Read 2. Darkness in the Blood Master copy MS 5 for Free Online Page B

Then he grinned, his blue green eyes crinkling around the edges. “Sometimes, I’m jealous.”
    “I was thinking of you,” I told him honestly. Shirtless and shaving , I didn’t add. “About how well you fit into my crazy life. About how it doesn’t even seem all that crazy, my life, with you in it.” This last, in a whisper.
    Cradled instead of pinned now, his words tickled my ear even as his rough cheek scraped and abraded my smooth one. “And I was telling you how it felt, that first day I was human. How every human need I had, every pain and hunger all combined into two little words.”
    My hands crept towards the curve of his spine, finding the indentation of his bowed back. My fingers rested there lightly. “Mmm,” I agreed, wanting him to keep talking as I rubbed small slow circles against the soft skin of his lower back.
    “Two words,” he repeated, warm damp breath brushing my ear. His heart pounded over the soft skin exposed by my open jacket. A black leather jacket that had once been his. “Caspia. Home.”

Chapter Five:
    Shadow Sick

    I was dying or having a nightmare. Or both.
    The blood in my veins was on fire. An honest-to-God, five-alarm, someone put a bullet through my brain fire pulsed through me.
    My body was nothing but a fragile shell for the pain. Only two things could happen here: the burning would stop or I would die.
    I ran through strange corridors. Whispers rose and fell around me instead of wind. Everything was gray and barren, the walls around me crumbling. If there had once been a roof, it was long gone, so there was nothing to shelter me from the sky. I was barefoot, wearing nothing but my pajamas, not caring where I put my feet. Rocks and crumbling bits of wall littered the ground. I felt like I had run forever through gray stone corridors following whispers that led me, finally, to a courtyard.
    But the courtyard was gray too, gray and dead under an always-twilight sky. I collapsed on the edge of a dry fountain while my heart went supernova in my chest. Time runs differently in dreams, and death is forever. How long had I been running the corridors? Hours? Days? Above me the sky pulsated with all the shades of twilight. At home, this time of day was nothing but a bridge between day and night and a backdrop for the fairy lights in the park. It made me dizzy, though, and faintly sick, watching the symphony of twilight colors: shades of grays, blues and violets as they chased each other across the sky. My blood simmered with barely contained heat. I want, I thought. I want … something . God, I didn’t even know.
    After a moment a man stepped out from the shadows. Roughly my age, he wore nothing but loose dark pants and tattoos. Dark hair, faintly golden skin. For a long moment we stared at each other. I wished I could see the shape of his features, but the shadows made this difficult. Heat traveled through my veins in waves and I had to remind myself to even out my breathing. At first he just stared at me like we were in Hell and I was trying to sell him Girl Scout cookies. Then his eyes flashed silver. Not solid, like mine, but in pieces, like stars. Shooting stars of pure pissed off.
    “What are you doing here?” he demanded at last. “How did you get here?”
    “I ran,” I told him. I was acutely conscious of the fact that I wore nothing but thin pajamas. “I’m dying. Or having a nightmare,” I amended, hoping he would feel sorry for me.
    “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said sharply. “Even in the Dreamtime. You have to go back. Now.”
    “Who are you?” I demanded. I tried to memorize him, his tattoos, his face, but the light was too dim and he seemed to flicker with a faint blue light when I try to focus on him.
    “Doesn’t matter.” Barefoot, he moved with the speed of angels, perching easily beside me on the fountain’s edge. He grew increasingly agitated. “How did you find this place?”
    “There were corridors,” I tried to explain. My