NOT DEAD YET: A Lucy Hart, DEATHDEALER Novel (Book Two) Read Free Page B

merciless.”
    “Oh.”  God love him, but he really was gullible when it came to his mother’s motives.
    Why hadn’t they just run off and eloped?  She’d asked him that not even a week ago.  Gabriel had said that his family would never forgive him for denying them the chance to be there.  That his family was very important to him...  as was hers.  But now she knew that it wasn’t going to be some special, heartbreakingly beautiful journey to the altar.  No, it would be heartbreaking, but not beautiful or joyous at all. 
    It was going to be torture.

Chapter Two
 
     
    Her eyes opened to nothing but blue.  It was a surprise for Delia, seeing anything after the sunrise.  That’s when every vampire in the world died, literally.  No thoughts, no dreams, nothing.  Once the sun rose whatever it was that animated them—be it a soul or magicks—departed, leaving them lifeless and vulnerable.  Nothingness was all the day brought for a vampire.  Even in her sleep imposed prison it was always the same.  When the sun rose she became nothingness.  But once the darkness came her mind would awaken, and she would plot her revenge against her lying, cheating ex-love and his blood-sack of a whore.
    Over and over she would imagine her vengeance, plotting how she would abduct them both, how she would torture them, making the other watch as she did truly terrible things to them both. 
    Nothing that they didn’t deserve. 
    And if she wasn’t trapped in the little blood-sack’s necromantic spell, she’d have had her fill of revenge.  But that’s the thing, if you can only think of vengeance, but can’t actually inflict it, the hunger, the need for it becomes all the more powerful. 
    She would see them both dead and bloody.  That much she knew.
    But sometimes, no matter how hard she tried, Delia would fall asleep and dream.  It wasn’t like she’d never slept.  She enjoyed the languorous lounging about that sleep could offer.  But this sleep was not a bit restive.  It was horrifying.  Every time Delia would dream, she dreamed the same thing.  About Lucy Hart chasing her with that damned silver dagger.  The one Delia was certain Gabriel had given her; faerie forged and wickedly sharp.  It had slid into her like she was butter.  And if the little blood-sack had had the guts, or the strength, she could’ve inflicted so much more harm than she had.
    But this wasn’t reality, or a memory, this was Delia’s mind torturing her.  This was her being hunted down by Lucy Hart.  And in her dreams Lucy wasn’t just some fragile, metaphysically gifted teenager who had just gotten lucky.  She was a monster—sleek and dark and merciless.  Enough so that Delia felt some admiration toward her murderer, yet still she went mad with fear every time she set sights on Lucy Hart. 
    There was a name flickering, echoing in the back of her mind whenever she saw Lucy this way, though she could never make it out, and she knew, just knew that it wasn’t her own voice saying it. 
    But just the soft whisper of the indecipherable word made her body turn frozen with fear.
    So that was what Delia Tokar was used to seeing in her dream prison, in her imposed slumber, her jail.  Visions, fantasies of her vengeance upon her lover and the one for whom he’d forsaken her. That and her own hunting and death by the hand of the same little blood-sack.
    So when she’d opened her eyes, feeling that the sun was high in the daylight sky, she was surprised to see all that blue. 
    And it was a hell of a lot of blue.  A vast, never ending sea of blue, stretching as far as her eyes could see.  She could feel, too, that what she was seeing was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  That even as immense as it all seemed, the thing before her was ten, a hundred times bigger, and endlessly powerful. 
    Just as she could feel that, and that it was maybe as old as time itself—it was looking right back at her.  No eyes.  No, just an