Vampire Most Wanted(55)

            “No,” Vincent admitted. “But then I wasn’t really looking for anything specific, and as I said, her thoughts and memories are sort of organized and disorganized at the same time. She . . .”

            When his voice trailed off, Marcus followed the man’s gaze to Jackie to find her staring hard at Divine with concentration. She was reading her now, he realized and almost protested, but the donning horror on Jackie’s face stopped him. He watched with a sickening knot growing in his stomach as Jackie paled, then flushed, then paled again, this time actually going a bloodless gray before she suddenly turned away and rushed for the bathroom.

            “Well, that can’t be good,” Vincent muttered, hurrying after her as they heard her retching.

            Marcus glanced back to Divine and then followed the couple. He watched silently as Vincent held Jackie’s hair back as she lost whatever meal she’d last eaten. He waited as Vincent murmured soothing words and dampened a cloth to wash her now flushed face, then just as he was about to ask what she’d seen, Jackie glanced to him, swallowed, and, voice husky, said, “She isn’t harboring Leonius. She’s one of his victims and the man is an animal. Worse, a monster. The things he did to her, at least the little bit I saw . . .” She shook her head. “She’d never harbor someone like that. He—”

            The rest of what she would have said was lost as she turned and retched into the toilet again.

            Vincent immediately dropped the cloth he’d used to wipe her face, slid his arm around her shoulders again, and murmured soothingly as he held her hair back. Marcus turned away from the scene to peer at Divine in the bed, wondering what the hell Jackie had seen.





            Twelve

            Divine woke up making a strangled sound she recognized at once as a scream caught in her throat. She’d woken up like that many times over the years. She used to wake up like that daily, surfacing from nightmares that claimed her while she slept. But they’d waned over the centuries and millennia. She rarely had them anymore. She supposed it was the pain of healing that had brought them back now.

            Pushing the dark memories determinedly from her consciousness, Divine concentrated on the here and now instead, taking careful note of the room she was in. It was the same rose-colored room Jackie and Vincent had shown her to before chaining her down so she wouldn’t hurt herself and giving her the bagged blood. The chains were gone now, she noted, probably removed once the worst of the healing had ended.

            That was a good sign, she decided. It meant they had no idea she was the Basha Argeneau they were looking for.

            Sighing, Divine sat up, pushed the sheets aside and grimaced at her bloodstained clothes. She looked like a two-year-old wearing her last meal. Wrinkling her nose with distaste at the nasty dry stuff, she slid out of bed and then headed for the bathroom Jackie had pointed out earlier. She’d considered showering and stripping then, but it had seemed a waste of time at that point when she knew that the healing would leave her feeling slimy and dirty anyway. It always did as impurities and damaged tissue were broken down and pushed out through the pores.

            Jackie and Vincent would probably have to throw out the linens and beds she and Marcus had lain in while healing . . . unless they had really good bed protectors. She hoped they did. She’d hate to think she’d cost them anything. Maybe she should give them money for their trouble, Divine thought as she turned on the shower and stripped off her clothes.

            The warm water pounding down on her head and body went a long way toward clearing away the last of the darkness at the corners of her mind. Divine hated the nightmares that occasionally plagued her. It was bad enough to have suffered what she had once; having nightmares about it just seemed to her like her own mind continuing the torture originally visited on her by Leonius Livius. She didn’t deserve that. No one did. That being the case, she’d learned to give the nightmares as little room as possible in her waking mind. On waking, she always pushed them back into an imagined closet in her head and firmly closed the door. To her mind it was the only way to handle it.