“You like this, don’t you?” Tristan murmured, his mouth disconcertingly close to her ear.
“Get out of my face,” she said through her teeth.
He smirked and stepped away from the bed. “I’ll be back. And you’ll be here, waiting for me. Because you’re mine now, and I’ll do whatever I want with you. Don’t make the mistake of thinking for yourself anymore.”
The door slammed as he left. Dawn cried.
She would get through this, get out of this. She would do whatever it took to save herself and Leila. She would play Tristan and win his trust, and then she would make him pay. She’d make them all pay, one way or another, even if she had to die trying.
But still she didn’t bother to scream.
~
He stalked through the night, searching for prey. It was what he’d always done, and what he would do till the end of time. It was his nature. His darkness was irreversible.
Tristan was ravenous for blood. He wanted to bathe in it, which he knew Branek had actually done once, just to see what it was like. The desire to smell it, to taste it, to slick it between his fingers and smear it on his skin was visceral. His stomach cramped with the strength of his craving. This was how vampires went mad and killed slews of people in a haze of bloodlust.
But he had more self-control than that. He waited around the side of a gas station, away from the buzzing flickering lights, and watched people come and go. He denied himself this one, that one, countless ones until he salivated at the thought of a neck, any neck. And then the station lights went off as it closed for the night. After a few more minutes he heard the swish of an opening automatic door, the chunk of a lock turning shut. Footsteps across the pavement, the beep of a remote unlocking a car.
His hands shook with hunger, but he reveled in the feeling. Other sensations dulled in comparison. He was nothing but need. If his conscience required any excuse for savagery, such all-consuming hunger would do.
This was what he loved. This was what he lived for, the surprise, the fear on their faces as he ambushed them from the shadows. The blood was hot on his tongue. He drank and drank until he was bursting with power, and he dropped the station clerk to the ground. Tristan didn’t know what the guy’s face looked like, and he didn’t care. It didn’t matter. The guy wasn’t even dead. He’d come to in a couple hours.
His tongue ran lasciviously over his lips and teeth to clean up the blood. It had been a long time since he’d killed someone. The need wasn’t in him, not like it was in Branek and Jared.
The first time, when Tristan was seventeen, had been an experiment. He’d been bumming around a skating rink with Augusta and Jared, smoking cigarettes in the alley behind it. They hardly ever went out during the day anymore. Loftus wanted them to get used to the dark and learn to work within the shadows.
Of the three of them, only Jared had killed. “She asked for it,” he’d explained. “Looking at me that way, pushing out her tits. Then when we got to her place she decided to go all fucking virginal on me.”
“You think everyone wants to sleep with you, that’s your problem,” Augusta said. “Also, you’re a medieval dick.”
“This one wanted to fuck, trust me. But we got to her house and she wanted me to work for it. So … I got mad. I kinda lost control, but it was fun. I heard her parents screaming as I ran down the street.” He shrugged. “There was a lot of blood.”
“You’ll get us all killed if you keep that shit up,” Tristan said.
“Nobody can touch us.”
Cigarette butts littered the asphalt at their feet. Tristan ran off to the convenience store on the corner for some beers to alleviate the malaise they always wallowed in and they felt happier after drinking a few. They chucked the empty bottles against the wall of the skating rink and shouted at the night. Nobody came out to scold them. Jared was right. They were untouchable.
“It’s not hard,” Jared insisted drunkenly. “It’s easier than you think. I can show you. You’ll have to do it some day.”
Augusta made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cry. Even looking at her face it was hard to tell what she felt. Her skin was dark as the shadows but her neon yellow hair was plainly visible in the night.
“He’s right,” Tristan told her. “Loftus will make us. He made Branek, when he changed him. And now he kills people all the time.”
“They both do,” she agreed wistfully.
“Yeah, see,” Jared said. He was getting pumped. “It’s the first test to see if we can make it as vampires. Branek passed, so we can too. We’ll just nab one of these underage fuckers inside before their parents come to pick them up.”
“We’re underage,” Augusta pointed out. “Besides, we can’t kill them inside.”
“We’ll lure them out, idiot. What do you want? Boy or girl?”
“Boy.”
“Go get one, then. We’ll wait.”
And they did. It didn’t take long for Augusta to lure some innocent little schoolboy. They were the easiest to fool, the least suspicious. Especially when a girl was involved. He was around their age, sixteen or seventeen, probably at the rink for a school skating night. So goddamned cute. His name was Luke.
Tristan and Augusta followed Jared’s lead. Luke drank a beer and smoked a cigarette and talked with them about stupid shit. He threw his bottle against the wall at Jared’s urging. Glass glittered on the ground in a beautiful, moonlit arc. Jared took his own bottle by the neck and smashed it over Luke’s head, as if he did that kind of thing all the time.
“Oh, shit,” Tristan exclaimed as the boy dropped to one knee in surprise.
Luke moaned. “What the f—”
Jared kicked the boy and he fell all the way to the ground. Tristan flicked out his pocketknife, never used for anything other than opening a beer or defacing furniture, and stuck it in Luke’s fleshy upper back. Luke yowled and Tristan drew his hand back in surprise. There was blood. So much blood soaking the boy’s shirt in a widening circle. Tristan’s eyes were wide with disbelief and a weird sort of excitement. So this was how power felt.
“Not like that, stupid,” Jared said, grabbing the knife. He kicked the boy over onto his back and ripped the knife into the skin of his neck. After wiping the blade on his jeans, he handed it back to Tristan. “Almost like a vampire bite, huh?”
“Holy fuck,” Augusta said. “He was cute.”
They got out of there fast, hopping in Jared’s Corvette and speeding through the night with the windows down. They howled at neon lights and flipped off passing cars, drunk on their own youth. They felt wild and immortal, and Loftus promised they would be immortal for real one day, just like him.
For a long time they tried replicating the experience outside pool halls and video stores on Friday nights. They lurked in the boozy lounges of casinos long since imploded and stole quarters from hypnotized gamblers hauling around oxygen tanks. They traipsed around with blood on their shoes beneath the pagoda-style roofs of the shopping centers on Spring Mountain and knew no one would ever connect a single murder to them.
If they’d been in school, Tristan knew they’d have been the black-wearing freaks everyone made fun of or avoided. But at night they ruled the city with their misery and shallow cruelty. They held all the power they could grasp.
The mornings after these weird, dreamlike nights, Tristan would hole up in his room, the only place on earth he could be alone, jerk off, and listen to Dead Moon until he passed out from sheer exhaustion.
His life had never again been as wild and wonderful and nightmarish. It had shaped who he’d become.
Back in the room, Dawn was asleep, her curly hair sprawled all over the pillow. He looked at her, confused. She didn’t trust him, but her self-preservation instinct was shit. To sleep in someone’s presence held a certain kind of intimacy. He didn’t sleep. Hardly ever. But hearing the even breathing of another person was soothing, he discovered. The rise and fall of a body was enough to make him ache.
He undi
d the ropes. She woke, flinching at the sight of him, and moved to the other edge of the bed. She curled up on her side, blue-green eyes wary. Unmoved, he turned away and made himself comfortable on the other bed. He stared at the ceiling for hours and found patterns in the darkness until morning arrived, bleeding his soul dry with its unbearable sunlight.
Five
A pale light draped itself over the room. The sound of rain spattering outside the door made Dawn want to stay in bed forever. Why was it raining so much anyway? The room was freezing beyond the covers, the A/C turned up too high. Tristan sat at the table. Behind him, the curtains were pulled open to reveal the blue-gray day.
“It’s cold,” she said, teeth chattering softly.
He reached out an arm to turn off the A/C unit. A soft vibrating sound she hadn’t even noticed disappeared, and there was only the sound of the rain.
“Thanks.” As if he were so polite. So considerate.
Her shower that morning was disappointingly lukewarm. Afterward, changed into fresh clothes, she sat shivering on the lid of the toilet and put her face in her hands. She didn’t have a grand plan. The motel room offered nothing in the way of weapons. There wasn’t even a second window she could squeeze out of. That was probably the only reason Tristan allowed her to be alone behind a locked door.
If you please me …
The pragmatic part of her knew she already owned everything she had to use. Her own limbs, her own mind. Those things were her weapons, only she didn’t know how to wield them.
Except she did.
Dawn was fully aware and in control of her sexual agency. She didn’t believe sexuality was the only tool available to her as a woman, and she didn’t think she had it in her to use it as a weapon anyway. She could have fought Tristan physically, though she’d most likely lose, or schemed until she figured out how to escape. She could scream for help the next time they were in a restaurant. This situation wasn’t impossible.
She went out into the room and sat on the edge of the bed to work on her hair. She’d forgotten her own comb and had to settle for the inn’s complimentary one. Scowling deeply, she worked the small, ineffectual piece of plastic upward through the long, damp ropes of her hair. Every so often she’d encounter a knot that made her eyes water. With mutinous envy she glared at the back of Tristan’s long, perfectly straight hair, the dark brown strands smooth and gleaming with no effort on his part.
He looked over at her. “I’ll take you to eat whenever you’re done.”
“This isn’t easy, you know,” she grumbled, her scalp aching. “Maybe I’ll just cut it all off. Go boy-short. I’ve always wanted to do that.” She’d refrained at Zach’s insistence that guys didn’t like short hair. Now that seemed stupid. She would cut her hair off if she wanted and if no one liked it, that was their problem.
Ignoring her, Tristan slid on his sunglasses. “Hurry up,” he sighed. “I’ve got shit to do today.”
“Hold on,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound like her own.
“What?”
He actually sounded curious. Her courage fizzled. “Uh … never mind. Let’s go.”
There was a bit of a crowd at the café that rainy morning, and the cheerful chatter around them was slightly unnerving for some reason. It was almost beginning to feel normal eating across a table from Tristan. Then Dawn realized she’d never actually seen him eat. He always just sat there with a coffee, endlessly stirring shit into it, but he never drank it. He never ordered food.
He probably got food on his own when he went out at night, she decided. What the hell else would he be doing?
Serial killing, her brain replied.
Dawn ate her omelet mechanically, without much enjoyment. Her frizzing hair glistened with tiny beads of water. Tristan leaned low on his side of the table, one arm slung across the back of an empty chair. His sunglasses kept her from seeing his eyes, but she felt his gaze lingering long enough to make her squirm. She slouched, cheeks hot, and cleaned her glasses with a napkin. When she looked at him again he was staring out the window. Metallic droplets decorated it in irregular, changing patterns.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced.
Tristan glanced toward the back of the restaurant. “Hurry up.”
She paused. “You aren’t going to follow me?”
He was amused. “You’d like me to follow you into the bathroom? What do you want to do in there?”
“Nothing that involves you,” she snapped, her cheeks flaming.
The shouts and clangs of the kitchen grew louder as she approached the back hall. There were doors not only for the restrooms but also an exit. She looked back and wondered why Tristan hadn’t at least come to wait outside the bathroom door for her. She didn’t wonder too long, though, and headed for the exit.
Much to her relief, the door had no alarm. She pushed it open slowly and gave a cautious glance over her shoulder once more. A harried waiter dashed into the noisy kitchen, but there was no sign of Tristan.
Dawn flung herself outside. Fat drops of rain immediately pelted her in the face. She swiped them out of her eyes and opened her mouth for a gulp of air. Oh, god, where would she go? This town was small, but there had to be somewhere for her to hide until she got her bearings. She—
Arms captured her from behind, lifting her off her feet. She kicked wildly. And then somehow she was on her back, Tristan’s weight pinning her to the ground, his hands trapping her wrists above her head.
“I told you I’d catch you,” he said, grinning.
“Get off me!” She thrashed beneath him until she realized how intimately their bodies touched. Mortified, she went still and averted her gaze.
Still grinning with strange elation, he pulled up her by her wrists and escorted her through the rain. They were both soaked. She shivered, but he seemed impervious to the wet, chilly weather.
She worked hard to gather courage in the time it took them to get back to the room, but her knees felt unstable. She grabbed a towel from the bathroom for her hair and skin. She needed to get out of her wet clothes, but she didn’t. Not yet.
Dawn arranged her features into an expression she hoped conveyed unbreakability. “I guess you’ll tie me up now while you go take care of your shit,” she said, emphasizing the last word in an attempt to mock him. She tried to sound tough because it was how she wanted to feel.
He tilted his head at her. “You want to be tied up?”
“No,” she snapped. “I just assumed you would, since you seem to get some kind of perverse enjoyment out of it.”
“Dawn,” he said casually, “I can do whatever you want me to do. I’m especially good at perverse forms of enjoyment.”
She kept staring at him and he stared back. She thought of the things he’d said, the threats he’d made and never acted on. Somehow he’d managed to disturb her senses in a wonderful, horrifying way that went against everything levelheaded in her. He’d done it just by looking at her. Just by saying her name in a voice like water on rocks. She’d been imagining his eyes lingering over her bare skin, achingly ardent. She’d been thinking of his lips, full enough to tempt, chiseled enough to seem cruel, and soft enough to kiss her into surrender. Whenever she looked at him she had to keep herself from falling to pieces.
Stay away, her inner voice had warned that first night.
She had never intended to listen to it, not even now, not even with what she knew.
Anyway, running hadn’t worked. Now she really did have to rely on something a little more drastic.
If you please me, I might let you come back alive.
He wasn’t a normal person, though she didn’t know in what way he was different. Her desire for him, for his otherness, was a strong motivator, though it was almost painful to admit that to herself. It was better to believe her desires were irrelevant if she hoped to change her situation this way. If that wasn’t just another lie she told herself. She would be a spy, a seductress, the kind who betrayed kings and genera
ls and went down in history. She would ensnare him and bring him to his knees. When she had him at his weakest, she would use her newly acquired power strategically.
Somehow.
Her heart was beating in her throat as she walked slowly toward him. Dawn wet her lips, wondering if he could see how incredibly nervous she was. Standing before him, so close she could feel the chill of his skin, she pushed aside his damp, dark curtain of hair and kissed him just above the collar of his t-shirt.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice low. He didn’t move.
Glancing up, she caught him in a faint expression of surprise. He looked as if he’d truly never expected her to come on to him. He quickly rearranged his features to appear cool and unaffected instead. “What do you think?” she said.
He gazed down at her in an intense, almost physical way that made her feel at once powerful and defenseless. After a moment, his lips shaped into a soft grin. “Nothing’s changed, Dawn. I’m just as dangerous as I’ve ever been.”
“Thanks for the warning. But I think I’m old enough to make my own decisions.”
The darkening of his eyes caused an unfurling feeling inside her. She lowered her gaze, unable to withstand his any longer, and found herself looking at his shoes. Black and white ones very much like hers, only hers were green. Seduction was harder than she’d thought.
He stepped forward just enough for their bodies to touch lightly. Chills rose on her skin, and Dawn told herself it was just the coolness of their wet clothes. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Second thoughts?” he murmured.
“No. I …”
“Do you think you can handle this?”
She stared at him, annoyed at the question, but didn’t answer because she couldn’t find her voice. The fingers of one of his hands were slipping down between her breasts, the others twirling a single curl of her hair. He let it spiral free and pressed his lips to her neck, inhaling hungrily. His soft touches, fierce in their restraint, made her feel hot and breathless.
Dreams for the Dead Page 6