From there, I had resisted as much as I could stealing into her mind, creating around us another dream. In the end, though, that had proved a battle I could not have hoped to win.

Something yet called to me. Some part of her. It came through the mysterious link that had been forged between us. Harkening to it, I’d halted at the doorway of the parlor, noting my chair inside. The one from which I had projected my mind those times I had entered her dreams.

I’d touched the scarred cheek of Tumult’s mask, beneath which my leathered skin recalled the grazing of those delicate fingertips. My lips. Did they not also still hold the sensation of the soft caress of her own?

These lips. She had kissed them.

Mine.

She had kissed me. Touched her angel’s lips to my dead ones.

The heart Stephanie had given me. If it had held through that kiss, would it not also hold until her final departure?

Heedless of the answer, I gave in to the need to see her one last time. In entering this final dream, I had only meant to show her the truth of the feelings I had contended with all this time, no matter what form or mask I took. And she had not run from me when I’d invited her to dance. My daring grew, encouraged by our invisible connection, her seeking eyes rendering me powerless to resist the desire that I had theretofore managed to keep at bay, if not deny.

She had gone with me into the dark, too. Even knowing what I sought.

How could she not when, due to our connection, there was no way for me to hide from her? But then, had there ever been?

There, in the nothing, I did what I had wanted to so fiercely that night I had first begun to love her, bending to take her lips with mine.

And oh, how her own had answered.

Her hands had dared to wander over my garments—and then so boldly beyond them.

Continuing as it morphed into something else entirely, our dance proceeded from there into forbidden territory. Dauntless, we accompanied one another there. Our entwinement—had it not been made all the more irresistible, all the more unstoppable, all the more ecstatic, by the precarious mingling of our two souls?

As it all escalated into rampant fire, which of us could have hoped to stop the other?

It was my contention that neither of us would have. Certainly not I.

Except . . . there were people in the house.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Lucas

“Erik!” shouted Rastin as Wes, Charlotte, Patrick, and I entered through the front door behind him.

“Well,” muttered Wes, who turned in a slow circle, “so much for the element of surprise.”

“He’s gone,” said Rastin, who pressed a hand to his forehead. “His spirit. I can’t feel it.”

“Lucas?”

“Oh my God,” said Patrick at the sound of my name, uttered by the softest of voices that had all five of us pivoting toward the grand staircase. Stephanie stood at the landing, her eyes hollowed with disbelief, her dark hair tousled, her expression at once bereft and lost.