“Now,” her mother said sounding businesslike. “If we’ve handled your little situation, I really need to get back to helping Joyce. Bye, darling.”
Holly heard the click and listened to the dial tone for a moment, then slowly hung up on her end. She then sat for a moment, trying not to resent the fact that her mother hadn’t even waited to see if they had indeed handled her “little situation.” The woman was . . . well, she was who she was, and whining about it and wishing she’d had a mother more like Joyce or Matild really wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
Shaking her head, Holly slid under the covers and reached out to turn off the lamp. It seemed she could go gently into sleep and enjoy her dreams without guilt. It was just her subconscious working out her issues.
At least they weren’t slasher nightmares, she thought and smiled faintly as she closed her eyes.
“Her.”
Holly shifted in her seat to peer across the food court at the woman Justin had gestured to, a middle--aged woman pushing a baby carriage. She was to be her first read. Well, her first mortal one. She’d been working with Dante and Tomasso for the past two days to learn to read. Now Justin had brought her out to the mall to see if she could translate what she’d learned to real situations.
Swallowing nervously, she concentrated on the woman. For a moment, she was afraid that all her work had been for nothing, she wasn’t picking up a single thing. But then suddenly it was as if a door opened. “Her name is Melanie Jones. The baby is her granddaughter.”
“Good,” Justin said. “Now him.”
He was pointing at an elderly man with a cane just sitting down at a table on the other side of the food court. Holly turned her concentration to him, a slow smile blooming on her face. “He’s a retired bus driver. His wife died recently. He comes here to avoid feeling lonely.”
“Her,” Justin shot out and she turned her gaze to a harried looking woman, rushing into a yogurt store.
“A businesswoman on her lunch. Linda Jenk—-”
“Her.”
Holly blinked and shifted her attention to the teenager he was now pointing to. Her eyes widened incredulously. The kid looked like she was twelve, but . . . “She’s a drug dealer,” she said with amazement. “She’s here to meet a kid from her science class to—-”
“Him,” Justin said and Holly automatically shifted her attention again, and again, and again. Justin shot out “him” or “her” like bullets, one after the other for the rest of the afternoon. By the time he called it quits and led her back out to the SUV, Holly was exhausted, and her head was pounding. She was sure she would also be proud of herself, except that she was too busy feeling extremely confused. It was the way Justin was acting.
Actually, it was the way Justin had been acting for the past -couple of days, she acknowledged. This was the first time she’d seen him since they’d gone to visit his parents. That in itself had seemed strange to her. What had seemed stranger was that she had not only noticed, but she’d kind of missed him. Holly blamed it on the dreams. After that first night, the dreams were no longer all about sex. Yes, there was sex, but there was so much more . . . In a way, the dreams had turned into something like dating. They’d gone bowling, laughing and joking as they’d competed against each other, although neither of them had won in the end; they’d gotten distracted halfway through the game and ended up making love against the ball return. In another dream he’d taken her to an amusement park. They’d ridden the rides, he’d won her a stuffed animal, and then they’d finished off the evening by having sex on the roller coaster. In last night’s dreams they’d gone to a water park, a zoo, and then Paris, where they’d made love under the Arc de Triomphe.
Okay, it always ended in sex, Holly acknowledged, but Dream Justin was charming and funny and sweet and an amazing lover, and Holly very much feared she was starting to confuse him with the real Justin. And that made her wonder why he was never around anymore when she was awake. It was unexpected, especially since he had said he was supposed to oversee her training. Instead of Justin being there, Dante and Tomasso had taken over her training the last -couple of days . . . and she’d found herself missing Justin, wondering where he was, what he was doing, and why he wasn’t training her as he was supposed to be doing.
Holly was trying to figure out how to ask him that, when Justin pulled into the driveway of Jackie and Vincent’s house.
“You must be exhausted,” he commented as they pulled into the garage. Putting the car in park, he shut down the engine and opened his door, saying, “Go get some rest. Tonight we hit the nightclubs so you can practice controlling minds and feeding.”