Dark Flame (Flame 3)

He moved slowly downstairs and smelled something very peculiar, something like smoke.

“Juliet?”

But she didn’t respond.

Had she lit up the barbecue? Yet the smoke didn’t have the smell of charred meat. If anything, the odor was more chemical in nature. It also seemed familiar in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.

He called for Juliet again. When there wasn’t a response, he went outside and walked the entire perimeter of the cottage. Where the hell was she? Had she gone to talk to Agnes? If so, why hadn’t she told him?

He headed up to the main part of the facility, but couldn’t find Juliet. He located Agnes, however, but she said she hadn’t spoken to Juliet recently.

A terrible dread filled him.

When he finally opened the compound entrance door and questioned the guards, he got the answer he feared. Juliet had levitated and headed southeast while he’d been in the shower.

The sensation of dread increased, pouring over him like a flow of sludge, weighing him down. He’d felt like this once before, when he’d learned his sister had been delivered up to a dark witch coven.

He felt compelled to return to the cottage. Juliet might have left by the front door of the compound, but that’s not where the damage had been done.

When he went back into the house, he walked straight for the dining area near the foot of the stairs. He could smell the smoke again.

As he examined the nature of it, his fears intensified, because this wasn’t ordinary smoke but the kind he’d smelled once before many years ago and had hoped to never experience again. When the witches had killed his sister, this was the same odor in the air. They’d used a spell to control her, to have her say aloud she was a willing sacrifice and she would die in their service.

His first thought was that one of the dark covens had gotten to Juliet. But the fae part of him knew it wasn’t that easy. The stench in the air told him the witches were connected, but he intuited that Roche had gone to them and purchased a spell. He’d wanted control of Juliet for years, and he’d finally found a way to get the job done.

Brannick worked hard to remain calm, especially since, as he focused on the situation, he sensed the other part of what had happened. The smoky smell was the key, because it carried a metallic quality. Roche had finally broken through Juliet’s powerful dreamglide block, then hijacked her as he’d been trying to do for a long time.

Part of him wanted to fly straight up into the air and find her now, go straight to Roche’s house and tear the damn thing apart until he found her.

But a wiser part that aligned with his acquired fae abilities, forced him to grow very quiet. He needed to think the whole situation through, including what he and Juliet had just done.

He’d made love to her, but immediately afterward he’d been filled with remorse. Only this time, he knew he was the one who’d crossed the line. He’d seduced Juliet when he shouldn’t have. When real-time merged with the dreamglide, he should have stopped the whole thing.

But he hadn’t.

Yes, he’d been caught up in the passion of being with her, especially the erotic combination of the dreamglide with real-time. But there had been a moment when he’d actually made the choice to make love to her.

Maybe it had been the passionate depths of her dark blue eyes, or how much she enjoyed being with him, or perhaps her purpose in becoming as she’d said, a resistance fighter. All of it had gotten to him.

But he’d also recalled how she’d refused his initial overtures when they’d first entered the dreamglide. She’d made her position clear and he’d loved her for that.

Now Roche had her, and he’d used a dark witch’s spell to finally break through Juliet’s blocks.

Roche had been there from the beginning, the main supplier of dark flame throughout Five Bridges, Arizona and in more recent years the entire U.S. Maybe he even manufactured the alter fae serum that corrupted the human genetic base and made long-lived fae out of regular humans.

Roche had been there the night his sister had died as well.

He’d been the one constant all this time.

Something shifted at the base of Brannick’s soul, something so extraordinary it felt like tectonic plates moving around. His view of the world rumbled with a dozen earthquakes.

He finally confessed the truth to himself that he’d allowed Juliet to seduce him in the initial dreamglide because he’d fallen hard for her at the White Flame. And every damn time he’d made love to her in the dreamglide, as well as every conversation he’d shared with her, had deepened that love.

He’d been pretending all these months that he didn’t love her, that it would be too dangerous for him to love anyone.

What he hadn’t realized until this very moment was the terrible truth of what Juliet had said to him recently. Five Bridges was a death sentence to every alter human being who chose to make a difference in their world. He could no more control Juliet’s ultimate fate than he could his own.

He felt a soft drift of fingers down his face, and he knew without having to explore the sensation very long that his wife, in her ghostly form, was with him again.