by Anna Santos
“You are too young, you’re right. And we have plenty of time to talk about that. I just want you to be okay. When the time is right, we’ll look for a doctor to test us. Besides, there are plenty of orphan kids in the world.” I nodded, feeling a lot better with his words. Then the oddity of the conversation hit me. We were making plans for the future, as if I was allowed to have a future, to have a family and be happy. “What’s wrong, Annabel?” he asked, sensing the tension in my body.
“I’ve just realized that…” I silenced myself, leaning back to watch his face. Shane was a part of my life and someone I wanted to have in my future. “I can’t see myself living without you.”
“That’s a good thing, because I can’t see myself living without you, either.”
“But… my life is messed-up.”
He chuckled, apparently amused by my affirmation; however, he had no idea how true that was.
“Just let me mark you and everything will fall into place,” he whispered alluringly, moving closer.
“You don’t know that,” I whispered, feeling helpless and craving the contact of his lips. I liked how sweet he was, but I was fully aware that he tried to manipulate me with words and kisses. He knew how much I loved him. But I couldn’t blame him: I was relying on his love for me to be patient.
In my defense, I had a good excuse for delaying the marking. Pureblood vampires have special powers to see their victims’s memories when they are drinking from them. The only warm blood I had inside of me was from animals; it worked differently from human blood. I had no idea if I had that power. Besides, what would I see in Shane’s head when I did bite him? Would I see his previous lovers? Would I see his kills, his fears and dark side? Marking each other would open a telepathic link between me and him. We would share memories and thoughts. I was scared of that—how couldn’t I be? He would see all my demons, my bad memories, and my fears.
I knew Shane struggled with that, too. He also had his demons, his bad dreams. So, even if he asked often, the lack of pressuring was a hint that he was delaying it as much as I was. But my time was running out. It was almost prom night, which meant my contract was finishing and school was almost over. I would have to accept a new contract there or leave, maybe live between places. Marking would just increase my need for Shane, my inability to stay away from him.
“You are the most beautiful thing in the world,” he whispered, staring at my purple eyes, touching my lips with his fingertips. “You have the most amazing red lips.” He moved closer to kiss me. I leaned down to meet his lips, molding my lips to his and trying not to cut him with my fangs. I loved the fact that he saw me as if I was the most perfect thing and not a simple blood-thirsty monster. “When are you going to let me mark you and bite me?” he asked, leaving space between us so he could look into my eyes and analyze my reaction. He was insisting again.
“Maybe next week,” I whispered, wanting to delay it but knowing that I didn’t have much time left.
“We have patrol tonight. After it, we’ll go to Sam’s Bar, if you don’t mind. Or do you want to skip this patrol and go to bed earlier?”
“Are you coming to bed with me?” I asked.
“I can’t skip the patrolling.”
“Then I’ll go patrolling with you. I don’t like when you are patrolling at night.”
“Duncan and Samuel will join me for patrolling tonight.”
“I would rather go on patrols with you than stay at home alone,” I said, caressing his face.
“We will probably just find couples making out in the woods or other kids playing tricks on their friends. It’s hot, and the days are longer. Everybody is excited about the summer holidays. Dangerous stuff hardly ever happens here.”
“I know, but I still want to go with you.”
“Okay,” he said, kissing me softly on the lips. “I’d rather have you by my side than one of the boys.”
“Someone needs to take care of you,” I teased, smirking against his lips.
“Cocky, are we?”
“I totally kick your men’s butts.”
“Yes, you do. I knew you were holding back. But I’d rather you didn’t hold back with me. We’ve talked about this. Your dad taught you well—I have to give him credit for that.”
“I don’t want to harm you. Besides, you also hold back with me.”
“Yes, you are right. I can’t stand the thought of hurting you, either.”
“So, let’s just agree to not compete about who’s the best.”
“I know you are the best with the sword. I don’t have any doubts about that. You are really good at it!”
“I practice a lot. It’s my favorite weapon.”
“Though… you could practice a lot more in body-to-body combat.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling slightly offended. “I’m a pretty decent fighter. Your men are the proof of it, at least their bruises are. You should train them better.”
Shane chuckled. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about that kind of body combat.”
“You are such a pervert!” I joked, pushing him back and trying to get away from his arms.
“I think it’s kind of late for you to complain about that. Any kind of perverted thoughts I have are all because of you, my gorgeous, addictive, and sexy mate,” he declared, grabbing, and putting me under him. “How are you planning to get away from this now?”
“I’m not planning to get away from anywhere. I’ve got you right where I wanted you,” I joked, making him chuckle before he lowered his face to kiss me.
“You can go wherever you want, so long as you take me with you,” he whispered against my lips.
My heart stopped beating for a moment. I simply nodded, kissing him back and hugging him tighter. I fought hard not to start crying. I didn’t want to hurt him or leave him. I wanted to find a way to tell him all about me and be part of his life. A future without Shane wasn’t a future. However, I’d never thought much about my future and the fact that I could have a future, a family, outside of my twisted way of life, given the burden that I carried around. I needed to tell everything about me to Shane, and I needed to talk to Jason, so I could warn him about it and tell him about Shane’s existence.
Shane and Jason needed to meet, and Jason needed to understand that my life was going to change from now on. Besides, maybe Shane could help me save my brother, Kevin. If he knew everything about what had happened, maybe he could help me find a way to convince a pureblood to donate blood to save Kevin. It was too much to ask, but if Shane cared, if his king was as compassionate and kind as Shane described him, then he could help me.
All I had to do was convince Jason that my decision to trust Shane was right. They were my teammates, and I had no right to talk about them and expose the Secret Society I worked for without warning them about it and reasoning with them about the necessity for telling someone else about us.
Shane was my soul-mate: if I didn’t tell him who I truly was, we would eventually fall apart, and the secrets would ruin our relationship and our love.
Chapter Eighteen
Shane
I was not proud of myself. Yet, I couldn’t resist any longer. I had to know what she was doing when she went away from town. So I followed her.
The first time I followed her, she spent her whole day inside a clinic. It was a private and expensive clinic. I was unable to get any information from the nurses or the receptionist about what Anna was doing there, or what floor she was on. However, after the conversation we’d had about babies and her transformation, I was pretty sure that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. I kind of felt stupid for following her, in fact. It was not that I didn’t trust her; I just didn’t want to be kept in the dark about something that could prevent us from staying together. It was clear, given her reluctance to talk about her family, that they weren’t keen on accepting her decisions about staying with me. Or maybe I was just being paranoid.
The second time I followed her, I thought she would spend her
entire day inside the clinic again. However, after a couple of hours of waiting, she left and drove for a long time until she arrived at a property in the middle of nowhere. Despite the lack of surrounding structures or living beings close to the property, it was guarded like a fortress of some sort. It had tall walls with electronic surveillance, electronic motion detectors, and video cameras spread around like weeds. After parking far away and shifting to my wolf form, I was able to sneak into the property and reach a big modern house. It had cameras and electronic motion detectors around it, too. I could not get closer, so I just shifted back, covered my genitals, and climbed like a clumsy monkey up a tall, robust tree. Then I changed back to my wolf form because it had better vision and enhanced senses. I stood there with a small bag containing my underwear and my phone, watching the empty big glass windows of the house.
Even if it looked like a house, it seemed like something more. It had modern architecture, including big, revealing windows. I could see the bedrooms, the kitchen, and the living room in front; I wondered if any of those bedrooms might belong to my Anna. I could see her bike parked in front of the entrance. She should be inside already, but I could not see her anywhere inside the house. It was all quiet and lifeless, like no one lived there. But, as night fell peacefully, I could hear the background sound of the surveillance cameras moving.
Lights came on after an hour of heavy silence. Then people appeared from somewhere in the back of the house; three men, to be more exact, and Anna. The men sat down on the couches in the living room, flipping through TV channels while Anna went to the kitchen. Then a tall blond guy went to the kitchen and started talking to Anna. She seemed to know him well, and she smiled a lot around him. He acted childish around her, making her get mad and throw pieces of cucumber at him from the salad she was making.
I was getting jealous—my wolf wanted to growl and attack him—but I had to be less impulsive. I concentrated on their moving lips, and I could clearly distinguish his name: Jason. He was her cousin. That made me less jealous, even if he kind of looked like he was flirting with her. My jealousy was perhaps because he was extremely good-looking and I was seeing him as a threat. But Anna had assured me that she didn’t have feelings for him. I wasn’t so sure about him not having feelings for her. But they were cousins and friends; they had the familiarity to act like kids, and Anna was smiling, even if he was an annoying guy.
After Anna made some steaks with fries, rice, and salad, they all sat down in the kitchen and ate. Dinner didn’t take long, and, soon enough, Anna went to her bedroom. It was the second bedroom on the right, and I had a nice view of it. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was aware that people could see everything inside when she had the lights on. Maybe they didn't worry much about it, since they had surveillance and alarms to warn them and had no neighbors. But if I was able to get in undetected, others would be able to, as well.
Anna was not doing anything, just lying on her bed, phone in hand, and moving her legs in a pensive way. Then Jason entered her room, and she looked bored by his presence. The blond guy sat down on her bed and started to annoy her with something; she was pouting and getting upset by his words. I could not figure out what he was saying or see his lips move, as his back was to me.
After a while, Anna rolled over in her bed and stared at the ceiling, simply ignoring him. He sighed and then got up and left. Once again, she stared at her phone and sighed. She looked sad; my heart was hurting with her sadness. But my head was roiling with questions. I wanted to know who the other two guys were, why they all seemed to live together, why the house had so many electronic security devices, and why she had never talked to me about that. She just told me she had a cousin, not that she lived with him and two other guys.
Eventually, Anna got up, closer to the glass, and stared outside like she was looking for something. She seemed worried, maybe even missing me. I hoped she was. I was missing her, even if I was staring right at her. I missed being around her, touching her, comforting her.
Then my phone rang, and I had the hardest time shifting back when I saw Anna’s name on the caller ID. I couldn’t answer, so I let it ring until it stopped. Far away, she hung up and stared at her phone, gloomy. I wanted badly to call her back, but I couldn’t. Being naked on a branch also didn’t help my case, and I couldn't make noise, so I texted her, inventing a lame excuse of being at work in a reunion and not being able to talk to her on the phone.
She replied to me immediately with three single words: I miss you.
I sent her a reply: Come home then.
She texted me next: Tomorrow I’ll be home.
I ended by telling her that I loved her, and she replied the same.
It intrigued me. The next day was Sunday. She would normally come back home in the evening. Maybe she was coming home earlier to be with me. I hoped so.
The messages made me feel a bit better. She was thinking of me while she was there staring at the void, and she missed me. Now, if only she trusted me enough to tell me what the hell was going on!
I didn’t stay much longer in the tree. Anna went to another part of her room that had no window, and then, when she came back to the bedroom, she entered a code behind a painting in the wall and took two swords out from an armory. I couldn't see properly inside, but it was definitely an armory; even stranger was that it was inside her room. She tucked the swords behind her back, inside the long sleeve on her leather jacket, and then put on a backpack to hide them. She finished dressing by putting on her leather gloves then she left her bedroom. Moments after, she was on her bike driving away from the house into the dark night.
I had no time to think where she was going. I just had time to jump down and run to my car so I could follow her. It was hard, since she had a head start, and her scent was hard to track down in a city filled with weird smells, garbage, humans, and pollution.
I found her bike parked in a dark, dangerous alley. She was alone, staring at a door with a red sign that had STAFF written on top. I parked and mingled with the crowd, making sure I was not seen and hiding where I could see and hear her. I was worried and intrigued. It was not a safe place. I could smell the scent of supernatural creatures nearby.
While she was there waiting, I could sense something was bothering her. She looked back a lot, as if she could feel she was being watched. It was our bond. It was getting stronger, and she could feel me. She just didn’t know that it was me she was sensing. Her instinct was telling her that I was nearby, like mine would when she was close to me or getting closer. If she could have understood, she would have known that I was following her.
Why was she there? And what could she possibly be waiting for? The swords under her backpack were also a puzzle. Was she afraid of something? Were they for protection? Was she waiting for someone?
I was beginning to think that Anna was far more complex than I had ever imagined. She could, in fact, be nothing I had thought. She was not as innocent as she’d appeared and definitely not as harmless as I’d first thought. I had to face it: Anna was hiding things from me. She lived with a group of men and had weapons hidden in her bedroom. She was a trained warrior, and all I was worried about was that she could be some kind of evil spy.
I would be torn apart if my soul-mate was a spy for the radicals, capable of betraying her own kind. She was mine, I loved her more than my own life, but my king would never forgive her. And what if all she’d told me was a lie? What if she had never loved me? If being a hybrid had made her immune to our bond and she’d just played me like a toy?
She couldn’t—she couldn’t be—a spy. She loved me. I couldn’t doubt that. She was my mate; I had to trust her. I had to trust my instincts, my wolf, and not make quick judgments without proof. I had to wait patiently and see why she was there.
Chapter Nineteen
Anna
I pulled my bike to the back of an alley, next to a couple of paper boxes. The garbage container was full of smelly debris. I scratched the back of my neck again. All d
ay, I had had an itchy feeling there and a crazy emptiness inside my heart. I could not stop thinking of Shane. I missed him. And it felt like it had been more than a day that I’d been away from him.
There wasn’t enough light in the alley for normal people to see properly. But for vampires, the dark wouldn’t be an issue. For me, the dark was perfect for not being seen, and the alley was vampire-and-people-free—for the time being, anyway. I couldn’t forget that I was in the back entrance of a nightclub called Fang. And that the obviousness of the name meant the place was crawling with vampires looking for blood donors, plus many vampire-wannabes who had no clue what they were getting themselves into.
This lousy excuse for a nightclub was my best friend’s favorite place. Jessica had a thing for vampires. Well, it was more than a thing: it was an obsession. Jessica was a chaser. A damn good one, but she actually loved vampires. She just punished the bad ones, or at least the ones who were too naughty. But she had a serious inclination to hook up with vampires, because being sucked turned her on, and it was her darkest sexual fantasy.
So it was expected when, moments later, the back door opened and Jessica came out in a serious make-out session with a vampire. They were too busy kissing to even notice me. And it was seriously weird when the guy pushed her against the wall, caressing her breasts and putting his fangs in her neck. But the weirdest part was still to come. She started to moan and gasp, as if she was having an orgasm right there. Then the guy began to lift up her skirt to have her right there. Gosh! She had the most terrible taste in places to have sex!
“Hmmm!” I groaned, trying to get their attention. A bit louder the next time, Jessica finally opened her eyes and stared at me.
“What the hell!” she cursed, pulling the vampire off of her and looking at me, upset. “Are you stalking me, now?”
“Nice to see you too!” I said, grinning wickedly.
“Did you invite a friend to play?” the vampire asked. He didn’t seem shy, just a bit confused about being pulled from his erotic feeding. He seemed healthy enough. His eyes were still black from feeding. He was tall and well-built. He had a nice face, too. And, of course, he was blond. Jessica had a thing for hot, blond, bloodsucking males.
