Come to Me

Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one

To my brother Chris,

who will surely be shocked by the naughty bits.

Maramures, Northern Transylvania, 1423

Naked and full of mischief, Samira crept onto the bed of the ruling prince of Maramures. She paid no heed to the wench who slept beside him, crawling over the snoring girl as if she did not exist.

The prince, Dragosh, mumbled and twitched in his sleep, as if trying to dislodge a bug from his face. Samira tilted her head, her long, bloodred hair slithering over her bare shoulders, her black, leathery wings fluttering once to keep her balanced as she peered into the face of her victim.

This was one of the many moments she enjoyed as a dream demon: perching on the bedcovers, gazing at a sleeping man's face, wondering who he was and savoring the power she held over him. He had no idea what was about to happen, the poor fool.

Prince Dragosh had a thick scar across his cheek, and deep creases etched into his square forehead—creases from a lifetime of strife, she guessed. Or maybe he was prone to indigestion. Stomach troubles, she had found, had a peculiarly strong effect on the tempers of humans. Sometimes she thought they cared more about eating than they did about having sex.

Silly creatures.

The prince's lips were thin, his skin weather-roughened, his nose a much-broken fist in the center of his broad face. Being a ruling prince probably meant he didn't have any trouble luring beautiful women into his bed, though.

Samira glanced at the young woman who was sleeping next to Dragosh, and upon whose stomach she daintily knelt. Drool dribbled from the corner of the wench's parted lips, and a thin film coated her exposed teeth. Samira shuddered and moved her wing away from the girl's gaping maw. If this was the best that Maramures had to offer in the way of nubile young beauties, Dragosh had her sympathy.

She turned her attention back to the nymph-deprived prince. A fanning of lines spread from the corner of each of his eyes, speaking of hours spent squinting into the sunlight, surveying the field of battle and happily counting the bodies of the slain. Or perhaps the lines spoke of kindness and humor. One never knew.

Dragosh was a strong ruler, she guessed. Fair. Hard. Which meant a lot of people probably hated him. Such was the perversity of humanity.

Samira looked back over her shoulder at her friend Theron, standing by the door to the prince's chamber. He was an incubus, a male dream demon who existed only to give dreams of sex to frustrated mortal women. Samira was a succubus, and gave such dreams to sex-deprived men. They were both demons of the Night World, winged beings who gave sexual fantasies—and sexual nightmares, when warranted—to dreaming mortals.

The fantasies were fun, and the nightmares even more so. Samira's nightmares were a punishment to men who had behaved badly: men who ogled women's breasts while talking to them; who made rude remarks about the size and lumpiness of their wife's buttocks; who thought foreplay was for sissies; who passed gas in bed. The list of tiresome male failings was endless, and Samira's inventiveness legendary amongst other succubi. She had a natural flare for female vengeance, and enjoyed it if only because she was good at it.

Dragosh, however, had done nothing wrong recently. Nothing that called for a sharp slap on his nose—unless Samira counted finishing first when he'd made love to the wench, and then falling asleep on top of her. A crime, yes, but so common among men as to go without remark. No, Theron had asked Samira to deliver this nightmare to Dragosh as a favor to him, to fulfill his end of an outrageous bargain he had made with a human named Vlad.

Some would say that it had been a bargain made with the Devil, but Theron wasn't the Devil. And delivering this nightmare meant breaking half a dozen rules of the Night World. Still, the stakes of the bargain were high enough that Samira was willing to help.

It was just another nightmare, after all. How much harm could it do? Dragosh had probably done
something
to deserve it. No man was innocent. She ought to punish them all just as a matter of course.

Theron nodded for her to proceed. Samira climbed atop Dragosh's barrel chest, squatting weightless upon his rising and falling rib cage. Anticipation tingled through her, as it always did at the beginning of a dream delivery. The prince's latent sexual energy was feeding her powers and rousing an echo of his hungers within her ethereal body. She had no physical desires of her own, and only felt lust when she reflected it back from a man.

She reached out and touched Dragosh's brow.

A jumble of images and emotions washed through her. Faces of men: worry; anger; distrust. The face of a young girl, tawny-haired: love; protectiveness. The vicious chaos of battle, Turkish armies in their foreign garb, with bloodstained spears and swords: fury; fear; bloodlust; determination. Peasant farmers in their tunics, bent in the fields: approval; paternal concern. The greatest enemy of Dragosh's family, the black-haired Bogdan of Moldavia: distrust; grudging respect; anxiety.

These were the echoes of the prince's thoughts, the impressions of his days, the bits and pieces of his history.

Again, and even more strongly, Samira sensed the tawny-haired girl. She knew already, from Theron, that this was Dragosh's youngest sister, Lucia, a miracle child born when their mother had been the astonishing age of forty-five. Samira sensed Lucia's purity in Dragosh's mind. Innocence. A deep love and pride in Dragosh, that this fragile angel among mortals should be his responsibility to protect and cherish, to keep untouched by the foul, lewd hands of other men.

Samira continued to invade Dragosh's mind like smoke through a house, discovering the paths of his emotions and the images that touched them off. From those inner emotions and images she began to weave the requested nightmare: Dragosh's beloved sister, the innocent, tawny-haired Lucia, was standing on a table in the great hall of the despised Prince Bogdan of Moldavia. She wore only a thin sleeping shift.

Dragosh gurgled in surprise and distress.

Bogdan's five sons sat around the table. Samira didn't know what they looked like, so she made the barbarian princes black-haired and dark-eyed like their father, and dressed them in the colors of Moldavia, with the silhouette of a wolf on the shoulder. The wolf—it was the symbol of the ancient Dacian race from which they claimed descent, which had inhabited Moldavian lands for millennia. The race was present long before the Romans had come to stake their claim fifteen hundred years ago, and was still present now, after those Romans, their empire crumbling, had retreated to their homeland.