Read Online Dark Needs at Night's Edge by Kresley Cole - Free Book Online Page A

hand or an elbow through her. Each time she grows still, then quivers as though shuddering.
    Nikolai is next. With a wave of her hand, a cell phone floats out of his jacket. Again the entity drops a pebble before floating the phone over to the corner.
    This cat-and-mouse game entertains him, and he wants her to fleece the bastards. She’s far more interesting than Sebastian’s patronizing speech about family and honor and forgiveness.
    He wonders where the little being takes her spoils. Why does she take them? Is she playing now? Or is it a compulsion, like his need to kill?
    For Murdoch’s turn, she plucks a woman’s jeweled hair comb right out of his pocket. Just who is Murdoch buying combs for?
    She smiles delightedly at her prize. That smile …Her eyes glitter, her lips curving. She might as well have been carrying a weapon.
    As she glides toward the corner, she raises her slender, bared arms above her and does a flawless pirouette. Then another. Her skirts flare out, and he hears them rustling. A single rose petal wafts from her wild hair to the bed, landing on the sheet beside him.
    Her lithe body, the way she moves, those slippers—she must have been a dancer. A tantsija. Of course.
    When she twirls around again, she suddenly laughs. The sound is haunting. But for some reason, his lips curl in response to it. The grin turns to a scowl when Sebastian regards him as if he’s completely gone. A vacant grin from a madman.
    Because he is mad—there is no raven-haired spirit who wants to show him more than her garters.
    And still he can’t take his eyes from her as Sebastian starts up again. He hears snippets of his brother’s words. As he tends to do when he’s weary and wanting to be left alone, he repeats them, muttering back in a different language. “It eats at Nikolai, the guilt…they’ve been fighting the Vampire Horde for three centuries…. We can join their army…kill them off…. Not all vampires are evil.”
    He blinks when Sebastian falls silent.
    With a narrowed gaze, Sebastian says, “You haven’t been talking to yourself. You’re repeating all of our words. This time in Greek! You weren’t hallucinating—you were listening .” Sebastian nods, as if he’s encouraged by this. “I wonder what else you can do that we don’t know about?”
    I can see ghosts. In Estonian, he asks Sebastian, “To your right, you see nothing strange? No female in the room?”
    Sebastian glances around. In the same language, he answers slowly, “There are only the four of us in the room, Conrad.” His tone is one he’d use to explain, “Actually, brother, the sky isn’t green. It’s blue .”
    The female seems to have concluded her stealing and appears slower, fainter. Is she tired?
    â€œConrad, do you see someone else?” Sebastian asks. “Your kind is supposed to suffer from severe delusions….”
    His “delusion” is now listening in on Murdoch and Nikolai’s murmured conversation at the edge of the room. “He reeks of blood and mud,” Nikolai says. “He might be improving, but to others he wouldn’t look like it. If we ever had to defend our plan…”
    Without warning, she’s on the bed beside him. From too close by his ear, she asks, “Is this true, vampire?” Her words come much more quickly, almost normally. He’s able to discern that she has a tinge of a French accent.
    â€œDo you reek, dément? I can’t smell. But it makes sense…considering how dirty you are .”
    He becomes acutely aware that his face is caked with blood and mud, his hair stiff with it. Dément . Is that all she sees him as? A madman to be ignored? Or worse—pitied? That is how she sees him.
    A filthy, sexually inexperienced lunatic.
    She’s seen him spit blood. Did she witness him mindlessly banging his head against the wall?