He closed the phone slowly.
She rubbed at her arms as she stared around the room. The fairies were so few now. Or the ghosts, as others called them. They were so dim, and the one that had carried her through the most hellish years of her life was rarely present at all.
But there was one. The small, huddled shape of a child. The child Dawn had left behind so long ago. Ghosts were the energy of those lost souls that had left their mortal bodies. Cassie knew she also saw the forms of other beings. Parts of people and Breeds who were lost or left behind, denied by the living beings that should shelter them.
It was that part of Dawn that followed her like a bleak little shadow, begging for shelter, begging to come out of the cold nightmares that held it.
“She promised me,”that little being whispered.“She promised me, and now she ignores me. You have to make her see. She has to keep her promise or we’re all lost.” That child that Dawn refused was dying. And if the child died, then Dawn would be no more than a shadow of what she was now.
“Cassie, she’s not as strong as the others.” Dash sighed. “You know that as well as I do.”
Sometimes her father understood her. He always accepted her and trusted her. Tears filled her eyes as
she felt the conflicting urges rising inside her. The good and the bad, she called it. The wolf and the wicked coyote. And he loved both.
She turned back to him as a tear fell. “You have to let her fight this battle. If you don’t, she’s dead to us.” She looked at the fog that made up the child. “And if that happens, then one day I’ll be lost as well.”
She turned back to him, her lips trembling as her own nightmares rose within her mind. But she knew her demons, met them each night and remembered them each time she woke. “If she doesn’t remember, then more than just the child she refuses to remember will die.”
She watched as he slowly slid the small phone back into its clip then opened his arms to her. She ran to them, ran to the security, the safety and protection he had given her, without question, most all of her life. He was her rock. Her father. More a father than any man who could share her blood, and she knew he had seen and sensed the terror inside her.
As his arms closed around her protectively, she let another tear fall, for Dawn. She wished Dawn could know this security as well.
CHAPTER 8
That night, Dawn dropped her clothes to the floor and collapsed into her bed before curling into a tight ball. Her womb was twisting inside her belly, convulsing as fire poured through her veins and the taste of the mating hormone filled her senses with dark arousal.
She lay atop the sheets, the temperature control in the room turned down to the fifties, and still she was sweating. Sweating and exhausted. So weary from lack of sleep, from fighting the mating heat and herself, that she was praying for sleep. For once in her life the nightmares weren’t as frightening as lying here night after night, awake, and needing Seth with a bitter intensity that she was suddenly afraid would pour free.
She had stayed far away from him as much as possible throughout the day. She stared blindly into the darkness of her room, her eyes dry, the tears locked inside her. She couldn’t force herself to be around him, even to breathe in the scent of him that she needed so desperately. Just the scent of him. She locked her arms around her stomach and tensed against a wave of gnawing pain. She couldn’t look him in the eye, because he had seen—
She swallowed tightly against the sickness rising inside her. She didn’t want him to see her, she didn’t want to see that knowledge in his eyes again. Because she had seen those discs, she knew, frame by frame, the images they contained. And he had been the one person she was certain, to her soul certain, hadn’t seen them.
And she had been so wrong.
She rolled over on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, feeling the need that tore through her like a hungry beast. The arousal, the aching desperation for his touch. It hadn’t changed for her. She hadn’t lost the need as he had; this was just another night, another torment to add to the others. How could Callan betray her this way?
She pushed her fingers through her hair as waves of red-hot mortification and confusion whipped through her mind. She had depended on Callan that first year, she knew that. After Dayan’s death. After
Callan killed him. She had let him protect her, let him draw her beneath his wing and help her find her way.
She shouldn’t have done that, she saw now. She shouldn’t have placed that burden on Callan’s shoulders.
You’re weak, Dawn. Look how weak you are. So weak you couldn’t endure what the rest of us learned how to live with. Look at that, Dawn.
The girl on those discs fought. Feral. Enraged. And she prayed. She prayed, and Dayan had laughed at it, laughed because he told her God didn’t care. He had proved it by taking her mind and leaving the animal to fight.
And Dawn felt no more for the memory of the images he had showed her than she did for any other image she had ever viewed of any other Breed. She felt regret, compassion for that child. And she felt humiliated, dirty, because Seth had seen it. He had seen her pray, and he had seen that God had turned the other way.
She blew out a weary breath and closed her eyes. She had to sleep. She couldn’t afford to leave Seth’s protection to a broken, exhausted woman. Just a few hours. She set her mental clock, her inner defenses, to awaken her in time to keep the dreams from slipping into her head like the malevolent creatures they were.
Not that she ever remembered the dreams. But she couldn’t let that animal free again. The one that awoke Sanctuary with feral, enraged feline screams. God help her if Seth ever had to see that, because she didn’t think she could bear that humiliation.
Sleep. She forced herself into the sheltering darkness, shut down her thoughts and made herself rest. As she had done so many times before.
An imperative, though slight, knock sounded at the bedroom door. It was muffled, but it didn’t stop. Seth snapped his lips together as he rolled from the mattress and padded in his sock feet through the bedroom and into the sitting room.
He didn’t have to pause to dress, because he was still damned well dressed. Slacks, shirt and socks. He wasn’t about to take his clothes off and feel the sensuous slide of the silk sheets against his flesh and remember how much softer Dawn’s flesh had been.