Dreams for the Dead Page 4

  She gave him quiet directions and by the time they’d reached the apartment on the east side of town, Dawn realized she didn’t have her keys. Then Tristan magically produced them. He’d probably gotten them from Branek.

  The wind was strong and hot, shaking the giant, overgrown oleander bushes outside the apartment with noisy rustles of spear-like leaves. Small white blossoms fell at Dawn’s feet, carpeting the patio outside the door. Tristan stood casually beside her as she opened it, but he didn’t follow her inside. She tossed the keys on the kitchen counter and paused to glance back over her shoulder at him.

  “Invite me in,” he said.

  Dawn immediately recognized a possible advantage and tried to figure out how to use it. She had no phone to call the police. Maybe she could escape out a window, but there were only three to choose from and Tristan would probably intercept her before she got too far.

  He watched her from behind his sunglasses, his mouth a grim, unimpressed line, and she knew he would wait there all day if he had to. Besides, he would come in whether or not she invited him.

  “Fine,” she said sarcastically. “Come in.”

  Stepping across the threshold, he nudged the door shut with his foot. He advanced with some caution, brows lowered suspiciously as he looked about the room. On her own familiar territory, Dawn found herself acutely aware of him. He was lean in a smooth, muscled way, and tall—at least six three, she guessed. She was five nine and she noticed things like that. Dressed in black jeans and a black shirt, he appeared pale and haunted, but disconcertingly attractive.

  Having found out he was a budding psychopath and spent the night locked in his room, Dawn was concerned that her attraction to him hadn’t fizzled. It had begun innocently enough, something between two strangers in a bar, but now her feelings betrayed her rational mind. She glanced away from him, chin held high, determined to ignore them.

  “Get your shit,” he said.

  Dawn went back to her room, where her crystals were purifying in small bowls of sea salt set atop her dresser. She thought about taking them out, but she could feel Tristan watching her from the door, silent and unknowable. Quickly she began to gather some things in a backpack she hadn’t used since her ill-fated first and only semester of college. Her wardrobe wasn’t creative and complicated like Leila’s. Very little thinking required.

  When she was done, she wasn’t even sure what she’d packed. Holding the backpack in front of her, she walked cautiously back to the door. Tristan didn’t move out of the way.

  Slowly, so slowly she didn’t even notice him moving at all, he closed the space between them and lifted a hand, reaching for her. She watched him with wide eyes, frozen by some dark spell. He is going to touch my cheek. He is going to lean in to kiss me. She held her breath, dreading and eagerly awaiting.

  He plucked something out of her hair and held it between his first two fingers. A tiny oleander flower. He looked at it without moving his head, then back at her. “You know this is poisonous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” he said in a low, confiding tone, “so am I.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  In answer, he crushed the already wilting flower between his fingers. Then he put it on his tongue and swallowed it.

  His voice was like gravel. “It means don’t try to fuck with me on this fucking trip. Or ever.”

  Dawn felt ill. “I … I won’t.”

  They left the apartment and he took her keys back. They folded themselves into the Nova and he found his way to the 15. He went north. They left the city in a blue-gray haze behind them.

  Images of her possible future haunted Dawn. She leaned against the door and shivered even though it was hot and Tristan hadn’t turned on the air conditioning. She fell into a restless sleep that seemed like no time at all. When she woke the car was stopped and Tristan stood outside it, pumping gas. It was past noon now.

  “Where are we?” she asked when he got back in the car. She rubbed the sleep from her gritty eyes.

  “Alamo.”

  There used to be a swimming hole somewhere around there, she remembered idly. Her dad had taken her and her sister once or twice. It was private now.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  He glanced at her, eyebrows slightly knit. “Oh. Right.”

  The convenience store had a pitiful selection. Dawn grabbed some chips, a chocolate bar, and a couple bottles of water. Tristan handed her some cash and she stood in line to pay, wondering if she could covertly alert the clerk to her situation. But Tristan was waiting by the magazines, his eyes never leaving her. She kept her eyes down as she paid and took the change with shaking hands. Pennies and dimes dropped to the floor. Tristan picked them up and pocketed them.

  “Careful,” he warned, and led her out of the store.

  “I need to make a call,” she said, spying a payphone.

  “No.”

  “I just want to tell my boss I won’t be coming in to work. He might worry if I don’t. He might even call the police.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said, handing her some change. He seemed vaguely annoyed.

  She knew the number of Endpapers by heart. “I won’t be coming in today,” she told Roy when he picked up.

  “Okay,” he grumbled, probably thinking of all the actual work he would have to do. “Are you sick?”

  “No. I’m having”—she glanced at Tristan, who raised his eyebrows at her—“uh, family trouble. I need a leave of absence.”

  “How long are we talking?”

  Dawn hesitated. “Indefinite.”

  On the other end of the line, Roy sighed. “This is really last minute, Dawn. I know you’ve worked here five years, but I might have to hire someone to replace you. I can’t guarantee you’ll have a job whenever you decide to come back.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” She turned her head and whispered rapidly. “Roy, call the p—”

  Tristan jammed a finger down on the receiver. “Nice try.”

  She hung up in defeat and then lifted the phone again to slam it back into the receiver, just because she felt like it. A light touch on her shoulder startled her. She stiffened and turned to face Tristan just as his long fingers pulled slowly away. Wordless, she waited.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  At certain times in her life Dawn had observed in herself an ability to remain detached from unpleasant situations. During her parents’ divorce she had been the picture of composure, while her younger sister had sobbed herself to sleep every night for months. In college she had habitually forgotten important assignments and test times, and she’d just shrugged at her plummeting GPA. She could recognize these things mattered, but her brain refused to engage.

  Maybe she needed to force herself to feel nothing now. She could trick herself into thinking she was perfectly safe driving upstate, or wherever the hell they were going, with a man who looked like a hot drug addict. A man who might kill her at any time.

  “What is it?” Tristan said.

  She’d been staring at him. “Nothing.”

  She fiddled with the rolled, ragged edges of a road atlas stuck between the seats and wondered how often Tristan had done this, just taken off at someone’s request, or on a wanderlust whim. The atlas looked like it had been used a lot, though she hadn’t seen him use it at all since leaving Las Vegas.

  “Have you done a lot of road trips?” she asked tentatively.

  He gave a one-shouldered shrug and didn’t look away from the road. “Not really. The occasional ghost town, if I’m bored.”

  A disconnected, introverted feeling settled into her as she watched the road ahead disappear beneath the hood. This was someone else’s body, these were someone else’s eyes. Yesterday she’d broken up with her boyfriend, the day before that her best friend had been kidnapped, and the day before that she’d only had to worry about having enough money to pay her half of the rent. Life had been normal. Now Dawn didn’t know what to call it. />
  They’d left the 15 some time ago while she’d slept. They drove through the desolate middle of Nevada, past low brown or gray mountains and scrubby desert life. The occasional lone house loomed back on some unmarked, unpaved road. Dawn leaned her head back, elbow propped up by the window, one hand shading her eyes. Her glasses had no tint and her eyes hurt from squinting. There was nothing much to see.

  Three

  Tristan cranked his window down as they rolled into Ely two hours later. The cooling afternoon air swished across Dawn’s shoulders and through her hair, blowing it into a state of wildness she usually allowed only during the in-between hours of day and night. The sun was beginning to take on the reddish tinge of evening.

  “I’m tired of driving,” Tristan said. “We’re staying here for the night.”

  He pulled into some random crappy motel right on the highway. Red neon letters announced vacancy. Dawn stood beside Tristan as he checked them in without removing his sunglasses. She wasn’t optimistic about her chances of surviving the night.

  The room had two beds, at least, but that wasn’t much comfort if she was going to die. They sagged in the middle anyway. The pine table beneath the window showed several cigarette burns. The walls were thin enough that she could hear the TV from one side and a guy talking loudly on the other. That meant someone would be able to hear her scream, though this might have been the kind of place where nobody would care.

  Tristan locked the door, put the chain on, and then walked to the window. He pulled back the curtains to see velvety clouds laid thick across the sky. It had started to drizzle lightly, nothing more than mist on the skin.

  “It won’t last long,” he said, taking his sunglasses off at last and tossing them on the table. “Never does.”

  He moved between the beds and dropped down on one of them. He’d been carrying a coil of thin rope and now he tossed it down beside him.

  “I could scream,” Dawn said, watching him from beside the giant old TV. “I could run.”

  He’d been staring at the ceiling, but now he turned his head to eye her casually from head to toe. His long, narrow face appeared extraordinarily pale in the low light, cheekbones sharply defined. There was something in his eyes, something chilling and forbidding. Something almost … feral.

  “I’d catch you if you ran,” he said. “And you don’t want to know what I’ll do to you if you scream.”

  No, she didn’t want to know.

  Hurt me, she challenged silently. I dare you.

  Unsettled, she tugged lightly on her howlite, finding comfort in the stone’s smooth contours. Her skin warmed the cool surface. Sometimes people dyed howlite to resemble turquoise, red coral, or lapis lazuli, all more precious stones. It seemed sad to her, as if the howlite wasn’t good enough on its own. As if its only purpose was to imitate.

  “I have to go out for a while,” Tristan said, sitting up. “I have to keep you restrained while I’m gone.” He reached for the rope and began to uncoil it. With a grim smile that didn’t reach his eyes, he advanced toward her.

  “No,” she said. She started to back up, but there was nowhere to go.

  “I can’t trust you not to run,” he said. “Now, where would you be most comfortable?” He stood there waiting for her answer, a length of the rope held taut between his hands.

  “I would feel most comfortable,” she mocked, “in my own home. Away from you.”

  “Well, you’re here now. So deal with it.”

  Fuming, she balled up a fist to punch him. He caught her hand mid-swing, the movement so fast and effortless it shocked her. Calmly he guided her arm down to her side.

  “I’d rather not hurt you,” he said quietly, though his voice was thick with menace.

  “Then why do you keep threatening me?”

  His eyes burned into hers. “Try not to test me and I’m sure we’ll get along fine. I’m leaving this up to you. Where would you be most comfortable?”

  “I … On the bed, I guess,” she said reluctantly, acid in her tone. Without waiting for a prompt, she swung toward the nearest one and slumped down on it like a sullen child.

  “That’s what I’d have chosen.”

  The rope was thin but tough, and the fibers were smooth. He only tied her tight enough that she couldn’t slip her wrists out or loosen them from the headboard. Anger consumed her as she watched him walk out the door, leaving her in such a vulnerable position. She was even angrier at herself, at the reaction of her body to his nearness, the light brush of his shirt against her skin that had made her feel warm. If he’d noticed her faint intake of breath, he hadn’t let on.

  The curtains were drawn, leaving the room depressingly dim. In Tristan’s absence Dawn felt unexpectedly afraid. Everything in her life was wrong. She was part of something horrible and strange. But it was also new and different than anything she’d known, and therefore darkly exciting.

  It was beyond terrible to find anything to enjoy in this situation, she knew, but when she allowed herself to think of a man whose eyes became distant when he didn’t think anyone was looking, she felt a small shiver of anticipation.

  ~

  The room was beginning to swim. The lights bled. A din of voices and the shitty jukebox music blended together into underwater echoes. Tristan closed his eyes and counted slowly to relieve that pulsing, that pounding in his skull. It happened whenever the hunger got this bad. He didn’t want to move, but the blaring music made the headache worse.

  He got up to wander along the walls and eye the locals. They were raucous, laughing loudly and talking over one another, sloshing beer on the filthy floor. They were happy and carefree because they were off work for the evening, and because they didn’t know what he could do to them.

  It would be easy to pick one of them off, like it always was. He’d talk the way they wanted him to talk, and he never promised specifics. They always followed him expecting drugs or romance or a quick fuck. He let them believe whatever they wanted to believe.

  “Hey. Got a light?”

  A pretty girl with blunt blue bangs sidled up next to him. She held an unlit cigarette aloft and smiled. He pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit it for her. She tilted her head back to blow out a thin stream of smoke.

  “Thanks.”

  She would be easy. Oh, so easy. It was almost disappointing, really.

  Tristan lit his own cigarette and waited beside her. Her bright pink lips moved, but whatever she was saying got lost in the drone of the jukebox. He felt restless tremors in his hands and weakness in his thighs. Glasses clinked and it sounded as if they’d shattered right next to his ears. The roar of chatter was endless. A daunting, nameless fear crept up from his gut, nearly paralyzing him.

  “You wanna get the fuck out of here?” he murmured in her ear.

  The girl smashed her cigarette beneath her boot. “Let’s go.”

  Jerking away from the wall, he pushed through the crowd for the nearest exit. He knew she followed him and he didn’t look back. When he reached the back door he shoved it open and it banged against the outer wall. Noises died away as it shut behind the girl, but the relative silence of the night provided little comfort.

  “What should we do now?” the girl asked.

  There was no one else in the back alley. He pushed her up against the wall and sank his teeth into her neck before she could scream. Her blood was thin and sugary. He drank neatly, carefully, until the wildness of his hunger had abated.

  After several moments he stood straight up and eased the girl to the ground. She’d live, the strange marks on her neck would fade, and she wouldn’t remember him. They never did.

  Tristan ventured back toward the highway, heading for the 24-hour diner he’d seen earlier. It was bright with the kind of lighting that revealed faces in unflattering clarity at two in the morning, when people were often at their worst. He slipped inside the near-empty place and, taking over one of the hard plastic booths, ordered coffee.

  He didn’t drink coffee
, or anything but blood, really, but when it arrived he stirred sugar into it. The clock on the wall above the kitchen said it was almost seven. He’d been gone from the room for a little over an hour. He placed the wet spoon on a napkin beside the mug and watched a pale brown stain soak softly into it. Time meant little to him now. Somehow it was always early, yet always late.

  Branek was suddenly sitting across from him. His dark green eyes were hard despite the almost-smile on his lips and the mocking tilt of his head.

  “What are you doing here?” Tristan asked.

  “Following you.”

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t been playing with your toy.”

  No, he hadn’t. Tristan had thought about fucking Dawn the night they’d met, but the notion had quickly been lost to ensuing events. It would have taken some work, anyway—she wouldn’t have slipped off to a bathroom stall with him. Anyway, she was his captive now, so fucking was out of the question, as was drinking her blood. He wouldn’t force himself on her, though he knew no one in his family would have such scruples.

  With a shrug, Tristan said, “How do you know what I’ve been doing?”

  “I have my ways.”

  “You shouldn’t even care.”

  It was Branek’s turn to shrug. “Do whatever you like.”

  Back when they were teenagers, before Loftus had made them into vampires, the group of them would hang out all over the city. Tristan and Augusta would find some record store to prowl, two slender outcasts dressed in black, she with a safety pin in her lip and he with one in his nose. They’d hang out in front after, smoking cigarettes and drawing disapproving stares. Augusta’s candy-colored hair was probably the least offensive thing about them.

  Jared might have been there with them but in those days he hardly ever left his room. Tristan imagined he wrote angst-filled poetry and mourned the loss of his most recent ill-fated love, or the loss of a love he hadn’t even discovered yet.

  Branek, ten years older than them and already a vampire, would always show up, just like this, out of nowhere and for no good reason. No matter the time of day or part of town, he always knew where to find them. With bloodstains on his shirt, he’d demand a cigarette, high from whatever kill he’d just done, and smoke it fast before taking off again.