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“Do you enjoy being a daytimer?” I asked, to keep our conversation going and so she wouldn’t ask why I’d been talking to a bag.
Celine made a face at me while she chewed. “Yeah. It’s fantastic. Rainbows and ponies, the whole time.” She took another huge bite of burger.
It was hard for me to imagine her being any other way, but clearly she hadn’t always been a daytimer. She must have had, once upon a time, other hopes and dreams. They were probably pinned like butterflies underneath her framed head shots. “What were you before this? An actress? Or a model?”
She swallowed, then took another bite, rather than answer me. I watched her eat, trying to wait her out, but it didn’t work. When she was done she pulled her legs up onto the bed. “Can it be bedtime now?”
“Is anyone else going to try to kill me tonight?”
“Only in my dreams.” She dusted her hands off and then reached up to draw the curtains of her bed.
I went to set the bell over the door. Then, lying down in my nest of pillows and sheets again, I turned the light off.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I heard a rustling sound from the bag. The Shadows were probably setting themselves free, or they were faking it and would be trying to hitch a ride to the dump with the trash tomorrow, agreement with me forgotten. There’d be no way to talk to them with Celine in the room, but right now they weren’t my first priority. I needed to sleep first, to keep up my strength, and to see if I could find that strange vampire in my dreams.
As an ex-night-shift nurse I was good at operating tired—which would probably be a good thing if I managed to live long enough to be a parent. But the punishment for that was sometimes my body held on far longer than it ought to, as if I were fighting sleep itself. Between worrying about the baby, Asher, and Anna, I could be up for the next forty days straight.
Somehow though, in the abyssal dark of the catacombs, I finally slept.
* * *
Instead of dreaming about my house this time, I was in a land of rolling hills, covered in desert scrub. I spun around making sure I didn’t have any company and muttered, “The hills are alive.” I took another look in all directions. “I guess that’s okay, as long as they don’t have eyes.”
“Why would hills have eyes?”
I jumped, startled anew, and found a man standing behind me. I decided to not honor his question with a discussion of seminal horror films. “Is it you?”
He nodded. He looked like he’d just stepped off a statue, because he was wearing a toga. He was a little shorter than I was, though far more muscular, and his skin was dark tan where it showed.
“What’s your name?”
“It’s not safe to tell you that. Right now, I could merely be a bad dream.”
I grunted. In case Raven interrogated me. Even if I thought my dreams were real, there was currently no proof, and I supposed it was safer for both of us. “Can you really kill him?”
“Do you really want me to?”
Now that I was out of Raven’s presence I had my right mind. “The sooner the better.” Before he could trick me again, or me myself.
“Then yes, I can.”
“How?”
“Because I am his Sire. If I command, he must obey. I could even command him to kill himself, and he would.”
“I take it that’s why you’re a prisoner here?”
“Indeed.”
This was sounding too easy. “Are you’re sure you’re not a dream?”
He raised his hand, and our surroundings changed. The desert scrub folded away, replaced by sharp mountain peaks and drifts of snow. Then we were near a river, bridged by stone, and on an ocean shore, standing on rough rocks—“Okay, okay.” I held my hands up. “You can stop shaking the snow globe now.”
The world around us resolved into a pavilion in front of a temple, lined with columns, a statue standing between each pair. Roman—original. The statues were painted, not worn white by time. Each had a face not unlike my mysterious friend’s.
“I have lived for very long and traveled well. These are my dreams, not yours.”
“Agreed.” My dreams would have had a lot more traffic in them, or involved me being back at school and having forgotten my locker combination. “But why are all of them in daylight?”
He looked taken aback, but quickly recovered. “Because you wouldn’t want to see me in the dark.”
Probably true—or even vampires missed the sun. It wasn’t worth calling him on, though. I walked down the steps of the temple to the road outside and started smoothing sand for him to draw on. “Make a map and show me where you are.”
He followed me, more slowly. “I … cannot. I was incapacitated when I was brought here. I do not know where I am.”
Here at last was the much more familiar difficult part. “You’re kidding me, right?” I dusted my hands off on my legs and stood. “You’re aware that there’s an apparently endless system of tunnels where you could be? Do you know anything about where you are?”
“In a hole. In the dark. My walls are stone, and my cell is grated with silver.”
I’d finally found someone who could help me, and I didn’t even know where to begin. I started pacing in a circle.
“But if you find me and free me—” he began.
“You’ll kill him. I get it.” I looked back at the temple behind us. He was like it, in a way. Hugely powerful, currently completely useless. “Why me? Why haven’t you asked someone else for help?”
The temple shimmered like a mirage and we were in the hilly desert again, forcing me to look back at him. H
is face was serious and drawn. “You’ve already been a servant long enough to know that admitting weakness among our kind is halfway to defeat.” I nodded, and he went on. “When I woke you from your last dream to save your life—did you kill the one who tried to take it?”
I closed my eyes. “No. Which was probably a mistake.”
“Probably,” he agreed. “But it shows that you are ruthless enough to contemplate your Master’s death for freedom, but not ruthless enough to kill without thought.”
So he was willing to help me because I seemed unlikely to kill him. Damned with faint praise, once again. “There are others here who want out. Why not one of them?”
“Because they’re not also with a child they want to keep.”
My baby was just a little extra assurance that I wouldn’t kill him for his blood once I found him. I hugged myself. “Why’re you so weak?”
“I’ve been starved for the better part of three centuries. A servant shoves in pieces of half-drained corpses that I wouldn’t feed a dog, then leaves them here to decay and foul me.”
“A servant? Which one?”
“Different ones over time. This most recent one, I could not say. The scent they leave behind is artificial—your world, not mine. And no one ever visits at night. But they’ve been absent for a month now.”
Was there a way I could ask the others, safely? Jackson, maybe, but none of the rest of them. “How long does it take a vampire to starve to death?” I wouldn’t only have to free an angry vampire—I’d have to figure out how to feed one too.
“Hopefully not as long as it takes for you to find me,” he said, lips pulled thin. “If you value your own life, and that of your child, you must find me quickly.”
There were other things I wanted to know—how his dream powers worked, how he’d originally been trapped, and just how old he was—but for now the final thing I needed be sure of was my safety. “You promise you won’t hurt my child? Or me? Or my friends?”
“Do you have any friends here?” he asked, eyebrows rising.
“Who knows how long it’ll take me to find you. I might by then.” I already knew I didn’t want to kill Jackson. I frowned at myself. Dammit, Edie, dammit.
