Chapter 14
This nightmare is new. Wind and rain lashing my face, my hair whipping violently in my eyes, my heartbeat frenzied as I try desperately to clamber up a steep mountain with my bare hands and feet.
My blunt nails dig into shallow grooves.
My toes slip against the slick rock. My panic ratchets higher and higher—I’m running from something, I don’t know what, but my urgency was pulsing already as my nightmare began, and my fear has never steered me wrong.
And my fear is saying I need to climb or die.
My shoulders are burning, my forearms quivering from exhaustion. I’m almost at the top, though. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I’ll be safe as soon as I reach the top. That’s all that matters: Get to the top of the peak.
Lightning shoots across the sky, teasing the hair on my nape to standing. I have to hug the narrowing rock to keep from being shaken off when the thunder comes. Pieces of debris break from the rock face, tumbling into the darkness below. I push myself beyond all reason, beyond pain, beyond terror.
Two more reaches of my arm. One more. My fingers close on a flat, protruding edge, just large enough for me to stand on.
Gasping in relief, I pull myself onto the ledge.
I keep my arm anchored around the spire-like rock as I push myself to standing.
My legs are shaking, my stomach roiling and churning from panic.
I’ve never been this high up. I shut my eyes, take deep breaths.
Don’t look down, I say to myself. Just don’t look down and you’ll be okay.
A gust of wind slams into my side. I wrap both arms around the rock. The sounds of the storm grow oddly faint, the bluster taking on an echoing quality, forming something that almost sounds like a voice. I listen hard and manage to make out a few whispery, resonant words.
Careful. Or you’ll fall.
Tendrils of wind, icy and invisible, latch around my wrist, wrenching me off the spire.
I scream as I’m whipped around, overlooking the edge, staring down at the plunge into darkness.
The cold shackles on my wrist tighten and pull, and I scream as they drag me over the edge so that my toes are the only part of my body barely grazing the ledge, the rest of me suspended above the open air.
It’s just a dream, just a dream, I try and tell myself, but that doesn’t stop the terror from rushing, doesn’t stop my heart from thrashing. Thunder shakes the sky. When lightning flashes just before me, I wake up.
I open my eyes. Choke on a gasp. Close them. Open them again. No way, no way, no way. I’m wearing the white cami and plaid shorts I wore to bed. So I’m definitely awake, which is the worst news imaginable.
Because I am, just like my nightmare, impossibly suspended hundreds of feet above the ground in the whipping wind and rain, my feet touching the cold brass of a church steeple, held up by some invisible, miraculous force, staring down at the sharp iron spikes lining a twisty black gate.
The gate Hayden and I walked through the other day.
The gate housing the graveyard where I fell a little more in love with him.
A gate that will impale me in real life, truly ending me, when whatever invisible force holding me breaks.
The storm rages around me, drowning out my screams, soaking me and striking my face with sharp, painful wind-whipped jets of rain. I scream and scream, paralyzed, because any move I make will surely lead to death. But you have to try, Rose, I urge.
I flex both of my feet, stretching as far as I can back onto the metal ledge of the steeple.
My big toe catches on a cold iron lip. Yes, yes, Rose!
I reach out with my other big toe, secure my hold on the ledge.
Slowly, slowly, I pull myself toward the steeple with my legs back far enough that I can hook my ankles around the spire. It’s working!
The invisible hold breaks. I’m suddenly free-falling, making an ungodly shriek, a bloodcurdling sound I’ve never made before.
I’m going to die. It’s happening faster than I’d expect, the rusted metal spikes of the fence are rushing toward me, soon I’ll have one through my mouth, one through my chest, it’ll hurt, god, it’ll hurt, and I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, but I’m going to die.
A terrific force slams into my side. I spin through the air, a nauseating cartwheel. Two ironlike holds wrap around me, and I feel cocooned in stone as the dark and storming world somersaults. I lose sight of the gnarled iron points, the ground.
I squeeze my eyes shut, terror filling every crevice inside me, squeezing out the rest.
I hit the earth sprawled on my belly, breathless from the impact, the taste of copper flooding my mouth, aching and feverish, but otherwise alive.
“Are you hurt?” comes an urgent whisper from below. I feel cool, gentle fingers stroke along my cheekbone. “Rose, are you hurt?”
I open my eyes. Hayden’s terrified face is inches from mine.
Lightning flashes, illuminating the brilliant amethyst of his eyes.
They’re wide and frightened, darting wildly across my face.
He moves his hands to my bare neck, feeling for injury.
Finding none, he slides his touch down my shoulders, down my arms, prodding lightly.
When his hands sweep down the sides of my body, find my hips, my lips part on a gasp.
It occurs to me then that I’m lying full-length on top of Hayden, wearing only a cami and sleep shorts, soaked, trembling from cold, impossible occurrences, him.
“How?” I say. Hayden’s chest rises and falls against me. His hands move back to my face, cupping my cheeks.
“You’re not hurt, then?” Hayden’s voice is unsteady. I shake my head, and Hayden’s body sags, relief slacking his features. I answered his question, now he has to answer mine. I lean close.
“How?”
Thunder booms. I can feel it resonate where our bodies are pressed together.
He’s not gonna tell me, I can feel it. There’s something like resignation settling into the stillness of his body.
Anguished, I bite my lip, accidentally reopening the injury from my fall. The taste of iron pools in my mouth.
The change in Hayden is instantaneous. I feel his body go rigid beneath me and the world spins, upending once more. I suddenly find us both sitting upright in the soaked grass, me straddling his legs. His hands grab my hips. I gasp when he squeezes me, making my blood a hot, pulsing rush.
“You’re bleeding,” Hayden says thickly. I gasp at the want in his voice.
His brows wrench with that losing-war agony I’ve seen before on his face, and he closes his eyes, starts to pant.
“You…wanna know how?” He sounds a little lost. “I…I’ve tried so hard…
Rose, you have no idea how painful…” He pulls back a little with an anguished snarl, his fingers digging painfully into my hips.
It rises in me once more. That hot, dark instinct. I let it guide me: I dig my sharp canine into my lip, coaxing more blood from the wound. His eyes shoot open, and he looks terrified when he sees what I’m doing.
“Rose,” he warns, but he doesn’t stop me when I slide my arms around his neck and bow forward until my mouth is only inches from his.
Hayden’s looking at me like I’m his guillotine. But in such a desperate, desirous way that it seems like he’s never wanted anything more than my blade on his neck.
“Hayden,” I whisper, and dip my mouth forward so my bloody lip grazes his top lip.
The world somersaults again, and now my back is pressed to the ground, Hayden stretched above me, caging me with his arms, his body hovering a careful few inches above mine.
His violet eyes flash with rage as he licks his lips.
A delicious frisson of fear shoots through me. He looks like he wants to eat me alive.
“You torture me.” Hayden drops his open mouth to mine, his breath sweet against my parted lips.
He brushes his bottom lip against mine, his breath hitching.
We’ve barely touched when he jerks back, making a low, angry sound, like it’s a Herculean effort.
His mouth glistens, red and wet, his eyes now all pupil.
Hayden drags his tongue slowly across his lip, licking my blood like it’s ambrosia.
I can see the moment he tastes it: His eyelids flicker like it’s so good he can’t help it, and I can hear the soft scrape of dirt from his fingers burying into the soil beside my head.
He makes a rough noise in the back of his throat like someone’s punched him, and it wallops me with desire, a feeling I’ve never known, a sudden heat that makes me arch up involuntarily, my hips seeking the weight of his body.
His hand immediately finds my waist, gently pushing me back down.
“Rose.”
I stop breathing. Hayden’s voice sounds inhuman. Rough, dark, low. I peer up at him in the dark. Lightning strikes, bathing the world in light for a breath, and when I see his face, I cry out.
“See?” he rumbles. “Do you see now?” He lifts his face to catch the rain, and when lightning flashes again, all I can see is the glint of his great, terrible fangs, sharper than diamonds, sharper than any knife or needle has ever been, glinting above his plush bottom lip.
“This is why, Rose,” he says in a ragged voice.
He presses his forehead to mine. “This is why I couldn’t…
why I could never…” His voice hardens. “I told you there’s nothing out there worse than me.
I’m more terrible than any monster there is.
” Hayden’s fingers claw at the earth. He gives me a fierce, pleading look.
“Tell me you see, Rose. Tell me you see.”
“I see,” I whisper. “I see you.”
Hayden.
Hayden is a vampire.