Edge Of Darkness

51

She stumbled toward the door, barely seeing anything because her eyes were filling with tears. All those horrible memories she’d been so careful to repress came flooding back and mingled with the Internet images of the m******e on Christmas Day at the Vatican and the two corpses on the street last week, all of them mutilated and covered in blood.

Her footsteps sounded loud as cannon fire in her ears as she ran blindly toward the front door, a sob caught in her throat. Just as she lifted a hand to reach for the massive bronze ring that would unlatch the door and release her to freedom, something pulled her up short and had her scrambling back in shock.

Sinuous as smoke, a pale gray plume of mist snaked down in front of her, coiling and ruffling in the air. It gathered and shimmered for a moment, suspended, an odd cloud blocking the door, then coalesced, quickly gathering mass and taking shape as a form she knew all too well. Feet and legs, arms and chest, sculpted body, and breathtaking face, complete with a pair of green eyes so vivid they glowed.

Christian. He materialized in front of her eyes from nothing more than a thin cloud of fog.

He was naked.

The scream that clawed its way out of her throat was equal parts horror and disbelief.

“Wait,” he snapped with a hand outstretched. “Ember, just wait—”

“Let me go, Christian!” she sobbed. “If you care about me at all, just let me go!”

Without waiting for an answer, she ran past him, yanked open the front door, and ran out into the rain swept night.

The pounding on her apartment door was loud and unrelenting. So was the shouting.

“Ember! Open this door right now, honey! September! What the hell!”

It was Asher, roused most likely from a Xanax-induced sleep by the sound of her footsteps pounding up the stairs, the door to her apartment slamming shut and her hysterical sobbing, the last of which hadn’t let up since she’d collapsed back into the waiting taxi outside Christian’s house.

The ride home had been interminable. She kept expecting a cloud of smoke to filter in through the air vents and coalesce in the passenger seat into the naked form of Christian, which would terrify the driver—for so many different reasons—and they’d wind up in a fiery crash.

Ember didn’t think Fate would grant her the luck to survive not one but two fiery crashes in a lifetime.

Still in her soaked clothes and shoes, she’d flung herself face down on the bed as soon as she got home, buried her face into her pillow, and pulled the covers over her head. Then she tried not to think about how a supernatural cloud of mist—ethereal, insubstantial—would not be hindered by silly little human things like doors and locks.

The pounding on the front door ceased. Thinking he’d given up, Ember enjoyed a brief moment of relief until the sound of it being unlocked and swung open intruded through her sobs. When Asher burst through her bedroom door and started shouting up close, she wished with all her heart she’d never given him that extra key.

“Jesus Christ, honey, what’s going on? Are you hurt? I’ve never heard you cry! And I’ve never heard anyone cry like that. It sounds like someone’s skinning a cat! Tell me what’s happening, I’m about to blow an O ring!”

Obscure car engine references from a hysterical gay man who’d broken into her house in the middle of the night after she’d discovered her sort-of boyfriend was something right out of a Steven King novel; the world had officially ended.

From under the covers Ember moaned, “Nothing’s wrong, Ash. Leave me alone.”

She heard his disbelieving “Puh!” just before she felt the bed wobble under his weight as he sat down on the edge of the mattress. A hand began to rub slow, relaxing circles on her back through the comforter. It reminded her of something her mother would do when she was sick as a little girl and brought on a fresh wave of tears.

“Please—you have to tell me you’re okay. You’ve refused to see me all week and I’ve been worried sick and now you come home like this. I haven’t talked to you since right before your date last Sunday—what the hell is going on?”

She blubbered, “It’s…it’s Christian. H-he—” She paused, then wailed, “Oh God!”

“That son of a b***h!” Asher shouted at the top of his lungs, scaring the wits out of her. “Did he touch you? Did he hurt you? I swear to God, Em, just say the word and I’ll get out my gun and go find that bastard and blow off his di—”