The Shadows

FORTY-TWO

“You have the most beautiful hands.”

As Trez lay in his bed with Selena beside him, they were both naked and totally exposed. The sex had been so heavy-duty, the covers were on the floor, their hot skin only now beginning to cool in the subtle air currents of the dark room.

“You’ve mentioned that before,” she said with a smile.

He made an mmmm-hmmmm in the back of this throat. “I like them on me. I like to look at them. I like the feel of them.”

Smoothing his palm over hers, he felt the contact all over his body. So peaceful, he thought. This was so peaceful.

“I like to see the stars,” she said, after a while. “Through the window over there.”

“Yeah.”

As it was just before five a.m., the shutters were about to come down for the day. With fall getting a grip on not just the weather, but the sunlight, dawn wasn’t arriving until later these days.

“You know, I’ve never had this before,” he heard himself say.

She turned over on her side, propping her head up on the hand he’d been attending to. And like she knew he missed the contact, she gave him her other one to play with.

“Had what?” she asked.

“This kind of quiet.”

During all those years of empty orgasms, he wished he’d known such profound communion was waiting for him. It would have made that nutrition-less gorging totally unnecessary.

“Do you want some music or something?” he asked abruptly, in case he was the only one enjoying the quiet.

“No, this is . . . perfect.”

At that, he had to twist around and kiss her on the mouth. Then it was a case of resettling back against the pillows and resuming this new kind of hand job . . . where he traced each of her fingers with his, stretching them up and pulling them out, before playing with the strong, blunt tips.

“I love the stars,” she said as if she were speaking to herself.

“I have an idea about tonight.”

“Do you?”

He threw out another mmmmm-hmmmm. “It’s a surprise. You’re going to need to put off our boat ride, though.”

And he was probably going to want a valium. But she was going to love it.

“Trez?”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

He smiled in the darkness. “Does this involve my tongue, by any chance? Just name the body part, my queen.”

“No.”

The change in her voice stopped him. And for a split second he wanted to say, Please, no. We can talk about it at nightfall. Let’s leave the day hours for the fantasy of forever.

But as always, he could deny her nothing. “What is it?”

Selena took a while to answer, and that probably meant she was choosing her words carefully.

He tried to stay calm. “Take your time.”

“My sisters.” She hesitated. “The ones who have passed . . . they’re put up in a cemetery. You know, right where you found me?”

That hedgerow, he thought. The one that he had looked through to see those marble statues . . . which now he feared weren’t made of marble at all.

“Yes, I remember.”

“Don’t let them take me up there.” She took her hand away from him and sat up. As she stared down at him, her long, beautiful black hair poured over her shoulders, covering one of her breasts, touching the skin of her thighs. “They’re going to want to. You’re supposed to pick a position . . . you know, when the time comes, they can put you in any position you want. Then they plaster over your hair and your face and your body. It’s a ritual. That’s why they’re all different up there—in different poses, I mean.”

Trez rubbed his face. Which did nothing to relieve the lancing pain in his chest. “Selena, let’s not talk about this—”

She grabbed his arm. Hard. “Promise me. I won’t be able to advocate for myself when that time comes. I need you to do that for me.”

Again, he could deny her nothing—and as a bonded male, that not only seemed right, but healthy. Except with this request? It broke him in half to nod.

“All right.” He cleared his throat. “Okay, I’ll make sure of it.”

At once, her body relaxed and she let out an exhale. Then, as she resettled beside him, she shook her head. “I know this is against everything I’ve been taught and all the traditions of my service . . . but a part of me is paranoid that they’re stuck in there.”

“I’m sorry—what? You mean, your sisters?”

She nodded. “How do we know for a fact that the Fade is real? What if everything we’ve been told is true is actually not? As with everyone else in the Sanctuary, I have always tried to avoid that cemetery—I hate the silence and the stillness inside, and, God, those poor females, some of whom I knew and shared meals with and worked alongside in service to the Scribe Virgin.” She cursed softly. “They’re stuck in that cemetery, not just frozen in their bodies, but forgotten by the rest of us because we can’t stand how we feel when we’re with them. What if they can see us? What if they can hear us? What if time just stretches out into forever with them imprisoned . . .” Selena shuddered. “I don’t want that. When I go, I want to be free.”

Her eyes returned to the window, to the twinkling stars so high above.

“Every species has a version of an afterlife,” he said. “Humans have Heaven. Vampires the Fade. For Shadows, it is the Eternal. We can’t all be wrong—and each one is a version of the same. So it would seem to make sense that there’s something after all this.”

“But there’s no guarantee—and you won’t know until it’s too late.” She seemed to retreat into herself. “You know, when I’m in the Arrest, I can hear things . . . when I’m in that place where my body is just . . . out of my control, I can hear and smell, I can see. My awareness is with me, I am there, but I can’t do anything. As I’ve said before, there’s no greater panic than what you feel when your brain is functioning and nothing else is.”

Don’t lose it, he told himself. Don’t you dare lose it.

You pull your shit together and you be there for her. Right here, right now.

As she grew quiet, he put himself in that place she had described, aware of everything, but unable to respond or speak or react.

Reaching over, he stroked her long hair back. And then he was kissing her, softly, slowly. A moment later, he rolled on top of her and found her sex with his own. As the penetration happened, as that familiar yet ever shocking tightness of her gripped him, he gave her his vow through the physical act.

Sometimes, the evil you fought wasn’t anything you could hit or shoot or dismember. Sometimes you couldn’t even hurt it.

And that was really fucking awful.

As his hips rocked and she wrapped her arms around him, he kept the rhythm sweet and careful so that he could kiss her the entire time.

Halfway through, he caught the rainwater scent of tears.

They were both crying.

Down in the training center’s gym, Rhage was running like he was being chased by his own beast.

The treadmill was not feeling it. He was pretty sure that the scream coming from the belt—which was loud enough that he could hear it over the T.I. he was pumping into his ears like the shit was heroin—meant the machine was going to check out at any moment. But he didn’t want to break stride long enough to move to the one next door.

When the thing began to smell like a lesser, however, he knew the decision had been made for him. Jumping to the side rails, he pulled out the red Stop card and the slow-down was pretty instantaneous. Either that or he had timed his get-off with the machine’s functional demise.

Catching his breath, he mopped his face with one of the scratchy white quarter towels. The things were pretty much sandpaper, but they all preferred ’em that way. Fritz had tried, from time to time, to switch the old schools out to something softer, but he and his brothers always protested. These were gym towels. They were supposed to be thin and mean, the terry-cloth equivalent of coyotes.

When you were sweating like a pig and couldn’t feel the bottoms of your feet from exertion, you didn’t want to pat yourself down with a Pomeranian.

Had he really done twenty-four miles?

Shit, how long had he been down here?

Popping off his Beats, he realized that not only had his high-steppers gone numb, but his groin muscles were on fire, and that shoulder he’d injured a good five nights ago was cranked off.

He ended up parking it on one of the wooden benches that ran down the far side of the room. As his breath gradually came back to him, he felt as if he were surrounded by his brothers even though he was alone: Whether it was the bench press that was still set to the six-hundred-pound load Butch had put it at yesterday or the barbell that Z had been doing curls with or the chin bar that Tohr had been crunching up and down on, he could picture each of the fighters with him, hear their voices, see them walk by, feel their eyes on him as they talked.

And all that should have made him feel more connected, instead of less so.

But the reality was, even if the forty-by-sixty-foot space had been crammed tight with all those big bodies, he would still have felt isolated.

Passing that towel over his face again, he closed his eyes and was transported to a different place, a different time . . . to a memory that he knew now was what he had been trying to put behind him ever since it had threatened to resurface.

Bella’s white farmhouse. That porch of hers, the wraparound one that was so New England cozy you wanted to either vomit . . . or cop a squat and eat some apple pie on the bitch. Him walking out that front door, head hanging like he had been decapitated and only the gristle of his neck was keeping his basketball still on.

His beloved Mary upstairs in that bedroom, having just told him to fuck off.

Although, of course, she hadn’t been so crude.

His life had been over as he’d left that house. Even though he’d been ostensibly alive, he had been a dead male walking . . .

. . . until suddenly she had exploded out of that doorway in her bare feet.

I’m not okay, Rhage. I’m not okay. . . .

“Why are you thinking like this, buddy.” He rubbed that hard towel over his face once more. “Just drop that shit . . . come on, think about something else. . . .”

Except his brain wouldn’t be rerouted. And the next memory was even worse.

A hospital room, but not one here at the compound, or even at Havers’s clinic. A human hospital room, and his Mary was in the bed.

Shit, he could still remember the color of her skin. Wrong, all wrong. Not just pale, but beginning to go gray.

To save her, he had done the only thing he could think of, thrown the only Hail Mary he had: He had sought out the Scribe Virgin. Had left that human hospital and gone home to his room, and lowered himself down on cut diamonds until his knees had run red with blood.

He had prayed for a miracle.

With a curse, he stretched out on the bench, leaning his torso back on the unforgiving wood while keeping both feet on the floor on either side.

His Mary wasn’t coming home today. She was staying at Safe Place.

The mother of that child had been taken back to Havers’s. After slipping into a coma.

The staff had decided to keep the young at the house for the day, and Mary wanted to be with the girl.

God, he remembered that anguish of daylight when Mary had been sick in the hospital. It hadn’t been safe for him to be with her during the sunshine hours, and he had been terrified she would die when he couldn’t get to her.

Guess they could drive that young over to see her mahmen if shit came to that. As a pretrans, she could go out even at high noon.

Staring up at the ceiling, he thought of Trez and Selena. Their date. Their escape from downtown. The fun they’d had evading the human police.

That was so worth fighting for. All of it.

His Mary wasn’t coming home today, and he didn’t know how he was going to make it through the next twelve hours until he saw her in person again. And that was even knowing he could call or text, or Skype with her at any moment for as long as he liked.

That little girl was probably going to lose her mahmen.

And Trez was probably going to lose Selena.

Rhage was pretty sure all of them were praying for a miracle just as he had. And maybe that was what he was having problems with.

Why had he gotten lucky? Tohr hadn’t. Well, yes, the brother had found Autumn, and that was a blessing beyond measure. But as much as he loved that female, his losing Wellsie had nearly killed him.

He just didn’t get it. Unless the Scribe Virgin stepped in again, or someone found a cure . . .

Why had he and Mary been spared?

As his brain began to cramp up on that one, he had to shut the thoughts down. He didn’t want to go mad down here all by himself.

Yeah, he thought wryly. ’Cuz it was so much better to share that with your loved ones.

Scary times. Scary times.

If deaths came in threes . . . he thought numbly. Who was going to be the third one?