“Then you should rest.”
Tears began to burn her eyes, and she sighed, leaning her head back, staring up at the star-strewn sky. “Not that kind of tired, my friend.”
She felt him moving near, although he made no sound. Looking down, she saw him crouched at her feet, and she reached out a hand. His large, pale one closed over it, and she saw the denial in his eyes. Before he could speak, Agnes said, “We’ve known this time was coming, Malachi. I’m nearly six hundred years old. My power is strong, but my body has grown weak.”
“The witch I saw dealing with our little guest earlier, she is not weak,” Malachi said, a muscle jerking in his cheek.
“Oh, there’s some strength left in me, love. But it’s waning.” She leaned forward, stroking a hand down his face. “Do not look so sad, Malachi. I’ve led a long, fulfilled life.”
“Not a happy one.”
Arching a brow at him, she asked quietly, “And look who is talking. You rarely understand the meaning of it. At least I knew it for a time.”
“More than five hundred years ago, Agnes. Mourning for one man, all these long years. You should have found another.”
A knot lodged in her throat, and she had to swallow against it before she could speak. “There was no other for me, Malachi.”
His eyes dropped as he lifted his other hand, cradling hers in both of his. “We’re two of a kind, Nessa. Why have you spent your life mourning one man? And why can I not find a woman to ease the ache inside of me? Two lonely fools. Perhaps . . .”
She heard his unspoken thoughts, and she sighed, shaking her head. “You were there when I needed you most, Mal. You always have been. I needed a friend more than I needed a lover.”
There was guilt in his eyes. She knew what was bothering him. Had they mated, forged a bond, she wouldn’t have aged as she had, and she wouldn’t be plagued with this ever-increasing weakness. “It wasn’t meant to be, Mal. Not you and me. You know that.” Then she smiled a bit. “You have a match; she’s out there. You two just need to realize it.”
Malachi snorted, shaking his head. “There is no mate for me. For a time, I had wondered if it would be you . . . I even wished for it. You understand me like no other. But decades and decades passed, and you still mourned your man. And I knew it wasn’t meant to be you. But there is no other. More than a thousand years, I’ve lived. I’ve seen civilizations rise and fall. And through all of it, I’ve been alone. No, there is no mate for me.”
Agnes hurt a little, knowing how alone, how lonely he had been. But in her heart, she knew his time of loneliness was drawing to an end, just as she knew her time left was drawing short. It eased her, made accepting the inevitable a bit easier. “Oh, she’s out there, Malachi. Believe in that.”
She patted his cheek gently before leaning back and closing her eyes, as exhaustion weighed so heavily on her. “And she understands you, perhaps a bit better than you would like.”
He said nothing, but she could tell by the look in his eyes that he didn’t believe her.
“You should go inside, rest,” Malachi said quietly. He studied her hands, rubbing them between his own. “It is too cool out here for you.”
Lowering her lashes, Agnes smiled and shook her head. She drew in a deep breath of the cool, predawn air. “No. I wish to sit out here a bit longer yet.”
“Then I shall stay with you.” He turned and settled on the floor of the balcony. She could feel the cool, strong lines of his body pressed against her legs, and she reached out, laying a hand on his shoulder.
Malachi covered her hand with one of his own without saying a word.
THE SHIELDS THE DAMNED HUNTERS’ WHORES HAD put around her were strong.
Morgan fell exhausted to the ground, her sweaty hair falling into her face. She glared at the door, willing somebody to come in. Somebody a bit weaker than the ones she’d seen so far.
Too damned strong, all of them.
Even the old woman.
The old woman
should
have been weak, should have been an easy target. Morgan was fast; all she needed to do was lay one hand on her. One hand, and she could have drained the energy she’d lost fighting the dark-haired Hunter. She hadn’t expected that wolf to be as strong as he was.
No, she hadn’t expected it at all.
But so far, nothing about these Hunters had been what she’d expected. She’d seen darkness inside the shape-shifter, Jonathan, seen it, felt it, sensed it. Getting to that darkness should have been easy.
But he had repelled her easily, pathetically so.
The vampire—Eli. Vamps had few weaknesses, but over the past couple of years, Morgan had learned how to exploit them. They were weak when it came to blood . . . and sex. But he had looked at her with complete disinterest.
The old woman—who in the hell would have expected that frail-looking creature to move like that? To have that kind of power?
The most unexpected, though . . . the black woman. She had stared at Morgan with mocking eyes, and nothing made Morgan as mad as being laughed at. How dare that bitch laugh at her. Didn’t she see what Morgan was?
And that tattoo by her eye—Morgan knew that mark.
It was the mark of the Scythe. A woman of the Scythe, fighting with the Hunters.
No. None of this made sense.
Weary, she dropped onto the narrow bed tucked against the wall. She needed energy. She needed to get out of here.
But right now, she needed to rest. And maybe . . . just maybe, there’d be dreams.
Morgan closed her eyes and succumbed to the weariness that battered her body.
She slid into sleep quickly, and even under that heavy blanket of exhaustion, satisfaction flooded her body.
Somebody was dreaming . . .
It was the witch—the young one. She’d smelled of magick and the musk of vampires. No wonder—she was both. The dark, ripe force of vampire and the skin-buzzing electricity of a witch’s power.
In her sleep, Morgan hummed with satisfaction. Oh, yes, Leandra was dreaming. She was also very hungry—so much so that the hunger intruded on her dreams.
Those dreams were dark, tortured.
It made her vulnerable, weak.
In her greed to steal some of that power, Morgan struck blindly, unaware that she was been being watched the entire time.
“SNEAKY LITTLE BITCH,” AGNES MURMURED, UNABLE to help the small streak of astonishment that shot through her.
It had been more than a century since she’d seen this. A dream thief. A dream thief didn’t truly steal dreams but used them to slide inside the subconscious and siphon away power.
It didn’t work on everybody. They needed a weak point, and Morgan apparently knew her power well. Leandra had weaknesses that likely only showed when she slept. No other time did she let her guard down enough.
The way the dream thieves worked, ordinary shields were ineffective. It was like expecting psychic or even magickal shields to hold against a man like Malachi—operating on two totally different levels.
Leaning on her cane, Agnes made her way down the hall. She hated this blasted weakness. It was a bone-deep weariness, one that no amount of rest would ease. She had tried to rest, but it hadn’t done any good.
It didn’t matter. Agnes suspected it wouldn’t be long before she would be able to rest as much as she wanted, for as long as she wanted.
A simple cotton nightgown floated around her ankles, and she had wrapped a pale grayish-purple shawl around her shoulders. Still, she felt the cold. Agnes wasn’t sure if it was the temperature in the air or something she sensed from the dream thief. Dream thieves had a way of suspending life as they worked. Depending on how practiced they were, they learned to control some of the external signs. But a young one—one with less control—could make the air as cold as winter in the Arctic.
Agnes reached Leandra’s door and laid her hand against it. It was cold, icy cold. This dream thief was still learning to perfect her craft, and Agnes had no intentions of seeing her improve.
Reaching down, she closed her hand around the doorknob and tried to open the door. It was locked—just locked, though. Agnes dealt with that easily and pushed the door open, stepping inside.
Mike lay next to Leandra, his eyes closed, face relaxed, completely unaware.
That was the danger of dream thieves; they operated in such silence. The only obvious sign was the chill in the air, and that was unlikely to bother a shifter. Shifters didn’t feel the cold any more than vampires did. Unless it was subarctic temperatures or it started to snow or rain, Mike wasn’t going to notice it.
Leandra lay next to him, and though she slept, she looked anything but peaceful. She was perfectly still, but her face was locked in a grimace, and a fine sheen of sweat glistened on her brow.
Agnes lifted her eyes briefly to the sky, saying a brief prayer.
Not for herself.
She was too weary to survive a battle right now.
No, she just prayed she could pull Leandra out of the potentially fatal dream without harming the young Hunter.
As she started toward the bed, Mike’s eyes flew open, and he sat up, his gaze alert, clear. He frowned as he saw her. “Agnes—what is going—”
Cutting him off, she said quietly, “Get Lori and Sarel. Quickly, now, Mike.”
He rolled from the bed, his lean body nude. Following her gaze, he looked at Leandra as well, but there was nothing he could see or sense that would concern him. “What’s going on?” he demanded coolly.
“Know you the same things a witch does, boy?” Agnes said calmly as she leaned over Leandra. She placed a brow on the young witch’s head, and Leandra didn’t even stir.
That, probably more anything she could have said, got through to Mike, and he began to sense something was wrong. On his way out the door, he grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor. Agnes’s last glimpse of him was that of his butt as he pulled the jeans up over his lean hips just before he stepped outside.
Shoving him from her mind, Agnes cupped Leandra’s face in her hands. With a sigh, she murmured, “It seems there’s one last battle left for me to fight. Let’s get it over with, shall we?”
Closing her eyes, she separated mind from body as she slid inside Leandra’s dreams. They were dark; Agnes suspected they often were. Tortured girl, so full of guilt, anger, and loneliness. And the dream thief had been drawn to them like a magnet.
In the dream, Leandra was fighting against a hideous darkness, some formless, shapeless thing. Agnes knew she was only interpreting the images as best as she could, but she suspected Leandra’s fears were the darkness. She fought against the darkness she sensed within, but in this dream, the darkness was winning.
Leandra was losing herself to her doubts, completely unaware that Morgan also hovered at the edge of the dream, fueling that darkness and drawing power from Leandra’s despair.
Agnes knew the moment that Morgan felt her presence.
The dream seemed to still, and the fabric of it grew weak and thin for the slightest second. Then the dream’s reality seemed to realign itself, and the darkness expanded, converging once more around Leandra.
He doesn’t want you . . .
Morgan pulled an image of Mike into the dream and used her magick on the fabric of the dream, made Leandra watch as Mike turned from her.
See? He doesn’t want you . . . he wants somebody pure,
somebody clean.
Agnes didn’t know the new woman Morgan brought into the dream, and she suspected neither did Leandra. But that didn’t matter; it was the pain that mattered, the pain that came from forcing Leandra to watch Mike take this new woman to his bed.
The agony as he covered her body with his—Morgan seemed to drink it down. And with every spike of pain, Morgan siphoned out more and more of Leandra’s power.
The dream Mike looked at Leandra as he fucked the dream woman.
She is what I want . . . what I need. You were nothing. You
are
nothing.
Nothingnothingnothingnothing . . .
Agnes could feel the pain splintering inside Leandra, and her heart broke.
Oh, Malachi, there’s much work yet to be done here . . .
In all her time with the Hunters, Leandra hadn’t really healed at all.
Agnes forced herself into the tapestry of the dream and felt the reality of it shifting, altering to accept a new presence. Morgan fought against it. The young witch would understand why Agnes was there, and she wouldn’t like it. Nobody liked having their meal taken away.
She fought the pitiful attempts to bar her from the dreams, and she forced herself further into the dream.
Leandra felt her presence. She barely glanced Agnes’s way, but Agnes knew that Leandra had felt her.
You are not nothing, Leandra.
Agnes smiled as Leandra turned away from Mike and the false lover for just a moment.
They are not real, love. None of this is real.
Tears spilled out of the young witch’s topaz-colored eyes.
It could be. I do not deserve . . .
Agnes snorted.
Deserve, not deserve—that is not what this is about. This is about doubts, fears. Are you so weak that you will let your doubts and fears blind you?
It was a conscientious jab at Leandra’s pride. And it worked. Agnes smiled a bit as she felt Leandra turning away from the false images. In the dream, exotic eyes narrowed and she sneered arrogantly.
I do not let fear control me in any way.
No—no, you do not. You never let fear into your life, did you? So why do you now?
Leandra’s face puckered in confusion, and she glanced over her shoulder. But the dream images of Mike and his lover were gone. There was . . . nothing. Just a gray fog that wrapped around them both and obscured everything.
What is going on, old woman? Why are you inside my dreams?