Elizabeth reached out and touched his arm again. “Thank you.”
He looked down at her hand and she thought he was going to tell her to let go. Yet when he raised his eyes, his cold exterior was flushed with humanity, as if no one had ever genuinely thanked him for anything. It was only the barest of glimpses, but she saw another side to King in that moment. A mere second’s exposure of his soul.
As quickly as it had appeared, the glimmer of something more receded into the darkness of his eyes. “Good night, Mrs. Cross.”
~~~
Simon closed the door to their apartment and turned impatiently to Elizabeth. She’d told him about the attempted robbery, but she was clearly holding something back. What could be worse than almost being shot? His stomach lurched. He didn’t dare follow that thought to its natural conclusion. “All right, we’re home. Are you going to tell me what really happened or not?”
She sighed, as she turned on the light. “First things first. I’m okay.”
His natural frown deepened. Any discussion that began with an assurance that she was all right was not going to be one he enjoyed. “Go on.”
She put her hands on her hips and scowled. “Well, you could be a little happier about that part.”
He was already impatient and her delaying tactics were only pushing him closer to the edge. “Elizabeth…”
“Maybe I’m imagining things.”
“Would you please—”
“I know, it’s just…I’m not even sure I saw what I saw. Does that make any sense?”
“At the moment you’re not making any sense at all.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Almost getting killed sort of threw me.”
He forced himself to try and relax. Bludgeoning her wasn’t going to help, but how could she expect him to be calm? She’d been white as a sheet when he’d come back from taking Frank home. In typical form, she’d downplayed the incident, as if aggravated assault was nothing more than an annoyance. As absurd as it was, he could live with that. She’d been spared. Thank God, she had. It was the secret she’d kept, insisted on keeping, until they were home. He sighed in frustration.
“I know,” she said with sad resignation. “I’m just a little frazzled.”
She wrapped her arms around her chest. He crossed the room and pulled her to him, kissing the crown of her head. Eventually, she eased out of his embrace and sat on the edge of the bed.
“I didn’t want to say anything in front of Charlie and Dix. But…when the man fired the gun, I swear King was hit.”
“Wouldn’t it be rather obvious if he had?” he said, taking a seat next to her.
“You’d think so. He says he wasn’t,” she said, her eyes filling with insistent fire. “I’m sure he was.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do either. He pushed me out of the way, and then there was this sound. This whoomp, and no ricochet. If it had missed I would have heard it hit the crates or the wall. Something.”
Simon gave in to the need to touch her again and took her hand, but even that couldn’t assuage the growing sense of dread in his chest. Did they have bullet proof vests now? Most likely not. He reached for another explanation.
“It all happened so quickly, you could have missed it.”
“Maybe. But he had this little hole in his waist coat. And he was in pain, I know he was. It didn’t last long, maybe a minute, then he was normal again. For King anyway.”
She squeezed Simon’s hand and the fear she’d kept at bay glistened in her eyes. “Sometimes when he’s looking at me, there’s something in his eyes.”
Simon tried to quell the surge of possessive jealousy that shot through his veins. Apparently, he did a poor job of it because Elizabeth shook her head.
“Not like that,” she continued. “Well, sometimes like that, but there’s something not right, something shadowed.”
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, but he wasn’t going to give in. Elizabeth needed assurances, not more to worry about. “He is a gangster.”
She shook her head. “I’ve known gangsters before. Sure, they were just two-cent hoods, but they didn’t see themselves that way. With King, it’s different. There’s something about him. It’s not…natural.” She paused in thought then shook her head again. “Or maybe I have vampires on the brain.”
Simon let go of her hand, and his fingers curled into fists. The niggling suspicion he’d been harboring was finally given voice. “You think King is a vampire.”
“No,” she said too quickly. “Not really. I don’t know. I guess I’m a little shaken, not stirred. Addled my brain. I’m not even sure what I saw. Maybe I didn’t see anything.”
“You’ve never been addled in your life,” he said, pushing himself up off the bed, his agitation growing with every passing second.
“Did you see any signs of transformation? Changes in his face?”
“I couldn’t really see his face. He was turned away from me.”
Simon did his best to slam the door on the voice that screamed “Harbinger!”, but the door wouldn’t close. Inexorably, he could feel his dream becoming a reality. Losing Elizabeth was more than untenable, it was absolutely unthinkable. If this man were the creature they feared he was…
A thousand thoughts swirled in Simon’s mind. If King was a vampire, how could he destroy him? There were dozens of different legends, different species. According to everything he’d read, lead bullets wouldn’t harm a vampire. So if he had been shot, it wouldn’t have done any permanent damage. Silver bullets, perhaps.
Nosferatu were never sighted out of Romania and not capable of taking on human guise. Uboir had been seen outside of Bulgaria, but weren’t susceptible to silver poisoning. If only he could call his colleagues at Oxford. Of course, they’d think him mad.
“Simon?”
Her voice pulled him from his thoughts. He held his hand out to her and she stood and stepped into his arms. “I’m sorry. I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation.”
Ockham’s razor dictated that the simplest explanation was the best. Then again, he’d never been a believer in accepting the obvious. Except, of course, when it was standing in his arms. And he intended to do whatever had to do to keep her there.
~~~
An hour later, Elizabeth rolled onto her side, and her arm fell across the empty bed. She could still smell his scent, but where his strong, warm chest should have been was only the cool smoothness of sheets long-abandoned. The unexpected change forced her awake. Still groggy, she looked around the room and found him sitting in his chair by the window. Even in the dim light of predawn, she could see him watching her.
“Simon?”
He didn’t respond, but she saw his shoulders rise and fall with the intake of a deep breath.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He gave her an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
“Simon.” She started to get out of bed, but he leaned back in his chair, lifting his elbows from his knees and curling his long fingers tightly around his thighs. She could feel him retreating, almost see the emotional shield he wielded in defense. With a deep breath of her own, she settled herself against the headboard. “Nightmares again?”
“Go back to sleep,” he said, but the strain in his voice betrayed him.
“Did you try—”
“Visualizing your wildflowers wasn’t quite up to the task,” he said with a touch of sarcasm, reminding her of her advice to him from what seemed a lifetime ago. “Go back to sleep, Elizabeth.”
There was something so despairing, so anguished in the way he said her name. She came instantly awake. “You want to talk about it?”
“No.” Quick, terse, definitive.
“Maybe talking about it’ll help.”
“I doubt that.”
She couldn’t let it rest. “You’ve been having them since we first got here, haven’t you?”
He ran a hand through his hair. She could feel t
he tension in his body even from across the room.
“Please,” he begged. “Some things are better left to the darkness.”
The silence pressed down between them until she couldn’t stand the weight of it. “Are they about this? Being here? Me?”
His head snapped up and she knew she’d hit a nerve. The fierceness of his expression surprised her, frightened her. Before she could learn more, he tore his eyes away and clenched his fingers tightly against the muscles of his leg, digging in against her, against the truth. His chest heaved with frustration as he pushed himself out of the chair and stared out the window. “Don’t ask me about them.”
If he wouldn’t be drawn out, then she’d get behind him and shove. “Please, don’t shut me out.”
“I’m not. I just…you don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me.”
He moved toward her, but stopped in the middle of the room. He started to say something, but clamped his jaw shut and shook his head. His hands, always so still and sure, hovered nervously in front of him. Finally, they dropped to his side, and his expression moved from frustration to loss. His eyes, which had been looking everywhere but at her, fell on her face. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “You die.”
She shuddered. It wasn’t just the words, although “You die” would have been enough. It was the way he said them. Like a confession.
“But it’s only a dream,” she said, trying to comfort him, or was it herself?
He moved back the chair and slumped into it. Relieved or defeated, she couldn’t tell. She ran her hands over her arms trying to smooth out the gooseflesh.
When he began, his voice was a crumbling whisper. “Thirty years ago, when I was barely ten years old…” he began, his eyes flicked to hers, sensing her confusion. “Everything begins before we think it does.”
She could feel him ebbing away like the tide, but after a brief pause, he continued, “I was spending the summer at my grandfather’s home in Sussex. I’d had nightmares all that week, but they were vague. Until one night, I remember waking suddenly, my heart bursting through my chest. And I simply knew—my grandfather was going to die.”
He paused and she could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed and tried to control himself.
She could picture young Simon, as he’d been in the photograph on his mantle, full of the fear and helplessness of being so young and afraid.
He sighed heavily and ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I heard a sound coming from downstairs, like someone falling. And I ran. Stumbled down the stairs and…there he was.” His voice began to quiver and the words came out in a rush. “Just like in my dream. I saw him, lying on the floor.”
Elizabeth shuddered at the image. What a terrible thing for a child to see. No wonder he had nightmares.
“He was covered in blood. The front of his shirt was soaked in it. And the smell.”
Elizabeth felt a chill. Was this what his nightmares about her were like?
“He was lying there in a pool of his own blood, reaching out to me, and I wanted to run.”
Simon wiped a hand across his face, briefly pausing to massage his temples. “He tried to say something, but there was too much blood. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear him. He whispered to me, in a voice I couldn’t forget in a thousand lifetimes. ‘We’re running out of time,’ he said, and then his eyes cleared and he…he smiled at me.
“‘You made a fine man,’ he said. A fine man.” Simon shook his head and groaned in self-derision.
She wanted so much to go to him, to wrap her arms around and him tell him he was a fine man, that everything would be all right. He wouldn’t welcome it. He was hanging on by a thread. If he needed space, no matter how much she wanted to hold him, she’d give him that.
His breath caught and he shook his head, struggling for control. “And then he was gone. Just like that, this man, who meant everything to me…”
He flexed his hands and cleared his throat. “It wasn’t until the servants came in that I even noticed his hands. The watch, our watch, was in one.”
“And the scarab ring was in the other,” Elizabeth said suddenly, remembering Simon’s reaction when he’d seen the ring for the first time.
He didn’t look at her, but nodded slowly. “And a scrap of black cloth,” he added, and then pulled himself from the memory. He wiped his palms on his pant legs. “Of course, as I told you, the family did their best to keep it quiet.”
He pushed out a quick breath and continued, “They took the watch and the ring. Locked them away with everything else he owned.”
“So, you hadn’t seen the watch until we opened the boxes in your house that night,” Elizabeth said.
Simon leaned back in his chair. “The nightmares started the night I received the crates.”
“That’s natural. Seeing his things, probably triggered old memories.”
“They weren’t about my grandfather.”
“Oh,” she said softly. “You mean you dreamt about me before we got here. Before we even—”
“Yes. The night his things arrived. I’ll admit I’d had dreams about you before that,” he said with an almost shy smile that faded quickly. “But not…”
“With me dying.”
He glared at her so fiercely, she thought he might try to grab the words out of the air and cram them back down her throat. She drew her knees up to her chest and watched him stride back to the window. He pressed his fist against the glass.
“It’s happening all over again. Inch by inch, night by night, I’m drawn closer to it.”
“Tell me about them,” she said, knowing even the worst had to be better than the helplessness she felt.
His back tensed, and he gripped the window sill. “No.”
She eased off the bed and laid a hand on his back. He jerked forward, but she wouldn’t relent. “Simon.”
He turned around, and she’d never forget the haunted look in his eyes as they bore into her, beseeching and desperate. “Don’t make me relive them.”
“I don’t think you need my help for that. You’re doing that right now aren’t you? You close your eyes and they’re there, aren’t they?”
He let out a shuddering breath. “Yes.”
“Then if I have a starring role in them, shouldn’t I—”
“Don’t make light of this,” he bit out and stepped around her. He stalked back over to the chair and sat down heavily. “Not this.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. But nightmares are normal. They—”
“This isn’t some subconscious manifestation of my fears. They’re real, Elizabeth. The things I see in them,” he said in low rasping voice. “They will happen.”
She walked over and knelt before him, taking his hand in hers and waiting.
She squeezed his hand and forced him to look at her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t think I could bear it, if…”
She gripped his hand more firmly. He pulled her hand to his lips and kissed her palm. His eyes shut tightly against the overwhelming emotions.
Elizabeth slipped into his lap. His arms tightened around her, and he let out a long breath before opening his eyes. He tried to smile, but faltered and it fell away. She kissed the corner of his mouth and felt his mouth open to hers. His kiss was quietly desperate. Without words, he eased his hand under her bare legs and carried her to the bed.
He made love to her with surprising slowness. Instead of ravishing her, he worshipped her. Elizabeth savored every touch, every motion. Her skin was burned by the roughness of his unshaven cheek, then soothed with supple kisses. Every brush of his fingers, every facet in his eyes called out to her. It was amazing to be loved so much, to be needed with such consuming desire.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when dawn’s bright light sliced through the window and heralded a new day. All the things they’d run from, the solace they’d found in each other’s touch, were gone. She’d tried to
rationalize his dreams about her, but he’d sounded so certain about them. He was so sure they’d come to pass. The one thing he seemed to believe in was the one thing she refused to. Simon was a man with issues. Big, fat issues. No wonder they came out in his dreams. So what if the dream about his grandfather had come true? That didn’t mean these dreams were portents. Did it?
Eventually, exhaustion took hold of her body and she snuggled closer to Simon. She could feel him watching her. And she knew, when she awoke again, he would be watching her still. Watching and waiting.
Chapter Twenty
THE NEXT NIGHT AT the bar, Simon’s mood was black even before King appeared. Sleeplessness and worry had conspired to shorten his fuse. The smug, far too gratified smile that curled King’s lips as he took his drink from Elizabeth made Simon’s stomach churn. It wasn’t enough that he hadn’t been there to protect Elizabeth, but to have this creature be the one who came to her rescue gnawed at him. Being beholden to anyone was uncomfortable enough, but to owe her life to King was impossible.
Simon watched him carefully, looking for any sign to confirm their suspicions. Of course, there were none. King looked like a man, but then he would until the change. If he changed…
Simon’s frustration grew and he jabbed at the piano keys, indifferent to the romantic melody. The set seemed to drag on endlessly, as he waited for the moment he’d been dreading. The thought of thanking that bastard forced the bile to rise in his throat. But if there were a chance to draw attention away from her, he’d take it. If he could make it a duty owed to him and not to her, he’d swallow his pride gladly. It was undoubtedly a deal with the devil, but better him than Elizabeth. If there were even a vestige of honor in King, surely he’d accept the debt as Simon’s alone.
Once he was sure Elizabeth was well occupied with other customers, Simon made his way to King’s table.
“I’d like to speak with you about last night,” Simon said struggling to keep his voice even.
Pulling his attention away from Elizabeth, King arched an eyebrow in mildly amused interest and gestured for Simon to take the empty chair.
The arrogance of the man was infuriating, but Simon stilled the barbs that stood at the ready on his tongue. He ignored the offered chair and enjoyed the feeling of looking down on King. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.”
Out of Time: A Time Travel Mystery (Out of Time #1) Page 19
