“Thank the True for that.”
“She’ll be thanking the Damned for it, before long.”
Whatever it takes. I’m just glad to be able to talk to my friend again, no matter what state she’s in—so long as I can avoid walking in on anotherurgentsituation like I did yesterday.
Hopefully she’s gotten that out of her system,I think.
Though, knowing how vampires are, and being intimately involved with a few of them . . . I sincerely doubt it.
Chapter 40
Sephania
The flower petals flutter away from the bloody rain in the reflection of the window. Where I usually see my terrified face in the reflection, I now see crimson eyes belonging to a blonde-haired girl with a rictus grin splashed across her mug. Wicked, wrong. She seems wrong.
Her head twists and turns, studying me through the window like I’m nothing more than an alchemist’s experiment. I can’t escape her incessant fingernails on the glass.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Come out and play, Sephania,” the fair-faced girl mutters. “Come out, Mistress.”
The tapping becomes more insistent. A new face joins the first, also pale and gaunt, red-eyed, yet with a dark mane over bony shoulders instead of tawny hair. I can see neither of their bodies, only their floating heads.
Floating heads . . . Like the ones placed on the four-poster bed of Sister Cyprilis.
In fact, this second girl looks just like my old friend, except wicked and wrong like the first. Always wrong. The smiles are misshapen, just a little off-center. Now they’re both tapping the window.
I squeal in a girlish, young voice. “Please go away! Mother! Help me!”
There is no mother here. Not in this room, this dark box. The rain drenches the girls on the other side of the window. The sunflower is gone, wilted.
When the rain turns to blood, I expect it.
But I don’t expect the reactions from the girls, who raise their chins back and widen their maws to disproportionate sizes, drinking the raining blood as it slathers their faces.
They turn to the window again, where I’m hiding. Bloody lips, trickling and oozing red down their chins. They move to tap the glass, which is showing a spiderweb of cracks—
And their tapping becomesbanging.Fists now, rather than fingernails.
The glass shatters—
I screech as shards rain down on me, trying to reel back but with nowhere to go. Their hands stream into the room, grabbing at me.
“Come andplay,Mistress!” they roar—
I bolt awake. My heart slams in my throat. Grabbing at my face, I make sure I’m intact and unharmed. Sweat soaks the bedsheets beneath me.
“Mistress?”
A sound somewhere between a sob and a wail wrenches from my throat as I flip on the bed to face the door.It’s just the remnants of my awful nightmare!
My eyes widen. It’s no dream.
Palacia stands at the foot of my bed. Her eyes are small, half-lidded, wreathed in red. She must have stumbled here from her recovery room. The vampirex wears a thin shift and nothing else. I don’t want to look anywhere but her face, fearing what I might find lower on her body.
“P-Pala?” I croak. “I’m sorry, my friend. I didn’t hear you come in.”
Palacia’s small hands fall on the blanket, gently tugging. “Please, Mistress,” she whines. “Can I join you? I can’t sleep.”
