Free Crave 02 - Sacrifice by Melinda Metz, Laura J. Burns Page B

her back again. She hadn’t sat up in a while—she’d been writing in that weird half-reclining position she used in her hospital bed at home. It was easier than trying to stay upright. The small room seemed to swim around her, the shelves spinning slowly past, holding their secrets packed away in the boxes and chests and bags. She couldn’t reach the top shelves, but she’dmade her way through the bottom ones, searching for any more information on her father.
    “Why don’t
you
have any collections of crap stored in here?” she whispered, reaching for the locket around her neck.
    “These vampires are young,” Sam said. “Their childhoods haven’t disintegrated yet.”
    Shay snorted with laughter. “I don’t think a single one of them is under a hundred years old.”
    “Vampire time. A century is nothing,” Sam told her. “It was barely even the Renaissance when I was born. You try carting around a collection of doggy statuettes for that long.”
    “Doggy statuettes?” Shay grinned and rolled onto her side to look at him.
    He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t there. Her father was long gone, and she’d never met him. He wouldn’t just show up in the basement of a bat laboratory in Tennessee. Gabriel had told her that once Sam left the family, he never contacted them again.
    So now she was hallucinating. Well, at least it was new. The fatigue and the cold dizzy feelings, those were familiar from her long illness. She’d never been quite this exhausted and weak before, but the symptoms themselves hadn’t changed. Seeing things, though, that was a surprise.
    He felt real,
Shay thought sadly.
He felt just like he did when I had visions of Gabriel’s life. He seemed like the Sam I saw through Gabriel’s eyes.
    “This is appalling,” a sharp voice said, cutting through the haze in Shay’s brain. “How dare you touch our things?”
    Shay didn’t have the energy to move. She just gazed up at Tamara, confused. “You have me locked up in a room without even giving mewater, and you think
I
have a lot of nerve?” she asked, her voice coming out in a croak.
    Tamara snatched up the china dolls and shoved them back into their pillowcase.
    “I’m looking for my father’s things,” Shay said. “I have a right to them.”
    Tamara frowned. “You’ll find nothing of his here. This room stores our
family’s
belongings. Your father isn’t in that category.”
    “He was with Ernst even before Gabriel. He was part of the original family in Greece,” Shay protested. “He’s more a part of this family than you are.”
    “Sam betrayed us,” Tamara barked. “If I could wipe his memory from my mind, I would.”
    She stormed out of the room, or at least Shay assumed she did. It was too much trouble to turn her head enough to watch Tamara leave.
    Gabriel didn’t tell me much about her,
Shay thought idly.
Maybe he doesn’t like her much. Millie seems a lot less prickly.
    It was odd, seeing these people with her own eyes. In all her visions of Gabriel’s life, she hadn’t gotten much sense of his family. Not this family, anyway. She’d seen his early life in Greece, and she’d experienced the horror of the massacre that killed his original vampire family. There had been Sam. And Ernst, always Ernst. Those were the two who showed up again and again. The only member of his American vampire family that Shay had gotten a vision of was Millie.
    Maybe there was some kind of guiding principle to the visions I saw,
she thought.
I didn’t notice a pattern then, but maybe I only saw visionsof things that were most important to Gabriel, events and people that he was most attached to.
    “He told you that you didn’t have the complete picture of his life,” Sam said. “Gabriel told you that you’d glimpsed only tiny pieces, not his whole self.”
    “I know,” Shay murmured, too tired to tell her father that he was imaginary. Besides, it was nice to have someone to talk to. “I guess he was right. I was