“Is anyone missing anything?” I asked, looking over the group to see if there were any obvious omissions—legs, arms, heads. Aside from Kellen sobbing like a preteen passed over for a dance at the sock hop, everything seemed right.
“Anything being…?” Holden replied.
“I don’t know. I…don’t know what’s happened.”
The night was cool, still clinging to the chilly dregs of spring. I felt the cold with a shocking clarity, and not how I normally would—acknowledging the temperature but not feeling it. But the moment I stopped worrying about the members of my party, or the digits on my body, I was acutely aware of how uncomfortable I was.
“It’s cold,” I said absently. “Isn’t it? It’s cold.”
“Secret?”
Something felt wrong. I could smell the garbage piled on the street, but I couldn’t smell the woodsy moss of Desmond’s fur or the scent of Holden’s skin. I could hear the thrum of traffic a block away, but I couldn’t hear the snatches of conversation from buildings around us or the throb of Kellen’s pulse.
Desmond paced nervously in front of me, whining and rubbing his muzzle against my thigh. He sat, staring up at me, and the concern in his violet-gray eyes made me queasy. I felt dizzy, my chest tight and sweat beading on my temples.
“Holden?” I looked at the vampire and saw five of him. “I don’t feel so good.”
He caught me right as I collapsed.
I woke up in my own bed, or at least it felt like my bed. I couldn’t see a damned thing in the murky darkness surrounding me, but the comforter and mattress felt familiar. My alarm clock glowed on the opposite nightstand, telling me it was after eight thirty. How had I slept so late? I must have done a real number on myself coming through the gate if I’d been out for such a long time.
Come to think of it, I didn’t know when we’d passed back into our own reality. The time, hell even the date. I had no idea how long we’d been gone or if time was different here than it had been there. In Calliope’s realm nothing was different, but it was a halfway point. We’d gone all the way to the other side, and I had no idea if it we’d come back to the same time or not.
I climbed out of bed, tripped over a tangle of pants on the floor and landed on my knees.
“Fuck.”
Okay, awesome. My messy bedroom had finally claimed me as a victim. How had I gone this long without face planting, and now on my first day home I stumbled on the only piece of clothing on the floor?
How had I not seen them?
Climbing to my feet and rubbing my raw knees, I tiptoed to the door, knocking my shin hard against the armchair and letting out another cuss before getting hold of the handle. Something had happened to throw me off my equilibrium. I was hoping it was just a bad case of interdimensional jet lag.
I staggered into the hallway, rubbing sleep from my eyes, and angled myself towards the kitchen. Pausing in the doorway, I felt a strange warmth on my back and dropped my hands. My yellow kitchen was bright. Too bright.
I turned to face my living room, my heart leapt into my throat, and I ducked into the kitchen, hiding behind the wall and keeping my legs out of the path of the light cutting an angry swath through the tiny space.
Sunlight poured into my apartment, turning my usually shadowy corners into blistering, white-hot light reflectors. I’d escaped it in my bedroom because of the bricked window intended to keep me safe from the very light now surrounding me.
I held my hands out in front of me, inspecting them for blisters or burns, but my skin was unblemished. I’d been standing in the hall long enough to feel the warmth. It should have been long enough for me to start showing signs of damage.
My heart pounded harder.
Motes of dust swirled in the column of sunlight beside me, churning like minute insects in the brightness. Reaching out, I put my hand into the light and kept it palm up, the sun making my pale skin look much whiter than I’d seen it appear before.
And I wasn’t burning.
The heat coming off the light was amazing, warmth without pain, a sensation of tingles causing my hairs to stand on end, but not from cold. A shiver of excitement riveted me, and I brought my hand back to my face, sniffing my skin. I could smell the sunlight.
“Oh God…”
My fingers were still warm when I touched them to my lips.
And I wasn’t burning.
I wasn’t burning.
Stepping into the light went against every logical fiber of my being, but I had to know. First I angled my foot and then my leg into the sunshine. Then I was standing in the light entirely, squinting at the shocking brightness.
My breath caught, and I let out a shaky sigh. I had to be dreaming, but this was so far beyond anything I’d ever imagined. This was too much. In my dreams, sunlight was fleeting and often a force of foreboding. But nothing here was hurting me.
I stood in the hall, blinded by the brightness but able to feel a previously unknown abundance of sensation. I’d only once ventured out into the sun, and it was by necessity, not desire. Even then I’d been so densely bundled that barely an inch of skin was showing on my whole body. Now I was barefoot, my toes curling against the warm pile of the carpet, and my eyelids were glowing pinkish-gold from the sunlight I couldn’t yet face head-on.
Leaning forward, I braced myself against the wall I knew was there and pressed my cheek to it. Was this what everything felt like in the sunlight? As if it were a living thing with a pulse, giving energy to every item it fell on? Each thing I touched in my apartment that I used to take for granted, was now warm like the body of a lover.
A sigh escaped my lips, and it was such a rapturous sound it should have followed an orgasm. Instead it was from touching a warm living room wall. What would it feel like to stand outside? Would I become this warm? Against all reason I wanted to try it.
“Secret?” A groggy male voice broke through my reverie. “Secret, what the hell?” The panic in the second sentence made me open my eyes finally.
Was I on fire? I didn’t feel like I was on fire.
Desmond was butt naked and standing next to my loveseat, a tangled blanket bunched at his feet where it must have fallen when he rushed to his feet. He looked frantic with worry, but also afraid. I surveyed my arms and hands, still squinting from the shock of the sunlight. I wasn’t on fire. There wasn’t even a mild burning smell to give warning. Just my ghastly pale arms.
“Am I dreaming?” I asked him.
He shook out of his own stupor and grabbed my extended arm, hauling me out of the living room and back into my dark tomb of a bedroom, where he slammed the door shut behind us, blocking out all of the sunshine. I felt colder, and after being exposed to the light, the darkness was more encompassing.
“I can’t see.”
The overhead light snapped on, bathing the room in dim yellow. I wanted to go back into the living room.
“Are you okay?” Desmond came close, his rough fingertips trailing over my tingling skin as he inspected me, presumably for any signs of damage. “What did you do to your knees?”
I followed his gaze down and saw what he was looking at. Both my knees were an angry shade of red. They weren’t bleeding, but they looked nasty. Rug burn might be unpleasant, but there was no way it wouldn’t have healed in a matter of seconds. Desmond and I both stared at my knees.
“You can tell me if I’m dreaming,” I said.
“You’re not dreaming.”
“Then why are you naked?”
He rubbed his thumb over my knee, and I winced, sucking in a breath through gritted teeth. “Usually people dream of themselves being naked, not other people,” he reminded me.
“You’ve obviously never seen how you look naked if you think people would rather dream about themselves instead of you.” My view of his perfect ass was obstructed by the top of his head, but he had a nice head so I wasn’t going to complain too much.
“Are you drunk?” he asked.
“You mean did I sleep-drink myself to a point where I woke up at nine in the morning and stumbled out into a sunlit living room?”
Desmond glanced up, and we stared at each other. “It didn’t seem like a stupid question when I asked it. Yet somehow you word it like that and I come across as a moron.”
“I want to go back into the living room.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
At this point, as much as I loved him, I didn’t care what he thought. This might be a spell, or a side effect of being in the fae realm, but whatever it was was letting me feel the heat of sunlight on my bare skin for the first time in twenty-three years, and I wasn’t going to give it up for anything. Even if I had to force my way through him.
I dodged to the side, but not quickly enough. He grabbed my arm and tugged me back towards him. His hold was rough, and when he pulled me, it hurt. Desmond was strong—he was an alpha-level werewolf after all—but I was stronger. He shouldn’t have been able to yank me that hard. And it shouldn’t have hurt.
He must have seen the pain in my response because he immediately dropped my hand and got to his feet. “Are you okay? I didn’t mean to—”
The gears in my brain were spinning like a locomotive about to jump the tracks. I could stand in the sun. A minor wound wasn’t healing. My pulse kept jumping around like a rabbit on crack. And Desmond had been able to hurt me. I thought about the previous night too. How I hadn’t been able to smell or hear things I normally should have.
My heart hammered. “Take me outside,” I told him.
“That’s the worst idea I’ve ever—”
“Desmond, please. I need to go outside.” Before he could come up with a reason not to take me, I scooped my wrinkled jeans off the floor and wriggled myself into them. “Now.” Without waiting for him I turned back to the door and was out in the hall and halfway through the living room before he caught up, a pair of his old jeans barely covering his ass. He fought with the zipper—carefully, since he wasn’t wearing underwear—and trailed me up the short stairs and out into the bright May morning. At least I thought it was May still.