My Blood Approves
( My Blood Approves - 1 )
Amanda Hocking
Seventeen-year-old Alice Bonham's life feels out of control after she meets Jack. With his fondness for pink Chuck Taylors and New Wave hits aside, Jack's unlike anyone she's ever met. Then she meets his brother, Peter. His eyes pierce through her, and she can barely breathe when he's around. Even though he can't stand the sight of her, she's drawn to him. But falling for two very different guys isn't even the worst of her problems. Jack and Peter are vampires, and Alice finds herself caught between love and her own blood…
Amanda Hocking
My Blood Approves
“Since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady I swear by all flowers.
Don't cry — the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph And death I think is no parenthesis”
— E. E. Cummings
Chapter 1
The goose bumps were standing all over her bare flesh and she stomped her foot, at least partially because of the cold. Jane would claim it was wholly because of her frustration over the length of the line and continue insisting that chain smoking cigarettes kept her warm. The law stated that people had to be at least twenty feet from the door of an establishment to smoke, and fortunately, we were much farther than that.
“This is truly disgusting,” Jane grunted, flicking her cigarette to the dampened sidewalk and smashing it hard with her stilettoed boot.
“Maybe we should just call it a night,” I suggested hopefully. Our fake IDs had not been as impressive as Jane’s connection had promised, and this would be the fifth club we would be turned away from, if we ever managed to even make it to the door.
Since we were going out, I had reluctantly allowed Jane to dress me, so everything was ill-fitting and far too revealing for the cold Minnesota night.
There was a heavy mist settling over us, and I felt chilled to the bone. Jane’s top was completely sleeveless, but she refused to shiver or admit that any of this fazed her. Her plan was to get crazy drunk and hook up with somebody completely random, and there was very little I could do to reason with her.
“No, no!” Jane shook her head shook ferociously and rolled her heavily lined eyes dramatically when she looked at me. “I have a good feeling about this place.”
“It’s after midnight, Jane,” I persisted. The pair of heels I had borrowed from her were causing permanent damage to my feet, and I shifted my weight in hopes of easing the pain.
“I just want to dance and be stupid!” The night had begun wearing on her, so she had started whining. It made her seem much younger than seventeen and made us even less likely to get into the club. “Come on, Alice! This is what being young is all about!”
“I really hope not,” I grumbled. Waiting in line for hours and being turned away from clubs did not sound like the way I had planned to spend my youth.
“We can try again next weekend. I promise. It’ll give us more time to find better ID’s.”
“I don’t even have any alcohol.” Her expression had gone all pouty, but I knew that she was starting to cave. Her boots could not be comfortable, and the cold mist had to be getting to her.
“I’m sure we can find some somewhere,” I reassured her. In truth, Jane could find alcohol the way I found water. She had an endless stream of guys that were eager to buy her drinks and let her get stupid and dance. I wasn’t actually sure what she was complaining about. Wherever Jane went, a party was sure to follow.
“Fine.” Sighing deeply, Jane stepped out of line and grudgingly started walking in the direction towards my apartment, away from the bright lights of the clubs and crowds of drunk people smoking cigarettes. “But you owe me.”
“Why do I owe you?” I demanded. We’d barely made it a few feet from the line when I couldn’t take it any longer. I stopped and ripped off the borrowed shoes, preferring to walk barefoot on the cold, dirty cement than risk any more blisters or injuries to my body. Most likely, I’d get spit or gum or something in a fresh wound and end up with typhoid or rabies, but it still seemed like a better option.
“For making me leave early.” Jane cast a disapproving look down at me and shook her head. I was short to begin with, but after wearing heels and walking next to her while she still had hers on, I felt like an awkward hobbit.
“Why’d you take off your shoes?”
“Cause they hurt.” The relief of being shoeless was almost painful. I could feel my feet expanding back out to their normal size and my calf stretching to reach the ground. My whole body seemed confused by the sudden lack of four inches and I struggled to keep up with Jane’s rather slow pace.
“Beauty is pain.” For some reason, Jane felt obligated to take me under her wing and try to improve my status, no matter how hard I tried to resist. I was all too comfortable in jeans and Converse, but that was definitely not good enough for her. At any mention of comfort, she would spout a sermon about the essentials of beauty. “Alice, you’re never going to get a boyfriend if you don’t step it up.”
“I am stepped up, and its not my life’s mission to find a date,” I muttered.
Fortunately, she didn’t bother to ask me what my life’s mission was because I was pretty sure I didn’t have one.
“Some days, I don’t even know why I bother.” Jane sounded completely exasperated, as if I was the one trying on her. Here I had gotten all dolled up the way she wanted and stood out all night in the cold for her, but I was wearing on her.
“We should get a cab soon,” I suggested. We had walked far enough away from the clubs where it was starting to feel deserted, and two teenage girls walking around in downtown Minneapolis wasn’t the safest thing in the world.
“Not yet.” The problem was that we didn’t have very much money, so the farther we walked, the shorter the cab ride would be. I lived by Loring Park, which really wasn’t that far from where we were, but it still wasn’t within walking distance.
“Soon?” I asked plaintively, looking up at her. A green and white taxi sailed past us, but Jane didn’t even look towards it. My feet were killing me, and the night felt too long. I just wanted to go home, put on sweats, and curl up in my bed.
“We need the exercise anyway,” Jane hedged my question. Maybe I needed the exercise but Jane could’ve passed for a supermodel easily.
“But my feet hurt.” It was my turn to sound like a petulant child, but I couldn’t help it. It was late and I was tired. I don’t know why I ever agreed to her shenanigans. They were always much more fun for her then they were for me.
Being the less sexy sidekick wasn’t a very glamorous life.
“Beauty is-”
“-pain, yeah, yeah, I get it,” I grumbled, cutting her off.
Jane lit another cigarette, and we walked in silence. I knew she was sulking about the club and trying to plot some exciting adventure to drag me into, but I wouldn’t fall for it this time. By the morning, it would probably hurt to even stand, and while I hadn’t officially checked yet, I was certain the blisters on my feet were at least the size of quarters.
Even though I was mostly just concentrating on the pain in my feet, I felt them before I saw them. There was suddenly this weird sensation of being followed, and the sound of the traffic from Hennepin Avenue had faded enough where I could start to hear the footfalls echo behind us. Jane seemed oblivious, but I didn’t want to say anything. Either I would let onto them that I knew they were there, or I would just once again confirm Jane’s s
uspicion that I was certifiably insane. Instead, I just quickened my pace, which pleased Jane as she easily met it. Her constant complaint in life was that I was too slow and she had to spend the majority of it waiting for me.
Then the footsteps behind us started to hurry up, becoming heavier and louder, and there was the sound of heavy breathing and hushed male voices.
Jane looked over at me, and the panic in her eyes meant that she heard them too. Out of the two of us, she was the braver one and managed to steel a look back over her shoulder at them. I was about to ask her what she saw when she started sprinting forward, and that was answer enough for me.
Futilely, I tried to catch up to her, but she wasn’t about to slow down for me, remaining a few steps ahead. It reminded me of that joke about how fast I had to run to get away from a grizzly bear — faster than my friend. Still following her, we ended up in a mostly deserted parking garage, and I wondered why this seemed like the logical choice to her. There were so many other places we could’ve gone where there would be crowds, but her first choice had been a dimly lit underground parking garage.
Jane dashed around the side of a van, and I allowed myself a look back behind me for the first time. In the darkness, I could see very little, but I knew there were four large guys, and when they saw me looking at them, one of them started to cat call. I ran forward, only I realized Jane wasn’t in front of me. I didn’t have a very good fight or flight reflex, so I just froze when I didn’t see her.
“Over here!” Jane hissed, but the acoustics in the garage were awful and my panic had completely set in. I couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from, so I just stood frozen underneath a flickering yellow light and hoped that my death would be quick and painless.
“Hey little girl,” one of the guys purred in a voice that sounded anything but friendly. Stupidly, I turned to face them. Since I had stopped running, so had they, and they were casually strolling over to me.
“Do you always run from a good time?” another one asked. For some reason, the rest of them thought that was hilarious, and the garage was filled with the sound of their laughter.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I opened my mouth to say something, maybe even scream, but I just gaped at them. I was standing in a pool of cold water and oil, and the light above me apparently decided to go out for good. This was not how I imagined that I would die. At the very least, I always assumed that I would fight back instead of letting it happen like a fool. I think there are many assumptions that we make about ourselves that are completely untrue.
Closing my eyes against the dark, I knew that I didn’t want to risk seeing anything they did to me. Maybe if I just squeezed my eyes, it would all be over faster. They were talking amongst themselves, laughing and making perverted jokes, and I knew I was going to die. Somewhere behind me, I heard the screech of tires, but I was trying separate myself from everything going on around me. I had never understood astral projection, but I desperately hoped I could master it in the last few minutes of my life.
“Hey! What are you doing?!” a voice shouted to the side of me. There was something warm and oddly familiar about it, and I knew that it didn’t belong to the group of guys closing in on me. As soon as I heard him speak, I opened my eyes.
“What’s it to you?” a large tattooed guy growled, but he started taking a step back. A car must’ve stopped in the parking space to my right, because I could see the bright headlights shining past me.
“I think you should just back off,” the familiar voice said.
I peeked over to the side to see him, but the headlights shining in the opposite direction made it too dark for me to make much out, except for the fact that he was wearing a pink tee shirt. He took another step forward, and my would-be-attackers continued taking steps back. But they didn’t seem to be moving fast enough, because I saw the blur of the pink shirt rush towards them.
It must’ve been the darkness and my fear, because I couldn’t seem to trust my eyesight anymore. It almost looked as if the pink shirt was moving faster than I could imagine humanly possible, and when I heard the guys yelling, it looked like they were being thrown. But that wasn’t possible, so I blinked my eyes to adjust them better, and then everyone was gone.
Not everyone, exactly. The light above me suddenly flickered on again, and the guy in the pink shirt was standing next to me. In big black letters across his chest, his shirt read, “Real men wear pink.” I stared at him, probably longer than was polite. Something about him felt so familiar, but I couldn’t place him.
He looked older than me, probably in his early twenties, and he wasn’t particularly muscular or tall. In fact, he leaned more towards wiry than he did muscular, and I couldn’t imagine what had frightened off the other guys. His face was open and friendly, and he had an easy smile that I couldn’t help but respond to, even though I had just been a few moments away from death.
“Are you okay?” he asked, appraising me up and down. There was something weirdly comforting about the way he looked at me. It wasn’t the way the other guys looked; he really just wanted to be sure I was alright.
“Yeah,” I said in a voice that barely sounded like my own. “You saved my life.”
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he replied, completely ignoring the fact that he’d done anything heroic.
“I’m not.” Suddenly, I remembered Jane and started looking around for her. A part of me was angry that she had done nothing to save me, but then again, neither had I, and I didn’t think that I should hold her to a higher standard than I did myself. “My friend Jane is around here somewhere.”
“Two girls?” Even the dark, I saw him raise an eyebrow and shake his head. “Real safe.”
“I think Jane has mace,” I mumbled lamely.
“Where is this alleged friend?” He took his turn scanning the parking lot, and then pointed to something by a van parked on the other side. “I think I see her over there.”
“Where?” I squinted at where he was pointing, but I couldn’t see anything.
“Over there,” he repeated, then took a step towards the black Jetta parked next to me. “Come on. We’ll go over and pick her up, and then I’ll give you guys a ride. You shouldn’t be out here like this.”
I walked around to the passenger side of the car, and it never occurred to me to say no. There was something about him that made me trust him implicitly. His car stereo softly played Weezer, and in the warm glow of the blue dashboard lights, I got my first real good look at him. His skin looked perfectly smooth, like porcelain, but his hair was a perfectly disheveled mess. His eyes, which looked almost gray in the light, were the happiest eyes I’d ever seen.
He sped off across the parking lot, and I finally pulled my eyes away from him to look out the window. Jane was cowering down behind a large white van, and I wondered if she’d even bothered to call the police or anything. The car stopped next to her, and he rolled down the window so he could lean out.
“Jane?” he said, and she turned to look at him.
I expected her to be afraid, maybe even bolt and run, after what had just happened. Instead, she gave him the strangest look. It was almost as if she was in awe. It didn’t make any sense to me. Sure, I did think he was attractive, maybe even very attractive, but I’d seen Jane go home with guys far more attractive then him. But she looked absolutely stunned by his beauty, and I was surprised she wasn’t drooling.
“Hi,” Jane stammered. It wasn’t her normal sultry, flirty voice, even though I’m sure that’s what she was trying for. She sounded too star struck to be sexy, and I wondered if I was missing something. I looked back over at him, trying to figure out if he was famous and I just couldn’t place him.
“Jane, he’s giving us a ride,” I explained when it appeared she was just going to stand there staring at him. “Get in the car.”
“Sure.” Jane finally seemed to regain herself a bit and smiled at him before sliding into the backseat. When she got in, I swear that she
leaned forward so she could sniff him. Naturally, I tried to inconspicuously inhale to see if I could smell anything, and admittedly, he seemed to smell good, but it was nothing spectacular.
“Are you okay?” I asked, looking back at her. Maybe in her fear, she’d popped an ecstasy tablet or something.
“I’m great,” Jane cooed, still gaping at him. “Who’s your friend here?”
“I don’t actually know.” It had never occurred to me that I didn’t even know the name of the guy driving the car.
“I’m Jack,” he offered, filling in the blank. “And you’re Jane.” Then he looked over at me, his eyes dancing. “And you are?”
“Alice.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see jealousy flash across Jane’s face. She seemed threatened that he was even looking at me, which was very un-Jane like. Even as conceited as she was, or maybe because of it, she was never, ever threatened or jealous of me.
“Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I could really go for a cup of coffee right about now.” Jack dropped the car into gear and sped off without waiting for either of us to respond. It wasn’t really a question anyway, and neither one of us would’ve protested. When I glanced up in the rearview mirror, I could see Jane staring at him with this intense expression and leaning forward, as if she couldn’t get close enough to him. Even with her rather storied history, I had never seen her look so desperate before.
I was afraid she’d catch me staring at her (which was silly because I doubted that Jane would notice anything but Jack), I turned my attention out the window. The city lights went past us in a blur, and I wondered how fast we were going. There was no sense of fear of getting hurt or even pulled over, though.
Ever since I had heard Jack’s voice, any real worry I had had completely dissolved. I felt completely at ease with him, and that fact should’ve been somewhat concerning, but I just couldn’t seem to muster any.
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