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“N-nothing,” I stammered, feeling stupid. “I fell.”
“What have you done?” he repeated.
I continued pulling the infinite dress back, and when it finally jerked free, I wished I had left the mystery alone. The grass was black with the thick smear of blood, and my whole skirt was now ruby red and soaked with the viscous liquid. When I gagged, though, it wasn’t because of the blood.
Desmond lay beneath me, his throat open in a ragged tear, his once-white shirt now as vermillion as my gown. His violet-gray eyes, something I loved most about him, were white and dead. His skin, once dark olive thanks to his father’s Mexican roots, was ashy and looked like wax.
The hole in his neck smiled at me like a second mouth.
I tried to scramble away, but Lucas’s legs kept me pinned in place.
“Oh my God.” Pink tears streaked down my face. I fought the urge to throw myself on Desmond, to find a pulse. The second urge was to open my wrist and give him my own blood. Vampire blood could heal, maybe there was…
No. It could heal, but it couldn’t bring someone back if they were already dead.
I sobbed.
“No.”
“What have you done?” Lucas was staring down at me, asking the same goddamned question over and over.
“I didn’t—”
“What have you—?”
“Shut up,” I screamed, covering my ears to block out the broken record of questioning. What had I done? Nothing. I hadn’t done this. I would never do this.
The crown I was still clinging to gave a tug. When I opened my eyes, I found Lucas trying to wrench it from my grasp. “What are you doing?”
“This doesn’t belong to you.” Tug.
“It’s mine,” I snarled, my fingers tightening so fiercely the edge of a diamond bit into my palm. I’d lost Desmond. Somehow I felt if I let Lucas have this too, I’d be left with nothing.
He stooped low, his blue eyes empty of any emotion, and with one mighty yank he wrenched the crown out of my hand. “It’s not yours anymore.”
I woke up with a sharp gasp.
Beneath my cheek was a soft mass of dark chest hair and below that the warm body of a still-breathing man. Strong fingers brushed my hair away from my forehead and trailed down my neck to my lower back, tracing the place where my torso dipped into my bottom.
“You’re okay,” Desmond whispered, soothing me.
“You’re okay.” I turned so I was looking up at his face instead of his groin. Not that his lower half didn’t deserve a good long look over, but it wasn’t my priority at the moment. I smiled in spite of how puzzled he appeared to be, and told myself again, “You’re okay.”
“Unless sleeping has become an extreme sport, I don’t think there’s much risk to my personal safety when we’re in bed.” He grinned wickedly, and his hand moved lower to give my butt a squeeze. “That is, unless you get too frisky. Then you can imperil me whenever you want.”
I looped my arms around his waist and squeezed him, letting the warmth of his body bring my temperature up. When I slept I got cold, not freezing, but I didn’t give off the nice radiance of a human being. I was closer to room temperature, like all vampires.
“You had another dream,” he said, clearly reading my expression better than I would have liked. I didn’t need to be giving my emotions away as freely as I seemed to be doing of late.
“Yeah.”
“Judging by your reaction, it didn’t end too well for me.”
I kissed the trail of hair above his bellybutton as I cast my gaze up to watch him inhale sharply. “It doesn’t matter,” I whispered. “It was just a dream.”
But the fact of the matter was, my dreams were never just dreams. And what was worse, I’d had this particular dream before. My sleeping mind had tried to remind me of that, but I’d been too caught up in the moment to recognize it. When I’d first met Lucas a year earlier, I’d dreamt of running towards him in a wedding dress, only then he’d vanished to be replaced by Peyton. Days later, Peyton had almost killed me.
Now I was dreaming about Desmond’s death, and there was no way in hell I was letting that part of my dream come true.
