by Gayla Twist
“Well, that was interesting,” Mom said to me when the visit was over and we’d climbed into the car. “I’m sorry she was so stressful today, but I’m really proud of the way you handled it.”
And then I was crying.
“Oh, sweetie,” my mom said, wrapping her arms around me. “I’m sorry if she made you feel bad. She’s just old and confused most of the time. You just happen to remind her of her sister. Being nice to her and assuring her that you wouldn’t meet whatever guy Lettie eventually ran off with was probably the kindest thing you could ever do for her.”
“Do you think Lettie lived?” I managed to choke out between sobs. “I mean, do you think she just ran away and got married, or do you think something happened to her?”
“I don’t know, honey.” My mom petted my hair. “I’d like to think she eloped.”
“Then why didn’t she ever talk to her family again? Why didn’t she ever visit?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she thought she wouldn’t be forgiven.”
“But Grandma misses her so much. Lettie’s been gone for like seventy years, and Grandma still worries about her. It’s just so horrible.”
“That’s why it’s so wonderful when you visit,” Mom told me. “She gets to see Lettie again. I know it’s hard on you, but it’s such a wonderful gift.” She popped the glove box and rooted around for some tissues.
“I know,” I said, my words muffled by the tissue she handed me as I wiped my nose. “It’s just hard, sometimes. It really freaks me out.”
“Well, what do you say to ice cream for lunch?” Mom put on her seatbelt. “I think having to pretend to be the ghost of Lettie Gibson warrants a little calorie fest.”
A huge part of me wanted to tell my mother the truth of why I was so upset. And in my old reality, that would have been the right thing to do. But the supernatural factor had me confused. If I started telling my mom about vampires at the castle, she would probably have me psychologically evaluated rather than helping me unravel my feelings for someone who was obviously dangerous.
“A calorie fest sounds great,” I managed to say as I tried to reel in my emotions. “Sorry I got all weepy. It just scares me thinking about what might have happened to Lettie.”
“Don’t I know it.” Mom backed the car out of the parking spot. “Every week, I think about switching over to some less emotionally taxing work. Let someone else tackle the tough stuff and just grab something with better pay. Become a cog in middle management somewhere.”
“Why don’t you?” I asked, not because I thought she should, but just out of curiosity.
“Because there are a lot of girls out there like Lettie, who need someone to turn to when they get in a tight spot. Or need someone to count on when things go wrong. Someone to help them make sense of their lives and move forward. In a weird way, Lettie Gibson inspired me to become the person I am today.”
She was driving, but I leaned over, put my head on her shoulder, and wrapped my arms around her. “I’m so glad I have you for my mom,” I told her.
Mom actually offered to get me a couple of different outfits while we were shopping, but I acted like I only wanted a skirt, two t-shirts, and some new tennies. All of them mega on sale, of course. I knew things were tight, and I wasn’t about to make them tighter by being needy about clothes. It was better to have a lean wardrobe and my mom helping people with the work that she did than an overstuffed closet and lost girls having no one to turn to. Besides, if I ever got desperate for something designer, Blossom was always super cool about lending me stuff.
I didn’t know how I felt about seeing Jessie again. My heart and my head were complete polar opposites. I refused to be one of those females who got caught up with an abusive guy and kept going back to him no matter how violent he was. But Jessie had been nothing but kind to me, saving me from a variety of creeps and never laying a hand on me. Still, he was a vampire. The undead didn’t have the best reputation. My head hurt just thinking about it.
There was one question I needed answered, and it would dictate my actions forever after. I just had to wait for Jessie and force him to tell me. I needed to know the truth about what happened to Lillian Gibson.
Chapter 15
Jessie situated himself on the roof that night. “What’s wrong?” he asked, as soon as he got a look at my face.
“Mom and I went to see Grandma Gibson this afternoon,” I told him.
“How is Lillian?”
I gave an honest reply. “Not great. She’s losing it a bit.” I tapped my temple. “Half the time she thinks I’m her long lost sister and spends a lot of time warning me about the man I’m seeing and telling me his whole family is dangerous.”
“I see,” Jessie said, frowning. “You should probably listen to your grandmother. I’m sure she’s right.”
“How many questions do I have left?”
Jessie spread his hands, palms upward. “You tell me.”
Rather than our usual debate, I decided to just forge ahead. Taking a deep breath, I launched into, “What was your relationship with Colette Gibson, and how did she die?”
Running his hand through his hair several times, Jessie looked down. “I can tell you about our relationship, but I can’t tell you about how she died because I honestly don’t know.”
I said nothing, just waited.
“I was still a very new vampire when we came to America. Just a boy. We managed the blood supply, even back then, with a story about a hemophiliac brother who needed daily blood transfusions. No one really knew what the disease was back then, so it was pretty easy. We set up a small infirmary in a back room of the castle. Townsfolk could come to the back door to donate, and we’d give them a fairly generous payment. A lot of families were able to supplement their income that way.”
“And nobody found it suspicious?”
“Not really. You have to remember, this was back in the thirties. There was no Internet or television or anything. And a lot of people were pretty darn poor. Most people were just happy to hand over a few pints of blood for some food money.”
“And that’s how you met Lettie? Selling her blood?”
“No, our housekeeper hired her and your grandmother as maids.”
“Didn’t anyone find it weird that you were asleep all day and only got up at night? That would have probably tipped me off.”
“The castle doesn’t have a lot of windows, and we claimed the whole family suffered from a sensitivity to light. Which, in a way, we do.” He shrugged with the small joke. “People are less likely to question eccentricities if they are getting paid well, and we made sure to pay slightly better than what was customary at the time.”
“So Lettie was hired as a maid at the castle and...” I coaxed him back on track.
“I noticed her beauty immediately, of course. She was so beautiful yet so very modest. She never took it seriously when people would praise her appearance. But that wasn’t what made me fall in love with her.”
“What was?” I hated myself for asking, but couldn’t stop.
He then said something I wasn’t expecting. “It was because she was kind. To everyone. It didn’t matter who. She was particularly worried about Arthur, our fictional sick brother. Staff weren’t allowed to enter his room, but she would always make up a bouquet of wildflowers and leave them in a vase outside his door for the nurse to take in to him. She said she wanted to bring him a bit of nature to keep his spirits up.”
“She was kind to you?” I wondered. It seemed incredible that such a handsome boy would fall for a girl because of her kind nature. That wasn’t something that happened too frequently in the modern world.
“Yes, very kind to me.” He smiled at the memory. “I began to watch her. To find excuses to run into her. She was a great lover of books, and I arranged it so she could borrow as many as she liked from our private library.”
Nice, and she liked to read, I thought. That didn’t sound like anything that would draw the attention of a boy in my
high school.
“One evening, I caught her looking in my direction the way I was always looking in hers. Our eyes met, and I felt like a flame had been kindled inside of me,” he said, and I swear there were tears glistening in his eyes.
I reached out of the window and laid my hand on his sleeve while he collected himself. I desperately wanted to touch his cheek, his hair, anything really, but I knew that would make me shudder, and that seemed inappropriate given his emotional state.
Jessie continued with, “I began to court her but in secret. I knew my family wouldn’t approve.”
“Did she know that you...” I tried to figure the polite way to ask a delicate question. “Did she know about you?”
“She knew our family had a dark secret and we weren’t like regular people, but I didn’t want to just come out and tell her the full truth all at once because I knew it would frighten her too much.”
“You wanted to make her your companion?”
“No,” Jessie said in a defensive tone. “I wouldn’t have done that to her. I didn’t want her to have that kind of life.”
“Then what were you thinking could happen between you? I mean, given that she was human and you’re a vampire.”
“It’s rare, but under very special circumstances, vampires and humans can be together as equals. The Bishops have to approve it, and it usually means you’ll be shunned by the vampire families.”
“You guys have bishops?” I couldn’t keep from interrupting him. “Like church bishops?”
“No, the Bishops are the oldest and most powerful vampire family in the world. They rule as kind of a governing body for us.”
“Oh.” I had more questions, but figured I’d better learn the fate of Aunt Colette first. “So, you loved Colette so much you were willing to be shunned?”
“I didn’t care,” he said with such passion that I definitely believed him. “Being part of the elite was nothing compared to being with Colette.”
“You wanted to marry her?” I asked, feeling jealous of a girl who had more than likely died several decades before I was even born.
“When it’s a vampire with a human, it’s not considered marriage. We call it conjoined. And like I said, it’s very rare. I would have had to vouch for her as my mate and then never take another, not even after her death.”
“Not another human?”
“No. Not another mate, period. That’s how much the Bishops want to discourage a non-vampire union.”
“Wow,” was all I could manage. It was such a big decision to make for someone who was really just a teenager. Colette would have gotten older and older, and Jessie would have stayed young and fresh. Eventually it would have looked like she was his grandmother. “You must have really loved her.”
Jessie nodded.
“So, did you...” I felt awkward with the new terminology. “Did you conjoin?”
He shook his head and looked down at his hands, which he was clenching in his lap. “I told my family of my intentions, and they became very upset, forbidding me to soil the Vanderlind name with human blood.”
I knew he didn’t mean to insult me, but I couldn’t keep myself from saying, “Yeah, gee, wouldn’t want to soil the good name of a vampire.”
Jessie was so caught up in the memory that he didn’t pick up on my sarcasm. “Daniel kept insisting that I should just turn her or make her my companion.”
“Why didn’t you turn her?” I asked.
“No,” Jessie whispered, the memory obviously causing him pain. “No, that wouldn’t have been right for her. She would have refused to eat. She would have starved herself.”
“Just like the Brontes,” I murmured.
“We decided we were going to run away together. We would elope and then face whatever we’d have to face as husband and wife. I knew if we were legally married in the human world that it would help our plea with the Bishops.”
I did very much want to know more about who the Bishops were and how much power they had but didn’t want to keep interrupting. Jessie’s eyes were wide and filled with grief as he relived the whole thing with the telling. “What happened?” I asked in a voice just above a whisper.
“I wanted to tell her my secret before we were wed. She insisted there was nothing I could say that would stop her from loving me, but I knew she didn’t realize the extent of evil that was in the world. We arranged to meet in the woods outside the castle that runs along the river. If she still loved me after I explained what I really was, then we would take a boat down to the next town and wake up the justice of the peace.”
“What happened?” I asked, feeling a chill run up my spine.
“I don’t know,” Jessie said in a voice that choked back a sob. “She never showed. I never saw her again.”
“Not to be cruel, but maybe she found out about the whole vampire thing and just ran away?” I suggested. It was a pretty damn scary thing to know.
“No. I wish that were true. When she didn’t show up, I searched for her. I found one of her shoes by a log in the woods, and that’s all. There was no blood; there was no trail; her family seemed to think she’d eloped. Or maybe they just wished she did. For years, I held out hope. Not that we could be together but that maybe she was still alive. Finally, I had to accept that she was gone. My darling girl had vanished,” he said in a ragged voice.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I survived,” he sighed. “I kept going. I put one foot in front of the other day after day, year after year. Daniel insisted that I would get over it eventually, but he didn’t realize how much I loved her.”
“And it’s been like that ever since?” I asked, my heart aching for him.
“No, not quite. Maybe fifteen or twenty years ago I woke up one night, and something was different. I felt a feeling that I hadn’t had in a long time.”
“What was it?”
“Hope,” he said simply. “I wasn’t happy, but I began to feel like I might want to live again. I started feeling better and better each day. I even agreed to celebrate my maker’s day this year, which is something I’ve refused to do for decades. That’s why it was such a large celebration.”
I could hear my mom moving around downstairs, cleaning a few dishes that had been left in the sink. Crickets chirped, filling the night with their special music. “So you don’t really know what happened to Lettie. It’ll always be a mystery.”
“I’ve had to come to accept that,” he said with a sigh; then he lifted his arms in the air and stretched. “I should go. Your mother will be up soon to say goodnight.” He got to his feet. “Oh,” he said, remembering something that caused him to search his pockets. “I brought you something. I hope you don’t mind.”
My heart did a little somersault. “No, I don’t mind,” I managed. “As long as it’s just a trinket.”
Jessie chuckled. “It’s definitely a trinket. I think you’ll be pleased,” he said, squatting down next to me, closer than he usually sat. I closed my eyes for a second to just enjoy the cloved-orange smell of him. “Open your eyes. Look,” he said, pulling a chain from his pocket. At the end dangled a clear orb that seemed to capture the moonlight.
“What is it?” I asked, captivated by its simple beauty. The orb had a belt of silver around it to keep it in place. The metal had been worked into a design of flowers and vines.
“It’s carved from a rock crystal called Pools of Light. It’s the clearest of all the crystals and was very popular in jewelry when I was growing up. It made me think of you.”
“Why me?” I asked as I reached out to gently touch the smooth orb with one finger.
“Well, when I first saw you in the library, I thought you were Lettie. I could see only her when I was looking at you. But you’re not her. I know that now. You just look alike because you’re related.”
“Okay...?” That still didn’t explain anything about the crystal.
“Well,” he went on, “with Pools of Light, when you look through the crystal, it m
agnifies whatever you’re looking at and refracts it. That’s how you know it’s genuine.”
“I’m still not following you,” I said, our hands almost uniting over the bauble.
“It’s just a way for me to separate you from Lettie in my head. You’re not her, but it took a while for my brain to adjust. It’s like looking at a refracted image.”
I was too embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by a refracted image. Science was not my strongest subject. My confusion must have shown on my face because he said, “Here, let me show you.” Lifting the pendant to his eye, he said, “Look through the crystal. We can still see each other, but differently.”
I leaned so close to him that our breath mingled together; we were just a kiss apart. Steadying myself to peek into the crystal, I stifled a shriek.
“Are you okay?” he asked, lowering the bauble.
“Yes,” I managed to whisper.
“You don’t like it,” he said, his handsome face showing keen disappointment.
“No, I love it,” I told him. “It’s the loveliest thing anyone has ever given me.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I assured him. I was trembling all over, and he knew I was lying. I tried to cover with, “Sometimes I find it hard to be so close to you.”
“Because I’m a vampire,” he said bitterly, looking away.
“No,” I assured him, touching him on the sleeve. “You know that’s not true. It’s just...”
“Aurora? You still up?” my mom tapped at my door.
“Goodnight,” Jessie whispered, pressing the orb into my palm and then disappearing into the night.
I can’t even remember what I said to my mother. I guess I managed to string a few coherent sentences together because she wished me goodnight and went to her own room. As soon as she left, I scrambled for my dream journal. My last entry was about the inverted eye. I had been just inches away from someone I loved, but viewing him in a way that was distorted. Upside down somehow and backwards. When I peeked through the Pools of Light, looking into Jessie’s beautiful gray eye, that’s how it appeared.
