so he thought until she stabbed her finger deep into the wound Baylor had created. Trace bellowed in agony and tried to haul himself off the floor and out of her sadistic reach, but all of a sudden the little blond mouse who shook at every word he spoke had found the strength of a dozen Demons and kept him forcefully in place as she wriggled her finger down as far as she could into his body.
“By the Dark, are you insane?” he roared, fumbling at his back for her hand. Before he could reach her, however, she yanked it out and shoved him hard onto his back again. He was so heavily occupied with his pained shouts that she climbed up over him without any argument from him that didn’t come in the form of curses she probably didn’t understand. Not unless she had happened to learn Shadese, the Shadowdwellers’ native tongue, in the past five minutes or so.
On a visual-sensory delay of sorts as information filtered through the haze of his hurt, Trace absorbed her actions as she yanked up the long skirt she was wearing, soaking it with bloody handprints while she threw her leg over his hips and settled herself over him as if she were about to ride him into the ground. The fact that he was in too much pain at first to protest, despite the image she made in her strange, pale sort of beauty, only made him angrier.
“Get off!” he gasped at last, reaching for the waif with his jellied arms. He was as weak as a kitten, but he would be damned if he couldn’t throw off a sadist bitch no bigger than a ten-year-old.
When she swatted him away as if he were a pesky fly, Trace was ready to explode with frustrated fury.
And then she did the oddest thing, the mere shock of it cutting off his torrential emotions at the knees. The peculiar little blonde ran her splayed hands slowly up his bared belly and chest as she leaned fully forward, just until her eyes were gazing down into his, and her lips were touching his mouth by the space of a hair. Trace caught his breath, holding back his reaction merely by the power of his surprise. He stared up into eyes of blue, so unique to someone like him, and felt her breath and its incongruous warmth as it spilled in rapid rushes over his face. He became aware of her scent again, but this was probably because it was everywhere, warm and weighty and pervasively sweet.
“Trust me,” she demanded of him as all of her weight came to lie against him. “This will help.”
Trace couldn’t even conceive of how to argue with her about that. Old instincts cursed him for ever turning his back on a woman, even if he was about to die. But older instincts than that were shifting the focus of his attention, helping to curb the lance of pain constantly running through him. As if he had his father’s perceptions and could sense the truth on a higher level, Trace knew that she believed what she was doing could actually help. Ashla was as gentle now as she had been seemingly cruel a moment ago, and the softness of her caressing touch left him off balance and raw with vacillating focuses.
Wraith or not, she had an intriguing little body tucked into that dress, he realized as she slowly began to reach and glide over him; moving like liquid poured over a polished path, she simply flowed. She stroked, she touched. She found every bit of exposed skin she could and painted it with her special brand of delicate attention. All the while she laid herself along his body, warming him in more ways than one.
Trace was left with the inane thought that while he’d never been overly fond of the scent of flowers, he might be persuaded to think otherwise in the future…provided he even had a future after this.
The Lost woman continued running her hands all along his bare skin and Trace was struck by how very much it was like a seduction. Her eyes slid closed now and again, her expression one of deep concentration, while at the same time it seemed as though she were experiencing a focused pleasure. It radiated into all her increasingly delicious movements, but it was most reflected in the soft, unthinking sounds she made. She moved in slight rocking motions as she reached to touch his arms, hands, and the tips of his fingers where they lay passively at his sides. Then she reversed her direction, her slightly sticky fingers climbing up Trace’s throat and head until they were in his hair. Simultaneously, she sprawled out over him, her full weight, such as it was, resting on him as her legs slid down along the length of his.
“It’s all right,” she whispered as her lips trailed down his jawline until her cheek was stroking against his.
Trace’s confusion and any last remaining instincts to rebel faded. He lifted a hand to the back of her small head, the silky-soft texture of her feathery hair sliding under his fingertips.
“You know,” he said hoarsely, “there are easier ways to get a date.” But even as he made the facetious remark, Trace felt his entire body shift in sensation. It took him a moment to comprehend that what he was feeling was an actual rush of relief. As the pain bled from him in earnest, he took hold of Ashla by the back of her head and neck and pulled her back until he could see her eyes again. She looked flushed and uncomfortable now, her body stiff all of a sudden as she refused to look directly at him.
“What are you?” he asked on a whisper as he studied her carefully for Nightwalker attributes.
The Nightwalkers were the supernatural races, the night races, those who held the sun in dread and thrived in the darkness and moonlight. His race, the Shadowdwellers, was the epitome of that description. All of the Nightwalker breeds were the caretakers of strange and wondrous powers, rather like the power to heal with a touch.
She was no ’Dweller, of that he was certain. Not with that fair coloring and tiny body structure. She was also far too pale to be a Demon, a race that ran to tan themselves. And Vampires, while pale, were not able to heal anyone but themselves…unless a bite was involved. He eliminated Mistrals and Lycanthropes for similar reasons. Besides, only two creatures on Earth that he knew of could enter Shadowscape.
Shadowdwellers and humans.
Specifically, comatose humans.
Shadowscape was a lightless dimension just a step out of phase with Realscape. It was only a step, but it was enough to make the entire ’scape completely absent of the world’s population to the perception of anyone there. With concentration, a powerful Shadowdweller like Trace could Fade into the dark of Shadowscape, and Unfade to return to Realscape at will. For ’Dwellers, Shadowscape was the ultimate world away from the painful sear of light that rampantly littered a human-dominated world. The human need for illumination, coupled with the natural course of the sun, had made most of the planet completely unlivable, and often suicidal, for Trace’s people. As it was, they spent most of their lives chasing the darkness to places like Alaska and New Zealand, the Arctic and the Antarctic lands where night would fall seasonally without end for months at a time.
Humans were the second occupants of Shadowscape; what Trace’s people referred to as the Lost. Trace looked into Ashla’s eyes, surprised at the depths of light and emotion within the sky blue pools. Previously, his experiences with the Lost had been chillingly flat. They weren’t supposed to be able to see the ’Dwellers—or each other, for that matter—so they never seemed to react to anything around them. To look into their faces was to look into a vacant place, an expression of haunted bewilderment as they tried to solve the puzzle of where they were, how they had gotten there, and how they could possibly get back to the life they had known before. They didn’t realize that somewhere in Realscape their bodies had become blanks, empty of soul and consciousness, some illness or trauma having stolen away the tether that tied the Lost part of the person to their now blank body.
The Lost were merely spirits, mental manifestations of the wandering soul. In essence, they were wraiths, images projected by the Lost’s own memory of themselves. They had no warmth. No scent. No awareness of the Shadowdwellers and the truths of the dimensional landscape they were now trapped in.
But this one did, he thought as he stared
