The Strip by Heather Killough-Walden, Gildart Jackson Read Free Book Online

over again. Another wave of nausea rolled through her and she tried to take a deep breath. Her lungs didn’t seem to want to expand, at least not all the way. She could only get half a breath. One half here, one half there.
    When her heart skipped again and another terrible chill racked her body, she shoved off her soaked covers and stood. Dizziness washed over her. She sat back down and put her head between her knees.
    “Breathe,” she told herself. “Just breathe. Think of thunderstorms….” She tried to imagine an anvil cloud above her, the wind of a racing tempest on the way, the rumble of thunder as the storm gained ground on all who fled before it.
    To anyone else, such a vision would probably have been less than settling. But she’d always loved storms. She loved the way there was no controlling them. No stopping them. They were in charge. They were awesome. There was nothing anyone could do but stay inside and wait them out. She loved that.
    Her lungs opened up a little more and the nausea passed. She imagined the sound of the rain hitting a tin rooftop. She closed her eyes and could smell the damp soil. It was her favorite scent in the world.
    After a few minutes, she was able to sit back up again. In her mind, lightning cracked the night sky and thunder rolled. She was in a cabin beside a warm fire. It crackled invitingly as the gale raged outside.
    Slowly, as the world’s claws retracted around her, Claire opened her eyes. When she did, she continued to breathe calmly and looked around.
    The hotel suite she was in was enormous and opulent. It had been decorated with lavish tastes. It was a no-holds-barred luxuriousness that made Claire more than slightly uncomfortable. She almost felt as if it wasn’t just her music that was being purchased.
    In truth, and to put it bluntly, it made her feel cheap, despite the obvious high-end price tag of everything around her. The room was on floor beneath the penthouse level of The August and overlooked the entire Las Vegas strip below. The floor to ceiling windows were covered at the moment; she’d pulled the curtains before heading to bed.
    Now Claire stood and went to the windows, slowly drawing them open. As ever, the city was wide awake so many feet below. She raised her gaze to the line where the lights seemed to stop and the desert reclaimed the night. It looked peaceful out there beyond the synthetic, neon-lipped fracture that humans had carved into the region’s face.
    At that moment, she desperately wished that she were out there somewhere, sleeping beneath the stars, with nothing for companions but the coyotes. She took another deep, cleansing breath, hugged herself against the chill that would not leave her slender form, and let her breath out in a long, weary sigh.
    She wasn’t going to get any rest this night. She knew that now. Every time she closed her eyes, they were there.
    The first dream to come was always about the man with the blue eyes that seemed to delve into her very soul, paralyzing her as they ripped away the layers of her secrets and exposed her to her core. It laid her bare and vulnerable, shivering in her sleep until the second dream rolled along.
    Without fail, it was of the man with the piercing green eyes whose perfect, white smile she could only just make out in her mind’s eye. She remembered that he was painfully handsome… the kind of man you couldn’t make eye contact with because it lit up too many fires within you.
    Claire was disarmed by his dream. He seemed to catch her unawares. He took her pleasantly by surprise. And yet, when she awoke, she could barely remember his face. All she could recall clearly was the green of his eyes. As sleep faded away, the dream image hid from her like a flounder in the sand. She would always roll over, frustrated and despondent.
    Until the third dream invaded her mind. The beast. The teeth and claws and the terror-induced flight through a landscape that fought her at every step. The force