no one with her tonight.
And unfortunately that continued to prove true. No matter how far she went, or how intently she searched the pines, the old woman with the strange aura failed to show up.
It seemed ironic that she was trying to seek out that which she had totally denied back in the spring. Then again, life had a sick sense of humor, and people who were at rock bottom didn’t have the luxury of getting fussy with their opinion of reality.
You have a disease of the soul. If you do not cure it now, it will destroy you.
Between one blink and the next, she saw eyes staring up out of a bandana, eyes that she had taken without any conscious knowledge of having done so. Then she pictured that body on the slab at the morgue.
The energy is trapped just beneath your flesh. Unless it is released, once and for all, you will never be at peace.
“But how?” she said to the pine trees. “How do I release it? Ah, come on… throw me a fucking bone.”
You must, child. Or you will die by inches… and take all you love down with you. To stay where you are is a death sentence.
“What am I doing? Please… tell me.”
There was no reply, and goddamn but she wished she hadn’t wasted her time arguing with the entity. Instead of getting answers, she’d only wanted to fight with everything she hadn’t wanted to accept.
Now, when she needed guidance most, all she had were her own useless thoughts, scrambled and tormented.
And her own useless company.
Or so it appeared.
* * *
As Xhex marched up the trail like she was heading to her own execution, Blade tracked his sister through the pines, making sure that he stayed downwind and behind her. He was also careful to monitor her vicinity. That male of hers, John Matthew, was bonded, and he had big friends, so there was a chance that there were members of the Black Dagger Brotherhood nearby.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle them. He had too much on his mind to be bothered—and the fact that Xhex had shown up tonight, while he was already wrestling with so much, was just fabulous.
Exactly what he needed.
Her mood seemed no less sore than his own, however. Walking up the main trail, she stopped regularly, but not because she was taxed physically. She was in prime condition, a true specimen of a female, capable of feats of strength and cunning that made her just as deadly as any male.
No, she halted from time to time because she was searching for something, and he wondered what would bring her here with such dark expectation.
Then again, her grid was in shambles. The collapse that had been threatened had in fact occurred, the three-dimensional structure of her emotions and her consciousness utterly disbanded. Something had happened since he had seen her last—and so recently, too.
You are better at caring for others than you wish to acknowledge.
Shut up, he thought back at the voice of that “old woman.”
Memories of the entity, or whatever it was, had dogged him since the moment the thing had supposedly departed. To the point where he felt hounded. Pursued. Even though there was never aught in his wake. Indeed, he had left the confines of the cave shelter after darkness had arrived to try to find some peace—and his sister’s path up the mountain had intersected his winding way down. As if things had been planned.
Or mayhap “inevitable” was the word.
It was hard to know when he made the decision to allow his presence to be known, but at some point, halfway to the top, he stepped in some distance behind her. As his strides were slightly longer than hers, the gap between them was gradually closed as the ascension progressed.
And yet Xhex persisted in her forward orientation, her attention remaining upon what was before her and off to the sides, but never what was in her rear.
The absence of a reaction—or any awareness at all—struck him as alarming. After which, it dawned on him that she was, in fact, totally alone.
“Xhex.”
The instant he said her name she pivoted, her hand pushing into her leather jacket and fumbling around for something.
“Do not shoot me,” he said, assuming a bored tone.
You care for things more deeply—
“Shut. Up.”
Xhex stopped with her searching, her dark brows slamming down over her gray eyes. “I haven’t said shit.”
Gritting his teeth, he forced a smile. “That was not intended for you. And are you… unarmed?”
He hadn’t noticed before, but there was no scent of gunpowder on her. Which was not her normal course of things.
Alone? With no personal protection? Where the fuck was her mate—
“Then who’s it for,” she countered. “And what the hell are you doing following me.”
No surprise she left the weapons question unacknowledged. And he told himself it was not his place to worry over her.
He did not believe that lie, however.
“You came to the mountain, sister mine. I was already here,” he intoned grimly.
She glanced around. “So you think you own all this now?”
“No, but if you’re accusing me of tracking you, I have every right to point out the fact that you arrived where I reside, not the other way around.”
“Your home is the Colony.”
“By birthright, so is yours.”
Xhex shook her head. “No, I was escorted out of there. Remember?”
He opened his mouth to answer with something flippant, something appropriately distancing and arrogant. But as the moonlight filtered down through the pine boughs, he saw not the illumination for what it was. Rather, he saw fragments of that old woman, as if her shimmering essence had been split apart, yet not diminished.
Shifting his eyes back to his sister, he felt as though he were standing at the lip of a great fall, one that he had been teetering on for quite some time. For… over twenty years.
“What,” Xhex snapped.
When he could not speak, she threw her hands up and pivoted away from him. “I’m done with your games—”
“I have never forgotten.”
His sister slowly twisted back around. “What did you say.”
He cleared his throat. And yet his voice was no stronger as he repeated, “I have never… forgotten why or how you left the Colony.”
THIRTY-FOUR
EVERY TIME I get out… they keep pulling me back in.
As Gus ran for the patient room he’d recently been treated in, Al Pacino’s voice banged around his head, but one of the better scenes in the worst Godfather movie was promptly forgotten as he shoved open the door and flipped into doctor mode.
The patient on the bed was not a surprise.
The options for treatment were going to suck.
And given the amount of blood on the front of that gray sweatshirt, there was a whole lot of nothing good going on.
“What happened,” he asked Lydia as he pushed one of the staff out of the way.
Even with the three or four medical types circling the bed, removing Daniel’s clothes, hooking up leads, the woman was right by her man, and going nowhere. She was clearly scared to shit, her face frozen in terror, her hands shaking as she kept pushing her hair back over her shoulder. But someone was going to have to forcibly remove her if they wanted to reach that left side.
Which, at the moment, they didn’t need to.
“He started coughing,” she said, “and he couldn’t stop—and then he just lost consciousness. I called down here and they came with a stretcher and…”
As she trailed off, he glanced at the monitor. Oh… great. Oxygen stats were in the cellar. Blood pressure was way too low. Heart rate was in the high 180s, trying to compensate for both.
“I need oxygen, stat, and let’s get some blood.” Maybe Daniel had an infection somewhere and was going septic? Except the downturn had been a little fast for that. “When he’s stable, I want to do some imaging—and could someone gimme their stethoscope.”
That last command was followed fast, and as soon as he’d plugged his ears, he took a listen—
“What is it.” Lydia leaned in. “What are you—why do you look like that?”
Well, because the poor bastard’s lungs were full on one side. Not that he was going to talk about that until he had a plan—
The door to the room opened wide, and yup, there she was: C.P. Phalen, still in her tough-guy armor. And as she stepped inside, he fought back his emotions.
Not now, I do not need the distraction—
But instead of interrupting or causing a further disturbance—or even looking his way—the woman stayed quiet and just went to stand by Lydia. And as she put her hand on the shoulder of Daniel’s better half, Gus shook his head and wished like hell that Phalen wouldn’t keep surprising him. The calm compassion was going to be a help.
