Free Dark Needs at Night's Edge by Kresley Cole

studio.
    Yet now she could do nothing but watch her possessions age right before her. Just like her home. She couldn’t feel any of them, couldn’t run her greedy fingertips over a spill of cool silk or the tickling tip of a feather….
    â€œNow what?” she asked aloud.
    The echoing silence seemed to mock her. Alone…alone…alone…
    Néomi considered materializing to the vampire’s room—or tracing there. She assured herself it was the pressing quiet that spurred her to debate returning, and not the madman himself. But he did seem to sense her the best of anyone who’d ever come to Elancourt.
    Even if he was insane and unwashed, something about him drew her. She had the undeniable urge to talk to him more.
    Yet in the end, she was too exhausted to return, her essence depleted from all the energy she used for her concentrated telekinesis. Needing to rest, she floated to her cot.
    Long ago, she’d brought it into the studio. Though she couldn’t feel it or the blankets she’d strewn over it, she slept there almost every night. As much as possible, she liked to behave as she had when alive—except for drifting through walls and tracing, of course.
    She curled up an inch above it for her reverie. Néomi termed her ghostly sleep a reverie because it differed from what she’d known when living. She didn’t have to have it every day. If she didn’t use telekinesis for more than moving the newspaper, she could go days without it. Waking was instantaneous, with nothing altered except her energy level. She still wore the same clothes, her hair was unchanged, and she never needed to shave her legs and underarms. Normally, she only lost consciousness for about four hours.
    That is, until the sliver moon came each month. On that one night, some force compelled her to dance. Like a ghostly marionette, she spun to the same gruesome end, left exhausted and shaken, wishing for a true death.
    There were only three days left until her next performance….
    Her maman had always said the sliver moon was lucky for people like them— people who hold on to the sky with all their might, and do it again and again. No matter how many times they lose it . That was why Néomi had scheduled her party on that night.
    Lucky wasn’t the first term she’d use to describe that party—the one meant to celebrate the achievement of all her dreams. At twenty-six, Néomi had bought this place on her own, after working her way out of the Vieux Carré—all the while managing to keep her shady background a secret.
    Her uptown patrons had never found out that Néomi was a French émigrée’s bastard born in the seedy French Quarter. They hadn’t connected Néomi Laress to Marguerite L’Are, the infamous burlesque dancer.
    They hadn’t discovered that, for a time, Néomi had been one, too.
    After her maman had succumbed to influenza when Néomi had just turned sixteen, she’d begun doing shows. Néomi had been well developed then, and with the right makeup and costumes, she’d passed for twenty. Times had been tough, and the money was good.
    She’d had no inhibitions, no moral convictions against it. Everyone got what they needed, and no one was hurt by it. Though she’d never been ashamed of what she’d done, she’d kept it secret because she’d understood that others wouldn’t view it the same way she did.
    After a year of saving up money, Néomi had quit. She’d always dreamed of being a ballerina and hadn’t wanted to waste all those lessons her mother had scrimped to afford—and all the work Néomi had done to justify the incredible sacrifice. And somehow, she’d made it….
    Then I died .
    She wished Conrad could have seen her as the ballerina she’d once been—onstage in a luxurious costume, flushed with pride, inundated with lusty applause. Would he have found her