Edge of Darkness (14 page)

“I wanted to call you, I wanted to see you—God you have no idea—but I can’t Shift when I’m injured,” he explained quietly, that finger still making slow tracings across her cheek. “I’ve been stuck in my animal form until today. I can usually heal very quickly, but this gunshot wound was nasty, my entire kneecap—”

“Gunshot!” Ember sat up stiffly, her eyes raking him for signs of injury. “Those bastards
shot
you?”

Amusement flickered over his face. “In the leg, yes. One of them Shifted and tried to eat me and the other one shot me. Does that make you feel better about it?”

For killing them, he was asking. Perversely, it did, and she nodded to let him know, her teeth sunk into her lower lip.

He seemed relieved at her answer. His eyes closed briefly, and when they opened again, he said, very softly, “What are you in Spain to forget?”

It was a long while before she answered him, and his eyes never wavered from her face. “Everything,” she said truthfully. Then she realized with sudden, swift horror the two of them were more alike than she’d realized.

They were both killers.

The thought made her sick to her stomach.

She staggered to her feet, a hand cupped over her mouth, nausea rising in her throat. This was too much, it was all too much, and she couldn’t think with him so close, with his scent and his dark, molten gaze—she had to get away.

“Ember, wait—stop—”

Now
.

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 massacre 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 bitch!” 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—”

“No!” she groaned, cutting him off. “It’s not like that! He didn’t hurt me…” She trailed off, realizing she’d put just enough emphasis on that last word that Asher, if he was paying attention, would have picked up on it.

Fortunately, Asher was too busy having his own meltdown to notice.

He leapt from the bed and began stalking around the room, punctuating every third word with a foot stomp. “I should have
known
he was too good to be true! That face! That body! That wardrobe! That
accent!
I bet it’s all a ruse, isn’t it? He doesn’t really even have any money. He’s some kind of con artist, isn’t he? He’s a grifter! He lures innocent young women into his trap and then has his way with them—or their bank accounts!”

Ember thought it prudent not to mention she was neither innocent nor in possession of an enticing bank account.

Then Asher pulled up short and with a gasp said, “I bet he’s not even British…he’s probably from somewhere completely horrific…somewhere like…somewhere like
Utah!
”

Ember threw the covers from her head and shouted, “Asher, please! You’re only making me feel
worse!
”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry.” He wrung his hands together, chagrined. Wearing fuchsia pajamas with a pattern of gold and scarlet peonies and a pair of mauve tufted slippers, he hurried to the side of the bed, sat down again, and took her hand. “But you have to tell me what happened or my imagination will get the better of me! What did he
do?
Or what
didn’t
he do? Tell me!”

Looking into his worried, beseeching eyes brought a fresh onslaught of tears. She hid her face into the covers again and blurted a muffled, “He’s not the person I thought he was.”

Her inner voice amended that to a derisive,
He’s not a
person
at all.

Because life has a cruel and capricious sense of humor, her cell phone rang at exactly that moment. Before she could stop him, Asher had flung himself across the room, retrieved it from where she’d left it atop the dresser, picked it up, and shouted, “Hello?” He listened for approximately two seconds, then screeched into it, “What the hell did you do to her, you bastard?”

Ember moaned into the pillow and put her hands over her ears.

“No, you absolutely will
not!
I don’t know what you did but I’ve never seen her like this and so help me God if you come over here I’ll—” He cut off abruptly, listened for another moment, then with a muttered oath that included the words “roasted balls” he slammed the phone down.

Ember sat up in bed. “What? What did he say?”

Furious, Asher looked at her, his face a mottled shade of red. “He says he’s coming up.”

“What—now?” She looked wildly around the room as if he was lurking behind the curtains or beside the bookcase. “He’s
here?
”

In answer, there was a violent pounding on the apartment’s front door.

Seeing the look of pure panic on her face, Asher pronounced with venom, “
I’ll
take care of this jerkoff,” and marched out of the bedroom.

He slammed her bedroom door behind him so she couldn’t see what was going on in the living room, but within two seconds there was the muffled sound of shouting, another door being slammed, more shouting, this time louder, then a few unidentifiable thumps and bumps that had her cowering on the bed in terror, imagining the worst. Then her bedroom door burst wide open, disgorging an apoplectic Asher, wielding one of the set of carving knives from the block on the kitchen counter, and a snarling Christian, dressed only in the pair of linen trousers he’d been wearing when she saw him standing in front of the fireplace.

Ember shrieked, “Asher! Put the knife down!”

Then commenced the loudest, most convoluted shouting match Ember had ever heard. Asher screamed something, Christian shouted something back, the two of them volleyed threats and insults and ignored anything the other one was saying until Ember, exhausted and so strung out she thought her head might actually explode, yelled, “STOP!”

They froze. Both their heads whipped around in her direction.

Asher—athletic and muscular, but easily outsized by Christian—was in Badass mode. She’d seen this a few other times when he’d had occasion to divest some bigot of a misconception that gay men were nothing but effeminate, promiscuous, Streisand-loving sissies who’d been molested in childhood, triggering some kind of sexual Stockholm syndrome whereby the victim would forevermore “choose” to be attracted to other men in an effort to heal their painful past.

Despite the pretty pajamas and fluffy footwear, Asher was scary as hell. Color stained his cheeks, his face was hard as granite, his chest rose and fell in sharp, staccato bursts. The hand that held the knife shook. His fingers were curled so hard around the hilt his knuckles showed white. He was Italian, with that Mediterranean passion and volatility, and it showed.

In contrast, Christian seemed relatively composed. Until she looked into his eyes.

What she saw there made her mouth go dry.

He was furious, too, but it was cold and feral and utterly deadly, a savage blackness unfurling even as she started at him, a violence so thick and profound it actually had
heft
. It was nothing like Asher’s hot, blustering outrage, and though he was the one holding the very wicked-looking knife, Ember felt a thrill of fear slice through her, straight to the bone.

Her friend could take down the best of the best…humans.

Now, he was in mortal danger.

She whispered, “Ash. Put the knife on the dresser. Please.”

“I’m not doing anything until you give me a very good reason why I shouldn’t relieve this prick of an important body part.” Asher’s angry gaze flickered to the general vicinity of Christian’s crotch.

“Please,” she reiterated, keeping her voice as calm as she could. “Christian hasn’t done anything to hurt me, physically…” She swallowed and began anew, hoping her voice wouldn’t crack. “Or emotionally. We’re just having a-a fight. It’s nothing fatal, there’s no need for any amputations.”

After a long, murderous glare in Christian’s direction, he finally complied. Then he folded his arms across his silk-clad chest, tossed his head and said to her, “That was probably the worst lie you’ve ever told me, honey. And I’m pretty sure you’ve told me a lot.” He huffed a breath through his nostrils and shot another glare at Christian. “You’re lucky she’s not PMSing, or you’d be missing your baby-maker, Romeo.”

Christian smiled at him, and Ember would have sworn under oath she’d never seen anything so frightening in her entire life.

In a voice low and infinitely dark, his gaze never once wavering from Asher’s face, Christian said, “No one has ever threatened me like that and lived to tell about it, but considering you’re acting as a guard dog on behalf of someone I care about, I’m going to let that go. A word of advice, however: never do it again. Or
you’ll
be missing much more than your baby-maker, friend. Now piss off. Ember and I need to talk.”

Before the jumping muscle in Asher’s jaw translated into another round of hurled threats, Ember broke in. “Please, Ash. Please, it’s okay.”

Asher looked back and forth between her and Christian, his gaze clearly disbelieving, anger still evident in every feature on his face. Finally he said, “Since no one will tell me exactly what’s going on here, this is what I’m going to do.” He pointed to the door. “I’m going to sit on the sofa in the living room for ten minutes; that’s enough time for you to say whatever it is you have to say, and for my girl to listen. During that time, I will be listening for any noise or indication whatsoever that she is afraid, angry, or even the slightest bit
miffed
. If I hear anything out of the ordinary, I’ll call the police, and then I’ll be back in this room with the entire set of kitchen knives, whether she likes it or not.
Capisce
?”

One corner of Christian’s mouth twitched. He stared at Asher for just longer than was comfortable, then said, “
Capisce
, Pacino.”

Asher looked at Ember, then looked at the knife on the dresser he’d just put down. He picked it up again, gave the two of them a tight smile. He said, “You kids won’t be needing this,” turned, and sailed from the room.

Christian shut the door behind him. It closed with what seemed a deadly soft scrape of wood on wood.

She couldn’t look at him. She looked at her feet instead, still clad in her wet shoes, hanging over the edge of the bed.

“Well. That was a first. I’ve never been threatened with bodily injury by a drag queen before.”

He hadn’t moved from the door. His voice was less frightening than when he’d spoken to Asher, but there was still a hard edge to it, though she sensed he was trying to control himself for her sake.

“He’s not a drag queen, he’s gay,” she said, feeling miserable and confused and exhausted. “And he used to be in the Marines. Gay Marines are the toughest people on earth.”

“He’s wearing fluffy slippers, September. And women’s pajamas.”

Faintly, Ember protested, “Those are Gaultier.”

Ignoring that, Christian said, “You’re still wet.” He sounded mad about it.

Following his tactic, she sidestepped his comment. “Say what you have to say, Christian. Then leave. Please. I can’t digest all this in the span of one night. Especially with you here—like that.”

She made a vague gesture with her hand to indicate his lack of a shirt, which up until now she had been doing a very good job of not focusing on. He hovered enticingly in her peripheral vision, however—bare chest and golden skin and sculpted muscles—so she turned her eyes to the opposite wall, letting them rest on an oil painting in a hideous gilt frame her father had bought for her on a whim at the same flea market where he’d bought her divan. It depicted a litter of sleeping kittens curled together on a knitted blanket in a basket, which at the moment seemed incredibly sinister.

“Oh? Do you find the sight of my body distracting?”

His voice sent a shiver through her. It had changed from dangerous to soft, a liquid sensuality like warmed honey sliding over her skin. She closed her eyes against it and said, “Just say what you came here to say.”