Alex was paralyzed by the sight of this woman in her death throes. The killing was so grisly it didn’t seem real.
When light from the storm ignited in a long fit of flashes he could see Bethany blinking in confused desperation as she convulsed.
Her whole body went limp as her last breath of life gurgled from her failing lungs.
The fist holding her by the hair tossed her off the side of the bed. She hit the floor with a bony thud.
In another flash of lightning Alex saw Jax standing before him holding the blood-slicked knife.
She was gazing into his eyes as if there was nothing else in the room, nothing else in existence.
19.
YOU JUST WOULDN’T BELIEVE how long I’ve wanted to do that,” Jax said in a voice that sounded better than he remembered, and he remembered it as mesmerizing.
Alex wondered if she could have hunted Bethany from another world and followed her to his bedroom in order to catch her without all of her protection.
“She mentioned something about that.”
In a flicker of lightning he saw a hint of satisfaction curve her mouth.
Alex had wanted Bethany dead, and he grasped that she was involved in something that would result in harm to a great many people. She had promised the thug with her that he could cut Alex up, and then changed her mind and decided to do it herself just because he had insulted her. Still, he had never seen anything as gruesome as her death.
Jax must have read the look on his face because she addressed his unspoken thought. “Alex, it was quick. What she would have done to you with her knife would have lasted hours. In the storm no one would have heard you screaming and crying. She would have enjoyed your suffering.”
Alex swallowed and nodded. He was relieved that she had put it in perspective.
“Jax—” He glanced to the rain lashing at the window. He turned a puzzled frown on her. “How come you aren’t wet?”
“It wasn’t raining where I came from.”
He saw wisps of vapor, silhouetted by the flashes of light coming in the window, curling up from her arms and shoulders just as they vanished.
The last time he’d seen her she had basically told him that he was on his own and that she was going to go tend to her own business. She had warned him that trouble would find him.
He wondered why she’d had a change of heart. “What are you doing here?”
Her gaze was still locked on his. “We happened across some of what they had planned. I got here as fast as I could.”
“I’m really glad to see you. I mean, really, really glad.”
“Well, since you’re finished with your sick little part in this coupling, pull up your pants and let’s go. We need to get out of here.”
“I didn’t take any part in it, and don’t you think that if I could pull my pants up I would?” When she didn’t answer he signaled with his eyes toward his wrists. “Cut me free. Please?”
The thought of what Bethany had told him about Jax crossed his mind. Watching Bethany die in such a brutal fashion left him shaky and sick to his stomach. In his whole life he’d never seen anything so horrific. He was covered with splatters of her blood. Only moments before, her living, breathing body had been pressed up against him. Now she lay on the floor dead and he was covered only in her blood.
With the way Jax was staring at him, he wondered if he might be next.
At last withdrawing her gaze from his, she glanced up at his wrists. In flashes of lightning she could see that he was tied to the bed and finally grasped the reality of the situation. She looked back at him and at last smiled just a little.
“Sure.”
As she bent close to him to cut the zip ties, distant flickers of lightning lit her growing smile. By the nature of it he thought that it revealed how happy she was about his helpless condition—not because he was helpless, but because it told her that he was telling her the truth that he hadn’t been a willing part of it.
As she leaned across him to cut the tie on the far side, he caught a hint of her fragrance. It complemented everything else about her.
Alex would have given just about anything not to have been this close to Bethany. He would have given just about anything to stay this close to Jax.
“Thanks for coming, Jax,” he said softly. “I guess I owe you one—in addition to an apology.”
She paused to look down into his eyes from only inches away. She was pressed lightly against his chest. He could feel her steady heartbeat.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have gotten here sooner, Alex. I really am.”
“You got here in time.”
She slowly shook her head. “Not in time to save your grandfather.” Her words hit him like a blow. “You mean that Bethany had something to do with that?”
Jax stretched farther to finish cutting his wrist free, then straightened. “I wasn’t there, but I was able to catch a glimpse through the mirror in his workshop. I saw Queen Bethany and I saw fire.”
Alex sank back against the bed. He’d buried his grief, but hearing that Ben had likely been murdered not only resurrected the anguish, it also awakened a smoldering fury.
Ben hadn’t died from natural causes. He would still be alive if not for Bethany. Maybe Ben would still be alive were Alex not somehow involved. But how could he have avoided being born a Rahl?
As Jax cut his ankles free, Alex yanked out the barbs and pulled up his pants. It was a great relief. She had the grace not to make a point of his embarrassing situation.
“Queen Bethany? What do you mean, ‘Queen’?”
“In our world she was a queen. A very troublesome queen. She hurt anyone she didn’t like, and she didn’t like a lot of people. I had to come to this world to get close to her.”
Her words caught him by surprise and reignited his sense of caution. He wondered if he had been part of some grand scheme after all—a scheme to assassinate a troublesome queen. He wondered if he had been nothing more than human bait.
“What’s a queen from your world doing in my world?”
Jax considered him for a moment. “She apparently had some use for the House of Rahl.”
“What use?”
Jax arched an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you didn’t understand what she was intent on doing here tonight in this bed.”
“I get that much of it.”
Alex reminded himself to cool the heat in his voice. It wasn’t her fault that Bethany had tied him to the bed and intended to kill him after she finished getting what she wanted. It wasn’t Jax’s fault that Bethany had murdered Ben.
He buckled his belt as he collected his thoughts. This woman had, after all, just saved his life. She could have just as easily let him spend the last few hours of his life being cut up by Bethany.
Somehow Alex couldn’t think of Bethany as a queen. He could barely think of her as an adult.
“What I mean is that I don’t know why she had a use for the ‘House of Rahl,’ as you put it. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“We have that in common,” Jax said under her breath as she glanced down at Bethany’s corpse lying in a spreading pool of blood.
20.
ALEX PULLED THE PHONE out of his pocket. “I’d better call the police.”
With his thumb he flipped it open. Jax snatched his wrist before he could dial. She used the tip of the bloody knife in her other hand to flip the phone closed.
“You’re not going to alert anyone. The last thing we need is the authorities giving us trouble. We already have enough trouble. We need to get out of here, and we need to get out now.”
He tried not to take too deep a breath, because the smell of blood was gagging him. “But the body is going to be found sooner or later. When it is, the police are going to think that I murdered her. I’ve got her blood all over me.”
With a finger and thumb, as if to prove his point, he lifted his blood-soaked shirt away from his body for her to see. He wanted the sodden shirt off of him. He needed to
change it. He needed a shower.
“If I run it will only make me look guilty. Attractive women who end up dead are usually killed by their husband or some other man in their life. The police will naturally think that I murdered her.”
Jax glanced down at the body. “Did you really think she was attractive?”
“Yes—no—” Alex raked his fingers back through his hair. “Yes, she was obviously attractive, but no, I wasn’t attracted to her.”
“Calm down, Alex.”
As he gathered his thoughts he realized that she was right. Calling the police would be a problem. What was he going to tell them? How could he possibly explain it?
“How in the world are we going to get rid of her body—and not be found out?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Jax said.
“There’s blood everywhere!” He swung his arm around at the room. “You can’t possibly clean up all this mess. The police have ways of finding even the tiniest speck of blood. They have technology that makes blood glow in the dark so that they’ll still find the tiniest specks of blood that you miss no matter how well you clean it up.”
“They’re not going to find any blood, even with their technology.”
Alex didn’t think that she grasped how good technology could be or the way it was going to look to the police. He had dated Bethany. People had seen them together. She had been killed in his bedroom. She was naked. What else were the police going to think? He certainly couldn’t tell them the truth, and lying would only get him in deeper trouble.
“Jax, they will find traces of blood, and then what am I going to tell them? That she was from another world? That she wanted to have sex with me so that I would get her pregnant with my Rahl heir and then she was going to kill me? They’ll never believe me. I’d be lucky if they thought I was crazy, but they won’t. They’ll think I murdered her.”
Jax gripped his arm. “Calm down, Alex. Let me handle it. I know what I’m doing.”
“Let you handle it? In five minutes you’re liable to vanish again.” How could he tell her how much he feared being locked up? “You’ll be gone again and I’ll be left here alone to handle it.”
“Not this time,” she said in a somewhat haunted voice.
Alex looked up. “What do you mean?”
She gazed into his eyes for a long moment. “If I hadn’t gotten here in time you would have been lost.”
“Lost? You mean I would have been killed when she was finished?”
“Yes. I had to get here as fast as possible. I wasn’t able to take certain . . . precautions.”
“Precautions?”
“I had to forgo the procedures I used before.”
“What procedures?”
“I didn’t have time to establish a lifeline this time.”
“A lifeline . . .” Alex paused a moment. “Do you mean that you can’t get back to your world?”
Her gaze broke away. “Not for now.”
He suddenly realized the magnitude of what she had done in order to save his life. His worry about everything else evaporated in his sudden concern for her. “When will you be able to get back to your home?”
“You let me worry about that. For now I’m stuck here.”
“For how long?”
“Maybe a day or two.”
“But maybe longer?”
She swallowed. “Maybe forever.”
The lightning died out again, plunging the room into gloom lit only by the faint glow of streetlights, but it was enough to see the worry in her eyes.
“It’s all right, Jax. You won’t be alone. I’ll help you.”
She gestured with her knife to the still body on the floor. When lightning crackled again a flickering rectangle of light coming in the window fell across the curve of Bethany’s naked hip. “Yes, I can see that you have everything well in hand.”
Despite everything, Alex was able to smile just a little.
“Do you think your friends will send anyone to help you?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“Because right now I’m the only one able to undertake such a journey. We’re on our own.”
He let out a deep breath. “Jax, I need you to know how sorry I am for the way I treated you the last time.” He discarded the speech, the excuses, that he’d rehearsed in his mind a few hundred times. “You came to help me and I didn’t listen. I didn’t mean to belittle what you and others have done. I just didn’t understand. It was so hard to—”
She lifted a hand to keep him from going on. “When I went back the last time I told people about some of the things I saw here, some of the technology I saw. They reacted much the same way as you. They didn’t believe me, didn’t believe that I had succeeded in coming to this world. Many of them thought I was making it up to cover failure.
“It made me realize just how hard it had to be for you. I suspect that were the situation reversed and were it you who had come to my world instead, I wouldn’t have believed you, either.
“For now let’s both try to be a little more understanding of the gulf between us. We need to help each other if we’re to survive what is coming.”
Alex didn’t know what was coming, but he nodded. It felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, a weight that he’d been carrying since she’d left the last time.
Still, it was profoundly difficult to get his mind around the idea that this woman had actually come from another world.
“Where is this world of yours? Your home? Is it across the universe? In another universe? Through some wormhole in space that allows you to step out of your world and into mine?”
“I can only tell you that the place I come from is on the other side of darkness, on the other side of nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We don’t either.” She lifted a hand in a helpless gesture and then let it drop to her side. “There’s a lot I can’t explain. All I know for sure is that they are very different places, but at the same time they are very much the same. Right now, though, that’s not our problem. Right now, our problem is that if we’re going to find answers we first of all need to stay alive and to do that we need to get out of here.”
Alex nodded. “What are we going to do with Bethany’s body?”
“Send her back to my world,” Jax said as she squatted down beside the dead woman.
When next the lightning flashed Alex was shocked to see Jax using the tip of her knife to cut strange symbols in Bethany’s forehead. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sending her back to my world.”
“But before you said this is a world without magic. How do you expect to do such a thing if there’s no magic here?”
“She came here with a lifeline, the same as I did the two previous times. I’m merely activating it.”
He gestured to the bed. “Jax, there’s blood everywhere—it’s all over me. Even if you get rid of Bethany’s body, her blood is still going to be everywhere just waiting to be discovered.”
Working at the grisly task, Jax spoke without looking up. “The blood is hers and not from this world. It will return with her.” She looked up and grinned. “I wish I could be there to see their faces when I send their queen back to them like this.”
As lightning flashed, the room lit for a moment in its harsh glare only to plunge back into shadows as a cracking boom of thunder shook the house. Outside, branches clattered together in the wind. Rain beat steadily against the windows.
Jax swiftly cut two more mysterious symbols. Despite Bethany being dead, blood oozed from the strange network of lines. Alex couldn’t help taking in the design with an artistic eye, seeing the sense of movement in the lines’ composition.
“There,” Jax said to herself as she stood.
“There what?” In the harsh illumination of another flash of lightning he peered down at the dead woman. “What’s supposed to happen?”
Bethany might have been beautiful in life, but in
death, with the way the wound across her neck gaped open, she was grotesque. The sight turned his stomach. In the next flash of lightning he noticed a stab wound in her lower back. Jax’s blade had been bloody when he’d first seen it. It dawned on him that she must have stabbed Bethany first to disable her.
As Jax stood, the flickers of lightning died out and the room again went dark. Rain thrumming against the window made the darkness feel altogether creepy.
When the lightning crackled again, there was nothing at their feet. No body, no blood.
Alex blinked in surprise and disbelief. Bethany was gone.
Just . . . gone.
“There,” Jax said. “Feel better?”
“How did you do that?” he asked in shock, pointing at the empty place on the floor.
“I told you. I activated her lifeline to pull her back.”
Unable to believe his own eyes, Alex backed up until he bumped into the bed. “No, I mean, really. How did you do that?”
He turned and in the next flash of lightning saw that the sheets were pristine white. There was no blood. Not a speck. He looked down at himself, then ran his hand over his clean shirt. There was no blood on it.
It was as if Bethany had never been there.
Jax leaned in. “Are you all right?”
Alex nodded dumbly. “It’s impossible, but I saw it.”
“I’ve told you every word true, Alexander.”
He could only nod.
She let out a sigh. “This must all be hard for you, Alex. Later on maybe I can help you understand it better, but right now we have to get out of here.” She cast him a suspicious look. “By the way, what happened to that fellow out in the other room, out near the door?”
“What—” Alex remembered then. “Oh, him. I broke his neck.”
“Really?” Jax arched an eyebrow. “Well done, Alex. Well done.”
“There were two. After I broke his neck the other one tied me to the bed. Then Bethany sent him out to wait until she was finished with me. He’ll be out there in the rain somewhere, waiting.”