Relentless (Vampire Awakenings #11) - Brenda K. Davies Page 0,103

bask in the joy she felt from experiencing this time. “I’m going to help you with your next case too.”

Dante laughed and kept his arm around her shoulders as they turned to stroll down the street with the others.

“Let’s hope the next case is a little more normal and doesn’t involve vampires,” he said.

“I second that,” Kyle said.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Dante felt like someone had picked him up and thrown him back in time twenty years as he studied his old college campus. While some things had changed, many things remained so similar, he felt like he could almost touch the past.

They stood on the edge of a couple of acres of grass they called “the lawn” in his day; he’d bet they still called it that now. Students milled around the lawn as they talked with friends and played games. There weren’t as many kids as there used to be, but that was probably because the spring semester was over and the summer semester had started.

As he had when he attended school here, kids threw frisbees across the lawn. Students sat in the branches of the large maple tree everyone climbed, and the building across the way—though freshly painted a grayish-blue instead of cranberry—was still the women’s dorms.

The clothes and hairstyles had changed, and he didn’t recognize any of the faces, but the laughter and carefree attitude of young adults enjoying their freedom remained the same. He recalled that carefreeness and the feeling of having the world at his fingertips.

He’d been so confident everything would work out exactly as he planned. Nothing was going to stop him from living his dreams. And then, something did.

But now, he had new dreams, a new family, and a life he’d never allowed himself to hope for after losing everything he once loved. This world, and that life he dreamed about, would never be his, but it was never meant to be his.

However, he had love again, and he would fight to the death to protect it. And maybe he would finally have some answers too.

“Can I see that picture of your sister?” Brian asked.

Dipping a hand into his pocket, Dante carefully removed the small photo of Maya he’d tucked inside. He also had a picture of Lewis Guthrie. If Brian couldn’t find Maya, he might be able to locate Lewis. And if he did, Dante would do whatever it took to get the answers he sought from the man.

Dante gazed at Maya’s beautiful, smiling face before handing the photo to Brian. He wasn’t exactly sure how Brian’s ability worked, he didn’t think Cassidy knew either, but after Brian looked at Maya’s photo in Cassidy’s old apartment, he led them here.

Brian stared at the picture for a minute before closing his eyes and bowing his head. Beside him, Abby searched the lawn as Cassidy studied the students.

A breeze caused the leaves overhead to rustle as the wind stirred the trees. In between the students, robins hopped across the grass as they hunted the worms driven from the earth by last night’s rain. Dante focused on the birds as the knot forming in his chest nearly choked him.

He’d spent the past twenty years relentlessly searching for answers. It was what propelled him from bed on the mornings he could barely face another day alone. And now that he might finally have those answers, he dreaded them as much as anticipated them.

Maya was dead, but was he ready to see her body? Was he prepared to know how his sister died? Please let her death have been quick, he pleaded like he had thousands of other times over the years.

Even with the shouts of the students, the day was peaceful, but an air of sadness enshrouded it. He’d returned to this college dozens of times since his sister vanished in search of answers. Every time and everywhere he went, he sensed her ghost and the ghosts of his past haunting him.

Today wasn’t any different. He could feel a ghost from his past hovering over his shoulder; it was the one that appeared the most. The one that told him over and over again he should have put his books aside and gone with Maya to get ice cream.

Unlike her friends, he never would have let her walk back to her dorm alone. Sometimes, he could see that alternative reality playing out in his mind. In it, his parents were still alive as the loss of Maya hadn’t beaten them down so badly they had no fight left