Reserved for CK
The dream which woke him took several moments to resurface once his silver eyes found the ceiling. Long moments kept the vividness of the dream from him, and the immortal kept his brain as quiet as he could muster, his ears focused on the mortal heartbeat of the young woman downstairs, his eyes remaining on their original spot. He lay still within his bed, alone, dressed in sleepwear.
She was running again, but this time he saw her running, her almost bare legs moving as fast as any human\'s could. The girl smelled horrible, like men who had not given her a chance to be. He remembered wrinkling his nose at the scent of the men, the make-up and the sweat. But there was something about that look in her eyes that made him not turn from her. There was something desperate that he couldn\'t abandon as easily as one would some piece of trash. She wasn\'t something he could so easily discard to the gutters, or hand back to Laurent with an indifferent nature.
Rachel ran; he could hear her lungs wheezing and her feet skidding and her heart hammering in her bosom as she came closer to him. He was alone again, the same way he had been for several scattered nights since the actual girl had so ungracefully fallen into his care, and she came to a stop in front of him, not two feet before his chest. And they simply looked at each other with the deepest of looks that he could not describe. And, as always followed, two men grabbed her and pushed her hard against a wall, running over her with intolerable grasps. His blood, hot with anger, found its ability to flow once more as he tore the intolerable hands off of Rachel and off of their stubby wrists.
He there he was with the girl again, face to face. Something had connected him to her without physically touching her. And in the moments that they stared at each other, in that un-physical connection, he felt his hand calmly reach up to her small, round face and brush against it with the backs of his fingers, with nothing of Lucretia rising in his mind.
Damien awoke just as his hand brushed the cheek of the mortal girl and while it escaped him for a few moments, as it always did, the dream returned to his memory fresh and with lingering importance. Below him he could still hear the purring of the small cat, the steady rhythm of his Delilah, and the quiet flipping of pages of the same girl of his dreams. Yet now she smelled infinitely better than before, her blood, skin, and hair two and a half years delayed from returning to the control of that man whom he despised with everything that made him a man. Her eyes had gained a happiness that he had become quite used to, her smile finding more truth than lie.
It was nearing dark when he willed himself out of bed. For nearly hours he laid silent, un-breathing and listening to the house around him react, his animals eat and his ward move about. More often than not she pulled at the vampire’s attention as he lay there, the warmth of her blood and the rhythm of her heart calling to his immortal senses. Upon waking he couldn’t find it in himself to be tired and sleep more. So after these hours the vampire woke and showered quickly, dressing himself in normal attire; a pair of jeans and a cream-colored turtleneck. With damp hair which remained in his eyes, Damien descended the stairs at a human’s pace so as not to startle Rachel, whom recognized his purposeful creaking steps of alert. She didn’t move, but flashed a smile at him when he entered the kitchen to retrieve the newspaper.
“Good morning,” he said reflexively in clear English, flicking open the immortal paper with white ink to read about the happenings of the city of immortals.
