Dark Secrets: A Paranormal Romance Anthology

by Colleen Gleason

  Now she was sitting there, afraid to move, unsure what to do, all too aware that something was very, very wrong. This wasn’t just a woman who was feeling possessive about her man. This was crazy.

  Marguerite was studying her manicure. “You know, I think I’m going to have to find a new salon. I just had my nails done yesterday and they’re chipped already. I don’t know this area all that well. Can you recommend a salon?”

  Sara just shook her head. Her mind was a complete blank, her thoughts skittering left and right, trying to figure out how she was going to contact someone for help. How she might escape.

  Swinging her leg over the other as she sat in an oversized chair across from Sara, Marguerite sighed. “No? That’s a damn shame. But I guess I’m not surprised. You look a little on the earthy side. You really need to put more effort into your appearance, hon. Your hair could use highlights to lift it, and some quality concealer could really cover up those dark circles under your eyes. I realize Gabriel likes your helpless delicateness, but still, you don’t want to look like a crackhead. Of course, I guess it doesn’t really matter since I’m going to kill you.”

  “When were you planning on doing that exactly?” Sara asked, annoyance slicing through her fear. She didn’t like being toyed with, nor did she like being insulted. She had insomnia. She was entitled to dark circles under her eyes.

  Marguerite glared at her. “Whenever I feel like it. And maybe I won’t be compassionate and put you in a trance like I did with Anne Donovan and your mother. Maybe I’ll just let you struggle while I slice you open like a fish. You’ll feel everything and you’ll fight me, and you won’t be able to stop me because I’m a hundred times stronger than you, and I’m the one with the big knife.”

  “I don’t see any knife,” Sara said, suddenly feeling defiant and infuriated. Was this bitch admitting she had killed her mother? Sara would be damned if she would just sit there and be murdered. If it wasn’t for Jocelyn in the bedroom she would make a rush for the door again, but she didn’t want to leave her friend behind.

  Marguerite pulled a knife out of her purse. “Right here. Isn’t it pretty?”

  They both heard the front door open at the same time and Sara didn’t hesitate. She ran for it, wanting to make sure whoever was there would understand the danger, that they would go for help. She screamed for good measure, yelling and shrieking as she tore for the door, waving her arms. There was a tug on the back of her shirt and she was suddenly lying on the floor, the wind completely knocked out of her and pain exploding in the back of her head.

  “Marguerite.”

  It was Rafe. Sara tried to suck in a breath, blinking back tears. She had no idea how Marguerite had grabbed her so quickly, but she had given her a brutal smackdown. Every inch of Sara’s body hurt and she couldn’t seem to speak, no matter how desperately she wanted to get Rafe’s attention. She could see his legs as he moved into the room, closing the door behind him. That door closing bothered her. She wanted out. So she forced herself to press her hands to the floor and sit up. Everything spun for a second, but she swallowed back the nausea and tried to get her bearings. She was a good five feet from the door, but Rafe and Marguerite were behind her.

  Rafe was talking in a low voice to Marguerite, and he was rubbing her arms in a soothing manner. She was shaking her head. Sara couldn’t hear what Rafe was saying, but she really didn’t care. She was just relieved for the distraction and whatever form of assistance Rafe could offer. Grabbing the leg of the end table, she heaved herself to her feet, shaky and nauseated, wondering how in the hell she was going to get Jocelyn out of the house. She was going for her purse with her phone inside it when the front door exploded, flying off the hinges.

  Sara let out a yelp and jumped back, stumbling over the coffee table. A man fell backwards onto the floor, skidding on top of the now horizontal front door. It was Alex, and the man who obviously had shoved him was Gabriel, out of breath, fists raised, blood all over his yellow t-shirt. What did Alex have to do with anything and why was Gabriel so angry with him? With no clue what was going on, Sara stepped onto the couch, intending to avoid contact with everyone and go quietly down the hallway to Jocelyn. She was going to force Jocelyn up and they were getting the hell out before she really stopped to think about what she was seeing and she absolutely and utterly lost it.

  “Are you okay?” Gabriel asked her, glancing over, worry on his face even as he dodged a vicious kick aimed at his shin from Alex’s left foot.

  She nodded. It was startling to see Gabriel, who she thought of as such a quiet, artistic, non-confrontational man, in a brutal fist-fight. Alex was back on his feet and they were exchanging blows, without any sort of regard for the rules of good sportsmanship. When Alex landed a hit to the kidney Gabriel winced in pain, but came right back at Alex with a punch that collided with Alex’s skull with such force Sara actually heard the crack.

  Jesus Christ. They were going to kill each other. Sara ran past Rafe and Marguerite, purse in her hand, her goal to get to Jocelyn and then call the police. They needed help, because while Gabriel looked like he was holding his own, she didn’t like the ferocity of his fight with Alex. Someone was going to wind up with a concussion or in a coma and she sure in the hell didn’t want it to be Gabriel.

  The shadow rising on the wall in front of her as she stumbled down the hall had her instinctively turning to see what had caused it.

  Then wishing she hadn’t.

  Because what she was seeing didn’t make any sense. It was completely illogical. Insane. But there it was– Rafe and Marguerite embracing, his arms around her patting her back, her head on his shoulder. Three feet off the floor. They were hovering in space, in air, in nothingness, their feet flat like they were standing on solid ground, only they weren’t.

  Sara squeezed her eyes shut hard. Reopened them. They were still floating like human helium balloons. Beyond them, Gabriel and Alex continued to grapple with each other, and Gabriel rammed Alex into the wall so hard that when he pulled back there was a hole in the drywall from his elbow.

  It wasn’t right. None of it was right and she wasn’t seeing what she was seeing.

  Afraid that she was on the verge of going down, her head swimming, mouth hot, stomach churning, Sara whirled and went for the bedroom, slamming and locking the door behind her.

  * * *

  Gabriel was glad Sara had finally left the room. She had lingered longer than he was comfortable with, given that Marguerite was a loose cannon and Alex hell bent on beating the shit out of him. It made him feel better that she was in another room with the door closed.

  “Your girlfriend doesn’t know anything about you, does she?” Alex taunted. “She doesn’t know you’re a drunk and a drug addict.”

  “Actually, she does.” Gabriel ducked when Alex swung to hit in the face. “So no need to run off and tell on me. She’s perfectly aware of my flaws.” He didn’t bother to refute that he was no longer a drunk and a drug addict since he had been clean for seventy-five years. He didn’t need to explain himself or justify anything to Alex.

  They were both out of breath and seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement to pause in pummeling each other, because they were just circling, fists up. Gabriel flicked his hair out of his eyes and watched Alex warily.

  “This is nothing personal, Gabriel.”

  “Than what the fuck is it?”

  “I just want my daughter happy.”

  “Your daughter shouldn’t have hurt those women.”

  “What women? I don’t know anything about any of that. I just know she wants Raphael and I’m here to ensure she gets what makes her happy.” He tilted his head to the side, where Raphael was hugging Marguerite. “So now that they appear to have worked something out, I suppose you and I can cease this nonsense.” Alex wiped at his bloody nose.

  “You started this nonsense.” Gabriel wasn’t sure he could in good conscience just let Marguerite walk away, not after what she had done, even with Raphael w
illing to sacrifice himself to act as watchdog.

  But then he heard the sound, the click of a lock once, twice, and he and Alex both turned to Raphael and Marguerite. Raphael had bound her hand and foot to him with the power of punishment, chains that usually only demons and angels could see, but a bond that couldn’t be broken until the last days of the earth. It was more than he would have expected Raphael to do, condemning himself to an eternity as security guard.

  Alex made a sound of rage in the back of his throat.

  When he would have attacked Raphael, Gabriel stepped in front and stopped him, putting his hand on Alex’s chest. “Don’t. She looks pleased, and this will keep her from harming anyone. It’s for the best.”

  Marguerite did look satisfied. She had gotten what she wanted– Raphael.

  Now Gabriel was going to go and determine if it was at all possible for him to have what he wanted.

  Chapter Twenty

  Gabriel found Sara in the bedroom on her phone talking to the police.

  “I’m not sure what the address is, but I’m in the Harper’s Landing apartment complex.” She was biting her fingernail and staring at her friend, who Marguerite had clearly put into a sleep state.

  Gabriel reached out and took the phone from Sara and pushed the End button to hang it up.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, startled, glancing at the door in fear.

  “We don’t need the police. It’s all under control.”

  Her eyes went wide. “What do you mean? She… I saw…”

  Sara looked panicked, and her fear wasn’t just for what she had seen in the living room. She was afraid of who and what he was. He could sense it, see the goosebumps on her arms.

  “Raphael took care of Marguerite, and Alex left.” With a warning from Gabriel to stay a hundred yards or more away from Sara or he would vanquish him. The demon version of a restraining order. “Everything’s okay, I promise.”

  He reached for her, but she took a step back. “What do you mean, took care of Marguerite? Explain to me what is going on. They were floating in the air. That’s not possible. And you and Alex… those punches should have knocked each other unconscious.”

  This wasn’t how he wanted to have this particular conversation, but he didn’t really have a choice. “Sara, I know this is going to seem crazy, impossible, but just listen to me and trust me. The truth is that Alex, Rafe, Marguerite and myself are all immortal and have known each other for hundreds of years. We don’t age. Alex is Marguerite’s father. Rafe is Dr. Raphael from the old court records.”

  She shook her head. “What? That’s insane.”

  “No. It’s true. And I am Jonathon Thiroux– the painter, the pianist, the addict.”

  Those three words summed up the entire length and breadth of his existence.

  Her face drained of all color. “Oh God, the hair. The DNA… Jocelyn said the two hairs came from the same man, but I thought it was a mistake. That I had mixed up the samples somehow. Because it can’t be possible.”

  “What hair?” He had intentionally refused to give her his DNA because he had known what she would find. But apparently she had found precisely that–that he was a match to John Thiroux–and she had chosen to believe it couldn’t be true. She had chosen to accept the more logical explanation that there was a lab error, which he had to admit was probably what the majority of people would conclude. The truth really was unbelievable when you didn’t come from his world.

  “One of your hairs was stuck to my pillow so I took it. I had Jocelyn compare it to Thiroux’s hair, and she said it was from the same man. A perfect match.” She shook her head. “I thought I had goofed somehow, but now you’re telling me it’s true? That’s crazy. Just crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy. It’s true, Sara, I swear to you.” He had no idea how to convince her. He had never told anyone the truth of what he was. So what he did was instinctive, the only way he knew to show her so she could believe. He reached out and took her hands, opening his mind and projecting it onto her, letting her see his thoughts, feel his emotions, trace his life back to the beginning. Back to when he was Jonathon Thiroux and Dauphine Street was filled with brothels and drinking holes.

  He opened himself and showed her the truth.

  Sara felt it the second Gabriel’s hands touched hers. It was a tingle, a static shock, the sensation of electricity rushing up her arms and vibrating in her shoulders. She would have jerked back, except that his grip on her was tight, and his deep brown eyes were drawing her in, holding her in place, mesmerizing. It should have frightened her, the intensity, the gleam, the depth in his eyes, but instead, she was reassured. This was Gabriel. This was the man she had fallen in love with.

  And he was letting her into his thoughts. She could see and feel them, wrapping around her, whispering in her ear, his fear that she might have been hurt by Marguerite, his desperate relief that she wasn’t. His powerful and honest love for her, the surprise he felt at the depth of his emotion. She felt the struggle it had been for him to not touch her, how much he had wanted to make love to her fully and completely, and how torturous his restraint had been.

  She would have spoken, would have questioned why he couldn’t touch her, share the pleasure of their bodies together, but he put his finger on her lips. The shhh reverberated in her brain, as clear as if he’d spoken it, but he hadn’t. Just watch, he said into her consciousness, and she barely had time to register the wonderment of having him inside her mind, his thoughts blending with hers, when she saw it.

  It was the years clicking backwards, like pages in a calendar, until she saw Gabriel in the same apartment, wearing clothes with an odd seventies cut, quiet and alone, resigned but in control, the French Quarter outside him dirtier than what she had encountered. Lonely, both the man and the street, shabby and knocked around a bit, bleak, but calm. It shifted, blending and blurring until he was writing on a typewriter, and walking dark streets crowded with mid-twentieth century cars, women in voluminous skirts and bright lipsticks rushing by in pumps, Gabriel’s demeanor cautious, brittle, a residual hardness lingering as he refused to make eye contact or speak with anyone. Then she saw him in a smoky bar, women with short capped hair and straight dresses laughing and dancing, the atmosphere secretive, seedy, seductive. Gabriel was watching the piano player croon to the crowd with a longing to touch the keys himself. But mostly he watched with loathing. There was a drink in Gabriel’s hand, several empty glasses in front of him, and his mood was bitter, dark, desperate. He wanted to fling the glass at the piano and make the half-hearted, unimaginative music stop.

  Then suddenly he was lying in the gutter, filthy and bruised, his hair caked and crusted with grime, sweat, an empty bottle clutched to his chest. People walked over him, sniffing in distaste, someone stealing his boots right off his feet while Gabriel sang quietly to himself off-key, his eyes closed, heart screaming with a pain so violent that Sara wanted to weep for him, for all he had been, all he had lost.

  But the image shifted again, and she was there. In that tiny room. Seeing through Gabriel’s eyes the loveliness of Anne’s arm in the moonlight, his desire to capture her. She felt the fuzziness of his mind, understood the languor, the sharpness, the pleasure of the powerful absinthe and opium cocktail. Then the confusion, the sharp shock when he realized that Anne was dead, her blood on his fingertips. The shift from pleasure to horror in the minute it took his fog-filled brain to process what the smell, the wet feel on his fingers was. The smack of death, harsh and ugly, ripping into his daily stupor.

  The vision cut off before she could see Anne’s face, but it was enough to understand the horror of the moment, the self-hatred, the grief, the guilt.

  Sara whispered, “Gabriel. I’m so sorry.”

  It wasn’t possible that he was immortal, not by the standards of the reality she had always lived in, but she knew it was true. She had seen it, felt it. However it was possible, whatever it meant, he was the same man.

  He squeezed her hands
. “So it was me who found Anne Donovan dead. She was the girlfriend I told you about who was murdered, and for a hundred and fifty years I wondered if I could have done that, if I could have been hallucinating, blacked out, and taken a knife and killed her. I had to know. I had to find some way to deal with the answer– to make it right, for Anne.”

  “Why would Marguerite do that to Anne?” she asked, glancing back at Jocelyn. “And please tell me my friend is going to be okay.”

  “She’ll be fine. When we’re done talking, I can wake her up. She won’t remember anything.”

  He was holding her hands so tightly her fingers hurt, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him to ease up. The solidity of his touch was comforting and she suspected he actually needed to hold on to her, to reassure himself that she was still there, standing with him.

  “Marguerite did all of this because she was jealous. She was jealous of women Raphael was involved with. He had visited Anne earlier that night before I got there and Marguerite must have seen them together. She seems to have concluded her relationship with Raphael was more than it was, because I don’t think they were ever actually dating.”

  “So she killed my mother because Rafe was in a relationship with her? That’s appalling.” And she didn’t know what was worse– when she hadn’t known why someone would do that, or now that she knew someone had for such a flimsy, selfish reason. But there was a soft, sad comfort in knowing that she had been right about Rafe, that his love had been genuine. It helped to know that her mother had enjoyed the last year of her life with him, and that it was legitimate emotion on his part.

  “I’m sorry, Sara. I truly, truly am.”

  Sara looked up at him, her brain still processing everything, lingering sorrow from Gabriel’s memories hanging over her. There was so much to ask, so much she needed and wanted to understand. “What happened to you, Gabriel? You were drinking before Anne… why?”