Dreams for the Dead (13 page)

Though he finished, there was no satisfaction, and afterward he felt unaccountably bleak.

They parted and rose to their feet, an unusual tension between them. There were no words of a
ffection tonight. They stood there in silence, she pulling down her dress and he zipping up his jeans.

With grass in her hair, Nola frowned at him. “What’s the matter?” she asked. He heard the co
ncern and disappointment in her voice.

“Nothing. It’s not you,” he assured her. “I’m—I don’t know. I don’t feel right.”

“Let me know if I can help?”

“Of course.” He leaned down and gave her a soft, lingering kiss. “We’ll talk later.”

Augusta and Branek were no longer in the family room. Tristan had no idea where they’d gone. Jared was probably holed up in his room with Leila. Dawn’s friend, Tristan remembered. The thought was suddenly uncomfortable to him. He turned abruptly and went back outside to look for Nola, but she was no longer in their spot.

Alone, he wandered around for a few minutes, trying to pinpoint the source of his restlessness. There were things he didn’t want to think about. Misdeeds he didn’t want to remember. If you were going to be a sinner, it was better not to repent. He would be harsher on himself than any god ever would.

Across the lawn, the shadows shifted. Someone moved toward him. The pale, square-jawed face of a thin man with silver hair and lead-colored eyes appeared. His presence wasn’t unexpected.
I watch
, Loftus had informed them many times over the years.
I know everything you do.

“Tristan,” Loftus said. “I would like to speak with you.”

Dryness scratched Tristan’s throat. “Of course.”

“Was your trip successful?”

“Yes. Fallon was in a town called Mineral Springs. I told him you needed him back here.”

“And yet he has not come to me. Did it not occur to you to bring him here by force?”

“I didn’t think it necessary to go that far.”

“I see.” Loftus turned his eyes to the moon and appeared thoughtful. From years of experience, Tristan knew the calm was a façade. “I cannot help but think your failure to act has something to do with this girl you’ve been dragging around with you. I did not imagine, when I sent you on the trip, you would bring her back with you.”

“Mm. She’s nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Of course not. And I cannot say you are the only one ever to have lost his head this way.” Loftus smiled. “I’ve had doubts about you in the past. At times I’ve thought you too soft for our lif
estyle. Thankfully, you’ve nullified my concerns many times. You have proven yourself, Tristan, but I do not like this game you are playing. I must remind you toys are meant for your temporary amusement. They are not to sustain you.”

“Yes. I know.” Tristan’s stomach felt unpleasantly lumpish.

“I am aware you do, and I hope you come to your senses soon. All I require from you is commitment and obedience. Can you give those things to me?”

Tristan looked Loftus in the eyes. “Don’t doubt it.”

“Do not give me cause.”

And then Loftus receded into the shadows, returning to whatever voyeuristic control-freak hell he’d come from.

Alone, Tristan sat down by the pool, shaded by the ash trees, and decided for about the hundredth time in his life he didn’t give a fuck about anything Loftus said. Trapped at twenty-six, more and more years slipped by him, and there was no point keeping track. He wasn’t a child. Why the fuck would he answer to someone other than himself, or let another person define and run his life.

All their lives.

He felt lost, and maybe the others did too but were too afraid to say so. Maybe they’d let Loftus control them for so long none of them even knew the definition of
self
. Vampire was their identity. Loftus was their master. He’d broken them long before letting them discover that for themselves in a dark, damp passage in the earth.

Tristan’s mind wandered to Dawn. The thought of her both lifted his spirits and dragged them down. If he kept her, he would destroy her. Undoubtedly. If he did it right, she’d let him, and she wouldn’t even know it until too late.

Help me
, he thought.
Save me. I don’t know where I am.

N
ine

I
n the
morning, Dawn wasn’t sure whether she’d actually spoken with Leila sometime during the night before, but the memory stuck with her. She was alone in the room.

She went into the bathroom and filled a glass with water. She kept it beneath the faucet even after it was full, letting the water run over her hand in a smooth, continuous stream. It was sort of comfor
ting in a small, mesmerizing way.

After a moment she shut off the water, drank from the glass, and dried her hand on a worn white towel.

“Are you all right?” Dawn whispered to her reflection.

I’m starting to … feel. Freak out. Break down.
She didn’t know which one to choose. All of them, probably.

There was a bowl of fruit on the small end table by the teal chair. She pulled out an orange and ate it section by section. She left the rind on table.

With a sigh, she walked over to the door to try it, not thinking it would be unlocked. To her surprise, it was. She froze for a second, listening hard, but there were no sounds. Alone and apparently unobserved, she stepped cautiously into the foyer.

It was daytime. Maybe the vampires were sleeping, resting like corpses in coffins, though she knew better about the coffins. And if Tristan were any indication of a typical vampire, they wouldn’t be sleeping.

Walking along the wall, she came to another door. It was off in a corner, on the opposite side of the foyer from the purple-curtained room. Looking in, she saw a small office. A plain writing desk in the center of the room held a brass lamp, glowing softly. Every inch of wall space was devoted to shelves, most of them crammed with books.

Hello
, Dawn thought with interest, temporarily forgetting she was a prisoner. The sight of books could do that to her, apparently.

She’d only look for a moment, just in case there was some kind of information she could make useful somehow. She drifted toward the shelves, letting her hand come up to hover over the spines of ancient texts. They were bound in cloth and leather, some relatively new and others disint
egrating. Some of the books were swollen into wedges, the pages discolored with water damage. Some were just sheaves of yellowed parchment bound together with twine. They looked so rare and expensive she was afraid to touch them, yet she wanted to linger and browse them all, just for fun.

After circling the room once, she walked to the desk and glanced over the papers strewn across it. Most were covered in someone’s indecipherable scrawl. She saw intricate mathematical equations that made absolutely no sense to her and charts with pentacles and other weird symbols she didn’t reco
gnize.

Shuffling lightly through the papers, she saw a small book bound in soft brown leather. A few sheets of paper fluttered to the ground as Dawn picked it up and let it fall open to a page in the mi
ddle. It was a diary, written in a quick, slanting hand.

We were in the car, heading nowhere into darkness. The headlights glowed upon a narrow strip of paved road. Stars stretched overhead in glittering infinity. Delphine leaned her forehead on the cool glass of the window. Her eyes could not see in the darkness as mine could, but I knew she must have felt our distance from civilization. She must have known this was just some anonymous road snaking through dry lake beds and endless mountains, the night cold enough for jackets and blankets and fires. She missed trees and greenery, but I found the desert suited me just fine.

I looked at her profile, the dashboard lights carving her delicate features with harsh lines. She made me angry and my foot pressed down hard on the gas. When I spoke, my voice broke the silence with a startling growl, bitter and biting.

“You’re mine, Delphine. I made you mine when I gave you my child. And now you refuse to let me give you this gift?”

She said nothing. Her reflection in the black window was passionless and uncaring. Her indiffe
rence gave rise to my anger. I glared at her, not bothering to watch the road. I hit the steering wheel several times, nearly cracking it. Delphine did not flinch.

She’d rejected my offer just days after losing my child. “It’s not a gift,” she’d said. “It’s a curse.” But I did not agree, and I knew she would soon see reason. Her body was still soft from pregnancy, her breasts heavy with useless milk, and she would only need time. She b
elonged to me and her will was not strong enough to resist me for long.

I switched off the headlights, plunging us into a darkness mitigated only by the inad
equate glow of the dashboard. She did not blink, but I could see her chewing anxiously on her lower lip. Her heartbeat quickened.

“Tell me you’re mine,” I implored. “Tell me or I will kill us both.”

As soon as she saw the tiny pinpoints of light in the distance, I eased the car over into the left lane. My speed made the old car shake. She sat up, staring at the oncoming headlights, but I didn’t change lanes. If she said nothing, she
wanted
to die. I’d warned her. If she would not make the choice to join me as a vampire, I would make it for her.

Blinding whiteness filled the windshield. She reached for the wheel and I slammed on the brakes. Our bodies pulled forward. The car swerved around us, honking angrily, and De
lphine cried out with crazed relief. But she’d pulled the wheel too sharply and our speed had changed too abruptly. We were rolling, glass was breaking. We were weightless.

Silence. I felt a trickle of blood on my forehead, but I was otherwise unharmed. I came car
efully to my feet and saw her lying a few yards away in the dirt, bits of glass studding her forearms. The smells of blood and burning rubber drifted away on a breeze. There was a fire in the banged-up car.

She called my name and I was at her side in an instant. Her fine black hair was wet and thick. When I touched it, my hand came away soaked in blood.

“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” she said.

“I’ll save you.”

“No. Just get away from me.”

“I won’t lose you, Delphine. You are my love, the mother of my child. You are beaut
iful.”

“Your
dead
child! You don’t even know me!” she shrieked weakly. “I hate you.”

I knew it was only her pain speaking, so I had to take it away from her. She cried as I drank her blood, but soon the tears dried and her body stilled. I dripped my own blood down her throat. Her eyes were closed against the stinging, smoky air. My lungs burned.

Something had gone wrong, but I refused to believe she was truly dead. I lifted her body in my arms and walked into the night.

Dawn flipped through some more pages, not really reading but seeing enough to realize whoever had written this diary was no stranger to violence. With a shudder, she closed the book and put it back on the desk, covering it with loose sheets of paper. Strange words jumped off the pages at her:
quintessence, chrysopoeia, henosis, prima materia
.

Prima materia
. Fallon had mentioned those words in Mineral Springs. They meant nothing to her, but she couldn’t deny the sudden fear this room and its contents inspired. Someone was messing with dark things and she didn’t want any part of it.

Though she wanted to leave the room right away, first she bent to pick up the papers that had dropped to the floor. She didn’t want anyone knowing she’d been here. Her fingers felt thick and clumsy as she tried to lift the thin sheets from the hard floor as quickly as possible.

And then she noticed it—a hand. A hand beneath the desk. It was pale and bloodless, severed just below the wrist. Dawn could see the bones and red gore congealed at the end. The fingers were curled in a loose fist.

The papers fluttered from her hands as she jumped to her feet. What did it matter if anyone knew she’d been there? A dead person’s
hand
was just lying on the floor. Maybe that was an everyday occurrence in this house, but she’d never seen a severed body part casually forgotten beneath a desk. The sight of it freaked her out and reminded her of the type of people who lived here.

Vampires. Bloodsucking, murderous vampires.

She turned to leave the room and jumped to see someone standing in the doorway. Pressing a hand flat over her rapidly beating heart, she realized it was only Leila.

“Jesus. You scared me. Oh my god, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Leila whispered.

Leila’s olive skin had lost much of its luster. Her black brows arched high above her amber eyes, which appeared huge in her hollow face. Dawn caught glimpses of her inner strength, but also the misery Leila was desperately trying to hide. She couldn’t, though. Not from her best friend.

“I meant to come rescue you,” Dawn said. “But … everything went wrong. I don’t know what I was thinking— God, I fucked this up so bad.”

“Like we stood a chance against these psychos anyway.”

Dawn walked over and hugged Leila, but she stopped herself from squeezing too hard. Leila felt disconcertingly fragile.

“We have to get out of here,” she said. Shuddering, she resisted the urge to glance back at the hand. She tried not to wonder how many more amputations might have been strewn about the house.

Leila shrugged. “It was hard to come down here without him knowing. He watches me all the time. He never lets me say no. He … he always gets what he wants from me.” Her voice was small, a bit shaky, so unlike the confident, carefree tone she usually had. “Everything was sort of … foggy at first. I knew I was in trouble, but for some reason nothing seemed very urgent.”

“I’m sorry, Leila, but we—”

“He drove me here,” Leila continued in a rush, her eyes desperate and distressed. “Here, to this house, and somehow it started to feel familiar, as if it were remolding itself to accommodate me. I felt like I’d been here for years.”

Did vampires have powers? Tristan had said vampires couldn’t read minds and that they were strong. From Leila’s story, it sounded like vampires—Jared, at least—also possessed powers of persu
asion.

“I met some of his family. A girl and man he said was his dad. Then he took me to his room. He watched me when I slept that night, and he was there when I woke up. He started massaging my shoulders and I told him that was a stupid way to seduce me. I said I wanted to go home but he just kept grabbing me. It was easier if I didn’t fight him, Dawn,” Leila said, her voice cracking. “It was easier to give in.”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t think— Oh, god, I’m so sorry.”

“I want to go home. I can’t breathe here.”

“Come on. We’re going now.”

“I stole a key from him. It opens every door here. That’s how I get around when he’s gone.”

“Well, good, I’m sure it’ll help us—”

“He’s coming,” Leila said suddenly. She grabbed Dawn’s forearm and glanced around, eyes wild with fear. “He’s coming! I have to go.”

“Okay, just—”

“I’ll find you later.”

“Leila, wait—”

“Don’t let them touch you. Don’t let them hurt you. You’ll never be the same again.”

With those mysterious words, Leila ran from the room. Dawn hurried after her, but she wasn’t fast enough to see where she’d gone. Several doors led off from the foyer. Besides the door to Tristan’s room and the one to the office, she had no idea where they led.

“Leila?” she called tentatively.

Suddenly a hand came down on Dawn’s shoulder. She gasped in fright. “Dawn!” someone cried. “
Dawn
. Wait, your name
is
Dawn, right?”

She found herself staring at a girl a few inches shorter than her. The girl had skin like a smoky quartz and wide citrine eyes. Her hair was neon blue.

“Uh … right,” Dawn stammered, her eyes searching the foyer behind the girl.

“I’m Augusta.”

“Oh. Hi.” She thought Tristan had mentioned her before. The pizza story, she recalled. “Do you know …”

“What are you doing out here?”

Dawn snapped to attention, startled by Augusta’s abrupt, chilly tone. She suddenly remembered she’d seen Augusta before, draining a red-haired boy dry during that strange scene in the family room. “Uh … looking for Tristan? I …”

“That other girl wanders around all the time. But Jared treats her really badly, so I never say an
ything. I keep hoping she’ll try to get out, but she never does.” Augusta grabbed Dawn above the elbow in a surprisingly strong grip for someone with such small hands. “If you thought you were going somewhere, you’re wrong. Sorry, but I have to take you back to his room.” She paused. “
Were
you trying to get away?”

They began to walk, but very slowly. “Er, no.”

“You’re very confused, aren’t you? Oh, you poor, poor dear. Do you want to help Tristan? You think you’re going to save his soul or something?”

“Well …”

“I hate to tell you this, but he’s a fucking mess. We all are.” Augusta giggled in a slightly maniacal fashion. “Anyway, he probably doesn’t want your help. We’re used to misery. We probably wouldn’t know what to do without it.”