Dreams for the Dead (19 page)

“Relax,” Branek said soothingly. “I’m not going to bite you. Won’t you invite me i
nside?”

Blood pounded in her skull. “No.”

His arms tightened and he moved his mouth closer to her skin. She could feel his lips moving as he spoke with quiet menace. “Dawn. I’m telling you to invite me inside.” He repeated her name in a warning growl when she hesitated.

She swooned. Branek’s body pressed against her back as he rocked her back and forth. Anyone looking at them now would only see a loving couple. Silky strands of his black hair tickled her neck.

“You’re not going to scream,” he said soothingly. “You’re going to invite me inside your apartment, unless you’d rather stay out here and die of blood loss.”

Dawn took a long, shuddering breath, and closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep. “Come in.”

“I was sure you’d come around.”

He deposited her on the couch and wandered around the room for a moment, touching ever
ything. He straightened one of Leila’s framed movie posters.

“I’m going to give you something,” he said, sitting down beside her. He grabbed her arm so she couldn’t get away. “You won’t want it, but you need it. Look at you. You can barely keep yourself conscious.”

She twisted in his grasp, angry and swooning so much she felt belligerently drunk. “What do you care?”

“As it happens, I don’t care. But I’m giving you my blood anyway.”

“I’m not taking that from you.”

“You are, actually.”

He pressed her back against the couch, pinning her with his weight, and bit the large vein in his wrist. Before Dawn knew what was happening, he’d shoved it up against her mouth and blood was seeping past her teeth. She pressed her lips shut but he forced the fingers of his other hand between them. She coughed and swallowed. Spilled blood sluiced along her jaw. Her eyes watered and her throat stung.

Just when she thought she couldn’t take it anymore, the pressure left her lips and she could breathe again. Sitting up, she wanted to tell Branek just what she thought of him and his stupid blood, but it hurt to speak. Anyway, he probably knew what she wanted to say from the daggers in her eyes. Not that he cared.

“There,” he said brightly. “That should be enough.”

“Enough for what?” she coughed out.

“To heal you. Jared’s attack, while sloppy, took a lot from you. Vampire blood gives strength.”

“Tristan didn’t give me blood when
you
attacked me.”

“He just let you recover the old-fashioned way, then? Well, my bite was much cleaner than J
ared’s. And I didn’t take too much. Just enough to make you faint.” He smiled at her, and she didn’t like it. “I thought you might be lonely, Dawn. I thought I could comfort you now that you no longer have Tristan in your life.”

“No. Get out of my apartment.”

“You’re not strong enough to stop me from doing what I want, you know.”

“If you hurt me—”

“Why would
I
hurt you? I just rescued you.”

The wind had picked up and was making alarming, alien sounds. It whistled and roared, gusting like crazy. Mulberry branches whacked the outer walls. Dawn sat stiffly on the couch while Branek idly paced the room again. Her eyes followed him warily. He appeared to be paying absolutely no attention to her, but she knew better.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

He looked over at her, mildly surprised. “I told you. Tristan’s done with you, and I’ve come to pick up the pieces. He told me exactly where to find you.”

“I don’t believe he’d do that,” she said bravely. “You’re lying.”

“Must be nice to be so naïve.” He raised his dark eyebrows in a caricature of innocence. “He did have his fun, didn’t he?”

“You’re a bastard,” she seethed.

“I’ve been called worse. Don’t hate yourself because you fell for him. You’re not the first. Tri
stan, especially, can be very persuasive. He’s got a talent.”

Dawn narrowed her eyes at him but didn’t respond. It was the only way she could remain calm while Branek stood there in her living room, plotting some horrible thing to do to her, and telling her Tristan had only been using her. She’d known that all along, of course, and it was fine, because she’d been doing the same to him. But still it hurt to hear, which was surely what Branek had intended.

With a long-suffering sigh, he crossed the room and stopped before her. “Don’t look so upset. So what if he used you? We’ve all done it. Tristan had some things to sort out, and you were a convenient comfort for him, but now he’s back where he belongs.”

She shoved her shaking hands beneath her thighs.

“That haircut doesn’t really suit you, by the way.”

“I wasn’t looking for your opinion.”

“Well, then, how about an explanation for why I really gave you my blood?”

“W-why did you?”

“Well,” he began slowly, lowering himself to the coffee table so that he sat facing her. He rested his elbows on his knees and rubbed his hands together lightly. “At first I only wanted to help Jared get away with Leila. He’s my brother, after all. But then I remembered my father had just tried to kill me, so I’m feeling especially vulnerable. I need something fun to put me back in the right frame of mind. Maybe that taste I had of you made me want more. But mostly,” he said, “—mostly I just like to fuck people’s shit up, and I wanted you fully conscious while I fucked up yours.”

Dawn knew what it took to fight a vampire, and she didn’t have it. She jumped up anyway, at the same time as he did, and shoved her hands into his chest. He barely moved except to grab her wrists in one swift move. He squeezed hard, grinning with evil glee. Her mouth dropped open and she winced in pain.

“Let me be clear,” he said, his dark green eyes boring into hers. “I’m not like Tristan. I won’t hesitate to hurt you when I feel like it. I love suffering, Dawn, and I came here to see you in its throes.”

“No!” Dawn struggled against him, her movements growing more and more urgent until she was thrashing violently but uselessly. “No!
Noooo!
Stop!”

“Jesus.” He stared down at her as if she were the one who’d done something offensive, but he didn’t let go. “You like that word, don’t you?”

“I said
no
. I don’t
want
it!”

“Haven’t you guessed?” he said without emotion. “It doesn’t matter what you want.”

Her vision blurred and swam with black spots as his hand cracked against the side of her head. His hard, dark eyes danced before her, his fangs bared savagely. He hit her again, multiple blows exploding against her cheeks. Pain radiated across her face. His evil laughter shattered against her like glass.

It’s not too late
, she told herself as he flipped her facedown against the couch.
I’m not dead yet.

He yanked down her jeans and shoved himself inside her. His thrusting weight held her down. She pressed her face into the couch cushions, waiting for it to be over.

But it wasn’t just the rape. It was a bite, too. Swift and sure, his fangs sank into her neck before she even noticed the pain. This was going to be the last thing she ever felt. He was going to kill her. He drank and drank, and plunged tirelessly into her, and her eyes drifted shut, and her body went still.

“Forgive me,” Branek whispered just as her heart stopped beating.

T
hirteen

S
he
was reborn in darkness. A draft of subterranean air stirred her to unlife. Her heart was like a stone, so heavy in contrast to the weightlessness of her body. She inhaled the imaginary scent of oleander. She could hear the creaking of her bones. She hovered in the silence between dreams and reality, or life and death.

Darkness. It was cold, the air so still and quiet. Holding her breath, Dawn listened hard. She thought she heard footsteps, or whispers, but the sounds were indistinct and fleeting.

She lay in her grave.

Who is going to save me?
she asked herself, even though she already knew the answer.

The floor beneath her felt familiar. Unsticking her tongue from the roof of her mouth, she slowly pushed herself up to a sitting position and waited for the black to fizzle from her vision. Then she realized she could already see, and she wasn’t in an underground grave after all. Everything was in shades of gray, but the apartment was unmista
kable. She was alone.

No, not alone. Gasping softly, Dawn noticed a man slumped against the front door a few feet in front of her. She could see his angular profile, his pale skin, his dark hair indistinguishable from the shadows. For a moment he was unfamiliar, a stranger, and then he raised his head to look at her.

“Dawn,” Tristan said.

“I … didn’t invite you in.”

“You invited me once. The invitation is good forever.” He smiled softly.

She blinked at him. She could see in the dark.

Her heart was not beating.

And … fangs. There they were, poking down on either side of her tongue, slightly indenting the flesh. The lasting proof of what Branek had done to her. She would drink blood now. She would crave it.

Her chest tightened and she thought she might cry for a million different reasons.
I’m a vampire. Oh, god, I’m a vampire.

The words caught as she uttered them. “I … I’m dead, Tristan. I’m like you now.”

“I know,” he whispered.

She was a vampire, cold and dead. This was death. This was the afterlife, just as Tristan had said. Her body was a pillar of ice.

“Why,” she said in a low, dangerous voice, “didn’t you just kill me?”

He watched without a word as she rose to her feet and began moving slowly toward him. Her muscles were tensed, her jaw tight. Her hands, clenched into fists against her thighs, trembled. She spoke with seething calm.

“The night we met, you said the rules dictated that you kill me. Well, why didn’t you, Tristan? Why didn’t you just fucking kill me then? Why didn’t you spare me all the shit I had to put up with just for trying to get my best friend away from you sick fucks?
Why
, Tristan?
Why didn’t you kill me
!”

Her voice broke into a manic shriek and her body exploded with violent rage. She threw he
rself on top of him, slapping his face, pounding her fists on his face and shoulders and wherever else she could reach. She screamed and cursed, hating him,
hating
him. Hot tears blinded her and she kept flailing even after he’d grabbed her wrists to stop her from hitting him. He came to his knees and got behind her, wrapping his arms tightly around her torso until she’d lost the energy to fight. She sat there in his embrace and he held her without a word. She wept herself silent.

“I wasn’t going to come,” he said in a low, soft voice, not quite a whisper. He rested one cheek atop her head. “I was going to forget about you. But Jared turned up with Leila, and he said he’d left you with Branek. And I came. I had to. I was … scared. But he was already gone, and you were here on the floor where he’d left you, and I could smell death. You were changing.”

“He gave me his blood,” she said. “He
forced
me to drink it. Before he …”

Forgive me
, he’d whispered. That wasn’t going to happen.

“Did it hurt?” Tristan asked.

“Yes. It hurt. Everything about it hurt. And then it didn’t, probably because dead people don’t feel pain. But I guess it doesn’t matter now,” she added with a tremulous sigh.

“You’re very brave.”

She let out a disbelieving laugh. “Is that what you think about me?”

“I think a lot of things about you. Right now, I think you need blood.”

Dawn flinched. “How am I supposed to get that?”

“I usually go and find someone on the street. But you could always go to someone you know.”

Zach’s face flashed in Dawn’s mind but she dismissed the notion. Drinking from Leila was similarly out of the question. “I don’t think I’d like to do that to someone I know.”

“Unsuspecting strangers it is, then.”

“Tristan …” She turned in his arms to face him. “How do I … I mean, I’m not sure I can just attack someone on the street.”

“I’ll help you,” he said. “It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.”

She would venture to guess taking blood from strangers wasn’t so great either, but she would have to get used to it, like he’d said. It was simply her life now.

Dawn glanced back at the door as they left the apartment. “Will I need to be invited back in?”
She remembered having to do that for Tristan, though she hadn’t known he was a vampire at the time. Branek had forced her to invite him, too.

“No,” Tristan said. “You already lived here and you were made inside these walls.”

They walked. Tristan was impassively beautiful. Dawn realized her vision hadn’t magically improved and that she still had to wear her glasses to see anything. Apparently being a vampire didn’t change the shape of your corneas.

Not much time had passed since Branek’s attack. It was still night, hours before sunrise. The dark would aid their ability to obtain blood in a stealthy manner, she thought. Her street, lined mostly with other apartment complexes, was deserted, but so many windows faced out. Though it was late, Dawn wo
rried someone might see them.

They crossed the street to Palm Bay. Murder Bay, Dawn and Leila had called it, after a man had killed his girlfriend on a night ending in a wash of red and blue police lights. The complex had since gone bankrupt and had been vacant for months.

Tristan led her behind it. The space between a corner building and a long cinder block wall was a narrow alley of unkempt grass and bits of trash the wind had deposited there.

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Dawn watched as he made his way out of the alley and through a nearby opening in the wall. On the other side was a rocky desert lot littered with the occasional overturned shopping cart. It sloped unevenly down to the back of a convenience store advertising beer, cigs, and snacks. Tristan was a sinuous shadow.

And now I’m a shadow, too.

He reached the store and she lost sight of him for a few moments. Suddenly he reappeared with a second figure trudging alongside him. That had been fast. She shrank back behind the wall, pressing herself against it. A headache throbbed behind her eyes. It was suddenly hard to breathe.

Tristan arrived with his prey—
their
prey. Dawn opened her eyes to see a skinny young man with a petulant mouth whose eyes furtively scanned the area. “Well?” he demanded abruptly.

“Are you ready, Dawn?” Tristan said.

“No.” Nervous, she shook her head. “Can you …?”

“This better not be some bullshit,” the guy said, growing quickly agitated.

Unnoticed, Tristan slid up behind him, mouth open to bite. His hands clawed over the young man’s shoulders, holding him in place as his teeth sank in. Dawn’s eyes went wide as she watched the young man thrash briefly. Then his glassy eyes dropped shut and he stilled, and Tristan continued to drink. He looked so dark and alien, so in control, and Dawn felt oddly titillated. The feeling grew into exhilaration as the young man slumped. Tristan held on to him all the way to the ground. She realized she was moving toward them on her hands and knees.

“He’ll probably die if he loses any more blood,” Tristan said. “Do you want someone else?”

Dawn didn’t want the young man to die, but she couldn’t imagine two unconscious bodies before her. She couldn’t imagine bringing a person down on her own. She couldn’t imagine waiting any longer. She already recognized the craving, a sort of empty heat not in her stomach, not exactly, but in her veins and muscles. She felt slightly ill, as if she’d had too much strong coffee and not enough food.

She shook her head silently, frowning, and stared at the guy’s flung wrist. If she could still feel her pulse, it would have been hammering. Her mouth was open, tongue teasing at the points of her fangs. Her body was weak and hot, her craving so strong it robbed her of the ability to think straight.

“I need it,” she said, distressed. Her eyes burned with unshed tears. “I
need
it.”

Tristan didn’t speak as she grabbed the young man’s wrist and pulled it slowly toward her face. After a brief hesitation, she bit down and her mouth instantly flooded with warmth. The blood tasted faintly chemical, unpleasantly so, but it was utterly satisfying, like water for a parched throat. It came so freely, with so little effort on her part, and she swallowed it with greedy passion. This was her su
stenance and she would gladly kill for it. She felt powerful and ecstatic with a sudden understanding of bloodlust—a reverence for it. This must have been the sensation vampires sought so ruthlessly.

At last the blood slowed and she found she’d had enough. Dawn licked her lips as she sat back on her heels. Guilt set in. The young man looked like a boy, pale and still but for the slight rise and fall of his chest. These were his last breaths. Tristan, crouched on the other side of the body, watched her attentively.

“How did you get him to come up here?” she asked, unable to look away from the body, even though it suddenly repelled her.

“You only have to promise them whatever they’re looking for,” he said. “It’s easy when they’re desperate.”

She poked her fangs lightly into her lower lip, brow furrowed. “It’s so sinister.”

“Yes. But I do it every night. You will too.”

“I didn’t know that seeing you drink someone’s blood would be so … well, it was … um.” She cut her eyes to him, not sure why she had trouble uttering a simple word. It was ridiculous she would still feel embarrassed to speak to him of certain things. She wondered if vampires could blush.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “But I don’t like to mix blood and sex. They’re better sep
arate.”

“I can hardly believe this. It’s … it’s not something …”

Dawn didn’t know what she wanted to say. She wasn’t exactly shocked at what she’d become and she could tell Tristan wasn’t either. There would be no discussion on why it should or shouldn’t have happened this way or another. They both accepted that she was a vampire because it was done, and because it was irrevocable. She felt … not sad, but sort of introspective, sort of serene.

“This is our nature,” Tristan reminded her.

Sooner or later the act of drinking blood would become normal for her, she supposed, but now it was new and disturbing. She was a predator, but it seemed doubtful she could ever truly think of herself that way. She would drink the blood of strangers. She would do it to survive. This was her
life
. Oh, god, how was this her life?

She looked up, away from the body, and stared at Tristan with glistening eyes. “Will you be with me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Okay,” she said firmly. “Okay. I’ll be fine. I will be.”

It was what she really believed.

When they got back to the apartment, she attempted to wash away the feel of Branek’s touch, but the memory remained on her skin. Her dark, frightening bruises were gone, healed. Her damage was invisible.

After the shower, Dawn studied herself in the mirror and found she looked mostly the same. Her delicate mouth was solemn as ever, her wide eyes as indirect, her forehead as high, her resting expression the same one that always made people want to know why she was mad. She didn’t yet have the courage to look at her fangs. Leaning forward until her nose touched the glass, she stared into the dark orbs of her pupils until the depths of them chilled her.

“What’s all this?” Tristan asked when she returned to her room. He sat on the floor, leaning back against the dust-specked dresser, and nudged the boxes with one shoe.

“My old life.” She could hardly remember what was in them now. “After we … after I came back, none of it seemed to matter.”

Tristan wrapped an arm lightly about her legs when she went to stand beside him. She lifted the howlite pendant from the dresser, where she’d set it before her shower.

“I kept my crystals. This one has always been my talisman. But I guess it’s nothing more than just a symbol.” She turned and sank down beside him, tying the stone around her neck. “So. This is the afterlife.”

Tristan nodded pensively. “We’ve died, Dawn, and yet we live. That’s why they use the term
undead
. Our bodies still have to maintain themselves. We talk and we breathe. Our blood still flows. It’s just that everything inside us is slowed down to a near standstill, except for healing. That’s fast. It has to be fast.”