Beloved Vampire Read Online Free PDF

household from a young age, after her mother’s death while bearing one of Farida’s siblings. It perhaps explained why Farida hadn’t been married off as young as other Bedouin girls were. But if she’d been dreaming, longing for more, it was not evident until that first journal entry. Of course, in her world such dreams were not indulged, and perhaps never would have been if her soul mate hadn’t stepped into her father’s tent.
    Jess didn’t have the comfort of Dawud’s faith. God, if such a being existed, had abandoned them all long ago, but she’d experienced a taste of an illusory paradise in stolen moments with Farida. Perhaps that was the only Heaven that truly existed, what love and imagination could create, explaining why she’d clung to belief in the story so firmly.
    She wanted to step into Farida’s body. She wanted not only to read about it, but to feel what she’d felt . . .

    JOURNAL ENTRY 102, PAGE 45
    Farida bint Asim
    He has a way of looking at me. I might be cooking my dinner, or using some precious water to wash. Though I rarely hear his approach, I know he is there. I close my eyes and smile as he takes the cloth from my hand and passes it over my skin, his male eyes watching it trickle down my breasts, my stomach.
    “Bathing is a woman’s job, my lord,” I tease him. “A handmaid’s task.”
    “I beg to differ. This is definitely a man’s job. And in your case”—he moves my hair to the side and finds my throat, telling me of his hunger—“only mine.”
    “I missed you.”
    “I know. I felt it.”
    009
    Jessica opened her eyes. I felt it. To be so close to another that such yearning emotion could be felt, even at a distance. It was the last entry, poignant and ironic at once. Ten days after that, just short of their leaving the Sahara to return to his family home, where they might have been safe for the duration of their lives, he was captured by the tribe, for they’d convinced the prince to help them with his resources. Farida disguised herself as a man and rode Lord Mason’s stallion proudly into her father’s camp. Then she pushed off her turban and requested the right to die with her husband.
    She’d drifted off. Jess blinked. The moon was full and bright now, the stars sparkling, diamonds in a vast darkness, a promise of light in so much unexplained void.
    During the day she’d managed to mostly re-cover the obelisk, pushing sand in with her feet, pacing herself. The desert winds would take care of the rest, as well as her shelter. She began to walk west. She had to stop several times, not only to check her direction, but to collapse, her bones quivering in the nighttime chill. Once she even slept, despite her best efforts to stay awake, but when she was roused by her own panic, it had been only a few minutes. Struggling back to her feet, she continued. Then she stopped to throw up bile and blood, and found she couldn’t regain her feet.
    “No,” she rasped. Then, a harsher snarl. “No.” She kept going, on her hands and knees. Since the moon and stars were bright, she didn’t use her flashlight, but she was tempted. She might not fear meeting God alone, but darkness was an entirely different matter.
    The last part of her journey took her up the back side of that tall dune. While less steep than the other side, it was still a challenge for her. Pushing back despair at her failing energy, she went, one struggling pace at a time, like a religious supplicant on a holy quest.
    Seventy-five shuffling feet up, she stopped, gasping. Felt around. Sand would have shifted so much over this time, but she had to believe he’d allowed for that, figured out something. Please let it be here. Please. It was here. She knew it. She’d prayed for it, would have sacrificed her soul to find it, if the devil wouldn’t have laughed at such a pathetic, battered offering. But maybe there was someone who could still find value in it.
    Exhausted, she rolled onto her back to look at the