Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [870]
She closed her eyes, feeling the awful words—the horrible memories—rise up like acid in her throat. “I can’t,” she murmured. “If I speak it, then everything I’ve tried to put behind me … everything I’ve worked so hard to forget … it will all become real again.”
“You can’t spend your life running from the truth,” he said, and something haunted crept into his voice. A sadness, a resignation that told her he understood some of the burden she’d carried for so long. “Denying the truth never makes it go away, Alex.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she replied quietly. In her heart, she knew that. She was tired of running and sick of fighting to keep the horror of her past buried and forgotten. She wanted to be free of it all, and that meant facing the truth, no matter how awful—no matter how unfathomable—it may be. But fear was a powerful enemy. Maybe too powerful. “I’m scared, Kade. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to face it alone.”
“You are.” He dropped a tender kiss on her shoulder, then brought her gaze back to his. “But you’re not alone. I’m with you, Alex. Tell me what happened. I’ll see you through it, if you’ll let me.”
She held his imploring stare and found the courage she needed in the steely strength of his eyes. “We’d had such a good day together, all of us. We picnicked down by the water, and I had just taught Richie how to do a backflip off the dock. He was only six years old, but he was fearless, and willing to try anything I did. It had been a perfect day, filled with so much love and laughter.”
Until darkness had settled over the swamp, bringing unholy terror with it.
“I don’t know why they chose our family. I’ve searched for a reason, but I’ve never been able to find one for why they came out of the night to attack us.”
Kade caressed her carefully as she struggled for the words that came next. “Sometimes there are no reasons. Sometimes things happen and there’s nothing we can do to make sense of them. Life, and death, isn’t always neat or logical.”
Sometimes death sprang out of the shadows like a wraith, like a monster too horrific to be real.
“There were two of them,” Alex murmured. “We didn’t even know they were there until it was too late. It was dark, and we were all sitting on the veranda, relaxing after supper. My mom was on the porch swing with Richie, reading us Winnie-the-Pooh before bed, when the first one came out of nowhere without warning and pounced on her.”
Kade’s hand stilled. “You’re not talking about a man.”
She swallowed. “No. It wasn’t a man. It wasn’t even … human. It was something else. Something evil. It bit her, Kade. And then the other one grabbed Richie with its teeth, too.”
“Teeth,” he said evenly, no shock or disbelief in his voice, only a steady, grim understanding. “You mean fangs, don’t you, Alex? The attackers had fangs.”
She closed her eyes as the impossibility of the word sank in. “Yes. They had fangs. And their eyes … they glowed in the dark like bright coals, and in the center of them, their pupils were thin and long, like a cat’s. They couldn’t have been human. They were monsters.”
Kade’s touch was soothing on her face and hair as the terror of that awful night played out again in her mind. “It’s all right. You’re safe now. I only wish I could have been there to help you and your family.”
The sentiment was sweet, however improbable, given that he couldn’t be more than a few years older than she. But from the sincerity of his voice, she knew he truly meant it. No matter their odds, or the enormity of the evil they faced, Kade would have stood with her against the attack. He would have kept them all safe when no one else could have.
“My father tried to fight them off,” Alex murmured, “but everything was happening so