Dreamveil by Viehl Lynn

Author:Viehl, Lynn [Viehl, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Onyx
Published: 2010-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Taire woke from the nightmare of the dark room with a shriek, and as soon as she realized where she was she pressed a hand over her mouth to smother the sounds until they stopped. She lay still and listened until the silence reassured her that no one was outside the closet. No one had heard; no one knew she was here.

A few months ago she would have spent the next hour crying into her pillow, but she had neither the tears nor the time to wallow in her misery. The sun was setting—she could always feel it, even in here—and she had to get up and get moving.

One of the hardest things for her to do was one of the simplest tasks in life, one she’d never thought about before she’d left home: bathing. The hotel had no running water, and there was no place in the city that did that would allow a runaway to make use of their facilities. Using the sinks in one of the few public restrooms to wash more than her hands was too embarrassing; Taire had tried it once and some tourist woman had actually tried to take a picture of her. A few of the kids she’d met on the streets sometimes used public fountains for a quick soak in their clothes during the summer nights—occasionally getting themselves arrested in the process—but Taire couldn’t risk it. After a month of being unable to wash herself properly, she’d started to bring her own water into the hotel, one bottle at a time.

Everyone drank bottled water these days, so it had been easy to scrounge enough bottles out of trash cans around the city. Every night she filled three of them at a public water fountain, tucked them in the pockets of her jacket, and carried them back to her place, where she stored them in a room on the first floor. Once she had collected twenty-one filled bottles, she had enough to bathe.

Taire uncapped the bottles and lined them up beside the tub in the first- floor room where she took her baths. After she cranked her flashlight and turned it on, she set it on the sink with the beam aimed at the tub. As she stripped off her clothes, the frigid air made her shiver, and the cold water in the bottles didn’t help. She’d learned to keep them covered with a mound of towels to prevent them from freezing solid, but it didn’t warm the water any.

She stepped into the tub and took the first bottle, pouring it slowly over her head while working her fingers through her hair. The water was so cold it made her gasp, but after the second bottle it wasn’t as much of a shock to her skin. It took another two bottles to get her body wet, and then she went to work with a mini bottle of shampoo and a thin bar of soap she’d scrounged from one of the housekeeping carts.

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