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Chapter Twelve
~Claire~
"Come to me, Claire. Come to me now."
I jumped out of bed and ran out the door, not even stopping to wonder why Becki wasn’t in the room anymore before thundering down the hotel emergency stairs until I reached the lobby. When I burst through the doors, I registered a man shouting, but didn't stop to make sense of what he was saying as I rushed out the front doors and hurried into the woods.
Victor’s words echoed in my head, a command I couldn’t ignore. He needed me and I was helpless to deny his call.
Rocks and twigs tore at the bottom of my feet, but I was too blinded by my need to reach Victor to be concerned with cuts and bruises. My Victor. My beloved returned to me.
Lightning streaked across the sky overhead as the sky seemed to open and rain sluiced down through the trees, soaking me to the skin as I ran, causing the ground at my feet to turn to mud, which frustrated me as it slowed my progress. But finally I reached the tomb and rushed inside.
The coffin sat as it had that afternoon, sealed and quiet, but I could feel Victor inside. Awake and whole once more. I gripped the lid of the sarcophagus, straining to move it aside, my nails snapping and breaking from the force of my desire to break inside.
"Victor!" I screamed, my arms shaking with effort as I struggled to wrench the ancient locks from the sides of the coffin.
Why wasn't he moving? Why wasn't he using his strength to break free?
Finally, the wood around the lock gave way, splintering and shattering, releasing its hold on the lid.
When I finally managed to open the coffin, for a moment I was terrified that I’d been wrong. That his voice in my head had only been a dream, because the body in the coffin surely couldn’t be my Victor.
Emaciated, grey, cold. The skin stretched so tight and thin over the bone, it was as if only the skeleton remained. His dark eyes were open, but sunken so far back they looked like inky black pools of nothingness.
My mind went into overdrive, sifting through the memories of past and present Claire, desperately seeking the answer to unlocking my love’s torpor.
A kiss. He needed my kiss to wake him.
Lowering my face over the corpse-like body of my soulmate, I pressed my lips against what remained of Victor’s mouth, his teeth hard and sharp against my skin.
Then his arms folded around me, holding me in a way that I’d thought he never would again.
And as his fangs sank deep into my throat I came back to myself enough to realize that Booker had been right. It hadn't been a good idea for a human to open the coffin of an unfed vampire.
The memories of two Claires warred inside my head, even as darkness began to close in around me. Present day Claire wanted to struggle, but back then Claire insisted that we’d died for him once, and it would be fitting to die for him again.
In the end, the decision was left to Victor, who held me tightly against him as he drained my consciousness away through the wounds in my throat.
