by Alina Banks
“No, I’m not, and I’m not going to. I’m happy as I am.”
When we reached the Easons’ house, I was grateful I’d made the decision to give out the potions in advance. I had no idea how I was going to find anyone. At least, until they all appeared from the darkness by the door. Sabrina was still in the middle of drinking the potion, but upon seeing me, she pinched her nose and downed the rest of it. “That tasted awful, Ana. I hope you’re right that it will stop anything they might try to spike me with, because if it doesn’t, it really wasn’t worth it, not even to make you happy.”
“Hey, I drank it too.” I smiled at her, pulling her into a hug, more grateful than I thought I’d be that they’d all waited for me. The last thing I wanted was to be dealing with Mom and the Easons by myself. “Mom’s behaving kind of weirdly right now, so just ignore it as best you can.” Glancing at her, I shook my head. “She’s got it in her head that I should be in a relationship with Damien. I’ve asked her to drop it more times than I can remember, but she won’t. She’s annoyed with me because I wouldn’t wear some kind of dress.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what to do about her right now. Apart from ignoring her as best I can, because it’s getting to be a lot to deal with.”
“I’m sure it has been.” Sabrina shook her head. “Got any idea why?”
“Unfortunately not. I wish I did.” My eyes met hers for a moment. I hated lying to her, but it was better than she didn’t know everything I did. “Just keep in mind that she’s going to be acting even weirder when someone opens the door.”
Just as I said that, someone slid open the door. Turning, I saw the entire family in the doorway, and I reached out to take Alex’s hand. He squeezed mine gently. “It’s going to be okay.” His voice was little more than a whisper, but I still heard it. “I’m going to do my best not to leave you alone with him. I’m also not going to be stupid enough to make promises I can’t keep.”
“Good choice.” I squeezed his hand back. “We’re going to be okay.”
“Yeah, we are, as long as we get through this together.” He stepped closer to me, and when Mom looked back at us, I could see the disappointment in her eyes. “I know she liked me before, Ana. This is just the Easons. I’m not taking any of it personally.”
“Thank you.”
“I know this is hurting you far more than it’s hurting me. You’re the one who has to deal with her every day.”
Finally, Mom stepped forward into the house with Dad by her side. Principal Eason was leading them into the house while the rest of us moved to the doorstep. Damien’s eyes were on me, but I didn’t look at him, choosing instead to study Madeline, the woman who’d managed to change Mom’s memories. She was far more delicate than I’d expected. She was pretty and I could see the resemblance between her and Jessie, but Madeline was much shorter. Almost like a pixie. If I wasn’t almost entirely certain she was a vampire, I might even have asked if she was a pixie. Doing my best to seem happy, I smiled at her. I didn’t know how natural the smile looked, but I was trying. She smiled back at me.
“Oh, Ana, finally meeting you is such a pleasure.” Before I knew what was happening, she’d pulled me into a hug. “Lilah has told me so much about you, and…” She glanced over my shoulder. “...your friends. Jessie, why don’t you take everyone in while I spend some time with Ana?”
“We’d rather stay together.” I kept my voice light. “Especially since I’ve already lost Mom and Dad. I’m sure you understand. Big parties like this are a lot. We don’t often have parties like these, so…” I shrugged. “I’m sure you know why there was a position open for principal, and we just like to be careful after going through that.”
Slowly, Madeline looked at each of us in turn. “We were told there were four students who’d helped to find out the truth about Principal Woods. No one said who it was, but I should have known you were going to be involved.” She squeezed my shoulder. “How are you feeling about that?”
Jessie wasn’t trying to hide that she wanted to get Alex by himself for a bit, but Alex was playing the oblivious game, being nice to her without seeming like he was too interested. Damien, so far, hadn’t said a word to me. All he’d done was stare at me. There were a couple of times when I felt him gently poking at my mind, but it wasn’t anything that made me think he was trying to get me to do something. The longer it happened, the more obvious it became that he was going to get to the point where he would, and I didn’t know how I was going to deal with that, even though it was something I’d talked to Alex about. I knew I had options. If I thought Damien was trying to make me do something, it would be easy enough for me to do that, with Alex by my side. I knew he wasn’t going to leave me unless I gave him one specific signal we’d come up with.
“Can we talk?” Damien moved slightly closer so he was able to whisper almost directly into my ear, which wasn’t something I much enjoyed. “I know you said you wanted to stay with your friends, but I had something I wanted to show you.” He ran a finger over my hand. “We know you know. It’s not as though you’re an idiot, and I’m pretty sure you didn’t take us for idiots either. How about we get this part done sooner rather than later?”
Blinking, I stared at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do, little witch.” He smiled. “I like witches. I know you probably aren’t going to believe that, Ana, but maybe you’ve made your mind up with information that isn’t entirely correct. There are those who hate us, and they’d do whatever they had to in order to make you hate us too.”
“Maybe if your mom hadn’t screwed around with my mother’s mind, you might have stood a chance of convincing me of that.” I snatched my hand away from him. “Leave me alone, Damien.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Damien…”
“Come on. Be logical about this. If the two of us talk and come to some sort of arrangement, then it will make things far easier than they were before.”
“Before?”
“Do you really think I don’t know about Violet’s journal? I was the one who let her keep some of those memories so she could write things down, so you’d have a slightly better idea of what you were dealing with. We are stronger than you. Even with there only being four of us. We took out entire covens of witches and stole their power, which made us even stronger than we were before. You, on the other hand, have decided to be in a relationship with a human.” Damien glanced at Alex. “He is one who has some connection to the coven, which would be enough to get him killed, but not enough for him to use that power…at least, not without help. We might be willing to help. Might be willing to walk a different path this time. We were called here to make certain choices, but we have no reason to believe it when it tells us it will give back our mortality. To be honest, we’ve gotten used to not being mortal now. For so long, all we wanted was to have that back, and things are so very different after having lived for hundreds of years.”
“I have no reason to trust you.”
He smiled. “I have no reason to trust you either, Ana, but I want to try. Come with me. Let me show you what it means to be a vampire, and then you can make your choices. I hate the fact that you’re making these decisions without all the information you need. I can understand your fear. We did make certain choices in the past, but they aren’t the kind of choices we’re likely to make now. We’ve been through certain experiences that have led us down this path, and we will do whatever we have to do in order to change things. We don’t want to work for the demon any longer. Maybe the time has come for us to work with the witches and try to get rid of the demon for good.”
Chapter Twelve
The garden was much cooler than the house. Damien was beside me. I didn’t think I was making the most logical choice, but there was a part of me that wanted to give him a chance. We walked silently at first. I didn’t know if he wanted me to ask any questions or if I was supposed to wait for him to start with some kind of story. He stopped when we we
re much farther from the house than I thought we were and looked at me, his eyes meeting mine for a moment. I felt him gently poking at my mind again, the way he had before, but it didn’t seem like he was actually trying to do anything to me. From the feeling I had, he was simply trying to gather my thoughts, so he would know what I was thinking. I was doing my best not to think about anything.
“You really don’t trust me, do you?” He smiled, seeming more amused than anything else, which was probably something I should have expected. “Ah, well, witches often don’t trust vampires, and I know you’ve already done what you could to protect the people around you. Jessie told me about it when she first felt it.” He reached out to gently touch my hair. “You’re smarter than the witches I have come across in the past, which is very interesting. I think I like you more than I liked Violet, because you look at things in a very different way, and the moment she found out I was a vampire, she did everything she could to force me out of her life. That didn’t work.”
“Are you willing to tell me what happened the last time you were here?”
“I am, if you’re willing to listen.” He studied me. “I think you are. You want me to believe you are, anyway. If you don’t…well, maybe it’s better that you know what the situation is. You understand what we are actually capable of. Mom told me this was the best chance I’d ever have of being able to tell you our side of the story.”
“She’s not really your mom, is she?”
“No, she’s not. Madeline was chosen, along with the rest of us, by the demon so many years ago. That was back when it realized the coven wasn’t going to work, because the witches had turned against him. I believe that was the best choice they could have made, considering what it wanted them to do, but that…it meant we were created, and that was something it took us a long time to forgive you for. Not that it was you. It was the first coven, the first witches, and you aren’t one of those first witches. There’s no reason for us to be angry with you, especially considering what the coven looks like right now.”
“Only three of us.” I shrugged. “It is what it is. We will find a way through this. We always have.”
“Humans work that way. As there are only four of us, and there will always only be four of us, we have to be more careful. That’s why we made some of the choices we did. Choices I know you wouldn’t agree with.” He shrugged. “That’s because you’ve never been a vampire, fortunately.”
“So you can’t change others?”
“Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try, it seems like that is entirely fictional, unless there are other vampires out there who have that ability. We have tried in the past. Jessie tried with the man she was about to marry when she was changed, but she killed him. That was something she blamed on the witches. She said she would never have had to try something like that if it hadn’t been for them. The demon never would have changed us. But we can’t know for certain that’s the case. It’s possible the demon might still have chosen to create vampires in order to have us as his warriors when the time came for him to take over whatever it was he wanted to take over.” Damien sighed. “All I can be certain of is the fact that we were all changed, and we were all changed at the same time. We were each taken from the people we cared about in order to become what we are. We should have turned our anger on the demon, but we didn’t. Instead, we turned it on the beings who’d been changed by it the same way we had. It wasn’t a logical decision. It was an emotional one.”
“Vampires are emotional?”
“More emotional than humans, sometimes. At times, Jessie hates you because you are mortal, but we refuse to believe the demon will be willing to take our immortality from us. Instead, we believe we may have to turn to you, but the last time we came to Clermont, we did what we thought we had to in order to get what we wanted.”
“By either changing or killing all the witches?”
“By trying to open a door to the other world.” He shook his head. “It was longer ago than you can possibly imagine. We’ve been through so much since then, and when I made the decision to leave Violet alive…I knew it wasn’t something the others would agree with. They wanted me to wipe the coven out, and I didn’t. Not when I knew there were going to be children born to those who’d been affected by the way we’d changed their memories. None of them remembered being witches. Mom wanted to do that to both you and Rebecca Cane, until she realized the two of you were too strong. We didn’t want to have to hurt you, so we made the decision that talking to you would be the better option.”
“You made the wrong choice when you took Mom’s memories from her. I’m not willing to give you a chance until you fix that.”
“Mom said you would say that. After the party is over, we’ll give Lilah back her memories. I promise you we won’t be taking the memories of anyone around you, no matter what happens next.”
“At least you understand Mom isn’t going to be at all pleased with the choices that were made. I’m not the current coven leader, Damien, so I can’t make any decisions on their behalf. Mom is. By doing what you did…” I shook my head. “I don’t think there’s going to be any coming back from this. What I will do is try to convince her that it might be worth giving you a chance, but I highly doubt she’s going to listen to me.”
“I know apologies aren’t going to change anything. They never do. We had a certain plan, in the hope that we were going to be able to protect you, and it didn’t work out. There’s a high chance it would never have worked out, but we had to try something.”
“The demon would have killed us no matter what you did.”
“Maybe, but we would have done what we could to help you, even if it meant we would have died beside you. This wasn’t a war we wanted to fight, and I know it’s not a war you wanted to fight. We were both thrown into it by a being that wants to use us, because it doesn’t really have any other options, and that…well, there’s no changing what is. All we can do is keep on walking this path, for now.”
Mom stared at me. I could see the fury in her eyes. “No.”
“We need to think about this before we make a decision.” Miss Cane, fortunately, said exactly what I wanted to say, but I knew there was no chance of Mom listening to me. “I understand your anger.”
“They took everything from me than made me who I am.” She shook her head. “I’m not willing to give those creatures any kind of chance after what they did, no matter what their reasoning was. I want them all dead.”
“You know as well as I do it’s not going to be that simple, Lilah. They’re vampires. They’re stronger than we are, and they’re obviously able to do things we can’t. There’s no reason for us to fight them if we have any other option. From what Ana said, they’re willing to work with us, and that’s not a bad thing. We need to take that time to plan our next steps. There’s no reason to make the emotional choice. We need to make the logical choice.”
“Believing they were telling the truth wasn’t something I was willing to do until they fixed what they did.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if that was just a part of the game they were playing or if Damien was being honest with me when he said he wanted to do something different. I want to believe them. I want to give them a chance.”
“Of course you would, Ana. You’re still young enough to see them more kindly, because you’ve never dealt with vampires before, but I have. The demon sent another small group of his vampires against me before, and I did what I had to do to get us out before anything bad could happen.” Mom studied me. “I know what vampires are capable of. I know what they would have done to you if they were given the chance, and that’s something you need to keep in mind. They’re using you right now because you’re the youngest of us. You’re the one who’s most likely to give them a chance, so they were going to speak to you in hopes that you might be able to convince us to do something we shouldn’t be doing. We shouldn’t trust them to be honest with us. They’re using us as they always have, and I’m not going to make the mistake
of trusting them again. Not after what Madeline did to me.”
I shared a look with Miss Cane. I wasn’t wrong when I told Damien I didn’t think there was any coming back from what had been done. Mom was too angry to see sense. Too angry to see that we could use the time to get prepared. “Lilah, do not go running into a situation we aren’t ready for. The vampires obviously came into Clermont knowing exactly who we are, and that…” Miss Cane shrugged. “It means they have the advantage. They know there’s only three of us, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Ana and I were too strong for them to affect our memories, we never would have stood a chance against them. We do have time now.”
“Yeah, time for them to get stronger. Time for them to feed on the people of Clermont. We can’t let that happen. We have to hit them now, right when they believe we won’t, and that will be so much better for everyone.” Mom smiled. “I’ll kill Madeline. A stake through the heart should work well enough.”
“Not against these vampires, it won’t.” Mom looked at me. “The coven tried that the last time the vampires were in Clermont, to find it doesn’t actually kill them. The demon, it seems, protected them from it, so we need to find another option. Logically, another one would be to decapitate them, but I really don’t think that would be quick enough for us not to die too.” I shook my head. “I understand why you want to do this. I also think it’s the only option was have, Mom, but that doesn’t mean we do it straight away, because we can work towards weakening them. For now, they believe we have a chance of a truce, so we can use that.”