Caelum Vance
I was not asleep.
Vampires did not sleep, precisely. We stilled. The body’s endless restless machinery wound down to its lowest possible register — breath almost nothing, heart a slow distant knock, the mind releasing its grip on the present moment and drifting somewhere between consciousness and its absence. It was not sleep. It was the closest thing to death we were permitted, which was perhaps why so many of my kind found it difficult.
I had never found it difficult. I had four centuries of practice.
Tonight I had been lying in the dark of my chamber for three hours, still as the stone around me, and she had come.
She always came eventually. That was the thing I had learned about her in months of these encounters — she did not navigate the dreamscape so much as drift t
