Who was she?

I woke with a start and sat up in bed, looking around. Frantic. My heart beat rapidly. There was a roar in my ears as blood raced through them. Who was she? And where?

I looked at my shaking hands and could’ve sworn I could still feel her. Her cold skin, the nightgown she wore. Satin, maybe. Her weight in my arms—not much, she was thin, but even so. She was there, a physical presence. Wasn’t she?

The otherwise empty motel room told another story.

I blinked hard as I ran my hands through my hair and talked myself down from near-panic.

All right, it was a dream. Just a dream. Dreams happen all the time. They weren’t real. But this one felt so damned real—I could smell death and salt air. I hadn’t even been to the beach in years. Decades. Not much time for fun.

Five thirty. Not hatefully early, though earlier than I wanted to get up. But if I went back to sleep, I’d never want to get up in an hour. And I had more miles to cover before I reached the city.

Sitting in rush hour traffic before I even got started was not the way I wanted to spend the last leg of my road trip.

The motel mattress was hard, unforgiving, and my back screamed in protest as I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up before gravity and sleepiness pulled me back down. Even an uncomfortable mattress was better than getting out of bed in the dark. Alone. In a shitty motel room in the middle of nowhere.

A hot shower helped work out some of the tightness in my back and shoulders. I leaned on my forearms against the shower wall—it was clean, at least, to the point where the smell of cleanser made my nose wrinkle in distaste—and let the water run down for a long time.

After I got to the city, what was I supposed to do? I had never held a job. I had no skills. I had no way to pretend I had skills.

I had a healthy savings in the bank—at least, I hoped it was healthy, though I knew how high the cost of living was in Manhattan.

At least I had something to fall back on. One thing they hadn’t taken away from me. One of the only things.

I was lucky Dominic had offered use of the old apartment at all.

It couldn’t have been easy for him, and it wouldn’t curry him any favor with the rest of our kind even if he owed me much more.

No. Not our kind. Not anymore. His kind.

I wasn’t one of them anymore. After spending my entire life as one of them, it would take time to catch up in my brain to the reality of losing my powers.

The reminder stung.

I pushed it aside in favor of returning to that dream. I had no idea who the girl was, but her face was still so clear to me.

My dreams were never that vivid, not to the point where I made up people I’d never met or even seen from a distance. Her long, black hair. The delicate nose and high cheekbones. Full lips. Even though she was a wreck—lips dry and cracked, eyes ringed in dark circles, hair limp and dirty—there was beauty to her. She’d be stunning under different circumstances.

What I’d done during the dream didn’t take much interpretation to understand. I was powerful again. I had my skills back.

A sorcerer the way I’d always been. I had effortlessly cleared the way once I entered that awful, crumbling room.

There was no time to look around, but it seemed like an old ballroom or something of that nature, in a former life, before it turned into a home for bats and rodents and any number of slinking, crawling creatures.

When those creatures had come at me, I’d mowed them down and felt almost gleeful while doing it. Their cries of shock and surprise had sent fire rushing through my veins.

I finished shaving and looked down at my hands.

There was no magic left in them. Not so much as a spark when I held my palms up and concentrated hard enough to make my head hurt. I never even had to concentrate before. A flick of a wrist, and whatever I had envisioned became true. I had taken that power for granted. What I wouldn’t give…

“Enough.” I looked myself in the eye, palms down on the cheap, particle board vanity.

The mirror reflected a tired, worn-out man when all I’d ever seen before was confidence. Youth. Vibrancy. I would have to get to know myself all over again—or, rather, for the first time. I’d never been one for self-reflection.

I had, however, always been single-minded. Once I set my sights on something, it was mine. No questions asked, no excuses accepted. I only had to turn that single-minded focus back on. But what was there to focus my time and energy on?

“You will build a life for yourself,” I muttered, still staring at the man in the mirror. “You will be successful, as you’ve always been. You don’t need the power to be you. You were always more than your powers.”

I wished I believed it.

What was a sorcerer without his powers? Easy: a human. A pathetic, weak, cowardly, stupid human. I found myself examining my dark brown hair for signs of gray, then chided myself. The aging process wouldn’t speed up by much. I’d look thirty for a long time.

Just not as long as I would have before losing everything that made me who I was.

I closed my eyes and turned away, marching into the bedroom area and flipping on the TV for background noise.

As long as I didn’t feel so lonely, the self-doubt and apprehension didn’t gnaw so hard at my gut.

The nightly news was on, and the normal litany of disasters was being rattled off by the anchors.

Even on the other side of the country, in a hick town in the middle of nowhere, stories were the same. Only the locations changed.

Instead of Sunset Boulevard, it was a heavily-traveled highway winding through the Appalachians. Accidents, missing people, robberies. The story of a trucker whose badly decomposed body was found in the woods, miles from the motel he’d been staying at. He’d gotten in an altercation at a diner with a man that customers later told police seemed supernaturally powerful, and wasn’t seen again after that.

Whoa.

That got my attention.

Supernatural powers?

Humans were so quick to dismiss the obvious. Cops assumed the guy was on drugs which only made him seem strong, but I knew better. That was no human they’d been in the presence of that day at the diner.

I couldn’t blame them, the humans. They didn’t understand, so they tried to connect the dots. They’d long since been brainwashed into believing we were nothing but the stuff of folk tales, invented by ancestors even more hopelessly backward than they were. So they blamed drugs, or strange disorders, or untrustworthy eyes when they witnessed the truth.

There was a very sloppy vampire out there somewhere who had let humans see him for what he was.

He was probably long gone by now—and I wouldn’t want to cross paths with him even if he wasn’t.

Gone were the days of hunting vampires for sport.

Did Dominic still do that sort of thing? I would’ve bet on it. He was one of the most merciless hunters I had ever seen, lightning fast and without compunction when it came to taking down his prey.

I could never keep up with him. Not for lack of trying.

I clicked the TV off and tossed the remote aside.

It was past time to get moving.

Maybe if I drove long enough and fast enough, I could outrun my memories.

New York would be a good change of pace. If there was a city in the world in which I could start again, it was there.