Then, an infant’s cry, a new-world wail made with a lusty first breath. A second cry signaled the twins’ birth.
Annabella tripped and fell, gouging the earth, and turned her head in time to see the wolves alter their direction, a river of furious black rushing down the hill, making for the innocents.
No! Here! Not the babies. But she had no voice.
She clawed a tree trunk to stand and lurched to follow, but her muscles had hardened, betraying her, blood chug-chugging through collapsed veins. She pushed forward, crested the rise herself when a mother’s scream pierced the air. A banshee’s scream.
“Annabella!”
A low voice filtered through Annabella’s darkened consciousness, but she refused to wake. The babies, my fault.
“Annabella!”
She felt herself gathered in a warm embrace, heat pouring into her shaking limbs.
“You’re okay. It’s just a dream,” a rumble of a voice told her. “Wake up, Annabella.”
The nightmare went gray, diluting, spreading into the absent sky. Her heart still pounded; her throat was raw.
Annabella cracked an eye and gazed dumbly at the gray-blue wall opposite her. The solidity was mundane, real. Yet a trio of imaginative paintings hung in the center of the flat expanse. Black tree trunks stretched across the foreground of the canvases like a wicked gate, but beyond was a magic swirl of indistinct figures, dancing. If she let her eyes blur a little bit, the picture seemed to move. The composition evoked ghostly Giselle, but was more mysterious than mournful.
Annabella triple blinked her bleary eyes. Where was she?
She shifted in place, turned to find Custo holding her. He smelled fresh, like soap and shaving cream, and his hair was spiky wet. He leaned against the headboard, her body across his lap. He smiled down at her like a lover who had beaten her to the shower.
“Morning,” he murmured when her eyes focused on him.
She was tempted to curl into his chest and borrow the tempo of his heartbeat, slow and steady. His arms felt like the safest place in the world. So strong. A lick of desire had her core tingling as he nuzzled her neck.
“Everything’s okay. You’re awake now,” he said.
And it all came crashing back: The dress rehearsal, Custo, the cab ride to some storage basement, her subsequent capture and imprisonment in that frightening cell. Sweet Talia, and her babies. The wolf.
Nothing was okay. And nothing ever would be again.
The world as she knew it had turned upside down. Monsters were just as real as she was. A nightmare stalked the shadows of her life. And the man holding her was not human. Or at least not anymore.
Angel.
Annabella sat up and slid off Custo’s lap. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to throb.
He let her go, and his expression sobered. “What time do you need to be at the theater?”
What on earth was he doing cuddling her like that? He was a frigging angel, for crying out loud. She’d stopped going to church a long time ago, but she was pretty sure getting intimate with an angel was a one-way ticket to hell.
Angel. The whole thing made her head ache.
“The theater, Annabella? It’s past noon already.”
Last night she hadn’t been able to let the angel comment pass, so she’d pressed him into some half-assed explanation about how he’d died and his mission on earth: save her and save Segue. Seemed to her like he was making it up. If she hadn’t seen his first clash against the wolf with her own eyes, she’d have never believed him. His fair eyes, dark blond hair, and olive-gold skin pretty much defined angel, but the way he moved—which in Annabella’s opinion said more about a person than anything else—told a completely different story. His smooth prowl and tense bearing suggested a brute strength of sweat, blood, and violence. Not angelic.
She knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth.
Now he was bent on ridding the world of her wolf. The one who’d killed Rudy and almost made Talia lose her babies. All because of her. She couldn’t let anyone else get hurt.
The insanity of the situation burned through Annabella’s body, scorching her dreams, destroying her hopes. This wasn’t happening.
Reality was worse than her nightmare. Shadows were everywhere. In most light, she cast one herself.
Annabella dragged a twisted ponytail out of her hair to cover the return of her shakes. “I have to make a call so the director can make a substitution.”
The gala was at seven. There wasn’t a whole lot of time for the company to run through Serenade. Thomas Venroy would be angry she was ditching Giselle after she swore she could do it, and that would be the end of her time at CBT. The company would say she cracked under pressure. That she hadn’t been ready. That she wasn’t cut out for principal.
Principal.
Her dream of dancing Giselle evaporated. She went as dry and bare as a desert inside.
Dance. Ballet. Joy. All gone. She couldn’t breathe.