Hey, sorry it's taken me a little while to update. I have been really busy lately. I am officially an editor. I'm about halfway through editing a book that is going to be published. No info on the title or the publishing date as of right now, but I will keep you posted. Well, let's get to it…

"Rose, get some sleep. We've been at this for three days and you haven't had a wink of sleep." Dimitri said. We were in the back of an SUV, still trying to find Maya.

I was in the middle of the back seat, leaning forward and looking out the windshield. It was true, we had been at this for three days, but I hadn't gotten any sleep in four days. I was extremely tired, but I knew that I couldn't sleep. It wasn't just that my daughter was missing – although that did play a large part in my insomnia – it was also that I kept thinking about what might be happening with her. It had been three days. I didn't want to think about it, but there was a part of me that thought she was…dead.

"I can't. You go ahead." I said, without looking at him.

He sighed. "Look, I'll stay up while you sleep, and if something comes up, I'll wake you."

I finally sat back and looked at him. I whispered, "Dimitri, I don't think this is working. I have a plan, but I'm going to need some help."

"Roza, you know that I go along with most of your plans, but I can't go with this one. The guardians know what they're doing. If you go off by yourself, you could get hurt. Or worse." Why did he always have to sound so…reasonable?

"Fine." I said, angry that he wouldn't back me up. I leaned forward and looked through the windshield again. This whole time I had been gathering energy from being angry. If I gave in to my desperate need and worrying, I would crumble apart.

Dimitri scooted closer to me and whispered in my ear, "Sweet, I may have already lost my daughter. I can't risk losing you, too."

"Yeah, me either."

Dimitri and I screamed and jumped forward. The SUV lunged to the right, and then got back on track. We looked behind us to see Lissa looking over the seat at us. "Liss, what are you doing here?" I shrieked.

"You didn't think I could let you go on yet another trip without me, did you? You guys always leave me out of these things. I'm telling you I can help." Something was wrong with her. "Look, here's the thing, I…" Tears started to fall down her face. "I can't stand this! I will not stay at court while you put yourselves in danger looking for Maya. I love her, too, and I can help!"

I took a peek into her head. Oh. My. God.

"Lissa! I told you to pay attention to how much you were healing… Oh, forget it." I closed my eyes and started drawing some darkness from her. I felt arms grab me, but I didn't pay too much attention to it.

Suddenly, the arms went away. I couldn't feel the motion of the car anymore. I opened my eyes to see Adrian. I realized that I must've passed out. I hadn't been to sleep in so long, and add taking darkness from Lissa with that, it equals me passing out.

I looked around. We were in a very weird place. Well, I wouldn't really call it a place at all. We were surrounded by darkness, except for a strange fog that went up to my knees. The only other thing there besides Adrian and I was a tree. It was huge, and had what seemed like a million leaves.

"Rose, what's wrong?" Adrian said.

I was immediately taken back to before Maya was born, when I had passed out on the jet. I shook the thought and said, "Nothing, why?"

Adrian looked me up and down. I thought he was just being a pervert until his eyebrows furrowed. "Your…eyes."

Speaking of my eyes, I rolled them. "Adrian, just spit it out."

He looked me right in the eyes. "Fine. I've been waiting forever for you to go to sleep. But you didn't go to sleep, did you? Something happened, and you passed out. What is going on? I mean, look around us. What happened to you?"

"Adrian, you're the one who decides where we go and what we wear. Why are you yelling at me about that?" I snarled. I didn't know why, but suddenly I was really mad at him.

He grabbed my arm, but I shook him off. "Rose, you're eyes are blood red. I let your mind decide where we go, and this is what you dreamt up." Adrian's eyes suddenly went wide. "Oh, God. You were taking darkness from Lissa, weren't you? You took too much and passed out."

"That is none of your business, Adrian. Quit getting on my case, and just tell me what you brought me here for." I was fed up of this.

Adrian walked over to the tree, and ran his hand across it as he walked around it. "I was just worried." he said. "About Maya, that is."

I looked down at the ground. When he'd said Maya's name, I realized that I should be awake right now. "Adrian, can you wake me up?"

He shook his head. "You're the only one who can do that. But, Rose, I gotta tell you that not only do you look like you need some sleep, but you actually do. Pretty soon, you'll start dreaming while you're awake, you just won't know it. You'll start seeing things. Let…Dimitri handle things while you sleep." He'd sneered when he said Dimitri's name.

I walked quickly over to him. I put my hands on his face and made him look at me. "Adrian, listen to me. I am so sorry. I know that…all of this is difficult for you. But you have to understand that I love Dimitri. He's the father of my child and the love of my life. What we have is something that I have never felt before, and it's something that I don't fully understand, but I know that he is the one I'm meant to be with."

I'd tried to say it as softly as I could, but the look on his face told me that I hadn't said it soft enough.

"Look, I realize that. Do you really think I'm that stupid?" I was going to say no, but he continued talking. "I know that you love Maya and Dimitri more than anything, but does that mean that things have to be this way between us?"

I looked at him like I thought his head was going to explode. I had no idea what he meant by that. "Hey, you're the one who's been making things like this. I've tried to be your friend, Adrian. You don't want to be mine."

He sighed. "Forget it. You aren't getting what I'm saying."

He tried to turn away from me but I grabbed his arms and held him there. "No. You do not get to turn away from me right now. What is it you're getting at? I don't understand these riddles you keep giving me. Just spit it out!"

"Fine. You want me to spell it out for you? Well, here you go: I. Don't. Want. To. Be. Friends."

For a minute, I still didn't get what he was talking about. I mean, I had already told him that I loved Dimitri and that nothing would ever happen between him and I. I tried to think things through in my head.

He said that he understood Dimitri and I were together and that that was how things were going to stay, so he knows I'm not going to be in a relationship with him. He said he doesn't want things to be like they are between us, so that means that he wants to be friends and stop all the fighting and weird stuff going on. But he says that he doesn't want to be friends. What did all of that mean? He wants to be goody-goody with me, without being friends?

And that was when I got it.

I slapped Adrian hard on the face. After he took a step back, I snarled, "You bastard! Why are you doing this? Adrian, things could be so much easier between the two of us, but you just can't accept things, can you? You want me to cheat on Dimitri with you? You're delusional and sick!"

He narrowed his eyes at me, holding his cheek where I'd slapped it. "Fine then. I guess we can't be friends."

The dream dissolved and I was left in a dreamless sleep.

[BREAK]

"Roza? Rose, wake up. We need you." Dimitri said. I could feel him shaking my arm, trying to wake me up.

I opened my eyes and blinked a couple of times. It was dark, which meant that it was nighttime yet again. In some ways that was good. We would be able to find strigoi roaming around in the dark and they could lead us right into their lair. In some ways it was bad. They not only could come out during the night, but they were also at their strongest.

"What's going on?" I asked. "What time is it?"

Lissa peeked her head over the back seat. "We found a building the strigoi are staying in."

I looked to Dimitri for confirmation. He nodded and added, "We've scouted out the place. It seems like there are about four strigoi inside. We figure it won't be too hard to kill three of them and hold a fourth to get information from."

I nodded, sitting up so that I could fully wake up. I was already alert in my mind, but my body said a different thing. To prove that point, I yawned.

"Are you sure you're up to this, Hathaway?" the driver asked me. His name was Holmes, but I hadn't really talked to him much before then. He was a guardian.

I snorted. "Of course I'm up for this. That's my daughter out there. She could be hurt. There is no way I'm staying here while you guys get to do all the work." Like I'd told Dimitri earlier, I'd had a plan. As soon as I got a strigoi, I was going to unleash my ghostly friends to get the information I needed.

"Well, with that settled, let's get going. Belikov, Hathaway, you guys are going to come in through the back as Lissa makes a distraction in the front. We'll be in hiding near Lissa so that when the strigoi come for her we can take them down." He motioned at the other guardian sitting in the passenger's seat. I thought his name was Jon.

"The four guardians in the other SUV," he motioned to the SUV parked in front of us, "will enter in through the front while we're taking the strigoi down. As soon as you hear a foghorn, go in. Remember: our job isn't to kill all the strigoi, it's to get at least one of them captive so that we can get information from them."

I looked at him like he was stupid. "Duh. I'm trying to save my little girl, here."

He shrugged his shoulders and got out of the car. I knew I should've been a little more concerned for Lissa, but at the time I couldn't think about anything else but getting my little girl back. He opened the back of the SUV and grabbed Lissa's hand so that she could get out easier. She gracefully climbed out of the SUV, looking like the princess she was.

Dimitri and I watched as they snuck to the front of the building. We saw the guardians in the SUV in front of us getting out and getting ready to go into the building. "You ready?" Dimitri asked me.

"As I ever will be." I replied automatically.

We snuck out of the car and to the back of the building. There was one door here, but it was steel, and there was no way we'd be able to knock it down if it was locked. It was a good thing there were windows in the back, even if they were really high.

Dimitri and I exchanged a glance before he nodded at me. He cupped his hands so that I could stick one of my feet in it and boosted me up. I latched on to the roof and pulled myself the rest of the way up. From there, I grabbed the latch on the outside of the window - I hadn't ever seen windows with latches on the outside so it took me a minute to work it - and opened it slowly. It didn't make a noise as it opened.

We sat there waiting for our signal. Dimitri was so wound up, he was bouncing back and forth from foot to foot - something I hadn't really ever seen in him before. I knew that he was just as worried about Maya as I was, even though that was really hard to imagine.

Just when I thought something had gone wrong, the foghorn sounded and I bolted into the window. I didn't wait to hear if Dimitri had gotten in before I ran down the hallway I was in and into the nearest room.

There were two guardians in here. One was fighting a strigoi, the other was unconscious on the floor. The strigoi's back was turned to me, and he obviously hadn't heard me come in because he didn't even turn to look. I lunged forward and thrust my stake through his back, all the way to his heart.

He gave a cough that sounded wet and went down. I nodded at the guardian - a woman who I thought was named Belle - and darted out the door again. I ran to the next room. Dimitri was there, but he didn't look like how I thought he would.

He just stood there, staring at a strigoi who was about ten feet from him on the other side of the room. I was about to rush forward and attack it for him when I saw what had stopped him from rushing the strigoi.

It was holding my baby girl in its arms, smiling while he did it.

"You want this?" he asked, evil smile still in place.

I stepped forward. "I swear to God, if you-"

Dimitri put his arm out, stopping me from going any further and cutting off my words. He didn't look at me as he did it, he just looked at the strigoi. "What do you want?"

The strigoi started to pace back and forth, smiling all the while. I wanted to go over there and wipe that stupid smile off his face. "Oh, you know what I want. I want her blood."

He was talking about Maya. Her blood had the ability to let him go into the sunlight, and that was something a strigoi wanted more than anything else in the world. It would allow him to hunt constantly, especially if we didn't know he was able to. If the moroi public thought that the strigoi still couldn't come out in the daytime, they wouldn't know to protect themselves.

"Well, that is something you can't have." Dimitri told him, snarling.

The strigoi touched Maya's nose, causing her to cry. The sound of it tore my heart in two. On one hand, I hated the fact that she was crying. It made me feel like she needed my help and I wasn't able to go to her. On the other hand, it pissed me off. I wanted to rip this bloodsucker's head off.

"Oh, I know I can't have it now. She hasn't ripened yet. Her blood won't work for another…five years? Yes, about that." the strigoi teased.

I took a step, even though Dimitri was trying to hold me back. "We'll give you anything you want other than her."

His eyes narrowed and looked at me. "Even the Dragomir Princess?"

I gasped. Had this been his plan the entire time? Take Maya before…her blood ripened - as he put it - and then bargain with us for Lissa? Well, if it was, he was in for a big surprise. I knew that what I was about to do wasn't all that smart. I mean, he could drop Maya. But, I thought, I would jump out and catch her before she could hit the ground.

I closed my eyes and focused, counting on Dimitri protecting me if I needed him to. When I heard the strigoi gasp I knew that I had done it.

I opened my eyes to see ghosts walking around us. They went straight for the strigoi, scaring the crap right out of him. He let go of Maya, trying to run as fast as he could around the ghosts, who were trying to hurt him even though they couldn't.

I darted forward, hands out to reach Maya.

I swear my heart stopped beating in that moment. Every part of me was screaming that I was too late. Sure, my hands would catch Maya's feet, but there was no way her head wouldn't hit the ground, probably killing her. If she died, or even got hurt, I would never forgive myself. I was her mother, and it was my duty to take care of her.

Just when I was sure she was going to hit the ground, a hand snaked out and put itself under her head, keeping it from hitting the ground. I looked up from the hand, to its elbow, up to its shoulder, and finally into loving brown eyes.

Dimitri had saved our daughter.

"Come on, Roza. We need to go." he said, handing Maya over to me and corralling me out of the room.

We didn't come across anymore strigoi on the way out of the building. We didn't say anything as we ran as fast as we could to the SUV. The only sound as we ran was Maya's steady crying.

"Go!" Dimitri yelled as we jumped into the SUV. Holmes, Jon, and Lissa had already gotten back in the car since they never went in the building where all the real action was.

Holmes stepped on the gas, leading us and my whole-again family back home.