“I have to go to school.”
His shoulders sagged.
“But we can talk afterward?” I offered.
His hidden face watched me for a long time before he spoke. “I’ll be right here.” He pointed to the spot in which he already stood.
I thought it was weirdly specific of him, but okay.
Unsure of what else to say, I nodded and turned around, sensing that the more steps I took, the less intense his presence became, until it was gone, and I was at school.
Port Inlet High School still looked exactly the same, and I knew logically I hadn’t been away from it for more than twenty-four hours, but it felt different somehow. Perhaps because I knew the star quarterback that the entire school missed was not missing. He was waiting for me at home. I couldn’t fathom the thoughts from yesterday and the present. They didn’t go together.
I closed my eyes just as the first raindrop fell, opening them to a storm. I rushed up the steps and inside, finding Samantha Young walking down the hall. She was with her friends. All three of them had their hair in pigtails with dark green bows and they each wore matching black pants and green shirts. I remembered Misty mentioning that her sister was a cheerleader. A poster overhead proclaimed that tryouts for the upcoming season were being held in the gym after school.
I met her eyes the same second she met mine. In hers there was no familiarity. But shouldn’t there be? We both knew that Maxell was out there.
I stopped in front of her.
She glared at me. “Move.”
“Can I talk to you?” I asked, unsure where I was going with this, but only knowing that I had to find out if she knew what I knew.
“You know her?” Her friend gave me a bored look, as though the mere idea of me ever being worthy of her time was so pointless to even consider, she didn’t even bother.
I ignored her and her friend and focused only on Samantha. “Alone.”
She sighed dramatically. “Give us a second, girls.”
They rolled their eyes in unison and stepped around us, heading for the stairs.
“What is it? I don’t have all day.” Samantha barely gave me her attention.
So I took it. “I saw Maxell today.”
Her eyes were solely on mine now. They didn’t widen in surprise the way I thought they would. They narrowed. “What did you just say?”
“I saw Maxell.”
She curled her lip. “Do you think you’re funny? You can’t see Maxell. He isn’t alive anymore, you freak.”
I tried to gauge if she was kidding, until I realized my mistake. She didn’t know. She really thought her boyfriend was gone and she’d been talking to his ghost. For all I knew, she had been. Feeling horribly stupid and bad, I backpedaled. “I meant I saw a picture of you two together. You were… really cute together. Made for each other.”
She immediately deflated. Her shoulders sagged and she took a deep breath. “Oh. Yeah. We were. Thanks,” she mumbled, stepping past me, frown heavily in place. She turned back to give me one last narrowed-eyed gaze before she caught up with her friends.
Shaking my head at myself, I went to class. She didn’t know, which meant Maxell hadn’t told her. She’d never been to his place, she didn’t know he was a…
I couldn’t say the word. Not to myself. Not in a hall packed with my peers, with high school posters strung overhead, and normalness oozing from their pores. I went to class, giving Misty a smile in return to the one she gave me.
“Feel better?” she mouthed.
Assuming she thought I was out sick yesterday, I shrugged and quickly sat down, thankful that Mr. Greene launched immediately into Dracula.
It wasn’t until I took the book out did my heart drop. Did it harden and shatter. I tried to calm my breathing, to stop my pulse from hammering. I also tried—and failed—not to put Maxell’s face on Dracula’s body. The image left this ache behind, this metal taste of terror.
I swallowed down my emotions. Shoving them deep. I had to try and focus, or I might never focus again. And something told me I desperately needed my focus.
Since I was behind a day, I spent the class catching up, handing in last night’s homework just as the bell rang.
Misty waited for me in the hall.
“Hey,” she greeted. “Was it like the twenty-four-hour kind?”
“Was what?” I asked, still trying to shake off my mood.
“You were out with the flu yesterday, weren’t you? That’s what Mr. Greene said. Your grandmother called you out sick. Are you still contagious? Mom’s worried we might get sick. This one time, we all got the flu and were sick for like a month. Minus the throwing up, it was kind of cool being out for that long. Samantha blew chunks all over Maxell. It was amazing.”
My grandmother had called the school? Somehow I didn’t believe that and immediately went with the more likely scenario. Masters or Reowna had called in. Something about them doing so lessened my fears. Serial killers didn’t normally take the effort to make more tracks in their effort to cover them up.
Making my way to math, I winked at her. “You better keep five feet between us.” I touched my stomach. “I’m feeling queasy.”
She shrunk away from me and put her book up to block me. “Stay away.”
I fake hurled and she screeched, scampering away from me and disappearing around the nearest corner. I spent algebra much how I spent English, catching up. In gym, I lucked out. Mrs. Gather took one look at me and either determined I was sallow enough for me to actually be sick, or enough so to not risk me getting the whole class infected. She asked me to sit out. I gladly obeyed her order, taking the note she handed me to the library.
The librarian, who I now knew was named Agatha, signed my note and gave me a polite smile and enough distance to make me think about playing the flu card more often.
Stay away from me, might blow chunks.
I sank down at one of the computers with every intention of catching up on my next three classes, and I did, at first, until my mind continued to stray to last night and I couldn’t forget. No matter how hard I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, there were pieces of it that had ingrained themselves in my brain.
Like the sight of Masters’ blood and the taste of it as it slid down my throat. The depth of pain and the ease in which it had healed. And that word. That frightening, impossible word.
Vampire.
I typed it into a fresh search engine page. I was surprised by how inundated the internet was by that one word. How many websites were dedicated to the supernatural creatures. Mostly, I got the impression they were dedicated to the idea of vampires. Everything I read didn’t correspond to what I’d seen. Which wasn’t much, now that I thought about it. Purple eyes didn’t even seem to register on the web. Black eyes did. The consensus seemed to mean that a vampire with black eyes was starving, or newly turned.
Like Maxell.
Against my better judgement, I typed his name in.
I anticipated what I’d find. High school newspaper posts, his social media pages frozen in time with well wishes and sad texts from his peers, and articles about his disappearance. I’d seen them all but for some reason I wanted to see them again.
But when I typed in his name, nothing came up.
I frowned at the screen and opened a new window, pulling up the search engine and typing his name in once more. The same results came up.
Your search for Maxell Heathestone did not match any of our records.
Recommendations:
Make sure all keywords are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more specific keywords.
It was like he’d never existed. As if I’d imagined the pictures of him I’d seen. The articles I’d read. I moved to a different computer, bypassing the search engine and going straight for his social media. They were gone. Completely and utterly gone. There was no one in the world with that name. Not in the past and not in the future.
Somehow, calling
in sick for me didn’t seem like such a gargantuan effort now. Not when someone had erased any proof at all that Maxell had ever existed on the web.
I tried to breathe through my panic, to think. Maxell still existed here. At Port Inlet High School. I went over to the librarian.
“How can I help you, dear?” she asked nicely, pushing the bottle of hand sanitizer on her desk toward me.
“Are there old copies of past yearbooks here?”
She nudged the bottle closer. “In the nonfiction section. They have their own row. Top shelf, uppermost right corner. We only go back ten years, though.”
I squirted some hand sanitizer into my hand and roughly rubbed my palms together. “Thanks,” I mumbled, heading that way.
When I found the section I was looking for, I pushed the footstool over, climbing atop it to get to the top shelf. I plucked last year’s yearbook down and flipped to the H’s. There. His picture was there. As handsome and alive as he was in all his others. I pulled his freshman yearbook down too and quickly flipped until I found him, much younger-faced but still mint-chocolate-eyed and adorable.
I clutched both yearbooks to my chest.
When the librarian had her back turned, I slipped both into my backpack and then I left the library, shocked to find that lunch was almost over. Focusing during physics was a feat. Being even remotely present in history was almost impossible, and by the time I made it to Italian, my ability to pay attention was difficile.
I ducked out of class and took the east side exit, jogging across the lawn, scrambling over the fence, and disappeared within the forest. The rain filtered through the trees, slowing the speed the droplets pelted me. The mud was thick, but the overgrowth was too. I waited for the sensation of Maxell’s presence, but it never came on my walk home from school.
When I got there, I was shocked to find that Granny Londa still wasn’t home. The sight of the empty driveway royally pissed me off. I went into the garage and turned on the light, trying to find what I was looking for. When I located it, I wiggled it free and then I set off for the grocery store. The bike was rusted, and the seat was so uncomfortable I kept flinching, but it was better than walking, and it was better than thinking.
Clover Foods was the only grocery store in town. Thankfully, it was large enough to accommodate the city, and my miniscule funds. I was just getting back on my bike when I spotted a familiar black sports car drive past.
I hoped they’d miss me, but no such luck. The driver pulled up alongside me and their tinted window eased down a fraction.
A pair of deep purple eyes peered through the shadows.
“Care for a lift?”
A shudder raced down my spine at the sound of his voice. I didn’t appreciate it here. Not in the light of day—or what was left of the light in Port Inlet—and not at the grocery store, where normal people shopped, and they had normal eyes and couldn’t erase your past off the web.
I leaned my bike back up against the wall and marched over to him. “You aren’t real. How can I pretend you’re not real if you show up at the grocery store?”
Masters sighed deep and long. “Is that the method you’re attempting to rationalize your time with us? Pretending it didn’t happen? That’s not original.”
I rocked back on my heels, peeved he was criticizing my attempt at surviving. “What do you want?”
He flashed me a smile. “You’re an adorable human, are you aware of that? Quite spunky. I know vampires who aren’t brave enough to argue with me, and yet you, a mere seventeen-year-old mortal girl would throttle me if she could.” His grin grew. “You ever wonder if you’re human at all?”
I frowned. “No.”
His eyes twitched. “I guess you wouldn’t. Get in. I’ll drop you off at home.”
“I’d rather ride my bike.”
He glanced at it. “No one would rather ride your bike.”
I huffed, annoyed with his pushiness. “Where’s Maxell?”
He didn’t falter, despite how badly I wanted to throw him off his game. “I’m unaware of his current whereabouts, as I am most of the time. I cannot control him.” Now his expression fell, a frown furrowing the smooth expanse of his forehead. His expression cleared as fast as it soured. “What’s for dinner?”
I followed his gaze to my pathetic grocery items and shrugged. “Instant ramen.”
He cringed. “Get in, Emmie. Reowna would kill to cook dinner, and I’m sure you have more questions.”
I couldn’t help seeing this as an educational program video. Creepy vampire guy offers you dinner, if you’ll only come to his place… I shook my head. “I’m all out of questions, sorry.”
“Then why are you searching for Maxell on the internet?”
A hot blaze burned in my cheeks. I glared at him. “Why are you erasing his existence?”
He put his chin on his hand and appraised me openly. “I’m not erasing his existence. I’m trying to give him one.”
Masters was eccentric. He didn’t look like he’d fit in anywhere other than at a Jay Gatsby party. I couldn’t see much of his outfit other than the collar of his white suit coat, but I knew it wasn’t the norm for most Clover Foods patrons. He was unflinchingly handsome, much like Maxell—it was hard to look directly at him without feeling the strange desire to blink. And if all of that wasn’t enough, if all of his uniquely attractive physical differences didn’t make him stand out, his deep purple eyes did so.
“I don’t know what that means,” I mumbled, unsure whether I wanted to keep having a conversation with a man powerful enough to eradicate someone’s presence on the internet. What sort of dark web magic was that?
He blew out a sigh, but it didn’t sound exasperated. It sounded amused. “Do you want to?”
I met his eyes, holding them even though every impulse inside screamed to run. “Yes,” I whispered, finding that as soon as the admission left my lips, the truth of it unleashed in me, too. This starving pit of questions unfurled, and I had this eerie feeling it would never truly be sated.
And the look in Masters eyes said he knew it. Knew things I didn’t even know to ask. Knew parts of life I was never supposed to see. Maybe then I could matter. But I was also afraid. Fearful of seeing things I had no right seeing. Afraid of my intuition screaming at the top of its lungs for me to flee.
“I admire your fight,” Masters said. “More than you’ll ever know. When you’re ready, we’ll be waiting for you.” Masters rolled his window up and drove away, his black sports car melting onto the road and out of eyeshot before anyone had even known he was there.
Gulping, I got on my bike and pedaled home, ignoring the rain pelting me in the face, getting in my eyes, and clouding my vision. I unloaded the groceries, fed Martian, and then I took a bowl of instant ramen upstairs with me and did my homework.
I was in the middle of my history homework when the doorbell rang. The moment it did, my stomach lurched, my heart too. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and then I went downstairs. A peek out of the window showed a tall, black-clad figure standing on the porch. I could pretend to wonder, but I already knew who it was. I knew his muscular shape, his unique stature; his physical presence was alarmingly familiar to me already.
“Who is it?” I asked unsteadily through the door. We’d never been this close before. All that separated us was a thin wooden door. I found it difficult to breathe.
“I’ve been waiting,” his deeply smoothed voice responded. “You’re late.”
I placed my hand on the knob, closed my eyes and counted to ten, and then I opened it.
Too close. We were too close. I was too close to him. I could see everything. Every part of his face. All the hard, beautiful plains. All the features that had eluded me. Little things I hadn’t known were there. Like how long and black his eyelashes were. How perfectly symmetrical his nose was. Even his lips; they were the fullest, shapely light pink lips I’d ever seen. Too much. His face was too much. His hood was off. His hair was messy, onyx, and it lo
oked unbearably silky and midnight. Deep shadows discolored the moons under his eyes, which were still the darkest tone of black I’d ever seen.
Fear and wonder snaked down my spine. I wanted to run as badly as I wanted to stay.
Short pulses twitched in his jaw. His entire body tensed. His hands were formed into fists at his sides. He exuded tension. I felt it all around him; I felt it all around me. His chest didn’t move rapidly up and down the way mine did. I realized in concern that he was holding his breath. He wasn’t even breathing.
“Do you need oxygen?” I asked with forced casualness, like I had some in my fridge.
He spoke without pulling in a breath. “It’s best I hold my breath around you.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise, I’ll rip your throat out,” he revealed easily, like he’d just explained that the humidity was eighty-four percent, and not his desire to kill me.
Now I understood his comments from earlier. He didn’t want to hurt me, but he may. “What makes me… um… appetizing? If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”
A strange glimmer moved across his dark eyes. If I had to put a name to the emotion, I’d think it was humor.
“I don’t mind you asking, but you might mind my answer.”
I braced myself. “Try me.”
“Masters says there are rare humans that have unique blood. Their scent is stronger. Their taste is unmatched. Their pull is so deep, it changes your soul. They might actually give us one before we rip theirs apart. We come across them once in a lifetime, most not at all. There are two outcomes for people like you. Death or… me.”
I blinked. Then I blinked again. For good measure, I blinked one more time. “So, basically, what you’re saying is, I’m like the most decadent piece of chocolate cake at a party, and if you eat me, you’ll never eat another piece of cake that good again, and thus your existence will become horribly meaningless?”
Again, that strange glimmer moved over his eyes. “Mostly. You’re leaving out the other outcome, though.”
“Which is what?”
“You’ve met Reowna, haven’t you?”
Court of Frost and Embers (The Pair Bond Chronicles Book 1) Page 8
