Then another, and another. Heat exploded on either side of her, fire rolling high into the night sky. Claire couldn't hold back her scream. Nor could she curb the survival instinct that kicked her legs into motion as the forest around her began to burn. She ran in the only direction she could, away from Andreas. Her sense of bearings was lost in the chaos of her terror, not that she actually expected she would escape.
She ran, waiting to feel the scorch of hellish fire on her skin, certain that Andreas's fury would not permit her to live. But still she ran. She was breathless by the time she reached the edge of the woods. Breathless and shaking, her feet stumbling over the grass and rough ground. She lifted her head and nearly burst into relieved tears to see the manor house looming up ahead of her. Behind her was darkness and the glow of flames in the distance. A jolt of adrenaline surged into her bloodstream, and Claire raced across the open lawn to the front door of the fortresslike estate. The place was unlocked, left open in the guards' haste to evacuate earlier. Claire flew inside and slammed the door behind her, throwing all of the bolts and locks home. She ran for high ground, grabbing a cordless phone along the way and fleeing up the stairs to the third floor, praying that the sanctuary she'd just found wouldn't turn out to be her tomb. She was halfway through dialing Wilhelm's secretary before she realized the phone had no dial tone.
It was dead, nothing but endless broken static on the line. "Damn it!" Claire threw the phone down as she drifted to the large, shuttered windows on the far wall. She had some inkling of what she'd see on the other side of the glass, but it still robbed her of breath when she opened the shutters and peered out over the estate's expansive grounds. Black smoke plumed from the long drive and from within the forest. Orange fire twisted up over the treetops, licking at the starlit sky. And in the center of the woods, a brighter light glowed--throbbing white heat, blindingly intense. Andreas. He was the source of all that eerie light.
Would he come for her now? If he did, she had nowhere left to run. But the light from his body didn't move. Neither did Claire. Her feet stayed rooted to the floor near the window as she watched that unearthly pulse, unable to look away. She watched, until hours passed and the fires on the road and in the forest began to die down. She watched... as night crept steadily toward dawn and the glow of Andreas's fury continued to burn.
Chapter Four
She didn't know what woke her. With a start, Claire lifted her head from where her brow had been pressed against the cool glass of the window. She didn't know how long she'd dozed--long enough that the faint pink blush of dawn had marched all the way over the horizon, bringing with it a drizzle-laden shroud of fog that blanketed the forest and the ground below. Oh, God... morning. Daylight growing brighter by the minute. And no sign of Andreas's light anywhere. Claire's breath misted the glass as she peered down from the window at the lifeless stretch of grass, pavement, and pines outside. Had he left while she'd slept? Was he gone now? Was he dead? After what she'd witnessed him do last night, she wasn't sure why the thought should put such a knot of dread in her breast. But before Claire could tell herself that she should be damned grateful just to have survived the night herself, she was already on the stairs, descending swiftly through the heart of the manor house. She freed the locks on the front door and eased it open, pulling one of the guards' coats off a stand in the foyer and wrapping it around her shoulders to ward off the wet chill as she stepped outside. The striking quiet hit her first. No sound at all other than the intermittent patter of a light rain. It was so peaceful and still, she might have been tempted to think last night had just been a horrible dream. But then the pungent stink of extinguished fires carried across the grounds. It had all been real, worse than the stuff of nightmares. Her nose burned with the acrid reminder of the violence she'd witnessed. Claire drifted across the grass, bypassing the long drive to avoid the carnage of her vanguard. She didn't want to see what the fires had done to the Breed males who'd been killed last night, nor did she want to know how quickly the rising sun would consume whatever might remain of them.
It was that thought--the understanding of what prolonged ultraviolet exposure did to the hypersensitive skin of the Breed--that pushed Claire deeper into the forest. Toward the place where she'd last known Andreas to be. It was difficult to tell where the fog ended and the trailing smoke from burnt trees and scorched ground began. Everything seemed cloaked in heavy gray mist. Her skin dampening with each step she took, Claire watched her feet move through the low-lying fog, following a blackened trail that led some long distance into the woods. The quiet reached out to her as she moved past singed bramble that clawed at her like skeletal fingers of the dead. The stench of old smoke and burnt vegetation grew stronger here, catching in the back of her throat. And yet another sharp odor--not that of cold, extinguished flames, or even the electrical tang that had been rolling off Andreas's body last night. But there was something else in the air. Fresh, rising heat. The sickly sweet olfactory assault of burning flesh. Oh, no.
She took a few anxious steps, faltering a bit as the earth dropped sharply, about a foot below her. The hole where the old tree root had been, she dimly registered. The hole that became a crater when Andreas blew her hiding place to bits in his rage. It was at this spot in the woods that he'd lingered last night. He hadn't followed her at all. And he hadn't left before the sun began to rise. He was still here.
Claire cautiously approached the large, dark shape huddled ahead of her on the fog-threaded ground. He wasn't moving, hardly breathing. The fire that had been burning around him and within him was gone now. His clothes were scorched and torn. His skin sizzled under the hazy rays of the sun, already forming blisters everywhere that he was exposed. He didn't look so dangerous like this. He wasn't the monster she'd met out here in the dark; he was just a man now. A man made deathly vulnerable by the part of him that was something more than human. Like this, it wasn't difficult at all to remember that she had once loved him like no other. It surprised her how easily the pain of their abrupt parting came back to her, as well. Those days were long past, but no matter what she felt for him then or now, she could not let him suffer. She would not abandon him to the sun, no matter what he'd done or what he'd become in the long time since they had been together. "Andre," Claire whispered, her voice breaking the closer she got to him and saw the severity of his burns.