Dom stood up and started cutting off pieces of the deer which Simon helped pass around while Arthur continued.
“It seemed a good place to be. We were safe from the drones, and all the humans wanted from us was for others of our kind to help protect them. And then…” He took his plate from Simon, and I wanted to backhand him for stopping. “One night something happened.” He took a bite of his meat and seemed finished with his story.
“What? What happened? You can’t fucking stop there!” Okay, now he deserved to be back handed, stopping in the middle of the story like that. Storyteller he was not. Thankfully, he swallowed and went on before I had a chance to stab him.
“I’m not entirely sure what happened. One minute everything was fine, and then Lisbeth was acting off, saying we had to leave. We got to the edge of the city before the humans stopped us. That night, Lisbeth was on Night Shadow, and it’s illegal to consume in Salvation, except for the designated humans vampires feed from. I lied and said I’d given it to her, and they threw me out for it.”
“That seems pretty straightforward, bro. Why are you not sure what happened exactly?” I took a bite of the deer meat when Simon handed me my plate, and fuck, it tasted amazing. Dom hadn’t just turned the handle, he’d been adding salt and a few spices to it as it cooked. I might have to keep him around.
Arthur sighed and stared into the fire again. “She never took Night Shadow. I swear she’d never touched the stuff. I know what it looks like, and she was fine until the humans found us. One of them shoved a flashlight into her face and when she turned around, her pupils were dilated, and she was babbling about shiny unicorns.”
“Sounds like Night Shadow,” I commented dryly, wiping a greasy hand on my pants. “So you just left her there?”
Arthur glared again, because his face only know how to make two expressions total. “If it was that fucking simple, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Salvation is a fortress,” Dominic said, his fingers covered in meat juices. He started popping them into his mouth to lick them clean like a cat. Speaking of cats: where was Puss? “We’ve been planning, waiting for the right moment, for many years. If this is done incorrectly, it will all be for nothing.”
“So we’re busting them out? Sounds like fun.”
“No,” Arthur said, shaking his head. “There’s more than a hundred of us in there with the humans, not just our family. If we go in and only take our family, we don’t know what will happen to everyone else.”
Our family.
“And you’re convinced this town is bad news?”
“I’m not sure. All I know is something happened that night, and I don’t know what. It could be safe now. We won’t know until we’re inside.”
I looked back at Arthur’s icy blues. “I’m in.”
10. Visions
Kitty
We finished the deer off, with the Lycans eating all the bones as dessert —eww—, before turning in for the night with the promise of beginning our plan in the morning. I put up my little tent and went in search of Puss. The trail of his scent led me to a tent right by a large tree, one I was certain belonged to Dom. Sure enough, the black cat sat inside Dom’s tent on a bed roll like it was put there just for him.
“Switching teams on me?” I admonished, bending so I could see into the tent. The cat just blinked at me in response.
“I’m definitely on the same team,” someone said behind me. I whirled, Artemis out before I could blink, and saw Dom with his hands in front of him in a ‘don’t shoot’ gesture. Confident he wasn’t a shark about to bite me, I put Artemis back into her holster and Dom lowered his hands. “Sorry, didn’t mean to give you a fright.” I had to admit, with the smile on his face and his delish Australian accent, I was feeling this vampire. And maybe I wanted him to feel me too. Sue me.
“No harm. I’m just here for my cat.” I reached behind me, pointing to him on the bedroll.
“Ahh,” Dom said as he walked over to us. “I was wondering where the little mate came from.” The vampire was standing very close, and I found it difficult to get enough air. It had been so long since I’d smelled a scent like his that set my blood on fire. He was so tall and there was only hard muscle underneath his shirt. I felt dainty beside him, a feeling I was very unused to.
Shaking my head to clear the cobwebs, I bent inside the tent, making sure I wasn’t presenting Dom with my ass, and retrieved Puss from his perch by the scruff of his neck. I brought one hand up to cradle his legs and straightened up again. He growled at me.
“Hey, kitty,” Dom said in a cute baby voice. I’ll admit, it was interesting hearing him say my name like that, and the responding heat all over had me flushed. “I meant him,” Dom clarified with a grin as he reached to pet the cat. “What’s his name?”
Shrugging, I adjusted the cat in my hands when he growled again and tried to hide my flushed cheeks by looking down at the fur ball. “I don’t know. I just call him Puss.”
Dom laughed, his cheeks turning a ruddy pink. “You can’t name a cat Puss! He needs a proper name. Names give things a purpose.”
Ahh fuck, he was a hippie.
I shrugged again and got another growl from the cat. “I dunno. He follows me around all the time. That’s not really a purpose.”
“Like your shadow?”
He was definitely that. I looked down at him and pet his fluffy face with my thumb. “I guess I can call him Shadow.”
Dom smiled again and wiggled his finger on Shadow’s forehead. He was so close, I could see the vein in his neck thumping along with his pulse. I was so thirsty. “Glad I can bring you around to my way of thinking.”
I twisted, taking Shadow away from Dom’s finger and removing the temptation to sink my fangs into the attractive vampire’s neck. “Is that what that was? Hmm. Didn’t seem like it. C’mon, Puss.” I walked away, swinging my hips as I went.
Sleep was hard to come by in my tent. Maybe it was being around so many people after so long. Maybe it was that I’d finally found my mom. Maybe it was that I’d spent most of my nights doped up on Night Shadow and I didn’t know how to sleep on my own anymore. I should’ve felt comfortable having Arthur’s familiar scent nearby, but all it did was agitate me. And as I lay there petting Shadow’s soft fur, I tried to figure out exactly why I was upset.
Maybe it was because I’d tried to find my family for so long and they’d been right under my nose? Or the fact that Jason was still missing. I could’ve gone the rest of my existence without finding my parents as long as I found my little brother and took care of him. Maternal instincts were completely foreign to me, except when it came to Jason.
Shadow’s yellow eyes disappeared when he blinked, and then reappeared like little globes of light. My fingers scratched under his chin and he immediately rolled over to attack my hand with his little teeth and claws. I let him, it wasn’t as if he could pierce my skin. Vampires made good scratching posts, it seemed. He kicked at me and gnawed on my thumb until he shook his head and looked up at me as if peering into my soul.
Surrounded by the warmth of Shadow’s little body, I somehow drifted off to sleep. I dreamed of a house. Dreams were so infrequent to me, I hardly knew the difference between a dream and a hallucination. This felt lighter, like a fairytale.
The house was old, almost ancient. A deep scent of rot and mildew drifted into my nose and I wrinkled it in disgust. The room I stood in had scattered debris on the aged, wooden floor. A doll. Scraps of lace. An old hammer. Something called to me, and in my dream induced trance I left the room and walked down a hallway with the same wooden floor. The walls bowed and shook with the wind, almost as if one strong burst would bring them crashing down. Finally, I reached the front door and my hand automatically went for the rusted handle, but a noise brought my attention elsewhere.
To my right was a room with broken chairs, the remnants of a dining table where a family once ate their meals. It turned into a kitchen, one I could tell had not been used to cook a meal f
or at least a few hundred years, judging by the antique stove and the lack of running water.
The noise came again, a rustling like shoes against paper. I left the kitchen to see a small pantry room with a boy sitting in the corner. His shoulders slumped in a way that saddened me, and I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.
He had long, brown hair, dirty and tangled like he hadn’t taken care of it in months. As I came closer, I saw the brown was simply a thick layer of dirt, and the hair underneath was black. In the boy’s hand was a piece of paper and his skin was brown against ragged fingernails.
Another sound came, this time soft sobs coming from the man’s throat. I approached as closely as I dared and twisted my neck to see what paper the boy held.
It was an aging photograph of my family.
Jason.
I burst awake, Artemis out and my breath coming in ragged gasps, the barrel pointed right at Arthur who crouched right outside my tent.
“Kitty?” he asked in his rough voice.
My body trembled all over and my hand shook so much that I dropped Artemis onto the ground. Had my dream been real? My mom had had a dream long ago about her future life. Now that I recalled, she’d mentioned an old house. The same one I’d seen?
Was Jason…. Was he really wasting away like that? He’d seemed far too young for his actual age of thirty-five, the exact age I’d been when I last saw him. Maybe I’d seen the past, whatever happened to him after the sharks came. But he’d been so alone in that house. It was exactly what I’d feared would happen to him.
Fuck, I was tripping.
Arthur was still crouched in front of me, his icy blues showing much more concern than I’d ever seen on his face. He didn’t ask if I was okay, simply sat and waited for me to speak. I’d forgotten how much I liked him.
Pushing a strand of black behind my ear, I picked Artemis up and slid her back into her holster. “Sorry. I’ll be up in a sec.” He nodded and left without another word.
Shadow was missing again, but I packed up my stuff before leaving my tent and packing it up too. The group of Lycans and the two vampires were gathered around the fire pit, this time passing around some freshly scrambled eggs with fried potato wedges. Arthur handed me a plate, glancing at my bag snug on my shoulders with the clip fastened in front.
“Leaving?” Dom asked me as he walked up.
I met Arthur’s stare and shook my shoulders to adjust the bag. “I’ve been looking for her for twenty years, Arthur. I’m not wasting another day here if she’s nearby. Plus, you intimated she was in danger.”
Arthur sat on one of the logs around the fire and patted next to him for me to join. I did and dug into my breakfast with the fork they gave me.
“We have to do this right,” he urged. “One slip up and our plans will fail.”
I put a mouthful of the lightly salted eggs to my lips and pointed my fork at him. “You have one day, or I’m going without you,” I warned him, my mouth full of food. He nodded and we finished our breakfast in silence.
11. Tea and pistols
Dreya
Bang!
The glass bottle on a fence in front of me shattered into a thousand pieces, mixing in with the sand on the ground. I pulled my pistol back and let a small grin come to my face. I’d gotten much better over the years.
Clara clapped her hands from her spot on the front porch where she and Lucas sipped tea from a dainty tea set, the likes of which I’d never seen anywhere in Salvation. We didn’t have room for such luxuries.
“Fantastic, Dreya!” Clara shouted, cupping her hands over her mouth so I’d hear her better, even though she knew my hearing was perfect. Clara was delightfully human sometimes. She always treated me like she would any other person.
“Now she can shoot her ridiculous boyfriend,” Lucas added, miming shooting with his hand and blowing smoke off his fingertips.
“Darius isn’t ridiculous, and you haven’t even met him,” I chided gently, and turned to shoot again, knocking an ancient soda can off the fence.
“Come have some tea, dear. Don’t waste the ammo.”
I clicked the safety off and walked to the porch where I laid the pistol on top of the porch railing. Clara poured me some tea and dropped in a precious drop of honey before she passed it to me. I held it in my hands, like a small baby bird kept warm with its mother’s wings. A sip filled my mouth with the gentle but potent flavor of Clara’s homemade rose tea. It wasn’t my favorite thing to drink, but I loved being there with my grandparents, drinking tea, like nothing else mattered. Like the world still made sense.
I speak as if I knew what the world was like before, when I clearly didn’t, but it was easy enough to imagine from all the stories people had told me. Somehow being at Lucas and Clara’s house felt like a look into the past. They hadn’t changed. They still made tea and baked bread, like nothing was different.
How I wished I could simply stay there with them and forget everything else, forget all the pain and danger, but maybe one day I’d grow tired of the simplicity, and that thought drove me back to Salvation after every visit to my grandparents’ house.
“How are things?” Clara asked, as she always did. She missed my mother deeply, and the look in her purple eyes almost made me feel saddened too.
I looked down at my tea cup, scratched at the side, taking another sip. “Mother is… fine. Dad tries hard to chase the shadows away.”
Lucas scoffed slightly, his face half hidden by his tea cup. “Son-in-law better take care of her. I can still punish him like a schoolboy. You tell him I said.” I nodded, trying not to smile. They didn’t know I was keeping my visits a secret from my parents, ever since Thomas and I had discovered their home when we were young. Deep in his thoughts, Lucas’s face fell, and he almost dropped his tea cup. “He can’t chase the shadows away. The shadows are all she’s made of now. If he chases the shadows away, there will be nothing underneath.”
Clara put her cup down and quickly got up to come beside her husband so she could take his hand. She whispered some gentle, loving words before holding him to her breast and stroking his blonde hair.
The faraway look in his eyes, the expression on Clara’s face as she soothed him, I knew he wasn’t thinking of my mother anymore. His mind was on her, my grandmother, Anastasia. Just as I felt time was reversed at their home, Lucas was often stuck in the past. He’d be gone for hours, if not days, before Clara could bring him out of it.
My great-aunt/step-grandmother met my eyes with a sad smile. “You’d best be back. We’ll be fine. Send your mother our love. Don’t forget the package for her.” She nodded to the small parcel on the table, and I took it before kissing her on the cheek. I’d tell Lisbeth the gift was from me so she wouldn’t worry.
Leaving them behind once more, I stepped off their porch and followed the trail, past the covering of trees, and onto the dirt road that led to Salvation. Thomas stood waiting for me, a slain deer across his shoulders. He had a swipe of blood across his chin and he smiled at me like nothing was wrong. My heart sped up seeing his bright pink aura, but I tried to ignore it. I had to ignore it.
“Nice visit?” he asked me. He looked down at my hands to see the small, wrapped package. “Best put that in your pocket. Don’t want them to see.” He adjusted the deer and turned once I’d joined him on the road. I pressed the package into my jacket as we walked.
“Sometimes…” I started, and stopped, pressing my lips together to stop my words. I couldn’t let go, not yet. I was so close.
“Sometimes what?” Thomas probed jokingly, moving his hip to the side to bump against mine. I remained silent, and when he realized I wasn’t going to open up, he sighed and kicked at a rock in the road. “You’re different, Dreya. I don’t remember you being so tight lipped in high school.”
My lips curled, and I ‘humphed’ low in my throat. “People change, Thomas. It’s part of growing up.”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “But I don’t think people change that much
. Sometimes… I don’t know. You’d get this gleam in your eyes, you reminded me so much of your mom. That’s gone now.”
Practiced patience. Ahh, fuck it.
“Maybe you’re the one that’s different, Thomas,” I snapped suddenly, whirling on him. “Did you ever think about that?”
He burst out laughing at me, dropping the deer onto the ground with a thump. “There. That’s her. With your icy blue eyes and your beautiful blonde hair. I almost forgot what the real you looked like.”
I wanted to kiss him so much.
Instead, I clunked my foot onto the ground and stomped down the road without him. “You’re such an ass, Thomas!” I shouted over my shoulder. My enhanced ear caught the sound of him slinging the deer over his shoulders again and jogging to catch up with me.
“I might be an ass,” he conceded once we were back in step. “But at least I’m me.”
I sighed and swiped some hairs that had fallen into my eyes. “You don’t understand.” The boundary gates of Salvation were in view and I couldn’t keep talking with them looming over me.
“Don’t understand what?” he asked as he stopped walking again. I continued down the path to the fence and Thomas grabbed at my jacket. “Dreya, what don’t I understand?”
One of the Lycan guards approached us and nodded to me, silencing Thomas’ protest. “Dreya, you’re needed at home.” My stomach fell. Shit, no. Not again. “Nothing bad,” he explained when he saw my look of horror.
Thomas handed the deer off to one of the vampire guards and brushed himself off. “What’s up, Martin?” he asked, addressing the Lycan.
The Born Vampire series: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (The Complete Series, NSFW Edition) Page 72