He'd severed his hand for her. For them. He'd been proud to take the pain. To get a step closer to discovering a way for them to be together.
She betrayed you, willfully kept you a captured plaything. Why was it that everything he gave a damn about ended up stabbing him in the back?
She'd played him for a fool, keeping his mind from hunting. He'd walked around that mausoleum high on her, complacent. Charmed by her every move, he'd been blinded to what was really happening... .
Hours toiled by before he finally passed out.
Sometime in the night, he jerked awake with a yell, cradling his arm, his body slicked with sweat. He'd seen Néomi screaming in terror, trapped in darkness where he couldn't reach her.
She wasn't here with him as she always had been. "Shh, mon coeur... " she'd soothed. "Good-bye, vampire," she'd said last night.
His brows drew together. Stop thinking about her!
She'd calmed him, surrounded him with laughter. She'd challenged him to rethink his blind hatred. You'll never see her again. Once his trust was lost, he didn't give it again.
He was disgusted with himself. Even after her betrayal, he missed her presence more than he missed his hand.
The silence within her home seeped into Néomi like a damp chill, until she thought she'd lose her mind.
Just as she'd known it would.
For the last three days, she'd aimlessly roamed her halls, a lonely, despairing ghost, filled with regret. And always she wondered where Conrad had gone, where in the world he was at that moment. Was he safe? Healing? Was he drinking from a glass - or from victims?
Is he thinking of me?
She hadn't known it was possible to miss another this much.
He would never return, and she could do nothing but... await. Await the years to pass, hoping for the arrival of someone, anyone.
Néomi was helpless, powerless to alleviate her own misery. She was as pitiful as he'd accused that night.
With a sigh, she exited the house into the drizzling rain, bent on getting the paper. Having long since read the ones he'd collected, she pined for something to take her mind from this.
She had no other escape. She couldn't unburden herself to a good friend or change her scenery. She couldn't drink. There was no television show or good book to absorb her.
At the property line once more, her hopes sank. Tears began to fall for the paper that was well out of her reach.
I'm in the driveway, crying over a newspaper. This was the low point of her afterlife. She was as weak and pathetic as Conrad had deemed her with his crazed, yelling words.
Next thing she knew, she'd be moaning, "Woowooo."
To hell with this. She would not mope like a... a damned ghost!
Her sadness boiled to anger. She refused to feel guilt for what she'd done. She'd been trying to protect him and his brothers. For ages they'd wanted to save Conrad. He was the one who'd gone and lopped off his hand without so much as a mention of his plans to her!
With her new anger came realization. Had she actually thought she needed a man to actualize her? To save her from this cursed afterlife? Would she wait forever for his return, as Marguerite L'Are had done for Néomi's contemptible father?
Conrad called me pitiful - and he was right!
How much she'd changed. In life, she'd always been bold, taking her destiny into her own hands. After that year of burlesque, Néomi had told everyone at the club, "I want to be a ballerina," and they'd laughed. "Maybe you could make the leap from burlesque to vaudeville," they'd said. "There are a few who've made that climb."
But burlesque dancer to ballerina was supposedly an impassable divide. Which was why Néomi had had to make it.
How do I get from point A to point B? she'd thought, hour after hour, day after day. She had figured it out, and though it had taken her years, she'd done it.
Néomi had danced her way from the Quarter to worldwide fame!
I want to be the old me! She had to do something. Think... think.
But in the last eighty years, she hadn't been able to come up with any way to alter her existence -
Wait... Néomi possessed two things she never had before. One was a tool - Nikolai's cell phone. The other was the knowledge that at least one person on earth had been able to hear her.
What if someone else could? Someone like Conrad, someone from the Lore? If there was one thing Néomi was learning about this Lore, it was that assumptions were readily turned on their ears.
There were witches, they'd said, some with extraordinary abilities - like that Mariketa. Maybe witches could hear ghosts?
And maybe pigs can fly.
She frowned at herself. Why was she scoffing at her daring idea?
Because she wasn't the old Néomi who relished challenges. She supposed that being disembodied did that to spirits. After all, she couldn't recall a tale featuring a ghost worthy of rooting for. How many stories recounted the quests of intrepid ghosts?
But what do I have to lose? She gave a laugh. My precious time?
What if this Mariketa was powerful enough to make Néomi... incarnate? Néomi had to find her number. Yet how?
She floated through the tangled gardens to the sad little folly, turning it over in her head. How? How?
Chapter 14
Nikolai had used their services - it made sense that their number would still be in his phone! In a flash, she traced back to her studio and raised the phone in front of her face.
When the rain outside faded and the night cleared to match her change in mood, she reminded herself, Don't get too excited. Even if she could divine how to operate the phone, the telekinesis to work it would be complicated and tiring.
Surely I can figure it out! In nineteen twenty-seven, telephoning had been difficult - today, it wasn't. Besides, a cell phone wasn't a totally alien object to her. She'd seen the brothers using theirs, pressing buttons without even glancing at them. And she'd read the reviews in the paper for all the newest products, learning about their features.