by Kelly Oram
Ethan, help me!
Ethan swung the door open, and when he saw Andrew he said a word that was strictly forbidden at Atherton Prep Academy. His whole body went rigid as if he was getting ready to pounce, but he didn’t actually move.
“What have you told her?” he asked Andrew.
“Interesting company you keep, love,” Andrew said to me without taking his eyes off Ethan.
Ethan just stood there. Why wasn’t he doing anything? Andrew wasn’t that big and didn’t appear to be armed. If Ethan took down Randy, he could totally take Andrew. Why was he just standing there?
Was it because I hadn’t wanted Ethan’s help? I’d asked him to stop over and over, and now here I was desperate for him to come to my rescue. I’d been so mean to him. So ungrateful. He hated me enough now that he wasn’t going to help me.
I’m sorry, okay? I’m so sorry! I know I don’t deserve it, but please help me! Don’t let him hurt me!
Ethan’s eyes snapped to me, and his face went dead white. Seeing him look so completely shocked and afraid made me panic. I couldn’t just lie there and wait when I could still taste Andrew’s blood in my mouth. I fought again as hard as I could and ended up kicking the corner post of my bed with my cast. Searing pain surged up from my foot and brought on a new wave of tears.
“Grace, just stop for a minute before you make things worse!” Ethan barked. He looked at Andrew and said, “What is going on?”
I was so shocked I stopped moving.
How could Ethan be yelling at me right now? And for trying to fight off an attacker? Especially when Ethan didn’t seem to be planning an intervention. How could he be mad at me for this? It’s not like it was my fault.
Ethan’s anger confused me so much that I started bawling uncontrollably.
“My business is nothing that concerns you.” Andrew sounded way too calm for the situation. “The girl is human. It is my right to claim her.”
“I’ll kill you if you try it.”
Ethan’s threat was enough to make Andrew spring into a defensive crouch in front of me.
Once I was free, I couldn’t think of running or fighting. The only thing I could do was roll onto my side and throw up.
Ethan gasped and Andrew’s response was viscous and smug at the same time. “Yes, you’re too late. There is no stopping the Change now. It is best you forget the girl and let us be on our way.”
Suddenly, there was a blinding light in my room that made Andrew scream in pain. Then Ethan flew at Andrew.
Literally.
Flew at him.
Because he had wings.
I’d never seen anything like him. He was radiating a heavenly glow and had huge snow-white wings that looked more glorious than anything on this earth had a right to look.
I was so awed by the sight before me that I couldn’t even process the impossibility of it. “Beautiful,” I whispered.
I couldn’t recognize the danger I was in, either, until there were two gigantic, snarling wolves bursting through my bedroom door. Then I became paralyzed with fear.
Ethan had Andrew pinned on the floor and the two wolves flanked him on either side. Their presence made Andrew go insane with rage.
“I have done no wrong! Council law allows me to claim a human mate if I so desire!”
“This human is under my protection,” Ethan hissed.
“She is already mine!” Andrew shouted. “My blood already courses her veins!”
The wolves yelped in reaction to Andrew’s statement and one of them crossed the room to my bed. Seeing it come toward me finally unlocked my frozen body.
I scrambled off my bed into the corner of my room, screaming.
The wolf followed me, whining the way a puppy would if it was frightened. It pushed its nuzzle against my head. The moment it touched me, its entire body collapsed.
I didn’t stop screaming until I realized that the wolf in my lap had just transformed into my best friend. She seemed very disoriented for a moment and frightened until she met my eyes.
“Did you really drink his blood?” she asked.
I didn’t know how to talk to her. I didn’t know if I could talk anymore. I was still in shock from being attacked by a psycho. Not to mention my bodyguard had wings, and my best friend was lying completely naked in my lap after having just morphed from a giant wolf.
“Gracie?” Cynthia asked, hot tears streaming down her face.
The only thing I could do was sit there and let my own tears run like a waterfall down my cheeks.
Cynthia pulled my shaking body into her arms. “I’m so sorry!” she said over and over again. “Gracie, I’m so sorry!”
“You see?” Andrew asked, turning everyone’s attention away from the freaked out human girl having a mental breakdown. “You are too late, young nephilim.”
“I don’t really care,” Ethan said. “I’m still going to kill you for this.”
“The less vampire filth in this world, the better,” another angry voice grumbled in agreement.
I looked to see who had spoken and immediately regretted it. The other wolf was gone and Caleb was standing in its place, still flanking Ethan’s side. And yes—he was every bit as naked as his sister.
It’s amazing that as confused, and terrified, and as in shock as I was, I could still be flooded with embarrassment because there was a naked guy in my room. A very good-looking naked guy. I blushed as red as a fire engine.
I pinched my eyes shut and buried my face in Cynthia’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, Grace.” She ran her hand over my hair as she hugged me. “We’ll figure this out. You’re going to be okay.” She kissed my head and then said, “What are you waiting for, Ethan?”
“If you wrongly bring any harm to me, you will start a war,” Andrew said.
“One that your coven would have no chance of winning,” Ethan replied.
“The council will take action.”
“But I’ll feel better.”
“So will I,” Caleb said.
Ethan wrapped his fingers around Andrew’s neck, and Andrew became desperate. “Do you know what happens to vampire fledglings when they don’t have their Sire to help them through the transition? Without that bond, they are driven mad. They cannot control their bloodlust. If you kill me, you will destroy her. She’ll become a monster!”
Cynthia started crying again and squeezed me so hard I almost couldn’t breathe. I found the force of the embrace comforting.
After a long moment of silence Ethan finally let go of Andrew, but he was seriously unhappy about it.
“Get out of here right now before I change my mind and kill you anyway.”
Andrew climbed to his feet and smoothed out his clothes with a very satisfied look on his face. When he turned to me, his smile melted into something softer. Something that frightened me. Something that disgusted me.
He held out his hand to me. “Come, love.”
Cynthia’s body turned to a steel cage around me. “You’re not taking her anywhere.”
“She is one of my kind now,” Andrew said simply. He wasn’t ruffled by Cynthia’s temper at all now that Ethan had let him go. He was completely serene because he was getting his way and he knew it.
“She hasn’t changed yet! She’s not yours until she’s a vampire!”
Andrew smiled again with his honey-gold eyes looking so warm they appeared to be liquid.
“Grace,” he said softly. “The change is painful, love, and very disorienting. You will be much more comfortable in the safety of your new home with others of your own kind.”
He held his hand out to me and I literally cowered away from him. So much for being like any of the girls in the books I’d read, or brave like Preston claimed. I wasn’t strong at all. Just pathetic.
When Andrew moved as if to take me by force, Caleb shifted back into a wolf and placed himself between Andrew and me.
Andrew glared at Ethan, who laughed in response. “Do you see me holding a leash? You kn
ow how wolves are—temperamental and territorial as hell. I think Caleb here was crushing on our little Gracie. You’re lucky he hasn’t torn you to shreds.”
Andrew let out an angry hiss through a set of razor sharp fangs. “I will feel it when she turns, and I will be back.”
He disappeared out my second-story window. As soon as he was gone, Ethan began pacing the room.
“What should we do?” Caleb asked, having returned to his human-self. His naked human-self.
“There’s a towel in the bathroom.”
Everyone froze when I spoke. Ethan and Cynthia looked almost afraid of me.
I suppose I couldn’t blame them. I probably looked pretty shattered. I know I felt that way.
Caleb, however, grinned. “After everything you just went through, this is what you’re worried about?” He gestured to his bare body without a shred of shame, and when I buried my face in Cynthia’s shoulder again he laughed a boisterous laugh. “You really are something else, aren’t you, Gracie?”
“Shut up, you jerk. She’s in shock!” Cynthia yelled. “Go cover yourself up. Despite what you think, we don’t all enjoy seeing you naked.”
Caleb laughed as he left the room.
Cynthia asked Ethan to get my bathrobe out of my closet for her. “Sorry, Grace,” she said, even though she knew I wouldn’t really respond. “Nudity’s not really a big deal to werewolves. Too much of it always going around to be shy.”
She was trying to make her voice sound normal, hoping she might calm me down a little. I still flinched when she used the term werewolf, and couldn’t make myself stop shaking.
“Oh Grace, I’m so sorry this happened.” As she put on my robe, she looked at Ethan. “What are we going to do?”
“What can we do?” Caleb asked, coming back in the room in a pair of my dad’s sweats. “She’s got vamp blood in her. As soon as it works its way through her body, she’ll turn. End of story.”
I’m not sure what frightened me more—what they were saying, or the way they said it so casually.
“But vampires don’t age,” Cynthia said. “They can’t go out in daylight. She’ll have to leave home.”
“She’ll have to go with Andrew,” Caleb said. “As much as I could kill him, he’s right, Cyn. Without her Sire, she’ll lose control. She’ll go insane.”
“But vampires and werewolves…” Cynthia’s voice trailed off.
“I’ll look after her, Cynthia,” Ethan promised. “Nephilim don’t have blood feuds. I’ll help her. I’ll make sure Andrew takes care of her.”
Cynthia burst into tears again and held on to me as if she planned on never letting go. “How much time do we have?”
“Hard to say,” Caleb said. He was now talking to his sister as delicately as she’d spoken to me a minute ago. “Every human reacts differently. Some turn in minutes. Some take a couple of hours. And some of them don’t make it through the change. You have to be prepared for that.”
“Grace will,” Cynthia insisted. “Grace is strong.”
“What if you bite her?” Ethan asked suddenly.
They were all talking about me as if I weren’t even in the room. Not that it mattered. I could hear what they were saying, and the words all made sense—in theory—but my brain had shut down. I was hearing, but not understanding. I knew I wouldn’t be able to process any of this for a while. Probably not until I fell asleep and it came out in my nightmares or something. Wasn’t that going to be fun?
“She hasn’t turned yet. What if you bite her? Is there a chance she could become a werewolf instead?”
Cynthia gasped. “You want me to turn my best friend?”
“She’s going to turn anyway,” Caleb said. Unlike Cynthia, he didn’t sound horrified by the idea. “Better a wolf than a leech.”
“She’s probably about to become the first daughter,” Ethan said. “She can’t just disappear. She’s too well known. As a wolf, she could stay home. She could live a fairly normal life—for a while, at least. If she turns vamp, Andrew’s going to have to take her to the North Pole or something where she won’t ever be recognized.”
Ethan’s hands balled into fists again and a look so furious settled on his face. It was terrifying. “That selfish, arrogant—the council would never have let him claim Grace. If they find out, they’re going to be pissed.”
“The council can’t find out!” Cynthia cried. “The council can’t ever find out! Her fame makes her too big of a risk to the supernatural world. They’ll kill her!”
That thought got through to me and I gasped, completely horrified.
“They wouldn’t kill the first daughter,” Ethan said. He locked his eyes on mine and promised, “They won’t, Grace.”
Cynthia shook her head. “Better a dead first daughter than a vampire first daughter. They will, Ethan. They’ll kill her. You know they will.”
I thought I would throw up again when I watched Ethan’s face fall. Whoever this council was, Cynthia had just convinced him they’d kill me.
“The resistance will keep her safe, Cyn,” Caleb promised.
“Not if she’s a vampire,” Ethan said quietly. “The De La Cotes despise the resistance. The resistance won’t be able to protect her, and you know it. Come on, you have to try it. One of you has to bite her.”
“It won’t work. The vamp blood was in her first. It’s probably already too late.”
“We gotta try, Cyn. At this point, what harm could it do?”
Cynthia sighed, and I felt her untangle herself from around me. “I’m sorry, Grace,” she said. “Please don’t hate me for this.”
“Wait.” Caleb pulled my hand out of Cynthia’s. “Let me do it. Just in case it works.”
“Caleb.” Cynthia had miraculously stopped crying. Her voice was suddenly as hard as it had been when she rescued me from him at the lunch table. “You realize that if you turn a human female, you are claiming her as a mate.”
I couldn’t help gasping again. Somehow the thought of being claimed as Caleb’s mate sounded even more frightening than being a vampire or a werewolf—or even killed by some secret council.
Caleb glanced at me but quickly glared right back at his sister. “And you realize that if you turn a human female, she’ll be fair game to the entire pack. Dad could give her to anyone he sees fit. He could give her to one of the older guys. Someone who’s ready now, even though she’s only sixteen.”
“He wouldn’t! Dad is good about letting the pack choose!”
“He’d have to in her case, and everyone’s gonna want her, Cyn. She’s different. You know she is. That’s why you’ve been so protective of her. You were smart to keep her separated from us all of this time, but the pack knows about her now. If she’s one of us, they’ll fight for her. Dad will be forced to make a decision. At least you know I wouldn’t treat her the way some of the other guys would. When we touched today, I felt something—we had a real connection. If this works, I’ll be good to her, sis. I promise.”
Cynthia glared long and hard at Caleb, but eventually her eyes filled with tears and she handed me over to her brother.
I couldn’t stop the terror that took me over. “No,” I pleaded and tried to cling myself to Cynthia. “No!”
“Sorry, Gracie,” Cynthia whispered. She brushed my matted hair out of my face and tried to smile. “You don’t want to be a vampire. You hate vampires. And hey, if this works, we’ll be sisters.”
Caleb pulled me securely into his arms as if he expected me to resist him, but I was way too overwhelmed to do anything. My fight or flight senses were spent.
When Caleb grinned at me, I finally realized why all of the Layton kids had such terrifying smiles. His smile was feral. It was the smile of a predator. And his teeth, though I’d never noticed before, were unnaturally sharp.
Caleb brought my shaking hand to his lips and kissed it. “If this works, Gracie, I hope you’re ready for a fiancé,” he teased before biting my wrist. When I felt his teeth sink into my skin, that was
it. I finally couldn’t take any more trauma.
Everything went black.
I woke up to the sound of a soft knock on the door and Ethan’s hushed whisper. “How is she?”
“Sleeping peacefully. Finally. She had horrible nightmares all night.”
I didn’t remember having any bad dreams. Well, except for the one that I knew deep down had been real, even though I was still trying to deny it. The fact that Cynthia was here and Ethan was coming to check on me only affirmed the truth of the last night’s events.
I wasn’t ready to face either of them, and I really, really didn’t want to know yet whether I was now a werewolf or a vampire. At the moment I still felt like I always had, so I kept my eyes closed and willed myself to try and go back to sleep. The longer I stayed asleep, the longer I could hold onto whatever was left of myself and pretend that fantasy was still just fiction.
“Wait!” Ethan gasped in what could only be disbelief. “Is she still…?”
“Yeah.”
“How? She should have changed by now, right?”
“I’ve never heard of it taking this long before. For vampires or werewolves. The most I’ve heard of is a couple of hours. Caleb’s been texting me every fifteen minutes since he left last night.”
“I don’t understand. How is she still human?”
“I don’t know, Ethan. It should be impossible, but I’m not complaining. I can’t stand the thought of her being a vampire, and as much as I love being a wolf, Gracie’s just not cut out for it.”
“But she’s still human!” Ethan said again.
It wasn’t until that moment that I really understood what they were saying. I was still human. I hadn’t turned into any freaky, mythical monster of any kind. This was the best news I’d ever heard in my life. I was so relieved I sucked in a breath that nearly gave me away.
“Shh!” Cynthia hissed.
The room was silent for a minute, and then Ethan broke it by whispering, “She knows the truth about us now. After what she went through last night, if she doesn’t turn, it will drive her mad. She’ll go completely crazy.”
“She won’t!” Cynthia insisted. “Grace will handle it.”
Ethan actually laughed at that. “Oh come on, Cynthia. Grace? You think Grace will be the one-in-a-million human able to handle the truth?”
