Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
Summer, baby girl, you need to wake up.
The voice drifted through layers of sleep, familiar and urgent. Summer tried to focus on it, but the dream kept shifting around her; hospital corridors turned into bayou paths, examination rooms became elegant libraries, patients with scarred torsos spoke with Vincent’s voice.
He’s not what he seems, baby. None of this is what it seems.
“Mama?” Summer called into the shifting dreamscape, recognizing Sybil’s voice with a jolt of longing and fear. Her mother had been dead for many years; since before Katrina, but in the dream, she felt present, real, desperately trying to communicate something important.
The pale one weaves pretty lies. Don’t let him in.
The voice cut off abruptly as Summer’s eyes snapped open, her heart racing, desperate to connect with the urgent message her subconscious was still trying to hear.
The blue suite was dark except for shafts of moonlight filtering through the silk curtains, drawing pools of silver light on the rugs.
For a moment, Summer stared at the ceiling, totally disoriented, unsure if she was still dreaming.
“Easy, ma chérie. Calm yourself.”
Summer turned sharply to find Fabian sitting in the chair beside her bed, his pale eyes reflecting the luminescent quality of the moonlight. He was smartly dressed in a black tie and tuxedo despite the late hour, and she wondered if he’d been watching her sleep for some time.
“Fabian?” She pulled the covers higher, suddenly aware of how vulnerable she was in her thin nightgown while he was fully clothed in formal attire. “What are you doing here?”
Why are you here now? She wanted to ask, but he’d probably been in his restaurant; after all, this apartment was above the eatery.
“You were calling out. You sounded so distressed. I couldn’t leave you alone to suffer.” His voice was gentle and concerned, but something about his presence in her private space made her skin prickle. “I was passing by when I heard you struggling with what sounded like a nightmare.”
Summer tried to remember her dream, but the details were already slipping away like water through her fingers. Only the sense of urgency remained, and her mother’s voice warning her about something—or someone.
“I don’t remember much of it,” she said, sitting up and leaning back against the cool silk pillows. “Just my mother trying to warn me about something.”
“Dreams can be powerful for those with supernatural heritage such as yours, ma chérie. Sometimes they carry messages beyond the mundane.” Fabian leaned forward slightly, his expression compassionate. “Your mother was a wise woman. What was she trying to tell you?”
“I’m not sure. The dream faded too quickly.” Summer rubbed her temples, frustrated by the lingering sense that she’d lost something important. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“Not long. I didn’t want to wake you unnecessarily, but you seemed genuinely distressed.” Fabian’s pale eyes studied her face with intensity, making her acutely aware of her disheveled state. “You were speaking in your sleep—calling for Sybil.”
The casual mention of her mother’s name made Summer’s breath catch.
She hadn’t spoken to Fabian about her mother for some time, although she knew he had studied her family history in great detail.
No, studied was the wrong word. With Fabian’s long life, she recalled he knew her mother and her grandmother.
“You called out her name just now, then you asked about your mother.” Fabian’s smile was gentle, reassuring. “I have excellent hearing.”
Had she said her mother’s name aloud? Summer couldn’t remember, but the dream was already becoming hazy, the way dreams did when consciousness intruded on their strange logic.
“I should let you return to sleep,” Fabian said, but he made no move to leave.
Instead, he moved to sit on the edge of the bed and reached out to brush a strand of hair from her face; his fingers were cool against her warm skin.
“Unless you’d prefer some company? Sometimes conversation can help dispel the lingering effects of disturbing dreams.”
The cool touch of his fingers was gentle, but it sent an unexpected shiver through Summer, leaving her disconcerted and almost… afraid? Yet, she found herself leaning slightly into him despite her confusion about his presence in her room.
“I keep thinking I’ve forgotten something important,” she said. “Like there’s information just out of reach… something I need to remember.”
“Perhaps it’s simply stress. You’ve endured tremendous upheaval recently—losing your pack status, being abandoned by your mate, adjusting to a new environment.
” Fabian’s thumb traced along her cheekbone with meticulous tenderness.
“The mind sometimes creates mysteries where there are none, especially when one is feeling lost and uncertain.”
The words should have been comforting, but something about the way he said “abandoned by your mate” made Summer’s chest tighten. As if he were reinforcing a particular narrative about Rowan’s departure.
“You don’t think he’s coming back,” she said.
“I think you deserve better than waiting for someone who chose to leave rather than fight for what you had together.” Fabian’s hand moved to cup her face, his pale eyes intense in the moonlight.
“You’re an extraordinary woman, Summer Vale.
Brilliant, compassionate, brave. Any man who would abandon such a treasure does not deserve a second chance. ”
The words were exactly what part of her wanted to hear—validation that Rowan’s departure was his loss, her worth was independent of his choices. But another part of her recoiled from the sentiment, from the way Fabian seemed to be encouraging her to give up hope.
“I still feel connected to him,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I feel our mate bond. It’s weak, but it’s there.”
“Bonds can linger long after their usefulness has ended.” Fabian’s voice remained gentle, but something flickered in his eyes. “Sometimes holding onto them prevents us from embracing new possibilities.”
He leaned closer as he spoke, close enough for her to smell his expensive cologne, feel the cool temperature of his skin. The intimacy of the moment—her nightgown, his presence in her bedroom, the way he was looking at her—created an atmosphere which felt both seductive and wrong.
“New possibilities?” she whispered.
“You know what I mean.” His thumb brushed across her lower lip, and Summer found herself caught between attraction and alarm. She released her tight grip on the covers.
Fabian’s eyes dropped to the pebbles of her nipples under the nightgown. “We’ve both felt the connection between us, the potential for something deeper than simple alliance.”
When he leaned forward to kiss her, Summer didn’t immediately pull away.
For a moment, she let herself imagine what it would be like to stop fighting, to accept comfort from someone who was present instead of clinging to a mate who had chosen to leave.
Fabian’s lips were cool, gentle, patient and redolent of his centuries of experience.
But as his hand moved to the back of her neck, as the kiss deepened slightly, the claiming scar on Summer’s neck pulsed. Her hand flew to it, but it was still cold to the touch. She prodded the area frantically, pressing her fingers against it to feel it pulse again. But there was nothing.
She edged away from the vampire, pulling the comforter up to cover her breasts.
This was wrong—not because Fabian wasn’t attractive or compelling, not because they hadn’t shared intimacy before, but because now it felt like a fundamental betrayal of who she was and of what she and Rowan had shared.
She looked deep into the black pools of Fabian’s eyes, wondering if he knew she’d lied about the mate bond.
She still felt connected to Rowan—that much was true, but the bond was dead. As dead as Rowan surely was.
She pulled away abruptly, her hand covering her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I can’t. I’m not ready for this.”
Fabian’s expression showed disappointment but not anger. “Of course. Forgive me for presuming. Your loyalty to your absent mate is… admirable, even if it’s ultimately self-destructive.”
The phrasing bothered her, but before she could analyze why, Fabian rose, moving toward the door with his usual grace.
“Try to get some rest,” he said. “The full moon will bring new challenges, and you’ll need your strength.”
After he left, Summer lay in the darkness replaying the encounter.
The kiss had felt both natural and forced, as if she was responding to genuine attraction while simultaneously being manipulated into it.
And there was something about the way he’d appeared in her room, his ready explanations for being there; it all felt rehearsed rather than spontaneous.
Closing her eyes, she tried to remember her dream more clearly, to recapture whatever urgent message her mother was trying to convey. But the harder she focused, the more the details slipped away, leaving only a sense of warning and the echo of Sybil’s voice telling her nothing was what it seemed.
Exhaustion eventually claimed her, dragging her back toward sleep despite her churning thoughts.
Fresh dreams met her. Dreams which brought no more comfort than her mother’s warning had.
Running along narrow paths, she chased her wolf mate, but he remained out of reach, occasionally turning, waiting, holding out his hand, but dodging her at the last moment and dashing further into the bayou.
Spanish moss reached down from overhead branches, tugging at her hair, scratching her face, swinging aside as Rowan raced through their strands and closing again to block her own passage.
On and on she ran, mud squelching over the sides of her shoes.
She caught as one shoe snagged in the swamp, sucking the shoe from her foot, but on she ran, chasing him, the mud squelching through her toes.
Hard as she called and begged. Rowan remained tantalizingly out of reach.
Eventually, she fell into a deep sleep, and the dreams disturbed her no more.
Yet when she woke the next morning, her discovery made her question everything about the previous night. Her shoes, which she distinctly remembered leaving by the dresser, were beside the door. And they were covered in mud—thick, bayou mud suggesting she’d walked somewhere outside during the night.
Summer stared at them in growing alarm. She had no memory of leaving her room, no recollection of truly walking anywhere which would result in her shoes being caked with dark earth and decaying vegetation.
The mud was dry but not completely hardened, suggesting it had happened recently—vague recollections of her dream came back to her.
She checked the French doors to the balcony, but they were locked from the inside, just as she’d left them.
The main door to her room showed no signs of tampering, yet Fabian had been able to enter her room as if the locks could not prevent his passing.
Her clothes from the previous day were folded neatly on the chair where she’d left them the night before.
Yet somehow, despite having no memory of it other than her dream, she’d apparently left her room during the night and walked through the bayou.
Summer picked up one of the muddy shoes with trembling hands, studying the pattern of dirt clinging to the leather.
Her palms warmed as she held each shoe. This wasn’t just casual contact with earth—this was mud accumulated from walking through swampy terrain, the deep, clinging muck, characteristic of the wetlands outside New Orleans.
Was it a dream or had she been sleepwalking? Was the stress of recent events causing her to do things she couldn’t remember? Or was something else affecting her memory, her control over her own actions?
She thought of her dream, of Sybil’s urgent voice trying to warn her about something. Had her mother been trying to tell her about these missing hours, these gaps in her memory she was only now discovering?
Summer sank onto the bed, staring at the muddy evidence of a journey she couldn’t remember. Whatever was happening to her, whatever forces were at work in this beautiful mansion, they were more powerful and more invasive than she’d realized.
And somewhere in the back of her mind, her mother’s voice echoed with increasing urgency. She rested her hand on the base of her neck:
Nothing is what it seems, baby girl. Nothing at all.