“Ice-cream’s up,” I called, and she smiled big when she spotted the bowls.
We ate in silence for a little while, and I remembered to return her charm bracelet, helping her put it back on. I sat back against the pillows and watched as she finished off the last of her ice-cream. There were times when she got extra quiet, and I sometimes wondered if she was thinking of her dad. With everything that happened, she never really had the chance to grieve for him.
“Do you miss your dad?” I asked, my tone gentle.
Rebecca nodded, a sadness in her eyes that shouldn’t exist in a person so young. “All the time, but he’s with my mummy now, so I know he’s happy.”
I paused, considering what to say next. “What if you could have your mother, would you want to live with her, even though she’d be a stranger?”
Rebecca gazed at me, her big brown eyes full of hope at the mere idea. “I think so.”
Her answer made me feel much better about what I planned to do, and I didn’t fail to notice how she fiddled with her charm bracelet the whole time I’d been talking to her. In fact, she played with it a lot, like it was a comfort to her. Perhaps this little girl wanted her real mother more than she even knew herself.
16.
Finn
I’d never felt softer lips in my entire life. Alora moaned when I kissed her, and my tongue tried to memorise the taste. After spending hours in bed talking about our lives and getting to know everything about one another, I’d stripped her down to just her underwear and a T-shirt, and shit, I didn’t think it was possible to find plain white briefs this sexy.
She breathed in quick little bursts, all revved up, and it drove me crazy. I’d barely touched her aside from the kiss, and yet I could just tell if I slipped my hand between her legs right now, she’d be slick and ready for me.
Just as these thoughts were flitting through my brain, her entire body stilled. I pulled my mouth from hers to find her eyes rolled back in her head as she started to convulse.
Crap, she was having a vision. Panic seized me.
It was just so hard to see this happening to her. I grabbed her hands, and just as I was about to pull her into my arms, something strange happened. I felt myself being drawn closer to her. My eyes drifted shut, and then there was only darkness.
When I came to, I was standing in a long hallway, hand in hand with Alora. I looked at her, and she seemed just as shocked to see me as I was to be there. The carpet we stood on was lush, and on the walls was that expensive silk wallpaper people used to have in the 1800s. It had pictures of birds and flowers on it.
“You’re in one of my visions,” Alora said, awed, her voice bringing my attention back to her.
“Yeah,” I breathed, unable to figure out how this was happening.
“Something isn’t right.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re not in the future,” she explained. “We’re in the past. This has never happened before.”
“How am I here with you?”
“It might be because you were touching me when the vision took hold and probably because of how close I felt to you when we were kissing.”
Before I could ask any more questions, a door at the end of the hall opened and Theodore stepped through. His clothes weren’t modern, but they still held that whimsical touch. He wore an old-timey suit with a cravat, and his socks were purple with blue stripes.
I held my breath as he approached, but he simply walked right by us.
“We’re not really here,” Alora informed me. “We’re just spectators. Come on.”
Hand in hand, we followed Theodore down the long hall. I got the impression that we were in some sort of fancy hotel. Theodore smiled as he slid a copper key from his pocket and stuck it into the door of room 203. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
As we continued to follow him, I was struck with the harsh scent of lavender perfume—and the unmistakable aroma of blood and sex. The key Theodore had been holding dropped from his hand and clinked to the floor as he stormed through the suite. He stopped when he reached the bed, where there was a woman with long, dark hair and brown eyes lying naked in the arms of a muscular blond guy.
When the woman saw Theodore, her eyes widened, and her fangs extended as she smiled. Shit, she was a vampire. The man she lay with had bite marks all along his neck, and he looked completely zoned out from blood loss.
“No,” Theodore whispered in disbelief. “How could you …?”