by Sotia Lazu
I try to look at my hand, the one holding his in the real world, but my fingers aren’t in my line of sight, and I can’t move my head. I’m trapped here, unable to even close my eyes when Ádísa cups Alex’s cheek with her free hand and guides his mouth to hers.
“This time you’ll do it,” she whispers against his lips.
A fist clenches around my unbeating heart when Alex just melts into the kiss.
“This is just a dream,” I chant in my head.
Willoughby gives me a scornful look. “How wrong you are.”
If it’s Alex’s dream, how can my maker know my thoughts?
“You won last time,” Willoughby says, “but it was sheer luck. Your precious Constantine won’t be able to save you this time.”
What’s everyone’s obsession with Constantine? He wasn’t saving me when he ripped Ádísa’s head off. He was saving himself. She planned on offing both of us. All of us—Alex included. I scowl at Willoughby, hoping my gaze shows exactly what I think of him.
“Oh, you may speak. This will be the last time we hear your annoying voice anyway,” he says.
I test my vocal cords by clearing my throat. Sound comes out. Instead of wasting it on my maker, I call for Alex.
Alex, who is still kissing her, his palms curved around the weight of her full breasts.
He doesn’t stop kissing her. Doesn’t stop squeezing the perfect creaminess I’m seeing way too much of.
“Alex, please,” I whisper. The sight of him responding so eagerly to her advances is breaking me in a way his almost draining me earlier couldn’t have done.
Wake up. I have to wake up, if he won’t.
“He can’t hear you. Ádísa has him now.” Willoughby says her name as if she’s more than his maker. A goddess, perhaps. “He belongs to her. You can scream his name till you lose your voice again, but this time she’s won. Pity you won’t be around to see her become her true self again.”
For a change, my mind latches onto the important detail. “Where will I be?” I ask.
Willoughby raises both arms, palms up. “Everywhere. You’ll be scattered by the first gust of wind, once Alex finishes the job.”
“The job?”
“Choosing her, and in doing so, killing you.”
Fuck, I need to wake up. Now! Wake up and tell Constantine what Willoughby is planning. Alex’s subconscious is trying to warn me through his memory of Willoughby, and if his subconscious still cares, I can appeal to the rest of him.
“Alex,” I call out again. “Please stop. Please remember who you are. What you know about her. This isn’t you.”
Only, whoever it is, he’s obviously enjoying himself, even as Ádísa rips open his T-shirt and scratches a line from his collar bone to his navel. It’s a shallow cut, barely bleeding. Alex hisses in an unnecessary breath, and tangles his fingers in her hair, to bring her mouth to his chest. “Lick it,” he says, voice gruff with what I recognize as lust.
I’ve lost him this time.
“She’s obviously won. He’s with her now. Choice is made. Why does he have to kill me, too?” I try to stall for time, unsure what I’m hoping for. Divine intervention can’t reach me here.
Why can’t I wake the fuck up?
“You will never wake up again, Cherry. God, you’ve always been so dense.” Ádísa nuzzles Alex’s stomach, but looks straight at me, the sapphire around her neck lighting her face with an eerie blue glow. “We’re not figments of Alex’s imagination. His subconscious isn’t doing this.” She glides a palm down the front of his jeans, and he bucks his hips against it. “I am really me, and it’s really Willoughby holding you down, like the powerless little cunt you are.” Turning her face up to meet Alex’s gaze, she says, “Let me touch you. Please.”
If she’s telling the truth, there’s no getting out of this. My only advantage over her in the real world is that she’s dead, which isn’t the case here. There’s two of them, ancient and half-past crazy, and only one of me. I can’t count on Alex to take my side, even if I don’t believe he’ll really help them.
I need a weapon.
The only thing I can think of is Ádísa’s ego.
“Makes sense,” I say, “that even when you control someone’s dreams, you need to beg for their affections.”
She doesn’t take the bait. Her lips are fixed in a smug smile, when Alex pops his fly and pulls his jeans down his hips.
I can’t close my eyes, so I settle for rolling them. “Your hold on him only works when you’re touching him. I remember you using sex to win Constantine over too, and he ended up dusting you for me.”
This time her smile falters, but it doesn’t fall from her face. “Constantine fell for your innocent act. The women in your family seem to have the damsel-in-distress bit down to a pat. Alex is smarter than that, though.” She closes her hand around Alex’s cock, slides it to the base and squeezes, until the head turns an angry purple. “Aren’t you, lover?”
Alex moans, and begins fucking her fist, one hand pulling on her hair, pushing her head downward. I almost wish she’d take him in her mouth, so I don’t have such a clear view of her pleasuring him. What she’s doing to him is essentially rape. Even if he’s a willing participant, his consent is not informed. He thinks he’s dreaming, while according to her, this is actually happening.
“Alex!” I make one last effort to concentrate on everything that’s passed between us from the moment we hooked up until he started changing. I need to believe he can feel the love I try to broadcast his way, and break her spell.
For a split second, I think I may have succeeded. He inclines his head toward me, and his eyes hold immeasurable sorrow. “Cherry loves me.” His voice holds no conviction. He grabs Ádísa’s wrist, stops her, but his hips are still thrusting forward. “I can’t. I love Cherry,” he says, louder this time.
Ádísa frees her hand and stands.
Is she giving up?
No. She pushes at his shoulders, until Alex takes a step back and lets her lower him to the ground. He opens his mouth to talk, but she hushes his protest with a finger across his lips.
“I love Cherry,” he says once more.
She smiles. “Not enough, though.”
Chapter Twenty
I expect her to straddle him and compound my misery, horror, and disgust, but she passes her palm over his face. “Sleep.”
“Didn’t you get the memo?” I snark, therefore I am. “He’s already asleep. We’re in his dream. And if you’re done perving all over him, it’s time for us to wake up, and for you to go back to being nothing but a memory.” Is that a quaver in my voice?
I’ve almost forgotten Willoughby, until he speaks. “You still believe you’ll wake from this? That there is an after for you?”
I snort. “There’s obviously an after for her, and Constantine twisted her overly made up head off!” Until now, I’ve more or less been flying by the seat of my pants, going for the what-if scenarios. ‘What if Alex’s subconscious kind of hates me?’ turned into, ‘What if psycho bitch and her boy toy are really real?’ and to, ‘What if I can keep her talking?’
Now I realize that, to see where the latter may lead, I have to focus on the hows.
“How is she here, anyway?” I ask.
Ádísa approaches us. I can see Alex’s prone form behind her, his face placid and body limp. “She is eternal.” The bitch says.
I laugh. “Not the tune you played when Constantine got rid of you.”
“But I’m still here.” Her calm grin is disconcerting.
“So you say. Prove it.”
“I need prove nothing to you, girl.” Her voice turns deeper, older. It bounces off the trees surrounding us, as though they were walls, and reaches my ears in a rumble. “I am who I am. You can only see my aftereffects, and you will—as have those who came before you.”
There we go with the riddles again. “Are you being cryptic on purpose,” I ask, “or simply unable to carry a normal conversation?”
I don’t see her move, but I feel the sting of her slap on my cheek. Tears of anger burn my eyes. I’ve never felt so vulnerable. Not even last time she tried to kill me. I won’t give her the satisfaction of showing it, though. “So it’s door number two, then.” If I could, I’d toss my hair back.
Ádísa kneels in front of me. Initially I’m irrationally afraid she’ll kiss me too. She seems about to, with how close she brings her lips to mine. “Maybe I should fuck one of you. See what all the fuss is about.” She scrutinizes my face. “Nah. I think I can live with not knowing.” She stands again, and now I’m looking at a pale thigh. Creepy crawlies make their way up my spine, when she says, “I’d rather just get rid of you.” Alex’s subconscious can’t possibly be making up the hatred in her tone.
“But why?” My bravado deflates as the certainty she is who she says, and not a faded memory, takes root.
She walks backward, until I can look into her face. “Because I’m done, Cherry. I’m tired of seeking your line up and down the world, vying for the attention of mortals whom I wouldn’t spare a second glance. I’m fed up with rejection upon rejection, for the sake of the same women who ultimately spawned you. That’s why I had Willoughby turn you.”
To my left, Willoughby preens as if she’s given him a compliment. ’Cause bleeding an unsuspecting woman dry in the back of a limo, while making out with her, is apparently an accomplishment.
I don’t voice my thoughts, because Ádísa is still talking. “As a vampire, you’d be the last of your line, and I could focus my efforts on you. I mean, look at us. How hard could it be to convince someone to leave you for me?”
Too hard, as it turned out.
“I guess I could have waited for you to have a loving boyfriend, and then killed you. That way, I could take advantage of his grief, but I tried killing the women before. It never works. The men won’t get over them. They just won’t. Constantine didn’t, even after you made it clear you didn’t want to see him again. It’s been what? Six months?”
“Four years plus change—but who’s counting?”
“Whatever. You were together for less than it takes me to braid my hair. You should have been nothing to him, yet he killed me for you.”
Ah huh! “So you are dead.”
“Not as dead as you’d want me to be. Tell me, Cherry Stem, what is it about women in your family that makes their men so loyal?”
This is the complete question. Now I finally know what she meant last time we’d met. “Maybe we simply don’t fall for men who would go for deranged murderous bitches,” I say.
She gives me a strange look, devoid of the anger I expected. “I will never understand the attraction, and I’ve made my peace with it. I just want it all to end, and I want to return to my rightful place. It is why I planned for Constantine to become your lover. Stealing him back would seal the deal and release me from this limited shell.” She looks at her immaculate body with as much disdain as I usually save for my belly rolls.
If she dislikes this form, how stunning did she originally look? Never mind. I don’t want to know. I have enough complexes already.
“So you wanted to get your Valkyrie cred back, but Constantine threw a wrench in your plans when he wanted to win me back.” I can’t entirely suppress my smugness.
“Valkyrie? You believe that?” She laughs, the sound too beautiful to be coming from a creature as evil as she is. “Valkyries don’t exist. I was so much more. So much stronger. I brought men to their knees, and they begged me to kill them with my love. I was a succubus, favored by Satan himself.”
My turn to laugh. “I see death has amplified your delusions of grandeur.”
She acts as though she hasn’t heard me. “Constantine was one of my greatest disappointments. No matter what I did, his soul was never far from yours. And this is why I’m going to take Alex from you.” There’s the devious smirk that makes my stomach lurch. I don’t believe for a moment she was what she claims to have been, but she’s still lethal.
If I’m to save Alex, I have to save myself first. “You have him. Now leave me alone.”
She shakes her head. “What I have is a man convinced the woman he loves is in love with another. He may do many interesting, deliciously depraved things with me, but he hasn’t chosen me. Not until he kills you.”
“But that’s—”
“A loophole.” Her smile is like a shark’s. “The way the condition was worded, he has to kill you for me, because I say so, not because he loves me.”
Fuck. Can we get back to trying to wake up?
“It won’t make a difference what you do.” Willoughby’s face appears impossibly close to mine, his pupils taking up most of his irises. “This dream is my playground. What I say goes, and I say Alex will drain you for her. For my maker. She will return, and bathe in your blood.”
“I thought I’d be drained by then. Best she’ll be able to do is snort my powdery remains.” My boldness is completely fake. Right now, I don’t believe there’s a way to survive this dream. Not unless Constantine figures out something’s wrong, and magically jumps in here with me.
“You can jest all you want, but the result will be the same.” Willoughby snaps his fingers, and my limbs shift. Lift. Straighten. My ass glides up the tree trunk I butted my head on, until the entire length of my body presses ramrod straight against that same trunk.
“Alex will drink you to death, proving Ádísa’s victory.” Willoughby brushes invisible specks of dust off his shoulders. He takes his time unbuttoning his sleeves, and rolling them up to his elbows. “Then I will carve out his heart with my fingers, and offer it to her. She will be restored, and after I’m done with your friends and family, there won’t be anyone left to remember you ever existed.”
I try to swallow past the knot in my throat, but find it impossible. Killing me won’t be enough for the twisted dynamic duo. They have to obliterate all traces of my passing from this world. “How are you doing this? You’re not even Alex’s maker, I am. I should have more power over his dreams than you do. Constantine said you can visit the dreams of someone whose blood you’ve tasted. But to control them?” It’s imperative I understand before I die.
“I am more than a thousand years old, Cherry. I know more than you ever dreamt of.”
“Constantine is older than you,” I say.
“But he hasn’t spent that time learning. Researching our nature. That’s why I knew how to bring her back.” His eyes are burning with fanaticism. He’d lay his life on the line for Ádísa. There’s no talking sense into him. “The only thing I didn’t know was that Ruby walks in the sun,” he says, “but now our dear Alex has informed me, I am certain your mother will eventually tell me all I need to know, to duplicate Ruby’s elixir of life.”
“She doesn’t know how,” I whisper.
“She doesn’t know she knows. I can dig into her memories. It’ll be painful, of course.”
My dead heart constricts in my chest, but I can’t let myself believe he can get to my mother. I have to trust Constantine to protect her, as he’s done before.
“With you out of the way and the curse broken, Ádísa and I can finally realize our plan,” Willoughby says.
Right. The world-domination thing. I’ll give you one guess how that went down last time.
If your answer was, ‘Like a lead balloon,’ congrats, you have more common sense than your run-of-the-mill megalomaniacal vampire.
“Let’s take over the world today, Pinky,” I mutter under my breath. I look at Ádísa. She’s standing over Alex, looking down at him with pure hunger. I’m not sure she’ll spare a moment’s thought to Willoughby, once she’s back to her true nature—whatever that may be—but he won’t believe me if I try to warn him.
Constantine will stop them. He will. He has to.
“No, he won’t.”
I should have realized sooner. The fucker can read my mind.
“It’s not that hard. You basically broadcast your thoughts. More to th
e point, I already told you this dream is mine to play with.”
“Then why don’t you get on with it? Have Alex kill me, if you think you can.” I have no doubt he can, but at this point, death may be easier than listening to these two planning my demise, and I’m not going to beg them for my life.
“Oh, we first had to make sure you’d convince your lover to do what we need,” Ádísa says.
Huh?
“He’d never kill you just because I asked him to.” She fiddles with the end of her braid, the gesture almost innocent. “But if I told him the only way to ensure you stopped wanting Constantine was to drink all your blood, he might.”
I narrow my eyes. I can do that much now, even if I can’t flex my pinkie.
“Oh, wait,” she says. “I’ve already told him that’s the way to your heart. I’ve made sure to keep him company in his dreams for a while. I’ve warned him about Constantine’s efforts to steal you back. Fed into his jealousy. But he needed to hear it from you. And now you’ve spent your precious last moments thinking how Constantine could help you. Only Constantine. He’ll be the one to save your parents. He’ll stop Willoughby and me. Such faith in a man who’s betrayed you.”
She tuts. “Pity Alex heard those thoughts as clearly as we did. He’s heartbroken, the poor dear. He’ll do anything in his power not to lose you. Even if it means killing you.”
No! I have to wake up!
I have to open my eyes before Alex does. Open my eyes open my eyes open my eyes open my eyes
I opened my eyes to complete darkness.
I was awake. I had to let people know what was happening. I tried to get off the mattress—why was it wet, anyway?
I wasn’t in bed.
I smelled moist earth and dead leaves, and the electricity in the air that usually meant a storm was near. Before I could focus my night sight, I heard a rustling.
“Constantine?” I croaked.
“Guess again.” My vision adjusted just in time to make out Alex’s disdain. The storm was in his eyes, as his fangs popped out, the right one nipping his lower lip enough that a drop of blood welled up to the surface.