Dark Needs at Night’s Edge (Immortals After Dark #5)(13)
Author: Kresley Cole

He becomes acutely aware that his face is caked with blood and mud, his hair stiff with it. Dément. Is that all she sees him as? A madman to be ignored? Or worse – pitied? That is how she sees him.

A filthy, sexually inexperienced lunatic.

She’s seen him spit blood. Did she witness him mindlessly banging his head against the wall? Damn it, he’s beginning to dislike this clarity! Again, he craves the oblivion of memories. It’s easier to be awash in them, to hate, to hurt… .

Yet the female beside him moors his mind to the present like an anchor.

"They should give you a bath," she says in her whispery voice, just as Sebastian intones, "Rest easy, Conrad. The hallucinations will disappear before you know – "

"Leave me!" he snaps. He almost said, "Leave us."

The ghost drifts away, readying her loot to depart. No, not you! When she and the items vanish, all that’s left of her is the petal on the sheet. He inches over, wanting to touch it. But it begins to fade. Then gone.

He shifts in the bed, restless and chafing in his bonds. Want her here.

Sebastian rises. "Very well, we’ll go. Call out if you need anything – or if you feel like drinking."

They leave him in the darkened room. "Have you seen my cell phone?" Nikolai asks on the way out.

Before he has time to analyze why her absence could possibly disappoint him to this degree, others’ memories bubble up in his mind as though from a wellspring.

Over the years, he hasn’t killed honorable men, actually has taken out some who were even more monstrous than himself. And their memories, now his memories, chill him to his bones.

He sees scenes of torture he hasn’t inflicted, harrowing murders of women and children he never committed. Glassy, sightless eyes stare up at him – but not him.

These memories demand to be acknowledged, to be experienced. Before they’ll be allayed, each must be relived, eking away his sanity.

And he has none left to lose.

8

Néomi was fairly much an open book – open about her sexuality, her body, her opinions. But she had two dirty little secrets.

One of which was her penchant for relocating an odd item here and there that didn’t belong to her.

Inside her hidden chamber, behind the concealed Gothic entrance, she placed her new acquisitions on the display table. Here lay all of her trinkets and treasures picked up from tenants over the years.

The table was nearly filled. Soon she’d have to employ the coffee table. Not a bad take, considering Elancourt had been occupied for only about a third of her afterlife.

So I tend to steal a lot.

She didn’t necessarily appropriate things of value, more items that intrigued her. Among the contraband: a battery-operated TV with the batteries long dead, a fairly modern bra, a gramophone, and a box of condoms she would’ve paid thousands for in the twenties.

She had matchbooks and Mardi Gras doubloons, candy she’d never eat, and about a dozen spray-paint cans confiscated from myriad teenage vandals.

With slammed doors, flying sheets, and tempests of leaves, she’d scared les artistes graffiti past the point of spontaneous urination, at which time they always dropped their paint and ran. This was Néomi’s home, her entire world. She refused to read poorly crafted "art" for the rest of her days.

Like a bird feathering her nest, she’d collected things from outside and brought them within her hidden enclave. This room used to be her dance studio – with ballet barres, a wood parquet floor, and wall-to-wall mirrors. The studio itself was largely untouched, though newspapers were stacked everywhere, and the mirrors had been modified to fit her current appearance. In other words, she’d broken them.

In the days after her death, when movers had brought in boxes for all her belongings, she’d yearned so passionately to smuggle them back to this room, they’d actually moved. That was how she’d first recognized she had the ability to transport things with her mind.

In a mad dash, she’d levitated all the things she’d valued: her jewelry, clothes, scrapbooks, her prohibited stash of liquor, and even her weighty safe, conveying them to the hidden studio.

Yet now she could do nothing but watch her possessions age right before her. Just like her home. She couldn’t feel any of them, couldn’t run her greedy fingertips over a spill of cool silk or the tickling tip of a feather… .

"Now what?" she asked aloud.

The echoing silence seemed to mock her. Alone… alone… alone…

Néomi considered materializing to the vampire’s room – or tracing there. She assured herself it was the pressing quiet that spurred her to debate returning, and not the madman himself. But he did seem to sense her the best of anyone who’d ever come to Elancourt.

Even if he was insane and unwashed, something about him drew her. She had the undeniable urge to talk to him more.

Yet in the end, she was too exhausted to return, her essence depleted from all the energy she used for her concentrated telekinesis. Needing to rest, she floated to her cot.

Long ago, she’d brought it into the studio. Though she couldn’t feel it or the blankets she’d strewn over it, she slept there almost every night. As much as possible, she liked to behave as she had when alive – except for drifting through walls and tracing, of course.

She curled up an inch above it for her reverie. Néomi termed her ghostly sleep a reverie because it differed from what she’d known when living. She didn’t have to have it every day. If she didn’t use telekinesis for more than moving the newspaper, she could go days without it. Waking was instantaneous, with nothing altered except her energy level. She still wore the same clothes, her hair was unchanged, and she never needed to shave her legs and underarms. Normally, she only lost consciousness for about four hours.

That is, until the sliver moon came each month. On that one night, some force compelled her to dance. Like a ghostly marionette, she spun to the same gruesome end, left exhausted and shaken, wishing for a true death.

There were only three days left until her next performance… .

Her maman had always said the sliver moon was lucky for people like them – people who hold on to the sky with all their might, and do it again and again. No matter how many times they lose it. That was why Néomi had scheduled her party on that night.

Lucky wasn’t the first term she’d use to describe that party – the one meant to celebrate the achievement of all her dreams. At twenty-six, Néomi had bought this place on her own, after working her way out of the Vieux Carré – all the while managing to keep her shady background a secret.

Her uptown patrons had never found out that Néomi was a French émigrée’s bastard born in the seedy French Quarter. They hadn’t connected Néomi Laress to Marguerite L’Are, the infamous burlesque dancer.