Midnight Ash (A Blushing Death Novel) (23 page)

“How long have you been her prisoner?” I asked.

“I stopped counting after a century,” he answered with great effort.

His confession hit me dead square in the chest, shoving away the guilt. A century? A hundred years of torture, pain, and madness. I’d finally had enough. I was tired of fearing this woman. She needed to be put down like the wild animal she was. I was just the girl to do it.

I turned back toward Kurt who was already halfway up the stairs. I scanned the corners of the basement looking for anything I could use.

Underneath the stairs a pile of building materials lay in chaos, as if someone had tossed whatever hadn’t been used in the corner. Kurt was almost to the top of the stairs when I reached for the iron rebar that lay bent and twisted among the pile of boards, pipe, and bricks. I turned back to face the Fae.

Byron’s stricken eyes followed my every movement.

“You shouldn’t suffer any more,” I whispered as heat rushed my face. The rebar wasn’t very sharp. I knew it wouldn’t be quick and it would hurt, a lot, but anything was better than the life he’d been living. Wasn’t it?

“What is that glow about you?” Byron asked, staring at the air around me as his shoulders slumped and his body relaxed into acceptance.

I took a step closer to him.

“What are you?” he asked, his eyes shining in amazement as he finally met my gaze.

“They call me the Blushing Death.” I gripped the rebar tight in my hands and brought my arm up above my head.

“Thank you, my Blushing Angel.” A peaceful expression transformed his features, relieving the tension in his body and lighting his eyes with the sheen of tears.

I stabbed the rebar downward.

My weapon was blunt and it took all my strength to plunge the iron through the Fae’s hard, muscled chest. My hands burned as my palms slid down over the groves on the rebar. Byron gasped once, wide eyes, as the rebar pierced his heart, before releasing a single groan as he hunched over, dead. I watched as his eyes focused on nothing as the life drained from them. He finally looked peaceful.

Heart heavy, I followed Kurt up the rickety stairs as quickly as my blood-soaked flats would let me. Jade was waiting for us with an expectant look on her face when I reached the top.

“Come on, Jade, We need to check the second floor,” I grumbled, pushing the memory of Byron’s slumped, dead body from my mind. I grasped Jade’s hand and dragged her away from the basement door. “Kurt!” I shouted but he was already one step ahead of me.

“I think I have something in the car that’ll cut the gas line,” he called over his shoulder as he jogged through the front door with his shoes in his hands.

I stepped in front of Jade and climbed the stairs. I drew my gun again. The windows were open on the second floor leaving nowhere for the vampires to hide. I was still cautious, especially after what had been waiting for us in the basement.

The stagnant air was thicker on the second floor. The smell more like mothballs than mold. I reached the top and motioned for Jade to stay back. She waited behind me as I opened the door to the first bedroom. The room was small, an exaggerated closet with a twin bed crammed into it. There wasn’t room for anything else, let alone two grown women to walk. It was bare of any design or personality; no paint on the walls other than white, no television, not even a comforter on the bed. More like a cell than someone’s bedroom.

I closed the door behind me and moved onto the next and discovered much the same. This one was a little bigger, though. We moved on to the bathroom that was done in a putrid sea-foam green with alternating pink tile. The medicine cabinet held much more than I had expected; a tooth brush, hair gel, and dental floss—a vampire really had to look after their teeth—and a prescription for blood thinners in the name of Simon Tacoma.

I closed the medicine cabinet and moved to the last closed door on the second floor. I forced the door open slowly with the barrel of my Smith and Wesson, ready for anything that might jump out at me.

This room was different from the rest. The walls were covered in photographs of me, taken in a myriad of places. Pictures of me with Patrick, me with Jade, me with Danny, and with Amblan.

Oh shit.

I needed to deal with this bitch soon or whether I wanted to or not, Amblan was going to get dragged into my mess. This room appeared lived-in with nightstands and a chair in the corner, surrounded by books. The bed was unmade and the alarm clock on the nightstand was flashing 11:45 in angry red numbers. A sharp clank echoed up from the basement and I stopped to listen.

“I’m all right,” Kurt yelled.

Jade dug in the nightstand, throwing items on the floor as she went.

“This looks familiar,” she said, pulling a woman’s short-sleeved red T-shirt with a Superman logo graphic on the front from the nightstand drawer.

“It should,” I said, unable to tear my eyes from the clothing.

“Why?”

“It’s mine,” I snapped, trying to hide my emotion. I didn’t want Jade to see the creep factor that crawled up my spine and had settled in a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. She didn’t need to know just how terrified I was. Hell, I didn’t want to know myself.

He’d been in my house. Simon Tacoma had been in my FUCKING house. My blood pressure rose, pounding against my skull with the thought of my space being violated.

FUCK!

I dug around on the dresser looking for something, anything, that would tell me where the hell they were hiding.

Random slips of paper with notes on them littered the bottom of the nightstand drawer. They looked like shopping lists. Not very helpful. I flipped through the loose pieces of paper and found a parking stub for a garage. The only parking garages in town that gave out subs like it were downtown. That’s where I’d start my search. It was better than nothing.

“You ladies ready to go? We don’t have a lot of time,” Kurt yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

“Yeah,” I yelled down. “We’re coming.” I glanced over at Jade and she nodded. We were done here. I followed her down the stairs and out the door with my own shoes in my hand.

We got back in the car and I buckled my seat belt. Kurt pulled away from the curb in a squeal of tires. I looked back at the house, still intact.

“Are we just leaving?” I asked with a slight hint of disappointment. I’d imagined flames shooting from a huge explosion. I was a little disappointed.

“Yup,” he said and kept his eyes forward as his foot pushed down on the gas.

“What did you do in the basement?” I asked.

He pushed down on the gas pedal hard, sending the car above 50 miles per hour in a residential area.

“I lit some firecrackers,” he said with an edge of anxiety. He gripped the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles turned white. He kept his eyes straight ahead. Jade leaned up from the back seat and gripped his shoulder with her long slender fingers. Kurt was a werewolf but he was also a good man; killing, arson, and general larceny wouldn’t sit well with him. He took a deep breath and relaxed under her touch.

The faint
pop
. . .
pop
. . .
pop
of distant gunfire reached my ears and I watched Kurt in anticipation.

The sound of the explosion boomed through the neighborhood, ricocheting off of houses and shattering windows as pieces of the house rained down from the sky.

The car rocked wildly and I gripped the door instinctively, holding on for dear life. Kurt kept driving, never taking his eyes from the road. Even as a disembodied hand hit the windshield and slid off, leaving a bloody streak down the glass.

I asked Kurt to drop me off at home. I needed to wash the gore and the guilt from my hair and body as quickly as I could.

I stripped off my shirt, pants, bra, panties, and my shoes, and left them in a pile in my bedroom. The faint metallic aroma of blood was still in my nose as it radiated from my clothing and off me. I stepped into the shower and turned on the water as hot as the hot water tank would allow. I wanted to scald the top layer of skin off and even then I wasn’t sure I would feel clean.

Jade would be back in the morning so we could hit the garages downtown. That parking garage stub came from somewhere and I would find where. In the meantime, I was lying low for the night.

The water felt great as it singed my skin. I’d done the right thing in killing Byron. I knew it in the pit of my stomach but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.

I stayed in the shower until all the hot water was gone, instead pelting me with ice-cold droplets. I stood there under the chilly stream a few minutes longer, not wanting to get out and face the world.

I grabbed a couple of towels from the linen closet and wrapped myself in their fluffy warmth and went into my bedroom. The silence of finally being alone in my own home settled over me, lonely and unnerving, almost prickly around the edges. I walked the house, checking the locks on all the doors and windows before I went back to my bedroom and sat on the bed. I picked up the phone next to my bed and dialed Patrick’s office number at the house. It was early, not even dark yet. He shouldn’t be up yet but in my gut I knew he was. I could feel him there, resonating as part of me. I needed to tell him what I found. More than that, I needed to feel like I wasn’t alone. The phone rang three times before he picked up.

“Dahlia?” Patrick asked.

I felt an immense overwhelming sense of relief fill me when I heard his voice.

“Yeah. It’s me.” I lay back on the bed and cradled the phone next to my face. I felt better and couldn’t even explain why. He cared what happened to me and that mattered. Knowing he was there filled me with a calm that was so different from the peace I felt from killing. Patrick was acceptance and contentment; the other was cold and empty.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

His voice was soft and less frantic than it had been when he answered. I wanted him to be here, to tell me I was being silly, and that everything would turn out all right.

“I’m fine,” I whispered. I didn’t even believe me. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t either.

“What happened?” he asked. There was no room for sentiment in that voice.

I understood, probably more than he knew, what it hid; his fear, his desires, his uncertainty.

“I don’t know where to start,” I said with a heavy sigh. I gave him a condensed version along with my plan to investigate the garage parking stubs in the morning. “Patrick, she tortured him. He was damaged, broken.”

There was a sigh on the other end and it carried a sadness that he very rarely showed.

“Men have fallen into women’s traps for millennia, Dahlia. This Fae was no different,” he said softly. “Not everyone is as lucky in their trap as I’ve been.” I heard the smile in his words.

“I can’t roll my mind around Byron being in love with Midnight Ash. I just can’t accept it.” I sighed as my brow furrowed and my body tensed.

“Dahlia,” he consoled. “Sometimes we fall in love with dangerous creatures. It does not always make sense.” I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Byron anymore.

“I think I’m going to stay here tonight,” I said, burying the questions about love I couldn’t ask. I also didn’t want him to realize that I was just plain scared. I couldn’t go out into the dark and have the oppressive scent of rotten gardenias hanging over my head. I wanted a night to sleep and be peaceful before all hell broke loose.

“If you wish.”

Why is this so hard?

Before I could think of what to say, the line was dead. I dropped the phone and rolled over on my side. The towel fell off of my head and my wet hair strung out over the bed like seaweed on the sand. I clung to the towel wrapped around my body as I curled up into a ball on the bed and wept. It had been a very long time since I’d cried myself to sleep. In that moment it was all I was capable. I wanted nothing more than to be normal. I didn’t want the weight of people’s lives on my shoulders or the death of a man on my conscience who’d done nothing but love the wrong monster.

I don’t know how long I wept. I was exhausted and sniffling as I lay curled up on the bed like a child. A chill spread through me as the wet towel cooled and the warm humidity from the bathroom finally dissipated.

I froze as a cool hand stroked my head, pushing my damp hair from my face. I was alert and as still as death, the tears and shaking frozen in fear. I didn’t even shiver until he spoke.

“I couldn’t leave you alone tonight,” Patrick whispered in a soft, soothing voice.

I turned, twisting my body to face him. He sat on the bed behind me. I hadn’t noticed the change in weight on the bed or that he was even near until he touched me. I hadn’t noticed either of them. Danny stood in the doorway pensive, like he was afraid to enter or suspected he wasn’t welcome.

I sat up and placed my feet flat on the floor, clutching the towel in my fist at my breast.

They both stared at me with worried eyes, afraid to do or say anything. I couldn’t blame them. If the intruders had been anyone other than them, there was a good chance that I would’ve been killed. Patrick seemed to understand as concern etched deep across his brow. I knew Danny just saw me crying and wanted to help.

He stood stiff in a pair of faded jeans and an untucked burnt orange button-down dress shirt. The color looked good against his tanned skin and russet hair.

I glanced back at Patrick who still sat on the bed in a tailored, charcoal suit with a crisp white dress shirt beneath.

I reached out and touched Patrick’s face, brushing his cool cheek with my fingertips. My gut tightened and my bottom lip trembled as tears streamed down my cheek. He placed his hand over mine, pressing my hand against his cool skin.

“I’m so sorry—for everything,” I whispered. I was sorry for hurting him; sorry for asking too much of him; sorry for putting his entire colony at risk; and I was sorry for loving them both.

Danny turned to leave and a twinge of regret singed my synapses.

“Wait,” Patrick called, his voice soft and resigned.

Danny turned, uncertain and nervous, watching us.

Patrick’s eyes never left mine as he spoke. “She doesn’t want you to go.”

I knew in my churning gut how much that had cost him but I didn’t want Danny to go. I needed . . . I needed both of them. Something primal called out to both of them and them to me. I’d never felt anything like it, couldn’t explain it, and dreaded it, all at the same time.

“I can’t sit here and watch you touch her. I’m sorry,” Danny growled, his voice harsh and gruff.

There couldn’t be any tension among us, any of us, or Midnight Ash would know it and use it against us. We had to be a cohesive unit. Patrick knew it and now I knew it, too.

“Please,” I begged. “I’m not asking you to watch,” I said with an inviting smile curling my lips.

Danny seemed to consider my proposal for a moment.

“All right, Parasite,” Danny growled, amber flooding his eyes as he stared at Patrick, “but you don’t touch me. Get it?”

“Trust me, mongrel, there’s no fear of that,” Patrick huffed as he stood tall and impressive beside me.

I peered up into Patrick’s eyes with gratitude and a soft smile as I pressed my palm flat on his chest over where his heart should’ve been beating.

Patrick needed no other invitation. He leaned in and pressed his lips against my own, engulfing my face with his cupped hand. The towel fell from my body into a crumpled heap on the floor, leaving me chilled and naked. I shivered under Patrick’s cool fingertips as they caressed along the outline of my body. Down my neck. Over my shoulders. Caressing the skin along my rib cage and grazing the soft mounds of flesh of my breasts.

Danny’s warm hands slowly skimmed down my spine, trailing fire down my back and over the top of my butt where his fingers dug deep into the flesh of my ass, squeezing, kneading. He breathed against the back of my neck in short hot fits and starts before he pressed a feather light kiss against my skin.

It was like a jolt to my system as Patrick’s cold power sunk into me and Danny’s warm power cut through me. Energy surrounded me—us like a blanket, floating in the air and clinging to me like glitter. I felt whole for the very first time. Their power played with my energy, testing my limits, and teasing me. The power settled around me like it had always been there, was supposed to be there. I forgot everything but the bubble of our magic mixing together and the sensation of the physical touch of each man on my skin. My entire body tingled like I was covered in
IcyHot
. The energy engulfing me was warm, with a bite of a chill around the edges. I was happy.

Danny jerked away and the power evaporated, leaving me feeling empty and disjointed.

“I can’t,” he whispered.

I turned in a rush of panic to stop him but he was already gone. A single tear escaped as my heart shattered in my chest.

Patrick encircled me in a tight embrace, guiding me down onto the bed and onto his lap. He caressed my face with soft, gentle strokes. I gazed up at him and knew my eyes had to show the disappointment that rippled through me. I scrunched my eyes closed, trying to hold back my agony and wished that things could be different.

We fell back on the bed and Patrick spooned behind me, wrapping me in his arms. His cool skin calmed my feverish pulse but couldn’t quiet the longing in my being for warmth . . . life.

The scent that was undeniably Patrick, the sharp smell of blood, and the musty smell of old books filled my nose.

Patrick covered us in a blanket from the bottom of the bed when I shivered. There was something wrong with me, something wrong with us, all of us. I felt it in my bones but I didn’t know what it was or how to fix it.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick said, breaking the silence.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I pushed too hard, expected too much. I don’t even know why I’m so upset.”

“Maybe because you saw a momentary glimpse of what we could be,” he breathed as he hugged me tighter against him.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “It was wonderful and terrifying all at the same time. The power had . . . possibilities.”