Dreams for the Dead (27 page)

Several weeks passed, and Leila finished her semester with plenty of work to show for it. No one would guess she’d missed more than a week of classes, captive of a vampire who harbored damaging delusions of romance. She’d seemed to recover so quickly from her time with Jared. By immersing herself in art projects for school, she could effectively work through the things she’d experienced with him. That was how she’d explained it to Dawn, anyway, and Dawn saw no evidence to the contrary. Leila became, again, the same girl she’d always been.

“Will you come out with me tonight?” she asked Dawn one day. “There’s a show of everyone’s final work, and we’re all getting drinks after.”

Leila worked her way around the gallery that night, sharing stories and laughing. She knew everyone. Dawn watched from a corner, ill at ease among the happy chatter and bright lights. Oddly, they frightened her. They repelled her faintly.

All the pictures were in thin black frames against the clean white gallery walls. At a passing glance, they looked identical. Dawn began to glide past them, glancing at some and ignoring others. There were shots of people taken in their beds from unflattering angles. Shots of people lounging on couches, their zoned out faces cast in a television’s glow. Shots of empty chairs. Shoulder blades. Blurry shots of light shapes made through windows.

One picture was Dawn sitting in a booth at the Egg House, her body and face draped in striking shadows, her skin the yellowish color of a fading bruise. Her eyes, burned to lightless orbs, stared off somewhere past the camera. She looked bored and lost and lonely, and a little alien. The picture looked exactly how she felt, and she stared at it a long time.

“What do you think?” Leila asked, coming to stand beside her.

“It’s perfect,” Dawn said.

“You …” Leila stepped closer and lowered her voice. “You’re not going to bite anyone here, are you?”

Dawn glanced around at Leila’s fellow art students—mostly girls wearing cute dresses and boys who couldn’t be bothered to groom a beard.

“No,” she said. She stepped back from the picture and gave Leila a smile. “I’m going now.”

“Do you need my keys? I can get a ride from someone.”

“Thanks, but I want to walk. I’ll see you later.”

The December evening was crisp and clean. She unzipped the jacket she wore from habit but didn’t really need. Clouds followed her down the sidewalk.

In her time as a vampire, the night had opened like a door for her. She could go anywhere now without fear. Anything she wanted was available for the taking if only she would reach out a hand. People her age, tipsy and carefree, hopped down the streets in search of underground nightlife. U
nsuspecting figures moved inside the blazing white boxes of corner convenience stores. Burning eyes peered at her from the shadows, sometimes invitingly. Faceless others roamed alongside her, tortured by their own quests for sick seduction.

But among them all, he was never there.

Come back
, she thought with longing.
Don’t be gone.

She found a diner and slipped inside, squinting her eyes against the needlessly bright lights. She sipped on coffee even though she didn’t need it and stared out the window. It was still dark, but the sky was beginning to lighten. She felt no compulsion to hurry home.

Sunlight doesn’t hurt me. But I prefer the dark. We all do.

Daylight represented an escape for her now. Daylight was where most people lived. But she was no longer like most people.

“I want the sun!” she once shouted at the night. Nothing answered. The moon mocked her with its reflected glow.

Months slipped by with ease. Each day became less miserable than the last. Dawn carved a ro
utine out of her endless stretch of hours: going to work in the afternoons, trying to find blood afterward, purifying crystals and moving them about her room, altering dresses for Leila in the middle of the night, and reading until the last trace of darkness had vanished from the sky. With the morning bright but the sun still behind the mountains, she slept and slept. On her nights off, it was back to bars or art shows, where she could often pretend to be normal. Mostly.

She met people. She made friends, though she would never feel as close to any of them as she did to Leila. They could never know the truth about her, and that was fine. Dawn had always liked to be alone, but these days she craved solitude. It was as necessary to her now as blood.

It turned out she didn’t need Tristan after all. He entered her thoughts less frequently than before, and she hardly ever dreamed of him. She was content in her stagnant life. She wasn’t happy, exactly, but that had little to do with him. The recent past haunted her in hellish abstract. Flashes of bloodied faces and unforgiving hands grasping at her kept her awake. Images of the strangers she’d tasted stole her dreams.

She thought she understood why Tristan rarely slept or dreamed, and why he’d been so cruel. A vampire’s life was emotionally draining. There was energy for dwelling on the past or for pretending guilt was only for soft-hearted idiots, but not for both.

In March, warmish and windy, he returned. Dawn was walking home from work, a nightly routine now, when she became aware of a difference in the air. A new but familiar scent—the mingling of pine incense, soap-cleansed skin, and oleander—drifted to her on the breeze. She quickened her pace eagerly and then slowed to a stop.

Her hair stood on end as he walked into view, a lean black shadow. A streetlight blinked out overhead, but in the dark she could see perfectly. Her hair was growing out in crazy curls over her ears and forehead, but he still looked the same.

There was a moment’s pause when Tristan stopped in front of her, his face white in the gloom, his shadowed eyes betraying a thrilled heart. A moment filled with unvoiced emotion and infinite desire passed between them. She felt deliciously, terrifyingly overwhelmed.

“You came,” she said when she found her voice.

“I told you I’d be here,” he reminded her. He reached for her hands. “And I won’t ever leave you again, if you’ll have me.”

“You know I’ll have you.”

He smiled, but it was brief. The gleam in his eyes faded and his face turned serious. “I want to apologize. I don’t like the things I said to you, Dawn. I don’t like that I made you feel bad. It was so wrong of me. Will you forgive me?”

She lifted one of his hands and flattened it on her chest. “Do you remember when you said your heart beats for me?”

“Yes.”

“My heart beats for you, too. I’ll always forgive you.”

His other arm crooked around her neck and he leaned down for a kiss. The night folded around them. On his lips and tongue she tasted her own yearning and desire. Ripples of pleasure shot through her body like low currents of electricity. It was probably absurd to feel such profound relief at being with him after so long, yet there was no way she’d ever make him leave her again. She wouldn’t leave him, either. This was the moment she’d spent six months pining for, even the times she’d convinced herself she was better off alone.

The kiss ended slowly, their lips just breaths apart.
A breeze picked up strands of his hair and made them dance around her face. Tristan’s full, fanged smile was artless and heartbreaking. She returned it, delirious and happy.

“What,” he asked, “have you been d
oing with yourself for the last six months?”

“Missing you. Every single day, even when I didn’t think I was. What about you?”

“The same.”

“What are we going to do now?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Everything. Just be with each other. We have forever.”

“Forever,” she said, testing the word aloud. It was just a word. She had no true concept of it. Somehow, though, it wasn’t hard to imagine a
lways being twenty-three. Maybe that was the way of everyone young, cursed to think it would always be so.

“I don’t know what fo
rever’s like,” she told him.

“Neither do I. Not yet.”

“So we’ll find out together?”

“Yes.”

Arm in arm, the vampires disappeared into the night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heather lives in Las Vegas, NV with her family. She is the author of
A Dark-Adapted Eye
and the young adult novel
Unchanged
.