“Lucaaaa….”
The voice whispers again, and I know it’s from the translucent vision, but the lips don’t move.
The face becomes a face and shoulders, then face, shoulders, arms, and torso. Her hair flows around her, moving slowly, like it’s floating in water.
She looks at me, and the stark pain in her eyes almost has me staggering back with the force of it.
I really don’t fucking like that look. And I really don’t fucking know why. I’ve never seen the woman before. She doesn’t even look vaguely familiar. Why in the hell would her pain be my pain?
“Who are you?” I demand.
Again, her lips don’t move, but I still hear the v
oice inside my head. “Come to me, Luca. I need you.”
Before I have the chance to react to her words, something happens. I tense as swarms of the nearby glowing dust infuse the white mist of the woman. Her crystalline appearance starts to solidify. Her face and the upper half of her body become more visible. Her hair, which up until that point was colorless, is a deep, rich brown. It’s long, flowing to the middle of her back. Her eyes are light brown, but not an ordinary brown. They’re an unusual golden amber. I’m not sure if it’s because of her noncorporeal appearance or if that’s their natural color, but they seem to glow.
More specks of dust penetrate the woman’s form, and the more that rushes in, the brighter she gets.
She lifts her arm, as if reaching out to me, and before it registers what I’m doing, I reach out to her.
When I take a step closer, the light surrounding her shimmers brighter. This time I’m able to shorten the gap between us. I take another step, and it seems to glisten even more. I’m tall, so when I take my next step, there’s only a few feet separating us. But the brightness is now almost too much to bear. I have to squint from the sheer brilliance of it.
There’s only inches between the tips of her fingers and mine now. The pain resting in my chest intensifies the closer I get, but it’s as if there’s a force that’s pushing me toward her. Like if I don’t, the pain would be a thousand times worse. I don’t know why, but something inside me says I must go to her.
I hold my breath as the tip of my middle finger touches the glowing tip of hers. Several things happen at once. A low growl resonates deep in the back of my throat, my fingers curl into a fist and my arm drops to my side, and the fierce pain I was experiencing in my chest turns so excruciating I’d swear my heart is spilling out onto the floor at my feet.
The trifecta of feelings happens because the instant my fingertips touch the woman, her form disintegrates. The thousands of pieces of dust that make up her form fall away into space, leaving me once again in complete blackness.
I tip my head back and an angry, pain-filled roar leaves my lips at the loss of something so important.
CHAPTER ONE
Luca
I STAB THE KEY INTO the back door of Ink Me and shove it open. It hits the cabinet behind the door and something crashes to the floor, pissing me off even more than I already am. I flip the light switch, look around, and find pink shattered glass on the floor. I glare at the shards and silently curse my sister to hell for leaving her shit on the counter after I’ve told her multiple times to put it away.
After kicking the door closed with my boot, I shed my drenched jacket, then grab a hand towel from a cabinet and run it over my head a couple times to soak up some of the water from the torrential downpour outside. Dropping my keys on the counter, I head to the coffeepot. Once the machine starts gurgling, I grab the broom and sweep up the glass, then rest my weight against the counter. I take a minute to rub my temples, the pounding in my head from moments ago finally turning to a dull ache.
Those fucking dreams.
They do this to me every time I have them. I thought they were gone, but apparently that was wishful thinking.
For six years, I’ve dreamed of a woman in the dark. A woman I’ve never seen before, with glowing amber eyes. At first, I only got small glimpses of her, and the dreams were so infrequent I didn’t think anything of them. She never spoke to me, only stared at me with eyes filled with torment.
Two years ago, they stopped, and they moved to the back of my mind. As of a couple of months ago, they came back, this time with a vengeance. She’s more vivid and she speaks now. Not that I can really understand what she’s saying. She asks for help, for me to come to her, but I have no fucking clue who she is, where she is, or how she wants my help. I don’t even know if this person is real, and if she is, why it’s my dreams she chose to invade.
It frustrates the hell out of me, because although I don’t know who she is I feel drawn to her, like some invisible force has tethered me to her. I can physically feel her pain as if it’s my own. Anytime I get close to her though, she disappears, just evaporates into thin air, leaving behind her agony to mesh with mine.
That’s when I wake up, the pain from the dream still holding me in its tight grip. I never go back to sleep, because the pain is too great. It usually takes hours for the ache in my chest and the throbbing in my head to ease. That’s why I’m here at Ink Me three hours early. To try to take my mind off my bizarre-as-hell dream.
I make a cup of coffee and carry it to the small office at the end of the hall where I do most of my drawing. Sitting down in the old cracked—but still comfortable—office chair, I pull a pad of paper from the desk drawer and look down at the image I’ve been working on for months. I still don’t know what the full picture will be. It’s a vision I had one day. Every so often, small things will appear in my head, and I’ll add to it. Right now, it’s just a wisteria tree with its branches spread out wide, drooping and full of leaves and purple flowers. There’s a girl sitting beneath it with her knees to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, and a bird on the lowest branch watching her. The branches hang so low that they almost shield the girl from the outside world. The last thing I added to the image was the silhouette of someone standing across from the girl. That was a couple weeks ago, and I haven’t had the call to draw more.
I flip the page to a fresh one and grab a pencil. A client came in a few nights ago wanting a tattoo of a woman that’s half angel, half devil. Original? No. But I draw what the client wants me to, and try to add some uniqueness to it.
Ink Me used to be my dad’s business. Growing up, I’d come here every day after school and watch him work. Mom hated it because most of the clientele that frequented back then weren’t people you wanted your kids to be around. Not because she had anything against the type of person who had tattoos or piercings—my dad was covered in tattoos and to this day she still says his body is a work of art—but because half were gang related or heavily into drugs or some other bad shit that hit the streets in this neighborhood. Silver Hill is split right down the middle with the proverbial railroad track separating the rich half and the dirty half. With Ink Me being the only tattoo place around, this was where people came when they wanted ink or piercings.
Before I was even old enough to really understand what a tattoo was, I knew I wanted to work here. I got my first tattoo machine when I was twelve years old and practiced on fruit. At sixteen, I apprenticed under my dad and he shaped me into what I needed to be to one day own Ink Me. I bought him out five years ago, and since then, I’ve cleaned the place up—not that it was trashy before, but a good paint job inside and out, new counters, equipment, and furniture does wonders—and I refused to put up with the bullshit of the fuckups that come in here. Dad was no pushover when he owned the place; actually, he was pretty much a hardass, but he also had his wife and three kids to feed, so he couldn’t be that selective in his clients.