She got up, feeling her vampirism fully for the first time. There were many reasons she should have run away screaming in fear. But somehow her fear wasn’t a concern. She was oddly focused and vigilant in a way that made everything else less important. She was cool and alert and quietly furious.
“You think it’s regular watering that keeps this lawn so green?” Branek gestured carelessly and grinned. “That’s not all of it. I’ve buried bodies here. I’ll bury you here too, when I’m done with you.”
Dawn knew her strategic fighting skills were still miserable, though. She could do nothing but react like a wild animal when Branek lunged for her. She jumped to meet his malicious embrace and the world shook as they clashed. She opened her mouth as wide as it would go and tore at his neck. He shouted angrily and pried her off, flinging her far across the ground once more.
She tumbled a few feet before she managed to dig her fingers into the soft ground, skidding to a stop. Her mouth was full of blood and bits of skin.
“You’re so young,” he laughed as she pushed herself to her feet. “So powerless.”
“I am not powerless.”
“Against me you are.”
The side of his neck gaped where she’d bitten him. It seemed a large gash, all dark and viscous, and yet she hadn’t swallowed much blood. Just enough to moisten her mouth.
Physically she was no match for him. The gash didn’t even seem to have fazed him.
“What are you gonna do?” Branek taunted.
She debated whether to attempt another attack on him or just run. She didn’t want him chasing her. Either way, though, he meant to kill her.
“Why do you hate me so much?” she asked, stalling.
“I don’t hate you,” he said, as if the very notion were absurd. “I hate what you’ve done to us. There’s no shame in taking a little joy from making you suffer, though.”
He took several long strides toward her, grabbing her arm to hold her still when she tried to run away. His fist slammed into her stomach hard enough that she immediately threw up whatever was in it. Blood, bile. She dropped to her knees, sick and breathless. There was a hard knot at the base of her sternum.
Branek’s hand slapped down on her shoulder and squeezed hard. She thought she felt a bone crack, but she was already in too much pain to be sure. He shook her viciously and grinned. “You can count it a favor that I’ll wait till you’re dead to fuck you again.”
He touched the skin beneath her shirt, probing gently, like a doctor doing an exam. But his fingers quickly turned cruel, pressing in, bruising, and then penetrating. Dawn was in too much shock and pain to do anything other than make a soft gurgling sound. The pain seared her. It made her facial muscles spasm and the rest of her body seize.
Dawn watched Branek withdraw his hand, gloved in her blood. And then she fell, not quite unconscious, not quite awake. She lay curled on one side, her guts spilling out. Only her slick, warm hands held them in place. The world went still and soundless but for the sound of her own labored breathing. The red night had the surreal quality of a nightmare come true.
Something lay low to the grass in the shadows to her right. Something pale. Her swimming eyes focused with effort and she saw the hem of a filmy white dress that was really nothing more than rags. Long ropes of black hair lashed fiercely in the wind. Twin spots of red gleamed from a pallid face. A dark mouth gaped in a haunting, silent scream.
Did you know a demon can steal your soul?
Staring into those piercing crimson orbs, Dawn saw how that could be true.
But this thing wasn’t a demon. Or it hadn’t always been. Dawn realized the cramped, trembling figure was Delphine, the woman she had read about in the diary. Loftus had killed her for resisting his advances, and then he’d changed her into a vampire. But it hadn’t worked.
It was hard to see a victim behind the death-white skin. In that twisted, pained body. It was hard to reconcile this … thing with the human woman from the diary, the woman who’d wanted nothing to do with Loftus. That woman hadn’t asked for this. I hate you, she’d said to him.
“I know what happened to you,” Dawn whispered, not sure if she was close enough for the thing to have heard her, or if it was even capable of understanding her.
The eyes glowed at her. If she looked hard enough, she could see the wretched fury in them. And she could read a message. Kill me, it said. Kill me. Kill me. Over and over. The clawed hands shook, the stringy hair snapped, and the eyes just stared and stared.
“Do you want to be free? I could set you free.”
Dawn knew she’d never be able to describe, later, what happened next.
She did not know what it was she saw, and didn’t see, because it wasn’t something in front of her. It was inside her, and around her. Like fire and air, but not burning or breathing. Together they made a deafening roar. There was color and light and dark and nothing. And everything.
This experience, this unfathomable moment undefined by time … It was creation, but it wasn’t an event. Not God, not he or she, but god as a condition. Non-anthropomorphic. Non-being. The center, the seed from which the universe sprang. The beginning and maybe also the end. It was entirely atheistic. Something without a name. It was the reason anything existed. It was existence itself. It did not exist.
A fundamental understanding of the prone white figure filled her. It was not just Delphine behind those eyes, but a demon feeding on whatever was left of her soul. Somehow Dawn made a connection to them and for a moment they were all one. They shared the same power. Delphine helped Dawn fight for it, and that power was the only thing keeping Dawn alive.
The three of them broke apart, dissipating.
Maybe she was dead now. Floating in a void somewhere in the universe.
But she smelled fire. Poisonous smoke invaded her lungs. She wasn’t dead, though she would be soon, if a fire was close. She opened her eyes, searching instinctively through gray wisps of smoke for the pale shape on the grass. But it was gone, dancing orange flames in its place.
Someone lifted her arm. Branek. Dawn didn’t know whether he was trying to save her from the fire or do something else, but his intentions didn’t matter. She wasn’t healed, but her pain was gone, leaving her in a sort of transcendental state. With her other arm she reached up and latched onto Branek’s forearm. Snaking her feet between his ankles, she managed to topple him so he fell down on top of her.
“Dawn, we have to go,” he said, trying to get back up. “I’ll take you out of here. I’ll save you.”
She was far beyond listening to anything he had to say. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and dug her teeth savagely into the slowly healing hole in his neck.
The wind spread the fire fast. Dawn could barely breathe, but she sucked up whatever blood she could and held on until she could no longer feel her arms. Branek struggled to escape her embrace, but she’d found an impossible strength that somehow surpassed his. She didn’t let go.
I am not powerless, she thought. But now you are.
Everything was burning. Maybe there was shouting, but it was hard to hear anything over the crackle of flames. Dawn clung desperately to Branek as if they were tragic lovers, and they expired together in a maelstrom of smoke and fire.
Sixteen
She was reborn in water. It washed the taste of ash from her mouth and cooled the smoke that had singed her lungs. Rain, spattering lightly on her skin, seeping beneath her eyelids, trickling into her ears. She coughed and tried to sit up. A hand behind her back, supporting her. Her name spoken in a familiar voice.
“Drink this,” he said.
Fresh blood dribbled past her lips. Dawn swallowed it down and finally opened her eyes. Tristan’s blurry face was in front of her. He pulled his bleeding wrist back from her mouth.
“Y-you’re here,” she said, stunned. She blinked myopically and groped absently for her glasses. Wet grass slid through her fingers.
“Yes, I’m here.”
�
�I found your glasses,” someone else said. “They’re not even broken.”
Dawn turned toward the cheerful voice and numbly accepted her glasses from someone with blue hair. Augusta. She winced in pain putting them on. The lenses were dotted with moisture.
“But I’m dead,” she babbled incoherently. “I’m dead. I died.”
Tristan’s face was soft. “Almost.”
“But …”
Her eyes went down to her stomach and she lifted the hem of her shirt hesitantly. No entrails spilling out. No broken skin. There might have been a scar, but it was hard to tell through the wet lenses and the rain dropping all around. Her arms, though, were covered in burned, blistered skin to her shoulders. Her jeans were singed with holes, the visible skin glistening red. Seeing the injuries, she suddenly felt stinging pain all over her body and face.
“What … happened?” she asked weakly.
“Branek tried to kill you.”
“I know. But how did I …” Dawn swallowed nervously and looked around at the three faces staring back at her: Tristan, Augusta, Fallon. She moved her shoulder, the one Branek had squeezed, and it felt fine. “How did I survive? My stomach …” She looked down again, but it was still all right. “Did that really happen?”
“Yes, he really tore you open,” Tristan said darkly. “I’m not entirely sure how you healed from that. You were drinking his blood when I found you, and I had a hard time prying you off him. You must have gotten enough of his blood because I watched your skin close up right in front of my eyes. I was—” He broke off with a quick sigh and looked abruptly away. “I wasn’t sure you were going to live. So I gave you some of my blood, too.”
She listened, confused and troubled. She thought of the hallucinatory moments preceding the fire. Delphine begging for death, Dawn promising to free her. And then an indescribable feeling of … something. Of god. Of connecting to the universe, lame as that sounded. She didn’t know what, exactly, had happened before she’d latched on to Branek, but she felt that sensation of power and oneness was somehow responsible for healing her.
“Augusta set the house on fire,” Fallon informed everyone.
“I didn’t want Tristan to have all the fun,” she explained.
Tristan sighed. “My records were in there.”
“It would have burned us alive,” Dawn said, still in shock over the whole situation.
Augusta grimaced. “That wasn’t my fault. It spread from the house. It’s this damn wind, blowing every fucking day. At least it burned itself out. The rain helped.”
“I got you out of the fire, Dawn,” Tristan said. “You did a pretty good job taking care of Branek yourself, and I left him in the flames to finish dying. He’s nothing but a pile of charred bones now.”
“It could have been one of us, you know,” Augusta mused sadly. “If things had been just a little different. Not just tonight, I mean, but our whole lives.”
“Yes.” Tristan’s voice was penitent. “I know.”
Dawn glanced down at his forearms and noticed he had burns to match her own. Tears flooded her eyes. “Thank you,” she said, unable to meet his gaze.
“The skin will heal,” he said gruffly. “I told you about healing, didn’t I? There might be scars in this case, but we’ll be fine.”
“How long will it take?”
He shrugged. “These are pretty bad burns, so … a couple hours. Or maybe you’ll heal faster, since you’ve had vampire blood. Your stomach did.” He studied her, an odd look on his face. “You look different.”
“I am different.” But she didn’t know in what way.
“Are we getting out of here anytime soon?” Augusta asked anxiously, glancing back at the charred remains of the house.
Tristan nodded. “We’ll go back to the room. Dawn, can you get up?”
“Yeah.” She struggled to her feet, allowing him to hold her steady. Her damaged skin still stung, sensitive even to the gentle raindrops. She kept touching her stomach, haunted by the memory of Branek’s hand plunging into it. Each time the thought crossed her mind she started a little, as if expecting it to happen again. The pain felt but a heartbeat away.
“Are you all right?”
Dawn just shook her head. It was the things you couldn’t see that worried her.
The air was no longer red. It was just night, with regular streetlights and neon signs. They made their way toward a hotel where Tristan had a room and didn’t attract much notice, despite their questionable appearance. Mainly because it was late enough—or early enough—that there weren’t many people to see them. Those that roamed the streets with them were in no position to judge.
Part of the way there, Dawn’s jeans were chafing so badly against her burned legs that she burst into tears. Without a word, Tristan lifted her up and carried her the rest of the way. She rested her head in the crook of his shoulder, where she couldn’t see anything of the world.
In the room, Tristan laid her down on the bed and she curled up on her side facing the wall. She wasn’t tired or in danger of passing out from pain. She just felt empty. She’d gone to hell and back. She’d figured out how close she could get to the fire without getting burned, and then she’d gone closer.
Help me. Oh god, what’s happened to me?
The pain searing her soon subsided into dull throbbing sensations that flared into something sharper less and less frequently. Her healing skin itched fiercely. She did her best to ignore it, but she found herself shifting against the sheets in pursuit of relief.
Please, she thought wearily. Please . . .
Exhaustion caught up with her swiftly. She curled up her legs and pressed her fists to her mouth, trying to stifle tears and screams. The repercussions of everything that had happened to her, everything she’d tried vainly to ignore or cope with—rape, becoming a vampire, killing, dying, everything, everything—made her catatonic in her mind’s desire to reject it all. She slept in restless shivering spurts, waking every so often in sheer terror before losing consciousness once more.
And then it was earliest morning. Only faint light shone around the edges of the curtains, but Dawn knew the sky over the mountains would be orangey pale. She scratched at her arms. The skin was smooth now, and the only redness left was like that of a mild sunburn. A sleek strand of dark hair rested on her shoulder.
She turned to him, snuggling her body against his for comfort and companionship. He was so lean she had always been able to feel the bones beneath his pale skin, softly poking into the fleshier parts of her. Now she wondered what it would feel like to be strong enough to break them with her bare hands. Strong enough to rip them clean away from the skeleton.
It was odd sharing a bed with a guy she still didn’t completely trust. Dawn was afraid of Tristan, just a little, and she was sure he knew it. But then she remembered him hefting her up in his arms to carry her through the streets because it hurt her too much to walk. He’d been gentle when she’d been numb with shock and fatigue and fear.
She raised her eyes to his face. The blue moons were there beneath his dark, luminous eyes, enhancing his delinquent good looks. His angled brows hung low in pensive concern. A faint shadow covered his jaw. Her heart strained.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hey.”
The room was silent except for the drip of the bathroom faucet. “Are we alone?”
His lids lowered and he slung a familiar arm across her waist. “Mm-hmm. Augusta went out a while ago for blood. She didn’t say if she’s coming back any time soon. I don’t know where Fallon’s gone.” He left a soft, brief kiss on her lips. “How do you feel?”
“I don’t know.”
He lifted his arm as she wriggled out from under it. His clothes were filthy and torn, full of holes and streaked with grass stains, just like hers. Despite the rain, they both still had black streaks of dirt and ash on their skin.
“I need a shower,” Dawn said. Abruptly she scooted off the edge of the bed and went into the connecting bath
room.
Afterward, she was standing in front of the steamed mirror wrapped in a towel when he came in. He reached into the shower and turned on the water. She watched his blurred reflection casually strip and drop the clothes to the floor. Unable to resist looking at more than just a vague outline, she turned just in time to see him step in, all pale skin and defined muscle and long, dark hair.
Oh god, she thought helplessly.
She’d just finished dressing in her ruined clothes, having no other wardrobe options, when the water squeaked off and Tristan came out, dripping and unabashed in his nakedness. Wet strands of hair clung to his skin. There was no reason he would be embarrassed—they’d seen each other in one or two compromising positions. She kept her eyes on the floor while he dried off and dressed.
“I have to ask you something,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Do you know where Jared is? I need to find Leila.” She looked up at him, feeling defensive. “Will you help me?”
“You know I will.”
Dawn didn’t know it, actually. At least, she hadn’t been entirely sure. But now that he’d said it, she found it easy to believe. He’d helped her before. He’d saved her life, after all. To have him near her was comforting.
“He showed up here earlier, but he’ll be at your apartment now,” Tristan said. “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go, and he probably expected you wouldn’t be coming back.”
Because I’d be dead, Dawn guessed.
It was full morning by the time they arrived, and the sun was clean and fresh, if annoyingly bright. Dawn didn’t have her door keys. She didn’t have anything. The window blinds were shut tight. At the front door, Tristan reached around her and twisted the knob until the lock broke.
They stepped into the dim, quiet living room. Dawn’s body tingled in anticipation of finally completing the task she’d set out to do in the first place: save her best friend.
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