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I frown, wishing my headache would go away. “Once again?”
The girl, Rose, she just shakes her head. “Never mind.”
She turns around her back to me and puts her head in her hands.
I feel like I should go over there and comfort her, but honestly I have no idea what I would say. How do you comfort someone you just purposefully forgot?
“Well, I guess I should probably figure out what to do next,” I say. “You can keep this room, I’ll go to the front desk and get myself another.”
“That’s it!?” she shrieks, whipping around to face me. Her eyes are on fire. “That’s it!? You just go and get another fucking hotel room and that’s it?! Like everything is back to normal for you? Oh, it must be nice to be Valtu Aminoff, motherfucking coward of the year, keeps running from problems that don’t even exist yet, just another clean slate and another clean slate, never having to be the one left behind when someone erases your existence!”
I put up my hands, taken aback by her rage. “Hey. Listen, Rose, I don’t know what to say, I didn’t choose this—”
“Yes you did!” Her face flames with anger as she storms over, getting right in front of me. “You chose this! Don’t pretend there are a million different versions of yourself because there’s only one and he’s a fucking coward that puts the title of Dracula to shame. You’re pathetic, you know that? Absolutely pathetic and selfish and a gutless, scared little boy. You’re all of those things and yet I still love you and I fucking HATE you for it! And I hate me too! And all of this, I hate all of this, all of this!”
With a final shriek that nearly blows out my eardrums she picks the book off the desk and grips it hard between her hands. “I hate this book for coming into our lives, for ruining our love and what we had and making you believe that living without love was the only way to live. You are so wrong, Val, so fucking wrong, and one day you’ll see it. One day, centuries from now, you will be so alone it will curdle your blood and hollow your bones and you will wish that you had someone you could love. And there will be no one there! You will live forever with only your own emptiness for company and it will be what you deserve!”
With another scream she raises the book high above her head and stares up at it with fury so strong that her whole body starts trembling violently and she’s levitating off the ground.
“I wish this book never existed!” she howls, her voice bouncing off the walls. “I want it destroyed!”
“Wait, what are you doing?” I ask, fear clutching my chest. “I need that to—”
Lightning jolts through the open doors of the balcony, hurtling right into the room, right into Rose with a fiery CRASH.
Everything explodes into white.
I go flying backward, hit by a ball of spreading nuclear light, my back slamming against the wall where I get the wind knocked out of me and fall to the floor. I hit my head on the tiles, wincing, covering my face as smoke fills the room, the smell of burned pages.
Shit.
I cough, and try to sit up, to look through the smoke. Pieces of burning paper rain down from above, electricity crackling around us.
The book.
I feel it in the very depths of me, like someone removed one of my organs in my sleep.
It’s gone.
The book isgone.
She destroyed it, she…she…she…
Suddenly a figure steps out of the smoke.
A woman. A naked woman.
I stare at her open-mouthed. Not because she’s naked, but because I know that body. I know those hips and that stomach and that warm spot between her thighs. I know the curve of her breasts and the slope of her shoulders. I know that neck, a neck that I’ve drank from, blood that made me more alive than anything else in this world.
I know that face. The strong jaw and nose, the soft lips, those cheekbones and those eyes.
I’m staring up into eyes the color of March leaves and late summer moss and they’re staring back at me.
I can’t breathe.
This can’t be.
“Dahlia?” I manage to say, and she flinches like she’s hit by another bolt of lightning.
