Blayke

by Dawn Sullivan

  “So, what? You thought you would come save me in case I got jumped by vamps? Or wait, did you think I was maybe going to do something I shouldn’t be doing because you don’t trust me?” When his green eyes darkened dangerously, I scoffed, “That’s it, isn’t it Eben? You followed me out here because you don’t trust me.”

  “I followed you out here because I was worried about you, Blayke,” he ground out. He gestured to the weapons I held as he growled, “It’s not safe to hunt alone.”

  “Don’t worry, wolf boy,” I said, turning my back on him, “I’m fine. And if something happens, you will get what you want.”

  “And what do you think that is?”

  “You can follow Asher instead of me.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to follow Asher.”

  “You did the other night.”

  Eben sighed deeply, and then I heard him moving toward me. Stopping by my side, he crossed his arms over his chest and glared out over the lake. “Maybe I was wrong.”

  Holding my dagger so hard that the dragon head on the handle cut into my skin, I whispered, “Maybe you weren’t.”

  We stood in silence for a long time, and I shivered as the cold air seeped into my bones. Maybe what he was thinking the other night was right. Maybe I wasn’t fit to lead anyone. Maybe it would be better if we all followed Asher. But in my heart, I knew it wasn’t true. It was my destiny to lead. I felt it in my soul.

  “Why are we out here, Blayke?” Eben finally asked. “What is this place?”

  “My mother, Alyiah, used to bring me here when I was a child,” I told him softly. “She said it was our secret place. We would play in the water, and have picnics. It was always just the two of us.”

  “That’s a nice memory,” he muttered, “but why are we out here in the middle of the night? Why didn’t you just come tomorrow after school? We would have all come with you.”

  I laughed as I reached behind me and put my sword back in the scabbard at my back. “Because she lied to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Alyiah,” I snapped, anger filling me as I remembered that night so long ago. “It wasn’t just our place. She was sharing it with someone else, too.”

  “Your father?” Eben guessed, walking over to a large rock near the water and sitting on the edge of it. “The vampire one, not the witch?”

  “Sorcerer. Dad doesn’t like to be called a witch,” I corrected, looking over at him in surprise. “Yes, it was Alex. How did you know?”

  He shrugged, “Lucky guess.” When I raised my eyebrows, he grinned, “Fine. You sounded angry. He’s the only one I could think of who would make you mad like that.”

  Turning around, I slowly scanned the area. I was looking for something, anything, that might point me in the right direction. There was a reason I was here tonight. I knew it. I could feel it. I just had to figure out what that reason was. “I only saw him once,” I said, beginning to walk along the shoreline close to the iced-over lake. “The night someone set our house on fire. I was just a kid.” Stopping, I squatted down and peered closely at what looked like an indention in the hard ground. Reaching out, I slowly traced my finger over it. It was a boot print. Not too big, but not a child’s either. Standing, I rested my hands on my hips and faced Eben. “Alex came in through the window and saved me, then brought me here. He has eyes just like mine. I remember them clearly. They were so soft and kind, until Alyiah showed up and told him she was sending me away.” I trembled slightly when I whispered, “That was the first time I ever saw a real vampire up close.”

  “Is that why you came here?” Eben asked. “So that you can try and remember everything that happened that night? Are you going to try and find your father?”

  “I think there are some good vampires out there, and some bad. Just like with humans. A part of me would like to see if Alex is good, the way I feel he is, but no. That’s not why I came tonight.”

  “Then why?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Something has been pulling me here for days now. There is something that I have forgotten about that night. It’s right there, on the edge of my memories, but I can’t grasp it. I need to figure out what that is. It doesn’t make sense that Alex never returned. He was so angry, so adamant that he was coming back for us, but he didn’t.” Slowly, I began walking around the clearing again. “I’m missing something, Eben, but I don’t know what. Why did he stay away? What would keep him from Alyiah? From his own daughter?”

  “He could have been killed by hunters.”

  I shook my head, my eyes narrowing on another footprint just a few feet away from the first. “No, he is royalty. Alyiah would have heard about it.”

  Eben hopped off the rock and came to stand near me. “Maybe he was worried about his people finding out about you and Alyiah, and he stayed away to keep you safe?”

  “Maybe,” I said, scanning the area for more footprints. “A part of me wants to believe he has a heart. That he is one of the good vampires like Alyiah says.” I refused to believe it without proof, though. I would not go down that road. I would not let myself care for him, only to have him turn out to be the monster I remembered in my dreams.

  “What are you doing?” Eben asked, following me as I made my way over to a large tree on the edge of the clearing.

  “Look at the tracks,” I said, pointing them out one-by-one, starting at the lake and ending by the tree.

  Eben knelt down, and I saw his nostrils flare slightly before he muttered, “Alyiah.”

  “That’s what I thought too.” When he looked up at me, I grinned. “The prints are smaller than mine, but bigger than Chandler’s. I figured they had to belong to a woman. As far as I know, Alyiah is the only other person who would come out here.”

  “She stood here for a while,” Eben said, as he rose and walked around the tree. “The prints are deeper, and her scent is stronger.”

  “Her scent?”

  His eyes met mine, and a small smile crossed his lips. “Just because I can’t turn into my wolf, doesn’t mean he isn’t still there.”

  “Are there others like you out there? Ones who change into animals besides wolves, I mean?” I couldn’t keep the eager curiosity out of my voice. I was still having a hard time believing someone like him existed.

  “We are called shapeshifters, or just shifters for short,” he said, running a hand over the bark on the tree. “We have been around for centuries, but keep our existence a secret from humans for obvious reasons.”

  “Because you don’t want to be hunted like the vampires are?”

  Eben paused in what he was doing, and looked over at me in surprise. “Yeah,” he agreed after a moment, “I guess that is partly right. I never thought of it like that before.” Turning back to the tree, he began to knock lightly on the bark. “I grew up in New York City. My father was a wolf shifter, my mother human. I had a little sister, Tillie. She didn’t have the wolf gene like my father, but I did. Dad tried to protect us from the paranormal world, but late at night when my mom and sister were sleeping, he would tell me stories of vampires. He said it was my duty to help in the fight against them. That he had run from his obligations when he found mom, and he never regretted it because it was the only way to keep us all safe, but that I had a right to make my own decisions.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked softly, watching as he knocked in one place several times, before taking out a pocket knife and digging around the edges of the bark on the trunk.

  Eben didn’t answer at first, and I could feel the pain rolling off him as he seemed to struggle with the words. “Some men broke into our house one night. They killed my parents and took my sister. The police said it was a robbery gone bad. They looked for Tillie at first, but after a while, they just gave up. I was thrown in foster care, but I ran away over two years ago. I lived on the streets for months, looking everywhere I could think of for Tillie.” His shoulders slumped and he lowered his head as he whispered, “It was no use. I finally had
to admit to myself that she was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. After that, I headed for Angel’s Pass, where my dad told me I would find the hunters if I chose to fight the battle he had left.” He glanced over at me, the moon above highlighting the agony on his face. “I had nothing else to live for until I found the Jacksons, Blayke. Everyone I loved is gone. This is my life now. It’s what I live for. And the Jacksons, Asher, Brielle, and Dahlia are my family.”

  I could tell that this was his way of apologizing to me for not trusting in me. Knowing what I knew now, it was easy to forgive him. Laying a hand gently on his arm, I smiled. “They are all my family, too, Eben. You are my family.”

  Eben swallowed hard, nodding to me, before turning back to the tree. “You, too,” he said quietly.

  Knowing he was done talking, I turned my attention back to the tree, watching in surprise when Eben pried a piece of the trunk open. “How did you do that?”

  “Someone made a hiding place in here,” he muttered, slipping his hand inside.

  “Alyiah?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It was obvious she was doing something by this tree, and it wasn’t digging a hole,” Eben grunted, feeling around in the trunk, before slowly sliding his hand back out. “The only other option was instead of hiding something under the tree, she was hiding something in it.”

  I gasped when Eben handed over a small box similar to the one that I had seen my dad take the letter from Alyiah out of at home, on that horrible day that seemed so long ago. He handed it over to me, but didn’t let go right away when I grasped it. “Are you sure you want to look in there?” he asked quietly. “If your mother is hiding something in there, inside of a tree where no one would think to look, it’s probably for a good reason. One that you may not want to know.”

  I tightened my hold on the box, and nodded. “I have to look, Eben. Something brought me here. I need to remember what I forgot about that night.”

  “What if it’s something best left forgotten?”

  “Then I will deal with it,” I said, taking the box from him and walking back over to the rock he was sitting on earlier. Climbing up on it, I held the box gently in my hands, running a finger over the intricate carvings on the outside. It was old, and the wood was slightly discolored, but it was beautiful. I glanced up at Eben, who now stood beside me, then back down to the box. Slipping the latch on the front of it free, I raised the lid and looked inside. A golden locket lay on top of several photos, and I could see something blue underneath the photos. I took out the locket, and opened it, gasping when I saw the pictures inside. They were of me as a baby, not very old, except my hair looked darker in the picture on the left than the one on the right. I frowned as I held the locket closer. It was the same baby, but not.

  Setting the box down on the rock beside me, I placed the locket on the rock, and then pulled out the pictures. They looked like they were of me, too, except the hair was wrong. I’d never had hair the light color of the girl in the photos. I slowly sifted through the pictures, horror filling me at the thought that kept running through my mind. In the last one, the girl looked like she was around six years old. The same age I was when Alyiah sent me away. She looked exactly like me, even her eyes. The only difference was her light-colored hair, and the tips of her fangs that showed when she smiled.

  “Blayke? What’s going on?”

  I knew why I had been drawn to this place now. I remembered the words that were spoken so long ago. Words that I had forgotten until I found the box. “She said ‘the girls’,” I whispered raggedly, a harsh sob catching in my throat.

  “What?”

  “I remember,” I whispered, my whole body beginning to shake with the knowledge of what my birth mother had done. “That night that he brought me here, Alyiah was scared that someone would find out about her and Alex, or about the girls.”

  “Girls?” Eben questioned, his gaze going back to the photo of the child I still held. “I don’t understand.”

  I knew he didn’t, but I did. I knew exactly who the child was. There was no hiding it. No denying it. Placing the photos down beside the box, I pulled out the bright blue piece of silk that was in the bottom of the box. The name Blayke was stitched in flowing letters in one corner. My hand was shaking when I set it down on top of the pictures and picked up the dark pink one that had been beneath it. Opening it up, I read the name stitched in the corner. Bellame.

  “Blayke, who is she?”

  I raised my eyes to his, unable to hide the tears that began to fall as I whispered, “My sister.”

  I put the box back in its hiding place, but kept the last picture of my sister. The one that showed the true reason my mother decided so long ago not to keep her, not even for the first few years that she had me. How could Alyiah do it? How could she give up not just one daughter, but two? My sister was just a baby. She may have been part vampire, but she still had Jackson blood in her veins. Where was she now? My sister. My twin. Bellame.

  A part of me wanted to confront Alyiah as soon as I got back home that night. Another part of me wanted to pack a bag and go looking for the sister I never knew I had. I did neither. I finally knew Alyiah’s secret, the one she had been hiding from me since the day I arrived in Angel’s Pass, but something held me back from saying anything to her. She had kept Bellame’s existence from her family for sixteen years, just as she had kept the fact that my father was a vampire from everyone. I knew she was doing it to protect me and my sister, so I would let her have her secret for a little while longer. And as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t go looking for Bellame, because I had no idea where to start. I thought about tracking down my father first. Alyiah had hidden me for years, it only made sense that Alex would have done the same with Bellame since they both had one big thing in common…fangs. There was a very big chance that he would know where she was.

  Once I got the idea into my head to find Bellame through Alex Christoph, I could not stop thinking about it. How hard would it be to find the prince of the vampires? And if I couldn’t find him, I was sure I could find my grandparents, King Alec and Queen Bronwyn. The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that it was a good idea. There were just a couple of things holding me back. First of all, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if I did manage to find any of them. What would I say to vampire royalty? For all I knew, Bellame was living with them now, a very loved and adored princess. Did I really want to find out? There was another reason I was hesitant to try to hunt down my birth father and his family. Although I strongly believed that there were both good and evil vampires out there, no matter what my grandfather may think, a large part of me was afraid that the Christoph’s were evil. From what I was quickly discovering, the vampires I had come across just wanted one thing from me. My blood. What if they were the same? Evil demons who wanted to sink their fangs into my neck and slowly drain the life from me? What if that was what my sister would want too?

  A week slipped by, and then another, and I still had not made up my mind as to what to do with my new secret. Chandler, Asher, Eben, Brielle, and I trained together daily, but had still not gone out on another hunt. Eben kept quiet about what he found out that night in the clearing with me, but I knew it wasn’t fair to ask it of him. We’d become closer, the group and I, and my heart was slowly beginning to heal over time. Until now. Now the pain of losing my mother was coming back full force.

  School was out for Christmas break, and the much-loved holiday was just hours away. We’d gone earlier that day and found a large tree that we set up in the living room and decorated with lights and long strings of popcorn, just like we used to back in Blue River. When Chandler and I sat down to make the homemade ornaments, the way we did every year the day before Christmas, the others jumped in and helped, full of excitement. It was so hard to act as if we were enjoying the holiday, but Chandler and I had made the decision together to push through it for Dad. We knew it was important to him
, which made it important to us, even if the occasional tear did manage to slip free.

  I was sitting beside Asher on the couch in front of the tree, listening to Brielle tease Eben about a girl at school who had set her sights on him, when Alyiah appeared in the doorway. Our eyes met, and I flinched at the anger in hers, directed fully at me. “Where is it?” she demanded.

  I knew immediately what she was talking about, but I wasn’t going to make it easy on her. Besides, did she really want to do this in front of everyone? She’d kept Bellame hidden since she was born, I couldn’t see her telling everyone, including her own parents, about her vampire daughter right now. Standing, I crossed my arms over my chest and raised an eyebrow haughtily. “Where’s what?”

  “You know exactly what I am talking about,” she snapped. “Give it back, Blayke Jackson, right now.”

  Glaring at her, I moved my hands to my hips and snarled, “My name is Blayke Wynters!”

  “Your name is Blayke Alexandria Jackson,” Alyiah growled back. “That was the name given to you when you were born, and it will always be your name, whether you like it or not.”

  “You named me after him?” I whispered in shock. I had my father’s name. Someone she had spent years hiding from, even if a part of her did love him. A vampire, one who at this point I wasn’t sure was good, or if he was evil. Shaking my head, I said, “No. My birth certificate says Blayke Wynters. I don’t even have a middle name.”

  “Your real birth certificate says Blayke Alexandria Jackson,” Alyiah insisted, taking a step into the room. “Would you like to see it?”

  “Sure,” I replied defiantly, “and while you are at it, why don’t you show me my sister’s too?” I froze as soon the words left my mouth. I hadn’t planned on saying it out loud. Even though Alyiah came into the room and confronted me in anger, I had planned on keeping her secret unless she said the words herself. Just for a little while longer, until I could figure out exactly what I wanted to do on my end. It was too late for that now.