B006XVUCOY EBOK

by Dawn Gray

  I watched the car pull away, then Julian went inside, and I snuck out of where I had been hiding. I walked up to the door and turned the handle slowly. As I stepped inside, checking over my shoulder as I stepped over the threshold, I could feel the powers in the house, there were definitely higher powers at work in this house. As I moved down the narrow hallway, peeking around corners and in doorways, I was blindsided by a dark shadow.

  Before I knew what was going on, I was pushed up against the wall, the arm of a rather strong person against my chest, staring straight into the eyes of a blond-haired man with red eyes. He snarled loudly at me, baring his teeth. I looked at him, suddenly unafraid of him, and I yelled, even louder, right at his face. His snarl faded and he backed off a bit, releasing his hold on me.

  "What's going on here?" I heard a man's voice ask. I turned and looked at Julian, then at the blond-haired one that stood in front of me.

  "I caught her sneaking in." He said and looked at Julian.

  "And, you are?" Julian asked me. I was about to answer him when another man and two women stepped up behind him. I looked at this new man and felt his presence instantly. I wanted

  to speak, but his dark eyes held me in silence. I could feel my heart racing as I stared in shock.

  "Young lady," Julian's voice cut through, "I asked you a question. Who are you?"

  "Angel?" His voice asked. I looked at him again, his eyes lightening with the realization that he suddenly knew me. I nodded as he came towards me, then, as if by some sort of magic, he was standing no less than a foot away from me. His hand raised and touched my cheek, then ran his hands over my shoulders. "What are you doing here?"

  "It's my mother." I whispered to him. He stepped back and looked at me. I took his hand and tried to ignore the eyes on my back. "Quinn, she's dead."

  "Dead?" He asked and closed his eyes. I nodded and he pulled me close to him. "Angel..."

  "Yeah," I asked, stepping away. I looked right into his eyes. "It was the others." I said answering his unasked question. "The hunters."

  "Hunters?" The blond one questioned. Quinn looked at him then back at me.

  "How did you get away?" Quinn asked. I shook my head and sighed.

  "I almost didn't." I told him and pulled down the collar of my shirt, showing him the bandage that covered the hand-sewn gash in my shoulder. He looked horrified at me. "Don't worry, it's almost healed."

  "Excuse me." Julian said and interrupted. The two of us looked over at him. "I don't mean to break up this happy reunion, but...,” he said as he walked towards us, "who are you?"

  "Her name is Angel Browne." Quinn said and touched my cheek as I looked at him and smiled. "She's my granddaughter."

  "What?" That was the general question that went around the room as I looked at Julian and smiled while he looked me up and down. This was going to be quite hard for us to explain.

  Dinner was set down in front of me as we all sat around a large table, Quinn, Julian, the blond haired man named Michael, Cleo, who was a tall blond woman, and Lauren, who was Quinn's "girlfriend". I was placing a rare slice of meat on my plate when my mind picked up voices from across the table. I put down my fork and listened as Julian and Cleo had a discussion about exactly who I was and why I was there. I finally got fed up and decided to tell them about my own "powers".

  "Excuse me." I said, quite loudly, disturbing everyone at the table. I looked up at Julian and Cleo. Quinn suddenly looked at me as he felt my anger growing, and he reached over and touched my arm. I tried not to look at him. "I would appreciate it if you would ask me about my business here and not talk so loudly between yourselves."

  "Oh, boy." Quinn said and looked at his brother and Cleo, who had turned and looked right at him. "I forgot to mention this, but Angel can read minds, among other things."

  "Thanks for the info." Michael said and I looked at him.

  "Don't worry, Mike. What you were thinking about stays between you and me." I whispered at him, concerning his very erotic fantasy about me. His face went flush as he looked away from me and I looked back at Quinn. "Maybe we should tell them."

  "Now?" He asked. I nodded.

  "Yes, now would be a good time." Julian said and looked at the two of us.

  "Do you want to tell them or should I." Quinn asked.

  "You start, I'll finish." I replied. Quinn sighed, folded his arms on the table and looked right at his brother.

  "When I was...mortal, just before Victor changed me, I was engaged to be married to a woman named Maria. She was very beautiful and very much like Ashley, a strong-headed woman without any fear." Quinn said softly and I watched as his eyes began to fade in color as he remembered those times. "Even when I told her what I had become, after I let her in on the secret that our little dysfunctional family held, she still wanted to love me, and to be with me, because she was pregnant."

  "Pregnant?" Julian asked. Quinn nodded, and looked at his brother. "Those were times when a woman who had sex before marriage was scorned."

  "I told you that she was fearless." Quinn said and looked at me.

  "Her journals told of a day when she was about two months pregnant that she had gone for a walk through the woods near Victor's house and she fallen onto an old bear trap, It snapped on her leg and she was caught there, until Victor came along and saved her. He brought her to his home and made her comfortable and while his nursemaid fixed up her leg, he gave her a glass of thick red liquid, and told her that it was going to help her heal. He gave her his blood." I told them and sighed, sitting back at the table. "My ancestor, Maria, had twins and they both had some signs of vampirism. One of them was taken by the assumed father, and the other was raised by Maria.

  "My grandfather, Louis, was given a second dose of Victor's blood when he was sixteen after he had fallen off a horse and hit his head on a rock. His scull had split and he was bleeding profoundly. His third dose, was just before he was married, but since he was not yet a true vampire, not yet killed and brought back to life, his blood, tainted with Victor's vampire blood, was passed on to his child." I said as if I had been reading it from the pages of the journals themselves.

  "And the other twin?" Michael asked.

  "His brother, Jacob, was also given a second dose of Victor's blood when he collided with a tree just after his own wedding, again, passing it on to his child, but Jacob found out about his past, about Quinn, and Victor. He felt like he had been betrayed, and he vowed to hunt down every vampire that existed and destroy them."

  "A vampire hunter." Julian said softly. I nodded, not that he had asked the question. "So, what does this have to do with you?"

  "My too-great-to-count grandfather, Louis, decided to hide from his brother, by taking his family out of France and down to some foreign land, that's not really clear to me." I replied and sat forward. "It doesn't matter where they went to hide, they were always found. I'm the only left, on Louis's line anyway. There are more of Jacob's kin in this country than I can fend off. They killed my mother only a week ago, and they tried to kill me but none of them lived to tell about their failure."

  "So, what are you, exactly?" Cleo asked. "I mean, you don't feel like us."

  "How do you think you feel to me?" I smiled back at her. "I'm not sure what you would call what I am, but I know that I'm definitely part vampire. I can read minds, drink blood, when the urge gets too strong to resist, move objects, manipulate time and space, and I have the power to overpower the strongest man. I can talk to the animals."

  "Manipulate time and space?" Lauren asked. Her mortal presence hadn't exactly evaded my senses either. I could smell her fear of me being so close, as if she thought I would harm her, but I could also smell Quinn all over her.

  "Yeah, um, let’s see. I can slow down time so that it makes it look as if I'm going faster, when in fact, to me everyone else slows down. The space thing is a little hard to understand. You'd have to see it to get a clear picture." I said and looked at the others. "Look, I didn't come here to get anyone i
n the middle of this. I came to see Quinn, to tell him about my mother and to warn him and the rest of you about the danger of Jacob's clan. I'll be gone in the morning, but if it's not to much trouble Ms. Danzeiger, would you mind if I spent the night?"

  "No, she wouldn't mind." Quinn spoke up. I looked at him as he looked at Cleo, then she nodded and I stood up. "Where are you going?"

  "I'd like to try and start now." I smiled at them. Quinn looked at me oddly. "I don't sleep well."

  "I'll show you to your room." Quinn said and walked with me up to the room that I was going to stay in. He stopped me at the door and put his hands on my shoulder. "Don't worry, Angel. I won't let anyone get to you. In this house, you're safe, and you don't need to leave in the morning, they'll be fine if you stay."

  "I didn't come here to be a burden, Quinn."

  "Please, Angel, be serious. You're my grandchild and this is where you're going to stay. I wonder what Julian thinks about being an uncle." Quinn smiled and kissed me on the forehead. "Good night, Angel."

  "Goodnight, Quinn." I replied and walked into the room, closing the door behind me. I looked at the bed and sighed. This was going to be a long night.

  The dreams had started about six to eight months ago, always starting the same, and always ending the same. I would be in some short of park, probably an amusement park, it didn't really matter, and all it had to be was full of people. I would be walking around, enjoying myself, walking with some of my friends, when I felt him close to me, always the same feeling when he was around. The desperate urge to run was what came next and it was to the same kind of house.

  It was a small two-story house on the outside, not always the same color, but the same basic kind. I would run inside and up to the second floor. The stairway would be at one end of the hallway and it would seem to go on forever. I walked down to the end of the hallway and stop at the last door on the left. It was always unlocked and it was easy to push open. A couple times a young man named Chris, whoever he should be, would rush me in and tell me to hide because they were right behind me, almost close enough to get me.

  My hiding spot was always the same, on the far back wall of this room was a door and behind that door was a bathroom. I would run into this bathroom and lock the door behind me. In the back corner of this bathroom where was a secret panel that swung open like a door and without fail I would got through it.

  Once the door had shut and my eyes had adjusted to the dimness behind the door. I found myself at a midpoint of a wide fuchsia colored stairway, with stairs leading up and then again leading down. Usually I took the down way, and it went on for a very long time. I felt like I had gone down two flights of stairs, as if the house were four stories instead of two. Once at the bottom, I stepped through the door to my right and into what looked to be a very large library, with wall to wall books and endless columns of catalogs used to find them.

  To the right and left of the back wall were two, spiraling staircases going up and connecting to a catwalk high up on the back wall, where a doorway was. I felt him, then, the man in black, never showing his face, never letting me see who he was, but it was always the same man, same build, same black clothes. He would walk into the room and I would run up the staircases to get away, but they would always begin to fall apart as I raced up them.

  If I had gone up the fuchsia colored stairway instead of down I would have ended up on the catwalk and then the stairs in the room would suddenly break apart, I was trapped no matter how I looked at it. Once I realized that there was no way out, no escape, I woke up and the dream ended, but the feeling of the man, the presence he gave off would still be in the room.

  The real reason that I had come to see Quinn was because I was so afraid. I hadn't had a peaceful night sleep since he started to appear to me, but then I had never really felt threatened by him; whomever he should happen to be.

  That night, as I curled up with all the blankets on the bed, I dreamed again. This time it was different and this time we came face to face.

  I was hanging around with two girls, one older, one younger, one with blond hair, the other with black. We were sitting in their home, waiting for something when they began to show me their stone collection. The one that stuck in my mind the most, the one that I can easily see, was a long clear quartz shard with other polished stones growing out of it, naturally, as if they had been there all along.

  The stones were blue and pink, and there were some purples and greens but it seemed so funny to see them set in this stone that I laughed at them. They told me that they were witches, which didn't really bother me any and that the stones were what they used to cast magic.

  The scenery changed after that, and I was lying in a bed with a fluffy white cat under my arm. Something told me to wake up, to look out my window and the presence of the man filled my room. I turned in my bed and looked out the window just above my head. There I saw a shadow of a man standing right next to my window. I got up and walked out of the room, and stood in the middle of a white hallway. I looked to my right and then to my left and was about to knock on the door across from me when I turned and looked to my right again.

  There he stood, dressed all in black, right down to his black hair. He was tall and built, like I would have thought he might be, and he stood there with his hands folded in front of him. He wore a black suit, with a button up shirt that had no collar, no place for a tie, black jeans that fit his muscular legs and butt quite nicely, and a leather jacket that was tailored to his body. He looked at me with his brown eyes and I noticed that he was dark, no maybe that wasn't the right word, he was darker. His face was round and his eyes, though they were dark, smiled at me. He looked as if he were of mixed decent.

  I wanted to step back, I wanted to run, but he raised his hand slightly, as if to tell me he meant no harm. I asked him what he wanted and why he had kept following me. He took my hand and looked to my right at the slightly opened door.

  "Don't go in the room." He said sternly. I looked at the room and then back at him. He placed a black knife in my hand and closed my fingers around it. "Don't go in the room."

  "Who are you?" I asked him and watched as he backed away to an elevator door that opened to my left. He stepped back into it and looked at me.

  "Don't lose that." He said and pointed to the knife in my hand. "And, don't go in the room."

  I stepped up to the elevator, and watched it closed, his brown eyes never moving from mine. I reached out to grab the door and the knife slipped out of my hand, falling down the elevator shaft. A hand reached out from my side and grabbed my wrist. I turned, looked at the black haired girl, and watched the elevator disappear then I turned to look at the doorway that he had pointed out.

  “He told me not to go in there.” I said to her. She nodded and pushed the door open. As she stepped into the room, I could see the crimson colored splatter on the wall. Moments later, she walked out of the room, a green color, and looked at me.

  "Don't go in that room." She replied and I closed my eyes and sighed.

  When I opened them, the sun was up in my real room and I was quite alone. I got up and got dressed, then decided that I was going to go out and get some of my stuff done, whatever stuff that I could do.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairway, a sudden nauseous feeling came over my body. I held my stomach as I walked down the small hallway, but the nausea became pain and I was brought to my knees. When I hit the floor, voices whispered in my mind, they became progressively louder and even covering my ears wouldn't make them go away. I felt Michael near me, his voice broke through the others like a booming voice.

  Angel! He said to me then I could feel his hands on my arms. Listen to me; you have to open your eyes.

  As if by magic, just by the sound of his voice, my eyes opened and I looked into his eyes, directly into them. My eyes began to fill with tears, the voices in my head were very loud, so much so that it hurt. I watched the world swirl around in the depths of his eyes, then he leaned forward and
kissed me softly on the lips. With his touch the voices grew instantly silent. I sat up and looked at him, then looked around and back at him.

  "In this house, minds tend to be quite loud." He whispered and smiled. "It's a distraction method, and I'm sorry if I offended you."

  "The hunters are close." I whispered to him. He grabbed my hand and helped me to my feet, looking at me oddly.

  "Are you sure?" He asked softly. I nodded and sighed.

  "Every one of us is connected." I explained. "There is one of them for every one of us, but all of the other ones like me are dead, but they, the others, they keep growing."

  I smiled at Michael; this realization hit me hard at that moment. I walked away, further down the hall and stopped when I saw Quinn on the phone in one of the dens.

  "Yes, she's here!" He yelled over the phone. "Where's Finn!" He asked angrily. "Well, he's suppose to be here guarding her and he's nowhere to be found."

  I looked up at Lauren as she walked up to the door that I was standing next to. She looked at me, I could feel the fear that seemed to jump off her. I smiled and stepped away from the door as she moved closer to it. She was afraid of me, but she didn't even know me.

  "I won't hurt you." I whispered to her as she walked by me. "Trust me."

  "Why should I?" She asked.

  "Your friend, Ash, she's one of them, and Quinn, he's one, too. I'm not. I’m just like you." I told her and watched her shake her head, her mind seemed to tell me what she didn't want to, that I wasn't like her. "You know, that's just the type of ignorance that I've come to expect from normal people. What you don't understand you judge, and after you've judged so much, you kill."

  "What?" She said in an angry tone. Quinn stepped out of the room. I looked at him then at Lauren. "You should look in the mirror when you talk about someone who judges."

  "I told you that I wouldn't hurt you." I told her again. I looked right at her then at Quinn, who was about to say something. "No, Quinn, don't defend her, there's no need. Let her fear what she doesn't understand, let her live in ignorance, it doesn't do me any harm." I said and walked away.