Faery Tales & Nightmares Read Online Free

ground. Instead, she was on her back on top of the ground.
    Like I was when Nikki killed Gory … and me .
    But the moonlight falling on Eliana’s soil-covered body felt like raw energy, pushing away all of her confusion, reforming her. It had saturated the soil in which she was lying, and the energy of the two pricked her skin like tiny teeth biting her all over. She wanted to stay there, soak in the moonlight and the soil, until everything made sense again.
    “Get up.” Nikki tangled her fingers in Eliana’s hair and stood.
    Eliana came to her feet, wishing she could stop or at least pause longer in the fresh-turned earth. At least the moonlight is still falling . It felt like a very light rain, tangible but too delicate to capture.
    She stepped backward, and Nikki released her.
    “You killed me,” Eliana said. It was not a question or an accusation but something between the two. Things felt uncertain; memory and reality and logic weren’t all coming together cohesively. “Suffocated me.”
    “I did.” Nikki walked over and tugged open the door of the crypt where the angel had been perched. “Come, or you’ll go hungry.”
    The angel from the crypt walked between Eliana and Nikki. “Kill her and be done with it, Nicole. These games grow tedious. You’ve made your point.”
    “Don’t be difficult, or”—Nikki went up on her tiptoes and kissed him—“you’ll go hungry, too.”
    He didn’t move, even when she leaned her whole weight against him. The angel’s expression remained unchanged. “Do you think she matters? She’s just some girl.”
    “No. Here she is”—Nikki grabbed Eliana by the arm and shook her—“ proof that you picked her. Again . How many of them has it been now? Twenty? Fifty?”
    “I got careless.” The angel shrugged. “Tormenting her is foolish, but if it amuses you…”
    Nikki stared at him, her hand tightening on Eliana’s arm. Then, still holding on to Eliana, she walked into the crypt.
    “Wash. There’s water over there”—Nikki pointed to the corner, where a cooler of melting ice sat—“and your outfit … hmm?”
    As Eliana dropped to the floor in front of the melting ice, Nikki looked behind them at the angel, who’d come to stand just outside the door. She opened a wooden trunk on the floor. “What do you think?”
    “Nothing you want to hear.” Then the angel walked away.
    Sebastian watched Eliana with growing doubt. He’d tried to pick a strong one this time. Blood and moonlight . That was the key. Killed under the full moon with enough vampire blood already in them . For two months, he’d kept her hidden, fed her, prepared her, yet here she was like a mindless sheep.
    Nicole always waited to see if they woke; she knew how often he’d been unfaithful, but she always hoped. Sometimes, the newly dead girls hadn’t had enough of his blood to wake back up. Nicole took those as victories, as if killing them before they’d had enough of his blood meant she was still special. She wasn’t. If he could kill her himself, he would’ve done so decades ago, but her blood was why he was transformed, and vampires couldn’t kill the one whose blood had remade them. And mortals can’t kill us . It left him very few options.
    “What are you doing?” Nicole had followed him. She shoved him face-first into the side of another mausoleum. “You don’t just walk away when I have questions! How am I to get changed if I have to guess how I look? What if—”
    “You look beautiful, Nicole.” He wiped a trickle of blood from his forehead.
    “Really?”
    “Always.” He held out the blood on his finger, and she kissed it away.
    There wasn’t any sense in arguing with her. It only prolonged the inevitable, and he wasn’t in the mood to watch her take out her temper on the barely conscious vampire girl who watched them from the doorway of the crypt where Nicole had left her.
    “She needs help.” He kept his voice bland.
    Nicole’s gaze followed his to the