Page 34 of Sleeping With the Vampire

“You must stop this,” he said to me. “This is on you. Only you know what to do.”

“But who is it, I can’t see my enemy?” I answered. “Is it Tempesto or the Servant? Is someone else behind it? I have a feeling there is someone else here. Perhaps MoZa? And what of Chakrat?”

“You know who it is,” said Zendan, angrily. “You have been blind! Smug in your tower, a little king with a little crown, you have looked away while they stole your power from you!”

In the dream, his voice shook with fury, he grabbed me and threw me against the wall. I didn’t fight back. Zendan had always been stronger than me, even in my dreams.

“Do you want to live or do you want to die!” he screamed at me as darkness came in great waves and provided relief from his rage.

In another dream, Simonis sat next to me on the day bed. It seemed so real, as if it was really happening. Her blond hair twisted in braids around her head, her beautiful violet eyes as enchanting as ever.

I put out a hand to touch her and I could feel her arm, like she was with me.

“Are you here?” I asked. “Are you really here?”

She didn’t answer, but stood up, walked around.

“You don’t have time for reminiscing like an old man,” she said. “You must act now. It will all be taken away from you, all of this. It will be gone.”

I didn’t know if the dreams were manifestations of my own fears, my subconscious trying to spur me into action, but they shook me up. When I woke up, I felt myself shaking, wondering why they would come from the spirit world to berate me. Of course, I didn’t have anyone able to talk to me like that now. Izzy was probably the only one who had dared to speak openly to me and I had put an end to that.

In the early morning, my most disturbing dream was of my mother, my real mother. I found myself in the small peat house we had then, my father outside, covering our wood supply. It was raining outside and cold. My brothers and sisters were sitting in front of the fire. My mother sat in a chair, doing some sort of needlework, mending clothes probably. We were poor and life was dreary.

I must have been around eight years old then and was supposed to look after my younger brother and sister. But Iwasn’t paying attention, playing instead with some sticks I had picked up. My brother took one of the sticks and stabbed it at my sister, playfully, but hurting her. She had an ugly scratch on her face and started bawling, my mother blamed me. She looked at me, her eyes blazing. “I asked you to do one thing, just one thing! Go outside! Now!”

She chased me into the cold, wet rain. I remember hearing my sister cry and thinking it was my fault, wanting to go back inside and warm myself at the fire. But I had been banished into the night. Within the year, they would all be dead, only I would survive. It would be decades of me, alone in the wilderness, roaming the land. I never belonged anywhere, never could find a place where I felt safe. It was not a stretch for me to remember that time, always with a chill in my bones.

I had tried to create warmth with my own family, setting up an empire in the Grey Mountains, but it wasn’t enough, it had not changed a thing.

When I woke up at the end of the second night, the fever had broken and I felt able to sit up.

Ragnar was in the room, keeping watch.

“How’re you feeling?”

He offered me some product, which I drank.

“Where is Layrr?” I asked.

He told me Layrr had gone to check on the blood bank. They had reports that our people had been removed and that it was taken over by others, it wasn’t clear who.

“This is all part of the same destabilization attack,” I said.

I asked after the mobile signal and Sunil.

“It’s still down, we are not able to call anyone in the Capital or Citadel.” He paused. “But we sent crows to find Sunil.”

“And?”

Ragnar’s face darkened. “He’s gone, we can’t find him.”

“You can’t find him?”

“The housekeeper says he has not been there in days.”

“Could something have happened to him?”

Ragnar didn’t know. “We’ve sent someone to track him down, a shifter, able to blend in. Reports from the Citadel are patchy. But it seems like the Council has been overthrown.”

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