B00AO57VOY EBOK (19 page)

My world.

“Tell me again,” Grams
ordered, pacing back and forth in front of me.  “I know it’s hard, but I need
to know every detail of that dream.  You said you were at school, the dance?”

“Yes,” I said on a deep
breath as I prayed for patience, having been through the whole thing umpteen
times already.  “I don’t know what else I can tell you.  It was one of the
rooms at the end of the hall in the west wing, and Bastian was standing there
swinging this big freaking sword around while Nathan knelt in front of him like
a damned idiot—which I’m pretty sure would never happen in real life.”

“And where were you?” she
asked, giving me a sympathetic look.

“I was in a couple of
different places,” I told her—again—sighing.  “I was standing in the doorway,
but I was also burning in the middle of the room.” 

Fire.  Always fire.  I had
dreamed of burning my whole life.  It was why I stayed away from open flames. 
I had watched myself burn again and again in my dreams.  I knew the pain of dying
by fire very well.

Nathan hugged me closer to
him and I burrowed into his side like I was trying to escape.  His arm around
me felt good, made me feel like I was safe.  It was all an illusion, though. 
Neither one of us was safe anymore. 

I had gone over and over it,
both with Grams and in my own mind, and I still couldn’t understand what I had
seen—well, other than the love of my life having his head chopped off. 
That
I had understood perfectly.  The confusing part for me was
why
.  Why
would Nathan just sit there and let Bastian kill him?

 “I couldn’t save him,” I
whispered as tear filled my eyes. 

“It was just a dream, baby,”
Nathan murmured, holding me a little closer and dropping a gentle kiss on the
top of my head.  “That’s not going to happen.”

“Actually, I’m not so sure
about that,” Grams said, giving us a sad look. 

“You mean we
are
going
to die?” I asked, my voice shaking.  “Are you trying to tell me all of that was
real
?”

“At the very least, a very
real possibility,” she said somberly.  “The fact that you remember your dream
with such clarity, such detail, leads me to believe you may have some
precognitive abilities.  If that dream
was
a premonition, it is possible
that what you saw were the last moments you will spend on this earth unless we
find a way to change it.”

I turned to look at Nathan,
too horrified to speak.  I couldn’t watch him die.  I knew I couldn’t.  I knew
because I had seen that firsthand.  I had watched my grief and hatred kill me. 
I could still feel that heat, see that beautiful light, as I self-destructed. 
It was the only part of my dream I hadn’t told Grams about.   

But what if the future
really
wasn’t
written in stone?  What if I could save us both? 

 “How do I stop it?” I asked
quietly, turning back to Grams.  “I can’t watch Nathan die, Grams.  If I’m
forced to do that, I won’t survive it.  So, what do I do?”

“
We
,” Nathan
corrected.  “What do
we
do?”

Grams just sat there looking
at us for a long, silent moment.  There was something about the look in her
eyes that made me feel like I had been put under the lens of a huge
microscope.  I felt like she was searching out all my flaws and weaknesses and
magnifying them to ginormous proportions so she could determine just how to
remove them.  Considering how many flaws and weaknesses I happen to have, it
wasn’t exactly a comfortable experience.

 “It’s going to take a lot
of work for you to learn everything you need to know in such a short amount of
time—not to mention discipline and concentration,” Grams said, sounding unsure. 
“You’re going to have to work ten times harder than everyone else and then ten
times harder than that just to catch up.  It won’t be easy, sweetheart.”

Since when was
anything
easy
for me?  I could be disciplined and I was a fast learner.  I didn’t think I had
ever met a challenge I didn’t like, either.  When someone told me I couldn’t do
something, I did it just to prove them wrong.  I could learn to be a kick ass
witch like Kim.  I could learn to control my emotions, to be calm in the face
of death and danger. 

I just needed Grams to teach
me
how
.

“So, when do we get
started?” I asked in answer, causing her to smile.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” she
said, looking like I had just given her a gift.  “In the meantime, I think we
should start trying to determine what kind of demon we’re dealing with.  I
could use some help with the research.”

“How will that help?” I
asked, frowning slightly.

“In order to banish a demon,
you have to know what it’s drawn to, what its weaknesses are,” Nathan
answered.  “Every demon is different, you see.  What will get rid of one won’t
necessarily work on another.  Determining the true nature of a demon is very
hard to do, though, because there are so many of them.  You have to look at
every single thing it does, watch for patterns and the like.  And then you have
to hope they’ve repeated those same patterns before and that they have been
recorded somewhere down the line.  It’s not an easy job.”

It sounded like an awful lot
of
ifs
had been left out of that little speech.  We could get rid of the
demon
if
we could figure out what he was drawn to.  We could figure out what
he was drawn to
if
he had ever acted out the same little drama before. 
We could find out if he had only
if
someone had thought,
Hey!  I’m
being stalked by a psycho demon, maybe I should record the experience for
future stalkees to find.
 

Like I said, a
lot
of
ifs.

“Okay, so how do we figure
out what kind of demon he is?” I asked, hoping I didn’t look as overwhelmed as
I suddenly felt. 

 “We’re going to split
everyone up into research teams,” Grams said, straightening her shoulders and
reaching for a pen and notepad on the table next to her.  “There are a great
many places we can start looking for information, including the public library
here in Moonlight and the one at the school.  Since I am on the Council of
Elders, I will start going through the archives.  I had been saving that as a
last resort, seeing as they frown upon it, but desperate times call for
desperate measures.”

“Ember, you and Kimberly
start with the library at Oakhurst,” she continued, scribbling away on her
notepad.  “Nate, you can take Blake and Tyler and start on the library in
town.  Moonlight has a dark underside to its history.  Perhaps something was
written down at some point that will help us.”

I cringed, expecting Nathan
to react badly to Grams’ plan.  I had been surprised when Tyler had shown up
with Mrs. Amelia the night before, but Nathan’s reaction had been so unpleasant
that it had raised more than a few eyebrows.  He had reverted back to the
possessive caveman at the first sight of Tyler—and Tyler had egged him on the
whole night like it was funny to him.

In between being
interrogated, that is.

Grams, using my safety as
her excuse for being so rude and intrusive, had grilled Tyler for almost an
hour when he arrived.  For every question she asked, he gave her an answer that
wasn’t really an answer.  In the end, she just sat back in her chair and
studied him like he was a fascinating new species of insect.  The look in her
eyes kind of threw me.  I would have expected suspicion or even outright
mistrust.

Instead, she looked…curious.

“Tell me, Tyler,” she said
softly, when she had stared at him so long that he had started to fidget, “how
long have you looked like you do right now?”

“A while,” he answered,
evasively.

He gave her a look that
basically begged her to let the matter drop, but he didn’t know Grams.  She
wasn’t going to let it go until she had the answers she wanted.  I found myself
on the edge of my seat as I waited to see if she would succeed, just as curious
as she was.

“But, you
are
a
witch?” Grams asked, pressing on.

In answer, he just gave her
a look—a pretty damn cold one.

“No, I thought not,” she
said with a slight smile.

“This is getting us
nowhere,” he muttered, his tone bitter, throwing himself back in his chair and
giving her an insolent look.  “You know, I was under the impression I was here
to help with
Bastian
.  If I had known I was going to have to submit to
the Inquisition, I would have declined the invitation.  Now, do you want my
help or not?”

I frowned at him, confused. 
Why was he being so secretive about what he was?  What could be so terrible
that he wouldn’t even admit it to the bunch of freaks he was sitting with?  I
mean, it wasn’t like any of
us
were normal, either, you know.

Grams just gave him a knowing
smirk and waved her hand, “Please, by all means, wow us with your expertise,
Mr. Jordan.”

I stared at her, too shocked
to even blink.  My Grams, the woman who was worse than a dog with a bone when
it came to a mystery, who would gnaw and chew at it until she’d sucked all the
secrets out of it, had backed down.

I mentally recorded the time
and date.  History had been made. 

Not that Grams had actually
given up.  Not
my
Grams.  No, she was just coming up with a new plan of
attack.  If I’d been Tyler, I would have told her what she wanted to know just
to shut her up.  But, so far, Tyler was doing a remarkable job of stumping
her.  Curious as I was about what he was, I found myself rooting for him to
win.

“I really don’t think it
will take three of us to research what little documentation we’re likely to
find at the local library, Shea,” Nathan grumbled, apparently not happy about
his new research partners.

“Oh, Blake won’t be there to
help,” Grams said, not even bothering to look up. 

“Then why send him with
them?” I asked, confused. 

“To play referee,” she
muttered.

Yeah. That was probably a
really
good idea.

Having received our
assignments, we decided it was time to make our escape while Grams was
distracted.  I didn’t think I could take another dream replay.  Having to
repeat it over and over for the better part of two hours had been bad enough. 

“You know what I think?”
Nathan murmured once he had me all alone.  “I think you need to think about
something else for a while. Lucky for you, I know the perfect way to distract
you.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, smiling
at the teasing tone of his voice.  “And how do you plan to do that?”

“Just.”  He leaned down to
nuzzle the side of my neck, his cool breath sending a shiver down my spine that
made me feel like I had dissolved into jelly. “Like.”  He whispered against my
earlobe before catching the soft skin between his teeth and giving it a playful
little nibble. “This.”

His lips closed over mine as
he pulled me tighter against him, molding us together.  I forgot everything but
Nathan and the taste of his lips and the feel of his fingers against my skin. I
lost myself in him, let my senses drown out the warning voice in my head and
the doubt in my heart.

“So soft,” Nathan murmured
when he decided I needed to come up for air, letting his finger slowly trail
across my collarbone. “So beautiful.”

I had barely caught my
breath when he leaned down and caught my lips in another long, drugging kiss
that left me aching for more as he started backing us toward the bed.  I didn’t
stop him when his hand slipped beneath my shirt in search of skin.  But when I
reached down and worked it up and over my head, Nathan froze like I had doused
him in ice water.

It was only then that I
remembered the bruises.

“You should have had Shea
heal you,” he said, his silky voice gruff with worry, running his cool fingers
lightly over a particularly nasty bruise on my stomach.  “Why didn’t you say
anything?  These look pretty painful, baby.”

“Grams was a little pissed,
if you’ll remember,” I whispered, trying to keep my eyes from rolling back in
my head as he continued tracing my bruises.  “I’ll get her to look at them
tomorrow.”

I had been afraid to let her
know just how battered and bruised I was, to be honest.  The lecture that would
have brought on probably would have lasted for days.

“There’s no need for you to
wait until tomorrow,” Nathan purred with a wicked smile.  “I can help.”

“Oh?”  I arched an eyebrow
at him, pretending my skin wasn’t tingling from the way he was looking at me.  “And
how are you going to do that?”

“Being a vampire isn’t
all
bad,” he whispered pushing me onto the bed gently before ducking his head to
place a gentle kiss on one of my bruises.  “It does have a few advantages.”