She was still just trying to find her way through all this. “Levka,” she said.

  “You like to tread dangerously.”

  She laughed. “I’m going to imagine he’s sleeping and see if he’s dreaming. I didn’t have to fall asleep to enter Stasio’s dream.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “Yeah, I was really surprised. I didn’t think I could do that.” Then she rested her head against Arman’s shoulder and closed her eyes again. She concentrated on trying to connect with Levka with no luck at all. He might just be watching a movie, not asleep and dreaming about anything. She wondered really how useful her ability could be. If the only way to use it was when someone was dreaming, how would she even know that? She figured she had just gotten lucky with Stasio.

  She would try each of her new friends. But she couldn’t find any way to connect with their dreams. Then she thought she needed to wait until the lights were turned off for the red eye flight. At some point, maybe everyone would be asleep. She sighed and sat up in her seat.

  “No luck?” Arman asked her.

  “No. I’ll have to wait until they turn out the overhead lights and everyone settles down to sleep.”

  Arman got up from his seat and visited with his friends for a moment. She hoped he wasn’t telling them about what she did to Stasio and how she was trying to get into the others’ dreams also, but then he returned to his seat.

  “I didn’t tell them anything about what you’re doing or attempting to do. Everyone is watching different movies, so I was asking them what they thought of them.”

  She smiled. “Good. I want them to be unaware of what I plan to do, or they might be able to stop me in their dream. I’m not sure how this works. I might need to practice at it. But if they’re all watching movies, that’s the reason I couldn’t connect with their dreams.”

  “Right. None of them are asleep yet. That’s what I was checking out. Only Stasio was for a while.”

  Then she and Arman watched a movie together for an hour and a half until it was getting late, and they turned it off and snuggled against each other to sleep.

  “Remember,” he said, “I get to chase you this time.”

  She chuckled. “I need to train myself on how to do this, so we’ll see.” She figured she had to try and control the situation in the dream as much as possible. Then she frowned at him. “You don’t think I would have more control over it if I were one of you, do you?”

  “I’m not sure. But Tobias planned to turn your father, so it can’t lessen the effects of the ability if you’re one of us or Tobias wouldn’t have planned on changing him. Mostly, we were just thinking you would have better protection against a vampire, being able to move more quickly, vanish, fly, etcetera, to keep out of the vampire’s reach. Especially until you’re able to learn how to fight them well. As a huntress, you’ll be just as strong, but you can’t vanish or take flying leaps to get out of the path of a vampire.”

  “Right, but no matter what, I won’t be as capable of fighting, not until I’ve trained.”

  “True, but you can hold a sword. Caitlin even had trouble with that. She had to rely on her witch’s skills more.”

  “You said my father’s name was Nathaniel. What is my mother’s name?”

  “Bethany.”

  “And their last names?”

  “Fairhaven. They were born in San Antonio, Texas and lived in Dallas, Texas for years.”

  “Where was I born?”

  “San Antonio.”

  “So I’m really Fiona Fairhaven from San Antonio.” She was going to have to get used to that. But she liked it. It suited her. But then she wondered… “Is my first name really Fiona?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. She was glad something was the same in her life.

  12

  Arman was sure ready to share a dream with Fiona again. He didn’t even mind if she took charge if they had the same result. Though kissing her for real appealed even more. But when he tried to sleep, he found he couldn’t. She seemed to be sleeping, and he was glad he had told her what Stasio had learned about her family and that she hadn’t had a meltdown. Instead, she appeared to be eager to learn what she could about her powers and how she could really use them. Hopefully for good. And he hoped she would like to keep her abilities. Stasio hadn’t learned if she could actually get rid of the curse.

  Both Stasio and Ruric were using their skills to try and locate her parents in the meantime, and they hoped they would discover where they were and even more, that they would want to rejoin their daughter. Which made him wonder if they would even be happy that she was with a pack of vampires—helping her, sure, but would they prefer her to be with hunters? Finding a hunter mate?

  Then he wondered what the deal was with Fiona’s father. Why was it that Tobias had to turn Fiona into a vampire the night of the blood moon when she turned eighteen, but her father and her mother had already been together? So wouldn’t they have been older? Unless they hadn’t turned eighteen yet. Or maybe something about Fiona made her different from her father. Arman couldn’t quit thinking about it. Now he really couldn’t get to sleep.

  Fiona had curled up against the window and Ruric was zonked out. Stasio and Jasmine were cuddled together, their eyes closed, and he assumed they were sleeping. He didn’t want to disturb Ruric by leaving his seat to see if Levka and Caitlin were asleep or not. But everyone seemed to be sleeping on the plane for the most part. He saw a couple of overhead lights on where people were reading books though.

  Stasio didn’t get as annoyed with anyone if they woke him up while he was sleeping like Levka did, so Arman asked him telepathically, “Hey, Stasio. About your research, was Nathaniel Fairhaven eighteen during the blood moon when Tobias wanted to turn him and control his powers?”

  There was no response.

  “Stasio?” Arman hated it when he couldn’t get an answer to some question that was gnawing at his brain.

  Fiona had planned to sleep and enter someone’s dream, but when she was dreaming, she wasn’t with any of the vampires, just by herself, having a bizarre dream about babysitting a baby and wanting to wash it in the ocean, because everyone else was wading in the ocean. And they were waiting for her to take the baby in. But there was no beach. It was all boulders and so she was afraid she would slip off a slick boulder that was under water and the baby would be dunked. Then she began worrying that the ocean wasn’t clean enough. What was that all about?

  Who would ever think of washing a baby in saltwater? She woke herself from the dream and pondered it, but none of it made any sense. She figured it was just one of those weird nonsense dreams she often had. She glanced at Arman, and he smiled at her. Poor guy. It appeared he hadn’t been able to sleep.

  She snuggled up against him. “No luck on sleeping?”

  “No. Any luck with changing anyone’s dreams?”

  “No. I didn’t see anyone’s dreams at all. They might have been in REM sleep. I really don’t know how it all works. It appears everyone’s asleep though,” Fiona said.

  “Yeah. I had a thought.”

  “Don’t tell me. You wondered why Tobias was after my father when the magic time for me is eighteen and during the blood moon.”

  “Yeah, exactly. I tried to ask Stasio telepathically, but he’s dead to the world. Unless he was ignoring me. But you might be right. Maybe for you it’s eighteen. Maybe for your father, it was a different age and perhaps not even during the blood moon. Maybe during the wolf’s moon. Or at some other particular time? Who knows? We just need to keep looking into it.”

  “And find my parents.”

  “Yeah, that goes without saying. Though⁠—”

  “They might not like that I’m hanging out with a bunch of nice rogue vampires.”

  Arman smiled. “You could say that. Though they’re vampires now too. But they might want you to be with hunters like they had been.”

  “You accept me. You and your friends. Would hunters accept me if they knew I had parents who had been turned? I want to reconnect with my parents, so it’s not like I would want to hide what they are from others.”

  “I’m sure some will accept you for who you are, and others won’t. You know how it is.”

  “Oh, yeah. Even in school, it was definitely like that without even putting the hunter/vampire stigma to the test. I wonder why my parents wouldn’t have given me to a hunter family.”

  “Maybe for the same reason they didn’t want to keep you with them. That they were afraid that’s the first place Tobias would look,” Arman said.

  “Or”—Fiona had to look at this realistically—“it’s possible that other hunters didn’t want the trouble. I mean, when you really think of it, that could put them more at risk too. Whereas finding a human family who needed money, they could more easily be bought off, don’t you think?”

  “A money trail,” Arman said, snapping his fingers. “Unless your parents gave them a lumpsum payment.”

  “Or just used their vampire persuasion to make them believe I was their child.”

  “Oh.” Arman looked defeated in that moment. “I keep forgetting that your parents would have been vampires by the time they had to find a new home for you. They definitely could have done that. But still, if they did pay them, it might have been in installments to make sure you were fed and clothed properly. Or your foster parents might have spent the whole amount on themselves. Do you remember your foster parents ever talking about the money they were getting for you?”

  “Uhm, I remember them arguing about money. But I thought it was just that they weren’t making enough. They were really frugal, but Dad spent so much on his alcohol or at pubs that the money might have been tight because of that. My brother and I did get gifts from an aunt and uncle who sent them at Christmas and for our birthdays. I tried to learn who they were, but they were just listed as Uncle Nat and Aunt Bea. My foster mom and dad never mentioned who they were or whose side of the family they were related to by blood. I never really thought to ask. For whatever reason, we always assumed they were on my mother’s side of the family.”

  “It could have been a way for your biological parents to keep a connection with you if the gifts were from them and as a reminder, if they were paying your foster parents, to keep up the charade and spend the money on you that they were sending for your upkeep.”

  Fiona could understand that but what about her brother? “But they sent the gifts to my brother also. They were expensive gifts too. Updated computers every year. New cell phones every year. They gave my brother a car before he went to college, and when I turned seventeen, they gave me one too before my parents’ untimely deaths, but Regina sold it, saying it would have cost too much to drive it all the way to Oregon.”

  “To make it seem more like they were truly your aunt and uncle, they would have needed to send gifts to both of you.”

  “Then if that’s the case, wouldn’t they have been monitoring what had happened to me after my foster parents died? They must have known that Regina took me to Oregon. Why didn’t they come to rescue me?”

  “What if your father still has the gift of dreams? What if he connected with me in some way to come and help you out? Maybe it was the both of you who encouraged me to come? The man was blond-haired who had visited me.”

  “Oh, wow. A blond-haired man also came to see me. But why wouldn’t he have physically come for me?”

  “It’s possible that by the time your mother and father learned your foster parents had died it was too late. And then when Regina took you in, she was surrounded by her own pack of vampires. That would have been too many vampires for them to deal with if your parents aren’t in a pack of their own.”

  “Then why would my father make a connection with you?” Fiona didn’t think it made any sense.

  “What if you and I had this connection, for whatever reason, and your father could listen in on your dreams? Then he interceded on your behalf to me in a dream way to go to your aid. Maybe he and your mother researched who I was and learned that my friends and I had successfully removed the vampires who were in control of the League of Vampires in Scotland, no easy task, and thought we might be up to the mission.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It couldn’t be random,” Ruric said, his eyes still closed.

  Fiona and Arman smiled at him.

  Had Ruric been listening to their conversation the whole time?

  “I think you hit on something with the idea that you and Fiona were dreaming about each other, and her father joined in on the dream and then learned who Arman was. But also since we travel together, he would have learned who all of us are and realized we might be able to help you out,” Ruric said.

  “But he has to realize we are considered rogues, by some leagues,” Arman said. “I still don’t know why you and I connected.”

  “Because we were at the Dallas mall, and I spilled a soda on you earlier? What if that wasn’t by accident? Then again, maybe it was just meant to be. I felt lost when my foster parents died and then there you were in my dreams, telling me I was important, loved, special. You don’t know how much I needed to hear that. And then when I saw you at the Halloween party, I couldn’t believe it was you. It couldn’t have been. You were just a dream to me. A figment of my imagination. Not a real person. Yet once I saw you, I thought of you being at the Dallas mall and how I was instantly drawn to you, attracted to you, and that had never happened to me before.”

  “I felt the same way about you. But I thought I could control you with my vampiric gaze, bring you with me and protect you and I wasn’t able to. I knew for certain that you weren’t just a human girl I was supposed to save.”

  Ruric started to snore. Arman and Fiona smiled.

  “Did that bother you that I wasn’t a human who could easily be persuaded to do as you commanded?” Fiona asked.

  Arman sighed and then smiled. “It meant I had to work harder at it, do more research, find out what we needed to do to keep you safe, which was certainly worth it. No, it didn’t bother me that you were a huntress. What bothered me was that you didn’t know it. You could have been a prime candidate for a rogue vampire to eliminate you, especially since you had no other hunters to help you.”

  “Like Tobias.”

  “Right. Like him and Regina.”

  “But how did you and I…connect in dreams later? Did it really have to do with us running into each other at the mall? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “Fate.” He said it so seriously that she smiled at him. “It’s true. How else would you explain it?”

  “Okay, I’ll buy it, since we have no other idea of how it happened. Oh, I wanted to ask you about the couple in the first-class seats on the plane who were talking telepathically to each other. Were they vampires?”

  “Or they could be hunters who have the ability—which is rare. I’ve only heard of one like that. But I have to tell you that Caitlin had the ability also. Maybe because she was also a witch.”

  Fiona frowned at Arman. “What if they work for Regina and Tobias? Or are friends of theirs and they even know who we are?”

  “Hopefully they aren’t. They could try to contact some other vampires who might be friends of theirs in Scotland to come to their aid against us. But I’m hoping that’s not the case. They didn’t seem to really take notice of us when we walked past them. Though I had glanced at them for a split second, they didn’t react. Many passengers glance at who is in the various seats, so that they would not think anything was suspicious about that.”

  “True. Uhm, did you really want to dance with me at the Halloween dance?”

  “You bet.”

  “And you shoved Toga Guy halfway across the gym floor with your vampiric strength? Here I thought you might be kind of a geek. Though a really awesome looking geek.”

  He smiled at her. “Thanks. I didn’t want to scare you, but I did want to get you away from there and to the house we had rented so we could talk to you about what was going on. Dancing with you totally appealed.”

  “Even though I’m a hunter.”

  “I never really gave it a thought.”

  “It didn’t matter how I was dressed for the affair?” She couldn’t imagine that someone dressed in a tux would have been interested in dancing with someone who was dressed to fight—martial arts style.

  “Are you kidding? The first thought I had was I was glad you weren’t wearing tons of fake blood like the others at the dance, and the second thought I had was I was glad that you probably knew some lethal moves of your own and that they could come in handy in our line of work.”

  “I couldn’t believe so many of the kids were dressed as zombies. Nor could I believe that you were…are a vampire for real.”

  “Or that you’re a huntress from a long line of hunters.”

  “Right. Okay, I’m going to try and go to sleep again,” she said.

  “Good,” Ruric said.

  Fiona and Arman chuckled. Then the two of them tried to sleep.

  Before they knew it, the lights were coming on in the cabin, and the stewardesses were bringing them breakfast. Where did the time go? Fiona really hadn’t thought she would sleep. She sure thought she would have dreamed. Unless…unless she had forgotten them upon waking, which was what often happened.

  “Did you dream about me?” she asked Arman.

  “No. I was so tired, I think I just slept the night through, or I just don’t remember any dream once I woke.”

  “I dreamed of Fiona’s friend running into me with her car,” Ruric said, sitting up and eating his breakfast.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry about that.” Fiona still felt badly about it, though she was really glad they hadn’t hurt him. She wished she could have slipped into his dreams and given him more pleasant ones.

  “But then something strange happened.” Ruric drank some of his orange juice. “I was suddenly seeing the car accident in a whole different perspective. Instead of a car running me down, Fiona knocked me down with a big pillow.”