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  They walked for almost two hours, all the way to the downtown Middletown and back. The sun hung just above the horizon when they returned to the apartment complex. The day had grown much colder as the sun ebbed, but with her hand in Rave’s hand, Leesa scarcely felt it. It had been a wonderful walk, a wonderful afternoon, but she knew it was now time for another good-bye.

  She turned and wrapped her arms around Rave, pressing her cheek against his chest as she felt his strong arms encircle her, trying to absorb as much of him as she could while he was still here. Finally, she pushed her head away from his chest and looked up at his face. Dral and Bain had moved a few steps back, giving them some privacy.

  “Thanks for coming, Rave. It was a wonderful surprise.”

  “The pleasure was mine,” Rave said, smiling. “A two hundred mile jog is nothing—not when you are at the end of it.”

  “You’re such a flatterer,” she teased. “Two hundred miles isn’t that much for you whether I’m at the end of it or not.” She rose up on her toes and gave him a quick peck on the lips. “I like hearing you say it, though.”

  She stepped back out of his embrace. “Now get out of here. I hate long good-byes.”

  Rave grinned. “As you wish.” He nodded to Dral and Bain, who started down the walk.

  Rave kissed the top of her head. “Keep yourself safe, my love,” he said, then he turned and followed his companions.

  Leesa watched until they disappeared around the corner. It wasn’t until she had turned to go inside the apartment that she realized she’d forgotten to tell Rave about her vampire dream. Oh, well, she thought, there was no sense worrying him over a stupid dream anyway. She pulled the door open and went inside.

  24. A NEW FRIEND

  The first thing Leesa did when she got back to school, after putting her stuff away in her room, was go down to Cali’s room. She had only seen her friend once over the break, when Cali had borrowed her mom’s car and driven to Meriden two days before Christmas. That had been nearly two weeks ago, and Leesa missed her best friend. Texts were nice, but there was nothing like getting together in person.

  Cali’s door was wide open. Inside, Leesa could see Cali and Stacie sitting at Cali’s desk, their backs to the doorway. She knocked lightly on the door to let them know she was there and entered the room.

  The two girls turned at the sound of Leesa’s knock, and she immediately saw she had been mistaken. The second girl was not Stacie—this girl’s long straight black hair, so similar to the half-Japanese Stacie’s—had fooled Leesa. She had never seen this girl before. She was very pretty, with large, almond-shaped dark brown eyes and high cheekbones that gave her an attractive, exotic look, as did her café au lait complexion.

  “Hey, Leesa,” Cali said happily. She got up and crossed the room to give Leesa a big welcome back hug.

  Cali was wearing black jeans and a bright, pinkish-orange lightweight sweatshirt with I Love Pink printed across the front in giant block letters. Smaller letters proclaiming Pink Rules ran down the length of one sleeve. Leesa had never seen this sweatshirt on Cali and guessed it was probably a Christmas present. One thing about the Pink people—they were certainly not bashful about letting the world know which clothes belonged to their popular line.

  “This is my friend Vanina,” Cali said when she let Leesa go.

  The new girl rose gracefully to her feet and extended her hand. When she stood up, Leesa saw Vanina was a couple of inches taller than she was, at least five-ten, maybe taller. Her outfit was much less colorful than Cali’s, but almost as attention grabbing. Black leggings showed off her long, slender legs, while on top, she wore a loose, long-sleeved dark gray shirt unbuttoned over a crimson cami.

  Vanina’s hand was soft and smooth. Leesa wondered why she had never heard Cali mention her before. Maybe she was an old friend from high school.

  “Hi, Vanina,” she said. “That’s a pretty name. And so unusual. I’ve never heard it before.”

  “It’s Corsican,” Vanina said. This girl was, in fact, Edwina, but she knew Leesa would recognize that name instantly, so she had introduced herself to Cali using the name of Vanina, her long departed mentor.

  “Corsica…isn’t that were Napoleon came from?”

  Edwina smiled. “Very good. I’m impressed. Not many people know that nowadays.” She winced, hoping Leesa wouldn’t make anything out of the “nowadays” comment. Edwina was skilled at blending in with the humans, but every now and then something slipped past her lips that could lead an astute observer to wonder where the statement came from.

  Leesa thought she saw a strange look flicker momentarily in Vanina’s eyes, but it was gone before she could make anything out of it. The girl had just a hint of some kind of accent, too.

  “Is that where you’re from?” Leesa asked. “Corsica?”

  Edwina laughed. “Don’t I wish. How cool would that be? But no, I was born in Virginia. I haven’t lived there in a long time, though.”

  “She lives in East Hartford now,” Cali said. “We met at the mall over break.”

  Leesa nodded. That explained why she had never heard Cali mention Vanina before. She was a new friend. “What dorm do you live in?” she asked, assuming Vanina was a Weston student.

  “Oh, I don’t go to Weston, I go to UConn,” Edwina said, using the cover story she had come up with to explain why she wouldn’t be around all that much. “We don’t start back at school until tomorrow, and I live at home, anyway.”

  “She drove me back to school this morning,” Cali said. “Saved my mom the trip.”

  Edwina had learned to drive more than a decade ago, taught by a human boyfriend, when she realized the skill would help her blend in. As far as she knew, she was the only vampire in the entire coven who knew how to drive. Of course, most vampires had little use for a car. Cali did not know the car Edwina had said was her mom’s was in fact stolen.

  “It was no big deal,” Edwina said. “Besides, I wanted to see where Cali lived.”

  “Pretty luxurious, huh?” Cali said sarcastically.

  “It’s not bad,” Edwina said. “At least you have your own room. All the rooms at UConn have at least two people in them.” She knew this, because she had often hunted at UConn. “That’s one of the reasons I decided to live at home.”

  “Yeah, I guess having our own rooms is pretty cool,” Cali said. “Leesa lives up on the fourth floor.”

  “Cool. It must be nice to live so close to each other.”

  Cali draped her arm around Leesa’s back. “Yep. Sure is. Leesa’s my BFF.”

  “What year are you in at UConn?” Leesa asked.

  “I’m a junior, but I took a year off and traveled after high school.”

  Leesa nodded. She had guessed Vanina was probably a little older than her and Cali.

  “How’s Rave?” Cali asked. “Is he back yet?”

  “Not yet. I only saw him that one time I told you about.”

  “That sucks,” Cali said sympathetically.

  “Who’s Rave?” Vanina asked. “Your boyfriend?”

  “Yeah,” Leesa replied.

  “He’s smokin’ hot, too,” Cali said. She licked her fingertip, then held it out and made a sizzling sound to emphasize just how hot she thought Rave was.

  Edwina laughed. Now she knew the volkaane’s name: Rave. She had already carefully scouted the area where the volkaanes lived—another of the coven’s rules she had broken, going so close to their settlement—and discovered they had all departed. Where, she had no idea, but she would not have risked being in an enclosed space like this with Leesa if there was any chance her boyfriend might show up. Even so, she did not want to remain here too long, because she didn’t know when the volkaane might decide to return.

  “If he’s that hot,” Edwina said, “I hope I get to see him one of these days. Sounds like you’ve got a good one, Leesa.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Leesa said, smiling. “Rave’s the best.”

  “Well, I’d better get goi
ng,” Edwina said. “My mom might be needing her car. It was nice to meet you, Leesa.”

  “You, too,” Leesa said. “I hope we’ll see you again.”

  “Oh, you will, I’m sure of that,” Edwina said.

  She grabbed a black coat from Cali’s bed. How easy, she thought, it would be to kill one or both of them, right here, right now. But what would be the fun of that? As delicious as their blood might be, her thirst for revenge was even stronger than her thirst for blood.

  25. DREAM COME TRUE

  Leesa awoke in a cold sweat. She had just suffered another one of those powerful, all too realistic dreams. This time, she could only recall the final image, but that haunting vision was more than enough. She had seen a teenage girl standing outside a window peering in. Her hair was long and lank, her eyes wide but lifeless, her mouth hanging slightly open. Everything was dark behind her, but the light coming from inside the window partially illuminated her face. The total effect was one of longing, sorrow and terrible suffering.

  It was a horrifying image, one Leesa wished she could wipe from her memory. But no matter how hard she tried, the picture remained clear as a photograph. The girl’s face seemed to be seared onto her retinas.

  Unable to make the image go away, Leesa changed her focus, struggling instead to recall details from the dream. Who was this girl and where had she come from? What horrors had she suffered to make her look the way she did? And why had she appeared in Leesa’s dream in the first place?

  No answers came. The first part of the dream remained as elusive as the girl’s despondent face was persistent.

  Frustrated, Leesa sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The dorm was silent. A glance at her clock told her it was only 4:35. Out from under the covers, she felt the chill of the room enfold her. Enough light leaked in from the night outside for her to make out the dark outlines of her furniture. She got up and grabbed a terrycloth robe from her closet and slipped her feet into a pair of fleece-lined moccasins.

  Warmer now, she crossed to the sink and splashed cold water onto her face, rinsing away a film of dried sweat and hoping that becoming more fully awake would make the image go away. The sweat disappeared quickly; the distressing image of the girl’s face remained.

  Leesa was in no hurry to go back to bed—she doubted she would be able to fall asleep even if she tried. Instead, she crossed carefully to her desk and sat down. Usually, she did not mind the dark, but tonight the dimness seemed especially oppressive, so she switched on her desk lamp.

  This was the third one of these strange dreams to assault her sleep. People said things often came in threes—she hoped it was true, for that would mean this was the last one. She doubted she would be so lucky, though. Where were the dreams coming from, she wondered? She’d never had nightmares before, though if anyone had reason to suffer from them it was her, with her mom’s story of the one-fanged vampire and her dad abandoning the family when she was so young. Growing up, she had dreamed, of course, and some of them were scary. Every kid had scary dreams now and then, and she was no different. None of those dreams had been anything like these three—not even close.

  She asked herself the same questions she had asked after the first two dreams, and got the same frustrating lack of answers. There was nothing she could point to that might have caused the nightmares, no precipitating event she could recall. They seemed to spring up out of nowhere, for no rhyme or reason, but a part of her knew that could not be true. Nothing so powerful and realistic could spring out of nothingness. There had to be some reason, some cause—she just could not find it.

  Two days later, Leesa stared at her television in astonishment and dismay.

  Things had been going smoothly these first few days back at school. Her classes were good—no more physics, thank god. None of her choices this semester were going to be as much fun as Vampire Science, but her second psychology class looked like it would be as interesting as the first one, and since she had always liked history, she expected her American History class to be good as well. Sociology promised to be okay, as did part two of the required English literature series, which ran from 1900 to the present. There was even an Anne Rice book on the reading list. Chemistry would be her hardest class, but there was no way it could be as difficult as physics.

  Her professors had taken it easy on the students this first week, assigning minimal homework as the kids recovered from their vacation and got back into the swing of school. Leesa had spent the last couple evenings hanging out with Cali, Caitlin and Stacie, having fun and swapping stories from Christmas break. Caitlin sported a blue rubber sleeve on her right elbow, courtesy of a slip on the ice back in New Jersey, so when Guitar Hero came out, she could only watch and cheer. And sing along to the music, of course.

  Tonight, though, Leesa was alone. She had planned on going down to see her friends a bit later, but right now, she was in her room, doing some reading for history. The television was turned to the news, providing background noise and distraction. Ten minutes into the show, a story caught her attention. It was the words “dead daughter” that pulled her from her reading. She closed her book and listened as a reporter in New Orleans interviewed the parents of a seventeen-year-old girl who had died in a car accident a few months ago.

  The mother was crying, while the father recounted how they both swore they had seen their daughter standing outside their window the night before, peering in at them. The tale of distraught parents imagining they had seen their dead daughter, as heartbreaking as it was, would not have been newsworthy, especially on a national level, except for one thing. When the police went to the girl’s gravesite the next day, they found the plot dug up and the casket open. The girl’s body was still inside, but no one had any explanation for why it had been unearthed, or by whom.

  What caused Leesa to cringe in horror was not the desecration of the grave, however. It was the picture of her daughter the mom tearfully displayed to the reporter—the daughter looked an awful lot like the girl Leesa had seen in her dream just two nights before!

  The television switched to a car commercial, but Leesa’s eyes remain fixed on the screen. She was not seeing the commercial, though. She was once again seeing the haunted face of the girl from her dream.

  Leesa’s fingers danced furiously in her hair. What on earth was going on? This was the second time one of her dreams had seemed to come at least partially to pass, and both had to do with dead people. Were her dreams really seeing into the future? How was that possible? And why did two of them have to do with dead people coming back to life? If she had dreamed of people turning into vampires, that she could understand—she had been bitten by one of the creatures, after all. But corpses rising from their graves and wandering around made no sense.

  There was one thing that troubled her even more than the dreams of reanimated corpses, and that was the third dream, the one where a girl was chained to a wall by a vampire—a girl she had come tantalizingly close to recognizing, but just hadn’t been able to see clearly enough. What if that dream were to come true? What if, like the other two, it already had? And who was the poor girl? Was there anything Leesa could do to save her? She had plenty of questions, but no answers.

  A sudden, terrifying thought struck her. What if she was not just seeing things in her dreams that were coming to pass, but somehow was causing these events to occur? She immediately tried to banish the thought from her brain. No way could she be making these things happen. The idea was ridiculous, impossible—wasn’t it? But was it any more unbelievable and impossible than seeing into the future, or visualizing events she had no knowledge of? It was all crazy. There was only one thing she was sure of—something incomprehensible was happening with her dreams.

  If this kept up, she would soon be afraid to close her eyes at night.

  26. AN IMPORTANT CLUE

  Unbeknownst to Leesa, the one person who could have answered some of her questions was still almost three thousand miles away, growing more frustrated by t
he day in San Diego.

  Dominic had finally decided he needed help, so he had hired an investigator, paying cash and contacting the man once a day via a different public phone each time. After four days, the man had provided Dominic an address in the North Park section of San Diego.

  The place turned out to be a small, run-down apartment complex. Dominic had been stealthily watching apartment five for two days now, but had not seen a single person come out of the apartment. A check of the mailboxes showed a name he did not recognize, but it was possible Leesa’s mother had remarried over the years and now had a different name. He had walked casually past the window a few times and was able to see that the place was furnished, so at least he was not wasting his time watching an empty apartment. But whether Leesa, or even her mother, still lived here, he was becoming increasingly doubtful.

  If he had anywhere else to look, he would be there, but he did not. Still, he decided he needed to become a bit more proactive, despite his desire for discretion and secrecy. He crossed over to apartment six and knocked on the door. He waited a few moments and then knocked again. There was no response. The apartment’s occupants were probably at work.

  He walked past apartment five and knocked on the door to number four. He was about to knock a second time when a smiling, gray-haired lady opened the door.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Hello,” Dominic said in as friendly a voice as he could muster. “My name is Fred.” He plucked the name out of the air, continuing his practice of using a different name every time he inquired about Leesa or her family.

  “I’m a friend of the Nylands,” he said. “I know they used to live next door in apartment five, but I’ve been gone for awhile. Are they still around?”

  The woman shook her head. “I’m sorry, no. They moved out a few months ago.”