Dark Secrets Box Set

by Angela M Hudson

  His arms tightened on my waist and he pressed his cheek to mine. “What if I told you I could do it—run there and be back before you had a chance to blink?”

  “I would say that you are very talented”—my voice trailed up with humor—“and I would be jealous.”

  “But it would prove I’m a vampire? You’d believe me then?”

  “Yeah.” I spun around in his arms. “Let’s see what you got.”

  He looked out over the hills, then back at me. “So, you know the Applebury Reserve is the only place that grows blue roses, right?”

  “Um, yeah… I guess?”

  “Okay. Don’t be scared.” He inched away, holding up his index finger like a warning not to move. “Please don’t scream when you see this.”

  My eyes locked to his. He smiled, standing so tall and so sure of himself it was hard to doubt him. I almost hoped he could do what he claimed. I’d hate to think he was actually insane.

  He scratched his temple, nervous and a bit twitchy, then held his palms out. “Nothing in my hands, right?”

  “Right.”

  He turned them over a few times. I nodded to confirm—again. “Now, don’t move?”

  “Okay,” I started to say as a cold rush of air blew into my eyes. I closed them, feeling a tickle down my cheek, and the sweet, vibrant perfume of roses filled the air around me, flavoring my breath with a walk in the garden.

  “Look.”

  When I opened my eyes and they met with his, he watched expectantly, my quick gasp making him smile.

  “How did you get that?”

  “I told you. I run very fast.” He smoothed the petals of a blue rose over my cheek again.

  “Yes. That is fast. I am jealous.” My eyes narrowed with skepticism. “Now, tell me how you really did it.”

  David groaned in the back of his throat and took a step away. “I can see this is going to be a little more of a challenge than I anticipated.”

  “What is?”

  “You know, if this was the early nineteen hundreds, you’d already be screaming.”

  “Oh, and you speak from personal experience, do you?”

  Without even a smile at my joke, he placed the thornless rose in my hand and pulled me along. “Come. Sit down.”

  I slumped onto my feather quilt and dug my toes into the carpet. David stood before me.

  “You ready for this?”

  “For what?” I said. “A fashion show?”

  He flashed a cheeky, lopsided grin, and vanished into thin air, appearing a second later by my wardrobe door.

  “How did…?”

  “Do you believe me now?” He sprung up right in front of my face, and my rose-colored glasses snapped, every intelligent bone within me finally seeing the predator in him.

  A quick half-breath reached my lungs as I launched for my bedroom door, but his strong hand covered my mouth before my cry for help ever reached the ears of its intended. I convulsed violently, wriggling to break free from the intensifying hold.

  I screamed into his cupped hand, trying to stomp on his toes, but he moved his foot and my heel struck the ground with knee-jolting force, sending instant tears into my eyes.

  “Ara! Look at me!” He shook me once, pinning the back of my skull to his chest, his forearm firmly caging my shoulders. If I didn’t believe him by seeing how fast he moved, the sheer strength of his hold would have done it. “Just stop struggling. Look at me!”

  Heaving lungfuls of air came through my nose, dragging strands of my hair with it, and with each passing breath I managed to calm myself enough to stop struggling, but not enough to trust him.

  David’s hold relaxed a little, but stayed firm. “If I let go, will you promise not to scream?”

  I shook my head. He was a monster. A killer. Oh, my God. How did I not see this? The popping-up-everywhere-really-fast thing. The teeth. The cold body. The way he described the pizza to Ryan: he wasn’t talking about a pizza! He’d described a kill, and that was all I could think about right now. This David I loved was a lie.

  “Ara, please?” The hurt beneath the otherwise calm tone of his voice made my heart burn. I turned my head and forced my gaze upward, meeting the painful detachment behind the emerald eyes I once loved so much.

  “Mm-bm-mm-nn,” I muttered under his grasp.

  He released me instantly and air entered my lungs in a grateful gasp. I folded over, rubbing my sore chin.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “I’m not hurt, I—” I bolted for the door again, reaching the handle as he pressed his palm flat to it, stopping it from opening. “No!”

  “Ara, don’t.”

  “Let me go.” I tugged the handle, bucking him with my hip.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I need you to calm down first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t calm down, I have to kill you.”

  “Fine.” My fists tightened and I stood still, taking labored breaths. “I’m calm.”

  He just smiled, shaking his head. “You’re not calm.”

  “Ergh!” I growled, shoving his chest; he didn’t shift backward, not even a little bit. “Get away from me.”

  “Make me.” He laughed, pinning my wrists against my chest.

  My eyes darted over every inch of his face: his dark pink lips, his emerald eyes, so kind, so loving, and his dimple—the moon shape one above his lip that I loved. It was all David. He looked exactly like a normal human boy, but it was a lie. An act. The David I loved never even existed.

  “Ara, let’s talk about this.”

  “What’s to talk about?” I moved away, pressing my spine to the door. “You—you’re a… you have fangs, and I can think of only one thing they would do.”

  He touched a thumb to his tooth. “Say it.”

  “No.”

  “Say it. You need to admit this, Ara.”

  My mouth filled with saliva, fighting to avoid the truth. He’d told Ryan his pizza slid off the table and spilled all over the floor. He’d told him it was a mess, and that he was cleaning up red sauce for weeks. How could I possibly hear that and not understand what it meant?

  “You kill,” I confirmed.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God!” I folded over, hiding my brow in my hands. “Why?”

  “For… to survive.”

  “Isn’t that a little selfish?”

  He laughed once. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious!”

  “Ara, I don’t have a choice but to kill.”

  “Everyone has a choice.”

  “Not in this instance, sweetheart.” He wandered over and sat on my bed. I wanted to tell him not to call me sweetheart, but didn’t have the guts to say that to a vampire.

  He smiled—his secret smile. “Do you really hate it when I call you sweetheart?”

  My mouth hung open. “Did I say that out loud?”

  “No.” He grinned, rubbing the tops of his knees. “I can read minds, Ara.”

  As so many instances came to mind that made me believe that instantly, I slid down the door and sat on the floor with my head in my palms. “How is that possible?”

  “I’m sorry,” David said, suddenly kneeling beside me.

  “Get away from me.”

  He evaporated, appearing by my window. I dusted my arm off, scraping away any vampire germs that might’ve been left behind, then cast my eyes across the room quickly to make sure the vampire hadn’t moved. He looked so conflicted yet so comfortable, as he looked out the window, considering the world below. The muscles in his arms—with the way he folded them across his chest—looked bigger, more defined than I ever noticed. And I had once wanted them around me, wanted to feel him naked against me. Now, I only felt anger at myself for that—for ever loving him when he was such a vile, disgusting monster.

  “Despite what you may believe, my girl,” he said to the world below, “I am still hum
an inside. And everything you’re thinking right now does hurt.”

  I blinked, trying to make my mind go blank, but it wouldn’t. I just kept seeing the faces of people as they screamed and begged for their lives, while David towered over them and took it. Kept thinking about the blood that had spilled on his apartment floor when he dropped his dinner—a nuisance to him; something he had to clean.

  “Have you always been able to read my mind?”

  He nodded, not looking at me. I wanted to be mad, but if I compartmentalized, dividing the human David I’d loved and the vampire I never would, then the heat that rushed through me was more like boiling mortification than anger. I buried my face in my hand and groaned. Oh, so many thoughts I wouldn’t have wanted him to hear.

  David chuckled. “That’s pretty much what everyone says.”

  “God, I feel so violated.”

  “I’m sorry, my love. I know it’s awful, but if it’s any consolation, I’m not usually listening. And I can only hear your immediate thoughts. For anything in the past, I actually have to go inside your head.”

  I looked up at him. “But you can get in there—you can find things?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s so freakin’ creepy.”

  “Please don’t say things like that, Ara.”

  “Well, what do you expect me to say?”

  “‘Ah, it’s a vampire!’” He waved his hands about like a girl, looking way too human as he did.

  “I kind of did say that.” I smiled. “But you muzzled me.”

  “I’m so sorry about that, Ara.” David winced. “I just couldn’t have you running down to tell your dad.”

  I bit my lip, knowing that’s exactly what I was going to do. “So, I’m calm now. Am I free to go, or are you going to kill me?”

  He turned back to face me. “Will you keep quiet—for ever?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you’re free to go.”

  I felt better after a sigh of relief. Slowly, I got to my feet and opened my bedroom door. Dad’s voice lilted up the stairs, comforting and warm, tinted with laughter. I listened for a second, reminding myself that normality was still out there where I could reach it, then I looked over at David.

  “Was that all—is this your only dark secret?”

  He nodded.

  “So you…” I lowered my voice. “You kill—murder people?”

  He nodded.

  I stepped back into my room and shut my door, resting my head on it for a second. “Do you like killing them? Because you made it sound that way when you told Ryan about your pizza.”

  David laughed, stifling it quickly to answer in a calm, serious tone. “Yes. I enjoy the kill.”

  “Do you… do you ever regret it?”

  “I didn’t, no. Not until I fell in love with you.”

  I turned around then. “And what difference does that make?”

  “Compassion. Vampires are nothing if not compassionate, but only for our own kind. When we fall for a human, that compassion, for some reason, extends out to their race as well.”

  “Except, instead of loving thy neighbor, you eat him.”

  “It isn’t like that. We don’t just walk around with a constant desire to munch on random humans. And never those in our local community. We eat only when we get hungry, like you do.”

  “No, not like I do,” I demanded. “I go to the shop and buy a packet of chips. Not walk into a dark alley and end the local milk man.”

  David laughed. “Neither do I.”

  “How do you do it, then? Do you have a vampire supermarket—”

  “Ara, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What? That’s a pretty fair question.”

  David just sighed.

  “So what about when you are hungry?” I threw my hands up in question. “Is it hard to live among us then? I mean, there’s no way I could live in a chocolate factory.”

  “I just don’t let myself get that hungry.”

  “How thoughtful of you.”

  He cleared his throat, obviously hurt by that.

  “Does…” I looked past him to the gray day. “So how did you fall in love with me if I’d look better on your plate?”

  “I didn’t choose to fall for you, Ara. It just happened.”

  “How, I mean, what’s a vampire even doing at our school?”

  He laughed. “I’m on leave.”

  “Leave?”

  “Yes. I work for two years in the vampire community, then take two years to be human.”

  “Human? There is nothing human about what you are,” I said with a mouthful of spite.

  “We fall in love,” he offered, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “We can eat, sleep, walk in the day, as if we were still human. But—”

  “But you’re not.”

  “Actually, I was going to say but”—he tried to keep it light, but the hurt of my repulsion revealed itself within his eyes—“everything is stronger: our bodies, our minds, all of our senses. We feel everything with an intensity I cannot describe. Happiness, pain, heartache, and… love are so much stronger than you can possibly imagine.”

  I softened a little. It was the way he said love. There was something so… vulnerable about it. “I don’t know.” I bumped one shoulder up timidly. “I think I might be able to relate to the feeling-things-more-strongly aspect.”

  The sharp crescent-moon dimple returned as he nodded. “You have a lot of heart, Ara. Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to you.” His smile dropped away and he looked down at his shoes. “I am sorry that I’ve hurt you with my secrecy. More than you know.”

  The apology was not accepted… yet. I squared my shoulders. “Okay. So you said you eat normal food, and sleep, and everything else? Why be a vampire at all?”

  “It’s not by choice,” he said calmly, like I was an infant. “You see, it’s like an alien, I guess. I thought about it once—how I could describe it to a human.” He folded one arm in and touched his chin. “It’s like an alien comes down and plants itself in you. You’re everything you were before, except that, now, you have these incredible abilities, and your human side is driven by the desires of the alien’s first nature: blood.

  “I’m still David, but I’m also this alien. I drink because I’m compelled to. If I don’t drink, I become weak and desperate, then I’d eventually turn into a monster.” He laughed lightly and added, “Much like you if you don’t have breakfast. Only, there’d be no stopping me. I would kill uncontrollably until satiated.”

  Great, so I fell in love with an alien-operated mosquito.

  “So, why humans? Why not squirrels? Or cats?” I subconsciously nodded toward my window, imagining Skittles on a plate.

  David laughed. “It is vital to consume the blood of your own kind. I am human, in part. Without human blood, human energy, and human life force, I’m nothing. Animal blood, and I speak from experience, not only tastes like rotten flesh, but can’t satiate the thirst and it won’t nourish.”

  “What if you just didn’t eat blood at all?”

  “I’d end up back at square one: killing uncontrollably until my hunger was quenched. It’s more humane to take a few lives than many.”

  “Oh, God!” I nearly threw up. “How can there be any humanity in killing?”

  “Live a few hundred years, and you’ll find out.”

  I looked at him with new eyes, a pang of excitement making mine wide. “Are you immortal?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t die?”

  He shook his head.

  “At all?” I double-checked.

  He shook his head again and stood taller. “No. We’re virtually indestructible.”

  “Virtually?”

  “We can’t die, but we can get hurt. Our bones are like cement—iron-coated cement. They do not break. Ever. And our flesh is extremely difficult to penetrate, not that it would do any good to cut a vampire, because we heal incredibly fast. But we can be hurt.”

  “Well, so,
like, there’re no stakes or holy water or silver or decapitation?”

  “No. Immortal means immortal, Ara. There is no death. No peace. Only an endless eternity of mourning and solitude, watching everyone you love grow old and wither away, leaving nothing but an exhausting prospect of finding happiness again.”

  “Sounds”—I studied his face—“unbearable.”

  “You have no idea,” he said through a breathy laugh, as the tension in the room eased.

  “I know you, David. I know you have a good heart, but… I mean…” I thought about his soft touch, and how sweet he was with me, especially when he talked about grief. Measuring that up against the guy who whined about the mess left on his floor after his “pizza” fell… they didn’t seem like the same person. “I’m struggling to understand how you can be so loving yet so... cruel.”

  “It takes practice,” he said simply. “You make the loving part easy though.”

  “But how do you live with yourself?” I asked, thinking about how guilt-ridden I’d been for killing my mom and Harry.

  “I hate myself for some of the things I’ve done. You just find a way to do it without leaving too many scars on the world—or your own heart. But there aren’t too many vampires with empathy for humans. It gets lost when we change. Mostly, you’re just food to us.” As he shrugged, he flashed an easy smile, and I shuddered.

  “Food?” I balked. “Don’t ever use that term around me again, David. I still care for humans, you know, since I’m one of them.”

  “I’m sorry, Ara. We’re just from different worlds, you and I. I’ll be careful what I say around you, I promise.” He looked into my eyes, his gaze guarded. “Assuming you still want to see me.”

  Honestly, the human version… I still loved him. But the vampire… “I don’t know.”

  He looked down at his feet. “Would you like me to leave?”

  I bit my lip, tapping my fingertips on my leg. “Not yet.”

  “May I sit?” he asked, motioning to the bed.

  I nodded, letting a few minutes pass before asking, “Are all vampires totally hot and sexy?”

  “Depends on your tastes, I’d say.” He sat back a little, smirking. “Get to the point.”

  “I—” I shook my head. “I didn’t have a point.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Did not.”