Fire and Ash (Immortal Touch) (37 page)

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all that you’ve done.”

“No problem. Just - and I know this goes without saying - but please just make sure this never happens again. Reid might not be so forgiving next time.”

“There will be no next time.” Julian gave Eva a stern look.

“Good to hear. Well, I’d still love to see the two of you in San Francisco sometime. Under different circumstances, of course.”

“We’ll take you up on that one day before long. And thank you again.”

“You’re welcome.”

Julian
rested his forehead in his palm and heaved a deep sigh of relief. He would have defended Eva to the death, but knowing it wouldn’t come to anything that drastic was a load off his mind.

“So everything’s okay then?” She gave him a hopeful look.

“Yes, love. Everything’s okay.” He took her in his arms and held her close. “Well…other than one minor detail.”

“What detail?”

“Our honeymoon might have to be cut a bit short. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to leave your little amateur alone for an extended period of time.”

“It’s just two weeks.”

“Not counting travel time.”

“Oh…it doesn’t matter, Jules. I don’t care if we go anywhere at all. As long as I’m with you, I’m happy. Nothing else is important.”

“Then if it’s all the same to you, I’ll rearrange our plans to accommodate a less extended vacation. We can fly to the Virgin Islands some other time.”

“Sure we can. We have all the time there is.”

“We can drive to Kansas to see the world’s largest ball of twine instead,” he teased.

“
Well, I’ll be sure to pack my camera! You know, Rio might actually enjoy something like that.” Her hand reached for his and she laced their fingers together. “Jules…I’m sorry.”

“What for, love?”

“For putting us in this position. I never should have done it. I just…I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“
Don’t give it another thought.”

He wished he could put it from his own mind, though. They might have escaped trouble with the
elder in Florida, but Dane Chandler presented a whole different set of problems. He was on their turf, and any mistakes he made would also pose a threat to them. Not to mention the kid’s ridiculous infatuation with Eva.

He was going to have to watch his back.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

When her phone went off sometime during the night, Sami’s first
sluggish thought was that her hang-up caller was resuming his nocturnal activities.

A long, low rumble of thunder
added to the noise as she fumbled for the phone on her bedside table in the darkness. Not yet fully awake, the screen displayed little more than a fuzzy blur to her unfocused eyes. Was it to be the eerie music tonight, or did the front desk actually have a legitimate computer glitch?

“
Wha-at,” she groaned huskily, fully prepared to hear the Moody Blues melody taunting her once again.

“Hello, beautiful.”

“Ash...?” She rubbed her eyes drowsily and peered at the red numbers glowing on the clock radio. “It’s three in the morning!”

“Is it? Thanks for the update. Do you have the temperature
too?”

“
Huh?” Three o’clock, for crying out loud…it was way too late for this. Or early, depending on how you wanted to look at it.

He chuckled at her
sleepy confusion. “Are you awake?”

Well, of course she was
- now. “Barely,” she muttered hoarsely. “Somethin’ wrong?”

“
No, nothing’s wrong. I want you to come up.”

“
What…
now?
”

“
I can’t think of a better time.” He sounded far too animated for this abominable hour.

Tangled in the twisted
covers, she struggled to sit up. “Um…all right. Give me ten minutes.”

“
The clock is ticking.” He hung up, leaving her to wonder what insanity she had to look forward to this time.

It was useless to speculate.
Whatever he had in mind would be too far from the realm of normalcy to even take a stab at guessing at. And maybe that in itself was what drew her to him like a fly to honey. His magnetic but volatile instability. The long forgotten words of an old poem emerged from her distant memory. Something out of a children’s book read to her by her mother.

“Will you
walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly.

Hapless fly or not,
there wasn’t an inkling of resistance on her part. By the time she’d washed her face and brushed her teeth, she was feeling considerably more awake and alert. Dressing quickly, she made her way down the silent hallway to the empty elevator. The whole world seemed to be hidden away, slumbering. There weren’t even any late-night stragglers returning from a night of revelry. Maybe it was the weather - it had been storming off and on since midnight.

Asher was waiting for her by the elevator door on the sixteenth floor,
shirtless and barefoot, and the first thing he said was, “Twenty seconds to spare. How punctual you are when you want to be.”

She had no idea whether or not he was serious. He was smiling, so she decided he was joking. “What was so important you had to drag me out of bed at this ungodly hour?”

“I wanted to see you.” He made it sound as if the reason should have been perfectly obvious to her. The door to his room was wide open, and soft music drifted out into the hallway. Once they were inside he closed and locked the door behind him.

“Well…here I am.”
Recognizing the refrain of
Something
by the Beatles, she shook her head with a bemused laugh. “You and your hippie music.”

“The sixties were
a time like no other. It was a great decade.” He spoke almost as if he had firsthand knowledge.

“
Too bad we weren’t around for it. Woodstock would have been fun.”

“Oh, it was.” Grinning, he folded her into his arms and swayed gently to
the music. “So many free spirits…flower children wandering the earth with no specific destination in mind. Runaways with no past and no future. Dozens of them simply vanished and were never seen again, you know. They were so trusting…” He laughed then, as if the notion struck him as funny.

She looked up at him suspiciously, and there was nothing in his faraway eyes to reassure her. “You didn’t take any more of that nightshade, did you?”

“No. Not for this.”

Lightning flashed brightly, and Sami noticed for the first time that the
curtains were pulled back and the balcony door open. The distant thunder had moved in closer as the second round of storms rapidly approached. A sudden breeze carried in the fresh scent of rain, blowing the white curtains inward so they billowed like ghostly arms that reached out to touch her.

“It’s coming.”

“What is?”

“The rain.”
He kissed her softly while the Beatles were replaced with something less familiar to her. Just a clean and simple guitar arrangement, something almost resembling folk music with a male vocalist whose mellow voice was warmly pastoral.

“
What is this song?”

“
Time Has Told Me.
”

“
I’ve never heard it before. It’s beautiful.”

“
You like?” He continued to move dreamily with the music, his hands resting lightly against the small of her back. She allowed her own hands to roam freely over his smooth, solid chest, feeling his steady heartbeat through her fingertips. And she wanted that heart to belong only to her. He began to hum softly, and then to sing along with the lyrics in a beautiful voice that was a perfect replica of the one coming from the stereo’s surround sound.

She looked up at him in amazement. “Ash!
That’s not you, is it?”

“Of course not. It’s Nick Drake. I’m
just imitating him.”

“That’s incredible…you sound just like him!”

His lips curved slightly. “You might say I have a rare talent for impressions.”

“You
r voices are identical. I didn’t know you could sing like that…you should have gone into the music industry.”

“Like Rick Radcliffe?” He raised a cynical eyebrow.

Was he kidding? There could never be even the remotest of comparisons. “Rick has nothing on you.”

“You’re right. He doesn’t.”
The hands at her back pulled her more firmly against him. His lips grazed her ear. “No one does. So are you ready, Samara?”

“Ready for what?”

“To open your eyes. To see the truth.”

Maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t…but her need to know
all was a ravenous hunger aching to be fed. “Yes. I’m ready.”

“‘Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release.’”

“Are you quoting philosophers now?”

“Oh, I’m quite the philosopher.” Releasing her, he walked out onto the balcony as the lightning lit up the sky brilliantly. A deafening crash of thunder followed on its heels. “Come and look.”

Trying to ignore the concern that they both might be struck by lightning, she sidled up beside him. “What are we looking at?”

“The beach. It’s completely deserted.”

Well, that was no surprise. One would have to be crazy to be out there in weather like this. Another flash lit up the sky and she could clearly see the wall of heavy rain making its way toward them.

“There’s no one around to see what I’m about to do.”

“And what is it you’re about to do?”

“
You won’t soon forget this night,” he promised in a low voice.

The rain arrived with a
heavy gushing roar but he didn’t make a move to go back inside so she didn’t either. The worst of it couldn’t reach them underneath the awning, though the wind did its best to make sure they got sufficiently wet. She shivered, more from his cryptic words than the cold rain, sensing deep within her that something menacing and macabre had reached them on the winds of the storm.

He
quickly threw one leg over the side of the balcony railing, then the other, teetering precariously on his bare heels on a scant few inches of concrete while his hands gripped the metal bars behind him.

Sami felt her
heart drop into her stomach. “What the
hell
are you doing? Have you lost your goddamn mind - come back inside! Right now…please, Ash - you’re scaring me!”

“No fear, baby. We’ve reached the end.” Perched on the edge, black angel wings spreading down the perfect contours of his back, he resembled a seraphic sculpture that might have graced the architecture of some Roman chapel. Balancing carefully, he spread both arms out to his sides as if welcoming his own demise.

“Oh
shit
…Ash, stop…
please stop!
”

He turned his head to smile at her. “Watch me fly.”

She saw in horror his body falling forward slowly, though not slowly enough for her to prevent him from executing a perfect swan dive to certain death. Before she could pull herself from her frozen state of shock, he had disappeared from sight. The pouring rain mercifully drowned out whatever sickening sound his body made as it hit the ground below.

“
NO!
” Her hands flew to her mouth, muffling the remainder of her horrified screams. “
Jesus Christ…oh, God! Ash!
” Her hands reached for the wet railing and she leaned over it, waiting for the next round of lightning to reveal to her what she would have given her very soul not to see.

It came too soon. And
there he was, sixteen unforgiving floors below on the sand, what once was a beautiful body now contorted in an unnatural position that was wrong, all wrong. Crumpled in a heap like a discarded rag doll.

“Oh, God…
this isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.
” She chanted the words like a mantra between chattering teeth, refusing to accept what her traitorous eyes were showing her while her body shuddered uncontrollably. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t - he was down in the lobby, smiling and laughing with the night shift clerk…he was in her ground floor room waiting for her…he was swimming in the stormy ocean…he was someplace, anyplace, but
he wasn’t lying dead on the ground!

Spinning around, her legs threatened to buckle as she tried to make her way to the door
, though in her panic she didn’t even know where she was heading. They only carried her a few steps before her knees hit the carpet and everything around her went black.

~*~*~*~

“Gonna sleep forever?”

The
indistinct words seemed to come from far away. And she wanted to tell whoever it was that yes, she
did
want to sleep forever because it was preferable to the terrible reality she was waking to. Lifting her head slightly, she blinked to clear her vision as the hazy source of the question slowly approached her from across the room. The azure eyes were the first thing to come into focus.