by B. F. Simone
She blacked out.
“You left him in an alley barely breathing.” Lucinda’s voice sliced through Katie’s mind.
She opened her eyes. They were heavy. She’d had a nightmare?
“She would have died if I didn’t,” Tristan said, sitting with his shirt off and blood smeared on his face and chest. They were in his room. She could tell by the Japanese cherry blossom picture above his head. That was always in the downstairs room.
“I understand that, but you could have killed Brian,” Lucinda said. “Go take a shower. You smell like vomit.”
“He shot her. I don’t care if he’s got broken ribs.”
“I do! He’s my son, Tristan. We’re family. You don’t do that to family.”
“Now I’m family? Your son has problems. He’s out of control.”
“Enough.”
Tristan scowled and looked at Katie. She wished he hadn’t seen her. She didn’t want to talk. Not yet. He turned away and she went back to a drossy, ache filled blackness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nightmares flashed across Katie’s mind. So many people dying, or being murdered. All night, she awoke in cold sweats.
I’m sorry. She’d hear over and over again. Maybe it was Tristan. Maybe it was a lingering thought from the nightmares.
It was dark when she woke up for the final time. Her body was sore but she felt fine. She sat up and swallowed a scream when she saw Tristan sitting at the desk.
“Are you trying to kill me?” She was having a heart attack. Everything felt too fast. Too real. She tried to slow her heart down.
She stopped breathing when she saw his eyes. They were red. She didn’t know if he was crying or if they were just red. She looked away. There was no reason someone’s eyes would just be red, but she didn’t want to think that he’d cried. Her stomach turned.
Katie focused on herself. What had happened. She was with Brian eating pizza…then. Her stomach dropped and she touched her stomach.
It wasn’t a nightmare. What happened was real, and she should have been in a lot of pain. A bullet flew threw her stomach just yesterday. Or maybe it was still the same night? How many days had it been? She should be in a hospital hooked up to IVs.
She lifted up her shirt just enough to peek. Maybe it was all a dream. There was a angry red line just above her belly button. It looked like an old cut. Not a fresh gun shot wound. A thin red line where tiny perfect stitches held her together. Katie had seen Lucinda stitch enough things to know what her patch jobs looked like. Katie was a patch job.
“What’s going on?” She couldn’t look at Tristan without remembering how he forced blood down her throat, how she drowned in it.
The door burst opened and smacked against the wall, bouncing back into the grizzly man that was her father.
“Get out. You, get away from her.” He hadn’t shaved in weeks maybe. He had a beard that made him look like a mountain man. He grabbed Tristan by his shirt and slammed him against the wall. Tristan didn’t do anything to fight back. “How could you? Why didn’t you just stay away?” The last word came out as a whisper. Her dad crumpled over and let Tristan go. “Please, just leave.”
“I’m not leaving her.” Tristan said.
“Can’t you see you’ve ruined her life? You’ve ruined it. All because of you. You’ve destroyed my family.”
Katie’s mouth opened but the words stayed confused and swirling in the back of her throat.
Tristan met her eyes. Do you want me gone? If you want me gone, I’ll leave and never come back.
What was he saying? And why did she hear it so clearly in her mind? Hysteria spread through her. Her limbs ached. Why did Tristan look like that? So weak and defeated.
The memory attacked her like a violent nightmare. The little boy with black hair and blue eyes. Walking away from her. Leaving her as she reached out for him. Tristan looked at her now with the same broken eyes.
“Just leave,” her dad screamed.
“No!” Katie found her voice. “No.” She couldn’t make sense of what was happening, but she knew if he left she’d feel empty again.
Her dad sobbed. She’d never heard him cry. It made her cry.
Her dad stood up and hugged her. “I’m sorry, Katie Bug. I messed up. I messed up.”
He held her for a long time, and they cried. She didn’t know why, but she felt like this pain, was like going home. The deep pain felt like something they’d been side-stepping her whole life. All the nights he’d left her in this house for another family to raise. The times he was too drunk to remember she needed to eat more than chips and water. They never talked about it. She didn’t want to. She hated thinking about her dad that way. He wasn’t like that anymore.
Tristan moved and she panicked. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor in the corner. His head leaned against the wall and he watched her. Listening to the past she never told anyone.
Her dad pulled away from her. “Do you see why I tried to protect you?”
“Why don’t I have a giant bullet hole in my stomach? Why am I—Okay?”
Her dad didn’t say anything. Neither did Tristan. They weren’t going to tell her. Her breath quickened. They couldn’t go on treating her like this. They were going to tell her something or she was going to flip-the-fuck-out.
“You’re like me,” Tristan said.
Katie stared. She didn’t want a clarification. She didn’t need one; she knew what he meant. It was impossible.
“That’s why I made you drink. You would have died if I didn’t. You would have—”
“Please. Stop,” her dad said again. His voice was small. He was begging Tristan, not telling him.
“You don’t remember me because he made you forget me. I can read your thoughts because your mother made me take the Keeper’s Vow. You don’t remember her because—”
“I didn’t want it to haunt you for the rest of your life, Katie Bug. I wanted you to grow up happy. I wanted you to have your own life. Your mother wanted you to have your own life.”
Katie was calmer than she expected. Her mother was a vampire. That was kind of cool, maybe? Tristan broke their eye contact and she knew she hadn’t heard the worst of it. Allison had told her once that vampire women couldn’t give birth. They were infertile. It was only guardian women who could bare half-vampire children.
“You’re a vampire?” she asked her dad. It was impossible. His face contorted. He ran a hand across his face.
“There’s something I have to tell you. But you know, I’ll always be your dad.”
“Dad, don’t,” she didn’t want to hear it. He was her dad no matter what. She didn’t want to hear otherwise. No matter what they’d been through, the tough times up until her last year in middle school, it didn’t matter.
“I knew your mother for a long time, but there was a time I hadn’t seen her for years. I—she came to me looking for help. She was—pregnant.”
“Dad, please—I don’t want to know.”
“Your mother wanted a place to start over. Her family kicked her out. I always loved her. I fell in love with her all over agin. And you. Katie you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I’ve always loved you.”
Was that why he’d leave her with Lucinda. For months.
“Who is my—who was she with?” She couldn’t say father. She couldn’t even think of the woman that was her mother. She’d spent so much of her life not caring about the one she saw in the picture frames. Now she felt betrayed.
“She didn’t know.”
Katie sniffed. Her mother was a tramp. Her next question was directed at Tristan. “What’s the Keeper’s Vow?”
He looked into her. Deep. “It allows us to hear each others thoughts.”
“Why?” It didn’t make sense to her.
Tristan shrugged. He was lying to her again, but he didn’t budge. Her dad looked at him and sighed.
“Tell me what happened.” She didn’t have to clarify that she meant the event that se
emed to start it all. The event that made Lucinda start hating her dad three years ago, the one that made her dad erase everything about her life.
Her dad stood up. “I’ve relived that night over and over for the last ten years. I don’t want to hear it again.” His heavy footsteps thumped on the floor—they paused before opening the door. “I can’t stop you anymore. But I erased your memories for a reason. Katie Bug. We can still go back to the way things were.”
Katie stared at the floor. She was tired of being kept in the dark. “Life only moves forward, Dad. Never backwards.” Her eyes never left the floor, but she knew Tristan was watching her. It was what he had told her on their first practice. She finally understood what he meant. She couldn’t run away forever.
The door opened and closed. She didn’t have to look up to know her father was gone. The only sound left in the room was Tristan’s light breaths. He was so quiet, but she could hear it.
She opened her mouth.
“We lived in the mountains,” he said. “Because my mother was blacklisted. I was five at the time, but my parents only fed me blood, so I developed faster. I didn’t know that until I met you.
“You were almost five. Your mother brought you over because she wanted you to grow up around someone like you. I didn’t believe you were like me. You had never had blood. You were just like a normal girl, and as dumb as a rock as far as I was concerned.”
His sudden silence made Katie look up. He was staring at her—in her. “So calling me names is a force of habit?” she said, uncomfortable under his gaze.
Tristan smiled, but his gaze never broke. He was looking at her like he was seeing her for the first time in a long time. “You can say that. I wasn’t nice to you at first. I used to talk you into eating dirt and worms. You were the first kid I had ever met. You were the first and only friend I ever had. One day, I put a mouse on your head and your mom said she wasn’t going to bring you anymore. I think that was the first time I had ever cried as a boy.
“After that day I treated you like a slow-friend instead of my unequal rival. I read to you, and cleaned up after you when you made stupid messes. Annabel The Dimwatted. You’d always talk to this ugly doll you carried around,” Tristan snorted.
“Annabel?” Katie asked.
“That was your name. Annabel Watts.”
It made her uneasy to look him in the eyes. All this time she’d wanted him to be honest and share his secrets. The more he talked the more he relaxed. He was talking about them. A life they had together, and she didn’t remember a second of it. Whenever his lips curled she felt guilty. They had had happy times and he was the only one who remembered them. No one to relive them with.
“Your dad didn’t like it much. He thought I was an abomination. He’d tried more than once to get your mom to move back here. On your sixth birthday, we were popping all the balloons when we heard them arguing. He regretted getting Lucinda involved in finding us—” Tristan paused. Thoughtful.
He laid his head on the wall and smiled. “You used to torment me. It wasn’t a day unless you were trying to slip and kill yourself. I’ve stopped you from falling out of trees and falling into the lake when neither of us knew how to swim. It was always a count down before you did something stupid,” he laughed again but it wasn’t light, like the night in the park.
Tristan lifted his shirt and she saw a small, silver tattoo on his chest. It was sun, and inside was a crescent moon. “My dad had this mark too. He never told me much about it,” Tristan looked down at his before pulling his shirt back down. “It dated him. The only vampire known with it were born to royal houses.
“The royals were the only ones with gifts. Some used them to kill their fathers and ‘cleanse’ their houses. Others wanted to reform the vampire rule. My father didn’t care about any of that. He knew that his would only be used by others. He had the strength of a thousand men.”
He looked at the ceiling and his eyes were like ice, crystal clear and close to melting. “Your mother wanted me to take the Keeper’s Vow with you—because I have my fathers gift.” Tristan stopped and Katie was overwhelmed with his anger and guilt.
She looked at him but he wouldn’t so much as glance in her direction.
“My father never asked if it was something I wanted to do, or if it was something I was capable of doing. I imagine, when my dad made me speak the words and drink your blood, he didn’t know he’d be murdered less than a week later. In the end it didn’t matter how strong he was.”
This was it. Katie knew it was coming. The event that had change their lives forever. The one that sent Tristan away, turned her father into a drunk, and even now was still ripping things apart.
“We were playing in the upstairs bedroom. I heard them crash in through the front door. I could smell the blood before I heard my mother scream.”
“Why?” Katie said. Why couldn’t things be different? Why did any of this happen?
“Because if you kill a royal pure blood and drink his blood, you gain his power. It’s against the law, but some people don’t care about that as long as you don’t get caught.” Tristan adjusted himself on the floor. “They were fast. The only option was to hide. You were too slow back then to run. I wasn’t strong enough yet, not to carry us both and out run them. Your mother was the first to reach our room. I grabbed you before you ran out of the cabinet we here in. There was someone behind her. And then she was on the floor. I covered your eyes but you knew. I thought you would scream and give us away. But you never did. You didn’t say anything that night.”
“He made me forget it all,” she said, feeling overwhelmed. Even now she still couldn’t remember any of it.
“He did what was best for you.”
“How did we survive?” Her heart pounded in her chest.
“A friend of my father. But, I don’t know if it was luck or cowardice.”
“It wasn’t cowardly to hide. We were children.”
He didn’t seem to hear her.
“Why didn’t you stay with Lucy?”
“I didn’t belong here. If I’d have stayed people would have found out what we both are.”
“So. Is it that bad?” she could have remembered her mother. Maybe then her dad wouldn’t have turned to drinking, or if he did, at least she would of had a friend to talk to it about—instead of being ashamed every time an afternoon play date turned into a two week sleepover.
Tristan got up and sat next to her. He put his arm around her and she let herself be held. “It is here. Here, we are less than human,” he said. She had a healed bullet-hole to prove she was different.
“Where did you go? What did you do?” Like a closing door, his wall was rising and blocking her out. She’d never felt this before, but she knew what he was doing. “Tristan tell me.”
“I lived with someone who took me in. A nice big house, with no one in it. But I left a few years ago and—did odd jobs.”
“Like what?” she whispered.
He didn’t say anything.
She held her stomach feeling like she’d fall apart. She got a new life, a new name and he got what exactly?
When it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer, she asked a different question. “How did you know my dad changed my name?”
“I wanted to find you. I ran away and wandered around for a few days listening to your voice until I found you at the elementary school up the street from here.
“You were on the playground. You didn’t know me. You didn’t know me at all. Your new name was Katalina, and from then on I knew I would never see you again. I was sent to live in New York after that.”
“Why?” Katie said.
“Punishment? I was a bit violent after that.”
“No,” Katie said, imagining a little Tristan who’d lost everything he’d ever known in one night. “I mean why did this all happened. Why did it turn out this way? Why does life suck like this? Why did I get shot?”
She turned to Tristan, as if he’d have all the answers. He
was so much braver than her, and he was hardly a year older than her. She wondered if that was why he seemed to enjoy going to school and studying, why even though Lucinda yelled at him to mind his curfew or nagged for him to join her for a movie, he’d listen and comply. It was because he hadn’t had a real home life since he was seven.
“Life sucks sometimes.”
“That doesn’t explain why I got shot.”
“I don’t know what he wanted with you,” Tristan said, shifting.
“He knew you. He called you a traitor.” There was still something he wasn’t telling her. A something that got her shot.
“I killed him. He won’t come after you again.”
“Tristan. I was nearly killed—”
“Because Brian shot you. I saved you. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” If that vampire knew her, it was because he knew Tristan. It wasn’t a random act of violence.
“Katalina, I’ll protect you with my life.”
She steadied her breathing. She was almost killed. Extinct. Erased from the earth. That wasn’t enough.
“Nothing else will happen. He’s dead. I killed him. He’s gone okay?”
She nodded. He did kill him. He was gone. But what if there were others.
“There won’t be others. He was the only one,” Tristan said, gripping the sheets on the bed.
“How can you expect me to believe that. Just take your word for it?”
Tristan’s eyes darted around the room.
“Tristan?”
“I used to be a Death Dealer. My dad left me money, but it was the only way I could live on my own with protection.”
“I thought you had a place—”
“That place wasn’t a home.” The sheets tore under his grip. “Death Dealers are the underground police force. They were more like a family to me than the place I ran from.”
A thousand thoughts flew across Katie’s mind, but one flashed brighter than the others. Death Dealer. He killed people.
