Nightfire by Lisa Marie Rice

Named for you.”
    Chloe’s face crumpled again, her shoulders shook. She buried her face in Harry’s now-wet shirt, sobbing quietly.
    Sam walked in warily. Though he’d been married more than two years now, for him a weeping woman was still the equivalent of a block of C4 with the detonator in and the timer counting down. But before he reached them, Marisa rushed into the room.
    A weeping woman. Marisa was hard-wired to react. She came in bristling, shooting filthy glances at Harry, Sam and Mike, men who’d dared make one of her women, one of the Lost Ones, cry . She put her arms around Chloe’s shoulders, glaring ferociously at the three men. Marisa weighed one-twenty dripping wet and was fifty years old. But none of them, highly trained former soldiers that they were, would dare take her on when she was in protective mode.
    “What’s going on here? What did you men do to this poor girl—” she began furiously, getting right up into their faces.
    “She’s my sister, Marisa,” Harry said at the same time. “Come back from the dead.”
    Marisa’s face went utterly blank. They never talked about it, but everyone in the office knew Harry’s story. Knew that the loss of his little sister had been a tragic hole punched through his heart all his life.
    “Mamma mia,” she whispered, reverting back to the language of her childhood. She pulled away to look Chloe in the face, holding her by the shoulders. Eyes flicking from Chloe to Harry and back. “Mamma mia . ”
    “Davvero,” Chloe said unexpectedly, smiling, wiping away the tears that were streaming down her face.
    Marisa whooped, kissed Chloe on the cheek and did a little jig. Mike stared. No one had ever seen cool, calm Marisa so excited, so joyful. “ Una sorella ritrovata! A lost sister! Found! And she speaks Italian!”
    “ Solo un poco, very little.” Chloe smiled, wiped her eyes again. “I studied it only for a year.”
    “Hey, what’s going on?” Two beautiful women stuck their heads in the room, looking puzzled. Nicole and Ellen. Ellen had probably been working with Nicole on her accounts. Besides singing for them, Ellen kept the books of Nicole’s translation agency and of RBK. Mike always thought that was a great twofer.
    Ellen rushed over to her husband, seeing the tears running down his face. “Harry!” She sounded more shocked than worried. “What’s wrong, darling? Are you hurt?”
    This last was said slowly, as an afterthought, because though he was crying, Harry clearly wasn’t hurt. He started laughing and wiped away some tears, though more fell.
    Chloe turned to smile at the two women, hope and light in her golden eyes. Mike had never seen anything so luminous. It was as if she had a light source glowing inside her. Her smile was heartbreaking, the smile of someone who wasn’t used to happiness.
    “Come here, honey,” Harry said to Ellen. He opened one arm, the other around Chloe. When Ellen was by his side, in his embrace, he kissed her cheek. Ellen and Nicole were no dummies. Both of them were looking at Chloe, then Harry, then back at Chloe. Understanding that something was up, but what?
    “Honey,” Harry said to his wife, then gave a sort of laughing cough, as if whatever was in his chest was too big to express but had to come out. “I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but this is . . . Crissy. My sister. Back from the dead. Only now she’s Chloe.” He threw his head back and laughed again.
    Both Ellen and Nicole gasped.
    Mike was barely paying attention to them, to Sam and Harry. He moved closer. He couldn’t help it. Chloe was light itself and he was helplessly drawn to it, to her. There was some kind of aura there, something he’d never seen in anyone else before, something that drew him in without any volition on his part. His legs moved without him willing it, his entire body moving toward the light, moving toward something it had never seen before and instantly recognized as something it