“How comforting.” She studied him carefully from the corner of her eyes, but it was hard to detect a flaw in his stony demeanor, some hint of laughing malice in his gaze, when he wouldn’t even look at her. “So you don’t put people through the same thing?”
“I do,” he said unapologetically. “Every night.”
She shivered. When she spoke, her voice was thin. “Do you … do you crave blood?”
“Of course I do. It’s my goddamn life sustenance.”
“Can vampires see in the dark?”
“I can see everything in the dark.”
“Can you read minds?”
“No.”
“And you’re strong?”
“Very.”
“Sunlight obviously doesn’t hurt you,” she said.
“Not really. But we’re supposed to rest during the day since it drains our energy. We gather strength in the dark.”
He lowered himself to the other bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. For the first time since waking up, she registered his appearance and was astonished she hadn’t noticed it before. There was blood all over his skin and clothes. His face was swollen and bruised. His bottom lip had split and crusted over.
“You were … you bought hot chocolate looking like that?” she said. There was no blood on her, just dirt on her clothes and flakes of dried leaves in her hair.
“It was from the lobby. Anyway, I don’t mind a few stares.”
“Well . . . are you all right?”
“It wasn’t that serious. I’m fine now. I just need a shower and some blood.”
“Oh. Good. I mean, thanks. I guess. So … you don’t need a hospital?”
“Never have.”
Dawn burrowed herself down into the covers, feeling tired. “Are there side effects? Will something happen to me?”
“No. The only thing is you shouldn’t have remembered the attack. I guess you did because your situation is a little … different, since you’ve been with me. We’re not just strangers meeting in the dark.” He shrugged. “You’re fine, like I said.”
I’m not fine. Dawn curled her fingers into a fist. “I really hate him,” she mumbled. “And I hate you, too.”
“Yes,” he said.
She drifted to sleep.
Six
Late afternoon. Dawn woke, blinking the dim, quiet room into awareness. She lay on her side facing the window. The curtains were parted slightly, letting in a bit of orange light. Tristan sat at the table with his bare back to her, head down in his hands. Something was wrong. His shoulders shook with silent intensity. He rocked back and forth ever so slightly, face pressed into his hands to contain powerful sobs. Everything about him in that moment conveyed overwhelming heartbreak.
Dawn’s chest tightened and she felt swamped by a miasma of loss, panic, and loneliness. A single tear slipped from her left eye, trailed down her face, and soaked into the pillow. He had no idea she was awake and watching him. He’d never meant for her or anyone to see this poignant display, so she waited until his shoulders had stilled and his forearms rested on knees.
“Tristan?”
He stiffened at her voice. After the briefest of pauses, he rose from the chair and turned to her. His eyes were heavy with an expression that choked the room and made it hard for her to breathe.
He still has secrets. Frightening things.
He’d showered while she slept. He wore only his jeans and smelled like Dawn’s green apple shampoo. His bruises and cuts were already almost completely healed, she noted with suspicion and interest. He snatched up a shirt and tugged it down over his bare chest.
“How do you feel,” he asked in monotone, avoiding her eyes.
“Hungry.”
She didn’t know where she stood now with him, if she ever had. The fiery, intimate moments they’d shared had shifted things, as had Branek’s attack on her. She regarded Tristan thoughtfully, wondering how much she could get him to do for her. She would start small, which was smart. Somehow she’d work up to getting him to do things that mattered. Like letting her go home.
“Would you get some food for me?” she asked. “I feel weak.” It was true.
“Yeah. Fine,” he said, and slammed out the door.
That hadn’t seemed to go well, but she didn’t know why. And she didn’t care. He was her captor and her well-being meant nothing to him, except maybe to ensure the workability of his so-called toy. But she would never be anyone’s toy.
When he returned, she smiled wanly and accepted the takeout container he offered. He lowered himself to the other bed, settled back on his elbows, body long and sprawled. Dawn felt her blood start to rush and she looked inside the container. It was a sandwich. She picked off the turkey and ate it.
“I used to live in an orphanage,” he said.
She looked up at him quickly and waited in silence.
“It was in Montana,” he continued, talking more to himself than to her. “As far as I know I never lived anywhere else. I can’t remember. The four of us were there together, Augusta, Jared, Branek and I. Branek was a teenager already, one of those kids who would never get adopted and just leave at eighteen. Loftus came one summer and adopted us all. He was a vampire.”
Dawn didn’t know what to say. She watched him from across the space between the beds. His features were softly edged in the dim room. The swelling and bruises were gone and she could make out the straight lines of his long, narrow face. His slim nose was long and crooked, his nostrils high, cheekbones planed in fine angles down to the sharp edges of his square jaw. His lashes were dark against his pale skin, brows low over slightly upswept eyes.
“I had a … a fucking stuffed bear when I was there. It was the only thing I kept from that time. The only thing I was allowed to keep.”
“Tristan,” she began tentatively. “Am I … am I supposed to sympathize with you because of a teddy bear?”
He glared. “I didn’t ask for your sympathy. That’s because I don’t want it.”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” she said, a slight smile on her lips. “I’m not judging you for keeping a teddy bear. I’m sure that little bit of sentimentality is your only redeeming quality.”
His eyes shifted to her, keen with mistrust.
Not knowing quite what she was doing, or why, she slid her legs off the bed and took the few steps over to him. He stayed still and silent as she sat atop him, one leg on either side. She put her head down on his chest and listened, but she didn’t hear a heartbeat. An ominous shiver passed through her and she saw images of fire and blood. A deluge of the quiet, subtle fears that mattered only in the dead of night engulfed her. She was a child sitting alone in the dark, listening to the strange, terrifying sounds of some unknown monster crawling slowly, slowly toward her through the shadows.
It was exactly why Tristan’s arms shouldn’t have made her feel safe, but they did. She wouldn’t even have to open her eyes to know she wasn’t alone.
She was still weak from the attack. She wanted to sleep. In sleep, at least, only dreams of bad things could haunt her.
She was going to be different from now on. She’d spent so many hours in the dark.
~
Sometimes Tristan felt he misremembered the past. The things that had happened in his life, the things he’d done … surely they couldn’t be real.
There had been awful times. So many awful years. The lightless, windowless rooms where they’d slept. Sparse, tasteless meals. Furtive glances shared with the others when Loftus was angry, and never meeting his eyes if they could help it. Bloody knuckles, teeth gritted against tears.
Loftus had intended to instruct them, and he had. He’d wanted children he could train to be ruthless, those whose consciences he could obliterate. His reasons were his own for the longest time. After a while they didn’t even matter.
Voices whispered in Tristan’s ear in sinister tones. We will steal life. We will destroy. We will rule the world. Tristan had always hear
d ominous words such as these, nightmares from some echoing space in his subconscious.
He did steal life. He’d destroyed. Taking over the world seemed like a lot of fucking work, not to mention extreme, but Loftus had always been kind of a fanatic. And a shitty father.
Maybe Tristan’s actions had never been justifiable, but they’d been fun. Exhilarating. To hold such power over life and death … He’d done what he could to make his blood run wild. His life had made him unstable, unpredictable, and … and …
Evil.
The word was a whisper in his mind, insidious and undeniable.
One night five years ago Loftus had taken them to an interconnected series of caverns in the desert. Some random place in the middle of nowhere, a place no one ever went because there weren’t any proper roads to get there. He had to show them something inside. His life’s purpose, he’d said.
Augusta and Jared had hesitated for a moment at the entrance. Then they’d gone in, disappearing into the narrow black opening in the rocks.
Tristan hadn’t wanted to go inside at all and so he ran off into the open desert. He didn’t know why the night had become a spinning tunnel, the stars wheeling and wavering overheard. Running without direction in the vast space beneath the sky, he didn’t feel confined. The darkness concealed his quaking shoulders and clumsy feet. He was a bloodthirsty fucking vampire, and yet he felt like a child. He felt almost human.
He’d slowed to a stumbling walk when he came upon a fissure scoring the earth before him. It was a narrow wash, a gully, choked with weeds and thorny desert bushes and ravaged with litter. Still, there was something inexplicably magnetic about the place, something almost magical. He picked his way down among the remains of a steep wooden staircase, feet slipping on loose dirt and rock.
Altar-like alcoves had been carved into the rock walls, trashed with the broken remains of statues and stained glass. A robed statue rose high on a mound in the center, headless and covered in graffiti and shot full of holes. The hand raised toward the sky was missing.
Although he’d never cared for religion, he could appreciate that someone had made something beautiful and peaceful here, far into the desert. Or tried to. It was obvious no one had cared for the place in a long, long time. Not even God, for whom the statue reached in vain. And if no one cared for this, if even God wouldn’t save a holy place, Tristan thought maybe there wasn’t any hope for him. He was angry to think this, because he’d never hoped for anything. Fuck God and fuck anyone who’d just forget him and let him fall to ruin, like he’d never mattered.
“I allow you much freedom,” Loftus had said upon Tristan’s return to the house with dusty shoes and tears in his jeans. It was sunrise. “Do not abuse it. I raised you and I made you, but you have not yet served your purpose.”
Loftus had taken Tristan back to the caverns alone several nights after he’d run off like a frightened child. As they drove through the vast mountainous desert, Loftus had talked nonsensical shit about goetic ceremonies and drawing up the power of the earth. Tristan had tried not to listen, but he didn’t like the fanatical look in his father’s eyes.
“Go on,” Loftus said at the cavern opening. “This is an essential part of your instruction.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I am your father. I am your god. You will obey me in all things.”
Tristan shifted his weight insolently. “Actually, I’m an orphan. And I don’t believe in gods.”
Loftus shoved him inside the opening. Stumbling along a narrow corridor, Tristan entered into a lightless, limitless space. It was cool and smelled of damp rock, and the darkness of it would have swallowed his screams if it hadn’t already stolen the breath from his lungs. The darkness didn’t abate, no matter how hard he stared into it. He didn’t move, afraid he might find himself adrift in the shapeless, never-ending black.
His knees hit the ground as the weight of nightmares pressed upon him. He felt, rather than saw, images of bloodstained skin, of faceless trembling children, of a beautiful woman cloaked in death. His chest heaved as he recognized himself and his potential for atrocity in that revealing darkness. He’d already fucked with sick shit in his life. What was one more bloody nightmare, what was a lifetime of them. He would never be anything but something damned.
Sobbing dryly, he groped his way around, disoriented by the utter blackness, until he felt hands on his shoulders. He cried out and stumbled back, afraid of what he couldn’t see. His chest felt hollow, light as air. Loftus spoke.
“Do you realize, Tristan? Do you realize what you’re meant for?”
“I do,” Tristan had replied, feeling sick and crazy in a wild, needful way. He would never feel sentimental or sorry for himself again.
“You are not lost to us after all,” Loftus had said proudly. “You have been found.”
The tall, silver-haired man in black had worked to form them from a young age to obey his commands. He’d nurtured savagery in them with his own brand of shocking cruelty and insidious control. Do you love your sister, he’d asked Tristan many times, bending low, the whisper full of unmistakable meaning. Augusta would be standing just a few feet away, oblivious. Do what he said, and he wouldn’t hurt her. The indoctrination had such deep roots it was often easier to be a tool than an individual. But none of them minded, because they called themselves his children. With Loftus, they had a place of belonging.
Dawn had fallen asleep on top of Tristan, listening for a heartbeat that didn’t exist. Not enough to matter. He eased her off and found his shoes. He left the room without bothering to restrain her. Maybe she’d run. He’d have fun chasing her.
Fallon was still at the church, immersed in his faith and rituals and ancient texts, all of which contradicted each other. He was another castoff of society, brought among their fold at the age of thirteen, six years ago. Branek said he was Loftus’s half-vampire son by some woman long dead, but none of them really knew who he was or why Loftus wanted him. Tristan had listened at the door once or twice during Fallon’s sessions with Loftus, the murmurs of magical incantations in languages he couldn’t understand filling him with deep unease.
Tristan strode confidently into the candlelit church. They hadn’t finished their earlier discussion. “It was harder to find you this time,” he said louder than was necessary, enjoying the way his voice filled up the space. “But not by much. You aren’t very good at hiding, and I’m great at finding what I need.”
Fallon’s voice, by contrast, was soft and measured. He lit a cone of incense at the altar. “I can imagine. I do try to elude you.”
“Next time you should probably leave the state, if you really want to make it a challenge.”
“How would I ever serve you heathens if you couldn’t find me?” The ghost of a smirk flitted across Fallon’s ascetic face. “I see you left the girl behind.”
“I didn’t want you to worry about speaking freely.”
“I’ve had years of immersive study. You couldn’t possibly understand if I were to speak freely.”
Tristan leaned down on a nearby pew, bored. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing here. “Indulge me,” he said, blinking slowly. “What does Loftus need you for?”
Fallon looked up with well-restrained surprise. “Don’t you know?”
“I assume it has to do with your”—Tristan cast a skeptical look at the stacks of ancient texts on the altar steps—“expertise.”
For a moment Fallon considered the knowledge he had, how much to share. He was fooling himself if he thought he had an advantage of any kind. Tristan could have dragged him back to Las Vegas in the trunk of his car. He could have sucked his neck dry and fucked up whatever plan Loftus had. That idea had a certain appeal.
“Have you ever been to the caverns?” Fallon finally asked.
“Yes,” Tristan answered. “All of us have.”
“That is where Loftus keeps his secrets.” Fallon sounded quite solemn, even for him. “That is where he keeps my mother.�
�
Tristan lifted his eyebrows. “Why does he have your mother in a cave in the desert?”
“He loves her. She’s dead. I am a resurrectionist.”
“Are you.”
“That’s what Loftus trained me for. I am skilled in blood magic. Dark rituals—the kind that require sacrifice.” He sighed. “The unholiness astounds me. Sometimes I think I must have apprenticed myself to the devil to learn these things.”
“I’m sure I know the feeling,” Tristan murmured. “What do you do, exactly? I’ve never much believed in magic.”
“It isn’t hard. I’ll evoke demons and ask something of them. At least one will respond when I chant the names. They’ll ask for something in return for their assistance. Blood, or a vessel to carry them in our world.”
“That sounds incredibly non-specific.”
Fallon sighed. “That’s alchemy. It’s very vague. It’s mostly ceremony, actually. I’ve memorized all the names of the goetic demons. All the alternate names of prima materia. I know which symbols to trace in the air.”
“Good for you. What else?”
“I know it’s impossible to transmute lead into gold, but it isn’t impossible to turn a human immortal. And that’s the basis of alchemy: the quest for immortality.”
Tristan resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Have you ever done this before?”
“No. There hasn’t been an occasion. Until now, I suppose.”
“Right.” Tristan pushed up from the pew and walked backward toward the door. “Well. It’s time to put your magic to use. Get down to Las Vegas and talk to Loftus. Maybe you won’t feel so unholy if you pray first.”
He left the church and walked in the opposite direction of the motel. He followed along a fence for a while, looking at the brown and white shapes of sleeping horses on the other side of it. One horse was black. It lifted its head as he passed, a single limpid eye turned on him.
Nobody was on the street. It was too late for a casual stroll. So many of the gas stations were closed. A grocery store, he thought. A bar.
Dreams for the Dead Page 8
