Tide Read Online Free PDF Page B

and often the girls would have flashbacks for weeks and months afterwards, wondering what made them follow the tall, dark-haired man who whisked them away so easily and then didn’t speak a word the next morning.
    Her name was Laura. Nicholas held her hand tenderly on their way to his townhouse. For all the hatred in his heart, for all the anger he felt and that terrible, irresistible desire to destroy that ran in his veins, he would not harm her. He kept the anger for himself and burnt silently. For one night he would caress her, and touch her hair as gently as a mother, and kiss her as if he was in love.
    Love was part of the fantasy. Tenderness was something he looked for in them, the girls he couldn’t tell one from another. They had to be beautiful, and none of them could have long black hair; he couldn’t bear that, he couldn’t bear to be reminded of the girl from long ago. Only Sarah would do that for him and still be there the next morning, still be his.
    Laura. She would talk about her job and her family, she would laugh nervously and accept another vodka. She would be wholly and entirely human, with her worries about make-up and a compact mirror falling out of her bag and a run in her tights, and the photo of her nieces in her wallet. He would hold her and speak to her long into the night, and prevent her from falling asleep so that he would not be left alone to the calls of the Shadow World. Until her eyes would close, and eventually he’d have to give up and answer his father’s call, as the noise in his head grew louder, unbearable.
    Nicholas couldn’t stop thinking of Sarah as he kissed the blue-haired girl. It would have to be just Sarah and him in the world soon. Nobody else for her, nobody else for him, ever again. So this is what he’d have to do: the people closest to her would have to die. They’d just distract her otherwise. She’d have to be properly alone but for him, and she couldn’t be if she had aunts and best friends and all that bloody farce of a family, could she?
    I’ll take my time, and when you’re ready, the journey will begin. From Scotland to the gate of the Shadow World, every step forward will be another drop of your faith in life trickling away. Shame I couldn’t just move in with you now. It would be so good to spend all my time with you, day and night. But it’d be too soon. My control of your mind is not strong enough yet, though it seems to be working extremely well – and you might get suspicious. I hardly sleep, I hardly eat, my father contacts me when I least expect it. And I’m often surrounded by my Elementals. How much I would have loved it to be me and you, as good as married already … but I have to be careful .
    The last time they had worked on breaking a chosen wife … It didn’t end well, and all their plans were shot to pieces. They couldn’t make that mistake with Sarah.
    The girl from long ago.
    For a second, the blue-haired young woman resting on his pillow looked at him with black eyes, and not her own blue ones – and the arms entwined around his back were amber-skinned and not white. For a second the girl from long ago, the one chosen before Sarah, the one he’d loved … she lay on his bed and called his name.

     
    Laura lay asleep beside him, her dress draped over the end of the bed, her shoes and her coat abandoned on the wooden floor.
    Another girl he wouldn’t remember the name of, who held no meaning, who left him with no memories. Just a short-lived relief from the voices that screamed constantly in his mind, from the terror that grasped him more and more often as the time to be bound in the Shadow World grew closer. A desperate way to grab some crumbs of human life for himself before he’d have to shed his human form and his spirit life would begin. A warm body, lips that smiled, the need to eat and drink and sleep – a girl who smelled and felt like life.
    Until she fell asleep, and the dark closed on him again. He