Taste

by Claire Farrell

  “Oh, don’t be shy,” she said. “I’ll only take a little. You still need to be able to fight, after all.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Do you want my protection or not?”

  “Fine,” I said sullenly. “But take too much, and I’ll have to kill you.”

  She sniggered, a secretive little laugh that said I knew nothing. “Of course, my dear.” She got up and came over to sit beside me. “It won’t hurt much.”

  I closed my eyes and felt her gnarled hand touch my chest then run up to my neck. She clenched her nails into my neck, and my eyes shot open. Her mouth gaped wide as if her jaw had come unhinged. Her skin sagged, unable to contain her large rotting teeth any longer.

  My lips fell apart automatically, and a pale wispy light flew out of my mouth and straight into hers. My pores opened, leaking light, and I wanted to vomit, wanted to flee, but I was paralysed by her touch. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. My mind turned inward in blind nightmarish panic, and I was convinced I was dying. I felt life leave me. Felt my soul ripping away. Felt my body sag with every spark of light that left it.

  Her eyes brightened, the brown gleaming and shimmering. She made sounds of pleasure that turned my stomach. Then she was gone, moving away from me, and the strange sensations ended.

  I choked a little, struggling to catch my breath. My lungs were on fire. I tried to speak, but only emitted a croak.

  “You won’t be able to speak for a few minutes,” she said from the corner.

  I found her in the shadows. She was licking fingers that seemed impossibly long. I couldn’t make out her face, but I saw her eyes, electric and white in the dark.

  “Thank you, Ava. That was revitalising. I’ll get started on the preparations. Give me two days, and then you can bring them here. You may leave.”

  I got to my feet and almost fell back onto the couch.

  She apologised. “Perhaps I took a little too much. You should rest for a couple of hours.”

  I stumbled out of her house and found my way home, feeling as though I were high, floating with a weightless body. By the time I reached my cottage, the light-headedness had passed, but my knees struggled to hold me up. Inside my home, I came close to collapsing. I tried to crawl up the stairs on my hands and knees, gave up, and lay on the couch instead. The last thing I did was touch my neck, but there were no wounds from her nails.

  Chapter Six

  After waking early, I rang Gabe, still unsettled by the way I had practically died in my sleep. “Any chance the funeral can be arranged today or tomorrow?”

  “Why?” he asked with a suspicious tone.

  “Because I’m moving them all.Soon. Someone got in the sanctuary.”

  “What!”

  I held the phone away from my ear at his yell. “Okay, Shouty, settle down. Peter dealt with it before I got there. They thought the intruder might have been a half-breed. Esther sensed some shifter in him, and the twins felt fae magic, but…”

  “But?” He sounded impatient.

  “But he had tattoos on his scalp, under his hair, and Val reckons the tattoos were imbued with fae magic, something that can be done by a kid who used to be in the slave market.” I sighed. “Esther thinks a couple of people who work for the Council have these same tattoos. Then there was the brand on the back of his neck. Slave market markings, same as Val and Emmett. So we’re back to that idea again.”

  He was silent for so long that I asked, “Are you there?”

  “And it got in? By itself?”

  “Yeah, I think the lock is broken now. It could be the reason Folsom was murdered, because his protection is gone or something. I don’t get it, but that’s not even the point. We have to move them now.”

  “Moving that many wanted people will be difficult,” he said slowly.

  “I know, but we’ve no choice. If the beasts came… if they got into the sanctuary… I can’t let that be an option. We can’t afford to wait around for somebody else to sneak in, particularly if the Council are involved. So do you know anything?”

  “My hand wasn’t involved in this. I’ll suffer if your people are injured. I’m not that masochistic, Ava.”

  “Have you heard anything about this tattoo artist? Or some kind of group within the Council’s staff?”

  “I haven’t. I’ll dig up whatever I can, but this is all news to me.”

  “Maybe you haven’t been paying enough attention,” I said. “This is big and twisted, Gabe. I can feel it. We’re uprooting trouble, but the people in the sanctuary need this funeral, so we’re doing it.”

  “If you insist,” he said. “I’ll organise it for tomorrow. Be ready for my call. It has to be brief, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s fine. They just want a chance to say goodbye.”

  “They?”

  “Okay, I do, too. But I want them in safety before the beasts come.”

  “You’re really this concerned about the BVA?”

  I exhaled loudly. “Abso-fucking-lutely. This is real, Gabe. The vampire queen and her seer are running scared, so don’t doubt that this is happening. The beasts will go after anything even remotely like you and me. Don’t forget that. Be careful.”

  “I’ll need to know where they all are,” he said. “Your humans. In order to keep an eye on them.”

  I hesitated, still afraid to wholly trust him.

  “I can stay with them,” he pointed out. “You might feel safer if you bring me to them and refuse to let me leave.”

  “Possibly.”

  “I’ll get organised around here. Try to get all of your humans in the one place if possible.”

  Shit. That meant my grandmother, who was not exactly easy to be around, and a policeman who didn’t even know about the supernatural world. How was I going to pull that off?

  And what if Mrs. Yaga needed more energy to protect my friends? The thought of letting her touch me—letting her take from me—made my skin crawl.

  I called Shay and asked him to meet me at my house in a couple of days. I would think of something to tell him before then.

  Nancy, my grandmother, would be difficult. The last time she had been in possible danger, she refused to come with me, instead choosing to stay in a hotel. If there were beasts coming, I didn’t want her to be anywhere with lots of people unless I was there to protect her. I might have felt anger and bitterness toward her, but a tiny part of myself couldn’t let her be harmed, no matter what she had done.

  I headed to her home, dreading the conversation. Her reactions were unpredictable, something I was beginning to blame on her age, and I wasn’t sure if she would come with me, or if I could have her near me for any length of time without murdering her. I was only partly joking about that.

  A familiar sick feeling came over me when I reached her neighbourhood. It had been my neighbourhood, too, but the place never managed to feel like home to me. There had been too many wrongs done to me there, too much isolation and rejection. It would always be a place that made me feel uncomfortable at best and paralysed me with fear at worst.

  The door was ajar when I got to her house, and my stomach dropped to the floor. Not again. Please, not again. No more dead bodies of people who couldn’t defend themselves. I couldn’t take any more.

  I sniffed hesitantly, but detected no death. There was… something. Different scents that I couldn’t explain. I found Nancy in the living room, knitting rapidly.

  “Oh, hello, Ava,” she said brightly.

  Her out-of-character attitude completely freaked me out. “Your door was open.”

  “Did you leave it open again? Aren’t I always telling you to close it after you?” She shook her head and the clacking of her knitting needles grew faster. “The child will be the death of me,” she whispered.

  I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling ridiculously juvenile. “So I came to tell you something, and—”

  Her head shot up, her eyes narrowing coldly. “What did you do this time?”

/>   “Me? Nothing. It was the vampires. They—”

  She made the sign of the cross. “Don’t say that word in this house. You know the rules. Go to your room.”

  “My what? What are you on about?”

  “No answering back! Get out of my sight.”

  “Nancy, what the hell are you…”

  I caught a scent then, something I hadn’t smelled in over seven years. My breath hitched in my throat, and I froze. There was no escape. The past had just caught up with me.

  The front door slammed, and a voice called out, “I have your tea, Nancy.”

  I turned in shock as Wesley walked into the room. He faltered when he saw me, a half-dozen emotions flitting across his face in rapid succession. My own mouth had dropped open, and he let a plastic shopping bag fall to the floor.

  That broke the spell. Both of us bent to pick it up, our fingers touching briefly. I took a step back in horror as my throat ached with a thirst I couldn’t satisfy. Not now. Not again. Not with him.

  I turned away from my ex-boyfriend, the one I had been tempted to drain, the one I had run away from, the one who had changed my life in a dozen separate ways. My hands trembled; I couldn’t think straight. Between my grandmother acting crazy and my ex walking into the room as if the past seven years hadn’t happened, I couldn’t get a handle on what was going on.

  “No funny business, you two,” Nancy said, peering at us. “David, put on the kettle. There’s a love.”

  “David?” I gazed at my grandmother, still struggling to catch up.

  “It’s okay,” Wesley said under his breath, touching my arm briefly. “Why don’t you give me a hand?”

  He escorted me out of the room, and after a second, I heard Nancy’s knitting start up again.

  I made it to the kitchen before losing my mind. “What’s going on? Why are you here? And what the hell is with her?”

  He stared at me blankly for a couple of seconds. “You don’t know?”

  “Do I look like someone in the know?” I shouted.

  He held up his hands. “I thought you were here because you knew. It’s dementia, Ava. A couple of years ago, she was told she was likely in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Lately, she’s gotten worse. It’s been a pretty rapid decline, actually. We’ve been trying to figure out how to get in touch with you. She never said… my mother’s been taking care of her mostly. I help out when I’m home. And I’m home for good now. I owe it to you to keep an eye on her.”

  “Owe it to me? How could you possibly owe me anything?” I stared at him, aghast. I could have killed him back then, a man who had only ever been good to me. He had been the first to treat me like a person. The only one to see through the weirdness and awkwardness and appreciate the person I was underneath. I had repaid him by sinking my fangs into his flesh.

  He glanced away as if ashamed. When he looked back at me, his dark soulful eyes reached inside me, found my teenage heart, and squeezed it until it skittered in my chest. “I don’t fully remember what happened the night you left, Ava. It was a blur, but I must have hurt you terribly, and I’m so sorry. All I remember is how scared you looked. I can’t forget that one thing. If there’s anything I can ever do to make up for it, name it.”

  “You didn’t hurt me, Wes,” I said, my voice shaking. “I hurt you.”

  “There wasn’t a mark on me.” His voice lowered. “But there was so much blood. I should have been more careful. I knew the things that had happened to you. I knew you needed to be looked after. I should have known better than to rush you like that.”

  I blinked a couple of times. Had I healed him? I had spent all of those years assuming he hated me, and he had been thinking the same thing about me. It came back to me in a rush, how delicately he had treated me, how he was the direct opposite of Peter, who expected me to take care of myself or he would leave me behind where I fell.

  I laughed, a tinge hysterically, unable to stop myself. “I literally can’t deal with this right now. This is insane. And bad, really bad, timing. Nancy. She’s sick? Is there something I should be doing for her?”

  “She needs stability,” Wesley said, watching me carefully. “She needs patience, love, and comfort. She’s struggling a lot. When she’s lucid, she’s upset about something she doesn’t want to share. When she’s not, she gets distressed because she thinks she’s back in the old days. Probably because of… well, you know how it was.”

  “So how do we fix it?”

  He reached for my hand, but I put it behind my back. “You can’t fix her,” he said softly. “There’s no cure for this.”

  Frowning, I shook my head. “There has to be.”

  He cleared his throat. “Ava, people don’t survive Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t happen.”

  I waved a hand. “That’s ridiculous. She’s not going to die from some… some… I can’t leave her here. There’s stuff going on that’s… well, dangerous. They could come here, and I can’t leave her in this house, at risk.”

  “Do you need me to take her back to my mother’s place?”

  I bit my lip, thinking hard. “How would she react around a lot of strangers, do you think?”

  “Honestly? I think she would be terrified. It’s hard to tell, but I know it’s gotten a lot worse this year. She’s scared a lot. She mostly won’t say what it is, but she seems to be constantly waiting for something bad to happen.”

  Since I had come back into her life.

  He shrugged. “I can take care of her, Ava. We can all help her.”

  “You would do that? No questions?”

  He looked hurt. “You know I would.”

  “No, I don’t. I knew a boy.” I looked him up and down. “You are most certainly not a boy.”

  He grinned, and it was a flashback all on its own. I had loved him once, loved his dark skin and darker eyes, his mellow voice, and how different we were. He was warm, happy, and content and able to deal with people so easily. He had been the one to teach me how to act around others. I wore a mask to outsiders but could be myself with him. I used to think we were two halves of a whole. Those days were over.

  “Something bad is coming,” I said, attempting to keep my voice even. “Something dangerous for everyone. In the meantime, someone will guard your house if she’s there. If anything unusual happens, you contact me immediately. She has my number saved in her mobile.” I took a deep breath. “This country’s going to be involved in a war, Wes. You need to prepare yourself.”

  “Are you in the army or something?”

  I winced. “Kind of. I’ll be in touch unless your house number has changed.”

  “No, nothing’s changed. It’s been great to see you again, Ava.” He reached out to hug me.

  I panicked and backed away. “Yeah, I… I’m glad you’re well. Nancy told me you had emigrated.”

  “I didn’t find what I was looking for, so I came back.”

  I exhaled, only then realising I had been holding my breath. “I need to go. You should be safe in this neighbourhood. It’s quiet here.”

  He looked confused, but I swept out of the room, my insides trembling.

  Too many confusing memories. I couldn’t think straight.

  Chapter Seven

  On the morning of Folsom’s funeral, rain poured down heavily, washing away blood and guilt. I hadn’t told anyone about my grandmother or the hag, and I tried to push them both to the back of my mind.

  By the time Folsom was put into the earth, the rain had stopped, and the air felt fresh and clean. I felt different, too, determined not to have to watch another funeral.

  We buried the goblin under a willow tree, the branches caressing the ground, protecting what lay beneath, the rain-drenched leaves dripping as if crying. My eyes felt wet, but I did not cry. Not on that day. Tears were a waste of my energy. Sadness and regret were a waste of my time. I needed strength, maybe anger. More importantly, I needed focus.

  The people from the sanctuary huddled around the makeshift grave. One, the
small man whose brother had committed suicide in the Council’s cells and who I had only come to know as Ry, spoke on behalf of everyone. He said the most beautiful words, but I couldn’t concentrate on them. I was too busy watching, waiting for something to come.

  I had refused to allow Emmett out in the open to be a sitting duck. I couldn’t help it when we made the move, but I wouldn’t risk it twice. Peter had remained behind with him.

  Carl moved closer to me, and I could tell he was worried.

  “You doing okay?” he asked when I stepped away from the crowd.

  I kept an eye on the perimeter. I wasn’t the only one. “I’m okay,” I said, avoiding his eyes.

  “Come on. There’s something eating you. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  The rain began to fall again, drizzling onto my face. I blinked away the moisture. “I went to see Nancy. She’s going senile, Carl. I can’t bring her here. Not like she is. When I was there, she acted like I was a teenager again. It was spooky.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  I turned to check on the mourners. Lucia had her arms linked with both her brother’s and Val’s. Kate, the young woman who spent most of her time with Cam, stood as close to Lorcan as she did to the angel. Leah stood apart, her hands shoved into her pockets and her hood pulled so far over her face that I couldn’t see her eyes. The teenage girl hadn’t ever had a chance at being normal. I would have loved to offer it to her. And Esther… Esther mourned many things.

  “Someone else was there,” I said at last. “At Nancy’s place.”

  Carl gazed at me. “Sounds ominous.”

  “Not really. Just a blast from the past.”

  “Who?”

  “My ex.” Numbers ran through my head, and I squeezed my lips together to stop them from shooting out of my mouth. I shrugged. “Wesley.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. And he said he’d take her to his house.”