Echoes

by Michelle Rowen

“Give me your hand.” Frank stretched his hand out to me.

  “Why?”

  “Humor an old guy.”

  I hesitated before I took his hand. He placed his other hand on the back of mine and squeezed.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, worried now.

  “Seeing if I can sense something.”

  “Are you psychic?”

  “Let’s just say I sometimes have moments of helpful insight.” He paused, his forehead furrowing into deep lines. “There’s something there inside you. I can feel it. Very faintly.”

  “What?”

  “Ethan’s right. You are special. You’re different from most other people.”

  Ethan watched him. “What do you mean?”

  “I feel some power here. Something I haven’t felt in a very long...” His eyes widened a fraction. “Olivia, have you ever died before?”

  I stared at him, surprised by the question. “Have I ever died before?”

  “That’s what I asked.”

  “I nearly got killed on Monday night. Then again yesterday after school.”

  “Nah, before that.”

  “Well, I...when I was six I got hit by a truck. My parents thought I was dead, but I was revived by the paramedics. I don’t remember any of it, but that’s what I’m told.”

  Frank swore under his breath. “Well, that’s pretty special.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He studied me so long and intensely that it made me incredibly uncomfortable. It was hot in here with only that ceiling fan to help cool things down and a trickle of sweat slid down my spine.

  His grip on my hand increased until it became painful. But then, he grinned and loosened his grip. “I am totally psychic. Who knew? I guessed that you’d had a brush with death and I was right. I get a gold star. And...and you’re also an...Aries. Am I right?”

  I finally yanked my hand away from his. “Aquarius.”

  “Close enough.”

  “I don’t know how you can joke about this. Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?”

  His ten minutes were up. Frank was officially wasting our time. He didn’t know how it felt to be face to face with one of these monsters, knowing it wanted to kill you. Knowing that one of them wanted to use your dead body to play dress up.

  I’d hoped against hope that this guy might be able to help us out. Too bad I’d been dead wrong.

  “I’m done here. Go buy yourself another drink, Frank. You deserve it.”

  I left the bar and didn’t look back.

  Chapter 8

  Maybe if I were more patient, I could have fished something out of him if we’d kept talking. But patience wasn’t one of my virtues. Never had been. Frustration on the other hand—that tripped me up every time.

  “Sorry about that,” Ethan said when he caught up to me on the sidewalk outside. “Really.”

  “He must have heard about my accident. Maybe he found the newspaper article on the Internet. I don’t know. There are ways he could find out lots about me if he really wanted to, right?”

  “I swear he’s usually—”

  “What? Not a complete waste of space?”

  “Yeah, that. Look, I know that didn’t go well, but don’t completely write him off. I think he can still help us.”

  I tried to breathe normally, in through the nose, out through the mouth. “How are you friends with somebody like that? Where did you meet him?”

  He shrugged, his eyes on the sidewalk as we walked. We passed a stationery shop where my mother used to take me to get back-to-school supplies every year. “I’ve known him a while. He’s been there for me when I’ve needed him the most. Trust me.”

  “I guess I’ll have to.” I sighed. “Just goes to show that I really don’t know anything about you, Ethan.”

  A parking meter to my right had timed out, but the car next to it was still parked there. I stared at it for a moment and a mother and toddler walked past us and entered a kid’s clothing shop two stores down.

  I had to keep remembering that Ethan and I were in this together. I was disappointed in Frank, but I couldn’t really blame that on Ethan.

  Maybe Frank would be more receptive to being helpful later and we could try again. He obviously knew what he was talking about, but wasn’t in the mood to be totally cooperative this afternoon.

  I wasn’t giving up, that much was for certain. But now it looked like we had some time to kill.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “Hungry?”

  “It’s a question. Are you going to answer it, or reply with another question?”

  A glimmer of a smile played at his lips. “Yes, I’m hungry.”

  “I’m starving. We should grab something to eat.”

  He looked at me skeptically. “You mean in a restaurant.”

  I fought a grin at his disbelief. “I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.”

  “And let me guess, in this restaurant you’re going to do some of that grilling of yours.”

  “Maybe.” Definitely.

  He crossed his arms and appeared to mull it over. “How about I make you a deal? A question for a question, five each. You ask me a question and in return I get to ask you whatever I want, too.”

  “And the other has to give a truthful answer, no matter what the question is?”

  “Yes.”

  Sounded a bit dangerous depending on the question. But I was getting used to that when it came to hanging around with Ethan Cole.

  “Deal.” I held out my hand.

  He took it and didn’t let go for a long moment. “Where do you want to go?”

  “There’s a little diner just around the corner I like.”

  He nodded. “Lead the way.”

  We entered the diner and grabbed a booth in the back. The plastic menus were already on the tables. I knew the service here was fast, the food cheap and good. My dad and I sometimes went there for breakfast on the weekends.

  McDonald’s would have been faster and cheaper, but there I ran the chance of bumping into Helen, or Peter, or a multitude of other friends I’d rather avoid if I could.

  The waitress—one I recognized from other times I’d been here—came over and took our orders. Ethan ordered a burger, fries, and a Coke. I ordered a turkey burger, garden salad, and a Diet Coke.

  “Are you on a diet?” Ethan asked, then grimaced. “That shouldn’t count as one of my questions.”

  “You’re the one who made the rules. No, I’m not on a diet, but I still try to eat healthy most of the time.”

  “It shows. I mean...you look very healthy. Or...” He sighed. “I’m no good at this, am I?”

  “At what?” I winced. Damn. “I didn’t mean to waste a question there either.”

  “Rules are rules.” He pushed his hair back out of his eyes, which now held amusement. “I’ll tell you what I’m no good at. Being out with you and holding a cohesive conversation. It’s different from how I’ve always been.”

  “A loner.”

  “Yeah. Just the way I am.”

  The waitress delivered our drinks and I sipped on my Diet Coke as I studied him. His long bangs almost kept me from being able to fully meet his eyes. Almost, but not quite. “You’re shy. That’s nothing to apologize for.”

  He snorted. “Shy. Yeah, you could say that. Seventeen years of feeling awkward, keeping to the sidelines, trying to be invisible, and being alone most of the time. Calling it shy makes it sound cute.”

  “You don’t have to be shy with me. And when you’re with me you’re definitely not alone.”

  He wrapped his fingers around his soda. “You’re not really giving me much of a chance to be alone lately. You’re very determined.”

  “I can be when I want something.”

  “Noted. Okay, my turn again. Are you mad at me for introducing you to Frank?”

  “No, I’m hoping he’ll be more helpful on a day when he hasn’t been drinking since dawn. However, ba
sed on what I just witnessed, I do question your taste in friends. Other than me, of course.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Are we friends?”

  My gaze locked with his. He studied me intently, his dark brows drawn together. “You and me—we’re definitely friends.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. “So I couldn’t become invisible again around you even if I wanted to be.”

  “I’m thinking that would be extremely impossible. Unless you have some super powers hidden up your sleeve I don’t know about.”

  “Super powers might help, actually.”

  My mind momentarily drifted away from Ethan’s copper-colored eyes toward the memory of Mr. Watkinson’s flat gaze as he wrapped his hands around my throat and tried to squeeze the life out of me. I raised my fingers to my throat, remembering the pressure, the dizziness, the thought that I was going to die...

  “You okay, Liv?”

  “I’m trying to be,” I said, although I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “And, by the way, that was your fourth question.”

  “Hey…that’s not fair.”

  “Who said this game was going to be fair?”

  “Nobody, and that’s your second question.” He gave me a smirk and leaned back in his seat. “I guess I better make my last question count, huh?”

  “I guess you’d better.” He was funny. I didn’t care about the game. He could ask me as many questions as he wanted to.

  “You first.”

  “Fine.” I took another sip of my drink. Enough fun and games, time to get to the serious stuff—the stuff that I really needed to know. “Upyri take over dead human bodies and need to drink blood to stay alive. Sort of alive. So if they don’t drink blood does that mean they start to rot like a zombie?”

  His lips thinned. “No, they don’t rot. They’re not like zombies at all. The closer they take over a body to when the human spirit leaves, the more powerful an Upyr can be. The human body is literally alive and completely healed with a heartbeat, normal body temperature, the works. They sustain that life force by drinking blood every day from another living person. When they’re stabbed in the heart, you saw how they go up in fire, leaving nothing behind.”

  I nodded, inwardly cringing at the memory.

  “That’s a quick death. Starving...that’s slower, but the results are the same. After a day they’d be extremely weak. Their body temperatures will start to skyrocket. They start burning up from the inside. And very quickly, if they don’t get any blood or if they step out into the sunlight, their bodies will spontaneously combust and the Upyri wraiths will be off in search of a new shell.”

  I had a vivid picture in my head of that after seeing three Upyri go up in flames. “Is that where they get the vampire myths—the ones about sunlight killing them?”

  “Sunlight doesn’t hurt if they’re in a well fed human shell. However, when they’re in their wraith form, sunlight is torture for them so they wouldn’t go out during the day.”

  I went silent as I tried to absorb everything he was telling me. How was I ever supposed to fight back about something as horrific as this?

  The waitress delivered our meals and I picked at the salad with my fork. My appetite had waned thanks to the subject matter. Ethan took a bite out of his burger.

  “I know you’ve lived in Ravenridge since you were, like, eight years old,” I said. “How do you know so much about the Upyri?”

  He put the burger down and grabbed the bottle of ketchup, shaking some of it onto his plate. “I met Frank when I was a kid and he told me all about them. Even though he’s always been a drunk, Frank was like a father to me when my own dad was...well, he was an abusive ass—verbally and physically. Hit my mom. Hit me. That’s why what happened with my stepfather the other night made me so mad I finally had to do something about it. It was like history repeating itself.”

  I thought back to Mrs. Cole’s bruises. My own mom wasn’t abused by my dad, verbally or physically, which made me wonder yet again why she’d left us. In my heart I knew there was no good reason.

  But everybody deserved a second chance. That’s what my father thought, anyway.

  “You protected your mom,” I said.

  “Should have been done months ago, but I was too weak then to deal with it once and for all.” His jaw tensed and his eyes flashed. “I’m not weak anymore.”

  A swell of pride went through me knowing that Ethan had stood up for himself and his mom like that. I realized that I’d placed my hand over his while he’d been speaking about his past troubles. That feeling of pride shifted to something else, something warm and sweet that tightened my chest and made it difficult to breathe.

  “You have a boyfriend already, Olivia,” he said after a moment, his voice quiet. “You’re supposed to go to the prom with him the day after tomorrow, remember?”

  “I know.”

  “And yet, you crawled up into my room the other night. You...kissed me.”

  “I know.”

  His gaze moved to my lips. “And I kissed you back.”

  This time I just nodded.

  His frown returned but he didn’t break our gaze. “This is complicated, Liv. I can’t lose my focus any more than I already have or everything will go to hell.”

  I tried to find my voice. “Ethan...maybe we can...”

  The bell on the door jingled and I glanced over to see a couple kids enter that I recognized—Peter’s friend, Eddie, and one of my friends, Julia. They’d recently started seeing each other. I automatically pulled my hand away from Ethan’s when they glanced over in our direction and waved. I hadn’t thought anyone our age came here, but I guess I was wrong. They went to sit in a booth in the opposite corner to us. When I returned my attention to Ethan, he was looking at me strangely.

  “I have one more question for you, Olivia.”

  I nodded. “What?”

  “Did you want to come to this diner in particular because you were embarrassed to be seen with me in a more public place?”

  My mouth fell open. “I can’t believe you just asked me that.”

  The friendliness and openness that had been on his face a moment before had vanished completely. “I’m just as stupid as I’ve always been. Nothing changes, not really. Memories don’t lie. That I thought for one moment that...” He groaned. “Forget it.”

  My face flushed. “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Was I trying not to be seen in a more public place by coming here instead of going somewhere else like McDonalds? Yes, of course. But not because I was embarrassed to be seen with Ethan Cole.

  How could I say it so he’d understand? “Ethan, listen to me—”

  “I guess I thought after the other night things could be different. That maybe you and me...” He shook his head, pulled out his wallet, and threw some money on the table as he stood up. “I guess everybody gets swept away in the moment now and then. There’s nobody to blame for it.”

  He’d drawn Eddie and Julia’s attention again. They were both looking over here with interest. “You’re being ridiculous. Please sit down.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not abandoning you here. I’ll walk you home first. Let’s go.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply. He walked away from the table and left the diner.

  Chapter 9

  “Ethan!”

  He wasn’t walking fast, so I caught up to him easily enough, but he didn’t stop and he didn’t turn to look at me. Downtown was behind us now and we had to go past the warehouse area again in order to take the short way back to our neighborhood.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you!” I shouted at his back.

  His shoulders tensed, but he still didn’t slow down. “So talk.”

  I grabbed his arm, finally bringing him to a halt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It seemed fitting.

  That earned me a glance. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry you’re being ridiculous and tota
lly overreacting.”

  He hissed out a breath. “Why am I doing this to myself? Look, Olivia, forget what happened back there. Believe it or not, I understand. I might not like it, but I do understand.”

  “You understand what?”

  “That I’m making everything more complicated by being a dick right now. So here’s how it’s going to go. Tomorrow I’ll talk to Bree. I’ll get my hands on her ancestor’s journal and see if it can tell us anything we don’t already know about the Upyri and what they might be planning. I’ll go talk to Frank later tonight on my own and hopefully he’s sobered up a bit. I’ll get to the bottom of the real reason the Upyri are after you. No sign of them today. Maybe they’ve already left Ravenridge and won’t be back.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  He hesitated. “No. But I’ll figure something out and I’ll let you know what it is. I don’t want to get in your way any more than I have to.”

  I was quiet for so long, staring at him, that he eyed me warily.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I think you’re driving me crazy, Ethan.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Crazy. Completely and utterly crazy.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I had no idea what to say to make this not be weird between us and get us both working together again as smoothly as before. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

  “You’re making it seem like I don’t want to be around you at all. That I’m just using you to find out more about the Upyri. But that’s not true.”

  “Let’s just forget about it.”

  “No. Let’s not.”

  He hissed out a breath. “I don’t need this, Olivia, any of it.”

  “Any of what?”

  He shook his head, raking his hand through his black hair. “Anything I say now will make me seem even more pathetic than I am to begin with.”

  “You’re not pathetic.”

  “You could have fooled me. Every memory I have about you has me being pathetic in it. I guess I can’t help what I am. Not everything changes.”

  What the hell was he talking about? “For the record, I do like that diner. I have a lot of very fond memories about going there with my dad. But yeah, I’ll admit I did pick it because I thought it would give us some privacy, which has nothing to do with not wanting to be seen with you in public.”