by Su Williams
I allowed him to help me with my coat, but refused to take his offered arm on the walk out to the car. “I’d prefer…I mean…if you’re still shaky, I can drive.” I gave him a curt nod and let myself into the passenger side door. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, and wished I hadn’t. How was I supposed to stay mad at him, when he looked like lost little boy standing out in the cold?
Chapter 7 Disturbia
The ride was short and icy, more frigid than the winter’s snow. My boisterous beagle boy, Eddyson, bayed his greeting and waggled his whole body as I pushed through the back door and disarmed the alarm. Once he was done licking my face and howling his welcome, he squirmed to get to Nick. I let my happiness to be home with my precious teddy-puppy fall from my face. With a scowl, I handed the pup over to Nick. The grief in his eyes pricked my heart, but I turned away.
“Oh, my poor baby. He hasn’t been fed in…how long have I actually been gone?” I asked, still not quite certain of the day.
“Only about twenty four hours,” Nick explained. “And I came over a couple of times to let him out and feed him. But what about you? You must be starving. Can I make you something?” Nick put Eddy down and came to stand in front of me. My jaw clamped shut to detain the angry words that raged inside me. His warm fingers traced down my cheek and melted some of the frost. “Emi…” The sound of his voice swirled images of my rock star life through my mind; the handsome man, the stranger in the crowd, in the alley on the way to the hotel, before my header into the audience in Phoenix, the amber drop sparkling on his lips. It had all been Nick trying to get to me and Sabre had shut him out.
“Why didn’t I know it was you?”
“Because…I…you didn’t have any memories of me. And Sabre didn’t want you to. He was having too much fun playing God.” His eyelid twitched with restrained fury.
“Okay. Wait a minute. Have I been gone for weeks? I remember at least fourteen shows.”
“Reality and memory download are not on the same time frame. Memories that actually took weeks in reality can be transferred in a matter of moments. Hours if you’re doing manipulations like Sabre was doing.”
“So it’s not sometime in March?”
“No, Sweets. It’s still the beginning of February.”
“Ugh! My head is so fucked up. No wonder I’m exhausted.” Nick rubbed my arms in comfort and I pressed my hand to his chest. I choked out the words I couldn’t contain any longer. “Nick? Why did you do it? Why did you leave me like…” The words jammed in my throat.
“‘Like everyone else’,” he finished for me, and his gaze dropped to the floor.
‘Everyone else’ consisted of Mom and Dad, and now, it seemed, Jesse. But three was enough. I was still hopeful at redeeming my friendship with Jesse—if he could ever stop being humiliated over his brother’s abuse. I nodded, unable to speak, still choked with the raw emotions. Nick fidgeted and a struggle warred in his eyes. Then, he led me to the couch and pulled me down next to him. He was quiet so long I wondered if he was going to answer me at all.
“Fear,” he finally said. “Mostly. I was afraid the reason the Rephaim found you in the first place was my fault. Because I couldn’t—I didn’t leave you alone. Even after Thomas rejuvenated, I thought…”
“What?! After Thomas what?” I interrupted. Thomas was the Rephaim, or Nightmare Wraith, a dark and twisted version of Dream Weaver, that nearly killed all of us before Christmas.
Nick’s shoulders slumped and he lowered his head and raked his fingers through his hair with a dispirited groan. His face screwed up with reluctance. “He got away.”
“What? No. I remember. You guys killed Thomas. He’s dead…right? They can’t come back from a decapitation, right?”
Nick’s reluctant moan was leaden. “Someone released him. He’s gone.”
“Okay. Whoa. Back up the Dream Weaver train. You guys beheaded him. That makes him dead…for good…right?”
“Not exactly. Caphar, including Wraith, are able to regenerate for about forty-eight hours after physical death. The spark of the ‘spiritual’ side of us lingers that long after death. Sabre put the body in a metal drum and sealed it. He put the head in another sealed drum. After forty-eight hours the parts should have disintegrated because the energy of the spirit is no longer there to bind the body together, and time catches up all at once.” He huffed a rueful laugh. “Yeah. Kinda like a vampire. But…”
“But?” I pressed.
“I went out after forty-eight hours. The drums were unsealed. Thomas was gone.”
“How does that happen? You said ‘someone released him’.”
Nick’s face twisted with remorse. He had to know my heart was banging in my breast; he could probably hear it. My breaths convulsed in my lungs. “It means—there’s another Wraith.”
My lungs collapse with a gasp. My brain couldn’t even compute this information. After all we went through to destroy Thomas, not only to protect ourselves but all the other humans and Weavers he could use, manipulate and destroy. “Ohmygod! We’re fucked!”
Nick smirked. “Since when did you become such a potty mouth?”
“Ha! Since Sabre decided to weave me a life hanging out with crazy rocker dudes.”
He raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “That must have been one seriously vivid weave. I only got glimpses. Sabre kept me pretty well locked out. I tried for a few hours to break through, but he’s gotten very good. And he had physical contact with you. I was reaching through walls.” Nick’s eyes were working their magic on me, weaving their spell on my heart. But trust was shattered and part of me wondered if I was being manipulated yet again. I eased myself away from him.
Nick slid off the couch and kneeled in front of me. His warm hands encased mine and settled on my lap. “I love you, Emari. I didn’t want to lose you. And then when Thomas disappeared, I stayed close by, just in case. I watched over you from a distance during the day, and lingered over your bed by night…”
I closed my eyes to the influx of images that cascaded into my mind.
I lay in my bed, spooned against Eddyson’s warm body, my fingers cathartically scratching his fur. The aching pull that he fought to keep himself from touching me, tore at my heart.
“I was afraid if I touched you at all, even in ethereal form, your captured memories would leech back into you. I tend to leak when you’re around.” He glanced up and quirked the corner of his mouth in a hopeful half-smile. “I wanted to touch you so badly it hurt, but I preferred to be in pain myself than to subject you to more than you’ve already had to endure.”
Silence stretched thinly between us as I mulled over his words. Could I forgive him for abandoning me? Even if it was for, what he believed, noble purposes? Could I trust him not to leave me again if things turned bad?
“Emari, I’m so sorry. Please…” I muffled his plea with a kiss, sudden and warm. His arms wrapped around me, holding me as if I were no longer a fragile thing. His body shuddered against mine. ‘I forgive you’ warred on my lips but I just couldn’t release the words yet. “My Emi,” he whispered, as he stroked my hair and rocked me in his arms.
* * *
Nick made me a PBJ and we sat before a blazing fire in the fireplace, cuddled together on the couch.
“Okay, so you erased all of my memories, but all of my friends met you too. Wouldn’t they remember you and ask me about you?”
“That was a bit tricky—tracking down all of those people and deleting the memory of me and Sabre,” he explained.
“You found every person from my party?” Nick and Sabre had been guests at my Christmas party just a few short weeks ago. Both had made a lasting impression on all of my guests—some more favorable than others. Ivy had even pursued Sabre—a chase, I’m glad to say, she lost.
“Every last one,” he said.
“That’s an awful lot of work to go through,” I told him.
“I need you to be safe, whatever the cost.”
I stood and ambled
to the window seat, picked up a pillow and hugged it to my chest. The frosty night outside pressed cold fingers to the window. “Even though I didn’t remember you, I still felt—broken. I sat here and stared out the window and every flurry of snow tugged at me to remember. Every sparkling swirl drew my attention and I couldn’t understand why. But it was you, in spirit, tugging at my memory even across the distance.”
“See, I told you I can’t be too close and keep a secret from you.” He grinned a sheepish grin, but the phantom of something dark ghosted into his eyes. He blinked to exorcise it and tiny corrugations crept across his brow. I stared at him wondering. Was there something other than his own guilt that he was trying so desperately to hide from me? He kept the brutal images from his mortal life, images of his wife and son’s deaths, hidden from me. But something else, something new haunted his troubled thoughts
I set down the pillow and returned to him on the couch. Part of me still wanted to be angry at him for erasing my memories. But a more primal need for him urged me into his arms. Nick’s body was a thermal of warmth against mine. The tight-wound tension in his muscles melted in relaxation as I traced my fingernails up the contours of his forearm. The sensation of his skin under my fingertips hummed in the deepest part of me. His chest rose and fell in a slow rhythmic cadence, his easy breaths were my lullaby. Sleep drifted over me like a fog over the Spokane River on a cold October night. Cool, dense and nebulous. I always loved October fog that set the town in ghostly white. The kiss of the haze on my cheeks prickled my skin with a cool, sensual caress.
Another October fog encompassed my cottage and trembled with the vibrations of music blaring from the windows. An aura of light surrounded my home like a celestial beacon; a subtle breeze stirred my hair. But it wasn’t my hair. It was Nick’s. He stood at the precipice of light, his eyes roamed the compound, his heart searched my home. No more night terror screams accompanied the music that thrummed from inside. Content satisfaction warmed him, but buried deeper, an unquenchable ache tugged mercilessly at his heart.
I stirred against Nick’s chest, a quiet moan slipped through my lips.
“You okay?” Nick whispered.
“Mmm. Sure.” Then, the tow of sleep dragged me under, once again.
He was there. Again. A warm spring day. My father and I were outside making some repairs on the cottage, that, at that time, I believed was being turned into an investment property. An impossible level of intimacy wove through Nick’s mind. A friendship of sorts that didn’t seem possible. The clutch of hands. My father’s hand clasped in Nick’s. A friendly embrace. My father’s arms encircling him.
Turmoil shattered my sleep and I squirmed against Nick’s chest. What does this mean? Was Nick leaking again? Or was I just dreaming? Did I wish so much that my parents were here to meet him, to approve or disapprove of him, that the desire infected my sleep?
Nick’s body went tense beneath me and he petted my hair. His breath was warm against my skin, as he planted a reassuring kiss on my head.
“Bad dream?” he asked and I thought a detected tiny tremor in his voice.
“No, I…” I didn’t know what to say. It seemed impossible that Nick might have known my father. Nick hadn’t been around until—right before my parents died. I would have known if he was a part of Daddy’s life. Wouldn’t I? Surely Nick would have told me by now if he’d known my dad. I shook the thought away but the slow rumble of Nick’s heart now thrummed a little faster.
“What is it?” Nick asked as his heartbeat spiked.
“I don’t know. I’m just confused, is all.”
“What are you confused about, honey?” He wrapped a spike of my hair around his finger.
“I don’t know. Where you came from, I guess.”
“Well, you see, when a daddy loves a mommy…” he began.
I gave his arm a playful pinch. “That’s not what I mean.”
Nick chuckled. “How far back did you want to go?”
I counted the months backwards. Nick entered my life in December, after the assault. Unless you counted the previous time he chased away the night terrors, after the crash in April. It was now March, nearly a year since...So nearly a year that Nick had been involved in my life to one extent or another. I’d first been captured by his dark gaze across the tumbling waters down at Dead Man’s Creek.
“Well, the beginning, I guess.”
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the ow!” Another less playful pinch. I glared up at him for his obvious evasions. I’d experienced this before, when he didn’t want to tell me the truth. Typical, textbook evasion techniques. Despite the return of all my memories, they’d all come back in a supernova of images, sounds and emotions, and I was still sorting through them. Still filtering through the mire. “The beginning, like, when you started coming around here. Did you orchestrate our meeting at the creek?”
Nick fidgeted beside me but his expression remained cool. “No. I did not orchestrate our meeting at the creek. I was out exploring. I’d been wandering for over an hour through the woods between our place and the tunnel. You’ve never explored through there have you?”
“No. I always thought that stretch was private property so I never went beyond the ravine below the tracks. Ha. Which is still probably private property,” I mused out loud. “And when did you start coming around the cottage?”
This time, his squirming made its way to his face. He didn’t want me to know the truth. “That night.”
“Seriously?” Opposing reactions divided my thoughts; part impressed by his need to see me again, and part fearful of his need to see me again. It felt a little stalkerish.
Nick’s gaze skittered away from mine, and fell on Eddyson’s twitching paws. He reached out a hand to quiet the bird chase dream bounding through the pups hound-dog brain. “Um, yeah.”
I remembered, more than once, feeling so loquacious around Nick—not—and it made me smile that the tables were now turned. “Why?”
“Why what?” he stalled.
Frustration rumbled in my throat. “Why are you dodging my questions? Why can’t you just answer me?”
Clouds of remorse darkened his face. “I just…it’s just that, when you say it out loud, it sounds like I’m a stalker.”
“Well. Aren’t you?” I let my mouth curl into a mocking smirk.
Nick ran his thumbnail down the seam of my jeans. “Yeah. A little. I guess.” His face filled with worry and he turned the force of his eyes on me. “But I would never hurt you, Em.” He clutched hand and I winced as he crushed it in his. “You know that, right? You know I would never hurt you?” Something beyond this conversation was troubling the usual cool calmness that exuded from him, but I had to deal with one thing at a time.
“Of course. I mean, I guess. You haven’t done anything to suggest you might.” Except cut a guy’s head off right here in my living room.
“I would never. I swear to you, Emari. I would never hurt you.” Nick’s desperation stirred something on the inside of me. But he had hurt me. He hurt me when he left me.
“You haven’t answered the question, though. Why did you follow me home?”
Tiny tremors shook his fingers as he reached for my face…
Coarse fingers scorch a trail down the soft skin of my arm. Arms, a vice around my own; arms full of rage and violence. My world is pain. I am crushed. Beaten. Cruel words that my brain refuses to translate as human, grate through me like a ragged wind. Breath, putrid with the stench of alcohol and cigarettes, curls into my nostrils. A cruel, unwanted kiss.
Like an electrical arc, the tremble from Nick’s fingers shuddered through my body. “Don’t.” I swatted his hand away and launched away from him. A cavern of sadness pitched his eyes black.
“Em?”
My chest filled with cement and my lungs were lined with sandpaper. I heard Nick’s voice, but…rancid breath, crushing hands, hell blackness, and the smell of dust bunnies…crushed in on me, sudden and destructive, like a Te
xas storm. Panic stole my breath and I skittered away. Cold cement. Savage fists. Molten copper on my tongue. It all hijacked my senses with destructive force.
“Emari?”
No! Phantom pain split my skull; my muscles convulsed, prepared for cruelty. Please! My heart slammed with the force of a heart attack. Instinct blazed like wildfire through my veins. His face. Pain. Darkness. My welcomed friend. Ruby tears stained my face. Flesh swelled and split. Fear throbbed in my wounds. Just let me die. Light. I closed my eyes to the hell in his, gagged at the onslaught of his saloon breath—cheap beer and cigarettes. Bile warred in my gut and I fought to keep it down. The undertow of darkness drowned me.
“Emari?”
Nick’s hands, warm and tender, clasped my arms, but all I saw was him; all I felt was the phantasm of the pain he’d inflicted. My fingers curled into claws and I reached to scratch out his eyes; to escape the terror that bound me. Nick blocked my attack and gently, carefully grabbed my wrist and crushed me to his chest.
“No! Let me go!” I screeched and struggled like a feral harpy.
“Emi…” he breathed. “Hush, baby. I got you.” Reason and reality filtered into my mind with Nick’s soft words, and spread like whiskey fire through my body. “I’m here, honey,” Nick whispered and bent to look into my eyes. “Emi? Look at me. Everything’s okay.” His warmth snared my panicked panting, reined it in. My breaths slowed with the dawning of realization of where I truly was; whose arms truly held me.
“I’m here, honey,” Nick echoed.
“Why?” I whimpered.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m here and I’ve got you. Everything’s going to be okay.” His words penetrated the chaos inside me.
