Serafina and the Virtual Man - By Marie Treanor Page 0,80
what keeps me here. Maybe I’ll vanish when Dale tells the truth or when you find my body.”
Her fingers dug into his shoulder so hard it should have hurt. “I don’t want… I wish you could—”
“I know,” he whispered into her hair. “It’s all right. I don’t want you ever to regret this. Whatever happens, I want you to be happy, JK.”
She nodded against his cheek, unable to speak for the tears clogging in her aching throat.
She felt his lips stretch into a smile against her temple. “You’ve made my death very happy so far.”
A strangled laugh broke from her throat in an uncivilised gurgle. She raised her head to apologise, or perhaps just to look at him because she’d have so long to remember him. But his hand moved in her hair, angling her head so that he could kiss her parted lips, and she realised that he already understood everything she had such trouble saying. He might not have known exactly how much this meant to her fucked-up soul, but he got the basics. She cared, and somehow, astoundingly, so did he.
For once, she ignored the tears, let them roll down her cheeks and into her mouth and his, because it was more important to kiss him. As it was more important to help him than to selfishly enjoy his virtual company.
“No regrets,” he whispered into her mouth.
I’ll try. I’ll try.
Chapter Eighteen
When Jack stepped out of the virtual world, Blair still sat in the same chair, his back to the computer, looking completely inhuman. Pale and handsome, he appeared to be staring unblinkingly into space. He was either asleep or dead. Both, probably.
An instant later, it was worse, because his dark eyes leapt into focus on Jack, so alive with sheer hunger that Jack almost bolted back into the safety of Adam’s virtual world.
Instead, he said as calmly as he could, “You should go before daylight. Do you want a lift?”
The hungry look vanished into eerily silent laughter as Blair threw his head back in obvious mirth. Jack flushed. His offer had been stupid for many reasons, but common politeness died hard in him. After a moment, Blair met his gaze and shook his head, with at least as much courtesy as mockery in his gaze.
Consoled, Jack said, “So are you going or what?”
Blair shook his head again and passed a phone to Jack. It was his own phone, which he must have left beside Blair’s bottles at some point, and it displayed a text from Sera: “Weather better, driving down this morning. Stay with Jilly. Bringing Blair’s biking gear.”
Jack nodded, and since he had the feeling Jilly didn’t want him back too quickly, he pulled a box from the corner and sat on it, thoughtfully drinking his coffee.
It was bizarre. He could see the rest of the lab, including Jilly. Only Adam was completely absent. Although Jilly was sitting at a very peculiar angle in his chair, her arms raised, her hands gripping the air like claws.
Jack blinked. “Fuck. Is she crying?”
He leapt to his feet, glancing at Blair for confirmation. Blair only nodded, but when Jack began to stride forward, he suddenly found himself back on the box with an unpleasant bump and spilt coffee running down his sweater. Blair shook his head at him.
Jack swallowed. Adam wasn’t hurting her. This was their tender farewell. Although he turned his back like the gentleman he hoped he was, his lips twisted. “Who’d have thought it? I didn’t think Jilly could cry.”
Blair, of course, didn’t reply. Only for an instant, his eyes, which Jack always thought of as dead, betrayed a sudden storm of emotion, so profound, so all-consuming that Jack felt paralysed.
The vampire’s eyelids swept down, releasing him, but Jack felt shaken to his core. Everyone cried. Even hard-edged, tough-as-nails Jilly with the family from hell. Even Blair, who’d exist forever, an eternity without Sera. For the first time, Jack suspected Sera was more to him than the sex and snacks Jilly had accused him of wanting of her. He might not know what the vampire felt, but that he did feel and at least as deeply and intensely as anyone else, Jack could no longer doubt.
He suspected it was to be one of many revelations that day.
****
Dale rose with more optimism than he’d felt for a long time. The poltergeist, not Adam after all, but the fucking psycho Killearn, had gone, thanks to the psychic. And at last the new system was coming together and looked