Claire cleared her throat and I looked over at her.
"Sorry to interrupt," she said. Her expression was grim. "But there's something you need to see."
She led us in the living room and through to a hallway beyond. Up a short flight of stairs and into an expansive, professionally decorated master bedroom with a king-sized canopy bed. Candles were lit and flickering throughout the room. Dozens of them. There was the scent of perfume in the air.
Stacy was lying on the silk sheets of her bed wearing black, lacy lingerie and high-heeled slippers. She was asleep with her long blond hair spread out on the black silk pillows like a macabre Sleeping Beauty.
I frowned. No, she wasn't asleep. I sucked in a breath that I didn't actually need anymore.
Her eyes were open and staring up at the ceiling, wide and glassy.
And very, very dead.
The silver hilt of a knife stuck out of her chest, and I touched my own chest, flashing back to my stake wound. But I'd recovered from my injury.
Stacy wouldn't.
I heard somebody sob and realized it was me. Thierry gathered me into his arms and held on to me tightly.
"We'll find another way," he said softly.
"Somebody killed her," I said out loud, and it didn't even sound like my voice, too shaky, too broken. "Who would kill her?"
Considering her recent black magic activity, I'd say that was actually a long list. But looking at the romantic setup of the room, from the candles to the lingerie, I'd have put money on the murderer's being her new boyfriend.
"I don't sense the murderer is still here." Claire had her eyes closed, her arms raised to her sides. "Whoever it was left only minutes before we arrived."
I pulled away from Thierry and looked down at Stacy's face, still as coldly beautiful as she had been last night in the park. I wanted to feel sorry for what had happened to her, because it was a hell of a way to go—killed by somebody you thought that you loved—
but all I could feel was…
Nothing. There was a big, gaping hole inside me. A black hole that seemed to devour emotions. I wasn't upset or scared or depressed. At the moment, at the revelation that
Stacy had died, all I felt was nothing.
I remembered something she'd told me last night along with the three-day time limit for curse reversal.
"It's over." I swallowed hard. "She told me that if she dies, then the curse is permanent."
"Don't say that!" Claire said, and she began rooting through the bookcase at the side of the bed. "I've never heard of a completely permanent curse. Look, all of her magic books are here. I'm totally taking these back to Niagara Falls tonight. I'll read through them. If there's anything I can do to help you out I'll be in touch as soon as I can, okay?"
I nodded stiffly, still too stunned to even make room for a little bit of positivity. "Okay. If you say so."
Thierry turned me away from the bed to look at him instead of the dead witch. "Sarah, please be strong. This isn't the end."
"Just feels like it, right?"
He took my face between his hands and forced me to look at him. "Sarah, please. Don't lose hope. Hope is sometimes all we have."
"Since when have you become such an optimist?"
"Since about ten weeks ago."
I smiled weakly at him. "I'm tired. I know I've only been awake for a few hours today, but
I think I want to go to sleep in my own bed tonight. I'll pull a Scarlett and think about everything tomorrow."
He nodded. "Perhaps that would be for the best. Let's leave this place. I'll contact the authorities when I return to Haven."
So we left, literally closing the door behind us on any hope for breaking my curse tonight.
I went back to George's place, to my bed that I hadn't slept in for a week in which I'd stayed with Thierry at his townhome, stayed at the motel in my hometown, or slept on the sofa at Haven, and I pulled the covers over my head and tried to sleep.
Not too surprisingly, I dreamed. Vividly.
I was in Mexico with Thierry. A picture postcard of our trip to Puerto Vallarta shortly after we'd first met when I thought that I might have just achieved my little vampiric happily ever after with my handsome but angsty Prince Charming.
The sun was setting over the ocean, which sparkled like diamonds. The sand felt cool against my hands. I reclined on a lounge chair under the umbrella that had been up during the day. The sky was all shades of pinks, oranges, purples, and golds as the sun slowly slipped beneath the horizon. There was a slight wind that felt warm against my skin and I could smell a mixture of sea salt and that cocoa-butter aroma of suntan lotion.
I took a sip of the drink the waiter just brought by—a Tequila Sunrise. My favorite and definitely appropriate to the location. The mixture of tequila, orange juice, and grenadine slid satisfyingly down my throat.
I wore the skimpy red bikini that I'd bought specifically for the trip. When I'd first put it on
I felt strange and exposed wearing so little compared to the way we had to dress for winter in Toronto, but I'd quickly gotten used to it. A couple of beaches away the women went topless, so my small bit of red material was comparatively modest.
"You're so beautiful," Dream-Thierry said. He sat on the accompanying lounge chair. I turned my head and smiled at him. His shoes and socks were off and his black shirt was unbuttoned to the waist.
"You're not so bad yourself," I said.
He got up from his chair and knelt beside mine, resting his hand on my bare stomach.
"I'm glad you convinced me to come here," he said. He pulled off my dark sunglasses and set them down on the little table between the lounge chairs that also held our drinks. "I want to kiss you right now."
"Well, what's stopping you?"
His hand drifted down to my hip, over the tied strings at the side that held the bikini bottoms in place, and then further down to my thigh, my knee, my calf, and then back up again all the way to my face.
"When I'm with you, Sarah, you have a tendency to make me forget myself," he said, and his dark gaze returned to mine.
I frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It means that when I'm with you I feel like a normal man when I am anything but."
"You're normal," I said. "Very normal. Now are you going to kiss me, or what?"
A small smiled played across his extremely kissable lips. "I'm not normal," he said as he moved his face up to mine and brushed his mouth against mine. "And neither are you. Not anymore."