Fate

by Amanda Hocking

“I don’t know,” Jack said, and I scoffed. “What? I can’t really remember, and I’ve never seen anybody else turn. ”

  I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not, but it seemed pretty ridiculous that he couldn’t remember the most important event of his life, especially since it hadn’t been that long ago. I could understand if Ezra had forgotten, but sixteen years was relatively recent.

  “How can you not remember?”

  “Do you remember being born?” Jack countered.

  “No, but I wasn’t twenty-four when it happened. ”

  “Well…” He sighed. We pulled up in front of my brownstone, but we sat in the car as he thought of a way to explain it.

  “Mae can remember her turning vividly, and I think Peter can too. But I can’t. Mine’s all hazy, like a dream I had a very long time ago. I just can’t remember pain very well, I guess. ”

  “So it is really painful?” I asked, even though I wasn’t sure I’d want to know.

  “Your body dies,” Jack said softly. “Not all of it, but enough where you really feel it. But it only lasts a few days, and then everything feels really wonderful. ”

  “Is there anything they can do for the pain?”

  “You’re really so much better off talking to Ezra about all of this,” he said.

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  “Do you think I made the right choice?”

  “I think you made the only choice,” Jack told me solemnly. Then he smiled crookedly, trying to brighten my mood. “Come on. Let’s go pack your stuff so we can hurry up and have a sleepover. ”

  “You make it sound so much more fun than it really is,” I muttered and got out of the car.

  “Hey, any time you spend with me is fun!” Jack said, following me out.

  “Oh, yeah, last night was a total hoot. ” I meant it at as some kind of joke, but the hurt look on Jack’s face meant I cut a lot deeper than I meant to. “I didn’t mean it like that. ”

  “Nah, you’re right,” he brushed me off and went into the apartment building in front of me.

  The apartment looked the same as it always had, but it felt smaller somehow. Thankfully, my mother was at work, because I wasn’t ready for a conversation with her. It’d be too hard telling her Milo wasn’t coming home, even if I was just feeding her a lie a about staying in a vacation house.

  Milo’s room was immaculate, making it easy to find the things that I needed to pack. He mostly needed clothes, and I picked out what I thought were his favorites.

  Jack tagged along for moral support, and he ended up being a huge motivator. I tended to stand and stare until he prompted me to do something, like pick up a shirt.

  Going through all Milo’s stuff was hard. It felt like an invasion of privacy and the kind of the thing I would do when he was dead.

  After we got Milo’s stuff, I went in my room to grab my clothes. As long as Milo was turning, I didn’t plan to leave him, so I’d need things for myself.

  Before we left, I wrote a note for my mother and kept it as simple as I could. I told her we were at a vacation house for the next few days, and I’d have my cell if she needed me.

  The note didn’t sound very convincing, mostly because it was from me. Milo usually did that kind of thing.

  “How long is this gonna take?” I asked on the car ride back.

  “The car ride?” Jack was willfully playing dumb, and I didn’t appreciate it. “Like five more minutes. ”

  “How long will it take for Milo to turn?” I carefully enunciated all the words.

  “I don’t know, Alice. ”

  “What do you know?” I snapped.

  “I told you that you need to talk to Ezra about all of this,” Jack said. “I don’t know why you think I was kidding. We’re almost home now. You can run inside and interrogate him until your heart’s content. ”

  “I will. ” I crossed my arms over my chest, as if I had won something.

  “Yeah. I know you will. ”

  Jack carried the bags inside when we got to his house. Matilda waited by the door for his return, but even she seemed oddly subdued. The entire mood of the house had changed. Everybody waited on edge for Milo to be okay.

  Jack went upstairs and I started following him. I wanted to check on Milo again, but Ezra appeared at the top of the steps. Something about the way he looked made me freeze, but Jack kept going, brushing past him with my luggage.

  “Did something happen?” I asked Ezra.

  “He’s fine,” Ezra reassured me and descended the stairs. “But I don’t think you should see him right now. ”

  “Why not?” I straightened up for a fight. Nobody could keep me from my brother, not even an all-powerful vampire. He placed his hand on my arm, and some of my anger relented.

  “Let’s talk. ” Moving his hand to the small of my back, he ushered me to the living room.

  “Are you sure nothing happened?” I repeated.

  “He woke up,” Ezra allowed carefully, and my heart sped up.

  “He did? Is he okay? What did he say?” My excitement was overwhelming, but he gestured to couch.

  “Please, sit. We need to talk. ”

  “What?” I collapsed back on the couch, feeling nauseous.

  “He is turning, and rather rapidly at that. ” Ezra sat next to me. “He’s young and strong, and the change should be completely over within a few days. He’s going to be alright. ”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” I breathed deeply. A weight lifted off my shoulders, and a surge of relief went through me. Then I noticed the grim expression on Ezra’s face. “So why do you still look like you have bad news?”

  “I don’t. Not really,” he qualified, forcing a smile. “You just can’t see him for awhile. ”

  “What do you mean?” I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “At least until the change is complete, and he can get a grip on his hunger,” he elaborated, and I remembered what Jack said in the car. “You can’t go near him until things are under control. ”

  “He’s going to try and bite me?” I shook my head, disbelieving. “He hasn’t fully turned yet. He just woke up. ”

  “He’s already eating, Alice. ”

  My chest tightened, and my head swam. I thought I still had time. I don’t know what I planned on doing with that time, but I thought he’d be human for just a little longer.

  But he was drinking blood less than twenty-four hours after biting Jack. He was Milo the vampire, and he would kill me if I got too close to him.

  “It will get better. I promise. ” Ezra placed his hand on mine, trying to comfort me. “You can be around all of us without any problems, and it will be the same with Milo. It takes time to get a handle on things. At the rate he’s going, it shouldn’t be that long. ”

  “So…” My mouth felt dry, and I swallowed hard. “Do I need to go home?”

  “No, of course not. We wouldn’t expect you to go home while all this is going on, and Milo is still fairly incapacitated. He shouldn’t leave the room for a day or two. By the time he does, he should be in control enough. ” He smiled, as if that was reassuring in some way.

  “Awesome,” I said wryly.

  “I know the situation isn’t ideal, but he’s going to live, Alice. And he’s going to be better than he was before. You’re not going to have to worry about him anymore. ”

  “I know, I know. ” I closed my eyes, letting it all sink in.

  I knew I should be grateful to them. They saved Milo’s life and gave him an amazing gift, but it didn’t really feel like it then.

  When it came to my little brother drinking blood and turning into something that would rip my head off, it felt a lot more like a curse.

  “Did he say anything?” I asked.

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  “Nothing that’s coherent,” Ezra shook his head. “He’s not exactly conscious. ”

  “But you just said that he woke up and he’s eating. ”
I felt bewildered.

  “Yes, but he’s more…” He paused, trying to think of how he wanted to phrase it. “Delirious? He’s not completely there yet. It’s more instinct and confusion than anything else. ”

  “Has he asked for me?”

  “He hasn’t asked for anything. He only mumbles complaints of pain and hunger,” Ezra reiterated. “Mae is doing her best to see that he feels as little pain and hunger as possible. ”

  “So… what happens next?” I asked. “He turns, and then what?”

  “Let’s just get through this, and take things from there,” Ezra hedged the question.

  “Why? What does that mean?”

  “There’s no blanket answer for this. We’ll have to see exactly how Milo reacts to everything before we can say with any certainty what’s going to happen. So far, he’s turning differently than anybody else I’ve encountered,” Ezra explained carefully.

  “You’re supposed to know everything,” I said, growing frustrated.

  “I understand your impatience, but there’s really nothing more I can tell you. ” Ezra smiled sadly at me.

  Jack lumbered down the stairs, and I wondered if he was responding to the quickened beat of my heart. He was so sensitive to it, and it alerted him whenever I was upset about anything. He read my emotions almost better than me since he had a direct link to my heart.

  “How is everything going down here?” Jack was full of forced cheer, and his overly broad smile masked the anxiety underneath it.

  “How do you think they’re going?” I cast a look at him.

  “Well, I just checked in on your brother. ” He ignored my glare and tried to give me information he hoped would comfort me. “He’s asleep again, but he’s looking really good. I think you’re gonna be really happy when you see him. ”

  “He’s not a house that you’re remodeling,” I grimaced at his poor choice of words.

  He made Milo sound like some kind of fixer upper that they were working on, and while that wasn’t very far from the truth, I didn’t want to think of it that way.

  “Sorry. ” Jack shifted uncomfortably. “Mae sent me down here to feed you. ”

  “I’m not hungry. ” Stress destroyed my appetite, but I hadn’t eaten in a long time, and my stomach already reminded me of it.

  “Why don’t you let Jack make you some food and I’ll go make sure everything is going well with Milo?” Ezra posed it like a question, but there was no mistaking it for anything but an order.

  “I’m perfectly capable of making food for myself,” I said as I stood up. For some reason, I had resorted to refuting their generosity with pouting.

  “Fine, I’ll watch you make food then,” Jack rolled his eyes.

  In the kitchen, I made a show of slamming things down and banging drawers. Jack sighed and watched me make the angriest peanut butter sandwich in the world.

  But for all the stomping around and tantrum throwing I did, I wasn’t angry with Jack or Ezra or anyone. I was just scared.

  - 5 -

  Even standing in the hallway, I could smell Peter and hated what it did to me. The ache I tried to ignore burned unbearably inside me, and my heart sped up so quickly, it made me weak.

  Thankfully, Jack was downstairs, doing his penance by washing my laundry. Under normal circumstances, Mae would be happy to do it, but she’d been preoccupied with Milo, who required 24-hour care.

  I’d been here for almost three days, and I had seen almost nothing of her. I hadn’t seen Milo since Ezra warned me not to.

  That left me with a lot of time to wander around the house feeling lost and confused. Jack tried to console me while simultaneously keeping his distance, and it did little to make me feel better.

  He’d been sleeping on the couch downstairs, leaving me with his room. I snooped through his drawers in hopes of finding something incriminating, but everything was innocent. He had a trunk of graphic novels in his closet that I leafed through, but it was hard to focus on anything.

  I should have found comfort in this, because it meant that I would never have to give Milo up. Maybe if I had already turned I would feel that way, if I could completely understand what was in store for him. Instead, I had Jack’s vague assurance that being a vampire was awesome, and that was about it.

  What if it did something horrible to Milo? And he got sick or died or turned into something completely vile? What if he stopped being Milo, the timid over protective geek I loved, and turned into some overzealous blood sucker?

  Or what if he turned out fine, but he hated me for letting him turn? And for lying to him about vampires? What if I had to spend the rest of eternity with him hating me?

  When I tired of searching through Jack’s room and driving myself mad with worry, I finally gave into Peter. I stood in the hallway for a long while, just breathing in the intoxicating, tangy scent that Peter left behind.

  Since Peter took off last spring after the incident where he nearly killed me, Mae simply shut the door to his room. No one talked about whether or not he would be back, although he hadn’t packed any of his things.

  The unspoken consensus was that Ezra would find a cure for us, and life would go back to normal. Not that I even knew what it would mean to be “back to normal” anymore.

  I opened Peter’s bedroom door, checking the hall both ways just to make sure that Jack wasn’t around. Nobody had forbid me from entering his room. I doubted that Mae and Ezra would care at all, but Jack was liable to take offense.

  Even mentioning Peter’s name made him tense up, and I hoped that someday, he’d be able to move past that. I began to doubt that Jack would ever want anything to do with Peter again, regardless of how our relationships resolved themselves.

  His room was just as he had left it, but I barely noticed. I closed my eyes, breathing in more deeply, and a wonderful heat surged through me. There was a physical pull inside me, and I was drawn into his room.

  Peter had been gone for months, and my body still clamored to get in every last drop of him.

  On the floor in front of Peter’s massive bookcases, a white rug had been stained with a few drops of my blood. I remembered the terrible ecstasy when Peter bit me, and the way the life drained from me in this beautiful, peaceful feeling. Nothing, not even my magical kiss with Jack, had ever felt as good as that.

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  Even now, knowing what I know and having all that I have, I knew that if Peter offered to bite me in exchange for my death, I would gladly make the trade. My feelings for him were positively suicidal.

  I walked around Peter’s room, admiring his odd collection of things. His furniture seemed to be primarily antiques, and everything was natural wood or white. His bed smelled too sweetly of him, so I deliberately steered clear of his white linens.

  His shelves were lined with books from every day and age, and I let my fingers travel over their worn bindings. Then I noticed something that made my already shortened breath catch.

  Peter had an entire section of books on vampires, and I don’t mean things like Bram Stroker or Anne Rice. They were books with titles like A Vampire Dictionary and A Brief History of Vampyres.

  I pulled the latter from the shelf, carefully opening the cover to the yellowed pages. The moldy smell overwhelmed me, and I sneezed.

  I sat back down on the chair by the bookcase, and I looked through it. It had no table of contents, but a page appeared to be missing. It started with a foreword:

  “I am not the oldest of my kind, nor do I claim to be an expert on them. However, in my many years of existence, I have found little written on the subject of vampyres, other than questionable folklore.

  “In an effort to dispel the mythology and to create a guide for the newly turned, I have decided to write this book. In no means is it to be taken as a ‘Bible’ for my kind, but rather, as the title suggests, a brief history of vampyres as far as I can tell. ”

  My fingers beg
an to tremble, and I was afraid I’d rip the fragile pages out. Knowing vampires had a history was disconcerting.

  I knew they existed, but the only ones I knew were Jack and his family, and they weren’t particularly frightening or disturbing. But thinking of vampires as a whole, an entire species of creatures out there, feeding on the living for the past millennia… it sent chills down my spine.

  The first chapter was simply titled “In the Beginning. ”

  “Perhaps what is most unusual about vampyres is that while we carry many of the same traits of humans, we lack any real creation story of our own. Some vampyres still cling onto the religion of the people, while others banish it, saying that we are proof that God does not exist.

  “What I have found to be true is much less sensational than one would hope. We have neither a direct line with God nor the devil. We are no closer to the meaning of life than any other human.

  “Vampyres have not existed as long as humans have, by our best record, and I was unable to find anything on the first vampyre. More precisely, I have never encountered a vampyre who admitted to being the first one, or any other vampyre who met him.

  “Our first documented appearance happened to coincide with a plague, which leads me to believe that we are some kind of plague ourselves. ”

  “I see you found some light reading,” Ezra interrupted, startling me so badly that I jumped up from the chair and dropped the book onto the floor.

  “I-I just- I was just curious,” I stumbled and felt my cheeks burn with shame.

  “There’s no harm in being curious. ” Ezra waved off my apology and walked over to me.

  He picked the book up off the floor and held it for me to take. I hesitated for a moment, afraid that it might be some kind of trick, although he didn’t seem much like the tricking kind.

  “I just don’t know very much about you. ” I took the book from him, and I lowered my eyes and held it close to me.

  “We haven’t been as forthcoming as you’d like?” Ezra raised an eyebrow, and I wasn’t sure if he was being skeptical or sincere.

  “No, it’s not that,” I corrected myself quickly. “It’s just…”

  What was it exactly? They had been incredibly open with me. When I had questions, Jack answered them to the best of his ability, but somehow, that wasn’t enough. As much as I knew, it seemed liked there was twice as much that I didn’t know.

  “It’s because it’s personal now,” Ezra nodded knowingly. “Before, we were merely a curiosity to you, or an opportunity. ”

  “No, no!” I interrupted him forcefully. “You’re not some sideshow to me. ”

  “No, I know that. It was a poor choice of words on my part,” Ezra said, calming me. “I know how much you care for us.

  “But… you’d always known us as this, and whether you understood us completely was irrelevant,” he continued. “You saw that we were happy and well. But now that it’s struck Milo, it’s not enough to know that we’re content. You need to understand everything about us. ”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “So?”

  “So… you want me to tell you everything,” he smiled sadly.

  “Yeah, kinda. ”

  “I have bad news,” he exhaled. “There’s not much more to tell. ”