Tempest

by Laura Marie

  I wanted to say something. I opened my mouth, my argument lined up, but my phone rang, and Chloe’s name popped up on the caller ID.

  “Yeah?” I answered. It was probably better that I didn’t say what I had meant to say to my mom. Some words just couldn’t be taken back.

  “I’m coming over,” Chloe said. She was crying.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  The line went dead. She wasn’t going to talk to me until she saw me.

  “Chloe is coming over,” I said to my mom. “I’ll keep her in my room, so she doesn’t go on a killing spree and rip your throat out or something.”

  “Emily,” my mom said.

  “I thought you didn’t want to fight,” I said and walked out of the kitchen before she could answer.

  The doorbell rang not a minute later, and I opened.

  Chloe looked terrible. Her hair was a tangled mess, as if she had spent the evening pushing her hands into it. She wore no makeup, so her skin was very pale and her eyes seemed almost hollowed out. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  It was times like these I wished I could hug her. But she stepped back when I opened the door, folding her arms over her chest, a warning that I shouldn’t even try to get close to her.

  Whatever had happened had to be really bad.

  “Come on,” I said, stepping to the side and letting Chloe in. She made a beeline for my room, not even looking for my mom to greet her. It was better that way. My mom was pissed at me anyway.

  When I closed my bedroom door, Chloe fell apart. She started crying so violently, her shoulders shook, her hands covering her face.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said, sitting down next to her.

  “It’s not,” she said in a thick voice.

  She dropped her hands, and her blue eyes were the color of the ocean. The look on her face was heartbreaking, and I was suddenly terrified about what she would say.

  “I blacked out again tonight,” she said.

  I waited for her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when it was all she said.

  “I thought it would be better after I’d fed. You know, at the initiation thing. But it’s not better.”

  I shook my head. “Is that what you’re so upset about?”

  Chloe shook her head and played with a loose thread on my duvet. “There was that thing in the news. About the vampire kill.” She took a shuddering breath. “What if that was me?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Fresh tears rolled over Chloe’s cheeks. She had managed to pull herself together a little since she had come to my room, but she was in danger of falling apart again.

  “What if I’m the vampire that killed that tourist?” Chloe said in a whisper. Her eyes were so intense they could burn right through me.

  I stared at her, trying to make sense of the words she’d said.

  “No,” I finally said, shaking her head. “It’s not you.”

  “You don’t know that,” Chloe said.

  “Yeah, I do.” I was having déjà vu of the conversation we’d had last week. “You’re not a killer, Chloe. Sure, you have issues, we all do. But that doesn’t make you a monster.”

  She swallowed hard and nodded, but she didn’t look at me.

  “I just… don’t know,” she said. “What if it was me? I black out, Em. It’s bad. Sometimes I wake up somewhere else than where I was. God knows what I’m doing in that time that I don’t know about. What if I go out looking for blood?”

  The story was creepy. I understood her fear, but the nightmare she was telling me about couldn’t be real.

  “You’re not a killer,” I said again, firmly. “I know you’re struggling with the blood thing, but you’re not a vampire that kills people. Until the other day, you didn’t even know what blood tasted like.”

  Chloe nodded, her eyes weary. “Yeah. But now I do.”

  She’d said it so quietly I had barely been able to hear the words, but I shivered when she said it. For a moment, I wondered.

  But I pushed the thought away immediately. Chloe was not a killer. I would not believe that of her. I had been with the vampires, and there had been nothing evil about them. And Chloe was the nicest vampire there was. I refused to believe that she was capable of killing someone.

  My mom knocked on my door.

  “You’re going to the coven tonight,” she said, opening it before I could answer.

  “Not tonight,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a question.”

  She closed the door again, and I sighed. Maybe she wanted Chloe out of the house.

  She believed that Chloe could do something like that. I didn’t.

  “We’ll figure this out, okay?” I said to Chloe. “But it’s not you. I can promise you that.”

  Chloe nodded, but she didn’t look like she believed me. In fact, she looked like she was going to cry.

  She had to leave because my mom wanted to take me to the coven. I didn’t feel like going, but my mom was in a mood. It was because of our fight, I knew that. But I wasn’t going to indulge her and say I was sorry. I hadn’t been wrong.

  When my mom parked, she told me she would be back by ten. I climbed out without saying goodbye and walked into the trees, my open robe flapping around my legs.

  Mirta and Alistair stood in the clearing, the first witches I saw when I arrived. They both looked up when I appeared through the trees.

  “Emily,” Mirta said. Her gray hair hung loosely over her shoulders. I was getting used to the young face and the gray hair.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The two witches smiled tightly at me.

  Calder was nowhere to be found when I looked for him. When it was time to start, Mirta herself came to me. We both wore the same black robe, but she managed to look so much more archaic than I in hers.

  “Come, we’ll practice together, tonight,” she said.

  I was immediately nervous. The High Priestess was not only a perfectionist when it came to what she expected of me, but she was strict, too. She was hellbent on preserving the old rules, even though Calder had told me that we were the only coven that still practiced them.

  “Show me what you’ve got,” Mirta said when were alone and to the side.

  “I’ve actually been working on something new,” I said.

  Mirta smiled. “That’s good. You should explore your own magic.”

  I nodded and held up my hands. I tipped my head back and closed my eyes, focusing on what I felt. I reached deep down, grabbing my emotions and holding them in my hand. My emotions were almost like a paperweight, heavy in my hand, oblong and smooth.

  Thunder sounded above us. When I opened my eyes, clouds had covered the night sky, hiding the stars and the moon.

  “What are you doing?” Mirta asked, alarmed.

  “It’s okay, I’ve got this,” I said.

  Rain started to fall, and I laughed.

  I had realized after the vampire meeting that I couldn’t only control the air like I had thought I could; it was the weather in its totality.

  Atmokinesis, they called it.

  “Stop it,” Mirta shouted when lightning struck.

  I sighed and let go of my magic. It fell and splintered into shards. The clouds disappeared, and the rain stopped.

  Mirta shook her head.

  “Never do that again,” she said in a low voice. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t even just angry. She was furious.

  “You said I had to explore my magic.”

  “Not that magic,” Mirta said. “That’s dark magic.”

  “How?” I asked. “It comes from me. It’s my own power, I wasn’t dabbling in external stuff.”

  Mirta her head back and forth, back and forth. The other witches congregated around us. They had felt what I had done. I hadn’t rained on only the two of us, after all.

  I heard the witches murmur among themselves, their whispers skipping around me, taunting, judging.

  “Emily, we stick to the magic we’r
e allowed to use,” Mirta said. “You won’t use that magic again.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “It was what helped me defeat Valentina. And I managed to get out of trouble with the vampires when I did this, too.” I didn’t tell them it was my best friend that I had held at bay with this magic, her bloodlust and her lack of control.

  “If you use that magic again around here, we’re going to ask you to leave the coven.”

  “You mean to kick me out,” I said.

  Mirta’s face was hard as if she had turned to stone and her eyes were the color of slate, which was very different from her normal watery blue eyes.

  “Dark magic isn’t welcome here.”

  “It’s not dark magic,” I said.

  “You’re a new witch. What do you know?” she asked.

  I was suddenly angry. I wasn’t the one that had asked to join the coven, and I couldn’t help what magic I had. It seemed stupid to suppress my power.

  “I’m going,” I said. I turned around and walked away. It was very disrespectful to turn my back on the High Priestess, but I was angry, and she didn’t make a point of calling me back. I expected to be struck down for something so terrible, but when I reached the road, they still hadn’t come after me.

  I dialed my mom’s number. It was still an hour and a half before she came for me. But I wanted to go home. I wasn’t going to spend time with people who were so petty; especially when they were supposed to help me.

  I could figure my shit out by myself. I did it before, I could do it again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There was no way Chloe was behind the murder. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that Chloe was only freaking out because she had no idea what her body was doing with the transition from a young vampire to a fully-fledged bloodsucker.

  I knew her, and she would never bring herself to kill someone, not even when she was racked by bloodlust.

  I thought back to the initiation that had taken place, how close she had been to losing control. I’d had to use my magic to stop her from eating me.

  But she never would have done that, even if my magic hadn’t risen to fight hers. I was sure of it. Chloe was a sweetheart, not a monster.

  When Chloe and I sat at the table outside, something about her was off. She had been a little under the weather since I had arrived at school this morning. She was quiet, distant, and she didn’t really respond to any of my attempts at casual conversation.

  I didn’t want to go into the reason why she was so down. I couldn’t convince her any more than I had already tried that she couldn’t be the killer. And I knew it was still eating her up inside. It had been three days since the news bulletin, and the investigation had offered nothing so far.

  Maybe that was because the police didn’t know how to do anything, since they hadn’t done anything for so long. Or maybe it was because whoever had done it had only been passing through town.

  Either way, I was convinced it had nothing to do with Chloe.

  “I can’t be here,” Chloe said, and her voice was strained.

  She wore her sunglasses so I couldn’t see her eyes, but she repeatedly swallowed, making small movements with her mouth that looked a lot more like drinking and swallowing blood, now that I knew it was her bloodlust I was seeing.

  “You’re going to be fine,” I said. “I know it’s hard, but you just need to get used to this new feeling.”

  Chloe shook her head. “What if I don’t want to get used to it? I don’t want to drink blood. It was awful.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “No,” Chloe said. “Which is why I hate it. Because I actually liked it. I didn’t want to stop. If I hadn’t…” She shuddered.

  “But you did,” I said. “You drew it back in, and you did what you needed to do. Now, you just need to take care of yourself so that you’re not so hungry all the time.”

  Chloe shook her head. “I can’t,” she said and took off her sunglasses. “I won’t.”

  When she looked at me, something about her eyes was scary. She looked like a predator again, her pupils too big, the blue of her eyes almost non-existent. Her eyes rolled around in their sockets, and she swallowed again and again.

  “Chloe,” I started.

  “No!” she shouted and jumped up. She grabbed her head in her hands. “I can’t do this, Em. I can’t be here. There are too many of them. I can hear every single heartbeat, I can almost taste them.”

  “Hey, we’ll get through this,” I said standing up, too.

  “Don’t come close to me,” Chloe said when I tried to come to her. “I’ll just hurt you. I already had a taste, Emily. You don’t want to know how much I liked it.”

  I froze. I told myself I wasn’t scared, I just respected her wishes.

  Chloe laughed bitterly. “I can even taste your fear,” she whispered. “You’re scared of me.”

  “No, Chloe. I’m scared for you. I know you’re struggling and I don’t know how to help.”

  “I have to go home,” Chloe said.

  She took out her phone and called her mom to get her. I was glad. If anyone could help her here, it was her parents who would understand what she was going through. I couldn’t be there for her and I had new magic that could maybe do something, but I couldn’t help her the way another vampire could.

  “Do you want me to wait with you?” I asked when Chloe packed up her bag.

  She shook her head. “Please don’t.”

  I knew she was trying to save me, or something. But it still stung when she pushed me away. She turned around and walked toward the school building where she would wait in the sick room until her mom came to collect her.

  It was the best place for her to be.

  The rest of the day was boring with Chloe gone. I focused on my classes because there was nothing better to do.

  When school finished for the day, I walked to the bus. Reece caught up with me.

  “Where’s Chloe?” he asked after giving me a hug.

  “She went home early today,” I said. “She’s not in the best space.”

  “Is she sick?” Reece asked.

  “Something like that.”

  He looked worried. And why not? I was sure the guy had feelings for her. They never acted on anything because he was a werewolf and she was a vampire, but they connected on a level I hadn’t seen before between two people who didn’t date.

  “Tell me,” Reece said. “Was it a panic attack?”

  I nodded. I hesitated, wondering how much I should say. But Reece and Chloe had been friends for a while, and I knew he wasn’t an asshole. He would keep her secrets and respect her privacy.

  “Do you know what her anxiety attacks are?” I asked.

  Reece slid his eyes to me before he looked away again.

  “Bloodlust,” he said.

  “Did she tell you?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I know what it’s like. Wolves have something similar. It’s no party.”

  “It was really bad today,” I said. “I’m worried about her.”

  “I’ve been worried about her for a while. She hasn’t been herself for a while now. The vampire thing is really tripping her up. She hates herself so much because of who she is, it’s heartbreaking.”

  I nodded. He was right, it was heartbreaking. She was such a stunning person.

  “She thinks she did it,” I said.

  “What?” Reece asked.

  I looked at him without answering, letting him join the dots himself.

  “The murder?” he asked, his eyes widening. “There’s no way.”

  “That’s what I tell her,” I said. “But she won’t listen. She’s blacking out because she’s not feeding. She’s terrified that she does things when she’s not consciously aware of it.”

  “What, like DID?”

  “The identity disorder thing?” I asked. “I guess it’s something like that.”

  We walked in silence for a while, each of us wrapped up in our own though
ts. Instead of taking the bus, Reece and I turned down the road and walked side by side, extending the time we had to talk about this without anyone overhearing us. The last thing Chloe needed was being mocked by the kids at school for being a freak.

  I knew from experience that it only made matters so much worse.

  “We have to prove that it’s not her,” Reece said.

  “How?” I asked, looking at him.

  His face was stark, his sandy hair almost golden in the sun, and when he looked at me his green eyes were emerald, glittering jewel tones with the power of the wolf that slid behind them.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “But we can’t just leave this.”

  I nodded. I agreed with him, but I had no idea what we could do. Chloe was in a bad space, and the best thing for her would be if we supported her. What else could we do?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On Monday night, I went to Chloe’s place to check on her. I was worried about her. When I texted her, she only answered with single words.

  When I arrived at her house, there were cars everywhere. I hadn’t called ahead to see if it was okay that I came around. Maybe I should have. The Gardners didn’t usually have company.

  Chloe’s mom opened the door.

  “Emily,” she said with a smile. “We didn’t expect you.”

  “I’m sorry, is this a bad time?” I asked. “I wanted to check on Chloe.”

  “Not at all. A few of the clan members are here to see how she’s doing.”

  I wondered what she had told them, if she was still trying to put on a face or if she was coming clean about what she struggled with.

  My guess was the former. I hoped she was looking for help, but I doubted it. Chloe was very proud.

  “She’s in her room,” Mrs. Gardner said when I walked into the house. “I think she’s hiding, to be honest. Maybe you can convince her to come out and mingle.”

  I nodded and walked to Chloe’s room. I wasn’t going to convince her to join the other vamps if it wasn’t what she wanted. I just wanted to see if she was okay.

  When I knocked on her door and pushed it open, Chloe stood by the window looking terrified.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said when she saw me, and relaxed a little. “I thought it was my mom. She wants me to get out there.”