by H G Lynch
The room was quiet aside from the electronic buzz of her laptop and the chirp of birds outside as the sun came up, turning the sky from a leaden grey to light blue-grey with smudges of graphite clouds. It looked like it was going to be another frosty day. Just to break the silence, Ember asked Hiro, “You going to this meeting, or do you get to skip since you’re just my guard dog?” She smiled genially when he cast her a slow, menacing look.
“I was invited to the meeting and respectfully declined,” he said in a voice that was low and disinterested. He ran a hand though his hair, spiking it further, and moved off the bed to stand in front of the mirror to fix it.
“Respectfully declined?” Ember snorted, turning back to her computer and opening her email account. Waited for it to log her in…waited…clicked the ‘compose message’ button…waited…and, at last, a clean email page appeared on the screen. Her mind went blank as she tried to think of what to type. There was so much going on, so much that had happened in the last month since she’d spoken to Julie. Where did she start? Should she tell Julie all about The Society and how that stuff had gone down? Or just tell her the wardings had worked, thanks, and do a normal catch-up? Part of her wanted to tell her about what was going on with her and Reid, just to be able to explain it all to someone with an objective opinion and have them justify her anger, but Julie wasn’t the kind of person who was particularly interested in that sort of gossip. Like Ember, she wasn’t good at giving advice or being sympathetic.
Hiro, still in front of the mirror, toying with his hair, didn’t look at her as he said, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t so respectful. I think my exact words to Brandon were something like, ‘If I wanted to listen to morons trying to figure out the answer to their questions using the process of elimination, I’d go to Maths’. He just scowled at me and walked away. Have you ever seen him smile, ‘cause I’ve been here nearly a month now and I haven’t seen him smile once.”
With her fingers hovering over her laptop keyboard, Ember sighed. “Yeah, he’s sort of like a sad clown.”
“Huh? How exactly is he anything like a sad clown?”
“Because he’s a vampire, with super speed and ninja senses and the ability to control people’s minds, yet he’s always too friggin’ serious. Vampires should be fun and crazy, like clowns should be smiley and funny.”
“I thought you were terrified of clowns.”
“I am. I just couldn’t think of a better comparison. We’re not talking about me anyway, so it’s okay.” She hit the ‘D’ key and frowned, backspaced, stared at the blinking line on the blank email page. Dear Julie was too formal, but she was used to starting her emails that way. She hit ‘H’ instead, then ‘I’, followed by ‘Y’ and ‘A’. J-u-l-i-e, Enter, H-o-w, Space, a-r-e, Space, y-o-u-? Yeah, this was going to be one exciting email. Maybe she should leave it for when her mind was more awake and she could put her thoughts in order. The clock on the bottom right of her screen read 10:54 a.m. She sighed and shut her laptop without bothering to turn it off, letting it go to sleep instead. That way, when she opened it again, it would give her the email back and she’d remember she was meant to finish writing it.
“Time for you to go?” Hiro asked, idly examining a perfume bottle on her dresser with narrowed eyes. She nodded and pulled on her boots by the door. Hiro passed her a black hoodie from the floor by her wardrobe. She’d meant to hang it up the other night after her visit to Lia, but she’d gotten distracted by her miserable boyfriend moping on her bedroom floor. She hadn’t seen Reid since then and assumed he was giving her space like he’d said. Or he was avoiding her in case she decided to break up with him after all. She couldn’t break up with him if she couldn’t find him, because he never charged his damn mobile. It was always left, dead, on his dresser in his room, unless Ricky charged it for him – not that she’d break up with him over the phone anyway. She wasn’t that cowardly.
She had her hand on the door handle and was just about to leave when she paused and glanced suspiciously at Hiro, who looked like he was planning on hanging about in her room for a while. “Hey, why were you sleeping in here anyway? Did you and Cris have a spat or something? Tell me you didn’t chew on his cowboy hat.”
Hiro rolled his strange eyes. “Ha, ha. You’re so funny,” he muttered sarcastically, “No, I saw Reid loitering the hallway last night and suspected he might decide to come and see you, so I told him to go to his damn bed and if he came anywhere near your room, I’d bite his leg off.”
Ember felt her eyebrows shoot up, surprise writing a thousand words on her face. “Wow. So you were being protective of me? That’s…so weird.”
“How is it any weirder than me pulling you out of the lake when you were being drowned by that…whatever it was?”
She shrugged. “Because that was a physical threat. Reid is an emotional threat, unless you think he’s going to kill me so he can move on and be with Lia, but I doubt that. It’s just…weird. To have a guy trying to protect me from my own boyfriend…” She wasn’t entirely sure she could explain exactly why it was so weird; it just was. Hiro didn’t seem bothered, just shrugged back at her.
“Loyalty bond, remember? I never said it was all about physical dangers and death threats.”
“Well, thanks, I guess,” Ember said awkwardly, chewing her lip.
Hiro tossed her look that said ‘just go away now’. He was blushing. She gave him and quick wave and left, wondering how she’d ended up with a Kitsune doing the job her best friend was meant to be doing.
*****
About five minutes after she left, she cursed herself for not asking Hiro to teleport her to the meeting den. It was a forty minute walk from the school, and the wind kept trying to strangle her with her own red scarf. She was glad, though, for the matching red beanie she was wearing. But maybe she’d been going too far with the red skinny jeans…The moment she thought it, a couple of guys drove past in a silver BMW and hollered at her out the window. She grinned as she shot them the finger, and decided the jeans weren’t too much after all. She liked standing out, especially if it made others think she was a freak. Today, instead of her gothic freak look, she was wearing her indie freak look, which made her feel less volatile and angry – ironic with all the red she was wearing, but whatever.
Clutching her scarf, she tucked it into her hoodie to keep it from blowing away. The bitter wind made her ears and nose sting as she walked, and she wondered just how cold she’d be if it weren’t for her vampire resistance – likely too cold. It was, at most, three degrees Celsius. Cold. The trees and grass by the side of the road, crusted with ice and frost that had only just begun to melt in the rising sunlight fighting to shine through the wintery morning clouds, seemed to agree with her. They shivered in every blast of wind, right along with her.
By the time she reached the rickety old farmhouse, the sun had fully risen and icy, pale light stung Ember’s eyes. The wind was slightly less ferocious, lacking its teeth and claws, in the shadow of the leaning building. She pushed open the door – which, predictably, creaked in that annoyingly eerie way it always did – and stepped inside, trying not to choke on the staleness of the air and the musty stench of age and sweat that clouded her nose and crept down her throat. She was starting to really hate this place.
The quiet dimness of the place was so stifling that Ember practically tiptoed across the grimy, dust-carpeted floor, despite knowing that Brandon and the boys had probably heard her as soon as she’d opened the door. The heavy steel door that hid the boys’ secret den swung open with a low groan and Ember descended into the wonderfully creepy, cool and damp underground world the vampire boys had cultivated for their secrets. Down the stairs she went, her boots making no noise on the stone steps, only her breathing echoing back at her and the faint crackle of the flames lighting in the candelabras on the walls as she went past.
When she reached the bottom, she came to a stop, hesitating on the last step for some reason she couldn’t explain to herself except when her eyes
landed on Reid. Brandon, Perry and Ricky were all in their normal seats, looking perfectly normal, though serious – as ever – but Reid…it wasn’t that he was doing anything particularly amazing, like playing the violin while painting a masterpiece with a paintbrush between his teeth, but he was, in a very Reid-like, very bizarre move, lying flat out on the stone floor. Only Sherry, curled on the floor next to Ricky’s seat, so much as glanced at her as she came down into the room, and upon seeing her speechlessly confused expression, she gave her a look that simply said, ‘It’s Reid. Nobody knows why he does what he does’.
“Um,” she said, for lack of anything better to say.
Brandon glanced at her without really looking at her, raised one hand in a silent wave, and returned to poring over the yellow-paged book lying open on his lap. Reid twitched but didn’t move, his hands folded behind his head as he stared blankly at the cracked and crumbling ceiling. With her stomach, inexplicably, in sudden knots, Ember slunk around the edge of the room and planted herself on the little wooden stool that had been reserved in her name. She told herself, as she tried to stare at anything other than her possibly-insane boyfriend, that it was okay to have butterflies. She hadn’t seen him in nearly a week, after seeing him every day for the past three months. Of course she was nervous…but it wasn’t just nerves. Just like when she’d first met him, even when she’d been certain she hated him, Reid had the kind of overwhelming effect on her that nobody else she’d ever met had. Something sparkly and crackly fizzled through her and she sat on her hands, tucking her legs under the stool, to keep from going over and touching him.
The room fell silent as the saner three boys scanned through heavy books for information, Sherry eyed the ceiling in boredom, and Ember stared at Reid, waiting for him to do something, or for someone to explain precisely why he was lying on the floor. There was a tension between her and Reid that she was sure only she noticed – And really, just her. She had the feeling Reid was too far gone to notice if she suddenly took her top off and decided to give Brandon a lap dance. The distance between them felt achingly vast, like there was some impassable barrier between them. Her breathing and the occasional rustle of someone turning a page were the only sounds in the room. She’d dealt with so much silence lately that she couldn’t stand it. She had to say something. “Reid, why are you lying on the floor?” she asked the most pointless question, not expecting an actual answer.
There was a long moment when she thought he hadn’t heard her, or was ignoring her, but then he tipped his head back far enough to look at her upside-down. His eyes were very bright and surprisingly clear – She had wondered, in a distant part of her mind, if he was drunk, but apparently not. From her angle, Ember could look straight down the line of his body from the tip of his chin to his toes, and she suddenly really wanted to be on the floor with him.
Dammit! You’re mad at him. You are still furious at him. That body you’re ogling, yeah, that lean, sexy body, has been in so many girls’ beds it has to be a record. But, mad or not, she wanted Reid as much as ever. The guy was seductive and addictive as melted chocolate and crack.
“Do you actually want to know why I’m on the floor, or do you want to have meaningless, angry sex with me first?” Reid’s mouth quirked into that devilish smile of his, the one that she’d loathed and loved from day one, and his eyes flashed.
Ah. She should have known he’d notice her eyeing him. But she was taken aback by his attitude, so different from the other night when he’d sat on her bedroom floor in misery. He was acting like…like…well, like the arrogant playboy he’d been before he’d fallen down the rabbit hole and found himself helplessly in love with her. It was infuriating and somehow amusing at the same time. The distance between them had suddenly gone from impassable barrier to forty-kilometer-wide-river-of-lava proportions.
Yet, she still wanted to have meaningless, angry sex with him. How the hell did he do that to her, make her feel that way? She scoffed at him and crossed her arms. “Forget it. You’re an arse.”
He shrugged, folding his hands on his flat stomach. “We’ve established that before.”
“Why are you on the floor, then?” She just wanted to know to satisfy her curiosity, and then she could go back to trying to ignore his presence. In no way did she ask just to have the chance to keep talking to him after having not spoken to him in five days…If there was any proof she needed to convince herself she still loved him, this was it. Five days apart and she felt like throwing her arms around him and forgiving him. It was ridiculous.
“I don’t know,” Reid said casually with no particular inflection to his voice. It was like he’d simply found himself on the floor at some point and was disinterested in how he’d gotten there.
He’s a lunatic. What do you expect?
“You don’t know why you’re lying on the floor?” She heard the disbelief and annoyance in her own voice, tried to modulate it to nonchalance.
“Nope.”
“Are you high?”
“Nope.”
“Ricky?” Ember shot a look at Ricky, who didn’t even look up from his book.
“He’s not high,” he answered shortly.
“So why is he on the floor?”
“He’s Reid.” As if that explained everything.
“But—”
“I just wanted to lie on the floor. Do I really need a rational reason to lie on the floor?”
“Uh, what’s going on down here?” Cris’s voice broke their senseless argument and Brandon heaved a sigh of relief as the American boy stepped into the room and hovered by the stairs with a bemused look on his face. The firelight made his naturally tanned skin look dark and buttery, and his hair was highlighted with slinking ribbons of lighter gold and touched with slithering shadows.
“Thank God,” Brandon groaned, “We can finally get on with the meeting and stop this insanity. Are they always like this?” He gestured to Ember and Reid with a vaguely violent gesture. He was clearly irritated by their pointless babble. He was such a spoilsport. Sherry was stifling her laughter behind her hand.
Cris observed Reid lying on the floor and the blank look on Ember’s face, and nodded. “Yes. They are always like this. You should have been there for the raccoon argument,”
– She’d forgotten about that argument; they’d been debating whether a raccoon was a mammal or a rodent. Cris then proceeded to take a seat on the floor by Reid’s feet. Reid still didn’t move. Ember thought about throwing her chair at him but before she could budge, Brandon started talking in that agonizingly monotonous way that meant playtime was over.
“We need to find out what is in that lake,” Brandon stated the obvious once more and Ember considered leaving right then.
Why had she come to this thing again? Oh yeah, to avoid a lecture…Odds were she was going get one anyway so maybe she could just up and leave before she got the urge to smack Brandon over the head with one of the heavy books.
“This thing, whatever it is, is stronger than we’d anticipated and it has already dropped three bodies. We have to take it out before it kills someone else. Obviously, this isn’t some angry kelpie or a selkie playing games. It’s far more dangerous than those, and it seems to have intent beyond simply killing people. It wants something, something from us, or it wouldn’t be toying with us by throwing the wardings around the lake up to eleven.”
Hmmm. Yes, there was a mysterious lake monster screwing with them and killing boys in their underwear. It screamed evil, horny teenage girl. Just for a moment, the idea flickered through Ember’s head, that Liandra fit that bill. She almost laughed, a cold smirk curling one side of her lip. As if Lia would have the balls for something like that. She was a man-stealing bitch, but that was all she was. A stupid, slutty teenage girl who’d picked a fight with a powerful Fire Soul without knowing who the hell she was dealing with. She was going to learn her lesson soon enough. Dealing with the killer lake inhabitant was the priority right this minute.
“So, what
do we know now that we didn’t before?” Perry asked, possibly the smartest, most logical thing she’d ever heard come out of his mouth. He appeared to be focused, today, in way that made Ember think maybe he wasn’t quite as dumb as he let on. She eyed the boy, the tallest and third eldest of the boys’ group, very closely. She’d never really looked at Perry before. He was sort of Brandon’s shadow, always there but never really front-and-center, never the focus of attention. With his wide, doleful brown eyes and scruffy brown hair and bold features, he was handsome in a more rugged way than the rest of the boys, but there was a sharpness hidden deep behind his gentle, slow façade that Ember suspected the other boys overlooked more often than not. Not – she supposed – that it made a difference either way. Perry was obviously devoted to his role as Brandon’s obliging lapdog, so much so that she doubted he could be saved. He was a hopeless case.
Someone clicked their fingers in front of her face and Ember blinked, scowled down at Reid, who had slithered across the floor, presumably, just to be the one to snap his fingers in her face. He looked up at her with an expression that was hard to read, something like vague amusement and vague fear. She was oh-so tempted to peek into his head to see what he was thinking. There was dirt on his jeans and his hoodie and it was bugging her. She glared down at him and he smiled blandly back. “Window shopping there, Emz?” He quirked a brow at her.
It took her a few too many seconds to realize what he meant. Ah. He’d been watching her watching Perry. Was that what the hint of fear was about? Was he really that insecure now? Jesus, had she done this to him? Seriously, it was both flattering and a little scary. She tried not to let her heart give away the kick of snuggly warmth she felt, but she was certain Reid heard it stutter anyway. The way the tension in his shoulders – she hadn’t even noticed it until then – eased a bit confirmed her suspicions. Damn, she hated this. She hated wanting to hate him and not being able to because she still loved him so, so much. Part of her knew she shouldn’t want to hate him anyway, if he was telling the truth, if he really hadn’t meant to kiss Lia back…
