Still watching his face, I hesitated, noticing my chest still hurt.
“So that pain?” I said, rubbing the center of my breast bone. “That’s a seer thing, right? Is that why I only feel it with you?”
His gaze sharpened on mine. “You only feel that with me?”
“Well, yeah. As far as I know. I don’t remember feeling it before.”
“How much do you feel it? A lot?”
“Enough,” I said, wincing as I rubbed my chest. “It hurts.”
Seeing the tautness rise back to his expression, I flushed, feeling that pain in my chest worsen, shifting into that deeper nausea as he looked at me.
“I felt it earlier, too,” I added. “…in the bar.”
“And you’ve never felt it before? You’re sure?” He swallowed, looking at my mouth. “Not with Jaden? Not with anyone else you’ve…” He hesitated, his gaze flickering up. “…no one else you’ve liked?”
“No.” I gave him a puzzled look. “I already said that. Why? Is something wrong?”
He frowned, but didn’t answer.
I watched his face as he looked at the fire, wondering if I should ask him again. I was still trying to decide when he turned back in my direction.
That time, his face and voice were carefully businesslike.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess we’d better start.”
Looking at him, I realized suddenly that I believed him.
I don’t know that I’d thought consciously that I believed all of it, but I believed him that he could do something to me that would make me forget.
I thought about losing every memory I’d had of the past thirty or forty hours, and a low-level panic hit me, sliding over my body in a rising wave.
I thought about not knowing about him saving me from the bomb at SFO, or remembering yelling at him on the plane, or the crazy notes I’d gotten from Ponytail and his friends, or the female seer by the park, or that seer Jewel in the fetish bar. I thought about not remembering that Jaden cheated on me, or that I’d nearly died, or that this guy seemed to think his job was keeping me alive using his psychic powers.
I really might not remember this.
I really might not remember him.
“Hey, Revik, wait––” I began.
“Sleep, Allie,” he said.
His voice sounded almost tired.
Not just tired. Sad.
“Sleep… Now.”
The room, that piercing light gaze, the fire and everything around me disappeared.
I don’t even remember closing my eyes.
27
WILLFUL ILLUSIONS
I HEARD THE voice before I could force open my eyes.
It must have woken me, but I felt no transition.
Instead, it was like I was lost in a silent, blue-tinged pool of in-between, my mind wrapped in warm, clear light, soft as feathers.
I felt safe there. I felt so safe.
Only the voice intruded on that feeling.
“Allie,” it said, softer. “Come on, Allie-girl… we have to get up.”
Fingers caressed my face, brushing back my hair.
The touch was light, gentle, but I winced.
I didn’t want to leave those feather-like clouds. I didn’t want to leave that place, but the off-key notes kept intruding, forcing me back to where everything was gray and dull, where I didn’t belong.
I resented it, even as I tried to hold on to that softer place.
“Hey,” he said, his mouth close to my ear. I felt his lips on my cheek, then my forehead. “Come on, Allie-angel,” he coaxed. “You’re far too pretty to stay asleep all morning.”
Frowning, I managed to open my eyes.
Immediately I winced, that time from the light. Not like the light hurt really; it was brighter than I expected, but it felt more as if my eyes were greeted by too much in general, more information than I could wrap my brain around right then.
It was so much easier in that other place, where everything was still, and so quiet.
Like floating. Swimming through a golden ocean of light…
White wings beat above me, so clear and soft I could imagine they were tinged blue.
“Allie, come on,” the voice coaxed. “I know you’re hungover, but I’m getting really hungry. I want you to come downstairs with me. There’s a diner right across the street that’s supposed to serve a killer brunch.”
I opened my eyes for longer that time.
A familiar face hung over mine.
Dark blue eyes softened when I looked up at them. Smiling back, I rubbed my face, stretching my back. My back hurt. My arms hurt, like someone had been playing tug a war, using my body as the rope. My wrists hurt, my legs.
My head pounded, but that much was in the distance still.
It was hard not to want to go back to that other place. It felt so familiar, wherever it was, but it was slipping away from me already.
“What time is it?” I managed, stretching again.
“Ten,” he said, glancing at the night table by the bed. He pulled the covers up, wrapping his arms around me. When I let my body go soft, he pulled me tighter against him. “Aren’t you hungry, baby?”
“A little.”
“Want some coffee?”
I smiled. “Do you even need to ask?”
He caressed my hair out of my face, and I blinked up at him again, smiling more.
He fingered my neck, and I winced at something he touched. “What’s up with the teeth marks?” he said, his voice teasing. “Did I do that? Or do I need to beat someone up?”
Frowning, I tried to think. “Teeth marks?”
“That’s what it looks like. You don’t remember?”
My fingers found the part of my neck he’d touched, and I winced again, feeling an uneven line in my skin. A deeper pain whispered through my chest as I fingered it. I fought to think, staring up at the ceiling, my brow furrowed.
“Is it a problem that I don’t remember coming back here last night?” I said.
He grinned. “I’m not surprised. You were hammered, Allie-girl. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you that blasted before.”
“Really?” I frowned, trying to remember. I remembered the shots with Cass, then not a lot else. “I didn’t do anything too embarrassing, did I?”
“You mean other than leaving the club before my band started? Disappearing for like ten hours then being brought back here by that cop? Making us all go through interrogation because he was half-convinced we’d fed you some kind of illegal drug?”
“What?” I opened my eyes, suddenly wide, wide awake. “What did I do?”
Jaden chuckled, kissing my face.
“It’s okay, baby. You needed to blow off some steam. You’ll probably need to patch things up with Jon, though. He was pretty freaked out. I guess you dropped your headset outside the club, so he couldn’t even use GPS to find you. You’re lucky he and Cass found it before someone took off with it.”
I was still fighting to remember though, unable to believe I’d literally lost hours of my life, without so much as a flickering of helpful, if embarrassing, snippets of memory.
I’d never blacked out before. Not like that.
“What the hell was I drinking?” I said. “Moonshine?”
I stared at my wrists, seeing the red marks around them, which were rapidly turning into bruises. I swallowed.
“You said a cop brought me back?” I said. “Was I in handcuffs?”
“Yeah,” Jaden said, brushing my hair back again. “I don't think he roughed you up, though. He said you fought him, resisted arrest… then tried to get out of the cuffs in the back of his car.”
He smiled, shaking his head.
“He seemed all right. A little uptight, but it could have been a lot worse. He found you by the park, he said. Thank goodness you at least remembered the name of our hotel, or we probably would’ve been stuck picking you up at the drunk tank today.”
I groaned, flopping back on the bed.
“Seriously?” I pressed a hand over my eyes. “How could you let me get that drunk?”
“Me?” Jaden laughed. “I had nothing to do with it, baby. I was getting ready for the show. You want to talk to someone about your drinking speed––or, more to the point, you drinking a bottle of tequila on an empty stomach––you might want to hit up your buddy, Cass.”
From the faint edge in his voice, I found myself thinking that conversation may have already occurred between Cass and Jaden.
Probably more than once.
“…Anyway,” he added. “You already had a good head start on me by the time I got back from that photo shoot, if you recall.”
I clutched his hand, feeling a surge of guilt. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” he said. “Why? Just because you scared me half to death, making me think you’d been raped or murdered and dumped in an alley somewhere?”
“Not just that,” I said. “For missing your show. For ruining your big night.”
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about the show. You didn’t miss anything. You’ve heard all those songs about a million times by now, anyway.”
“That doesn’t matter… it was a big show. I can’t believe I missed it. It’s also why I came.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he insisted. “If you want to be sorry, be sorry for scaring me out of my mind. Not for the show. At this point, I’m just glad you’re all right.”
Glancing down at my expression, he smiled again.
“Once I knew you were okay, I kind of chilled out. That cop had a good long talk with all of us, mostly a scare-monger type lecture about keeping a better eye on one another in a strange city, and not letting drunk girls wander off on their own to get bitten on the neck by guys who aren’t their boyfriends.”
Smiling faintly, he shrugged, fingering the mark on my neck. “I think he let you off easy because he figured you were a dumb tourist. He seemed more worried about you than anything. He didn’t even charge you.”
Hesitating, he gave me a rueful look.
“Jon didn’t, though,” he added. “Chill out, I mean. Cass seemed to be a pretty good sport about it, but Jon, well. He was a little––”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “I understand. I’ll talk to him.” Blowing up my bangs, I closed my eyes. “It’s different with Jon, you know. Especially after Dad died.”
Pausing when I saw Jaden wince, I added,
“I really can’t believe I just wandered off… in New York, of all places. What a complete fucking idiot.” I looked up at him. “Why are you dating such a idiot?”
Jaden grinned back. “You’re not an idiot. Just a neck slut with a vampire fetish, apparently.” When I shoved at his chest, he laughed. “We all do stupid things now and then. I just don’t tell you all of mine.”
I grunted a laugh. “Gotcha.”
“See, you have to learn how to hide your idiocy, Allie-girl. The trick is to make everyone else think it’s only them. So next time, no bite marks. And get drunk in your own city. When none of your friends are around. Or me. Or your creepily over-protective brother.”
I laughed again. “I see. Words to live by, Mr. Donnelly.”
Leaning down, he kissed my neck.
“Did you really not do that?” I said, frowning a little. “That mark?”
Jaden laughed, raising his head.
“Don’t get paranoid,” he mock-scolded. “…Or make me paranoid. I’m pretty sure I must have. I was pretty wasted by the end of the night, too. And Jon asked you and your cop about a hundred times if anyone messed with you. You seemed really sure no one had. That cop said he found you alone and fully clothed apart from your jacket and your boots, which apparently you took off to walk on the grass.”
Jaden grunted a laugh, shaking his head. “He said you were looking at holograms. You were trying to get closer to one in the park when he found you.”
Leaning back into my pillow, I sighed, forcing myself to relax when he kissed me again. Once he let himself fall into what he was doing, he leaned into me more, putting more of himself into each kiss as he eased his body between my legs.
Feeling him starting to get turned on, I laughed.
I pushed at his shoulders when I felt his tongue in my ear.
“I thought you wanted me to get up?” I said. “Coffee, remember? Breakfast?”
“In a minute,” he murmured, resting more of his weight on me. “One of us up at a time is probably safer… and I never got to celebrate with my girl post-show last night.”
“I thought you did,” I joked. “Bite mark, remember?”
“It doesn’t count if we were both black-out drunk.”
His fingers slid into my hair, caressing it back from my face, and I shivered, looking up at him. A pain started in my chest.
Without thought, I raised my hand to where it started.
As I did, I felt it again, that soft, feather-like presence, wound into a darker nausea in the lower part of my belly. For a moment, it was strong enough that I closed my eyes.
Jaden raised his head.
“What’s wrong?” he said, frowning.
“Nothing.” I bit my lip, shaking my head. “It’s nothing. I’m probably just hung over.”
But I was frowning too, feeling that presence skirt the edges of my awareness. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, or why it felt so familiar. It hovered like the faint trace of a scent, like having a name or a flavor at the tip of my tongue.
The harder I tried to understand, to pull it closer, the more it dissipated like smoke.
Jaden kissed me again.
After a pause, I let the other thing go and fell into the kiss, wrapping my arms around his neck. Jaden’s hands slid under the T-shirt of his I was wearing, pushing it gently up my body. His kisses deepened as he did it, growing more sensual as he tugged at my underwear.
Briefly, the pain I felt worsened. The presence behind it strengthened, too.
That time, I tried to ignore it.
Jaden sat up long enough to pull his shirt over his head. As he helped me to do the same, the pain slowly began to dwindle, fading further into the background.
By the time Jaden started kissing me again, I questioned if it had been there at all.
The tug of presence lingered, but only a little longer. A near-melancholy reached me in that silence; it reminded me again of floating in that golden ocean, that feeling of peace.
Before I could find a name for it, the memory slid out of my grasp.
Wings beat at me, soft, silent and crystal-white.
Then the presence was gone, too.
* * *
WANT TO READ MORE ABOUT ALLIE & REVIK?
Read Book #1 in the BRIDGE & SWORD SERIES:
ROOK (Bridge & Sword Series #1)
Yanked out of her life by the mysterious Revik, Allie discovers that her blood may not be as “human” as she always thought. When Revik tells her she’s the Bridge, a mystical being meant to usher in the evolution of humanity––or possibly its extinction––Allie must choose between the race that raised her and the one where she might truly belong. A psychic, science fiction romance set in a modern, gritty version of Earth.
See below for sample pages!
1
ALLIE
I KNOW WHO I am.
Somehow, deep down inside, I’ve always known.
I don’t know how to explain that statement precisely. It’s not in the “I am Alyson May Taylor” sense of knowing myself. It’s more like this presence I carry within me, this solid sense of “me-ness” that feels untouchable in some way. It shocked me as a kid, when I realized a lot of people didn’t have that.
For a lot of people, that rock-solid, “here I am” thing was more elusive. A lot of them spent their whole lives searching for it.
Funnily enough, with me, it turned out who I was didn’t end up being all that important.
What I was mattered a whole lot more.
On that front, I knew a lot less tha
n I thought I did. I might have had that essence thing down, but I was missing a hell of a lot of pretty significant details.
“HE’S BAAAACK.” MY best friend, Cass, grinned at me from where she leaned over the fifties-style lunch counter, her butt aimed at the dining area of the diner where we both worked. Given that our uniforms consisted of short black skirts and form-fitting, low-cut white blouses, she was giving at least a few of our customers an eye-full.
Seemingly oblivious to that fact, and to the men sitting at the counter to her left and my right, pretending not to stare at her ass as she stuck it in the air, she grinned at me, her full lips looking even more dramatic than usual with their blood-red lipstick.
“Did you see, Allie?”
I pursed my lips, rolling my eyes.
“What’s the pool up to now?” she said. “Seventy bucks? Eighty?”
“Eighty-five.” I used the metal stopper to compress finely-ground espresso beans into the metal filter I held in my other hand, managing to spill a small pile of grounds on the linoleum counter in the process. “Sasquatch threw in twenty yesterday.” Remembering, I let out a snort-laugh. “He walked right up to the guy’s table. Asked him his name, point-blank.”
Cass’s black-eyeliner decorated eyes widened. “What happened?”
I smiled, shaking my head without looking up. “Same thing that always happens.”
Cass laughed, kicking up her high heels, which were red-vinyl platforms, more seventies than fifties, not like it mattered. Again, I saw the men nearby sipping their coffees while they surreptitiously stared at her legs.
Cass had been on a red kick lately. Her long, straight, raven-black, Asian hair had dark red flames coming up from the tips, the color matching her lipstick, eyeshadow, fingernail polish, and the five inch heels.
Two months ago, everything had been teal.
She could get away with just about any style she wanted, though. Her ethnicity, an odd mish-mash of Thai sprinkled with European and Ethiopian, somehow mixed inside her to make her one of the most physically beautiful women I’d ever seen.
I hated her a little for it, sometimes.
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