Embrace the Night

Page 141



"Do you dream while you sleep?"

"No. And yet, there have been times when I was aware of you, of what you were doing. When the orphanage caught fire, I knew you were in pain, but there was nothing I could do." He gazed into her eyes, remembering how helpless he had been. "It was a terrible feeling, knowing you needed me and there was nothing I could do."

"But you did help me," she reminded him. "If not for you, I'd still be confined to that chair."
"And now, because of me, your life is in danger."

"I don't care! I wouldn't trade a minute of the time we've had together. Not a minute. And maybe she won't come looking for us. Maybe she was only bluffing."

"Maybe," Gabriel said. And maybe the sun wouldn't shine and the rain wouldn't fall.

He held her a moment longer, and then sent her away. "Your promise, cara," he said, not wanting her to see him when the deathlike sleep was upon him. "Remember your promise."

"I remember." She kissed him one more time, then left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.
Chapter Twenty-one

She was too nervous to sit still, consumed by curiosity about why Gabriel had so adamantly insisted that she not enter the room while he slept.

She wandered through the apartment, straightening this and that, while she waited for Maurice, her thoughts as unstable as a kaleidoscope. Gabriel was a vampire. Maurice wanted to marry her. The company was going to London in the spring. Nina wanted her dead…

Sara shuddered at the thought. How did one fight against a vampire?

She fingered the small silver cross at her throat. It was hard to imagine that anything so small as a crucifix, or so common as garlic, had the power to repel a vampire, yet she remembered that Gabriel had been unable to leave the cottage until she had broken the circle of garlic and holy water.

Vampire… She had seen him when the hunger was on him, seen the unholy light that had glowed in his eyes, seen his fangs, and yet it was still inconceivable that such things existed.

Yet her blood had revived him.

His blood had made her whole.

He had said he would never turn her into what he was, and she believed him, and yet, far in the back of her mind, in a corner where she didn't look too closely, lingered a niggling doubt. What if the lust for blood overcame him? What if he changed his mind and decided he'd like to have a vampire companion to keep him company through the ages?

She tried to imagine drinking the blood of others to survive, and felt her stomach recoil in horror. She tried to imagine what it would be like to live always in darkness, never to see the sunlight again, never to walk in the morning rain, or lie on the grass and watch the clouds drift across a lazy summer sky. Never