Harsh Light of Day

by Jaye A. Jones

  **

  We drove in silence until Will mumbled something about a gas station. I hardly heard him. The weight of it all was finally hitting me. I was getting crushed by it.

  “I had no idea,” Annabelle whispered.

  “What?” I whispered back, hiding my face. I could feel the tears and didn’t want anyone to see. I was stronger than this. I never cried. Nothing was so bad it couldn’t be fixed.

  Will was outside the car that had blood in the back seat where I was sitting. I couldn’t smell it over the musty scent of the old Cadillac. I couldn’t even be sure it was blood, but it was dried almost black.

  “That you and Declan were—are—” she said, not finding the word.

  A hot tear trickled down my cheek. It hurt to hear his name. It hurt that Annabelle was thinking of us, thinking of what we had.

  What we have.

  The day I found out Declan was a vampire, I flipped out. Who wouldn’t?

  I found him at the medical clinic where I volunteered. In the same room filled with refrigerators I drank myself silly in yesterday. He’d contaminated five bags of blood, trying to find everything he needed.

  I understood it now. The blood wasn’t pure, whole blood, but separated into its parts, which was customary with donated blood. That’s why it didn’t taste right to me. That’s why it made me groggy. I didn’t get a complete and balanced meal.

  I shook the memory away because I was feeling queasy, and my thoughts were back on Declan instantly.

  He was able to retract his fangs as soon as he saw me. I knew now how difficult that was. Even stoic Annabelle didn’t have control of her canine teeth when there was blood in the room. It meant he didn’t want me to see him like that. It meant he was in love with me, even before either of us knew we were in love. But I didn’t know that then.

  “That we are what?” I squeaked at Annabelle, my voice trembling now.

  She didn’t turn around in the front seat. She didn’t look back at me. Her eyes stayed looking out the front, not wavering.

  “You are true mates. I never saw it before.”

  At first, I thought Declan was insane. He said the word for the creature he was and tried to explain, but I wouldn’t hear it. All I saw was the guy I’d been seeing for a few weeks had broken into the place I worked, ruined blood donations by drinking it, and came up with a lame story as an explanation because he must have thought I was very gullible.

  Vampires were fictitious. In my mind, Declan was trying to get rid of me. My affection for him was greater than his was for me. It took me a few days to understand that his telling me what he was meant he cared for me too.

  But I didn’t accept it immediately. I accused him of being sick and twisted, of lying to me and making me feel something for him. I called him a fraud, a jerk, a waste of my time.

  The more time I gave it, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I already knew Declan was different. I knew it the moment we met. I’d been willing to accept it when I thought he was just strange.

  We didn’t fall in love, or at least realize how we felt until after I found out what he was. He didn’t want to pursue anything with me if he had to lie to me.

  So noble. Always so wonderful.

  I shook my head trying to fend off the tears that were dripping from my chin.

  “Huh?” I grunted, not having the strength to say more.

  “I see the bonds between creatures, human and vampire alike. And you and he are bound.”

  Like Charles, I realized. He saw the true nature in vampires, could see the characteristics that made them who they were, the ones they wouldn’t be able to deny. Annabelle saw the same thing, only between people.

  I understood it all. Annabelle’s abilities had been too much like Charles’s. He got bored, and hoped to sire someone more interesting. He wanted to be the creator of one of his precious anomalies.

  However many partners Charles sired between Annabelle and Delilah, I didn’t know. But Delilah, he’d kept around. Because she restored vampires to their true form by healing their wounds. That must have been interesting enough for Charles. For the time being.

  But now Delilah was dead. Really dead. I wondered how the Vampire King would react. Part of me imagined he would be delighted.

  Annabelle spoke again, and it took me awhile to realize she was still considering what Declan and I had.

  “I never saw it before. I don’t understand why.”

  “Please,” I said softly, my voice like a child’s.

  Annabelle didn’t hear me, or didn’t care to listen. “This is unprecedented, of course. But your ability to be around them…and us…”

  She kept talking, but I stopped listening. Annabelle had no idea how her words were hurting me.

  The night Declan made me a vampire, I pretended to be okay with it. I ran my fingers through his hair and tried to make it easier for him, since there was no avoiding it. Declan would have been killed if I disappeared from the Castle before I was turned. And I was sure Colin would track me down and kill me too.

  Having Declan turn me had been the right decision to save our lives. Remembering that night now though was horrifying.

  The memory of his teeth going into my neck.

  Breaking the skin.

  Drinking my blood for the first and only time.

  We had been so much in love by then. We shouldn’t have had to do that to each other.

  And I had been mad at him in my last moments. That anger carried over into twenty years of vampire life. Like Lennox’s fear of Annabelle.

  Things were making sense, yet nothing seemed fair.

  I felt myself change that night, felt what made me human disintegrate, felt my blood thicken and my heart slow. There was a reason we forgot. No creature was meant to endure the gruesome memory of their own birth.

  Or death.

  I couldn’t get the car door open fast enough. Everything took so much effort. Everything was so hard. My human arms were made of straw. My human legs were like balancing on twigs.

  I was deaf and blind.

  Every horrible thing I’d witnessed in the past few hours swarmed in my head. Being snapped in half by Viola. The image of my own mangled body. The crawling bugs under my skin as Delilah healed me. The taste of Will’s blood. Delilah’s mutilated corpse. Declan fighting for my life.

  There was cold sweat all over my body. I could feel the blood leave my face, the clammy tingle on the back of my neck.

  I threw up bright red blood. Tears flowed freely now. My hands shook out of control and even though I was sitting on the ground, my legs felt weak. Looking at the blood made me retch again but my stomach was empty.

  I crawled as far away from the spot on the ground as I could, but I was so weak. So fragile. I collapsed onto the grass and cried into the earth.

  It didn’t feel good. There was no satisfaction in the release. But I didn’t stop it.

  The empty places inside me pounded as a reminder of the things I’d forfeited because of my selfishness. My family. The lives I may have saved. My Declan.

  Moments later, someone picked me up from the grass. I was taken to the car and placed gently in the back seat in a way only human hands could achieve.

  “Thank you, Will,” I croaked with a sob, then curled up and cried some more.

  I no longer felt ashamed. There was no reason to hide my face. What the others thought of me didn’t matter. I was sure they wouldn’t hold it against me anyway.

  After all, I was only human.