Hunter's Edge

Chapter Fifteen

Useless

Angel awoke in tears.

They ran down her face, soaked her hair and her pillow. Her throat ached from the sobs trapped inside.

The vague, fleeting memory of a dream slid away even as she tried to reach out and catch it. Nothing there...nothing but a crushing weight of guilt and grief.

Useless.

Worthless.

The words seemed to whisper themselves in her ear and vaguely, so vaguely, she had some distant understanding that she'd failed. Failed somebody.

Kel... Yes, she'd failed him. But that was twelve years ago and although she hadn't moved past her grief or guilt over it, that wasn't what this was about.

This pain, it felt too fresh. Too new. Rolling onto her belly, she buried her face in her pillow and let the storm of pain take her.

There was no sense to it, no reason...and it seemed, no end. Without knowing why, without having any control over it, she lay there in her bed and sobbed. She sobbed until her throat was raw and sore, until she had no tears left to shed, and still the grief wouldn't release her.

The sun was rising when the storm finally eased. It didn't disappear. It was a weight in her chest that pressed down on her as she fought her way free from tangled sheets and blankets, a weight that it made seem impossible to stand.

When she finally did make it to her feet, she swayed. Darkness pushed in her. As hard as it was to get moving in the morning, she'd always managed.

But today...? She couldn't even make herself take a step or two forward. Her brain didn't want to function and her limbs felt heavy and weighted. The knot in her throat was made so much worse by the hours of sobbing and when she swallowed, it felt like somebody had stabbed her with a knife.

Groaning, she tried once more to make her body move. But then she fell back on the bed and reached for the blankets, drawing them around her. Huddled under them, she lay shivering and shaking. Sleep pulled at her.

She was almost asleep...almost there—then music blared from the nightstand and hit her ears like an ice pick. She swung out with her hand, but when she hit the iPod, nothing happened.

It wasn't her alarm, she realized.

But the phone. Ringing...and ringing...and ringing... A niggling sense of responsibility made her grab it as she snuggled deeper into her nest of blankets. Shit. The yard sale.

Ronda Pickard, Jake's neighbor, was helping her with the yard sale to get rid of the stuff from Jake's house that Angel didn't want to keep or donate to the church.

With clumsy fingers, she grabbed the phone and croaked into the handset.

"Angel, sweetie, is that you?"

"Yeah."

"Girl, you sound like hell."

"Sick," she lied. She dodged a few questions, croaked out a refusal for some lunch delivered.

"You sound terrible. Can I bring you anything?"

Angel convinced Ronda that she just needed some sleep and as she tossed the phone into the general direction of the nightstand, she muttered, "Yeah. Bring me a knife. Something to get rid of this ache. Anything..."

That was her last coherent thought before she escaped into oblivion.

But it was little escape, because even there, the pain waited.