the long, dark locks spooling free of the confines that abruptly loosened and fell away into the inferno beneath her feet, revealing her face and her shoulders.
She was of flesh and flame combined, an apparition that called to him without saying his name, that captured him without chains or bars, that held him without laying a hand upon him.
“Selena?” he said desperately. “Selena…”
In the midst of the violent glow, he could see that her mouth was moving. She was speaking to him.
“I can’t hear you,” he called out. “What are you saying?”
In a panic, he tried to close the distance, but the heat was too great, a barrier even his love and need for her could not help him cross.
“What are you saying?” he yelled again.
When he couldn’t hear her, he turned to Lassiter, but the angel was gone. Maybe he’d never been?
Wheeling back toward the blaze, Trez was terrified Selena, too, might have disappeared. But no, she was there, still yelling for him, still trying to get her message across the pyre and through the strange wind, her growing frustration and fear killing him.
Just as he had the thought that he would jump in there with her and join her in the flames, even if he was destroyed, she stopped, crouched, and held her arms up as if to protect herself from something that was falling on her. Then the funeral pyre seemed to explode, sparks and heat pushing out at him so that he had to cover his head and bow away also, even with his desire to get in there with her—
Trez jerked upright with a strangled cry, sure as if his physical form had to be ripped free of whatever thrall had captured him.
Covered with sweat, panting like he’d run for his life, lost in the dreamscape he’d been in, he looked around and tried to ground himself.
His office. At the club. Except there was no noise down below, no thumping of music that would indicate things were still open, no smattering of talk that would tell him it was just after closing and the staff were—
His keen hearing, made even more sensitive because of the headache, picked up the howl of sirens outside of the club, and it was the distant, quiet persistence of them that made him realize that everything at shAdoWs had been wrapped up for the evening and the staff had gone home.
What the hell time was it, anyway?
Getting to his feet made him aware that he still had the headache, but considering the sharpshooter behind his sternum, that ouch in his gray matter was a drop in the fucking bucket. His phone was facedown on his desk, and he picked it up, hoping for…
But of course Therese hadn’t called.
Why would she?
As more sirens sounded out, from a different quadrant of the city than the first set, he entered his password and went into the call section. You know, just in case—
All at once, the image of Selena yelling out for him from the pyre, and then crouching down to protect herself, took over everything.
Like a movie inserted into his conscious mind, it was all he could see, and all he could smell, too, the stench of burning wood flooding into his nasal passages until he sneezed as if it were real.
“Fucking migraines.”
The headaches had made him go weird places in his mind on occasion, and olfactory hallucinations were not uncommon, although, from what Doc Jane had told him, they were usually prodromals rather than active symptoms of the neurological event. She’d even said that some people smelled bananas or citrus instead of experiencing an aura.
Who fucking cared.
As still another round of sirens lit off and streaked right by the front of the club, he put his phone down and went back to the couch.
Must be some fucking fire somewhere in the city tonight, he thought as he lay back down and closed his aching eyes.
All those fire trucks, from different districts.
It sounded like a whole city block was on fire.
CHAPTER THIRTY
As Therese lifted her head, flames were everywhere around her, the explosion’s incandescent core having retreated from its advance, leaving greedy subsidiaries in its wake. Part of her wall was fire. The rug was smoking. Molding at the ceiling was curling with flames. But none of that compared to the origin of the blast.
That apartment across the hall was engulfed with deadly fire.
Dizzy and disoriented, she sat up and was aware of a ringing in her ears—unless it was the fire