House of secrets, p.25
House of Secrets, page 25
“Well, for today, we wait,” Andras intoned gently. “We spend the day and tonight here, hoping he comes. If not, we’ll figure it out tomorrow morning.”
“Okay,” I said. “In the meantime, is there somewhere to get food?” I hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before, too sick with worry to even think about it.
“Oh, shit,” Andras swore, looking at Nadia wide-eyed. “I forgot to get food.” He turned to me, “I cannot believe I did that. I’m so sorry. Let’s go right now. There’s a small mountain store not far down the road. I’ll get dressed. Is that alright?”
“You don’t have to apologize. You guys don’t have to eat, right?”
“We can eat food, and we like to eat food. But we don’t have to,” Nadia said, raising up her cup of coffee.
Andras rose to his feet in one smooth motion. In a few long, graceful steps, he disappeared around the corner and down the hall. Nadia turned to me, a sly jester’s smile on her lips.
“So,” she crooned.
I shot her a look that conveyed, "No, we are definitely not talking about that." She shrugged as if to say, "Fine by me."
“Come sit by the fire while we wait,” she offered, yawning. “It’s much better than by this freezing window.”
She slid out of her chair, a pretty blue mug in hand, and sauntered toward the living room. I followed.
I sank back into the armchair near the crackling fire, as Nadia lowered herself onto the sofa with the grace of a ballerina and the regal confidence of a queen. She stared at me as if there was something she wanted to say but was holding back for some reason. I waited for her to start.
“I like you,” she said after a few heartbeats. “You’re brave. Kind. All of this is, well, a lot, and you haven’t hesitated or balked. When you suggested we go after Callum, you meant that. You’d kill him to protect your family.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “I would. I’d do anything for them.”
“I can feel your fear. That’s the reason a mother’s love is so fierce, not because she’s never afraid, but because she moves forward despite it.”
Nadia searched my face for a moment, her lips a tight line like she was reading something there. I smiled tightly.
“What did you mean? You can feel my fear…because you’re a vampire?”
She hummed in agreement. “Kind of,” she said. “It’s like how Andras can mindweave. I can feel how other people are feeling, like I’m experiencing it myself. And I can affect their emotions a bit, too.”
“Well, that’s rough,” I blew out a breath. “That sounds like empathy on steroids. Isn’t it hard to manage all the time?”
“Oh, after all these years, you figure it out. It has its uses, too. Like knowing that you’re a brave, honest, and kind person. And I know that Andras, well, he’s happy around you, in a way I’ve never seen. He’s at ease, and content.”
Hearing her words sparked something like giddy pride inside of me, even if I wasn’t entirely sure her praise was deserved. Andras always seemed at ease and content, prowling the neighborhood at night with random dates, casually draped over the bar at Blotto, striding around with his hands in his coat pockets. If I were to describe him, I’d say he was “at ease” most of the time. Still, the idea that I might affect him made me smile.
“I like you, too,” I admitted, finally.
We drank our coffee in silence, and both of us focused on the flames licking the edges of a log in the fireplace. I didn’t know much about Nadia, outside of how she’d met Andras and how they’d been forced to deal with Callum.
“Do you still live mostly in England?” I asked.
“I do. Well, I bounce around between England, Northern France, and random warmer climates when I tire of the cold. I was born in Anatolia.”
I frowned, trying to picture it on a map. Had I truly been out of school for so long I’d entirely forgotten geography?
“Turkey is what it’s called now,” she added.
“Oh, okay. Thank you.”
I wondered what it must have been like for them to have witnessed countries rise and fall and change. Nadia stretched her legs out on the sofa and lay back to rest her head on a throw pillow. She looked like royalty in her silk pink pajamas, her sleek hair fanning around her head like a crown.
“You want to ask me questions. Yes? There is nothing much to know, honestly. My family were merchants. We fled when the Roman Empire weakened and the Ottomans invaded. There was an opportunity for me to get separated from my very Christian family, and I took it. I was made not long after by a woman I met along the way, but I didn’t find myself in the same predicament as Andras, thankfully. She and I had our fun, we parted ways amicably, and that’s that. I’ve lived a dozen lives since. In one of those lives, I met Andras, we buried Callum, and then I lived a few more lives after that. Now here we are.”
She rotated her wrist and fanned her fingers, gesturing to the ceiling, as if to reveal a magic trick of some kind. As if to say, ta-da!
“The person who made you—”
“Such a long story, and I can barely remember her face anymore. She was beautiful, strong, and terribly old. Maybe one of the oldest of us.”
“The oldest? You mean…you know where vampires come from?”
“The same place everything else comes from, I suppose. We’re not human, but we’re of this world. There are many things in this world that exist outside of human reality but we’ll get to all of that another time.”
Her eyes flicked up to something behind me.
“Are you ready to go?” Andras asked.
He’d entered the room and leaned against the doorframe, hands in the pockets of his long coat, without me hearing a thing. Silent as the night, and just as deadly, I thought.
I set my empty coffee mug on the table and untangled my legs to get to my feet. My chin dipped once. Andras pushed off the frame to step toward us.
“Coming?” He raised a brow at Nadia.
“No, no. Go on without me.” She got to her feet and began stretching her legs. “I’m going hunting.”
I glanced at Andras for an explanation, and Nadia caught me.
“For deer blood,” she said. “Human blood is too...complicated.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
Andras shot her an incredulous look.
“I have one human source,” Nadia breathed mid-stretch, “she’s magnificent, otherwise I don’t touch the stuff.”
Andras looked amused. “Have fun,” he sang, then paused, waiting for me to walk ahead of him and we headed for his car.
In Andras's black sedan, we sped past blurry trees with mostly bald branches. A few stubborn patches of fire-colored leaves clung to branches here and there. We went faster than I’d ever gone in a car. His heightened senses allowed him to race through the hills without a care in the world. Every so often, our eyes would meet, and Andras would grin at me, as if this were something he’d always wanted to do and was overjoyed to be doing—just taking a drive together.
The country store smelled of beef jerky and apple spice potpourri plug-ins. A display of stuffed grizzly bears in overalls took up space next to the cash register. Corn dogs, potato logs, and donuts were for sale at the counter. Fresh cheese curds could be found in the refrigerator section near the back, next to the soda, chocolate milk, and glass bottles of fresh cow’s milk. A small fridge hummed near another wall, selling “night crawlers for two dollars” in small styrofoam containers.
I grabbed a few cans of soup, a loaf of crusty bread, some green apples, and three peach pastries. Just enough food to get us through the day, because after tomorrow, if Callum doesn't come for us, we’d start hunting him. I swallowed hard at the thought. I’d take chasing him to the ends of the earth any day over letting him roam free, lurking in every shadow, ready to pounce. Andras casually wandered the store with his hands in his pockets, taking in the local small-town fare, pausing before a small display of travel keychains. I tilted my head in question, ready to open my mouth to ask what he was searching for, when a tall man stalked past us, bumping into me with his shoulder, hard enough to send me sprawling into the keychain stand–if Andras hadn’t been there to catch me. The man smelled like he’d taken a bath in lager. Andras held me gently around the waist to steady me on my feet, his eyes searching for the slightest injury.
“I’m okay,” I said quietly. I glanced over his shoulder at the stumbling man, who turned to sneer at us.
“Watch where you’re going,” he slurred, clumsily backing up into the candy bars and sending tiny boxes crashing to the floor.
Andras went wholly still, his dancing sapphire eyes now dark and violent, locked on the drunk man.
“What are you lookin’ at?” the man barked, his ruddy face twisted into a rabid glower.
“You should apologize to her,” Andras instructed, calmly–too calm–his hands sliding into his pockets.
“Fuck you,” the man barked, “and fuck your bitch.”
Andras tilted his head casually to the side, grinning wickedly. He tsked. “I’m not having a great week, friend,” he began, “and that was the wrong thing to say.” He rolled his shoulders. “When you hurt someone, you apologize.” He nodded towards me, “see this woman here? If you so much as glance at her again,” the grin melted into something far more menacing and his voice became low, the sound of shadows and wrath, “I will rip your still-beating heart out of your fucking chest.”
He stepped toward the man, and his eyes darkened, all the blue eaten up by inky black. The man jerked back, his face white as snow, then froze. His breathing sped up, faster and faster; his chest heaved, but his eyes were vacant. I knew, right then, what Andras was doing. He’d pulled that man into his mind, conjuring up a place of terror, of nightmares. Then the man’s shoulders slumped forward and his breathing slowed, as Andras said flatly, “Off you go, then. Go sober up, get some therapy, turn your life around.”
The man looked like he’d woken up from a bad dream, blinking frantically and looking lost. The black receded from Andras’s eyes. Then the man launched into movement, fell backward onto his ass, scrambled to his feet, and ran from Andras in utter panic, tripping through the front door and looking over his shoulder as he scattered across the parking lot. Still holding my soup cans and groceries, I glanced at Andras, eyebrows raised.
“Seriously?”
“What?” he asked innocently.
He gathered most of what I had in my hands before heading toward the cashier, who had found something really interesting on a beef jerky package, with me by his side.
In the car, I waited for him to speak, but a hundred heartbeats went by, and we sat in silence.
“Andras?”
“Yes?”
“You okay?”
“Yes. And no. I’m furious that man touched you. I didn’t see it coming, and just…the thought of someone hurting you…”
“I can stick up for myself,” I reproached.
The last thing I wanted was for Andras to go crazy on everyone who insulted me from now until the end of time. The end of time? Why was I thinking about him in the long term? He had until the end of time, but I would age, and die. I had children to raise, and they certainly wouldn't grow up in the world Andras and Nadia lived in. One with ancient enemies, and…fuck. If someone like Callum exists and is just roaming free, I realized, there must be others, some undoubtedly worse than him. I felt sick.
“I know you can,” Andras agreed. “I didn’t do that because I think of you as helpless, or because I think you’re my property, or even because you’re a woman, or because I lo...care about you.”
My breathing hitched on his stumbled words. Was he going to say something else, something far more damning?
“Standing up for people,” he continued, “just feels like the right thing to do. Hell, Nadia could have killed him with a wink, with half a thought, and I would still have defended her. And she would have done the same for me. She has done the same for me. Because we’re friends.”
I smiled warmly up at him in understanding. Friends. We were friends. He cared about me, and I cared about him, complicated though it may be. A deer alongside near the road, and I remembered that Nadia was out hunting. My nose scrunched up at the thought of her, in her long-limbed elegance, pouncing on a doe somewhere in the powdery snow, and ripping its throat out. Ack.
“You gonna tell me what you did to the guy at least?” I asked.
“Oh, definitely not,” Andras laughed, with notes of wicked delight in the sound, and on his face.
I shook my head at him in mock reprimand, then turned my attention to the valleys and peaks dusted with snow, to Nadia, and then beyond to Jess, and my girls. A few months ago, I’d wanted a little excitement: to feel seen, to be heard. I wanted to be a good mother, to learn everything I could about how to raise them “the best way,” and for my husband to love me again, to smile warmly at me. For us to laugh together about our days and our children’s antics while rocking on our porch swing. Now…well, I could barely believe it. I was tearing through the mountains with a powerful vampire who looked like a lord of the night on our way back to a cabin where we were waiting for some ancient sadistic prick to come for us. I had filed for divorce, and my little girls were holed up at my mother’s manor, playing among the old maples and oaks, on grounds haunted by the memory of my father.
Music, full of vibrating bass sounds, repeating soft and then hard notes, greeted us as we neared the cabin.
Inside, we toed off our boots, and I put the groceries away while Andras went into the living room to say hello to Nadia.
I popped my head into the living room.
“Do either of you want soup?” I asked. “Or are you too full of Bambi?”
Nadia glared at me but I could see the corner of her mouth tugging up. She swayed to the music, her cheeks flushed with the fresh animal blood that coursed through her veins. She wore loose black slacks and a pretty floral blouse with heeled boots.
“Soup would be great,” they answered in unison. Andras had casually draped himself over the sofa, a book in hand. Nadia continued to twirl and sway to the music, her lips turned up slightly at the corners.
“Please,” Andras added, looking up from his book with a grin.
Minestrone plopped from the can into the saucepan. Stirring it with a wooden spoon, I watched the snow coming down again outside in fat flakes. I was so tired, and it was getting late. I wanted to go to bed, yet the thought of laying next to him, touching him, and feeling him inside of me made my cheeks hot and my stomach curl.
He was so many things. Beautiful, tender, and absolutely deadly. I wanted to stay in this world with him forever, spend eternity getting to know him and studying layer upon complicated layer. But I wanted to get back to my girls, and I wanted that even more. I ached for them like a part of my soul had gone missing. And I knew, I knew I couldn’t have him and them.
A pit formed in my stomach. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass, and the raw despair on my face startled me. There was something else, too, something beyond my reflection, near the woods. A shadowed blur.
THE HALFLINGS ATTACK
I ran for the living room, stopping short at the entrance as Nadia whirled from the fireplace towards Andras, who was stretched out on the couch.
“Andras. Callum is here,” she warned, her voice cold and commanding. “I know it because my mood has gone to absolute shit.”
Taking a step, I looked between them, “I just saw something near the woods–a shadow. A very fast-moving shadow,” I blurted out. I wrung my hands together, unsure what else to do with them.
Andras sat up slowly, tilting his head, listening intently. He sniffed the air and then went utterly still. A nod to each of us, his gaze lifted to the ceiling—something was up there. With cat-like stealth, Andras rose to his feet, inching silently toward me. Nadia slid the fire poker free from its stand, crouching low, one hand on the floor for balance, the other aiming the iron into the air. The fire crackled. Without warning, she sprang toward the ceiling, thrusting the poker upward before landing back into a crouch with a soft thud. She checked the tip for blood, cursing when it came up clean. Then all hell broke loose. Andras twisted, pulling me close as glass shattered. A dark figure exploded through the window, slamming into Nadia. She pivoted out of the shadow’s claws, rolling into the wall. Instantly back on her feet, ready to strike, Nadia’s eyes locked on the darkness rising in the corner of the room. The figure stepped into the firelight—a young man with brown eyes and sneering, pale lips.
“Andras,” I whispered, his arm still around me. My voice cracked as my body began to shake. “It’s him…” I whispered.
Andras froze in a way only an immortal could. He gently unwrapped himself from me and stepped away. Then, in a blur, Andras shot toward the man who had broken into my home, who had dragged me through my living room by my hair. Rage seared through my chest, so intense I thought it might kill me. Am I having a heart attack, right now? Andras' hand snapped out like a viper, seizing the man by the throat and squeezing. “Who the fuck are you?” Andras asked, his voice calm, quiet, lethal, with his fangs fully visible and terrifying. A groan escaped the enormous man, his bulging eyes darting toward the window, toward the outside.
“C-Callum,” he choked out, “sent me to follow you.” He was struggling, gasping. “I saw you talk to her,” his swollen eyes slid to mine, “so I snuck in to find out who she was. I thought the house was empty. But then, she was there, and I was…so hungry.”
A shiver shot up my spine and a cold like I’d never known before traveled through my limbs. Had that been why Andras had looked so worried when he’d stared into this man’s face that night? Because he suspected he might be a vampire?
A chilly, emotionless calm settled over Andras's striking face, half in shadow, half illuminated by the glow of the fire. He let go of the man’s throat, cocking back his elbow as if he were loading a punch, then his fist thrust forward into the man’s barrel chest with a thunderous crack, and his hand–his whole hand–buried itself inside. I inhaled sharply, covering my mouth. I was going to be sick. The man’s eyes widened in disbelief. He gasped, mouth opening and closing like a fish suffocating out of water. Andras growled and yanked his hand free, the squelch and crack echoed through the room. Something slipped from his grip and landed on the floor with a wet thud. I startled. The man’s face froze as he went boneless, collapsing to the ground in a heap. Blood trickled from Andras's hand down to the hardwood. Drip. Drip. Drip.
