Chapter One #2
Alone as she’d ever been, there in the dark, she spun around to suddenly find another man—one she hadn’t seen before—watching her.
Seeing her with something close to astonishment.
He looked vaguely familiar, like some figure out of a film she’d once seen, but the memory blinked away as soon as he met her eyes.
He took a tentative step in her direction, looking nothing like the others, who were all business and urgency, but quite separate from all that.
She couldn’t make out why. Except for the fact that his odd clothing…
Black leather pants, knee-high boots, and loose linen shirt—did not fit here. Just as she didn’t fit.
He shook his head, confused, taking one more step in her direction, his voice a hoarse, familiar if disbelieving whisper. “Violet?”
Emma blinked as something like lightning scored through her—a memory, a flash of something searingly hot and far away.
Then, everything went black.
*
“Ye should’a warned me it was her,” he growled, staring at the woman lying on the ICU bed across the hall. “’Twas wrong of you, Marguerite. You know it.”
“ Je suis désolé, Connor? Who exactly?”
Marguerite Ciel, Connor’s erstwhile mentor and overall pain in his arse, feigning innocence at his question with her Cajun charm, would be amusing if it wasn’t so predictable.
Over the last few centuries, she’d had her hand in every turn of his development as a guardian.
But mostly she’d thrown doors in front of him disguised as walls.
Most of those doors had opened peacefully.
With this one, however, she’d gone too far. Clearly, she knew it.
“Violet,” he answered. “ My Violet.” No, not his—ever actually—but at least a woman who was the image of her.
Corralling her small, fluffy dog, Enoch, Marguerite lifted him into her arms and tucked him against her, possibly as protection from Connor’s wrath. Glancing toward the bed that held the woman from the accident last night, she replied, “I believe her name is Emma. Emma James—”
“Ye know it’s her as well as I do. Or some twenty-first century version of her.”
“You know it’s her because…?”
“Because I’d know her in the dark,” he snapped. “I’d know her in any century or on any continent. Whether we understood each other or not. I’d know her.”
“Ah.” Marguerite sniffed. “Your point is…?”
“My point is ye had no business pairin’ me up wi’ her when you know my feelin’s on the subject.
” He stalked past her down the hospital corridor of St. Elias, contemplating all the ways in which walking away from this assignment—as he should, by rights, do—would burn his chances for the Council seat he’d been eying for longer than he cared to recall.
Not that he gave a flyin’ flock about that now.
Not when he’d found himself face-to-face with Violet again.
Whether she remembered him or not wasn’t important.
Though, for the briefest of moments out there in the dark last night, he imaged she had.
Marguerite was tight on his heels. “Roland approved the assignment. How was I to know Violet—or who this Emma person once was—was still such a peekon in your side?”
A thorn, indeed, that still poked him under his skin after all these years.
Marguerite knew full well, of course, his feelings about Violet.
If this was some kind of test, then he was bound to fail it.
Because he wouldna be paired up with the likes of that woman again.
Even if it was merely to escort her home, deposit her at the Gates, and bid her a fare-thee-well.
“As a third degree,” he argued, “I shouldn’t have to—”
“You’ll have to take that up with Roland, you know,” she interrupted, knowing Connor would get nowhere with the senior head of the Council. Roland was fair but famously unmovable when it came to changing his mind.
He rubbed a hand across his mouth. “Aye, I’ll do that. Then I’ll take a sharp stick to the eye. Just to prove I enjoy losin’.”
Enoch barked in his direction, a yippie little sound that Connor interpreted as opinionated. He narrowed a glare at the little dog. “Did I ask for your thoughts on the matter?”
“Roland’s not all that bad,” Marguerite pointed out, peering over Connor’s shoulder at the woman. “Why, look what happened with Elspeth Aloysius.”
Elspeth. Elle. A guardian/friend several ranks below him who had recently taken matters into her own hands and gone against every rule Roland had set up for her.
Connor had to admit, he admired her for that.
He secretly envied her outcome. But on this matter, he felt certain that if Roland had deemed it so, there would be no recourse.
Even when he’d gotten the assignment, there had been a crimson flag of urgency attached to it.
To turn it down could only hurt him in his quest for a Council seat.
“Fine,” he bit out. “I’ll escort her. But I’m not doin’ a lick more than is required of me. Don’t expect me to do orientation or take her through first steps at intake.”
She pressed a finger to her lips and glanced toward Emma’s room, where she lay surrounded by beeping machines and tubes. “Bein’ sure of yourself has always been one of your greatest strengths. But also one of your basic weaknesses, Connor. Who said her outcome is already determined?”
Not determined? “Isn’t it? Don’t play with me, Marguerite. We know each other too well.”
“This is no game, Connor. Our path—our job—as guardians is as deep as the bayou is wide. It’s filled with things that’ll either eat or sustain you. You get to choose which.”
A sigh welled up from inside him. “I know I’m in trouble when you begin talkin’ in metaphors.”
A smile eased the serious expression on her face. “’Twas you who said you wanted that seat on the Council, no? Do this, I can pretty much guarantee you will get what you need, Boo. C’est’ tout . It’s time for me to go. Be seein’ you soon, eh?”
“But wait!” he said. “What about—?”
Too late. She was gone.
Frustrated, Connor glanced down at the glowing dial on his inner wrist. A clock, of sorts, that measured not time but instead the completion of intention. It was a senior guardian tool, one he knew intimately.
His dial read -4 percent. He gave his wrist a few unproductive taps with his finger, then sucked a sigh through his teeth.
Never before had he had a negative reading of completion on his wrist dial.
If the thing wasn’t broken—which was technically impossible—that could only mean he was somehow losing ground in getting Emma where she needed to go, instead of making headway.
With a 100 percent completion rating required for this job to be signed off by Marguerite, clearly, this was already going badly.
Stubborn woman. But that was no surprise. Emma James—or whoever she was—had better hurry it up and get her head around her situation. Because he had better things to do than sit around waiting for her to—
He whirled at the touch of someone’s hand on his arm to find her standing beside him, her wide-eyed gaze every bit as shocked as his own.
“Oh!” Emma cried hoarsely, pulling her hand away as if he’d burned her. “You—you are real. I mean—” She stared down at her fingers, flexing them in a testing sort of way. “You can see me. Right?”
Violet’s voice with a twenty-first century inflection.
Balls.
“Aye,” he bit out. “I can.” To him, her spirit looked every bit as corporeal as he himself did. Even though he wasn’t, in fact, corporeal at all, as evidenced by the nurse who had just walked right between the two of them.
Shocked, Emma stared down at herself. “Am I… dead , then?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what is this ?” She gestured at the transmutability of her body, at him. At this other place they occupied.
This , Connor decided, was apparently Hell.
Because, just as he had the night before, he was momentarily incapable of pulling his gaze from the familiarity of her mouth or reconcile the effect the sound of her voice had on him or quit remembering the feel of Violet’s cheek against the backs of his fingers.
In spirit, she bore none of the bruises or abrasions her body had suffered in the crash.
Except she was minus one shoe, of course, and her auburn hair was a bit of a mess.
Which, to his chagrin, only hardened her appeal.
Oh, aye, he would have words for Roland the next time he saw him for forcing him into this—
Looking suddenly paler than pale, she reached out again, her fingers gripping his forearm, as if he could somehow keep her from falling, which she looked in very real danger of doing. He stiffened at her touch.
“I feel so…odd,” she said.
“Ye willna faint,” he told her. “It’s only the adjustment that yer feelin’.”
Her eyes were suddenly shiny with tears as she released her grip on him and backed against a wall. “The adjustment to…what?”
Still transfixed by this apparition from a long-ago life, Connor hesitated. He could almost remember when she was the one he could count on. Trust, even.
“Adjustment to what?” she repeated.
“To the in-between,” he said, hardening himself to the stricken look in her eyes.
“In between…what exactly?”
“That world,” he explained slowly, indicating her body in the bed, “and the next.”
“Oh!” she cried. “I am dead!”
“Calm yerself. Yer not dead. Yet. Nor are ye quite all there on the other side, either.”
“Don’t tell me to calm myself! Hasn’t anyone ever told you that’s the wrong thing to say to a woman in a moment of crisis?”
“Not precisely, no.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating. “Okay.” The spitting image of Violet nodded unconvincingly. “And so…you’re also in this…in-between?”
“No. I’ve definitely chosen sides.”
Her gaze slid over him, taking in every inch of his features. “I…I don’t understand.”
“Ye will.”
Suspicion clouded her expression. “And…who are you?”
“Name’s Connor.” He watched her closely to see if his name sparked any memories. It did not seem to.