Love Beyond Lies

by Rebecca Royce

  She swatted his arm. “You’re too much in your head again.”

  “Okay, what are we doing that’s fun?”

  Gia sighed. He loved the way she glowed from the inside. All of the beings in this dimension wore their emotions on their skin but she lit up the world when she was happy. He stroked the side of her face. Anything to see her like this, anything at all…

  She threw her arms in the air. “I want to go in there.”

  He pointed at the building next to them. “That’s one of their exclusive clubs. They don’t let people like us in there. Or people they think we are.”

  The Outsiders in this dimension had always kept a low profile. They didn’t mix and mingle with the elite here. She pointed at the door. “I want to know what they do in there.”

  He stared at the red door where she wanted to go. “Probably nothing all that fun. Stare at each other. Feel more important than everyone else.”

  She shook her head. “Well, I want to see it myself.” She knocked on the door—once then twice—until it cracked open. A man stood there, his gaze going up and down until he’d officially, and obviously, checked Gia’s body out. Colin wanted to kill him. He’d never get used to it. Her energy was pure sex, all of the time. She knew it and she used it to get what she wanted. Oh, she’d never cheat on him. They were together, connected, and when it came to actually having sex, she only sought him out. But he hated how every male in the room wanted her all of the time.

  Gia winked at Colin before she turned on the man. “I want to go in there.”

  The guy at the door wore wrinkled clothing and all of it was black. That struck Colin as odd. These clubs were exclusive. Did the guy not have the ability to launder his clothing? On this planet, in this dimension, it didn’t take much but a walk through a steam machine.

  “Gia,” Colin called out to her but she’d used her persuasive tone and now she had to follow through. Or at least she thought she did, as though the fact that she invaded their brains for half a second to get what she wanted, meant she needed to make sure she got what she wanted. She never backed down.

  He followed. Why was the guy so ruffled? The doorman didn’t take his gaze off Gia the whole time she walked past him or after. Colin took a deep breath. He was never as good looking as she was wherever they ended up. It was like their energies picked the same degree of hotness in every incarnation.

  The music in the club was too loud. He hated the atmosphere immediately. Why did his love always want to go to these places when all he wanted to do was be with her under the stars somewhere where they could hear themselves think?

  He sighed. Maybe there had been a universal mistake. Maybe she would have done better with someone else who wanted to be around people.

  Gia tugged on his shirt. “Darling. You’re in your head. I can feel it. Talk to me telepathically or aloud, but talk to me. You’ll talk to yourself so much that you’ll have the weight of the universe on your shoulders and everything about us will fall apart.”

  He laughed. How had she known that? “Gia…”

  She kissed him. It was such a sweet, gentle caress and he melted into her like he always did. She so rarely initiated physical contact. She exuded sex, but she had to be chased for it. This had always been their way. But when she reached for him, he felt like he grew inches in size and magnitudes in power.

  His love stepped back. “Something’s wrong.” She shuddered before she rubbed her arms. “There’s evil in this room.”

  Female Outsiders were always faster to feel danger than males were. He knew better than to distrust her instincts. “Evil we can manage or evil we run from?” Had the demon presented? Had he killed the scribe? Was the game in play?

  “I…” She doubled over and he caught her. This was bad. Who was assaulting his woman? He picked her up in his arms. That was when he saw it…

  The creature who’d looked like a man when they were outside but was so clearly not now. He was somehow a shadow, not really there.

  “What are you?”

  It raised its pretend eyebrows. Was it the demon?

  “Oh.” She clasped Colin’s neck as she shook. “It’s trying to get inside my head.”

  “You came in my head.” The not-man walked toward them. “You presented your power to me. Now you belong to me. You’re mine. I accepted your power and now you will take mine.”

  Colin had never wanted to have Gabriel or Drew around so much in his life. He couldn’t get her out of there fast enough. Where were the teleporters?

  Now

  Colin blinked, returning to the present. He squeezed Gia tighter. This creature had been after his love for so many thousands of years it wasn’t going to be put off easily, if at all. Not until Colin could get his shit together and think about the fact that it was here.

  His own power might work or at least throw the thing off for a bit. He was strong and he could go invisible—sneaking in and out of places. With a thrust of his power, he struck the creature, sending it backward, out the door, and down the stairs.

  “Hold on.” He pulled Gia toward him, enveloping her in his invisibility. It was hard to hold onto the power with someone else in his arms, but he’d do it for years for Gia. He’d run forever, too. That had always been true in their relationship. Whatever happened, he’d never wanted to let her down.

  The world was spinning to disaster. Demons ran amok and a shadow creature obsessed with Gia had presented itself again. Sure, why not? The only thing missing from this picture was a partridge in a pear tree and a rattlesnake.

  The next time Eden had a vision; he’d really appreciate it if she disclosed a little bit more of what he was walking into.

  Two

  Gia

  Gia Lancaster had never been a damsel in need of saving and she wasn’t about to start now. Colin was faster than she was and he could do the invisible thing—which she’d always found really cool—especially when he did it in bed. Not being able to see him forced her to close her eyes and just give in to the ways he made love to her. It was strangely erotic, and she’d always loved it.

  Now, however, he needed to put her down. They’d gotten away for the moment. Safety wouldn’t last long so they should take advantage of the opportunity to have a conversation.

  Not that she and Colin ever really ended up talking for too long. They started out with the best intentions and always ended up yelling at each other and eventually in bed, naked. That was just how their relationship worked.

  “Colin, put me down.”

  He complied and although they were in the middle of nowhere—even she didn’t know where they were and she’d spent days scoping out the area—she was able to take a deep breath. “Are you okay?”

  He blinked. “Yes, fine. You?”

  “I’m fine.” She was always fine. Gia wouldn’t have it any other way. “So, that is why I have been keeping to myself. So no one else has to deal with shadow man.”

  That was what they had called him during their last lifetime together. The shadow man. He came. He went. He was obsessed with her. In fact, it was that emotion itself that seemed to have drawn the shadow to her this time. A human had become obsessed with her and as though it was all he needed, suddenly the shadow man was back.

  She shuddered at the memory. One second she’d been alone and the next that… thing… had come back into her life. How and why made no sense to her. He was from a different dimension where she had long died thousands of years earlier.

  What in the hell was happening?

  As for the rest of it, she couldn’t help but continuously stare at Colin. Her Colin. She’d actually wondered if they would find each other in this world. She’d kept running to keep him safe. He’d been through enough on her behalf; if she could offer him some peace this time around it was the least she should do.

  Colin Knight. The name fit him.

  He was so handsome, but never pretty. His twin, Christophe, was always the more refined of the two of them. Funny how some things nev
er changed—world-to-world, life-to-life. Christophe always had an easy beginning and her sweet Colin worked for everything he had. Even, somehow, when the two of them grew up together.

  He charged into danger without any thought to his own safety.

  And never got an ounce of credit for it.

  “How did this happen?”

  They were clearly going right into this thing instead of taking time to catch up on how their lives had been. She swallowed. “A human—his name is Fitz Lowry. He became obsessed with me and…”

  Colin rolled his eyes. She hated that look. His, I’m judging you expression. I find you unworthy face. “Of course he did. How much power did you push at him?”

  They had this conversation a million times and he never understood it, not once. “This is my only power, my only useful one, really. Sometimes I have to use it just to survive. I have no discernible skills. Well, that’s not true. I can bartend really well and I’m good at it. But I can’t stay anywhere for very long because, as you know, we draw evil to us everywhere. Sometimes I have to get people to give me jobs they don’t want to otherwise give me so that I can eat.”

  Okay, she already reached shouting.

  He put his hands on his hips. “So you used your power on this Fitz guy and he became obsessed with you.”

  “You’re not going to comment on what I said at all? I haven’t seen you in thirty-some-odd years and you aren’t going to even respond to it?” The infuriating man made her nuts…

  He looked up at the sky. “I’ve heard it before. Nothing has changed. Different world, same set of problems. We need to focus on the here and now. You’ve had your memories the whole time, but for some reason, you decided to do exactly what got us into trouble in our last lifetime. Some human got obsessed with you. Okay. But how did that person’s obsession—by the ancestors I hate that word—call the last creature obsessed with you across time and dimension?”

  “I can’t explain it but that is what happened. Shadow man came right back.”

  It had been an utterly terrible afternoon. One second she had been warding off attentions she didn’t want from Fitz, and the next the creature from her nightmares was once again real and stalking her.

  “You didn’t come to me then, why?”

  Because he’d already exhausted a huge amount of time in their previous life cleaning up this mess and taking a lot of heat for things that were basically her fault.

  Because she didn’t think he should be doing it again.

  Because when they finally reunited in this life she wanted to be sure of herself, capable, and standing on her own feet instead of a mess—which of course was not at all how it turned out.

  She didn’t want him to look at her like this anymore…

  “Because I didn’t.” She shrugged. “Besides, it’s not like you went out of your way to come find me before today. What happened? Get bored and think, hey, I’m going to finally find my soul mate? Thanks for leaving me out there for so long by myself.”

  She’d taken the low road on that one and recognized it before she even said the words. No one deflected as well as she did. Colin couldn’t have found her without Eden and Eden was working with one hand tied behind her back since Gia wasn’t there to assist her. All of this led back to Gia being the real problem in this lifetime.

  “I’m not doing this.” He turned his back on her and walked over to a tree. “For the last… I don’t know… year, I’ve done nothing but try to figure out how to get to you. I do that and it’s like… I don’t know. Like you don’t want me here at all.”

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. The second she’d seen him negotiating with the snake illusion she’d felt like she could breathe for the first time in this life. “Why do we misunderstand each other all the time?”

  Colin rubbed his eyes. “You’re so fucking beautiful I can hardly look at you without wanting to just sigh into a puddle of mush.”

  That wasn’t what she’d asked him and yet she’d take the compliment over the bickering anytime. “Thank you Colin. You’re…”

  He waved his hand. “Messed up. Scarred. Rough around the edges. Trust me, I can see it whenever I look in the mirror.”

  Her heart sank. “That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

  He stalked by her, making his way to another tree. “We’re going to have to tell the others about the shadow this time. If I couldn’t kill it then—and I really thought I had—then I have no chance of it now. Not with the demon’s power sucking us dry. We’re going to have to ask for some help.” He rubbed his eyes. “And you can’t believe how poor the timing is on this. It’s… bad.”

  There was never a good time for them to need anything from anyone else. The world was always ending. Or close to it. But, even for all the hell they were constantly enduring, Colin seemed more worried than normal.

  “How bad is it?”

  He cleared his throat. “You may have been unaware—since you are hidden away—that the world is burning to the ground.”

  Gia shook her head. “The last few times we won. I mean, we beat him.”

  “It’s not just him.” He stroked a finger along the side of her face. She shivered. He could light her up, make her feel sexy with just a look. His touch undid her most of the time. She’d beg for it, kill to have his love. There had been times she’d died for his love.

  Her mind whirled. She tried to think through the feel of his hand on her to the words he’d spoken. “Then… they’re all here?”

  “Mom and sister are currently incapacitated. Dad is running around. He’s the one ending things. And believe it or not Sebastian, that’s his name this time, thinks he can help us win.”

  All of that was horrendous, the worst possible news. And if that was all true then there was just one more question to ask. “This is the last one then? We win or we lose, but it all comes to this?”

  He nodded. “That’s right. So it might have been a little nice if you had given a shit about any of it.”

  She closed her eyes. Not caring had never been the problem for her, just the opposite actually.

  What was she to do when anytime she tried to help, anytime she’d had a thought about how she could make things better, they always ended up in the kind of situation where they found themselves now?

  Another Time

  This wasn’t supposed to have gone like this. Gia stared as the creature that had been the bodyguard turned into something else entirely… some kind of shadow. And he wanted her. A dark presence loomed through her mind. He wanted in.

  “Colin.” She clung to him. “He’s battering at me. He wants in my head.”

  He nodded. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She’d never be able to make this right. How was she ever going to explain this? It had seemed like a good plan when she’d set out that evening, a way to take care of two things all at once. The first had been what she told Colin—they needed to have some fun. Everything was doom and gloom all of the time. One day dragged into the next and she was sick to death of sniping at her fellow Outsiders from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning. They needed a break.

  Her second reason had been more responsible. There was never a time the demon didn’t hide himself amongst the rich and elite. If they wanted to find him, it seemed perfectly obvious to her that they were going to have to go where he went.

  This club was a good place to start. Had she used some power to get in? Sure. What was the problem with that? No one got upset with Isabelle when she flitted through time. Their powers were designed to help in the fight.

  She’d used hers.

  Colin ran for the door and made it out before an animalistic growl sounded so loud that non-magical people stopped on the street to stare at each other. They had no idea what they heard and they wouldn’t believe it if she told them.

  Instead, she held onto Colin and let him take them far away from the dance club. They had a place they could go. O
nce there, Gabriel would feel them and know they needed a lift home. Colin put his hand on the doorknob and seconds later, their Outsider colleague appeared. He looked bored. But these days Gabriel always had a bit of a sneer on his face. He used to be really nice to be around until he’d had his epic falling out with Leonardo.

  Now, Gia wondered if some of the Outsiders wouldn’t rather just give up on this world and move on to the next one. Spend time in the other place. The celestial zone they got to go to between battles was essentially their version of heaven. Every time they had to go to another dimension it was as if someone ripped them out of heaven.

  Not that anyone would ever say that. This was their epic battle. They’d been so idealistic when they signed up for it. But even the best intentions waned after so much pain.

  “Done already? You guys get a date night and you check back in already?”

  Colin shrugged. “Yeah, well. I’m not fun.”

  That was so not true. Still, she followed his lead. If Colin wasn’t going to say anything to Gabriel, then she wouldn’t either.

  Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Leonardo and Kal came to blows. Kal struck him with lightning. It wasn’t pretty.”

  They’d never fought as much as they did in this lifetime. Was it possible they were all just sick of each other? She tried to stay steady, to not act like she was terrified. Faking composure had never been Gia’s forte.

  What had they done? What was that thing? Had they gotten away or was it going to cause them more problems?

  Gabriel popped them back to their mansion. “You haven’t asked, but fyi, Leonardo is okay. You know he and Kal have always hated each other. They’re like brothers. Who hate each other. Not like you and Christophe. You two always see things eye-to-eye.”

  Gia watched Colin nod as though Gabriel hadn’t just said the most ridiculous thing ever. Colin and Christophe? They fought like cats and dogs.