by Audrina Cole
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Perry. I know I shouldn’t have asked in the first place. But I promise, I’ll never ask again—”
“Of course you will. If anyone you love is injured or seriously ill again, you’ll ask. You’ll ask, because you love them. You’ll ask because you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t try to help. And Ember will help you, because she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t. That’s just the kind of girl she is. She’ll suffer, because of you.”
I rushed down the steps, eager to stop my mother. I could feel Alex’s guilt, and the rising of Mom’s fury.
“It’s bad enough that you risked Ember, but you risked our whole family. And not only that, you risked the lives of everyone in that hospital. The staff, the patients, even your own father—”
No! Oh God, she couldn’t. “Mom, no!” I called as I reached the bottom of the stairs.
But she must not have heard me, in her anger, or noticed my swelling fear.
“If Ember had gone into bloodlust, she could have killed everyone in her path, including you! It would have been bloodshed and terror, all over the hospital, and in the end, she’d have been gunned down by SWAT teams, all because she wanted to help. She’s too young to understand—”
I tore through the living room and into the entry hall where mom stood. “No, no no no no!” I yelled.
“Wait—what?” Alex stuttered. “What are you—?”
“Mom, no! Stop talking!” I grabbed her arm, breathless from my sprint, and my desperation to stop her, even though I knew it was too late.
Alex was dumbstruck. “Ember, what is she talking about?” He was looking at my mother as if she’d lost her mind.
Good. Let’s go with that. “Alex, don’t listen to her—”
My mother swung her gaze from me, to Alex, and back to me again. “You didn’t tell him? I thought you told him everything!”
“Mom, shut up! Please?” I begged.
“Ember, what the hell is going on?” Alex demanded. Behind his confusion, I felt anger welling up. “What is she talking about…bloodshed? And me and my dad getting killed?”
I gaped in horror, shaking my head. “Don’t listen to her, Alex.”
“Oh no you don’t, young lady,” my mother snapped. “You wanted to tell him the truth? Fine, tell him the whole truth! He deserves to know what kind of danger he’s in for, if he ever asks you to heal again.”
“No, mom. No!” I walked toward Alex, and tried to push him out the door. “You shouldn’t be here right now. She’s mad about last night.”
“Clearly.” His tone was cold, and he wouldn’t let me budge him. He had all his strength back, and then some, and it felt like I could push on him all day, and never move him an inch out the door.
I clutched at his shirt. “Please, Alex!” I begged, tears in my eyes. “Let’s just go. We’ll talk in the car, I promise.”
He cast an angry glance at my mother, then at me. “No. It’s obvious you’re trying to hide something. Something your mother thinks I should know. You were being evasive last night about something. Is that what this is about?”
I could sense Mom’s regret—she had let her temper get the best of her, and now she was realizing the possible repercussions. I knew she would be thinking that even though he knew half the truth, we were all better off if Alex didn’t know about the blood-drinking—that if he was repulsed by the truth, he could expose us all.
I knew Alex would never do that. But could he ever look me in the eye again?
“Alex,” Mom said, switching to her peacemaking tone. “I apologize. I’m tired. I was up late waiting for Ember. I don’t know what I’m saying, to be honest.”
“Really? You don’t remember using the word bloodlust?” He turned to me. “Ember, I gave you my word that I’d never tell anyone—not as long as you told me the truth. But if you won’t tell me…”
Mom sighed. “Tell him.” She rubbed her temples, looking away. “What choice do we have now?”
“No!” I wheeled my gaze from one to the other. “Please, I can’t…”
“Someone had better tell me…now.” Alex glared at us both, his arms crossed in defiance.
“I’ll tell you,” Mom sighed.
“No! Mom, please, he won’t understand—” I pulled on her arm, trying to drag her back into the living room, but she shook me off.
“Ember! Just stop. You made your bed, now you have to lie in it. Listen, Alex…you can’t tell anyone this. If this part of our secret got out, they would go on a witch hunt, looking for every Healer in the country…no, in the whole world! You’d be endangering the lives of men, women, children, even babies—”
“I don’t understand. What could make the government want to hurt children—?” He looked down at me, putting his arm around my shoulders.
The tears were streaming down my face, and I couldn’t look at him. I laid my head on his chest and clung to him, hoping he would remember who I had always been to him, instead of the monster I knew he was bound to see me as.
“Blood.” My mom crossed her arms in resignation. “We drink blood.”
“What?!” Alex barked out a laugh. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
I could feel him looking down at me, but I just kept staring at the floor.
“Ember?”
I couldn’t speak.
“What, so…you’re like…vampires?” He laughed again, but this time there was no humor in it. Denial mixed with confusion, as shock seeped in, to complete his mélange of emotions.
I glanced up at my mother, who gazed at him with a deadpan expression. “No,” she snapped. “Not like vampires. I detest that word. It’s a silly, superstitious word used by ignorant and fearful people. It’s just a matter of replenishing energy. We expend so much energy when we do a major healing that our life force is depleted.”
“You’re serious?” His arm dropped from my shoulder. “You told me that you don’t use your own energy.”
“She doesn’t…exactly.” Mom took a hesitant step forward. “We use the universal life force energy, but it takes a great effort to open our channels wide enough for complete healing. No one knows exactly how or why it works that way, but it does. When we heal someone who is severely injured or terminally ill, it…just takes a lot out of us. Blood is the only thing that replenishes us. And if we don’t get it soon enough after a major healing…bad things happen.”
“That’s what you meant by bloodlust?” He stepped back, away from me, and toward the door.
I wrapped my arms around myself miserably, too humiliated to speak.
“So you just—what—pop out your teeth and kill everyone in the hospital?”
“No!” I finally looked up at him, and what I saw tore at my soul.
Shock and disgust riddled his face, and I could feel his anger, confusion, and fear rising up.
“Alex, please understand. It’s not like that! We’re very careful. When we heal someone, we always try to plan ahead, and bring along pint bags of blood. We don’t take blood from live people, if we can help it. And Mom exaggerated, really. It’s not like everyone is in danger every time we do a major healing. If we’re prepared, there’s no danger to anyone. And we don’t have teeth—that’s just a myth. If we have to feed on a live person, as a last resort, we use a knife and make a clean cut, and heal it when we’re done!”
He shook his head. “Well, that sounds very…civilized.” His mouth puckered in disdain. He turned to my mother. “Then what were you talking about…when you said my Dad and I were in danger…?”
“I only meant you’d have been in danger if Ember didn’t do things the right way. Like she did the first time.”
“The first time?” His gaze swung back to me. “When you healed me?”
I nodded. “I…I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even want to go to the fundraiser because…I…”
“She can’t help herself,” Mom finished. “She’s soft-hearted, and generous…to a fault. She felt bad for you, and she went
too far. And Jenna almost paid the price.”
“What are you talking about?” He narrowed his gaze as the truth hit him. “When you said you had to go…that you weren’t feeling well…that was…was…bloodlust?”
I turned my head away, my face burning with shame.
“You healed me at a fundraiser full of families…with my parents there…knowing full well you weren’t prepared to handle the aftermath?”
“I’m sorry…I just…”
“Couldn’t help yourself?” He repeated my mother’s words, shaking his head and looking away. “You said you felt a connection…a bond. But I wasn’t anything more than just your latest charity case, was I?”
“No, of course not—!”
“I get it now. That’s why you keep telling me that my feelings aren’t real—that it’s just some kind of Florence Nightingale effect. Because you don’t feel anything for me.”
“That’s not true!”
“I’m just someone you felt sorry for. This has never been about us. It’s about you—feeling good about yourself, feeling like a hero. You go around healing people without thinking, without even giving them the choice as to whether they want a fricking blood-sucking vampire to be hovering over them, when the bloodlust hits!”
“Alex, please—” I reached out to him.
He jerked back, evading my grasp. “I can’t deal with this. I can’t believe you lied to me.” He backed out the door, pushing open the screen door and letting it bang shut. “Stay away from my mother.” He lifted a hand to point his finger at me. “Don’t go near her. She doesn’t need your kind of help. Just stay away…from both of us.”
He spun on his heel and stalked out the door toward his car.
My legs turned to rubber, and I sank to the floor, sobbing. Pain seared my chest, and I could barely choke out a breath as sobs wracked my body. My mother knelt beside me laying a hand on my shoulder.
“Get away from me!” I screamed. “Look what you’ve done! He’ll never come back! He hates me. He thinks I’m a monster. You just had to get involved. You had to stick your nose in where it didn’t belong, and now I’ve lost him!” I clenched my fists, wailing in agony.
“There will be other boys,” she soothed, ignoring my outburst.
“No,” I sobbed. “There won’t.”
I knew my mother would think I was being melodramatic, but I wasn’t. We had a deep connection, Alex and I. I’d never felt that kind of bond with another human being. I didn’t even feel that close to my own family—and we were closer than any non-Healer family that I knew. It felt as if my soul had been torn from my body, and I didn’t know how I would go on without him.
“Ember?” River’s voice penetrated my fog of misery. He must have heard the whole thing.
I didn’t respond.
River tried to pull back the hair that had fallen into my face, and was now pasted to my cheek by the rivulets of tears. “Mom,” he said over his shoulder, “I think she just needs time alone. Come on, Em.”
All I wanted was to remain hunched over on the floor and be left alone. But I knew he was right—I had to go up to my room. My mom would never leave me alone while I was downstairs.
He took me by the elbow and helped me up, then followed behind as I walked woodenly up the stairs to my room.
When I got to my door, I went inside and tried to push the door shut behind me, but River stopped it with one hand.
“Hey, give him time. It’s a bizarre thing to find out. But he’s a good guy. I can tell. He’ll come around.”
“No he won’t,” I said, turning away to sit on the edge of my bed, hugging myself and staring at the wall across from me. “He just found out the girl he cares about has been lying to him all this time…and oh yeah, by the way, she’s a vampire.”
“Don’t say that! You’re a Healer. It doesn’t matter how the world would see us. That’s what we are. You, more than any of us. You have the heart of a true Healer, Ember. You’re what we all were meant to be, before modern technology forced us to go into hiding. In the old days, we could be shamans, medicine men, apothecaries, midwives—anything that would mask what we truly are. But now, our hands are tied. We’re forced to hide our abilities, to watch people die unnecessarily, in order to avoid the genocide of our race. But all you care about is being who you really are. It pisses me off, sometimes, but it’s special. Sometimes…sometimes I really envy you.”
His words moved me, but my heart ached too much to let his touching sentiments penetrate beyond my pain.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“Just give it time, Em. If he really cares about you, he’ll come around.”
That’s the problem, I thought. He obviously doesn’t care about me anymore.
Chapter 6
I spent the rest of the afternoon crying. Like an idiot, I listened to love songs that only made me cry harder, but I didn’t care. I deserved the pain, anyway, for lying to Alex. For ruining things between us. I’d destroyed the one thing that mattered most to me, and I couldn’t seem to feel anything except agony. So I wallowed in it. I refused to eat, refused to speak to my mother.
I knew it wasn’t really her fault—at least not entirely—but I needed someone else to blame besides me, and she made the handiest scapegoat.
My dad even tried to talk to me through the door, but I wouldn’t say a word. Meadow came by, and tried to goad me into talking, but I just put a pillow over my head until she went away.
I must have cried myself to sleep, because the shadows were gathering in my room when I heard a noise that startled me awake.
“Em?” It was River. I could feel him standing at the foot of my bed.
“I locked my door for a reason.”
“Yeah. I picked the lock for a reason.”
“You’re an ass.”
“Geez, is that any way to thank me?”
Guilt niggled my brain. He was the only one trying to support me through this. But couldn’t he see that I just wanted to be alone? “Tell me what you want, and then get out.” I kept my back to him, curled up in the same position I’d fallen asleep in.
The foot of my bed sank in as River sat on the end of it. “I’m sorry about Alex.”
“Yeah,” I sniffed. “Me too. Is that all you wanted to say?”
“No,” he snapped. “And stop being bitchy. I’m trying to help.”
“No one can help.”
“Em, why don’t you stop feeling sorry for yourself long enough to think about Alex for a minute. Mom just informed him that the girl he has the hots for is a vampire.”
“Don’t say that!” I snapped. I hated that word even more than Mom did.
“Hey, I’m just saying—to outsiders, that’s what they think of, when they hear about blood-drinking. That’s major. No matter how much a guy likes a girl, that’s a lot to swallow.”
“It’s too much to swallow. He’ll never speak to me again.”
“You don’t know that. He probably just needed some time. That’s not the kind of thing you hear and just go ‘Oh, so you drink blood? Okay. Hey, you wanna go see a movie?’ Assimilating that in his brain takes time, you know?”
I sat up and looked at him. “How much time?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had a girlfriend tell me she’s a monster.”
Snatching a pillow, I threw it at his head. “That’s not funny!”
“Ow!”
“And you’ve never had a girlfriend, loser.”
“Hey, you don’t have to be mean about it.” He tossed the pillow back at me.
We both laughed—though my laugh was bitter.
“Anyway,” I sighed, “I don’t think I’m his girlfriend. Not anymore. If I ever even was.”
“I saw the way he looked at you, Em. He’s crazy about you. Not that I can figure out why,” he grinned, “but he is.”
“He was.”
“He is. He’ll come around. I have faith in him. He’s different than the rest.” River stood. “Anyway, I brought
you this.” He picked up a pint of blood from where he’d been sitting on the bed, and tossed it to me.
“I don’t need it,” I said, tossing it back.
“Don’t make me lob this at your head. Drink it.” He tossed it back, harder, and I barely caught it. “I counted the pints you put back last night. You didn’t drink enough.”
“I did.” I set the bag beside me.
“You didn’t.”
“One pint was enough. I only healed her a little, like a promised.”
“Yeah, but healing severe traumatic injuries, even a little, is a much bigger deal than healing a twisted ankle.”
“I feel fine.”
“Ember, knock it off. You’re emotionally spent, you’ve slept half the day away, and you’re snarling like a beast. You’d be handling all of this better if you weren’t so energetically drained. You drank enough to stave off bloodlust, yeah—but not enough to fully heal yourself.”
“Maybe I don’t deserve to heal.”
He rolled his eyes. “So you lied to him. What are you supposed to do? Tell every guy you meet on the first date that you’re a Healer, and you drink blood? No! That would be stupid. Look, no one likes it when someone keeps things from them, but anyone who isn’t a complete ass is going to understand that you’re protecting your family. Alex isn’t an ass, so he’ll come around. In the meantime, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Mom and Dad are out of their mind with worry for you. Can’t you feel it?”
I stopped for a moment, “listening” to the vibrations in the house. How had I missed it? I had never felt such a surge of agitation before.
“Has something happened?”
“Well, let’s see…you healed a dying kid, then you healed his mom, then Mom screwed up and announced that we’re blood-drinkers, and if Alex loses it, he could tell the wrong person and get us all hauled off to some medical installment somewhere…is that not enough for them to worry about?”
“They aren’t talking about the plan, are they?”
River’s brow furrowed. “Dad brought it up, but nothing has been decided yet. Mom wants to wait a day or two, then contact Alex and see where his head is at. I’d be worried, but I really think Alex is trustworthy. I don’t think anything will come of it.”
