by CC Solomon
Chelsea was the first to greet me with a wave when she saw me approaching the group table.
She had thick, strawberry-blonde, shoulder-length hair, and greenish-hazel eyes set against ivory, freckled skin. With her beauty, she’d had no difficulty in catching the eye of a guard while we’d been locked up. And, against all understanding, they had fallen in love. When Charles and I rescued our fellow prisoners, it was an all-out battle between our side and the guards. During the battle, Phillip had cruelly killed Chelsea’s love.
“I’m going to the bar to get a drink. We’ll wait forever for someone to come,” Erik announced, standing up. “Mina, Jack and ginger?” He gave me sorrowful eyes and I knew he was trying to apologize for his sharp words to me earlier.
“You know me so well,” I said, giving him a smile that didn’t reach my eyes before taking a seat. I could get through tonight and remain cordial. I didn’t want to make the others uncomfortable.
He nodded and headed to the bar.
When he was far enough away I turned to the others. “Erik asked me to be his mate,” I stated.
Felix frowned. “I thought he just asked you about your drink,” he said.
I shook my head. “Earlier. He asked me to be his mate back at my place.”
Chelsea tilted her head. “He came to your place? I thought you two broke up?” she asked.
“He just showed up,” I replied. “And it’s not a break up. It’s just a time out so I can focus on growing in strength and figuring out who helped David escape.”
Faith sat back in her seat. “He told me he was going to talk to you about it,” she stated.
“He presented it like a business deal.”
Faith rolled her eyes. “You broke up with him, honey.” She threw out her hands in mock surrender. “I’m sorry, put him on a time out. How else should he have proposed it? If you hadn’t dumped him, I’m sure he’d have gotten down on one knee and all that, but now he’s probably afraid you’d kick him in the face.”
I gasped. “Why are you making me out to be the enemy here?”
“You aren’t the enemy. You’re just silly.”
I opened my mouth to object but Chelsea interjected.
“What’d you say when he asked?” Chelsea asked with twinkling eyes.
“Nothing. Well, he just told me to think about it,” I replied
“Think about what?” Charles asked, suddenly appearing at the table with a short glass of clear liquid in his hand, probably vodka.
“Erik asked Mina to be his mate, which sounds like a marriage proposal to me but Mina said it was actually a business proposal,” Felix answered matter-of-factly before taking a swig of his beer.
Charles sat down. His typically expressive eyes were now lazy. This had become his usual face and it was difficult to tell how he was feeling. His emotions seemed to appear sparingly and carefully.
Charles didn’t say anything for a long moment and we all sat quietly, waiting for a response. He looked over to me. “You need him, he needs you. I approve,” he said in an indifferent tone before sipping his vodka.
And that was it.
Erik came back to the table with our drinks and was greeted with knowing smiles. He looked over to me and I took my drink, avoiding his eyes.
“Okay, let’s focus in on where we are now,” I said. “Anything new over in Silver Spring?”
“Business as usual. I’ve been accepted into Blake’s clique,” Faith replied. She was a succubus but she functioned like a vampire except that she needed life force, not blood. There were several succubi and incubi in Silver Spring and Blake, the vampire leader, was appointed their leader as well. “She told me that she doesn’t actually agree with the things Seth and Phillip do but she is super loyal to Phillip. And I found out why. He healed her sister, who was dying from cancer. She didn’t want to become a vampire and Phillip was able to help her.”
“I didn’t know she had a sister,” I stated.
Faith nodded. “Yeah, she’s no longer in Silver Spring. Moved to the Virginia government town. Even though she’s human, they were going to let her stay but she fell for some other non-gifted and decided to leave.”
“How does that son of a bitch heal someone but then go and kill innocent people?” Chelsea asked, a heavy scowl covering her delicate features.
“Blake and Mae keep saying he’s changed. Maybe he’s possessed?” Faith guessed.
“Whatever it is, we still have to act,” Erik said. “He’s growing stronger and more dangerous every day. If I can get control of the weres, I’d be in a better place to stop him. We’re the largest group there.”
“Phillip may not need their support,” I started, looking down at my hands. “He can probably control everyone on his own now. He may not even need to do the regular announcements to refresh his control over the town. Once might be enough for good.”
“How do you know?” Charles asked, an eyebrow raised.
I didn’t look up. “Because my powers have grown too.”
“How?”
I looked up now. I guess it was time to share my secret. Eventually, I had to tell them and it was only cowardice that was holding me back now. “Everyone hold hands.”
They did so without question. I grabbed Erik’s hand and Faith’s on the other side of me. I looked around at the darkly lit pub. “Stop,” I commanded.
Everyone in the pub went still except the six of us. The band stopped playing, people stopped dancing, no one spoke. It was if we were in a bar full of mannequins. The only signs of life were the rise and fall of the patron’s chests and the slight sound of breathing.
“I used to only be able to stop the people I concentrated on. But now I don’t have to focus, except if I want to be specific. Like now, I don’t want you guys to be controlled. Holding your hands keeps you exempt from being frozen. I can also do two types of magic at once, maybe more, which I couldn’t do before.” I looked across the room to the dark fireplace with a stack of logs settled inside. A group of frozen people sat in large, leather-and-upholstery-covered chairs and couches in front of it, in mid-conversation. One of the people, a shorter man with black hair walked over to the fire place, took a lighter from the mantle and lit the logs. He then turned and sat back down, eyes glazed and dead. I didn’t even break a sweat to move him while maintaining the frozen status of everyone else.
My friends turned and looked at the bright light coming from the fireplace. No one spoke.
“I could only think that if these things were happening to me, they were happening to Phillip too. Or it could just be because I’m part of this six that Mae told us we were, but without Lisa around, I don’t know.”
“How’d you find out that your powers grew?” Felix asked, staring around at the people on pause. “This freaks me out, man.”
“Go,” I stated. I let go of Faith and Erik’s hands and the crowd around us came alive with movement and sound as if nothing odd had happened. I’d done that too. I hadn’t just controlled their bodies, I’d controlled their minds and made them want to pause their bodies and thoughts. It was easier that way, for them not to know. There wouldn’t be any questions or fear, like before.
“I accidentally found out at school that I could do this. The fourth and fifth grade kids were being really rowdy one day. They just weren’t listening. It was after recess, so I guess they were still hyped up. I got overwhelmed and kindly told them to be quiet. Okay, I yelled it actually. They all shut up. At first, I thought that maybe they were just listening to me and decided to be good. But they weren’t.” I drew an imaginary circle around the rim of my glass as I spoke. “I started to go back into my lesson and I asked them questions but they couldn’t speak to answer. Some of them began to cry but no sound came out of their mouths. They were like mimes. I begged them to speak. And they did. Twenty 9 to 11- year olds crying and screaming at once.”
“Why didn’t we hear about this?” Felix asked. He worked at the school with me as a math and science teacher.<
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I shook my head. “The principal thought it best we keep it under wraps as long as I kept my powers in control.”
Erik twisted in his seat to face me. “How’d you get the kids not to talk about what happened?” he asked.
And this is the part I’d tried to forget. I tried to keep this quiet because it made me less innocent than I wanted to believe I was. It made me like Phillip, no matter how I tried to justify it.
“She wiped their memories,” Chelsea guessed with a squinty-eyed smile. How she found this amusing I couldn’t figure out.
I nodded, biting my lip.
Erik sighed. I wondered if he was angry or disappointed. He was full of judgement, I was sure. Living up to his standards was probably something I could never maintain.
“When did this happen?” Felix asked. His voice didn’t betray any disgust or disappointment. He was a kind heart and I’d confided in him before without his judgement but this part I just hadn’t wanted to share. Instead, I kept my head down as I answered.
“Two weeks ago. I was embarrassed and scared to tell you all.”
“You didn’t mean for that to happen, honey,” Faith comforted me with a pat on my hand. For a woman full of tattoos with an anger problem, she was amazingly understanding and kind when it came to her friends.
I looked up and she gave me a sympathetic smile.
I looked to Charles, who was leaning back in his chair with a slightly bored expression. That was disturbing. He seemed unfazed by the whole situation but, then again, that seemed to be his current state of emotion. “Those kids probably needed to shut up. I don’t see the problem. You fixed it. All’s right with the world,” he said, crossing his arms.
I felt a squeeze of my knee and turned to Erik, who looked at me with uncharacteristically softened eyes as he gave my knee a light pat. “You did the right thing,” he stated. “Just maybe not make a habit out of it.”
The others nodded and I let out a sigh of relief.
“It’s good that you’re growing in power. We can use that. There are more things about Phillip that we didn’t share with you because we thought it would make you worry,” Erik started.
“Do I look like I’m so fragile that I can’t be told things?” I asked, leaning back in my seat.
“Do you want an honest answer?” Charles asked. “Because we can test it out by mentioning your dark circles and your couple of premature gray hairs.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you,” Erik stated, taking a sip of his drink.
“Seriously?”
Erik shook his head. “Phillip’s imprisoning more people. People he thinks are betraying him. He’s still maiming people for disobedience.”
Chelsea slapped the table with the palm of her hand. Our drinks shook slightly. “I’m killing him. As soon as we find a way to unlink him to Mina, he’s a goner.”
“He’ll kill you before you get close enough,” Charles muttered, leaning back in his chair. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers, looking around the room. “Where’s the waitress?” He asked loudly. “Can they be any slower here?” Charles muttered as he rose. “I’m going to go get a beer with a shot of blood. I hope it’s fresh.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do they sell blood here?” I asked.
Chelsea smirked. “No.”
I jumped up and raced to follow Charles but he was already hidden in the crowd. He was super-fast. A mixture of vampire and witch, he was much more powerful than his former status of just being a tech mage. He was also dangerous and I couldn’t ignore the fact that maybe Chelsea’s influence on him was partly to blame.
Since being freed, her dealings with humans were becoming tenuous. Hagerstown was a human and paranormal government town, which meant they did not allow for paranormal-only groups, except for special occasions. Therefore, there were no were packs, vampire kisses, or witch’s covens. So, I was surprised she liked it so much here. Sure, we had paranormal leaders or liaisons to parts of the government to keep communication and control, but government towns focused on growth and the overall human connection and not division, magic or otherwise.
I began to assume that the only reason she was at Hagerstown was to get in on the action of taking revenge on Phillip. It wasn’t exactly that she hated non-powered humans, her murdered boyfriend had been one of them, but he seemed to be more of an exception now. Currently, she stuck to just other paranormals in her free time. At work, she was a cashier in the grocery-store-slash-farmer’s-market and was friendly to everyone.
I hadn’t thought she wasn’t being genuine until I saw her snacking on the necks of a few humans. She didn’t kill them. That would get her killed. She healed them and wiped their memories of the encounter. However, those weren’t the rules. If she drank human blood, it had to be donated.
I didn’t approve of her actions but there weren’t many humans offering up their blood unless they would get credits for it. The town was over two thousand in population and about three hundred were vampires, that we knew of. Most people were still a little fearful of them and the weres, so not everyone was jumping up and down to self-identify. Although the town had found a way to test for the infection, they couldn’t test for the paranormal gift.
Colonel Robinson, the leader of the town, had to make a few announcements about remembering to treat everyone, including the paranormal humans, with dignity and respect. Not everyone listened and any day now, a fight between the different groups would happen.
However, for now, I had to find my brother and make sure he wasn’t going to do something reckless to start the fight early.
I reached the bar, hoping Chelsea was wrong about the pub not serving blood. I didn’t see Charles. Not good. I didn’t see the point in asking the bartender if blood was on the menu. If Charles wasn’t there, that was a good indication they didn’t. I turned around and searched the room.
Where could he be?
He hadn’t headed towards the front door. I headed towards the back of the bar and outside to the patio area. There were tons of people outside enjoying the last of the warm September evening. The space was lit with colorful string lights, and wooden picnic benches covered some of the cobblestone ground.
No Charles.
I pushed through the crowd and went through the metal gate leading to the street. I looked to my left down the back-alley parking lot. Nothing. I looked to my right towards the main street. I spotted two figures under an unlit lamppost. One was a woman, the other a man. They looked like they were making out. They weren’t.
I walked over to them. “Charles, stop it. Now!” I shouted, clapping my hands with each word. “Stop it!” I patted my thighs when he didn’t move away.
Charles pulled away from the neck of a woman. She was plump and appeared to be in her 40s with dark-blonde hair and bangs.
Charles sighed, rolling his eyes. “What, Amina? I’m not a dog. This is consensual,” Charles said in an exasperated tone.
I looked to the woman. Her eyes looked glazed over. I didn’t doubt that all my handsome brother had to do was flash a smile to get her to consent if she were lonely or intrigued. Several people still believed that the old, Pre-world fairy tale of handsome vampires still existed. The fact that vampires often used their glamour and compulsion power only helped that myth.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Laura,” she said in a tight voice, narrowing her eyes. I was sure she was annoyed I was cutting into her and Charles’ time.
I reached up and hovered my hand in front of her neck, pouring healing energy out to close the puncture marks that Charles left. “Go back in and grab a glass of wine on me, Amina Langston,” I stated, throwing my magic into my voice.
Laura nodded and headed back through the gate into the pub.
“Way to be a hypocrite, sis. It’s bad if I do what’s in my nature but you can go around controlling every man, woman and apparently child and it’s
all good,” he stated.
Well, that one stung. I turned to Charles who was taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. I watched in open-mouthed horror as he took out a cigarette and lit it with a word spell of fire. “You guys said it was okay. And really? You’re smoking now?”
Charles cracked a smile. “First, we said that one time was okay but then you go around doing it over and over again. And second, this is weed. And I think I’m okay, what with me being dead and all. I’m sure I won’t get cancer and it won’t age me.”
I stepped back and did an over-exaggerated wave of my hand to break up the smoke. “Okay, you’re right. I can’t just use my magic any way I want. It’s very irresponsible. I was just shocked to see you like…this. And you can go to Joanie for a donation.” Joanie, feeling guilty for her role in the prison, offered her blood to Charles on a regular basis as atonement.
Charles turned his head and blew out a ring of smoke. “Eh, that woman was closer. Stop acting like my mother. She’s dead.”
I put my hand down and frowned. We were both quiet for a moment, letting his last sentence sit in the air. It was true, our mother was gone, but it was still hard to hear. She’d been gone almost five years now. It still hurt.
“I know that. Look, Charles, I just want things to be the way they were. Like—”
“Well, they aren’t, are they?” Charles took another puff of his joint. “I’m dead. You’re the soulmate to an asshole and Lisa is gone. Nothing is the same.”
“I’m sorry.”
Charles shook his head. “Not your fault, Mina. Stop apologizing.”
I threw out my hands. “So, what do you want me to do?” I was frustrated and scared that I was losing the old Charles I knew, forever.
“Just let me be!” he cried. He rubbed his joint against the lamp pole and put it back into his cigarette pack. “Let’s go back in.”
He turned and walked away. As I looked at him go farther and farther from me, I wondered how I could make things right again. Did I even have that kind of power?
