He stepped forward into the cabin so she’d have to move back. “The sun is coming up,” he repeated.
“Okay,” she answered. “We should get these bunks down.” She sounded tired.
“Philip,” Robert said, “Eleisha told me Angelo was teaching you about the elders from a book he’d written.”
Philip glared at him. Is that what they’d been talking of? Hadn’t Eleisha already been through enough tonight seeing Rose’s throat cut and Wade having to feed her? Now Robert was bringing up ugly dust from a distant past that didn’t matter anymore?
“Why?” he asked, not bothering to keep the anger from his voice.
“What was in it?” Robert asked. “Were there details?”
Eleisha was looking at him, too, so Philip finally nodded. “Yes, places they lived, their makers, children, loves, hates, anything Angelo knew. But I didn’t pay attention then. I was different.”
“Could Julian have taken that book?” Robert asked.
“He could have taken anything. He cut off Angelo’s head and told me to run. The house was empty.”
Eleisha looked down at the floor, and Philip had had enough of this.
“None of that matters anymore,” he said, folding the couch into a bunk. “We need to sleep.”
Whatever Robert was fishing for, he must have gotten it because he stopped asking questions. But something was still different—something between him and Eleisha. Philip could feel it.
“Eleisha, I’ll sleep on the floor,” Robert said.
There. It was in his voice. He spoke like he knew her. He’d never done that before.
“No need,” Philip answered shortly. He took his boots off and climbed into the lower bed, lying down, waiting to see what would happen. Eleisha knelt beside the bunk, looking so small and sad that he wanted to grab her, or maybe kick Robert in the face, or both.
“Can I sleep with my back to your chest today?” she asked.
And then everything was all right.
He rolled and moved over so she could press her back up against him and he could hold her with his right arm.
Robert watched this without a word. Then he pulled out the top bunk.
Normally dormant the instant the sun came up, Robert lay awake longer than usual. Maybe Philip was right.
Even if Angelo had a kept a book with details of places and habits and histories of all the vampires in existence nearly two hundred years ago, and Julian had used that book to find and destroy the ones like Demetrio and Cristina . . . did it matter anymore?
Julian might even have used such a book to lie in wait at the villa for Jessenia, believing she would come to check on her friends. This thought made his chest hurt.
But did it really matter now?
Jessenia was gone, and decade upon decade had crawled past him.
He was traveling in the company of vampires with either no training or a bizarre training from Wade that had given Eleisha abilities he’d never even heard of—and that she couldn’t control. They were foreign to him, these vampires. A new breed.
But Eleisha had given him a gift he’d never expected . . . a second life with Jessenia. He could still smell Jessenia’s hair, feel her soft skin on the tips of his fingers, hear her laughter. His eyes drooped from exhaustion, but he feared going to sleep in case he could not still feel her when he woke up.
With effort, he looked over the side of the bunk down at Eleisha, sleeping with her head pressed into the curve of Philip’s throat below his chin.
What am I doing here?
But this small alien group stirred something inside him that he hadn’t felt in a long time. He wanted to get them home safely.
That meant some part of him must still be alive.
Shortly after Eleisha woke up that night, everything seemed a little better.
They’d left the door between the cabins open, and she looked inside the second cabin to find Rose and Wade already up. Rose’s throat looked about the same, but Wade was moving around more easily and seemed to have some of his strength back.
Eleisha moved in to join them while Robert and Philip were busy turning the lower bed in their cabin back into a couch and then securing the upper bunk into the wall.
“Morning,” Wade joked, and she smiled at him. He was still getting used to their upside-down world. But he hadn’t seen her since sending her off to speak with Robert the night before. “Everything okay?” he asked.