I was not up for this.
I rolled groggily toward my night table. Ah shite! At some point I’d knocked my cup, partially filled with tea, off the bedside table, and to the floor.
I sighed.
Lovely nightmares. At least it had not broken.
I hated the way this felt. I hated the bad dreams. And I hated missing Liam. I think it was way worse to know someone wanted you, but refused to be with you, spurned his feelings or attraction, or whatever. And what the hell were these ‘dark ones’ and why was I dreaming of them?
What ‘something’ dark was on its way?
It was more than just a dream. I could sense that deep down, feel it my bones, in every fiber of me.
Oh yeah, and what language had I spoken? So strange. I knew I had dreamed of it before. Had spoken it in other dreams. It sounded familiar to my ears. Felt comfortable on my tongue. It sounded similar to what Gideon and been speaking, but none of the words I had spoken were the ones he had spoken.
So many thoughts paraded through my mind as I got ready for the day.
Topmost was that somehow I had to find a way to stash away, and forget about how I felt for Liam, how I felt when I was near him or merely thought of him.
What had passed between us last night? What had been that energy emanating from me? That was utterly new.
Culling aside, this was going to be a very tricky day.
Thankfully, I’d already showered, and dressed by the time the knock on the door came at 8:00 am.
“9:00 am…not 8:00 am…” I mumbled into the bathroom mirror as I put a light coat of mascara on my lashes.
It had been a strange and rough night, emotional and confusing on so many levels, and I found myself still in a peculiar state of being.
Though I was pleased with how the apartment was coming together—I was fairly confident I could turn this into a home—I was completely at a loss as to what that dream meant, especially the end portion.
My dreams had become so weird.
And my heart was immensely bruised by Liam.
So, by the time a resounding knock echoed through my apartment a second time, I was feeling a combination of gloominess, perplexity, anger, and petulance.
And just a dash of something else…that from now on I will deny I feel.
I took a peep through the peek hole, as a third, yet even more persistent knock resonated against my palms where they lay on the door. It was Liam. Of course it was.
I took a deep breath, preparing myself for…whatever may come.
“Good morning,” I said through my plastered on smile, forcing cheer I was not feeling into my voice, trying my best to be upbeat. He looked good. Of course. Simply and casually attired…and absolutely yummy as usual.
“So, where to?” I pushed on quickly, seeking to avoid any problematic conversation.
“Not going to invite me in?” He asked in that completely disarming and wonderfully accented voice of his, as if nothing had happened last night.
“Not much to see,” I said brightly, locking the door behind me.
“I know I’m early…I wanted to treat you to a coffee, maybe talk.” He smiled. But just as mine was counterfeit, his too seemed not all genuine.
“Um, sure.” I answered with an inaudible sigh. Talk. Great.
Elysium was busy as usual, Gideon had a good side business here…or main business…I’m not sure which it was. After being served our drinks, Liam led us to Gideon’s private room. The same room where first I had met him, and fled from him.
Liam faltered at the threshold…and I nearly ran into his back as I had that first night here, except this time he was nearly awash in my latte.
Peering past him I saw Gideon, but he was not alone. Had Liam known he’d be here? Was this about last night? Did Gideon know about the club and what had passed between Liam and me? Did he know of that golden and violet energy? Was he aware of my declaration to Liam?
Shit. Because last night hadn’t been humiliating enough?
It was only a moment before I noticed that he was not alone. On the couch—what had been my couch that night—sat Halah. Standing at the edge of the fireplace was a young man with his back to me. When he turned, I studied him briefly, found myself scrutinizing his face. He did look slightly familiar. But why? I couldn’t place him. I cocked my head slightly.
Or could I?
An awkward feel permeated the room, an air of trepidation.
There was something recognizable about the guy. Something that made my head spin and my stomach lurch in a very unpleasant manner. My breathing began to come in labored, shallow bursts, and I fell slightly against the door jamb to hold myself up as a wave of vertigo descended through me.
Then my heart seemed to stop, seemed to actually miss a beat as recollection dawned.
I knew exactly who he was.
He’d been at my party. Everything in me went still—deadly still—as I looked at him. He’d been the one that gave me the death cocktail. The one that had ended me. Ended Isabelle Finne. He’d been the one that killed me.
Ice water whirled through my veins. I walked to him without any further hesitation, quite pointedly, stopping directly in front of him, not even an arm-span away.
“I remember you.” So simply stated. My voice low, smooth. So much like what I felt building inside, rumbling in my head.
With only half awareness I saw Gideon rise from his chair.
“Why is he here?” I posed the question to Gideon, my voice seething, icy smooth. Gideon didn’t have a chance to respond, before he did.
“I’m sorry,” Max said. “It wasn’t personal.”
“Sorry?”
“I don’t know what happened, I had the right name. I had the right girl.”
“Sorry…” The word was not registering in my iced over brain. What? The right name? The right girl?
He looked to Gideon.
“This is your fault, you did this to me,” I wailed and wrapped my hands around his throat.
I had moved so swiftly. But I didn’t give myself pause to mull that over. Anger. Hatred. Flashing through my mind and body, blazing a trail from my heart to my hands. I’d never known that rage could burn so cold.
“You destroyed me. You destroyed everything.”
The world flew apart at the exact same moment. All hell broke loose inside me. All the rage, disgust, hatred, loss, and anguish—that had nowhere to land before—blew up and fell upon this one person.
Liam and Gideon were pulling me off Max. I knew this was his name because somewhere in the frigid haze I could remotely hear Halah screaming it.
Arms wrapped around me, around my waist and shoulders. They were Gideon’s. Liam was busy prying at my fingers where they relentlessly squeezed at the young man’s neck.
“Calm down, Iliana. Come on…let’s calm down.” Gideon’s arms tightened. “You can’t do this. Let him go.” His words spoken into my ear so softly.
My contact was broken, Gideon pulling my arms away from Max and down and around myself, hugged to my body tightly with his own arms, wrapped around my body from behind.
“Shhhh,” softly in my ear again.
I was crying. I could feel the warm tears tracing a path down my cheeks. Shouldn’t they be cold? How were they warm?
Gideon, without loosening his hold, dragged me away to an adjoining room; I dimly realized that I hadn’t noticed it before. He kept me crushed back against his chest, keeping my arms pinned with his, all the while I bucked and kicked like a ferocious thing. I wanted to get back to Max, to finish the job I’d begun. They wanted to see some culling, some proper reaping? I’d show them something!
I pushed against Gideon, trying to loosen his grip, wanting only—with every bit of primal urge housed within my body—to get back at Max, and deliver the same amount of pain to him as I’d been dealt.
Gideon pushed the velvet covered French doors shut with a foot, locking us away from the others.
“Come on…shhhh, let’s
calm down. We can’t do this. Shhhh,” he repeated, murmuring in my ear, softly, soothing.
His voice, as always, seemed to entwine through me gently, enticingly, assuaging my rage, turning it to something else. Was this one of his talents as a Caomhnoir? Was it the influence his voice had on me? Or simply the affect of him, being near him?
I wanted to melt into him. The back of my head pressed into his shoulder. His five o’clock shadowed cheek—well, more like a nine o’clock shadow—pressed to mine.
And I was suddenly acutely aware of his nearness, more than just him holding down my rage, but the length of my body against the length of his.
The ferocity was draining from me and being replaced by that, something else that I felt every time I was near him. Not fascination. Not desire. Not exactly anyway. It was something more complex and more disconcerting.
And that scent, his scent. The one from last night, at the club, that had so completely pulled me back from the edge with Liam. That mesmerizing mingling of woods, moss, and spice; faint leather, and subtle smokiness—it softened me, softened my fury and I relaxed into him, into his body. I turned my face more to his.
“You’re okay, everything will be okay. I promise. This will be a good life. I’m here to help you,” he spoke so gently into my hair as he held me still. It made me tremble.
My eyes met with his and there was a look in them. I’d seen a hint of that the night before. A glimpse of kindness, a gentleness and warmth. And for a second, I could swear that we both stopped breathing.
“I’m going to let you go,” he began.
Why did everyone keep doing that…letting me go?
“You’ll stay calm?”
I nodded. I didn’t want him to let go, but whatever hold I’d even briefly had over him was broken.
My body was suddenly too cold and too desolate. I didn’t want him to be away from me. It had to just be the trauma catching up, right? I mean, to miss Gideon? To want him close to me? That was all backwards.
“It’s all going to be alright.” He sat me down on the nearby Queen Anne settee. He remained standing. I’m sure on the ready to catch me if I bolted for the door.
I wrapped my arms around myself, oddly missing the feel of his. “How can you say that? You tell me that I can never go back home, that everyone I know, everything I had, I have to leave behind. Well, I mean, Liam did, but by your direction. I wasn’t supposed to pack a single thing. I was expected to just leave everything; Liam said…he was so worried because I did take things. So worried that you’d have his ass.”
“We work a sort of relocation package, when a new member joins the Bháis, something along the lines as witness protection. You were not supposed to bring anything along from your old life. The risk you put yourself and Liam in is…” he just shook his head grimly, words evading him, stroked his face roughly with his hand, “the unwanted attention you could have caused to be focused on us…”
“And what about my friends, and family? I just have to leave them all behind too?”
He didn’t say anything. He nodded, sighed, and looked down at the rug. Was that an actual look of…perhaps compassion? He studied me for a scant moment. Was he finally responding to my quiet tears? Could he feel my anguish?
“I can never speak to them again?”
“You need to cut off any links to your past identity.”
“I can’t do this, I thought I could, I don’t think I can,” I said hopelessly.
He pulled a matching armchair over to the settee and sat down across from me. Very solemn. “You were killed the other night. That life is over.” His face was hard now, resolutely set, his eyes stone. “Na Ceann Comhairle will not hesitate to do whatever they see fit to do to protect the secrets and ways of the Rúnaigh.”
He searched my face. I could feel the earnestness emanating from him. Obviously, this Comhairle didn’t screw around, or like to be messed about with. “Do you understand my words?”
I nodded soberly.
“If you run, they will find you.” He searched my face again. “I’m sorry, but if you value your life, this new life…at all…you really have no option.” He finished quietly, gravely.
“Just as I think I’ll be ok…” I wiped angrily at a tear. “I thought when I left last night, I thought I was fine. I thought…I can handle this. Be okay with it, adjust.” Should I tell him about the strange light that came from me? I shook my head forlornly, shrugged again. “I’m not.” The words came out softly, sorrowfully. “Did the others, the ones before me, did they handle it better? How was it with them?” My voice came out weak, tearful. I looked into his eyes.
“There’s never been anyone quite like you.” His eyes were locked to mine. “It’s been different with you from the very start.”
Why for just the briefest of seconds was I wishing that he was speaking of something else? Why did it feel as though his words were in regard to something better? Why was my heart racing at that thought, at the way his eyes were gliding over my face taking me in?
He leaned forward slightly. “You weren’t supposed to gain a body back, become corporeal, when you did. Nor as quickly as you did.”
He looked at me carefully, looked me over as if searching for the answers to his unasked questions in my face, in my eyes. As if I could possibly reveal anything to him.
“You should not have gone solid so quickly. That doesn’t happen. It should not have been mere minutes, or even hours. It takes time for a new body to form for the mhésen, to bond to it. And, as we’ve discussed before, you should look nothing like your old self.”
I began to cut in with my stand-by argument, but halted, too tired to re-hash it yet again.
“And yes, we have clarified, you do not exactly, but the fact remains, you do enough to make it an issue, possibly. We’ll just have to wait and see on that account.”
I simply nodded. I was done with that argument. I suppose I did look enough like my old self that if any California friends saw me they would recognize me. But here in Seattle, it should be just fine.
He continued, noting my silence, and acceptance, on the subject. “The reason Max is here is so I can try to get some answers.” He watched as a tear rolled down my cheek. “I’m sorry you had to see him again. That was unfair. Cruel.”
I looked down at my hands where they were holding tightly to the edges of my jacket.
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” he added. “You were expected to be meeting up with Halah, not having breakfast with Liam here.”
“He was early, we had some time,” I offered bleakly. I wasn’t about to fill him in on the reason why Liam felt the need to treat me to coffee this morning.
I couldn’t remember what song it was from, but the words played over and over in my head, ‘…we grow up and blow away, who we were, what we dreamed of…’
I shrugged, listless. I didn’t know what was left to say. So instead, I swallowed it all down, deep into my soul—I mean my mhésen—and wiping the last of my tears from under my eyes, I sat up, straightening myself. “Can you please tell Liam I’m ready to go?”
Gideon looked intently at me. Judging my state of mind obviously…I’d switched tracks rather quickly. He nodded his assent.
“I don’t ever want to see Max again,” I told him. “Please,” I beseeched faintly.
“There should be no need of that,” He stated gently, as he stood.
How stupid was this? I want him. He wants me. But we’re not going to do anything about it. Maybe it was idiotic to even feel this way, mere days after losing everything—and after just having tried to choke a guy to death—but inexplicably, I did.
And was it wrong? Truly?
Was being able to feel anything after losing it all? I’d been ripped from my previous life and drop kicked into this new one. And I’d decided to embrace it, I was trying to embrace it—at least it was a life—in all its bizarrely impossible craziness.
Why exactly couldn’t he be with me? Was it a rule of the R�
�naigh? Like office politics, no fraternization between co-workers? That seemed pretty lame. Was it just a rule of Gideon’s making? I knew I should ask Liam, just toss the words out there and see what became of it. But would he give me a straight answer? And I didn’t really want to broach the subject at this precise time and place.
Or maybe at all.
I liked just being with him. It was so comfortable just sitting next to him in the car, in the quietude. It reminded me of our road trip. I know…a shrink would probably have a field day with me. Tell me I was attracted to him because of what he is, what he could do, or some similar rubbish.
But I recalled how I’d been attracted to him at the party. How hot I’d thought he was. How I’d wondered who he was there with, because I didn’t know him. All before the realization of the death thing, when I’d spotted him briefly on the crowded rooftop. Before I’d seen my lifeless body on the sofa.
“So, how does this happen?” I asked him in a low voice as we stood next to Pike Place Fish waiting for Halah to arrive. “How do you know when to…when I’m supposed to—?”
“Halah will give you a signal. Well, you’re watching me first, so you’ll see her signal me.”
“But how…how is this person going to die?” I asked in an even lower tone, barely audible. “We’re in the middle of a marketplace.”
“Could be a heart attack, a stroke, or maybe a robbery gone wrong. Perhaps…an allergic reaction to seafood.” He shrugged, poking at a fish on ice. “We never know until it happens. We’re Coimhdeacht…it really doesn’t matter to us. The how. We just need to Cull and Usher.”
“Nice,” I muttered, a tad on the sarcastic side.
“Wait here a minute.”
“No way.” I grabbed his sleeve and stopped him from departing, from abandoning me here.
“I’ll be right back,” he placated, as he pried my fingers from his flannel over shirt.
I watched as he walked away and disappeared around the corner to another aisle of stalls.
We’d arrived at Pike Place Market a little early, even after all the drama at Elysium, and it was already quite busy and in full swing. The fantastic public market overlooking the Elliott Bay waterfront was full of all kinds of shops and booths, filled with merchants offering up a wide variety of wares.
No Time to Cry (Nine While Nine Legacy Book 1) Page 13
