by Yvette Ford
“Come and see for yourself.” He leered, wiggling his eyebrows.
“So not cute.” I rolled my eyes. “I’ll pass, thanks.” After we had left my block and continued on toward the park in silence, I decided to get some answers to my many questions. “So, why me? You made me think I’m somehow special. Why?”
He squeezed my hand. “That’s not up for conversation right now.”
“What?” I yanked my hand away, stopped, and put my hands on my hips. “You broke into my room and did who knows what before I woke up.” I was telling myself the blood thing wasn’t real. “I deserve to know what’s going on, especially since it has to do with me.”
Lorcan shoved his hands into his pockets and spun away. After a while I jogged to catch up to him. No matter how much of a fit I threw, I couldn’t make him talk about what he wasn’t willing to share. In my head, I knew I should be screaming my head off, scared, running in the opposite direction, but there was something about all this that was, if not familiar, at least...expected. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like I had been waiting for someone to wake me up, but that was ridiculous.
“So you’re not going to talk to me about it?”
“Nope.”
“Then what can we talk about?”
“Anything else.”
Chapter Five
We were in the park at the fountain they had just built two springs ago. The water had been turned off, along with the lights, but I stared in shock when Lorcan only waved his hand over it, and the bubbles began. The blue, green, and red lights danced beneath the surface, lighting the area, and his pale face. I shivered. Who was he? Where did he come from? Had he always been a vampire?
“Unlike you, I am no one special,” he said. “And no, I’ve not always been a vampire.”
I blinked and then grumbled, “Stop reading my mind, damn it.”
He laughed. “Sorry. You’re an open book. Getting into your head is easy. I almost don’t have to try. You just hand it all over to me.”
I pulled off my flip-flops and stood on the narrow stone bench running around the fountain. While I walked, I concentrated on closing my thoughts off to him, so he couldn’t read my mind. I didn’t know if it was possible. A light pressure around the edges of my consciousness let me know he was pressing to get in.
“Not yet, beautiful,” he whispered in my head.
I growled and lost my footing on the fountain. When I would have pitched face first in the water, his hands came around me and pulled me back to his chest. I elbowed him to get free and ran to leap over the side to the ground. I think I landed on a pebble and hurt my foot, but I wasn’t giving his big head the satisfaction of knowing. Hobbling to a grassy spot on the opposite side of the circle, I pretended not to hear him laughing behind me.
“So who are you?” I demanded.
He bowed like they did in the olden days or those shows from the past. “I am a simple vampire, in love with a beautiful black girl named Tanesha.”
“Boy, you are not in love.” My voice shook when I said the words.
“Who says I’m not?”
“You promised you’d talk about anything except me, so you better spill it, or I’m going home. And what was that with the waving of the hand? You can do magic?”
He dropped down beside me and reached for my hand. I let him take it to hold in his lap. “Not magic exactly. Not like witches and warlocks type of stuff. More like...” He paused seeming to search for the right words. I squinted up at him, trying to probe his mind. I got nothing. The flick of his eyebrow let me know he knew what I was trying to do. I wanted to punch him.
“A vampire comes with certain enhancements. The way I look at it is, should the human race evolve, kind of like using more of your brain power, anyone, no matter who they are, could do what I do.” He glanced down at me and smiled. “Do what you did back in the bedroom.”
“Wha—?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t notice.” He shook his head. “If I’ve learned anything at all about you, Tanesha Johnson, is that you have a strong mind, but you use it to block out anything that is hard to accept. That’s why you haven’t freaked over all you’ve learned about lately. I guess that’s a good thing.”
He looked up at the full moon. I found myself glad that he wasn’t a werewolf and considered whether they were real as well. A tremor went through me, and I shifted closer to his side. It couldn’t have come off more like I was flirting, and looking to be hugged, if I had been Butterfly herself. Lorcan’s strong arm came around me. A feeling of unreality washed through my head. This whole experience was mind-blowing.
“Back at the room, you used your own power to shove me hard enough to knock me out of my cloak.”
My eyes widened. “I did? How? What cloak?”
He wagged a finger in front of my nose. “Uh-uh, no talking about you. Almost got me. But I can tell you about my cloak. I can bend the shadows around me until I become like one. That is vamp all the way, and I’ve loved doing it ever since I became a vampire.” He closed his eyes with his face still raised like he was basking in the sunlight. I supposed he couldn’t ever do that now. “At first I hated it, felt like it was a curse, but now I’m used to this life. The best thing is being able to travel to places and hide in plain sight, wherever there is a shadow. I can people-watch and get into their minds to know what they’re not saying.”
“In other words, you’re nosy with everybody, not just me.” I thought about what he had said, about me using power. I didn’t have any, but again, he was acting like I was special in some way. How? “I’m not a vampire, am I? Did you feed me blood?”
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Lorcan, answer me! Am I dead? Or...or...undead?”
“No.”
“Then how can I—”
“Shh!” He stiffened, and his facial expression became alert. He tilted his head and then jumped to his feet, pulling me along with him. In a heartbeat, he shoved me behind him so my view of the circle was blocked. “What do you want?”
“You know what I want, Lorcan. You’ve disobeyed orders long enough. Give her to me.”
“Go walk in sunlight,” he snapped.
I didn’t recognize the voice, but by the tone, I knew it was someone older, a man. I tried to look around Lorcan’s body, but he threw his arm out, causing his long black coat to block my view. “You mustn’t look into his eyes. Stay behind me.”
My stomach did flip-flops. I was scared out of my head. His words confirmed that he had lied about needing me to look into his eyes to glamour me. I wondered what else he had been lying about. Did they send him to get me, or to kill me? The man had said he wasn’t following orders. My throat went dry.
While the two of them argued, I backed away from Lorcan, into the trees. I didn’t want to be with him anymore either. I didn’t trust him. What had I been thinking? This boy, as fine as he was, had been sucking my blood, admittedly even at times when I didn’t remember him doing it. He had been replacing it with his own. I couldn’t even begin to figure out why my doctor’s blood tests hadn’t seen that much. Must have been more vampire magic or mojo or whatever the hell he called it.
I spun around and high-tailed it through the trees. If I circled around the park, I could come out on the street opposite mine and get to my house by the front. But then I realized I didn’t have my key and wouldn’t be able to get in because Lorcan and I had jumped from the window. That’s all I needed was to have to ring my doorbell to get in. My mother would not believe that I had somehow fell out the window and walked around the front. I was in serious trouble.
A rustle in the leaves behind me and the crack of branches set my teeth on edge. I had come to a stop to catch my breath and consider what to do. I ducked behind a tree and struggled not to breathe so whoever was out there wouldn’t hear me.
“Stay right there.”
I don’t know how I knew this time, but I was positive whoever was speaking in my head was no
t Lorcan. Blake had said they were all like a big hive, connected by their thoughts. Was I in the loop now that I had Lorcan’s blood in me? Is that why I had powers like him? I closed my eyes and listened to the night around me, but I couldn’t pick up anything other than crickets. Where was the evolution stuff when I needed it?
“Who are you?” I asked the person who had spoken, but he didn’t answer.
I decided if he couldn’t tell me his name, then I didn’t have to listen to him. I started creeping toward the edge of the park. At least there would be more light, and if I needed to scream, houses were nearby for someone to hear me.
The thought of more light reminded me of something. The park didn’t have street lights, which was why it closed at night. Only the circle had old fashioned lamps around its edges, not here in the trees. So how the heck was I getting around? My heart felt like it was stuck in my throat, and I glanced about. In the sky, the moon had gone behind thick clouds, plunging the park into total darkness, yet I could see in that darkness like it was twilight. Another side effect to a vampire’s bite, I thought. I touched my neck but felt no marks. Like before, Lorcan had done something to heal me.
Instead of moving like a normal person would, stumbling with hands slung out to keep from bumping into something, I just walked. When voices up ahead reached my ears, I paused and crept to an opening. Mrs. Knowles was just turning away from Ronnie, and she darted into the trees so fast, I felt sick. That was not an old lady, and Ronnie knew it. From my distance, he looked worried and a little annoyed, but he did not look shocked at how Mrs. Knowles had moved.
My best buddy knew more than he claimed to know about everything that was going on. I stood there leaning against a tree and biting my thumbnail. Behind me the area was clear, and I could no longer pick up Lorcan and that other guy arguing, but that didn’t mean I was out of danger. I turned back to Ronnie. He still hadn’t spotted me.
After a few minutes, he put his hands out in front of him and moved like a bumbling idiot through the darkness. So he wasn’t a member of the undead society. That was good to know. When he stumbled over an untied shoelace that I zoomed in on with no problem, I laughed. Yeah his dumb behind was human.
I stepped out. “Ronnie, what are you doing out here?”
He spun to face me and then ran forward to hug me, knocking us both on her butts. I shoved him off.
“Stupid, are you crazy?”
He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Are you? What are you doing out here?” He hesitated and then continued. “I had this horrible dream a little while ago, and I called your cell. You didn’t answer. I started to get worried.”
I stood up, brushing dirt off my shorts and noticing for the first time that I was still barefoot. My flip-flops were back at the circle. I didn’t look at Ronnie as I headed toward the street with him falling into step beside me. He was lying. Just as sure as I knew my own name, Ronnie was lying his head off.
All of a sudden, an intense sadness came over me. I felt alone and scared. I had no one I could trust. I expected not to trust people I didn’t know. Now that I knew vampires existed, I expected not to trust them. But of all the people in the world, I did expect to trust me best friend, and I couldn’t.
That fact brought tears to my eyes, and I had to swallow over and over to keep them from falling. I wasn’t the crying type, not even when I had been teased and called Grimace by half the girls in my class in seventh grade. But this was worse than that, much worse. The more I found out, the less I knew, and nobody wanted to own up to anything.
We stopped outside my house, and Ronnie waited for me to go up to my door. I hesitated. “Ronnie, what’s going on? I saw Mrs. Knowles out there in the park. She was talking to you. What about?”
He was quick with his answer. “I don’t know why she was out there. You know that crazy old lady. I did ask her if she’d seen you though. She said she didn’t but she’d let you know I was looking for you.”
I found the nerve to look him in the eye but didn’t feel any glamouring happening to me, nothing to indicate he was trying to control me. He just blinked back with his big brown eyes behind his glasses. He looked innocent enough.
“She talked to you? I can’t believe it. She acts all anti-social and everything. I don’t remember anyone actually carrying on a conversation with her.”
“Asking if she’s seen you was hardly a conversation.” He crossed his arms and looked down at my feet. “Why would you leave the house this time and not wear any clothes or shoes? Your mom would kill you if she found out.”
I didn’t feel like telling him I had something on my feet when I left, as if that would make up for the fact that I was in the shorts and T-shirt I wore to bed each night. What I did struggle with is how to tell him I couldn’t get back in the house. “I pulled the door shut not realizing I didn’t bring my key. I’m stuck out here. I guess I’m in trouble either way.”
“How?”
I played dumb. “Huh?”
“How did you come out? Front door or back?”
“Um.”
He waved his hand. “Never mind. I know a way to climb up to your window. You left it open as usual, didn’t you? No matter how many times I’ve told you not to.”
“It’s hot, and the central air doesn’t mean squat in my room. I told you that. Besides, I broke my fan last week, remember?”
“Stay here, I’ll climb up and come open the front door for you.” He started to walk away and then turned back, worry on his face. He looked up and down the street and pushed me toward the steps. “Get up on the porch. You know some of these old people in this block don’t sleep. They sit by the window to watch what’s going on outside.”
I let out a squeak. “Oh my goodness, you’re right.” I darted up on the porch, praying no one had seen me. That was all I needed, for one of them to tell my mother I’d been out here this time of night. I wouldn’t have to be undead to miss daylight for a month. “Hurry up, Ronnie.”
He ran down the street to circle the block and go up the alley. I dropped into the chair my mother kept on the porch and winced from the hard metal under my butt. She took in the cushion for the chair every night to keep strays from making a comfy home on it when we weren’t looking.
By the time I had made it back to my room and assured that dang Ronnie I was fine to be on my own and wouldn’t leave the room again before morning, I was yawning up a storm. My eyes burned, and my jaw ached from stretching it so hard. I needed to go take a shower and wash the dirt off, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Instead I flopped on my bed and was almost out in two seconds before I felt someone in the room with me.
I forced my eyes open and scanned the room. This time, he didn’t use a cloaking technique to hide. He just sat bold as you please in the chair across from my bed, watching me. I made myself sit up and wrap the sheet around me.
“Why are you here?”
He smirked. “Why did you leave me? I could have protected you.”
“But who would have protected me from you?” Getting bold, I slipped out of bed and strolled over closer to him. The scent of blood on him was strong. It tickled my nose and made me want to smack my lips together like an animal. Because that was shocking, I resisted doing it. I wasn’t about to examine myself right then to figure out what issues I had. Besides, Lorcan had issues of his own.
When I got right up on him, I noticed he had gashes in the side of his beautiful face, on both sides, and his eye was swollen. My heart almost stopped, looking at him. I reached out to touch the cut on his forehead, but before my fingertips could make the connection, the little slit was gone. Just like that. I blinked.
“What in the world?”
His eyes drifted closed, and he looked run down in energy beside the fact that he was beat up. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? We heal fast.”
“Vampires?”
“Yup.”
I tried not to cry, but it wasn’t easy. “It hurts though, doesn’t it?”
�
��Like you wouldn’t believe.” Before I knew what he was doing, he stood up and lifted me in his arms like I weighed five pounds. He carried me to the bed, laid me down, and slipped up there beside me, resting his back on the headboard. I hoped he wasn’t getting any funny ideas, because I wasn’t ready for that.
We sat side by side in silence for a while, staring out the window at the moon. My thoughts were alive with trying to figure out who I was and why he was after me, or rather why the others had sent him after me. Who would tell me? Blake?
I shut down that thought before it could fully form. If Lorcan was reading my mind, he’d know I was thinking about questioning Blake about myself, and he might not like it. As weird as that guy was, he seemed the most forthcoming about what was going on. I was going to milk that for all it was worth.
