Dark Flame (Flame 3)

I did let you go, Olivia, to the degree I could.

You’d be married again already if you’d been able to pass through your grief.

He felt a spike of annoyance shoot through his head. Easy for you to say.

Her lips twisted in an amused smile. She leaned close and kissed his forehead, a strange ghostly sensation without real substance, yet real anyway. Let us go, Brann. I’m getting our children all grown up here in paradise and when your life has truly come to an end, when you’ve accomplished all that you need to in Five Bridges, we’ll be waiting to welcome you home.

He was going to argue, but just like that, Olivia was gone. The fire in his chest slowly died down, yet continued to deliver a constant familiar ache. He still missed his family. But had her visit been real? Was he really stuck at the edge of a place she called paradise, keeping his family from moving on?

Or was this just the delirium from a mortal wound?

His gaze once more shifted to Juliet. The cat had disappeared, and she now stood facing the canal and the eastern skies. The sun had set, and he could see stars above the homes opposite Juliet’s place. Her arms were crossed over her chest.

As had happened earlier, the awareness of how they were lovers in the dreamglide filled his mind. He couldn’t believe he’d kept the two parts of himself so thoroughly separate. He had a split mind in the same way he couldn’t seem to figure out whether to stay or to go.

He’d been lying to himself for five months, and he hated this reality. He felt like a coward, and the last thing he would ever be was a man who ran from a tough situation.

He knew his grief over the loss of his family

held him in a tight, crushing grip. But it had also served to keep him focused on what was important in his life as an alter vampire. Anything that prevented him from doing his duty as a border patrol officer had to go. He was committed to being a force for law and order within Crescent Territory.

So, how had he ended up in Revel? How had he become a powerful fae woman’s lover in a forbidden dreamglide environment?

And what was he supposed to do now?

~ ~ ~

Juliet stood on her patio, watching the last of the sunlight disappear from the emerging night sky. Because the back of her home faced east, she often spent this hour reflecting on her life. Agnes had taught her well.

The fae world tended to lean toward the philosophical, which of course made men or women like Roche an inexplicable anomaly in their territory.

The part of the canal over which her house looked was narrow but had strips of trees and grass and intermittent footbridges. In most ways, it resembled the main canal and surrounding landscape she and Brannick had flown through earlier.

She was at peace, or at least as much as she could be. For whatever reason, Brannick’s proximity to death had taken her back to her own near-death during her alter transformation.

She’d been in the hospital for most of the body-wracking experience, while the part of her becoming fae had flowed back and forth with her human self. It hadn’t been so much a battle of one form oppressively taking over the other weaker human part, but rather a merging. In that sense, it had been a simple adjustment, and she didn’t mind being a fae woman at all.

As a sage apprentice with a wise sage mentor of great spirit and strength, Juliet read and composed essays on the nature of life as an alter being. She had a blog that had over ten thousand human followers and about five hundred fae plus a few dozen more comprised of the other alter species. Her thoughts on life in Five Bridges tended to the theoretical and not the personal which meant she’d never once alluded to her dreamgliding with Brannick.

Until this moment, her alter life had been entirely intellectual, hidden, surface-based and in many ways a complete lie. She used a vampire in her dream-world to get her needs met. But she refused to date or to engage in any way that would be considered normal and healthy in real-time. Essentially, she was full of shit.

She could blog all she wanted about the beauty and majesty of life, but she wasn’t really living.

She turned back and stared at Brannick. His eyes were half-open and unseeing. She knew he wasn’t fully present. Emma had been right when she’d said he was hovering in some dark space between life and death. She knew he wasn’t gone, but he wasn’t with her, either.

He’d been in her home through the daylight hours and she’d gone to him at least a dozen times to try to ‘coax’ him back from the edge, just as Emma had told her to. But he’d been unresponsive.

A few minutes ago, when she’d had her neighbor’s yellow cat on her lap, she’d felt a shift in the energy in her living room. She’d hoped Brannick had started returning to his corporeal self.

But the energy had vanished a few minutes ago, and Juliet was back to waiting, but with hope dimming yet again.

She knew she had to make another effort to reach him, but she’d been putting it off.

Tears welled in her eyes. She didn’t want Brannick to die. She feared if she pressed him again, he’d take the last step and disappear from her life completely. Only then had she come to understand that despite the hidden quality of their relationship, he’d come to mean a great deal to her. She refused to call it love. She wouldn’t go that far. But he had eased her loneliness.

She knew that courage came in many forms. She wasn’t a powerful witch like Emma, who had taken out a monster of a wizard just a month ago. Emma was the kind of woman Juliet admired tremendously.

But Juliet had her own brand of courage as one who helped women escape Roche’s domination. The powerful fae still didn’t seem to know what she was up to, though she suspected the attack on the bridge could be a hint that he’d caught wind of her activities.