Love Beyond Sight (2 page)

"I wish we could fix this for you." Marina pulled the cover up to her chin exposing Eden's feet at the end of the bed.

The other Outsider women were all small and waif-like but Eden was tall, almost six foot in her bare feet and big boned. All-in-all, she didn't fit in with the women around her.

"I wish you could too but I've always been a problem. It may be that I'm simply not fixable."

"Nonsense." A voice from the door startled her. Standing in the doorway were Isabelle and Loraine.

"All of you had the feeling that I needed you this morning?"

Loraine laughed. "Apparently."

"And you all left your soul mates to come here and climb into bed with me?"

Marina shook her head. "Nope, my soul mate has vanished. I didn't leave anyone."

Marina's soul mate, Drew, kept showing up and leaving. Unlike Eden's who occasionally spoke to her telepathically but told her he would never be seeing her in person. Who could blame him? She was a mess. Given the choice, she wouldn't spend time in her own company either.

Loraine and Isabelle sat down on the end of the bed. This was getting ridiculous. Eden sat up and Isabelle gasped.

"You're soaking wet."

"I know. I had a really intense dream."

And she wanted to change her clothes. Immediately. Shivering, she moved quickly across the room into the bathroom hearing the whispers behind her from her friends. They cared about her but she still didn't like to be spoken about, literally, behind her back.

Closing the bathroom door behind her, she yanked her cold nightgown over her head and pushed on the lever to make the hot water come on in the shower. She needed to get the sweat off her before she put anything else back on. The spray came out with a rush and after a few seconds it heated up. Apparently, enough of their crew was up and moving since the heating system produced the needed hot water.

There wasn't much Eden missed from her previous life—but hot water whenever she wanted it was one thing she craved.

She stepped under the spray and let it rinse the night off her body. Staring down at herself, she winced. It was better not to regard herself naked. Maybe it would be different if she had a soul mate who actually wanted to be around her, who enjoyed her body the way the other women had with their men. She'd read enough self-help books over the last months to know she was supposed to find self-confidence from inside of herself but, realistically, it had to help to have someone look at you with heat in their eyes.

Her soul mate knew what she looked like and he didn't come around. As far as Eden was concerned, that pretty much said it all.

A haze settled over her gaze and she gasped. Gripping the side of the shower, she knew she didn't have enough time to even open the door before the vision would overtake her. This was a powerful one. All she could do was hold on and hope she didn't drown in the shower before it passed.

One second she stood, dripping in the shower and the next she found herself in the living room downstairs. Only, it wasn't the living room of 'now' but instead it was the living room of the future or, rather, a potential future the Fates had decided to show her. It could still be changed.
Maybe
.

Now, if she could manage to somehow not lose sight of the fact that she was in a vision she could weather this experience and come out the other end intact. The problem? She'd never managed to actually accomplish that feat.

Eden looked left and right, trying to get a handle on what she'd walked into. No longer naked, thank god, she wore a pair of black slacks and a green and white T-shirt she'd never seen before. In the 'now,' she didn't own those clothes, which meant that at some point she would acquire them. Small details. She needed to keep track of all of them. She always got asked a million questions when she came back into the present.

At the moment, she was alone in the room. That was unusual. Most of the time, she got shoved into the middle of a horrific battle or a scene of doom and gloom. Did she need to go looking around for the purpose of this vision?

She'd taken two steps toward the hallway door when it flung open. Leonardo and Jason rushed inside. Kal followed, holding Gabriel over his shoulder.

Jason pointed at the couch and Kal sat the clearly unconscious Gabriel down on it. "Where did they get him?"

Leonardo swore before answering. "Getting off the boat."

"That fast?" Jason placed his hand over Kal's stomach. "I think I can save him but this has to stop. We have to either decide to never leave this island or we have to find some way to have a warning system. They are picking us off too easily. Charma got grabbed coming out of the grocery store. We almost didn't get her away."

Kal kicked the sofa and Jason shot him a dirty look. Eden wasn't sure what to do. They couldn't see her. She wasn't really there but Gabriel was out cold and she felt like an idiot not going over to help him. Was she supposed to stand there and watch?

The clarity of this vision felt remarkable. Most of the time what she saw seemed so dire she could hardly watch it. Once, she'd watched Jason get beheaded by a minion of the demon. They'd managed to avoid that occurrence and both he and Charma had taken the news well but Eden hadn't been able to look at either of them without sobbing.

"We have to get a warning system. Eden's obviously not going to get control of her powers. We have to find something else." Leonardo, their leader in all ways that counted, shook his head, his eyes looking tired.

Oh well this was just wonderful
. She needed her visions to tell her what a terrible job she'd been doing? She didn't get enough of that during the present? Eden fisted her hands at her sides. She wished she could, well, punch something.

Maybe they all should have just left her in that mental institution in New Jersey under the ministrations of Sebastian the demon and his psycho sister. Tears flung from her eyes and she didn't even try to wipe them away. She was alone in her vision. No one could see her; no one could witness how pathetic she'd truly become.

"I can see you." She whirled around, her vision swimming for a second before correcting itself.

Standing in front of her was a tall man with dark hair. He was aristocratically good looking. His clothes spoke of expensive tastes. Eden didn't know anything about fashion—she'd been raised to believe looking at magazines was akin to devil worship. But, she knew none of the men she lived with had clothes tailored to fit them so precisely.

It was his eyes she couldn't look away from, even as she knew she should be running for the door. They were red.
Blood red
. She almost laughed from the cliché that her mind came up with to describe the shade. But sometimes clichés worked because they adequately described something. In this case, the demon who stood before her with bored amusement radiating from his stance had absolute blood red eyes.

"Do you drink blood?" She cleared her throat. Having never spoken to anyone in a vision before, she felt surprised she actually could. "Like a vampire?"

"Vampires are fiction, sweet Eden. I, by contrast, am the stuff of nightmares. Your nightmares, to be specific." He took a few slow steps toward her. "But to answer your question—yes, I drink blood. All of the time. And I will consume yours, before I munch on your brains."

The imagery made her gag and she covered her mouth with her hands like she could physically force the bile that rose in her throat to go back down. Her misery seemed to delight the demon, who broke out in a straight, tooth-filled grin.

When she could, she forced herself to stand up straight, to stare him directly in his red-coated eyes. "They call you Sebastian, yes?"

"That's what the world calls me this time around. When I'm done with you pesky Outsiders, the human race will call me master. And they'll all bleed for my amusement."

"Well, Sebastian." Eden took a step forward, even knowing she must be crazed to do so. She had to be brave. She had to be. "I don't believe you can hurt me in here."

"You'd be wrong about that but, please, do continue." His voice sounded laced with the music that was the southern American accent. Usually, Eden loved the twang. But Sebastian's voice ruined the effect for her.

"This is my vision. Nothing is real here. It's all just a possibility and you're trying to frighten me." She took another step forward. "You must be desperate. We must be getting close to defeating you if you're picking on me. I'm nothing to you."

"You're an Outsider. That makes you my problem." He cocked his head to the side. "Unless you want to make this easier on all of us and just come to me now."

He extended his arms like he wanted her to walk into them and hug him. She raised an eyebrow. There was no doubt the demon was frightening but she could see how he also liked to show off. His actions were those of a person seeking attention. Right now, he had her as a captive audience but she didn't want to end up like Jason. He'd been stuck in his own head for months, captured by a demon and forced to endure horrific pain before Charma had found him.

No. She wasn't going to let this demon continue to play his games with her.

"What made you ask me if I drink blood?"

She swallowed. "Your eyes are blood red. I'm not sure why I knew that meant you must feed on it but somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have picked up that information."

Sebastian rolled his eyes. "Or your parents knew it so it's passed down through that freaky thing you all can do with your minds?"

That freaky thing they could all do with their minds? Eden tried to keep her expression neutral. She didn't want to give away to him that she had no idea—none—what he talked about.

"Right, well, I'm done with this." She looked up at the ceiling. "I want to go back now. I'm done with this vision."

Sebastian raised his eyes to stare where she looked. "How's that going for you? Working?"

"I want to go back," she shouted. Her heart pounded hard. She couldn't be trapped. Everyone told her she could control her own powers. Someway she simply needed to figure out how to do it. This certainly seemed like a good time to gain that ability.

Her palms sweated and she wiped them on her pants leg. "I want to go home."

Sebastian advanced forward. "Which home, sweet Eden? The one where they beat you to try to remove the devil or the one where they basically put up with you like you're a child because you're too incompetent to be any help to anyone?"

Eden wasn't sure how he knew about any of that and she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of letting him know just how much both of those things hurt her. One of them left marks on her body and the other was starting to scar her soul. Even though in the case of the latter, they had the best intentions.

"I want to go home." She closed her eyes. Someway, somehow she could do this. She could make her vision do what she wanted it to do.

"Not working, is it?" Sebastian grinned.

Eden flung open her eyes. Looking to her left, Kal, Leonardo, and Jason still hovered over the future Gabriel, knocked out on the couch. In real life, they'd be helping her. She knew that. The women had all known she was in trouble and they'd reached out to help her. How had that happened?

She bit down on her lip. Her mind was in the living room, talking to the demon, and witnessing Gabriel's injury but her body still remained in the shower where she had been before being overtaken with the vision. Somehow, she needed to get her body to send out an SOS to the Outsiders in her own time.

That had to be possible. Then Marina could bring her back…

"Here's the problem, sweet Eden." That was the third time he'd called her that. Each occurrence made her want to gag. "You don't have a soul mate. I killed him when he was a child."

Eden's eyes got huge. The demon was wrong. She'd spoken to her soul mate. Well, he'd spoken to her, in her own mind. She'd never seen him. But he couldn't be communicating with her if he was dead. There was no doubt—he wasn't around but he wasn't gone from the earth.

"So you can want to go home as much as you want. But you aren't Dorothy in Oz. You don't have ruby slippers. You're never going home. You're dying here with me because you don't have an anchor, which means you are about as useful to the Outsiders as a rat."

No, Eden. You're not useless
.
You're incredibly powerful
.

She jolted. That was him. Her soul mate. The one the demon thought was dead.

I'm not dead
. She smiled, which made the demon look at her cross-eyed.
Brace yourself, darling
.

The room exploded with white light, so bright Eden couldn't see. Her ears rang as she was thrown backward onto the floor. Her head spun. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the demon screaming as he gripped his head. The room spun and seconds later she was back in her body, hot water pounding on her back.

Chapter Two

Samuel Quinn lit up another cigarette and tried to dodge the raindrops hitting his head as he ran through the streets of Portland. He knew smoking was a dirty, disgusting habit but the nicotine helped to slow the decay process of whatever temporary face he wore. Right now, in the middle of the street—even at five in the morning—was not the time to lose his face. No one needed to see that. He wouldn't inflict the horror that was his appearance on anyone.

More than anything else, he needed to get home so he could rest. He was two hours away from Eden. At this close of a distance, he should be able to monitor her without taxing himself this much. Except, the girl had a tendency to get herself into trouble. Apparently, this morning she'd gotten an early start.

Shit
.

If he didn't find a new face before this one dissolved, he wasn't going to make it back to his apartment without being seen. He turned left down Congress and kept his head down. The rain was a fortunate occurrence; no one would think it odd he kept his head down as he ran. They'd just assume he didn't want to get wet.