5. Chapter 5
5
T he alarm on my phone woke me from a dream of having my body worshipped by no less than seven gorgeous, well-endowed, and highly skilled men. At least, I thought there were seven of them. And I thought they were all men. I honestly couldn’t be certain.
I fumbled with my phone to silence the tranquil instrumental, then let it thunk onto the nightstand and lazily rolled onto my back. The needy ache of unfulfilled desire practically throbbed between my thighs. It had been one hell—or rather, one heaven— of a dream.
Under the covers, I trailed my fingertips over my underwear, seeking the heat between my legs. The thin fabric was damp with arousal, and my swollen clit pulsed in response to the gentle touch.
I let my eyelids drift shut. My eyes felt dry and grainy, and the room appeared slightly blurred, thanks to drunk me forgetting to take out her contacts, but my intense state of arousal pushed the discomfort to the back of my mind. I traced the crease of my sex with the tip of my fingernail as I attempted to recall as much as possible from the dream. Drawing my bottom lip between my teeth, I inhaled shakily.
Bastian had been among my dream lovers. I remembered taking him into my mouth, so deep that tears streamed down my cheeks even as I dug my nails into his ass cheeks, urging him on. I recalled the feeling of his fingers tangling in my loose hair, angling my head back so he could stare into my eyes as he fucked my mouth.
The vampire from my earlier nightmare had been there as well. He had been beneath me, gripping my hips as I rode him, while another man cupped my breasts in rough hands as he thrust into my back entrance, which I had never before considered an entrance —but it sure as hell had been one in the dream.
A faint moan drifted from my lips as I rocked my hips and slowly circled my clit with a fingertip. I was already on the brink of orgasm, and I wanted to savor my recollection of the dream a little longer.
I recalled pulling back from Bastian, gasping for air as his erection bobbed in front of my face. I imagined myself gripping his hard shaft in one hand while curling the fingers of my other around the neck of the man beneath me. In my mind, I gazed down at his face as I rode him, sinking into his luminous silver eyes.
Find the vampire with the silver eyes.
My blood chilled, my stomach giving an unpleasant lurch, and my fingers froze. I opened my eyes and shifted my hand to my thigh, digging my nails into my flesh as I recalled seeing my sister last night.
My dead sister. On my bed. Talking to me.
Amaya had been a sleep paralysis hallucination, just as I had experienced hundreds of times before. The condition started a few years before Javier disappeared, when I was twelve or thirteen. He explained then that sleep paralysis was a normal condition for a living vampire like me to experience during puberty. He even shared that the condition had plagued my mom before she came into her full powers and learned to control them. Even so, the late-night experiences were upsetting enough that Javier had tweaked the blood tincture I took in lieu of traditional feedings to help keep the condition under control.
But then, years later, when Javier was gone and I was alone, sleep paralysis plagued me once again. For a while there, it seemed like it happened every time I slept. But then, either because of reaching adulthood or having to ration the remaining tincture, it happened less and less. Until, eventually, I no longer woke in that terrifying, paralyzed state where I would see and hear all manner of horrors.
I closed my eyes again, attempting to draw the drifting fragments of the lurid dream back to the forefront of my mind. But all I saw were Amaya’s ghostly visage and Javier’s weary face, exactly as he had looked the last time I saw him.
Undead vampires weren’t supposed to age, at least not in the physical sense. They were already settled into their second immortal lives. But I would have sworn Javier had aged in the decade we were on the run from the House of the Sun and their relentless shifter assassins. I could picture his handsome face clearly, despite the two decades that had passed since I last saw him, the deep worry lines creasing his dark brow and fanning out from the corners of his eyes. The twitch of his nostrils when he concealed laughter. The tensing at the edges of his mouth when he looked at me.
No fun time for me, then. Not with Javier haunting me from my memory.
Blowing out a resigned breath, I opened my eyes and hauled myself out of bed to get ready for the day.
“Good morning,” I murmured to the aged photo of a swaddled newborn framed on my bedside. I touched the top of the frame, as I did every morning, and shuffled toward the bathroom.
I removed my contacts while sitting on the toilet, scenes of dancing with Bastian and riding in the backseat of a car together flashed through my mind. I had asked him to stay the night, and he had agreed, but he definitely wasn’t in the apartment now.
I found the small silver Tree of Life medallion hanging on a chain around my neck, a token from yet another man who had abandoned me in this life, and gripped it tight with one hand. Had something else happened during one of the black spots in my memory of the previous night? Had I said or done something to drive him away? Or had I even ever asked him to stay? The end of the evening was so muddled with drink and dreams that I wasn’t entirely sure which memories were real.
I shuffled to the sink, readied my toothbrush, and turned to lean back against the edge of the counter as I brushed my teeth. I spat into the sink and rinsed my toothbrush before turning the faucet to warm water to wash my face. I straightened, dried my face with a hand towel, then lowered the towel to assess the damage to my appearance from the night of excessive drinking. I didn’t feel terrible, which shocked the hell out of me.
But my lack of a hangover wasn’t nearly as shocking as my appearance. My face. My eyes.
The dull gray of my irises had brightened to clear blue-green. My pale skin appeared more ivory than pasty, and a pretty pink flush colored my cheeks. No blush required. The dark half-moons that had been ever-present under my eyes for the past few years were gone. After the restless night of sleep, I didn’t know how such a thing was possible. I should have looked awful.
I leaned in closer to the mirror, turning my head to one side and then to the other. “What is going on?” I muttered to my reflection, my eyes narrowing to thoughtful slits.
Was this some phase of development a living vampire goes through that Javier hadn’t warned me about? He had been frustratingly tightlipped about everything relating to our species, especially anything having to do with the unique gifts and abilities that belonged to living vampires like me. He had wanted me to live as a human. He had said it was safer for me to blend in with the mortal world. To let the immortal world, the only world I had ever known, forget me. The only way for me to survive would be for me to disappear.
But Javier had been the one to disappear, leaving me to blend in alone on the streets. Whatever had happened to him, he finally succeeded in his mission to make me vanish. Nobody was more forgotten in Seattle than the homeless. I became invisible to those who hunted me. I became someone else. Someone new.
Luna Sofia Teresi Athanasiou, fourth in line to the Teresi throne and a potential High Queen of the House of the Moon, became Sophie Matthews, just a girl who lost her way, then found herself again somewhere far, far away from where she had started.
But now, as I looked at my reflection, it was as though I was glimpsing who I used to be. Who I could have become—if my world hadn’t fallen apart nearly three decades ago when the House of the Sun massacred my family.
More than a little unsettled, I went through my usual makeup routine, which bridged the gap between the woman I had seen reflected in the mirror yesterday and the one reflected now. I picked up my glasses from the counter beside the sink, unfolded them, and put them on to hide further. My reflection blurred slightly, like the prescription was too strong and I didn’t need them. But if Bastian could hide behind a pair of glasses, then so could I.