Someone brought a blanket and covered me with it. I managed to say, in a voice that sounded so rough it wasn’t mine, “We need to go. Bibi will be here, and Paula Chu needs looking at.”
“You aren’t going anywhere until you have another bag of fluids in you,” the doctor said.
Edward was back at my head, smoothing down the edge of my hair, where the curls had stuck to the side of my face. “He’s right. You can’t go out like this.”
“We will go and make sure Paula Chu does not get away,” Olaf said.
“Yeah,” Bernardo said, “we can do that.”
They left, and another blanket went over me because my teeth had started to chatter. Edward touched my face again. “Rest, I’ll be here.”
I didn’t mean to sleep, but once I stopped shaking, it just seemed so hard to keep my eyes open. Bibiana was coming, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I slept and let my body start to heal. The last thing I saw was Edward pulling up a chair so he’d be beside me and able to see all the doors at the same time. It made me smile, and then I was gone to the warmth of the blankets and the tiredness of my body.
50
I DREAMED, AND in the dream I walked down a white hallway with doors on either side. I knew there was something behind the doors, but I didn’t know what. One of the doorknobs rattled, and it frightened me. I started to move faster down the hallway and realized I was wearing some long, white dress. It was heavy and hard to move in. I’d never owned anything like it. Mirrors showed between the doors, and I caught glimpses of myself in them. Pale oval face, black hair piled high on top of my head, curls artfully around my shoulders. There was a feather in my hair, and jewels around my throat. This was not my dream.
The next mirror showed a second figure keeping pace with me. She wore red, the color of crushed velvet and rose petals. Gold flashed here and there as she moved. She’d put me in white and silver, with the flash of diamonds. She wore gold and rubies.
I forced myself to stop running down the hallway that never seemed to get any shorter. I faced one of the mirrors, and there she was looking back at me, standing just over the shoulder of my reflection.
“Belle Morte,” I whispered, and it was as if her name conjured her, because I felt her hand slide around my shoulders, draw my back against her front. She was a touch shorter than I was, but heels gave her height. Our hair was nearly the same shade of black, but where my eyes were deepest brown, hers were almost amber.
“Ma petite, you have been a very busy girl.” She whispered it, and laid crimson lips against the white of my neck.
“No,” I said.
She left only a perfect print of her lipstick on my skin. She smiled at me over my shoulder, putting our faces together. “Didn’t you enjoy our time together, ma petite?”
I wanted to say no, but her ego was too large, and too strangely fragile for truths. If it was a truth. She’d come to me when I was unconscious, near death, and we’d had sex. She’d fed me enough energy to come to, and feed in the real world and save myself and Jean-Claude and Richard, though I wasn’t sure how much she cared about our wolf king. But she had wanted to save me and Jean-Claude. I still wasn’t entirely certain why she’d done it. Belle never did anything without a gain for herself.
Her hand slid down the white front of my dress until her fingers started to slide into the bodice. I grabbed her wrist to stop the movement. “If you’d wanted sex, you’d have put us in a bed. What’s behind the doors?”
She pouted at me, that soft mouth, bowed and petulant. Through Jean-Claude’s memories I remembered loving that pout. I remembered thinking that she had the most kissable mouth in the world.
“Open a door and see.”
“I’m afraid.”
“They are parts of yourself, Anita. Why be afraid of them?”
They were my beasts. “I just got sewed back together from one of them. I’d rather not repeat it.”
She wrapped her arms tight around my waist; at least she wasn’t trying to grope me. “You know why you couldn’t heal it, don’t you?”
“I didn’t have enough energy.”
“You have been feeding the ardeur barely, just enough to keep it sated but not enough to grow it stronger.”
“I don’t want it stronger.”
“But I do, ma petite.”
“I am not your ma petite.”
“You are anything I say you are,” and her eyes were drowning in amber fire.
I closed my eyes like a child hiding under the covers from a monster, but vampire gaze really can be avoided by just not looking.