“I know,” Sadira whispered. I could only guess that Tristan had caught her up on the evening’s events while I drifted in and out of consciousness. She was standing beside me. Her small hand swept over my forehead, pushed hair away from my face. “But we need to heal you now.”

“Triad—”

“None of that matters. None of that matters without you.” Sadira pressed a kiss to my cheek and then my forehead. “I need you to relax your mind.”

“Tired. So…tired.” I was exhausted. Tired of fighting, tired of the pain.

And then something stirred. Swamped within the pain, I felt something faint shift in my thoughts, but as I tried to focus on it, it slipped away, pulling back into the swirling mist that consumed my thoughts. I reached out again, searching for the movement, and then the pain was gone.

My eyes flew open and I screamed. My thoughts came to a screeching halt as I looked around me. The wall of books and stern-looking men was completely gone. The gleaming hardwood streaked with my blood was gone. Around me were cold stone walls and wooden torches held in wrought-iron sconces guttering with firelight in the large room. It was a dungeon. It was the dungeon below Sadira’s castle in Spain. It was the room where I’d been reborn.

Another scream of panic rose up in my throat as I sat up and twisted around to thoroughly scan the room. It couldn’t be the same place. When I closed my eyes, I’d been dying on a boardroom table in England. Sadira didn’t have the ability to instantly flit from place to place like Jabari. It couldn’t be real.

“It’s not real.” Her disembodied voice floated through the air for a moment before she came through the stone wall to my right and stood beside where I sat on the long stone slab. “The pain was taking you away from me. I needed to take you away from the pain so I could heal you. The damage is…extensive. Organs have been shredded and your heart has been punctured. You’re dying.”

“I guessed as much,” I sighed. Anxiety crawled up my spine, digging claws into my back. I could tell my brain that it wasn’t real, but rising panic wasn’t buying it. It looked real, it felt real, it smelled real. “But why here?”

“I need you to trust me,” Sadira said with a soft smile, tilting her head to one side. “This is the one time in your life you trusted me completely.”

A snort escaped me as I swung my legs over the side of the stone table and dropped to my feet, putting the table between us. “I have never trusted you.”

“That is an interesting lie,” she chided. “You lay helpless night after night for ten years, completely dependent upon me to keep you alive. I was in your mind; you never doubted that I would return each night to you.”

I stood with my left hip pressed against the stone slab, my arms crossed over my chest. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sadira watching me, waiting for my response. I knew she was right. I had trusted her to bring me into her world, not to abandon me. But at that point my only other option was death.

For a moment Sadira’s image wavered, and I turned to face her, automatically reaching for her, but my hand passed through her. “So much damage…” Her voice whispered through the air, but her lips never moved. She was having troubling repairing the damage and maintaining the fantasy world. Pain cut through my chest, doubling me over, my forehead pressed against the stone table before me. I felt nothing but the pain for several seconds before it faded again like a wave pulling back out to sea.

When I stood again, Sadira was before me. Her face was strained and pale, but she was with me again. “There is so much damage. I wish I could reach Jabari,” she absently said. She wasn’t looking at me, but down at the table that stood between us. “But then he may use that as an excuse to take you back.”

Something twisted in my stomach that had nothing to do with the wound she was fighting to close. Jabari couldn’t help her. Only Sadira could heal me. She was the one that made me a nightwalker, and only her blood could repair the wounded flesh she’d helped to create. I hesitated to ask. Sadira was very careful with knowledge, well-aware that controlling the flow of information was the easiest way to control her children. Despite her distracted demeanor, she didn’t drop that information without a very good reason.

“Only you can save me.” Even if it was all an illusion, the words tasted bad on my tongue as I said them.

Laughter danced in Sadira’s eyes as she looked up at me. “How I wish that were true.” She chuckled even as the light seemed to die from her expression. “Jabari has watched you from the moment I found you in Greece. I was allowed to keep you only if I promised to bring you before him whenever he commanded. And when the time came to bring you into the darkness, it was agreed that you would be a First Blood.”

“What do you mean ‘agreed’?” The statement implied that others were involved in the discussion about my fate, but there was never anyone but Sadira and her children around. As a human, I was occasionally brought before the Coven and other Ancients as a form of amusement, but Jabari had never been around then.

“Jabari and Tabor discussed it.” Sadira reached across the table and took my right hand in both of her hands. Turning my arm over, she ran the fingers of her left hand down the inside of my arm. “My blood runs in your veins—shaped your organs and gave you an immortal life—but so does Jabari’s and Tabor’s.”

“No!” I jerked my arm out of her grasp and took a step back. “I don’t remember either of them.”

“You were barely alive. It was easier to manipulate your memories then.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, pacing away from the table. There was no sound in the room, not even my footsteps on the stone floor. There were only our voices, because that was the point of bringing me here, not helping me to escape the pain. There was something she needed to tell me regardless of whether I wanted to hear it. “Why?”

“You were different, Mira.” Sadira walked to the end of the table and started to come around it but stopped when I backpedaled, trying to keep some distance between us. “There was no human like you. It was more than your ability to control fire. We could sense an energy in your soul that we had never felt before. So, we decided to make you into a nightwalker, but we knew you would have to be a First Blood if we were to have any chance to preserve this energy.”

“So you made me into a First Blood. That was part of our agreement. What about Jabari and Tabor?”

“Do you think Jabari would allow me to make a creature that could potentially destroy him?” Sadira demanded, incredulous. “Of course not. But if his blood flowed in you, he was sure you would feel bound to him, protecting him from your temper. It would also enable him to know your location at any time.”

I turned my back on Sadira, a chill sweeping through me as a slight pain throbbed in my chest. It was nowhere near as intense as before, but was a subtle reminder that there was another world I had to return to. I stared down at my bare arm, my pale, white skin unmarred and unbroken. The reality of my raw and bruised wrists did not bleed into this illusion. It wasn’t important. My focus was on the blue veins below my skin. Jabari’s blood filled my veins in some way, had helped to give me this life.

“Yet things did not go how he had hoped.”

Sadira’s words jerked my head up. She had silently walked around the table and now leaned back against it. Her small slender hands were folded before her stomach.

“What happened?”

“You remained…you,” she said with a smile, while an odd glow grew in her eyes.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means he assumed that you would be easier to control as a vampire because you could be subjected to more intense forms of punishment without being killed due to your human frailties. But you refused to obey me. You refused to obey any Ancient that crossed your path. Also, I refused to give you up, so you were stolen.”