He watched her from a distance. A thin gown covered her body as the mist at her feet did the ground, concealing the sharpest of details, delicately revealing the rest. Each step swirled the diaphanous night vapor around her ankles, rising, caressing her, and then flowing back over the pebbles of the narrow pathway. The sound of a heartbeat echoed in his ears. Was it hers, his, or a blending of both? He strained to see more, understand more, but the shadows and muted colors of night mocked his efforts as the moonlight ebbed and flowed with the passing clouds. His hand reached forward then halted, fingers curling back, a heavy breath pushing into the darkness. The gossamer figure slipped around the path's curve and stepped slowly toward the imposing cliff and the door set into the rock.

One arm outstretched, she pressed at the large stone door that loomed before her. For a moment, the small round carving on the door shimmered in a faint green glow, the design a memory just out of reach. The groan of burdened hinges, a grating as fingernails on a chalkboard, heralded the portal's opening. The sound moved over his flesh with the feel of a frigid wind. The breach was as black as pitch. Even the faint moonlight seemed to refuse to cross the threshold. Her long dark hair billowed back from an out rush of air and then quickly swung forward, as if the darkness inhaled. She turned to look at him over her shoulder, eyes of blue ice, lips the color of fanned embers; her paleness now amplified by the framing of the blackness before her. Her body twisted toward him, the curve of hip and breast made clear. A conscious act of seduction on her part reflected in the slight upturned corners of her mouth. The hand that pushed open the door now stretched out toward him and one finger with a blood red fingernail curled slowly, calling him closer. He could not feel a step taken and yet the distance between them narrowed until he stared into the subtle shades of palest blue eyes, their hues flickering before him. As he inhaled, her scent filled his head, everything around him fading into the mist but her. Like a predator, her desire, her hunger, revealed to him by her musk, like prey, he did not understand why. Her outreached hand let a single finger touch his face. "Khaba..."

Quinn jolted up in his bed, a cold sweat covering his body. He felt on fire where the touch of her finger still lingered on his skin, yet deep within him ran a cold thread that heralded more than seen in the dream. He inhaled, pulling at her lingering scent. Why he held to it so desperately eluded him in the still fogged haze of trying to wake. With hurried desperation, he placed the scent firmly in his mind, as a feeling of déjà vu sent yet another cold chill through him.

The woman beside him shifted. He looked over at the small blonde; a sheet half covering his newly made friend from the Saint Patrick's party, Cindy, no Candy, his mind still split between dream and reality. The dream seemed a little more corporal each time he had it and this time, the scent made it too real. He let a single finger trace over his cheek as hers had in the dream, trying to recapture the jumble of feelings a moment more. The tingle of cold slithered up his spine. How could a woman, whose lips looked as though they could set a man ablaze with a passing touch, cause such a shiver? It was just a dream. Dreams are not suppose to make sense. He held on to more of the dream each time it came to him, even though he could not visualize her face as a whole. Eyes, lips, a piercing with a green stone in her left nostril, bits and pieces but never the whole. He tried his best to file each little clue to her, to the dream, away in his mind.

Candy shifted and sighed, seemingly lost in a dream of her own. Quinn's gaze focused on the soft features of her face. His dream pushed to one side by the memory of watching this beautiful woman flirt with him across a crowded room. The way she seemed to appear and vanish at will among the other partygoers, a butterfly in a field of flowers, her antics held him captive most the evening. His mind filled with the music of their first dance. How when the third dance ended, he held up her hand and led them to the small terrace, taking two glasses of wine on the way. He handed her one, "Quinn White."