Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,96

off her feet and throwing her back into her flat. As she landed, her breath was knocked out of her lungs, but she stayed conscious.

So she saw the fireball that expanded like a great beast, its breadth extending down the corridor in both directions.

And bursting into her apartment.

* * *

From the depths of Trez’s painful delirium, his brain coughed up a memory that made the agony of the migraine seem like a paper cut. He was back to the night he had sent Selena’s remains unto the sky, her physical body set ablaze on the funeral pyre that had been built by his community of friends. He was standing as close as he could get to the flames, the heat so great that the skin on his face tightened and the front of his body roasted to the point of cracking. The blaze, which had caught quickly, burned brightly in the dense darkness of the night, the white smoke curling into the heavens—

It was as he brushed at his eyes to clear the tears of his soul that he realized… this wasn’t a memory.

He was present at the actual scene, returned to the past through some kind of alchemy—no, not magic. This was a dream. This was one of those dreams when you found consciousness within your mind’s subconscious, freedom of choice seeming to present itself in a reality that wasn’t real except for the way it felt.

Why couldn’t he have gone back to a happy time? To when he had rented out Storytown just for him and his queen, when they had danced between the headlights of his car, when he had been able to hold her against him once more?

If he could pretend to be in any scene from their relationship, pretend to feel anything, see anything, be anything, why was it the heat of Selena’s funeral pyre upon his aching body, the sight of her remains being consumed, the mourning cranked up to an acute suffering that took his breath away?

Was this never going to end, this cycle of sadness, loss and pain.

Trez stared at the curling orange and yellow fire, the pyrotechnic monster devouring the food it was provided, the wood, the body, breaking down, becoming the smoke that rose and the ashes that fell. And as the consumption continued, rage and anger became a blaze within his own body, burning him, destroying him, as his beloved was likewise alit, the two of them united for this one last time, both of them in flames.

Unable to hold the emotion in, he started to scream, an explosion of sound propelled out of his lungs by the constriction of his rib cage, the force so great he felt the veins in his neck and his forehead bulge, his arms and his shoulders turn into cords of twisted steel, his legs threaten to propel him into the pyre. He screamed until he was out of oxygen, and then he dragged in the night air. As soon as he had breath in his lungs, he screamed again. And again. And again—

It was during an inhale that he sensed a figure standing off to the side, and he wheeled around, panting. When he recognized who it was, he was confused.

“Lassiter?” he said hoarsely.

The angel’s body was nothing but an outline, only the glimmering wings that rose over his torso seeming to have weight and substance. As wind came up from all four directions, ghostly tendrils of the male’s blond and black hair swirled around.

Catching his breath, Trez wiped his mouth. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

The angel didn’t answer. Didn’t seem to hear him. Lassiter was focused on the pyre, a holy silver light radiating out of his eye sockets.

A feeling of disassociation compelled Trez’s own stare back to the roiling flames and his heart began to pound. The strange wind that swirled around the blaze changed the pattern of the fire, the flashes of yellow and orange coalescing—

From out of the pyre’s pulsing heat and flaring light, Selena’s white-wrapped body rose, the resurrection happening with an inexorable elevation that had Trez trembling from fear and love combined. This wasn’t right. This dream…

It wasn’t a dream, either.

He didn’t know what this was—but he didn’t care.

Selena was risen from both the cold embrace of death and the inferno of the funeral pyre, her arms lifting from out of the wraps he himself had wound round her lifeless body, her torso straightening, her legs standing strong. And now came her hair,