Darkness in the Blood (Gifted Blood Trilogy)

by Vicki Keire

  Dr. Christian managed to look both grave and dismissive at the same time. “I do not, Tabitha, but your concern is touching.” Messy-haired Tabitha turned bright tomato red at this praise and ducked her head in her hands. Those sitting near her clutched at her arm, either in support, or to absorb some of Dr. Christian’s magnetic attention by osmosis.

  I felt sick. I thought I had escaped this last semester. Not only was he back, but his charm seemed stronger than ever. Why was I immune to it? Why wasn’t everyone else as horrified by the news he brought as I was? I realized my fingers had curled around the edges of my desk. Maybe Dr. Christian was just filling in temporarily. Oh, please, I silently begged the universe.

  My hopes and my stomach plummeted when he announced, “I will be filling in for Mrs. Kenner until she recovers.” Dr. Christian smiled, slow and brittle. “I am afraid that means I may be with you all semester.”

  The buzz of approval swelled around me. What was wrong with these people? Mrs. Kenner was a sweet old lady who’d been with the school for ages. And Dr. Christian was… if not evil, then at least wrong on many levels.

  “So generous of him,” I heard a girl whisper.

  “Far beneath him, to take a class on this level,” another added.

  What the hell? A surge of hot anger shot through me as my shallow, traitorous classmates whispered excitedly around me. Excited, because Mrs. Kenner was so badly hurt she wouldn’t be with us for the rest of the semester.

  I felt myself standing without any conscious intention of doing so. My classmates noticed me, and one by one the noise began to subside. Dr. Christian waited until everyone was silent before singling me out. “Miss Chastain? You have something to say?”

  “Um, yes actually.” Was that hostility I saw in my classmate’s eyes, or was I just being paranoid? I dragged my gaze back to Dr. Christian’s plastic perfection. “What about Mrs. Kenner, sir? Do you know anything more about her condition?” The silence was somehow more deafening than all the noise had been. I angled my body and pitched my voice so it would carry across the darkened auditorium, appealing directly to the students now. “Isn’t there anything we can do?” I was about to suggest we take up a collection for her family, or send flowers or something, but his flashing blue eyes stopped my thoughts right in their tracks. Eyes so blue could not be natural; concepts like ocean and sky slid right off them like oil on Teflon. I thought, instead, of jungle predators in the dark, just before they consumed their prey. My breathing was labored and slow. I couldn’t remember what I had been about to say.

  “Miss Chastain is an idealist.” His voice was at once loud enough to carry across the entire auditorium and soft enough to feel like an intimate whisper right beside my ear. “She sees injustice, and wants to act against it. Admirable.” The class tittered. “Mrs. Kenner was an unfortunate victim, attacked by dark and terrible forces against which she had no defense. It’s a sad fact that most individuals have little or no defense, should those same dark and terrible forces,” he strode to the very edge of the podium, “choose to strike at them. Do you understand, Miss Chastain?”

  What the hell? I staggered back, hitting the edge of my desk with my thighs. All I meant was that we should send her a fruit basket or something. He was treating me like I’d suggested a vigilante mob start stringing up random citizens. I tried again to make myself understood. “That may be true,” I heard myself say. “But surely we can do something. Mrs. Kenner has been a teacher here for years and years. She is one of us.” An instinct I didn’t analyze made me put a slight but distinct emphasis on the last three words. One of us. Dr. Christian’s finely arched eyebrows shot up. “Or else…”

  “Or else what?” he echoed softly, almost mockingly. “It is comforting to think we can somehow protect the ones we love from all harm, Miss Chastain, but it is naïve. A child’s comfort.” The class shrunk to waves of noise around me, rising and receding like ripples in a smooth pond, pelted with stones.

  My throat had gone as dry as sandpaper. Did no one else find this one-on-one conversation exceedingly strange? He smiled, his perfectly shaped mouth twisting suddenly into a single sharp slash before smoothing out again into full curving lines. He prowled along the edge of the podium, his movements almost liquid in their grace. “Miss Chastain, as much as I am enjoying your charming conversational powers, you are holding up my class.”

  I realized abruptly that the entire class was watching our exchange. Roughly a hundred faces, ranging from curious to openly hostile, stared at me. I felt my face flame crimson. Most of them held a packet of papers impatiently; behind them, on the movie-theatre sized projection screen, Dr. Christian waited in front of a glowing screen.

  Great. He was going to teach by PowerPoint, too. I had a feeling there would be absolutely nothing resembling “Organized Group Sleep” in his class, though.

  A crew-cut young man wearing expensive hiking clothes that looked as if they had never seen a day of actual hiking nudged me roughly. He held out a stack of papers to me as if he’d rather touch a plague victim. I snatched them, glaring at Dr. Christian, and slid into my seat with as much dignity as I could manage.

  He smiled back, soft and wild and perfectly beautiful. The afternoon of Logan’s accident tugged insistently at a corner of my memory. I badly wanted to get out of here. I needed to talk to people. I longed for Ethan or Logan, or even grumpy Mr. Markov and sharp Mrs. Alice. I wanted to feel the safety and support of my own personal circle of Light. But I felt light-headed and dizzy. Underneath my desk, my legs shook. I smoothed the packet of papers out across my desk. Most of all, I needed to calm down before I erupted into Shadows.

  Amberlyn reached over and squeezed my hand. “Are you all right?” she asked. Dr. Christian had started his presentation. Not trusting my voice, I nodded. The words on the front of the packet ran together in a nonsensical blur. I leaned my forehead against the cool plastic surface of my desk, feeling as if I’d just run a marathon.

  Something was badly wrong. A sweet old lady had been brutally attacked in Whitfield, where nothing ever happened. And now I had to sit through almost two hours of lecture about some dead culture given by my least favorite teacher in the universe.

  Chapter Nine:

  A Little Wild

  I scrolled through the messages on my phone as I cut through the park. Work, work, Amberlyn; I stopped at Logan’s last message: “News. J. Roth’s. Important.” My thumbs hovered over the keys for just a minute while I thought about a reply. Did they know already? I thought of ways to pack the news of Mrs. Kenner’s assault, and Dr. Christian’s callous response, into text message form. I snapped my phone shut with a grunt that surprised me in its savagery. I’d wait.

  Dark emotions swirled through me like the tide. I’d left Andreas at almost a run, ignoring my best friend’s offer of a ride and Ethan’s order to travel in pairs. I needed the exercise, needed to burn off some of my fury before pasting a pleasant smile onto my face and serving espresso to unwitting customers all night long. I took deep breaths, almost gulps, of fresh park air to try and clear my head. Fantastic creatures spat water from the triple-tiered fountain I loved so much. Before, I’d always thought the fountain was just a whimsical thing, meant to enchant the town children who tossed pennies into it and sometimes waded in it on very hot days.

  Knowing what I now did about Whitfield and its secrets, I wondered if the gargoyles, wolf heads, mermaids, dragons, chimeras, and strange winged creatures had a deeper meaning. If so, was it a warning or welcome?

  Just how much did I know about my town and its secrets, anyway?

  “Get it! Get it!”

  “No! It’s mine!”

  Something hard, moving incredibly fast, struck me in the back of my right knee. It knocked me forward, scattering the contents of my knapsack, and would have planted me flat on my face had I not managed to get an arm out in time. “What the hell!” I yelled, rolling with the force of the blow so that I ended up on my rear end. Muddy fingers clutched a soccer
ball inches from my face.

  “Sorry,” a frizzy head of dark curls secured by a red bandana claimed, although I wasn’t quite sure I believed him. I squinted.

  “Timothy? Timothy Eden?” I accused. His eyes widened slightly, as if being identified made punishment for his crimes that much more certain. A few other muddy pairs of hands and tennis shoes ringed him, whether in solidarity or as witness to his shame, I couldn’t tell. “I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said, jumping up in one quick motion. “You need a haircut.”

  He blushed crimson. “Sorry I hit you, Miss Caspia,” he recited with an appropriate degree of contrition, completely ignoring my haircut comment.

  “You knocked me down flat.” I looked pointedly at his soccer ball. “My books, too. Now the polite thing would be to pick them up for me and apologize.” He blushed again, while around him his friends muttered and poked each other. “But I was your age once too.” With one lunge, I snatched the soccer ball from him. “And I was wicked good at soccer.” I dropped the ball so that it rested under my booted foot. I grinned at a thoroughly confused Timothy, pleased to find my bad mood lifting. For that alone, I would have kissed him, but it would have earned him eternal torment from his peers. “If you keep landing kicks like that, you ought to think about going pro.” I shifted my weight backward and kicked as hard as I could, sending the ball flying. “Run, run, run like hell!” I yelled as I watched Timothy Eden and his friends race after their ball.

  I wished for a time machine. I’d give just about anything to be nine years old for just one afternoon again. As I picked up my knapsack and tried to wipe the dirt off my palms, I felt about ten pounds lighter.

  “What happened to you?” Logan asked when I hopped across the threshold of J. Roth, Bookseller.

  “Lost a fight with a soccer ball,” I huffed, collapsing into the nearest chair. Ethan leaned against a sturdy mahogany table stacked high with books and papers. I grinned at him. I hadn’t been able to get the dirt off my palms and I could feel the blood pounding in my cheeks. He took the chair opposite mine, bringing the stack of newspapers he’d been holding.

  He stared at me. The air between us felt charged, electric. My breathing was speeding up instead of slowing down. He stared at me with a blend of curiosity and hunger. My lips felt swollen. “You have leaves in your hair,” he said at last, removing the offending objects with shaking fingers. I bit my lip. It didn’t mean anything. His hands often trembled these days. “You look…”

  “Messy?” I sighed, trying to smooth my hair.

  “Wild,” he corrected. The papers spilled off his lap and onto the floor. Neither one of us made any move to pick them up.

  Logan cleared his throat. Loudly.

  “Right.” Ethan shook his head, the spell broken. He scanned the fallen papers and grabbed two of them. “We think we found two more. We’ve only gone back a month, and this is still sticking to the Southeast, but even so, it’s pretty disturbing.” He leaned into me, our shoulders touching, and laid the papers across our almost-touching knees. I stopped myself from taking his slightly trembling fingers in my own. Instead, I scanned the front page of the first paper.

  The story was gut-wrenching. “Newlywed Missing; Feared Dead.” I read. Malinda Brooks, age twenty two, had turned up missing two weeks after marrying her childhood sweetheart in one of Nashville’s nicer suburbs. She had been six weeks pregnant at the time. I flipped to the next paper, dated only a few days later. “Husband Suspected of Murder,” the story proclaimed, and then went into a gruesome confessional tale in which the husband admitted, after days of interrogation, to years of abusing Malinda. Neighbors and church members admitted, after being questioned by the police, to “always suspecting something,” but no one had ever felt strongly enough to interfere. Malinda’s few so-called friends admitted to seeing bruises on the young woman, which she always explained away.

  After a few minutes of reading, I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my temples. “This is horrifying. But it seems to be a case of spousal abuse and murder, not…” I sat up suddenly, looking around the store. “Not a case of Nephilim abduction,” I added in a whisper.

  “Calla’s in the back, doing inventory,” Ethan said in a more normal voice. “It should be ok.”

  Calla? So they were working together today, then? I told myself to quit being stupid and focus.

  Logan produced a third paper. “David Brooks Convicted and Sentenced to Institution,” it said. Horror and sick cold fear marched up and down my spine as I read. Malinda’s body was never positively identified, but after days of questioning, David Brooks spewed out a fantastic tale. “ ‘Malinda wasn’t human,’ Brooks told police. ‘She could do things. Crazy things. I’ve seen her heal the sick. People so sick they were almost dead. It got worse after we were married. There was a darkness to her that I couldn’t cleanse, no matter how much discipline I used.’” Logan read softly. I clutched Ethan’s hand convulsively at the word ‘discipline.’ There was a roaring sound low in my ears as Logan read on. “Brooks never confessed directly to his wife’s murder, but he did admit to handing her over to what he described as an ‘angelic being’ who claimed he would cleanse her of evil. When questioned further about his wife’s whereabouts, Brooks stated, ‘I am sure she is in Hell, where she and her kind belong.’ Brooks has been sentenced to life without parole.”

  The paper was nothing but shredded ribbons between my fingers, blooming into a soggy mockery of warm melted newsprint as sounds of grief and outrage battled for dominance in the back of my throat. I was choking; I was drowning. What kind of world did we live in, I wanted to howl, where children were stolen in their nightgowns and pregnant women were beaten for the blood in their veins? But what came out was a kind of strangled gasping. My body hadn’t decided if it wanted to cry or scream, so it was trying to do both.

  I felt fingers in my hair, delicate but decisive, travel down to push my head between my knees. “Water,” I heard, as if from very far away, and still the fingers were there, soothing me. There wasn’t time for soothing, not with nightmares stealing those of us with gifted blood.

  Like me. Like Logan, though he didn’t know it yet.

  The fingers lifted my chin, held water to my lips, and I looked into the huge blue eyes of Calla Roth. Calla, pretty pink-haired Calla who was utterly human and had never been hunted by demons. “I’m so sorry,” she said, screwing the cap back on the water bottle. She seemed sincere. I gaped at her. How did she know? Had Ethan told her after all? She leaned back on her heels. “Mrs. Kenner is such a sweet teacher. She really cares about her students. I can’t believe what happened to her. I was so upset when I heard, Caspia.” She enveloped me in a hug I was too stunned to shake off. She even smelled like her name. Lilies.

  “Mrs. Kenner?” Logan repeated, his shock plain.

  “You haven’t heard?” Calla asked. “She was attacked last night. She was hurt pretty badly. It happened when she was at home, too.” Her soft voice couldn’t mask her agitation.

  “In Whitfield?” Logan said. “Mrs. Kenner was attacked in Whitfield?”

  In Calla’s floral embrace, I remembered where I was and what I was doing. I gave her a half-hearted squeeze. “I forgot you went to Andreas too,” I sniffled. I scrubbed at my face when she leaned back. “Have you heard anything?”

  “She’s stable,” Calla said, rising with the smooth grace of a dancer. Which was exactly what she was, I remembered as I noted the long lean lines of her tights-encased legs. Performing arts; ballet. I fought down an irrational surge of jealousy as she stood in front of Ethan in a short denim skirt, her long pink hair perfect even though I’d just sobbed all over her. “A couple of us were going to go see her later. After dinner, a little before visiting hours are over, if you want to come.”

  “I have to work,” I said regretfully. “Please tell her I… I…” I looked helplessly at all three of them. What did you say to a person who’d been assaulted in their own home, their job taken over by the evilest
possible professor in town?

  Calla smiled. “I’ll tell her you asked about her.” She gave both boys a graceful little smile and slipped from the room.

  “I don’t believe it,” Logan said, and then collapsed into an empty chair. “That’s… that’s just crazy.”

  “I know,” I agreed morosely. “I was going to mention it, but then there was this.” I thumped the papers that mentioned poor Malinda Brooks. “It’s like the whole world’s gone crazy.”

  “There’s more,” Ethan said slowly. “Just this one. It’s not much, but I think it’s related.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” I said hoarsely. I pulled my knees to my chest and sank back in the sturdy leather chair. “This is turning out to be a really bad day.” I leaned into my crossed arms.

  “We have to,” Logan interrupted. That faint red ring was back in eyes. I wondered if Ethan noticed. “If not us, then who? We may be the only chance these people have, the only ones with any clue that something’s going on.”

  “Yeah, but what?” I snapped, grabbing the final paper from Ethan. “What the hell are we supposed to do about it?”

  I wish I’d kept my mouth shut, because no one answered me. No one could answer me. I scanned the paper. A single grainy photo was sandwiched in between stories about robberies and homicides in one of the inner pages of the Birmingham News: “Popular Club Experiences Mass Hallucinations.” Logan met my shocked stare. “This happened at…”

  “The Nick. I know.”

  “Whoa,” I breathed, and went back to reading. “We’ve been here,” I murmured to Ethan. “A couple of times. But… Holy crap.” I read the story, what little there was of it, as intently as if I was studying for the bar exam. “It was at the Dexateen’s last show, so it had to be crowded. But only the people near the back had these so-called hallucinations. They claim to have seen black winged figures fighting a single guy… who had knives, which didn’t do any good, duh… but then…” The newspaper fluttered into my lap as I sat back, stunned and speechless against a growing cold crawling up my spine.