Grey Eyes (Book One, The Forever Trilogy)

by Quinteria Ramey

  But was it worth dying for?

  I stepped into the cabin, shivering in the darkness and uncertain if my beautiful seducer was about to end my life.

  He followed me inside, shutting the door behind him. He sighed. “Very well then.”

  Chapter 14

  History

  I heard his footsteps move past me in the dark. I exhaled.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  Lights flickered on, and what I saw shocked me. Photographs covered every inch of every wall and Tristan was in all of them. But he wasn’t alone. Several different girls shared the frames with him: A short, blonde-haired girl sat with him on the back of a beat up pickup truck; a chubby brunette waved to me from the deck of a large steamboat; a pretty redheaded girl put playful bunny ears behind his head as they posed in the sand… They were all in love with him, totally and completely; it was evident in their eyes. They were content.

  “Are these the photographs of all the girls you’ve been in love with?”

  He nodded slowly. His stare was intense.

  It surprised me how much hearing those words had hurt. Still, I followed the wall around, taking in every face. I had to see them, to know who they all were—that is, until I saw my own face staring back at me. Just like before, it stopped me in my tracks. While the other girls had dozens of photos hanging, my aunt had only one. They were seated at the center of the maze; I recognized the fountain from the images London had shown me. He held her in his arms, with her head nestled beneath his chin. Her eyes were shut, and their fingers were interlocked.

  Jealousy boiled within me. I hated them for having had his heart, and I was angry that he had made me aware of them. It was stupid, and I knew it. He was a stranger, a vampire. I shouldn’t even know him. Still, my heart ached.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked him. “Why would you show me this?” My voice cracked as I pointed to the photo of him and my aunt.

  “Ana.”

  “You expect me to just fall in line don’t you? Just to fall for you like those other girls. Like my aunt— what makes you think—“

  “She really doesn’t remember…”

  “Remember what?” I screamed at him.

  My reply surprised him. “Did you just read my mind?”

  “I…”

  “They’re all you,” he spoke quietly. “Every one of them.”

  “What?”

  “Please, just listen…The first time I set eyes on you was the summer of 1757. The war between witches and vampires was still going strong then and your family was hiding out in a small cabin on the Nebraskan plains. I had been tracking your movements for weeks. You were the daughter of a very influential warlock and I’d been sent…” He sighed. “To kill your entire family. I couldn’t believe my luck when on my arrival, I discovered you off on your own. You were standing there, perfectly still, at the center of a wide field of wheat in some sort of shiny gown. You were so still, and so obvious that I was wary of a trap. I decided to crouch in the high wheat grass and wait. You began to move, letting your body twist and sway with the whims of the wind. You were dancing, your dress shimmering in the sunlight amidst a sea of gold. You were glowing, Ana. You were like nothing I had ever witnessed. Make no mistake, I was a killer, a murderer by every definition, and yet as I sat there, I found myself utterly enchanted by you.”

  “We vampires are rational creatures, but every thought and every ambition centers first on quenching the thirst for human blood. It lingers in the back of your mind constantly. The first kill is always the hardest, because you’re still tied down by human emotion and morality. You learn to cast them aside, to give in to the unfeeling predator inside you. You must or you don’t survive the beginning. Eventually, you end up as I was, at the point where you not only enjoy the hunt, the kill—you live for it. Until, that is, something pulls you back. Something makes you feel again—because once you’ve remembered what it is to feel, to be human, the world suddenly isn’t the same anymore. That’s what you did for me in that field.”

  “Eventually, your mother came storming into view, reminding you, quite loudly, that you were no longer in St. Petersburg, and no longer a dancer. Your glow had faded, but as I watched you leave, I knew that I had to know you. You, who had instantly changed my world. I survived off animals during the day and visited your window in the evenings. I enjoyed messing with you. I’d move things around when you weren’t looking and leave you notes under your pillow. It was juvenile, but it was the only way to show affection that I knew. Eventually, you began to answer the notes, leaving them in your window before you fell asleep. You would tell me about the books you’d read and about the places you’d visit if the war ever ended.”

  “I began to want more and one night I convinced myself to wait for you in your room until you came in for the night. As I sat there, I found myself nervous, something I hadn’t felt in hundreds of years. You came in just after sunset, I remember, and my presence startled you so much that you nearly fell. I, who had been terrified that you would scream, had fled through the window. But you called to me, and I, hearing your voice from the other side of the field, returned. I could see in your eyes that you knew immediately what I was. But you came to me, first touching my face with your hand, then laying your head against my chest. You became, in that moment, the most important thing in the world to me.”

  A smile peeked through his despair. I kept listening.

  “After a week or so, we ran away together—it was the first time of many. It felt so impossible our being with one another, and yet it was happiness, as I had never known it. We drifted through eleven perfect months until you collapsed one night, as we played in the sands of the Carolina coastline. I could hear what was wrong even before I got to you. Your heartbeat would keep me company while you slept, and I had become accustomed to its rhythm. But it was sputtering now, your heart was failing. Our time was ending, and you were departing for somewhere I could not follow. You promised me that it wasn’t over, that you’d come back to me somehow. And then I, who had lived twenty lifetimes by then, watched you die after only seventeen years of life.”

  “It would have been so easy for me to give up my emotions again, to return to the life I’d led before, but somehow I knew that it would be a betrayal to your memory, and only that kept me from succumbing to the pain. I decided to enter society. I spent the next forty years traveling and learning about the human world. I visited all of the places you had wanted to see. Eventually, I came back to that cabin. It belonged to an old farmer then, and upon sight, he asked me if my name was Tristan. He told me that a girl of sixteen traveled there every month to ask about a boy whose description I fit perfectly. I offered to work for him as a farm hand in order to wait for the next visit. I convinced myself that it had to be some mistake—that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. I knew that the chances of you actually coming back were nothing, but still, I waited.”

  “Two weeks later, the wagon the old farmer described pulled up to the farm and a young girl stepped out and started for the old man’s house. It wasn’t the same girl that I saw in that field. I tried to think of what I should do. It was obvious that there had been some mistake. Then you were running, calling my name as you came down the hill as fast your feet would carry you. You leapt into my arms and before I could break the news that I wasn’t the boy you were looking for, you began to tell me things—things only you could possibly know. You had kept your promise to me, you had come back—“

  His voice was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  “Dammit,” he groaned. “I was supposed to have more time.”

  “What's wrong?” I asked, waking from what had felt like a dream.

  “I have to take you home now. Get on my back.”

  The knock sounded again, this time more urgent. “I’m going,” he shouted. I hopped onto his back and he rushed me outside, setting me carefully inside the boat before he got inside. His strokes were
hard and violent this time, and I had to hold the sides tightly to keep from being thrown into the lake. I tried to ask him something as we approached the shore but he shook me off. Once on the other side, we disappeared into the tall grass and then sped across the estate. He leapt up to my balcony as though it were only a foot off the ground.

  He let me down and took me by the shoulders. “I didn’t get to finish, Ana. I know how it must have sounded, but it’s not some fairy tale. It ends badly. I’ll be back in a couple of days to tell you the rest, and if you have any questions then I’ll answer them for you. After that, you won’t see me again.”

  Then he left me there, alone on my balcony, with my mind scrambling to make sense of tonight.

  Chapter 15

  Reunion

  I don’t know how long I stood there on my balcony. It could have been hours or even days for all I knew. I was lost in my thoughts, trapped in that same trance-like state I’d experienced while listening to Tristan explain the story of how he’d met me. The night kept replaying in my head. First, there were London’s odd revelations. She could hear the thoughts of others, which apparently I could do as well; she had said as much when she’d communicated with me telepathically. Tristan confirmed it when he’d asked if I’d read his mind while I was shouting at him. I had. I had heard him speak without him opening his mouth and it had literally left me speechless to discover myself capable of something like that. It was almost as shocking to learn that London wasn’t the “mean girl” I’d made her out to be. She had helped me to meet him, Helena too, though I couldn’t imagine how they were all connected. Well, Helena could have found out about him during the time that he and my aunt were sneaking around—when he and I were sneaking around. My aunt, those girls, I was supposedly all of them... reincarnated? That’s what he’d told me, but it was so utterly insane! I was willing to admit that my long held parameters for what was or wasn’t possible had taken a beating since learning that witches were real, but this was just too far out there—far too much of a leap to take on good faith. Yet, how else could I explain what I felt? The familiarity I had felt before tonight, or the emotions that had gripped me so strongly that I could barely sit still as I sat across from him on that boat—the separation anxiety that made me feel less than whole now that he was gone.

  “Ana? Ana, what’s wrong? What are you staring at outside?”

  The voice had registered as static until I felt the hand land on my shoulder. The contact jarred me back into the real world. I turned to find my grandmother—the woman who had lied to my face and stolen my memories—standing directly behind me. It was hurt that came first, but it didn’t last long; a new hatred was growing within me, devouring all other emotion, so intense that my hands were shaking…

  Tears began down my face and I balled up my fists to release some of the tension. I was so sick of being “protected.”

  She stared at me for a moment, puzzled. “Someone’s already told you?”

  “Told me what?” I answered loudly. I didn’t bother trying to conceal the resentment in my voice.

  This seemed to confuse her more. She tilted her head and studied my face. I tried my best to radiate as much anger as possible from my “royal” eyes. When she finally spoke, it was in an uncertain tone. “They’ve found her, Ana. They’ve found your mother.”

  ********************

  My grandmother, who’d assumed that my anger was the result of receiving some exaggerated, gossiped version of what transpired, quickly went about getting me straight on the facts as we waited on Duncan to arrive with the truck. Apparently, my mother had been found in a hospital eighty miles away from our home in South Carolina, a “Jane Doe.” That was the subject of the phone call she had received this morning, when she’d excused herself from Darren and my company. Remarkably, the hospital was the only health care facility in the state with a specialized “bite” center. The treatments she received there had done much to stall the effects of the vampire’s venom, but her condition was still very serious. Because of this, the doctors had refused to allow Duncan’s local team (Jake and Eddy) to bring her here, especially when they couldn’t identify what kind of “animal” had been responsible for the injury. In an offer of full disclosure (I flinched at her use of the phrase), she had admitted that they’d had to draw up some phony legal papers which stated that my mother was against all forms of medical treatment, for religious reasons. She explained that it was necessary to get her to our doctors, because that was the only chance, she had for survival. However slim that might be.

  The three of us rode in silence for the first half of the ride. None among us dared to risk exploring too deeply the fragile hope that wafted throughout the SUV. The fact that there had been hope at all was miracle enough, and we, each of us, clung to it desperately.

  Headed back towards the airport, we passed the Brighton city limits sign that had welcomed me here. It seemed odd to me that a hospital for witches would be outside the safety of the city. Instead of posing this question to my grandmother or Duncan, it got me thinking about earlier tonight. If Tristan really was a vampire, which was something I had no reason to doubt after experiencing first hand his speed and leaping ability, how had he managed to enter the city? Had he always been here? Those pictures seemed to suggest otherwise. Duncan’s phone interrupted my thoughts. He answered and my grandmother and I watched him release a pained breath.

  “What?” my grandmother asked in a trembling voice. “What’s happened?”

  He dropped his head. I didn’t need to hear the words. I knew. I felt it. One moment the world felt one way, and then it didn’t. She was gone. Just as before, my mind searched for some way to make it not true, for some improbable hope, but this time there was none.

  My grandmother and Duncan were saying things to me now, but I couldn’t hear them. I had zoned out, retreating into my mind. Memories exploded inside my head like fireworks, barely registering before being outshone by different ones. I began to think about the memories I wouldn’t have now—her walking me down the aisle, her holding her newborn grandchild…

  “I want to see her,” I said suddenly, interrupting what I was sure were words of comfort.

  Duncan and my grandmother exchanged glances. “I don’t think that’s a good idea sweetheart,” my grandmother said, shaking her head.

  All of the fight and the anger I’d been ready to unleash on her before we left was gone. I had been ready to rage against the idea that I needed protection. Particularly because it seemed to require keeping things from me. However, suddenly the world was different, the way in which I viewed it instantly changed, to the point where it was almost impossible to differentiate the thought of protecting me from thoughts of my mother. I considered how it felt to see Tristan in pain on that boat, how much it hurt me to see him like that. How much I wished I could make it go away somehow. I tried to magnify that feeling to what a mother’s love for her child must be like. How far would I be willing to go then? I would be willing to do anything, I realized. As much as it took to keep my child away from pain.

  I mean, what if my mother had told me that there were real monsters out there? That they were looking for me? What kind of childhood would I have had then— constantly living in fear of every shadow, jumping at every noise? Isn’t that what Mrs. Moorer’s grandparents had done for her? Sure, she suffers from the memory of their deaths now, but there had been a time in her life when her biggest concern was whether they were going to catch her sneaking off to the barn to meet with some friends. A time when my biggest worry had been whether or not I would be going to the same school the following year. I decided that given the circumstances, I probably would have kept the existence of vampires a secret as well. My whole life, I never understood why my mother kept her secrets, and yet the instant she dies, her reasons make perfect sense to me.

  Next, I contemplated the reasoning behind taking me away from Brighton. What might she be protecting me from what was here? Was she trying to protect me fro
m Tristan too? Duncan’s words rang in my ears, “She basically took her own life…for misguided love.” I remembered asking myself what boy could be worth your life. My thoughts shifted back to the green-eyed vampire who I had been willing to follow to an empty cabin where any number of horrifying ends could have awaited me. My feelings had been so strong that they overpowered the rational part of my brain. Could my mother have known about him and my aunt? If so, could Tristan’s story be true? He said himself that it ends badly. Was she protecting me from myself?

  I shuddered at that thought, and the physical act of it brought me out of my own head. Duncan and my grandmother were whispering about something, arguing it seemed, and I watched them for a moment.

  “We’ve already gotten the news, Duncan. There’s no reason to continue on.”

  “Going up there right now is the best thing for her to do.”

  I decided that I should speak on my own behalf. “I need to say goodbye.”

  My grandmother looked to Duncan again, and he met her eyes with a reassuring nod. “It will help her accept it.”

  We were riding again, but this time the atmosphere inside the truck was very different. Duncan didn’t speak after that, but every now and then, when we stopped at a stop sign or a red light, he would drop his head for moment and take a deep breath. My grandmother was weeping quietly, which struck me because I wasn’t. I hadn’t cried since I arrived here, at least not for her. Not since I discovered that I was rich, and royalty. While my mother was fighting for her life, I had felt relieved to be here. I was disgusted with myself.

  That brought on the water works. However, it only made me feel worse. I was still being selfish. I wasn’t crying because she was dead necessarily, I was crying because I’d been a terrible daughter all these years, especially in the time I’d been here. I hadn’t once asked about the search efforts. However, to be fair, that was only because I was afraid of hearing that she was dead. Still, I didn’t deserve a mother like her.