Vamped Up (14 page)

Chapter Eighteen

“One man will rise against many, one will fall by his will, and one will flee when he should fight. These three build the threshold from which there is no turning back.”

Grimorium Verum
, (prophesy written in elder blood), taken from bottom of first page recovered

R
UAN HIGHTAILED IT
back to ReVamp before sunrise. He couldn’t go home. One glance at his bed and he’d crash, and no matter how he pushed the feeling aside, he knew deep down the nightmare where he killed Eve over and over again would return. He wasn’t sure if he could handle seeing Eve in that drained state again. If he could bear the guilt of watching himself kill her.

He couldn’t say he was surprised by the look of wonder on Dylan and Slade’s faces when he walked through the doors and said he’d willingly help with the scrolls.

He’d fought them on it for so long, it was only natural they’d ask what changed his mind. He wasn’t about to tell them it had anything to do with a teleporting trainee with kerosene-like blood, so he gave some bogus excuse and darted into his office, closing himself inside with the scraps of scroll laid out over his desk.

They’d left him to his work, thank God, and disappeared to their scheduled Bloodlust Drinkers Anonymous meeting, housed in one of ReVamp’s many classrooms. That meant he had roughly an hour to scan over the two pages of scroll in private, try to figure out why the hell they were in his handwriting, and break the cipher by figuring out his keyword from a hundred years before.

He tried plugging keywords into the
Vigenère table,
anything he could come up with that related to their race: vampire, blood, Crimson Council, therian, Fort Point, haven, valcdana, enlightenment.

Nothing.

He flipped the ancient pages scribbled in Valcish, the ancient language of their kind, copying passages that seemed to stand out from the rest onto a pad of paper. It wasn’t long before the words started to blur and his eyelids became too heavy to keep open.

Sleep overpowered him. With a resounding thud, his forehead dropped to his desk.

The nightmare started the same as the last few he’d had. A dark void with no beginning and no end sucked his body into some sort of whirlpool, spinning him round and round. His thoughts spiraled like water down a drain, twirling faster and faster until they jumbled together and he couldn’t make sense of them. Where was he? Why couldn’t he see through this blackness yet be so conscious of it at the same time? Disorientation set in.

Like a mine went off in his brain, everything changed.

As black became light and Ruan’s nausea settled, he opened his eyes. He stood smack-dead in the middle of the chilling stone chamber that had haunted his dreams for longer than he could remember. Single door. A tiny slat of a window, too high to peer through and too narrow to squeeze through, sliced into the dirty concrete wall behind him. A hush echoed from outside. Was that surf breaking on rocks?

Curious about his dream environment that was so familiar, yet so distant, Ruan stepped closer to the window, tripping over something on the floor.

His lungs deflated as realization hit him like a cannonball. He fell to his knees. He didn’t have to look down to know Eve was lying on the cold, hard ground . . . lifeless.

Throat burning with grief, Ruan ghosted his hands over her body, holding back the urge to wrap her in his arms and carry her out of this place. He eyed her bloody leg, where he’d dipped his fangs into her flesh, violating her. His gaze drifted over her white chemise, along the soft curves of her body, to the light golden fan of hair haloing her head. He gently replaced a fallen strap over her shoulder.

It’s a dream. Only a dream.

Her neck was tilted awkwardly to the side. He touched two fingers to her chin and lifted . . . then dropped his shaking hand. Her head lolled back to the concrete, but not before he spied two fresh puncture marks on her neck.

He did this to her. She was dead because of his greed, his selfish nature. He’d killed her. Not again . .
 .

Air thickened until he couldn’t breathe. Walls closed in, flattened out, then closed in again. The chamber pulsated as he backed away until his back met the hard span of the wall behind him.

Blood chilled in his veins . . . except on his back, a warm buzzing spread through his muscles. At first he thought it was his imagination, but the longer he leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath, the hotter his back became. Confused, he spun around, his arms twisting behind him to touch the mark that was now throbbing with heat.

His eyes caught on something in the concrete. The heavy stones cemented together were old and worn, with dirtied grout and chipping mortar. All except one. One oblong stone in the center of the wall looked new and fresh. He swiped his fingers over it, feeling it radiate with some sort of power, and came away with a finger covered in dirt and warmth spreading through his hand. The grout between that stone and the others bordering it was faded, but not as dark as the other grout lines around the chamber.

He ran a finger around the outside of the stone, eyeing his trail with increasing curiosity. With each swipe, his finger buzzed with electric current. The grout faded lighter and lighter, until it was almost translucently white. Glowing.

No, he had to be mistaken. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, then peered at the glowing ring around the stone in question.

To his surprise, as if his mouth had a mind of its own, he muttered,
“Mentelo quisa a Grimorium Verum aprirligaza commando!”

He hadn’t the slightest idea what the words meant or where they came from, but the walls shook dust from the overhead lights and dirt to the ground. The border of the warm stone glowed so bright Ruan grimaced from its glare.

From out of nowhere he mumbled the words again, with more weight this time,
“Mentelo quisa a Grimorium Verum aprirligaza commando!”

The earth trembled at his feet. He touched the wall to stabilize himself, releasing his grip when the stone burned his palm. He knelt to the ground, watching the chamber quiver and shake and moan from its shifting.

Then just like that, the shaking stopped. The room stilled. The crash of waves on rock rumbled outside.

Ruan touched a hesitant hand to the stone. It was cold. Dirty. Ordinary.

He turned his attention to Eve, determined to get her out of this place—dream or not—and caught his breath. She was glowing, head to toe, from the golden strands of her hair to the tips of her dainty toes. She was an angel. Glowing like the stone in the wall. He bent down, stretching a hand to touch her, when she arched up suddenly, shattering into a fireball of white light.

“Ruan!” Dylan shouted.

He shot upright, head spinning, his gaze locking on Dylan standing over him in ReVamp’s back office. That damned dried-blood-colored paint on the back wall came into focus first. He really needed to pay someone to cover that shit up.

Dylan bent lower, examining his undoubtedly disheveled appearance. “Are you all right?”

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and ground them back and forth, taking the opportunity to run through his nightmare again. This time the feeling of the nightmare was different. Usually guilt and
hunger
filled him upon waking; so much so that he had to jet out of bed and take a cold shower before he laid eyes upon Eve again. But now, he didn’t feel either of those things.

He was curious about the glowing stone and what it meant, what the dream was trying to show him, and what the words meant that flew out of his lips. “How long was I out?” he asked.

“ ‘Bout twelve hours. It’s nearly sunset.”

Blinking slowly, Ruan checked his watch, feeling sore and bruised like the nightmare kicked the tar out of him. “Damn it. I gotta get home.” For the first time since meeting Eve, he didn’t feel like the remnants of the nightmare would cause him to harm her. At least that was progress.

“Eve called earlier. I told her you were sleeping.” Dylan curled up on the leather-wrapped chair facing his desk and tucked her feet beneath her, a white porcelain coffee cup etched with “Got Blood?” cradled in her hands. “She said to leave you be . . . that you haven’t been sleeping well at home and she’d catch up with you later.”

Eve’s response made it sound like she had plans or somewhere to be. Was he forgetting something?

Ruan took a deep breath and nodded, the details of the nightmare fading from his memory. What were those words he’d shouted?
Apri . . . command
. . .
something
.
Damn it.

How did they seem so natural to him, like he’d known them his whole life, yet now he couldn’t recall them with any kind of clarity? What the hell was up with that stone in the chamber wall? And why was Eve glowing after he’d touched it?

“I didn’t realize I was out for that long,” he said, fumbling through the scrolls as if he knew where he left off. “I wish you’d woken me.”

“You’re welcome to crash here any time you like; I hope you know that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Dylan cleared her throat, swallowed slowly, looking sickly pale.

“You all right?” Ruan asked.

She nodded. “I’ve just had some sort of stomach bug the last couple days, but don’t worry about me. Listen, if you ever want to talk about your nightmares,” she said in between sips of her coffee-blood combo, “I’m listening now.”

Yeah. Unlike the time at the Crimson Council meeting, where Dylan needed him to figure out the scroll and death shade connection for her.

He leaned back, stretching his arms behind him. “It’s the same thing that’s been happening since you found the shit kicked out of me on that beach by Fort Point. My dreams are whacked and I have to get over it, that’s all.”

She blinked slowly, disbelieving. “You can pretend it isn’t bothering you all you like, but I know you better than you think.” She paused and damn her, she was right. “You can see who the person is now, can’t you? The person you find all bloodied up in your dream?”

He nodded. Since she’d found him near Fort Point after the massacre, he’d had the same nightmare. Sure, there were years where they’d fade and he’d dream of nothing. But when the nightmares did resurface, the details were often blurred. They were always the same. The ominous feeling in his gut, the dank and rotten smells in the chamber, and the wormhole suction that pulled him into the nightmare from the beginning.

Recently, though—since he’d met Eve, actually—details became clear. First, he could see the chamber with increasing clarity. The brick and stone walls, the dusty floor, the dimly lit lights on the ceiling. Then he could see a body at his feet. Female, seductive, and much too young, with no recognizable features.

Once he and Eve became intimate, once she’d invited him into her bed, the nightmares resurfaced with a vengeance. Emotions like bloodlust and greed attached to them, creating a whole new twisted dimension to their relationship.

“So who is it?” Lowering her gaze, Dylan casually swiped a finger around the lip of her mug.

Ignoring the abnormally loud pounding of his heart, Ruan spun around and dug through the filing cabinet behind him. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but anything was better than the conversation they were having. Why wouldn’t she drop it? He pulled out a stuffed manila folder, flattening it on his desk.

Dylan was too still. He could sense her hesitation and feel the obvious question lingering in the air between them. Gods below, was he holding his breath? His chest felt too tight from built up pressure. Like it was about to implode. Ruan stopped sifting through vampire tracking records and met her eyes.

She swallowed hard. “It’s Eve, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he croaked.

“
Holy hell
.”

The clock behind him clicked over to six as the wind was knocked out of his lungs. “I know.”

She put her coffee cup down on his desk and hugged her knees tighter. “Have you told her?”

He slapped the manila folder onto the desk and shoved it away from him. “What am I supposed to say?” He tunneled his fingers through his hair. “That every night when I close my eyes, I kill her?”
Yeah, that’d go over real well.

Dylan rocketed off her chair, her eyes wide. “You kill her? You never said anything about killing her. I thought, I guess, I . . . I thought the person on the floor kind of—”

“What?” he fired, blood flashing lightning quick through his veins. “You thought the woman died of natural causes?”

Her gaze skipped around the room. “I don’t know, I guess I figured you stumbled across a dead body or something. That they were already gone.” She exhaled heavily, pacing from one side of the cramped office to the other, her hands firmly planted on her hips. “How clear can you see it?”

“Can we talk about something else?” Ruan snatched the manila folder again and thumbed through the pages, scanning over lists of hundreds of vampires who had been having trouble controlling their bloodlusting urges this year.

“Where are you when it happens?”

He huffed through tight lips. “We’re not going there.”

“Come on,” Dylan pushed, going palms-down on the desk. “How does it happen? Can you see that much? Do you drain her?”

“Damn it!” Ruan pounded his fists on the desk, silencing her. “
Please
, Dylan.”

Son of Hades, why wasn’t there a UV blocking window in this office? He’d kill for some fresh air right now instead of this dank, thin, pathetic excuse for air that his lungs suddenly couldn’t process. “I should probably get back to work.”
God, why wouldn’t she drop this and let him be.
“You and Slade come up with anything while I was out?”

Dylan stood board-straight, twisted her lips, and stared directly at him. Could she see the burden he was bearing? “You have to deal with what’s happening sooner or later,” she said finally. “And if Eve’s involved, it better be sooner.”

Ruan nodded, swallowing sandpaper. “I won’t hurt her, Dylan.”