Free Divine Fire by Melanie Jackson

firmly resisted the urge to tell these people that their losses—whatever they were—were unlikely to have carried the same terror and sense of helplessness that came from being trapped upside down in a car while an icy stream rushed in through a shattered windshield. That, while it was sad they had lost whomever, they had never watched the person they loved most in the world drown while they looked on, unable to help because their own broken body was pinned in place by a crumpled dashboard and a root-choked riverbank with branches sharp as spears.
    She hadn’t said anything then, but she had been angry. And only those who understood her need to grieve—and, yes, to feel guilt for surviving when Mark hadn’t—had remained her friends. All others had been dismissed from her life.
    And once the first anguish passed, she had adjusted. Mostly. There had only been one time, a black midnight when she had been very lonely and more than a little drunk. She didn’t like to think about it, but that February night she had almost been tempted into the suicide tango; a short, passionate dance with death that seemed to offer the only quick and easy way out of the guilt and grief and loss.
    But a kindly Fate had intervened, and She had come in an interesting guise. At the moment that Brice had reached for the bottle of tranquilizers on her bedside table, she had seen Byron—or rather, his photograph—staring up at her from the pages of a book of poetry. His eyes were intense, his lips slightly smiling. Leaving so soon? he seemed to ask.
    The great poet had looked better than the Grim Reaper—braver and kinder—so she had danced with him instead.
    Brice exhaled slowly. Her breath was shaky and irregular. Even now, the memory of how close she had come to giving up frightened her.
    They said that some sorrows grew sweet with time, and that bitter fruit could ripen into something beautiful. But that hadn’t been true of her loss. Still, she had thought she’d managed to keep the bitterness from poisoning all of her heart and the rest of her life. Was it so strange that she could never look back and think there was some silver lining to what had happened? Was it strange that she never looked back at all, period?
    Brice shook her head sharply.
    Enough .
    It was true that she rarely felt entirely free. And very little happened in her life. Very little that was exciting or dangerous, that is—idiocy and annoyance happened all the time. But these days, though she wasn’t carefree, she was rarely lonely either. Reawakened curiosity about Byron was always with her. The fascinating questions—and sometimes even more fascinating answers—were her constant companions. They kept the shadows away while the old grief and guilt slowly diminished in size and lost the cruel fangs and claws that tore at her dreams. And if she still had some problems with being confined in small spaces, at least she wasn’t having panic attacks anymore. She was healing.
    But she had to admit the memory of her grief was still there, deep in her once-broken bones, and sometimes—like at Christmas, and perhaps especially now that she had met a living man who fascinated her—those bones were bound to hurt.
    She looked out at Damien, so still that he seemed made of stone, so beautiful that he stole her breath away, and so distant that he didn’t seem human. Was that why she liked him? Because he wasn’t anything like the man she had loved and lost?
    “Bah,” Brice said softly. “It’s all psycho claptrap. I’m just coming down with a cold.”
    She touched a hand to her face. Yes, there was fever. She was ill and probably hallucinating. At the very least, she was exhausted and her judgment was therefore impaired. The throbbing in her body was not desire, it was sickness. What she needed was sleep, the kind to be had in the solitude of her room.
    Sighing, half with self-disgust and half with regret, Brice retreated along the catwalk, staying in the shadows as