Where Winter Finds You Page 3

  The message apparently being, if you took your own life, well, then, to hell with you if you didn’t appreciate the gift you were given at birth.

  Yeah, like this whole breathing/heart-beating thing had been such a fucking prize, these years he’d been upright and walking around such a goddamn joy. He’d been destined for a loveless mating since the night he was born, been responsible for the senseless suffering of both his parents, watched a dear friend get tortured by a psychotic cunt for a good twenty years—that was fun—been a pimp, a drug dealer, and an enforcer.

  Real partridge-in-a-pear-tree shit.

  And then that heaping sundae of shit-chip ice cream—which he’d self-medicated with an outstanding sex addiction, thank you very much—had been cherry-topped by the granddaddy of all gut-wrenchers.

  He’d met the female of his dreams, fallen in love… and, after what felt like twenty minutes of happiness, had had to hold her hand as she died of a wasting disease right in front of him.

  Honestly, he hadn’t just been born under a bad star; he’d been born under one that kicked him in the nuts so badly, he’d coughed them out in his hand.

  So now he was here, in this BMW he’d just bought, on this snowy night, during the motherfucking human season of cocksucking joy, contemplating suicide—only to have the GODDAMN ACCIDENT THAT COULD HAVE MADE IT ALL COME OUT ALL RIGHT DENIED TO HIM BY A SET OF ALL-SEASON RADIALS THAT HAD WORKED JUST FINE AT EVERY OTHER FUCKING INTERSECTION HE’D EVER DRIVEN THROUGH.

  Not to put too fine a point on things.

  But FFS, he couldn’t even have a chance to get dead in such a way that he could both end this bullshit AND not run afoul of the maybe truth that suicide got you, literally, nowhere.

  Not that he believed in the afterlife anymore anyway. No matter what he’d thought he’d seen after Selena had died.

  Hell, if there was anything that the last three months had taught him, it was that death was a hard stop. Especially if you were the one left behind.

  Well, Trez thought, as he sped along in the snow, at least there was still the embankment option.

  There was that to look forward to.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Her shadow lover came to her once again through the dense darkness of dream, his naked body pulling free of the ether, taking form before her. Tall and strong, wide of shoulder and long of leg, he was the fantasy made real in the realm of the subconscious, the representation of secret yearnings she held so dear they were in her soul.

  Holding her arms up, she reached forward from her recline, and he came unto her without any entreaty, covering her with his warm, hard flesh so readily, it was as though he required her as much as she did him. His mouth, familiar and a shock at the same time, took her lips, drugging her with kisses, his tongue, his scent. Hands, broad and masculine, skimmed her breasts and her waist, going lower… ever lower.

  As she moaned, she begged for his name without words. Her thoughts were known to him, and she told him through the magic that enveloped them that she needed the completion of his name, his call, his definition. There was no separate when they were like this, no him and her, no beginning or end. A whole.

  It was ever a reunion when he came to her.

  Ever the closing of a loop.

  Ever a return to the home she had been thrown out of.

  But he always left her. He never stayed. And it was too soon, the departure, no matter how long they had together.

  If she only knew his name, though… he would be real. He would stay with her through the wakefulness that was the thief of him. He would be next to her rather than inside of her. His name would change everything…

  Their bodies fell into place, the lock and the key, the question answered, the reason given for that which had been illogical.

  The wound healed.

  Tighter, she gripped him. Stronger, she pulled him to her. Harder, she concentrated on every shift of his body, every penetration of his sex, every surge of pleasure.

  Always the parting.

  No matter how long he was with her, he was always on the verge of leaving her behind, taking with him part of her heart, the cleaving a curse as much as the union was a blessing. He was beautiful moonlight eclipsed by the cloud cover; he was the still summer night interrupted by the violent storm; he was the warmth that flared before the brutal, numbing winter’s arrival.

  He was the last sweet breath taken before drowning.

  Tears, now. Tears torn from her.

  Stay with me, she begged him. Just this once. Do not go—

  For the first time, in all the years she had known him, he stopped and looked down into her eyes.

  His hand trembled as he brushed her long, dark curls from her face.

  When he did not reply, his silence said enough. Said it all.

  There was no divide between never and ever for them. Theirs was the space in between known and unknown, between the finite and the endless, proof that love was the tie that bound, but it was a faulty trip wire, changing nothing when death created the distance.

  In his silence, her heart broke.

  Again…

  …always.

  * * *

  Therese, blooded daughter of who the hell knew, shoved a hand into her cheap purse and pushed her wallet, a Kleenex pack, her ChapStick, and a hairbrush around. Change rattled on the very bottom and gave her brief hope, but her keys were still missing.

  God, she was exhausted and she did not have time for this. That damn dream had kept her awake even as she’d slept, the dried tears on her face when she’d surfaced something she was really frickin’ sick of, thank you very much. How many years had her subconscious been coughing that stuff up?

  Ever since she could remember. And even before the bad thing with her family—

  Across the hall from her apartment, a muffled yell and the crash of a broken lamp—or maybe it was dishes again?—brought her head up. The door to her one-room flat was standard-sized in terms of height and width, but it didn’t seem thick enough. Although considering who else lived in this rooming house? She’d need one that was a foot deep and maybe made of something flame-retardant.

  Back to her key search. They were definitely not in her purse, and courtesy of that dream, she’d slept through her alarm, so she was late for work. But she had to find them. And come on, there was only like, what, three hundred square feet to cover, tops. And that included the bathroom and the galley kitchen. Plus she was a nasty-neat who cleaned up after herself with a discipline that bordered on obsession. She could do this.

  As she lifted up the cushions of the worn sofa, checked all the counters again, and shook out the blankets on her murphy bed, she refused to look at her watch. She did not need confirmation that she was late, late, late. She was supposed to have been at Sal’s Restaurant for her shift waiting tables about an hour ago, and she could not afford to lose that job.

  Maybe she needed to take some Ambien or something. Her perennial heartache dream aside, this rooming house was loud twenty-four hours a day. If one of the tenants wasn’t yelling at somebody they lived with or next to or across the hall from, then they were burning food on their stove, throwing things that broke, or stomping around in concrete overshoes.

  Closing her eyes, she let the blankets fall back to rest on the thin mattress—and then had to hospital-corner everything all over again. The rooming house was a dump, and worse, it was dangerous—although at least that had gotten better in the last week. That creepy dealer down the hall was avoiding her like she was contagious, and considering the diseases she could sense were already in his bloodstream? That was saying something.

  “Keys…”

  Another crash, this time above her, made her heart pound. She really should have followed up on that offer of a relocation. But she didn’t want to be anyone’s charity case, and even with her getting the waitress job, she hadn’t saved much yet. She was going to have to find better employment, or pull in some major tips.

  As her cell phone starte
d ringing, she cursed and debated letting her manager, Enzo, go to voice mail. It couldn’t be anybody else. The burner was only to field job applications. Her other phone, the one she had used when she had been with her family, wasn’t even turned on.

  The reminder of how little she had, and how thin her margin of survival was, hustled her back over to her purse. Grabbing the burner, she cleared her throat.

  “Hi,” she answered cheerfully. “I am so sorry—yes, yes, I know. Yes. All right. Of course. No, no, I’m coming in. I’m sure. Thank you.”

  Ending the call, she swallowed hard and felt light-headed. The sense that things were getting away from her, and not just her keys, made her feel like she was in an out-of-control car, skidding on ice, heading for an accident she was not going to walk away from. None of this was working. Not these horrible living conditions. Not this new life she had started in Caldwell. And now, almost not the job she needed.

  Unlike humans, vampires had no safety net. There was no social security for the species. No Medicare/Medicaid. No organized charities. If she couldn’t keep herself afloat on her own, she was going to end up on the streets because there was no going back to Michigan where she had been raised, no returning to the fold because there was no bloodline for her there. Those people were strangers who had passed themselves off as her mahmen, father, and brother, and only through an accident that could easily not have happened had Therese learned the truth.

  Yeah, you’d think her abandonment as an infant and subsequent adoption might have come up at one of the thousands of First Meals they’d all shared. Maybe the Last Meals. Maybe the family meetings where choices were discussed and voted on. Or how about the festival nights? But… nope. Nada. The fact that she had not been born unto her family was a state secret to everybody but the one who it mattered the most to.

  As another wave of woozy hit her, she went over to the dorm-sized refrigerator to have a sip of apple juice and—

  Found her keys.

  “Sonofabitch,” she muttered as she reached inside the ice box.

  The slips of notched metal were cold in her palm, and tears came to her eyes as she closed her hand around them.

  As a vampire, she could lock the deadbolt on her apartment’s flimsy door with her will alone. Not a problem. She didn’t need a key for that, and God knew that the other people in the building were too distracted with their own dramas and addictions to notice that her door locked on its own. But there was more on the unadorned loop than what she had been given when she’d signed the papers for these four walls and a ceiling.

  Opening her hand, she stared at the other key. The copper one. The one that opened the front and back copper locks to the house she had grown up in.

  Members of the species couldn’t manipulate copper locks with their minds. They were therefore the first line of security when you had a house full of people and things you wanted to protect. People and things that were yours. That you cared for and provided for and watched over.

  She had tried to give the damn copper key up a number of times. She had taken it off the ring. Thrown it in the Hefty bag she used for kitchen trash. Pitched it into the Hannaford bag that hung on the back of the bathroom door. Even paused with the thing over an open municipal litter bin in the park, as well as the Dumpster behind the restaurant.

  Every time she told herself to let it go, let it fall, be done with it… at the last minute, her hand refused to release. How in the hell could a symbol of everything that had betrayed her be her talisman? It made no damn sense.

  Still, she had had no success arguing with her emotions around it up to this point.

  Grabbing her bag, she bolted for the door, stepped out, and locked things. As she proceeded to the stairs, she kept her head down, her hands in her pockets, and her arm clamped down on her purse. The smells were awful. Old cigarettes, drugs she didn’t know the names of but nonetheless now recognized, and old meat that might have also been rotting human skin.

  Her feet were fast as she entered the stairwell, and she moved quick on the stairs. If a human male ever aggressed on her, she could take him in a fight even though she was hardly trained for any kind of physical conflict. But that was only if he didn’t have a weapon. A knife? A gun? She would find herself in trouble fast.

  At the bottom, she punched out a fire door and strode into the grungy lobby. Someone called after her, but it was not her name that they used, and she was not responding to the rude term. It was a relief to get outside, and that was saying something considering it was arctic cold and snowing.

  Heading around the side of her building, she batted the falling snow out of her face and tried to ignore the wail of sirens and the sound of someone screaming far off in the distance. There was also a troubling, repeating banging sound, the kind of thing that she prayed was not a head going into a hard wall.

  Closing her eyes, she thought of her shadow lover and it all went away. The memory of him made her feel as safe as if he were actually with her—and yet, as always, when she was fully awake, she couldn’t picture anything about him. Not his face, not his body, not his scent… only his existence was known to her conscious mind, not any of the details that she saw so clearly when she was asleep.

  If I just knew his name, she told herself. It would change everything.

  That was what was on her mind as she dematerialized, and it was a relief to scatter into a loose group of molecules and ghost away to a safer place. As she resumed her corporeal form behind Salvatore’s Restaurant, she released the breath she had been holding and stepped forward in the foot-deep snow. The parking lot was mostly empty, only staff cars crowded up by the rear entry of the building, and a plow was trying to keep ahead of the storm, pushing more of what was coming down from the sky into piles at the edges.

  It was going to be a quiet night because of the weather, and that was probably why her absence had been noted, but fairly well tolerated. The grace period wasn’t going to last long, however. She had already been late once before because she’d overslept.

  Stupid humans. Always pounding around above her.

  Crazy dream. That wouldn’t leave her in peace.

  On the approach to the back door, she stood up the collar on her parka, like that somehow might make her look less late than she was. Which was ridiculous. Pushing her way into the unadorned concrete hall, she stomped most of the snow off her boots and then hurried to the staff locker room. Peeling off her coat, she tossed it and her purse in her locker—

  “Are you okay?”

  She spun around at the sound of the male voice. Emile Davise was six feet four inches of human male, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a kind smile. Right from the beginning, he had showed her the ropes and a lot of patience—even though he had no idea what he was dealing with, or who he was working for. Sal’s was vampire-owned and -run, although humans were employed. Members of the species kept things very discreet, however.

  “Oh, God, Emile.” She sat down and unlaced her boots. “I slept through my alarm again. They’re going to fire me.”

  “They will not. I will quit if they do.” He held out a pressed half apron. “I got your tables ready.”

  She stopped what she was doing and looked up. “Emile.”

  “I had extra time.” He jogged the apron. “Come on, service is starting. We have two tables full, believe it or not.”

  Therese hurried with the shoe change, swapping her heavy treads for black server shoes, and then she took what he gave her, folding and tying the apron around her waist and tucking everything in correctly so that her formal bow tie, white pressed shirt, black slacks, and the overlay were all smooth and orderly.

  “How do I look?” she asked on the fly.

  When there was a pause, she glanced at the human. His lids had lowered and a flush had come out on his cheeks.

  Emile cleared his throat. “You’re beautiful.”

  Therese opened her mouth to downplay everything—the moment, the attraction he was feeling, the subtle question
that was in his stare but that had not yet come out of his mouth—but then she froze.

  A Shadow loomed behind the man.

  Therese’s pulse quickened, her body responding in a rush. And as the shift in her attention was noted, Emile pivoted around.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Latimer,” the human man said. “I was… er, I was just leaving.”

  Emile glanced back at her, and there was regret in his face. As if he knew things he wished he didn’t. “I’ll see you out on the floor, Therese.”

  “Thanks, Emile.”

  After the human left, she looked up, way up, into the eyes of a male that she had not been able to get out of her mind. Trez Latimer was more than a vampire. He was a Shadow, his dark skin and black eyes integral to the venerable heritage of the s’Hisbe, his heavy shoulders and long powerful legs the kind of thing you never saw except in warriors.

  He was extraordinary. In all ways.

  And he was staring at her with a kind of intensity that she had never understood, but certainly could not question. From the moment he had first seen her, he had appeared to be captivated—which made no sense at all. Therese was a middle-of-the-road female, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither brilliant nor stupid.

  Yet to this incredible male, she seemed to be of unusual interest.

  There had to be a reason. But self-preservation dictated that she not go any further with him. God knew she had enough on her plate already.

  “Hi,” she said softly. “I wondered if you would be here tonight.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  And I wondered if you were dead, Trez thought to himself.