Heart and Soul by Jackie May (reading list .TXT) 📗

And so, closing my eyes, tilting my head back with a gasp, I let go. I let my heart plunge into ecstasies and rapture through bright, unguarded bliss at the hands of the only man who’s ever made me feel this way. Fire. Fire, not only across every inch of my skin, but streaking hot through my heart and soul, blasting from my mouth with heavy, panting breaths.

“Shayne,” he rasps, slowing himself. I open my eyes to see him searching my face with a look of complete helplessness. “Shayne…”

He can’t say it. He doesn’t have to. I know exactly what he’s feeling, because I feel it, too. And the butterflies are screaming, Enough is enough!Yes, it’s a beautiful swan dive, exquisite form, but dammit to hell, don’t you see the ground rushing up at you?Open your eyes! I close my eyes, and I stop Brenner’s lips with a kiss that says everything we haven’t been brave enough to put into words. Not that words could even do it justice anyway. Only certain classic song lyrics come close.

Can’t Fight This Feeling.

Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.

With a sharp intake of breath, Brenner pushes away from me. He scrambles off the bed, stumbles into the wall, and slides down in a heap. Shocked emotion stings his eyes.

I push hair out of my face. “Jay, what? What is it?”

He’s trembling. Chest heaving. This is wrong. This is very wrong. I freeze, as though facing off with a cornered feral animal. Any movement will send him scampering from the room.

He blinks hard, regaining some semblance of control over his emotions. “Black chin.” Another hard blink. “Black chin. It’s there. It’s right there. I remember it clearly, but…”

“Remember? Remember what? What black chin?”

“The vampires.” He shakes his head, correcting himself. “The revenants that killed Haley. One had…” He hovers trembling fingers over his chin. “Black, like a stripe—maybe a tattoo—from his bottom lip, down his chin and neck.”

“Okay…” I don’t know what else to say. My heart is convulsing with fright. This is bad. This is… One of his eyes twitches, a storm overcoming his expression. This is that broken part of Brenner, triggered by some memory. “And you’re thinking about that now?”

“I didn’t remember. I never remembered…I mean, until now, even though…but I can still remember not remembering.”

Fragmented thoughts. Twitchy. Overwhelmed. I remember first meeting Brenner like this. I remember describing him to Agent Hillerman as spazzy. I laughed about it back then. What a spazzy hot mess.

I don’t laugh about it anymore. Rushing to his side, I wrap my arms around him, pressing my cheek against his chest. I feel his hammering heart. He holds me tightly, massaging the back of my neck, as though I’m the one who needs consoling. “Shayne, this wasn’t there. It wasn’t there, I’m telling you. But it’s supposed to be there—I saw him that night. There were three vamps, but only one that I saw clearly. Pale gray skin; white, cataract eyes; sharp fangs, all bloody. I shot at him.”

“I’ve heard all that. You’ve always told it that way.”

“But that wasn’t everything. I mean, that was everything I remembered, ever since I first met you. I’ve played it out over and over in my mind, and there was never a black chin. Until now. It’s like…watching a movie you’ve seen a million times, only now somebody has added a part that wasn’t there before. Just now, it just popped into my head.”

My heart sinks. Ever since I first met you, he said. Ever since he first met me…on the same night master vampire Henry Stadther compelled Brenner to forget everything he knew about vampires and the underworld. The next day, I forced Henry to reverse the compulsion, to restore Brenner’s memories.

“The compulsion,” I say, pulling back to look Brenner in his haunted eyes. “When Henry Stadther restored your memories, he must have held that part back.”

“The black chin.”

“It must mean something to him. Henry was fine with you remembering everything else, just not that one thing.”

The obvious one-word question—Why?—hangs in the air between us. But when Brenner voices it, I’m surprised to find that we’re thinking of different whys: “Why now?” he asks. “Why did the memory suddenly come back?”

The answer is very simple, and very bad. “There’s only one way a compulsion could be released without him being here in person, touching you.”

Brenner’s eyebrows raise. “He’s dead?”

I nod. “Like, just now. Somebody just killed Henry Stadther.”

I feel Brenner’s body tighten with repressed energy. This will revitalize the search for Haley’s killers. He wants to go. He wants to go now, go at this hard, and he won’t stop until he finds that black chin. Brenner will throw himself at this the only way he knows how: all caution to the wind, a bull in a china shop. My anxious butterflies scoff. More like, china in a bull shop. A human doesn’t belong in the underworld.He’ll be crushed. You can’t possibly keep him.

“I know,” I say to both the butterflies and Brenner, “I know, you want to jump on this—”

“Let’s go to the Agency.”

I grasp both sides of his collar, as though jerking on a dog’s leash. “We will.”

“Let’s go.”

“No, but—”

“This changes everything. Henry Stadther was hiding this. He knew something about those revenants.”

There, Brenner’s just given me an inch. I’ll take a mile. “Exactly! He knew something, and now he’s dead, Jay. Do you know how hard it is to kill a master vampire? Do you have any idea how long he’s lived? It’s…this is huge. Whatever happened, it’s a kick to the hornet’s nest. All the most powerful underworlders in Detroit will rampage for better positions on the food chain. Trust me, we don’t want any part of that.”

“What, so we do nothing?”

I shake my head. “No, I’m saying that this is way bigger than us, so we have to play the table, not the cards.”

Sighing, Brenner leans his head back against the