Free Vampire Dreams_Int.indd by ghislainviau Page A

thing that Alexander discovered that most took him by surprise, was not about Zoe at all. It was about himself. He realized that he loved her deeply. And that was a signifi cant realization, given the fact that he’d never loved anyone, not when he had a life and certainly not since his life had been taken away.
    2

    Christina Moss
    For years he’d carefully reasoned with himself that he couldn’t offer her anything of importance or meaning because he wasn’t human. He’d settled, instead, on being content with her friendship a few nights a week and he enjoyed her human perspective and companionship. And of course, she was beautiful with long dark hair, dark eyes and a vibrancy he had never seen in another.
    It wasn’t easy, but time and again he’d managed to talk himself out of revealing to her that he wasn’t just a dream and that he really existed. If he told her the truth it was more than likely that she would reject him altogether, or so he thought.
    Recently, however, things had begun to change. Zoe had mentioned Michael — someone she’d met at a gathering —
    and Alexander feared that he would have to stop seeing her altogether. Therefore, something had to be done.
    And so, Alexander was feeling elated because after refl ecting on it for a good long time, he’d come to an important decision. He’d decided that he would ask Zoe to go to a particular location when she was awake. He felt certain that if he asked her to, she would go somewhere at a specifi c time, then he would turn up. In that way, he’d reveal himself to her as a real being, not just a dream. He’d tell her how much he loved her and ask her how she felt about him.
    3

    Christina Moss
    Five years later . . .
    Z oe stood before the three-sectioned, full-length mirror and stared at her naked refl ection. She looked aged and tired.
    But of course she did. She’d just been through years of absolute hell. People used to tell her she was pretty, but it seemed like a long time since anyone had told her. She wondered if anyone would ever tell her that again.
    An icy chill went through her, and she grabbed her white bathrobe from the hook on the wall and wrapped it around herself. It was just her own unfortunate luck that her divorce was fi nalized that very day — on her twenty-ninth birthday.
    She shook her head in disgust. A year of engagement was followed by four short years of marriage. She wondered how so much could go wrong in such a short time.
    Analytically, she understood that it wasn’t her fault. Emotionally, she felt guilty and spent.
    Having no experience herself with drugs or addicts, she couldn’t have known that Michael had already been addicted 5

    Vampire of My Dreams
    to meth when she’d fi rst met him fi ve years earlier. He’d hidden it well but she felt stupid just the same. Stupid that she hadn’t suspected anything strange about his behavior — not while they were dating, not on her wedding day, and not even for the fi rst year or so of their marriage. It wasn’t until he’d begun losing weight, acting frantically and staying up until all hours of the night (doing who knows what in the garage) that she knew something was terribly wrong.
    It was the rapid deterioration that alarmed her and that’s when she really paid attention. She thought he was ill so she pleaded with him to go to a doctor. No sense could be made of it — he just wouldn’t go. One clue led to the next and the discovery was made. Discovery was followed by confrontation, research, the broken promises and failed attempts to rehabilitate him. It was somewhere during that process that Zoe had lost, one by one, all of her friends. They’d become repulsed by his transformation and outraged at her for wasting her time with a hopeless addict. As painful as it was to lose her friends, Zoe knew she had to do everything in her power to save Michael.
    After all, marriage vows meant something!
    But even she had a breaking point. The decision hadn’t come