Read Online Dark Flame by Caris Roane - Free Book Online Page B

could see stars above the homes opposite Juliet’s place. Her arms were crossed over her chest.
    As had happened earlier, the awareness of how they were lovers in the dreamglide filled his mind. He couldn’t believe he’d kept the two parts of himself so thoroughly separate. He had a split mind in the same way he couldn’t seem to figure out whether to stay or to go.
    He’d been lying to himself for five months, and he hated this reality. He felt like a coward, and the last thing he would ever be was a man who ran from a tough situation.
    He knew his grief over the loss of his family held him in a tight, crushing grip. But it had also served to keep him focused on what was important in his life as an alter vampire. Anything that prevented him from doing his duty as a border patrol officer had to go. He was committed to being a force for law and order within Crescent Territory.
    So, how had he ended up in Revel? How had he become a powerful fae woman’s lover in a forbidden dreamglide environment?
    And what was he supposed to do now?
    ~ ~ ~
    Juliet stood on her patio, watching the last of the sunlight disappear from the emerging night sky. Because the back of her home faced east, she often spent this hour reflecting on her life. Agnes had taught her well.
    The fae world tended to lean toward the philosophical, which of course made men or women like Roche an inexplicable anomaly in their territory.
    The part of the canal over which her house looked was narrow but had strips of trees and grass and intermittent footbridges. In most ways, it resembled the main canal and surrounding landscape she and Brannick had flown through earlier.
    She was at peace, or at least as much as she could be. For whatever reason, Brannick’s proximity to death had taken her back to her own near-death during her alter transformation.
    She’d been in the hospital for most of the body-wracking experience, while the part of her becoming fae had flowed back and forth with her human self. It hadn’t been so much a battle of one form oppressively taking over the other weaker human part, but rather a merging. In that sense, it had been a simple adjustment, and she didn’t mind being a fae woman at all.
    As a sage apprentice with a wise sage mentor of great spirit and strength, Juliet read and composed essays on the nature of life as an alter being.She had a blog that had over ten thousand human followers and about five hundred fae plus a few dozen more comprised of the other alter species. Her thoughts on life in Five Bridges tended to the theoretical and not the personal which meant she’d never once alluded to her dreamgliding with Brannick.
    Until this moment, her alter life had been entirely intellectual, hidden, surface-based and in many ways a complete lie. She used a vampire in her dream-world to get her needs met. But she refused to date or to engage in any way that would be considered normal and healthy in real-time. Essentially, she was full of shit.
    She could blog all she wanted about the beauty and majesty of life, but she wasn’t really living.
    She turned back and stared at Brannick. His eyes were half-open and unseeing. She knew he wasn’t fully present. Emma had been right when she’d said he was hovering in some dark space between life and death. She knew he wasn’t gone, but he wasn’t with her, either.
    He’d been in her home through the daylight hours and she’d gone to him at least a dozen times to try to ‘coax’ him back from the edge, just as Emma had told her to. But he’d been unresponsive.
    A few minutes ago, when she’d had her neighbor’s yellow cat on her lap, she’d felt a shift in the energy in her living room. She’d hoped Brannick had started returning to his corporeal self.
    But the energy had vanished a few minutes ago, and Juliet was back to waiting, but with hope dimming yet again.
    She knew she had to make another effort to reach him, but she’d been putting it off.
    Tears welled in her eyes.