Bound by Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

of those documents were so dry and boring, they ought to help her fall asleep in a hurry. That would be a plus.
    As she closed the bathroom door, Merilee couldn’t take her eyes off the spot where she had last seen Jake on the townhouse stairs.
    "At least I might not have nightmares tonight," she muttered to herself. "I could definitely handle a juicy erotic fantasy for a change."
     
    (2)
    Bartholomew August preferred the dark. The modern world always seemed cleaner in the soft yellow glow of streetlamps, or the silver shine of the moon.
    He stood on the dock and took a long, slow breath of night air, tainted by brine and rot and pollutants, but oddly satisfying nonetheless.
    August’s first and truest home was darker than night itself, and cool, and deadly, a place where the slightest traces of scent drifted for miles unaided. He had just departed from that home without making a sound, reached this gods-forsaken spot, and assumed his alternate shape as fluidly as a magician closing his fist to complete some mystical transformation.
    One moment, August was nothing—and the next, a man.
    Tonight as he shifted, he chose black silk for his suit and light overcoat, not unlike Armani signature pieces. Once he settled into the human world, into his human surroundings, he would gather real garments—or rather have the woman and the boy gather clothing for him. Granted, the boy was mostly useless, but August had fathered him many years ago, and the boy had the lightest touch of August’s formidable gifts. Time and poor habits had ravaged the boy and the woman, but by his own choice August himself had remained unchanged in both appearance and attitude.
    New York City stretched before him, a festival of glaring lights, activity, and absolute disorder. The stench of human life surrounded him, assailed him, and he hated
    it, and he hated the dilapidated abandoned dock creaking beneath his feet. Human waste. So prevalent and pathetic. The chilly spring air pushed at his skin and bones, and his ears ached from the grating noise of traffic and music and the chaos that was Hell’s Kitchen and its Hudson River boundary.
    He had no place here.
    He had no place anywhere.
    August worked his newly solidified jaw and walked off the dock, trying not to stare into the black pit of loneliness that always waited, no matter where he went or what form he took. His all-too-human hands shook from the power of that awful, dark hole in his mind. He wanted to tear out his hair to make the sensation of loneliness stop. He would rip off his fingers or chew through his own feet if he thought it would help the pain in his now-beating heart.
    But it wouldn’t.
    For now, he’d just have to endure it as he had so very many times before.
    "You’re later than what you said," said the gnarled, rheumy-eyed woman as she stepped from the shadows of the gray warehouse looming on his right. "But that’s nothing new, now is it?"
    The sound of that unmistakable Irish brogue, the ring of that never-ending defiance, dragged August from his despair. His acute senses registered garlic, cooked meat, and yeast as he appraised the wizened creature standing before him. Thin. Wrinkled. Hair whiter than cotton, combed into a frizzled bun. All of this he saw in the partial light of one flickering streetlamp, because the rest of the bulbs had exploded upon his arrival, before he placed barriers around his energy.
    His human-looking skin crawled with the realization that this woman’s spotted, lumpy hands had once touched him with a supple, fiery grace. Those wrinkled lips had once kissed his own, and driven back the raging emptiness and loss inside him, at least for a few days, a few years—seconds, really, in the span of his life. His gut ached from the memory, and from the weight of his own disgust.
    Never again.
    But he had vowed that before about relationships with humans, only to surrender to need, to natural desire. A night’s pleasure or a month’s