My face flushed. “Me? What do you mean?”
“I felt peace with what I’d become. If it meant I could save others, than it was worth out living all my family.”
Regardless whether or not I trusted him, I’d never seen Blake so open. For the first time, I began to understand him. He’d been only a kid, worried about the day he wouldn’t have his older brother to look out for him. He’d been lonely, and then he’d saved me. What little boy didn’t want to be a super-hero?
I met his gaze. “So you helped others too?”
“I did. Well, at least I tried, for a while. Most were little things, nothing too dramatic. But since you were the first one, I was sort of obsessed with you.” He glanced at me and chuckled. “I’m being totally honest here. What do you expect? You were a pretty girl, and I…well, I had a crush on you.”
I knew I shouldn’t like hearing those words, but they made me happy. I wasn’t sure what to say. To my relief, Blake kept talking. Maybe he has been dying to tell me everything after all.
“Kory teased me when I started flying here just to check on you. He told everyone on the island about my crush, made me sound like a stalker. By that point, I couldn’t care less what Kory said or did. When I saw you were in counseling, not dealing with the near drowning well, I felt like I needed to watch out for you. There was just something about you; I couldn’t leave you alone. I had to make sure you were safe.”
Now I stared at him. “So you have been watching me for years.”
He gave me a crooked grin. “Okay, I’ll admit saying it all out loud it does sound sort of creepy, but Sam, I would never hurt you and I’d never change you. Like I said, I wanted you to be happy, have a normal life.” His tone became firm.
“But what about Kate? Kory said you changed her.”
He glanced at me, but he said nothing. The car slowed, and he signaled to pull off on a small county road. We came to a rolling stop in the middle of farm fields, nothing for miles. Nerves fluttered through my stomach, and my fingers turned to ice. Was all that talking just to get my guard down?
He left the engine purring. I wanted to hold my hands in front of the heater vents, to warm them, I but folded my arms across my chest instead.
Blake faced me. “Kate’s a long story.”
“I’m listening.”
He let out a low whistle. “Kory thought I needed to accept my fate. He made fun of my hero escapades, thought they were ridiculous. When we hit the teenage years, it only got worse. He moved back to Durango in eighth grade, really to spite me, now that I think about it. He kept pressuring me to change you, but I wouldn’t. I thought the discussion was over, that he’d let it go, but I was wrong.”
His eyes turned sad. “Anyway, a couple years ago, Kory told me about this sick girl named Kate. He said there were other ways to be a hero ; I could help save someone who would die by changing her into a damsel. I’d promised myself that no matter how much I wanted to be with you, I wouldn’t change you for my own selfish reasons. You were healthy. You didn’t need saving again, at least not that way. But I was sixteen, and well… I am a guy.”
I stared at him. “So in other words, your hormones took over?”
His eyes seemed sad. “I hate to admit it, but yeah. I decided I would help Kate become a damsel. And then, maybe, if it just happened to work out, I’d have someone in my life too. I went to Tonbo, and he agreed. He told me I could have anything I wanted to make me happy.”
“That sounds sort of self-indulgent.”
“Not if you know Tonbo. He’s a good man. You’d need to meet him to understand.”
“I’d love to.”
Blake looked surprised. “You would?”
“Yes, why wouldn’t I? I’m a damsel. I want to know everything about him and his island.”
His smile reached his eyes. “I’ll take you there whenever you want. We could go now even.”
I bit my lip. I hated to admit I wanted to say yes. Somewhere along the line of Blake’s explanation, I’d begun to believe him. Maybe even trust him again.
“Finish telling me what happened with Kate first, then we’ll talk about the island.”
The light in Blake’s eyes immediately died. “Okay, but Sam, please know this isn’t one of my finer moments. I should’ve known better. Sick or not, I shouldn’t have thought I could change Kate so I’d have a girlfriend or even a friend. Kory did it all the time, but I found it repulsive the way he treated damsels.” He sighed. “But I guess I’m no better. I did it too.”
He stared out the windshield.
“I met Kate in the hospital. She didn’t have much time left. She’d had a heart transplant, but her body rejected it and her antibodies attacked it. When I explained what I could do, what the shots would do, she begged me to change her. She said she didn’t care what it meant, that she’d rather live. I tried to convince her parents to let her come to the facility in Santa Barbara, but they wouldn’t listen to me. They just kept saying, ‘she doesn’t have cancer, there’s no way it can help her like it helped you’. And they were right to think that. I didn’t know what to do. Kate told me just to bring the shots to her. When you get them, you can’t eat or drink much.”
As he said this, I wondered if that was why I’d been given so little in the cabin.
“The shots make you sick. You throw up for days.” Blake confirmed my suspicions.
“I know. I couldn’t keep anything down either,” I mumbled.
His face fell. “I worried about that when I saw how thin you’d gotten; I wondered if you still felt bad.”
Our eyes met, his aqua blue ones filled with concern. My heart squeezed, and I longed for everything to be like it was again between us.
“I wish you would’ve just told me, Blake. Why all the secrecy? If it wasn’t you, then you had nothing to hide,” I said finally, breaking the tension.
“Sam, you were scared of your own shadow. When I moved here, I wanted nothing more than to talk to you. You can’t honestly tell me you wouldn’t have ran straight to your parents and told them you met a crazy guy in the woods if I had?”
“Well, yeah, I probably would’ve then. But you could’ve done it later.”
“I know, and I’m sorry I didn’t. You mean more to me than anything, and I’ve only wanted to protect you.”
I swallowed. The way his eyes caressed my face, and the softness in his voice, melted the rigid walls within me.
I cleared my throat. “So what happened with Kate?”
He sighed. “I did what she wanted. I gave her the treatment. It was tough not getting caught by the nurses, but it worked. After weeks of visits, she improved. The doctors had no idea why. I was glad she got better and I did care for her as a friend, but it didn’t take long after that to know she wanted more than that. But I couldn’t feel that for any girl because I was… already in love with someone else.”
Did he just say he loves me? I shook my head. “But you’d never even met me, Blake. How can you say that? You didn’t even know me then.”
“I did know you, Sam. In some ways, better than you know yourself.”
I stared back at him. The feeling in the car had changed; I wasn’t sure when it had gone from strained friction to anticipation. My racing pulse and flushed face let me know my body refused to believe Blake was a monster. I tried to retrace his words, find some gap in his reasoning. Surely, it can’t all be true can it? My eyes studied his face. He didn’t flinch or look away. He waited for me to speak, to fire the next accusation at him. I tried to clear my jumbled thoughts. Had he covered everything? Something nagged at me, but I couldn’t place it.
He just said he loves me. My heart lurched in my chest and my fingers turned to ice. Whether or not I wanted it, those words stirred something up in me. I broke eye contact; I had a hard time processing things with him firing up all my desires.
“So how did you find out I’d been taken?”
“I’d been camping with Jaxon, on my way to see Tonbo,
when I heard about it. I freaked out and raced back, totally thinking he’d finally done what he’d taunted he would.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Kory.”
“You thought it was Kory?”
“Like I said, he moved back to Durango just to bother me. After he’d convinced me to change Kate and saw I didn’t like her that way, he started teasing me for not having the balls to change you myself. The day he said he’d do it if I wouldn’t, things ended bad between us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I beat the tar out of him, and he ran away with his tail tucked between his legs.”
“That’s why he moved away again? But his family?”
Blake laughed. “Yeah, well, being a dragon has its advantages. Your mind works pretty quickly, and you can arrange for a lot of things to happen. So moving away with his family wasn’t hard for Kory to arrange.”
I stared at him, realizing something. “Just like you made your family move here.”
His smile faded. “Yeah, well, once I knew you were in trouble, I decided it was time to be closer. And if you’d become one of us, I wanted to be right here to protect you. I began searching for Kory, trying to catch his scent anywhere. I figured if I found him, I’d find you. But there was no trace of him. He hadn’t been around here for a long time or I’d know. So I kept searching for you.”
“I want to believe you, Blake, but you could’ve just as easily had me tied up and been arranging for your family to move here.” I had to say it.
“You don’t have to believe me, Sam. Just ask Mack.”
I stared at him, a tingling sensation crawling down my spine. “Why would I ask him? What does he have to do with all this?” I had a hunch I knew, but I wasn’t ready to accept it.
“Because he helped me search the whole time. Sam, Mack’s a dragon too.”
Hidden Monster Page 28
