Page 7 of Heir of Blood and Moonlight

Sombra swiped at her with one paw, his claws extended.

My sister’s specter vanished.

The panic that had gripped me tight eased the rest of the way, and the temporary paralysis left my limbs. My heartbeat slowed, and my head cleared. Breathing hard, I rolled onto my side and stroked Sombra’s sleek fur as the cat curled into the crook of my body.

Had the ghost of my sister really been here? Had Sombra seen her? Or was he just reacting to me, to my fear at seeing ghosts?

As the panic abated and reason returned, I thought the truth was far more mundane. Amaya was just a hallucination born of a bout of sleep paralysis, trapping me in the terrifying limbo between asleep and awake, where elements of my sleeping mind appeared in the real world. And Sombra hadn’t actually swiped at Amaya but had been reacting to me.

It used to happen all the time. I would wake to the specter of Javier huddled in the corner of my room, his body brutally beaten and his spirit broken. The disturbing condition hadn’t happened in years, but it was easy enough to recognize. The sensation was so uniquely terrifying, hardly the kind of thing anyone could forget.

I relaxed, letting Sombra’s comforting purr lull me back to sleep. At least the dreams that filled the remainder of the night turned out to bemuchmore pleasant.

5

The alarm on myphone 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, oneheaven—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 mysex 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 consideredan 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 starteda 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.

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