Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,99

for the worn pattern of the runner. She knew if she followed it, she would get to the staircase eventually—

She came up to the first body some thirty feet later. It was that of a man, and his clothes had been burned off his back and legs, his skin charred, the smell the kind of thing that made her want to vomit. He was facedown and not moving, and as she came up to his head, she looked into his wide-open eyes. They were fixed and dilated, unblinking because they were lidless, and his mouth was open, the lips peeled off yellowed teeth from the pain.

With a strangled sound, Therese kept going, especially as a fresh rumble vibrated up through the floor and made her terrified the whole building was collapsing. Faster, she tried to go faster. But it was not fast enough. As the smoke continued to get lower and lower, she lost visibility, only her elbow on the wall leading her at all, and soon her lungs started to burn so badly, she was coughing more than she was inhaling.

More rumbling. Someone screaming. Another body she had to crawl over.

All she knew was that she had to keep going or she was going to die.

* * *

Back at shAdoWs, Trez sat up on his sofa and looked to the observation wall behind his desk with a frown. Something was tapping on the glass, the knocking sound repetitive, insistent. Annoying as fuck in the quiet.

Getting up, he walked over and turned on the lights down below from the control panel by his office phone. One by one, the banks of fluorescent lights made noontime out of the club’s darkness, the black dance floor with all its scuffs and stains illuminated with the kind of clarity that did its wear and tear no good whatsoever.

No one was down below. Nobody hovering in front of the glass.

And it was too soon for the housekeeping staff to come in. Besides, humans couldn’t levitate without wires.

What the hell had he been hearing?

Under his skin, something was itching at him, and he ran his blunt nails up and down the backs of his arms. An unbearable sense of restless adrenaline flooded his veins, and without a lot of options, he walked back over to his bathroom. Inside the black marble jewel box of a loo, he ran the water and kept it cold, splashing his face. As he straightened and turned to the black hand towel, he looked through the water dripping into his eyes at the blinds that covered the tall, narrow window. Wiping his face with one hand, he used the other to twist the rod.

The view that was exposed between the tilting slats was of the long-and-low rooftops of the buildings between him and the river. Beyond them was that water. That icy, sluggish water that had previously called his name, but which was now silent—

Trez frowned.

The amount of smoke drifting across the Hudson and tangling in one of the span bridges’ arches was enough to obscure the far side.

Huge amount of smoke. Billows of it.

Trez’s brain was not working very well, the migraine dulling him up, that horrible disturbing dream making things even slower. And that was what made the lickety-split conclusion he came to as to the source both impossible and arguably irrational.

But it was just… if he triangulated the direction from which the wind was taking all that smoke, and the sound of the sirens that were still calling out into the night, and the glow off in the distance… there was only one place the fire could be.

No, that can’t be right, he told himself. It can’t be Therese’s rooming house.

Okay, it could be, but there were dozens of buildings, large and small, between him and her. It could be any one of them—

She was there. He could sense her.

Because she had taken his vein, he knew exactly where she was… and she was in that building.

But was she in a fire?

Trez’s heart rate tripled, another conclusion reached with the kind of certainty that facts did not support and his instincts could not deny. Closing his eyes, he dematerialized through a seam in the panes of glass, traveling through the cold night air across many, many roofs, passing by many, many buildings, flying over many, many streets.

He re-formed in the freezing wind on the roof of an apartment building directly in front of the blaze, and what his eyes focused on took his breath away. It was