Lex kept the apartment at a balmy seventy-eight degrees in the winter. Even so, it took a few minutes to shake off the chill from outside after she had slammed the door behind her.
“Reece? You home?” she called out, even though she already knew the answer. Her soulmate had left Montreal the day before. He hadn’t told her where he was going, when he would be back, or what he was doing. As he’d packed his suitcase, he’d given her the same explanation that he’d been doling out for months now: “Daybreak business.”
How she had begun to hate that phrase.
Alexandra pulled off her boots and left them by the door as she walked back towards the bedroom.
Their apartment wasn’t much. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a living room with a miniscule kitchen attached to it. They had chosen to sleep in the smaller of the two bedrooms so that the larger one could be used as an office. With various members of the team always coming and going, it made the most sense.
Lately when Reece was actually home, however, he spent hours upon hours in there alone—with the door shut. He didn’t answer her knocks, her calls to tell him that she’d made dinner, her pleas to come to bed. When he was in there, he might as well have been gone.
Lex wished that she could zap into his mind, as Karissa had suggested. But she knew how much she hated it when things had been ripped from her mind without her consent. It had been done to her for years and it nearly destroyed her.
No, Reece’s mind was his own and violating that would mean that she’d become the thing that she loathed. If he wanted her to know what he was doing or what was wrong with him, then he would tell her.
Once in her bedroom, Alexandra opened the closet door. Pushing her collection of wool sweaters aside, she reached deep into the back for her summer clothes. They were wrinkled, but she didn’t care.
To her surprise, a spark of excitement ignited inside of her as she started to pile her T-shirts and shorts into her bag. It was the rush of anticipation. She was going somewhere warm. God help her, she never wanted to be cold again.
Reece had been so warm once. Even the first time they’d met, when he’d believed that she had callously murdered a Wild Power, she’d been struck by his kindness. When they had realized that they were soulmates, he’d offered himself to her openly. And he had waited patiently as Lex slowly let down her own walls, trusting that he wouldn’t hurt her.
The witch she’d once known didn’t know how to hurt anyone. Not really.
When had things changed?
The question haunted her. It had happened too slowly for her to pinpoint it. All she knew was that, as time went by, he spoke less and less. He started to get lost in his thoughts, always preoccupied with something terribly private and terribly important. By degrees, her soulmate had become…colder.
The first time that she had truly noticed it, she’d been in bed with Reece. They had just gotten back from a night out—dinner and a movie. As she was falling asleep, she’d realized that he hadn’t tried to kiss her that night. And then, with a sudden sense of dread, she’d realized that she couldn’t remember the last time that he had kissed her. It had been so long.
After that, Lex had tried to talk to Reece about it. Awkwardly tripping over her words, she had told him that she was afraid they were drifting apart. He had assured her that everything was fine and had given her a peck on the cheek.
Then the mysterious “Daybreak business” trips had started. He’d been on six of them so far and sometimes it was weeks before he got back. If he really was on Daybreak missions, then Lex assumed that they never went well because he was always in a horrible mood when he got back. Sadly enough, that was the one thing that prevented her from believing that Reece was cheating on her on those trips. Surely if he had just returned from a week of mind-blowing sex with a mistress, he would be slightly less irritable.
Lex sniffed as she folded her last shirt and rubbed her nose roughly. She couldn’t afford to cry now. If she started, she might not have the courage to go through with this. She had to concentrate on where she was going, on the anticipation. She had to think of warm breezes, hot sand, and waves crashing on the shore. The endless rhythm of the sea would comfort her. It always had, even as a child.
In the bathroom, she dug through the cabinet underneath the sink for her makeup bag. She normally didn’t like wearing the stuff, but it made her look older. The ID that Karissa had made for her claimed that she was eighteen—old enough to travel anywhere she wanted, get a job, and rent an apartment. But to pull it off, she needed to paint four more years onto her face, which was eternally frozen at fourteen.
Foundation first. Then a gray shadow to blend with the bright blue color of her eyes. Light eyeliner—too much of it and she would be taken for a typical teenager trying to be trendy. Thin coat of mascara. No blush. Matte lipstick.
She looked at herself in the mirror.
Not bad. With some sophisticated clothing and the weariness in her eyes, Lex thought that she could pull it off. But if her ID was questioned, she just hoped that a few twenty-dollar bills slipped under the table would get her by.
She went back to the bedroom and sat down heavily on the bed. Alexandra withdrew the stack of cash from the envelope that Karissa had given to her and she counted it twice. After putting four hundred dollars in her purse, she threw the rest of it into her bag.
She had inherited an enormous sum of money from Tristan when he died. He used to keep it all stashed around their flat in Georgetown and she’d taken it when she left Washington. Of course, Reece hadn’t liked the fact that Tristan had stolen most of the money from humans that he’d killed, but getting rid of it seemed asinine. So Lex had left it untouched in the bank until now.
Looking back on it, she wondered if she had saved the money because she’d somehow known that she would have to leave Reece one day. Faith was something that didn’t come easily to her. Part of her always needed an escape route—a back-up plan—because she knew better than anyone how horrific it was to be trapped.
Zipping her bag closed, Lex realized that there was nothing left for her to do but leave. And she felt profoundly sad. In her life, she’d often felt depressed, angry, hateful, terrified, sick, disgusted, defensive, wrathful. But she couldn’t remember a time when she had felt so sublimely sad before.
It was strange, but she thought that the past year and a half with Reece had given her a sense of clarity. Her emotions used to be a tangled web that pulled her in every direction at once. She hadn’t been able to discern anger from hate or fear. Everything was threatening, everything hurt. But she felt things more purely now. Her emotions had become less confusing when she stopped fighting them. She knew her own mind in a way that she’d never had before.
At that moment, Alexandra knew damn well that she didn’t want to leave here. She only wanted her soulmate back—the one that she’d met in D.C. But hell, she didn’t even know where he was. She couldn’t just sit around the apartment while Reece drifted further and further away from her. At least if she left him now, it wouldn’t be so painfully drawn out. It would be done.
Still, maybe she could sit here for just a little while longer…
Lex lay down on her side and pulled her knees into her chest.
What did it matter, after all, if she left tonight or tomorrow morning?
She closed her eyes, squeezing out a single tear. It slid across her temple and dripped onto the bed sheets.
Just one more night. Just a few more hours of breathing in Reece’s scent, pretending that everything was all right. If she relaxed her mind, she could almost imagine that her soulmate was next to her.
Fully clothed, with her bag lying on the bed next to her, Alexandra fell asleep.
The shrieking ring of the phone startled her awake several hours later.
It was dark outside and a glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand told her that it was well past midnight.
Her brain was muddled. For a moment, she forgot what had woken her up. But then the phone rang again and Lex rolled over to answer it.
“Hello?” she said, her voice muted with sleep. She rubbed her eyes.
There was no answer.
“Hello?” she said again.
Silence.
Lex sat up slightly, suddenly alert, and listened intently. There was someone on the other end of the line. She could hear the person’s breath and was sure that the person could hear hers as well. That was why he stayed on the line, she thought. To listen to her.
Her heart started to pound. How many horror movies started out like this?
She tried to calm herself down. She was a vampire. If this was a horror movie, a monster like her certainly wouldn’t be the victim.
“What do you want, you perverted asshole?” she asked in a nasty voice.
The caller said nothing.
Alexandra sneered. “Fuck you,” she snapped, then slammed the phone down on the receiver. She lay back down, hoping that she’d just burst the caller’s eardrums.
She closed her eyes again, but they opened almost of their own volition. Her heartbeat was still roaring in her ears. There was no way that she would be able to fall back asleep now, but she still felt too tired and sad to get up. So she stared into the darkness of her room as she waited for the sun to rise.
The girl lay next to him on her side, resting her head on one hand while the long fingernails of her other hand trailed up and down his bare chest. It teased him and irritated him, but he didn’t bother trying to stop her. It didn’t really matter.
It felt hot in his apartment tonight. Stuffy. The smoke from his cigarettes had formed a soft cloud that took on a yellow hue in the lamplight. He wanted to open a window, but the December air in Buffalo, New York would have been too cold for the girl that he’d brought home.
She was beautiful—tall and lean, with supple skin. Her ash-blonde hair had been silky when he’d run his fingers through it on the street. Her blue eyes looked wide with innocence—a ploy that she had probably spent hours in front of a mirror perfecting. But as striking as she was, he couldn’t care less.
“Her birthday is today,” he was saying. “She would have been twenty-one.” He sighed tiredly as he tried to ignore the way the girl’s fingernails tickled him. “I wonder if she would have let me take her out to a bar. She could be so uptight. Sometimes she used to say that she didn’t understand the point of drinking. If you couldn’t have fun without being drunk, then there was something wrong with you.”
The girl at his side snorted. “Sounds annoying, if you ask me.”
Aiden St. Helen gave her an icy stare to remind the girl that he hadn’t asked for her opinion. He might have cut her tongue out for saying such a thing if he didn’t agree with her. “I thought so all the time,” he admitted. “Eve was always too mature for her own good. I think she had the soul of a fifty-year old even when she was a child. But it came with the territory, I guess.” He shrugged slightly. “I wasn’t much better. All work and no play.”
“Mmm, that makes Jack a dull boy,” the girl purred into his ear. Her breath was warm on his cold skin, but the heat only glided over the surface, never seeping into him. The winter had claimed Aiden long ago.
He smiled in spite of himself. “Oh, never dull. I can promise you that.” If nothing else, the Night World was at least interesting.
The girl’s hand slid down his flat, muscled stomach, stopping at the waist of his jeans. She was getting impatient. Aiden could hear snippets of the frustrated thoughts flitting in her mind, even though her glossy, sinful lips were still curled into a smile. She started to touch him through his clothes. His body responded, but he barely felt it.
In the first few months after Eve had died, Aiden had refused to allow himself to think about her. The guilt and the grief were simply more than he could take. Every time he imagined her eyes or her smile, he ached to thrust a stake into his own heart just to end his torment. And he couldn’t do that. So he’d believed that only way for him to continue his existence was to forget hers.
He realized soon enough that that was impossible. Sometimes he would become mesmerized by the glitter of the stars or the ripples in a puddle as it rained. When he saw beggars in the streets, he would feel a crushing pain in his chest that wouldn’t dissipate until he’d given them all of the cash he had in his pockets.
Eve had infected his soul. Even in death, she was a part of him.
So he withstood the pain. Somehow he continued to breathe even when the pain was choking him. He resisted the lures of the haze that starvation offered and the delirium that he knew would come after a slaughter. He didn’t drink or take any drugs, and he forced himself out of bed on days when he desperately wanted to avoid the world. For the first time in his life, Aiden forced himself to feel. And damn it, it was killing him.
“Her soul may have seemed old, but there was more to her,” he said thoughtfully as the girl in his bed continued to stroke him. “She could be playful. Cute. She had these fluffy, pink slippers that she couldn’t live without. And she painted her toenails ridiculous colors every few days. She baked batches of cookies and brownies just to see people smile. Simple things made her happy.”
He remembered how all of those things had confounded him. Aiden had always been obsessed with some goal, working towards some end. He’d never understood how such useless details could bring her so much pleasure. The only simple thing he’d ever enjoyed that much was killing. But then, even his kills tended to be elaborate. That was why Circle Daybreak had nicknamed him “Hellraiser”.
“How did she die?” the girl with him asked.
Aiden surprised himself when he answered her. He usually didn’t answer questions about her death. “She killed herself,” he said, which was close enough to the truth.
“How long ago?”
He swallowed. “Next Saturday it’ll be nineteen months.”
“You poor baby,” the girl cooed. She rolled over so that part of her body was on top of him. “And she’s the only girl that you ever cared for?”
Aiden opened his mouth to say yes, but the word froze on his lips. There was another girl that he cared for, though he never wanted to admit it. To do that seemed like pissing on Eve’s ashes. But he couldn’t lie to himself about it and that meant that Eve, wherever her spirit was, probably already knew.
“There was someone,” he murmured, “that I liked. But she was already taken. And it wouldn’t have been right, after Eve.”
“Well, you know what they say.” The girl lifted her perfectly-shaped eyebrows and smiled. Her voice fell to a husky whisper. “All’s fair in true love and war.”
He laughed bitterly. “Trust me, baby,” he said. “Nothing is ever fair. Love and war, life and death—everything is fucked.”
“Mm. You’re so jaded. Isn’t there anything I can do to make you feel better? Do you want me to pretend to be one of those girls?” The girl pressed her lithe body against him and her blonde, curly hair fell onto his chest.
Seeing her curls shine in the light of his bedside lamp, Aiden stiffened.
“What’s wrong?” the girl asked.
“Your hair…”
She brushed it back from her face. “What about it?”
He thought that he had chosen this girl because she was blonde, like Eve had been, but her spiral curls were exactly like Alexandra’s. Only the color was different.
Shit. What the hell was he doing?
“Nothing,” he said shortly, shaking his head.
The girl sighed, dropping her hand limply on his chest. Her gleaming smile disappeared. “Look, buddy,” she said. All of the seductive warmth in her voice was gone. “Are we going to have sex or what? You know I charge by the hour, right?”
Aiden rubbed his face and sat up, letting the girl fall off of him and onto the bed. “No,” he said gruffly. “I don’t want to have sex.”
The girl pushed herself up and leaned against the headboard. “Then what the hell did you bring me up here for?”
The corner of his mouth lifted in a self-effacing half-smile. “Conversation?”
“For fuck’s sake, get a shrink!” The girl rolled off the bed and crouched down to pick up her strappy high heels.
“I have far more respect for your profession,” Aiden said dryly. “Not to mention the fact that prostitutes tend to be better listeners than psychiatrists.”
“Yeah, well, you’d better pay me,” she snapped. “I didn’t waste two hours on you just to hear you moan about your dead girlfriend.”
He laughed. “Not to mention that prostitutes are far more honest than shrinks.” Then with inhuman speed, he threw himself at her, grabbing her neck and slamming her against the wall before she even saw him coming. The girl paled in terror as she gasped for breath. “But if you ever disrespect Eve again, I will rip your pretty throat out. Understand?”
She nodded her head rapidly and Aiden let her go. Then, as quickly as he had pounced on her, he moved across the room to stare out the window. It gave her a fairly obvious hint that he wasn’t human, but he didn’t give a damn. He had stopped playing by the Night World rules the moment that Eve had died.
He reached into his back pocket and withdrew a wad of hundred dollar bills. Throwing them on the bed, he looked at her. “I hope this was as good for you as it was for me, baby. You can go now.”
Aiden turned back to the window and listened as the girl grabbed the money off the bed and made a mad dash to the door. Then he smiled in grim satisfaction. Eve definitely wouldn’t have approved of him scaring the girl like that, but Eve was dead. And besides, he’d paid the girl three times as much as she charged.
Once she was gone, he walked over to his fridge and pulled out a bottle of Diet Coke, carrying it back with him to the couch. He sat back, drinking the soda in huge gulps. It was one of the better parts about living alone, he thought—being able to drink anything he wanted straight from the bottle.
He had never really lived by himself before. While he’d been working for the Night World, he’d always been in a coven of sorts. And then when he’d been a mole in Circle Daybreak, he’d lived in a compound with hundreds of other people.
The vampire that he’d once been would have preferred the silence and the solitude, but now Aiden didn’t enjoy it much. As sad as it was, this wasn’t the first time that he had sought out the company of a prostitute just to listen to him talk. He couldn’t afford to make any real acquaintances. There were too many people in both Circle Daybreak and the Night World who would love to see him dead.
How far the great and untouchable Hellraiser has fallen…
The words of his former Night World employer, Angie Catallini, ran through his mind nearly every day. Sometimes it angered him, but other times he could only laugh because it was so true.
Aiden St. Helen had once been a cold and driven vampire. He’d only cared about acquiring power, both for him and for his vampire race. Then, being the arrogant bastard that he was, he’d tried to kill a Wild Power—a Daybreak witch who also happened to be his soulmate. As she lay dying in his hands, he had felt her love for him. And his own love for her. It tore him to pieces. He ran from her, leaving her coughing and choking on the floor.
Even after that, he might have been able to put himself back together; Angie had had a strong hold on him and he’d had nowhere else to go. But then he’d watched his Eve gratefully give her life to another. In that moment, everything that he’d ever been was obliterated.
Now he sat on a frayed couch in a tiny, dirty apartment with nothing but regrets.
He wondered sometimes if this was really what Eve would have wanted for him. It wasn’t exactly living. But even though she had forgiven him for the pain that he’d caused her, he couldn’t help thinking that his life now was far better than he deserved.
Still, he wished all too often that he could end it. That he could throw himself out of a window and onto a picket fence. He knew that Eve’s wishes should have been reason enough to stay alive, but they weren’t. If that were all that he had, Aiden would have killed himself months ago.
There was only one thing stopping him. Just four little words that made him back up from the window every time: I like you, too.
He didn’t know why he clung to Alexandra Harper’s words after all this time. He couldn’t say why they meant so much to him. They had a strong, physical connection—a soulmate link that had been forged when Lex had taken Eve’s life—but the true emotional bond of the soulmate principle was lacking. Still, they liked each other. They understood each other. Even the first time that they had met, he had felt a strange kinship with her. And he realized that every time he went out in search of company, what he really wanted was to talk to Alexandra.
On a sudden impulse, Aiden grabbed his cell phone off the coffee table. Months ago he’d hacked into Circle Daybreak’s database to see if anyone in the organization was on to his location. Searching through the information on active members, he had stumbled upon Reece Cahill’s address and phone number. Of course, he knew that that was also Lex’s phone number and he’d memorized it on sight. Just in case.
Just in case of what, he didn’t know.
Without stopping to think, he dialed the number. His heart damn near stopped when he heard her answer. Her voice was thick, as if he had woken her up.
“Hello?” she said again.
His words caught in his throat. He suddenly didn’t know why he had called or what to say. All he could do was listen to her breathe.
“What do you want, you perverted asshole?” she asked.
That was Lex all the way. Aiden would have laughed if he could.
“Fuck you,” she snapped and slammed the phone down in his ear.
Hearing the loud click, he felt like he had snapped out of a trance. He stared at his cell phone as if he didn’t know how it had gotten into his hand, and then he threw it across the room.
What the hell was wrong with him? Alexandra had a life and a soulmate. He couldn’t interfere with that. What had he been hoping to accomplish?
And he had a soulmate of his own whom he had an obligation to honor. Eve may be dead, but he could never betray her. Not again.
With a heavy sigh, Aiden raised his bottle of soda in a toast and looked up. “Happy Birthday, Eve,” he whispered.
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