Letters From New York [Blood Magic, Book 2]

Chapter 2: Welcome to My Nightmare

Keel thumbed the button for loading bay door, then climbed in the driver's side and drove out into the waning night. He looked down at me often and kept an almost a constant hand on my shoulder. When it wasn't there, it was holding the steering wheel, fiddling with the radio, or stroking my tangled, ratty hair. Oh, to be back there, I thought miserably, to wake up and make any decision but to go and see my father; to still have firsts to look forward to, instead of just lasts and ominous prophecies.

I was just about to lose myself in the promise of that – or at the very least, in the continuing replay of what had actually occurred – when the car and the road and everything else vanished.

And not like my bedroom had. They merely blinked out of existence, and suddenly I was nowhere.

Of course, this was familiar too. I'd felt this way in that same van, on that same day, when I'd been about to come to. Maybe reliving that morning really was tonight's agenda. There were definitely worse ways to spend an evening.

There was nothing for a long moment. Just blackness. Then I felt rather than saw.

And what I felt confused me. I certainly wasn't curled up on the front seat of any vehicle. Sense memory told me I was in a bed, tucked beneath what felt like smooth satin sheets. Not my sheets. This was lap of luxury stuff and I lived in a practical-cotton kind of world. I tried to open my eyes, but my body did not respond, even though I could feel it; it was playing deaf to my brain's commands. Damn this dream, I thought, as I waited for something – anything – to happen. In the meantime, the observations I was able to make weren't adding up. My body felt strange, entirely the wrong shape and size. Also, wherever I was, it was way too quiet. In New York, sirens and the hum of traffic were constants, even late at night, and while you began to tune them out over time, when they weren't there you noticed. Like now.

When my eyes eventually blinked open – not at all of my own doing – I knew immediately I was no place I'd ever been before. The large, open-concept room was an extravaganza of black-on-black décor, everything gleaming and glossy, as if each piece of furniture was diligently polished every day. My body – which I'd started to think of more generically as "the body," since I was almost certain it wasn't mine and I had zero control over it – stirred of its own volition and sat up, allowing me a better look at my surroundings. Besides the bed, the room housed a pair of night tables, a desk, several amply stocked bookcases full of old, well-worn leather-bound volumes, a tall six-drawer dresser, an armoire and, in its centre, a dinner table that could comfortably seat eight. Everything was ebony and undoubtedly very, very expensive. Where the hell was I now?

My hands involuntarily rubbed my eyes with the balls of my fists, then came to rest on either side of my/the body. Poking out of the black satin pajama sleeves were a pair of pale white hands with long, slender fingers topped with ten fingernails, all perfectly arched into very sharp and very deadly claws. Nosferatu claws.

Keel?

Another version of Keel? Nosferatu Dream Keel? I knew it had to be the instant the hunger kicked in, a rumbling primal urgency inside of him – us – that eclipsed almost everything.

We – I was trying on the third pronoun in as many minutes – flung our legs over the edge of the bed, yanked on a black robe that had been thrown over a nearby chair and stormed towards the door. I was expecting us to go through it and hopefully spill out into someplace I recognized, but instead our fist wailed on the thick, hand-carved wood. The reverberations rang all the way up our arm but there wasn't any pain. Only hunger and need. I suspected we'd have no problem tearing the door from its hinges if someone didn't come soon.