Moonshade (Vampire Conclave: Book 1)

by S. J. West

  “Well, now that you mention it. I am curious about a few things.” I’m thankful he opened the question door and is allowing me to step over the threshold for some answers about my family’s past. “What did my grandfather die of?”

  “Old age, like most of the ones who are bound to me do.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I think it’s because the virus I give you fights off most diseases which increases their immunity. It’s very rare, but every once in a while one dies in an accident.”

  Like my mother did, I think to myself. If she hadn’t died in the fire, she would be the one sitting where I am now.

  “Did you just move into this house? I’ve never seen you around Pecan Acres before.” And I would have most definitely remembered seeing him shopping at the local Wal-Mart. Julian would have been the talk of the town.

  “Yes, we moved here a few days ago. When your mother said she and your father were moving somewhere neither your grandfather nor I would think to look for them, she was right. I didn’t even know this town existed until I started to search for you.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “The same way you knew I was in this house. We’re connected. We will always know where the other is.”

  I’m not sure I like that idea. Have I completely lost my privacy now? Will I ever have time to just be by myself?

  “Where were you living before you had to come here?”

  “A little town called Geneva in New York State. Your grandfather liked running the vineyard we owned up there.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was a good man. Honest to the core.” Julian smiles as he fondly remembers my grandfather. It’s the first real sign of emotion I’ve seen him openly display since waking up. It’s obvious he cared for my grandfather very much. “You would have liked him. Most people did.”

  “I wish I had known he existed. I don’t know why my mother kept me from knowing him.” I can’t prevent myself from sounding resentful, because that’s how I feel. It would have been nice to know I had at least one living relative after losing my parents.

  “If you had known him,” Julian says, you would have had to know me, too. I don’t think that was the plan your mother had in mind when she left. I’ve never agreed with what your mother did, but I understood the reasoning behind her actions.”

  “Did you resent her for leaving?”

  “At first I did,” Julian admits. “But after a while, I came to understand her desire for you to have a normal life. I never realized how hard it could be to live in my world. None of your ancestors seemed to mind. At least they never said anything to me about disliking it.”

  Julian’s gaze drifts to the top of the table. It seems to be his habit to avert his eyes when he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s thinking.

  I can’t help but sigh. He looks back up at me.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” I admit. “Since I can’t read your emotions, you’re really going to have to start expressing them more on your face. Or at least give me a hand gesture or something.”

  Julian grins. “I’m not one to show a lot of emotion. If you had been raised around me like the others, you would be used to the way I am.”

  “But I wasn’t,” I point out. “If I could still read you, it wouldn’t be such a big problem, but I can’t. So you’re going to have to work with me here and learn how to be more expressive. If you don’t, I’m going to go insane. It’s already hard enough to be around you without my empathic abilities telling me how you feel. I can’t imagine a whole lifetime of living this way with you.”

  “All right,” he concedes. “I’ll try to be more expressive, but only if you do something for me in return.”

  “What?” I ask hesitantly.

  “Tell your friend Kaylee about me tomorrow.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “The sooner you assimilate me into your life, the sooner we can break up and say we’ve decided to just be good friends. By then, we will have established our connection to one another, and you’ll be free to find someone else.”

  “Oh, yeah, you need me to get knocked up so you can have an heir.” I know I sound hostile, like a petulant teenager even, but I can’t help it. I don’t like the fact he expects me to find someone to fall in love with just so I can satisfy his heir quota.

  “There’s no reason to make it sound so dirty, Sarah.” He frowns at me in disappointment. Well, at least it was an expression I could read. “It’s simply the way things have been done over the years. Don’t you want to find a man to fall in love with?”

  “Who doesn’t want to fall in love? I just didn’t realize the time table for finding true love would be shortened for me.”

  “I have no intention of rushing you,” he says, sounding offended by my statement. “But women your age generally already have a man in mind for marriage. You seem unconcerned that you don’t.”

  “I have my reasons,” I mumble, finishing the last morsel of chocolate cake on my plate.

  Julian studies me for a moment before gently asking, “Would you like to talk about it?”

  I look up at him and see sincere concern in his eyes for me.

  I shake my head. “Not really.”

  “If you ever need someone to talk to, I’m always here for you, Sarah. We are a permanent part of each other’s lives now.”

  I know his words are true and that I can trust Julian with my life and my secrets. I’m just not sure if he’ll understand how much starting a family of my own scares me.

  After I finish eating the slice of cake, I begin to feel sleepy again. Julian reassures me that it’s normal for a newly-made companion to require a lot of sleep and escorts me back to the bedroom I slept in before.

  “You should think of this room as yours,” he tells me, leaning against the doorway as I make my way over to the bed. “In fact, you should think of this house as your home while we’re here.”

  I was pulling back the covers on the bed, but his statement quickly brings me upright again. “What do you mean by ‘while we’re here’?”

  “Eventually, we’ll need to move away from this city. People will begin to wonder why Helen and I aren’t aging if we stay here for more than ten years.”

  “I don’t want to leave. This town is my home.”

  “We have no choice, Sarah. It’s something we have to do to keep people from asking too many questions.”

  I know he’s right, and that I’m probably being unreasonable, but did he really expect me to be happy about leaving everything I know and the people I love?

  “I can come back for visits, though, right?” At least give me that, I pray.

  “I’m sure we can arrange something for you.” Even though he seems hesitant to concede even that much leeway, I’m glad he does. Otherwise, we might have ended up in a very heated argument. I’m not about to leave my family behind just because he needs to suck my blood!

  “Sleep well, Sarah,” he says, pushing himself off the doorframe. “I’ll see you when you wake up.”

  After he shuts the door, I crawl underneath the covers and try to get comfortable. I can still feel Julian’s closeness. He hasn’t gone very far. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard him walk into the room right beside mine.

  I snuggle up underneath the white comforter and fall asleep before Julian’s bombshell can bother me anymore.

  Sometime later, I’m awoken by the sound of a person humming close by. Before I even open my eyes, I know someone else is in the bed with me and that it isn’t Julian.

  When I open my eyes, I find a man lying on the other side of the mattress, raised up on one of his elbows and staring at me. He’s handsome with olive-colored skin, lavender eyes, and short chestnut-brown hair that’s slightly long on top and moussed to male model perfection. His face is triangular, with sharp predatory features. Facial hair covers the bottom half of his face, showing he hasn’t shaved in
at least a couple of days. It’s long enough to be attractive, but not so long that it resembles a true beard and mustache. He’s dressed in a black short-sleeve knit shirt and white jeans. If I were to make an educated guess, I would put his age at around thirty.

  “Hello,” he says with a rakish grin and a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

  I sit straight up in bed, holding the covers to my chest like a shield as if they’ll protect me from the man.

  “Who are you?” I ask, taking a quick reading of his feelings. He’s having fun. I get the distinct impression he’s gaining pleasure by surprising me with his unexpected appearance. There isn’t any malice in his action, just a sort of adolescent enjoyment in being able to startle me.

  He stands up from the bed and bows to me, one arm sweeping the air before him in a flourish.

  “I am Adrian Costel. And you must be Sarah Marcel.” He stands straight again and casually leans one shoulder up against the bedpost at the foot of the bed, crossing his arms loosely in front of him. He has a similar accent to Julian’s but it’s more pronounced, like he hasn’t spent as much time in the States as my vampire companion.

  “That only tells me your name,” I say, feeling irritated. “It doesn’t really tell me who you are.”

  Adrian smiles. “True.”

  “So, who are you?” I ask again.

  “He’s someone who shouldn’t be in here.”

  We both look to the now-open doorway of the room and see Julian standing there, a murderous look on his face.

  Adrian pushes himself off the bedpost and shrugs at Julian.

  “I simply wanted to meet the newest addition to our happy little troupe. She’s not like the others you’ve had, even if they all come from the same bloodline.”

  “You need to leave, Adrian.” The forceful way Julian says his words makes them sound more like a threat than a request.

  Adrian looks back at me and winks. “I’ll be seeing you, Sarah.”

  He walks out of the room, feeling pleased with himself. I get the feeling he accomplished what he set out to do: annoy Julian.

  Julian strolls to the foot of the bed, maintaining the scowl on his face. I know he isn’t upset with me even without my empathic abilities telling me how he’s feeling.

  “Who is Adrian?” I ask, hoping Julian will be more cooperative than the subject of my question was.

  “He is one of the pure-blooded vampires I told you about.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “Visiting.” Julian spits out the word in total disgust. “He’s on his way to see my sister in New Orleans, but he chose to stop here when he felt my presence. Basically, he decided to stick his nose into my personal affairs.”

  “Felt your presence? You can feel where the other vampires are?”

  “Yes, if we’re in close enough proximity to one another. Generally, we have to be within a fifty-mile radius for it to work.”

  “You never mentioned that your sister lives in New Orleans.”

  “She’s lived there for a few years now.”

  “Are the two of you close?”

  “We used to be, in the beginning. When you’ve lived as long as we have, staying in touch becomes less important. We haven’t seen each other for almost a hundred years, not since the last conclave.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned a conclave,” I say. “What sort of meeting is that?”

  “Once every hundred years or so, we vampires come together to see who is still left alive and to discuss anything noteworthy.”

  “Where do you meet?”

  “It varies. My sister is normally in charge of inviting everyone. She either invites us to the town she’s living in at the time or another neutral location somewhere in the world.”

  “If it’s been that long since you last saw your sister, you must be having another conclave soon?”

  “Yes, very soon.”

  “I suppose I’ll need to go to it.” It isn’t a question. I know I will need to go with Julian. If he’s going to be in a meeting with others of his kind, he’ll need to be as strong as he can be.

  “Wherever I go, you must go,” he says. His statement isn’t an order, just the reality of our situation.

  “I have a job,” I tell him. “We’re on summer break right now, so it’s not a big deal to travel, but I think you need to know I intend to keep working. If you want to make travel plans, you’ll need to arrange them around my schedule from now on.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m the biology teacher at the local junior high school.”

  “I see.” The corners of Julian’s mouth twitch like I’ve said something that amuses him. Why can’t he smile more often? He looks so handsome when he lets himself relax.

  “Something funny about me working?” I ask.

  “No, it’s admirable,” he replies. “How old are you? Twenty-three?”

  “Yes, my birthday was the night you found me at the nightclub. We were out celebrating it.”

  “I see.” He seems pleased because he lets himself grin. “So you don’t make it a habit of drinking and dancing at clubs with total strangers?”

  “No, that was all Kaylee’s idea. I think she hoped I would meet someone there. It’s her mission in life to have me at least engaged, if not married, before my next birthday.”

  Julian’s smile falters a bit. He puts on his emotionless mask again, like he’s trying to hide something from me. Or, does he do that even when he’s hiding his own emotions from himself?

  “Helen thought you might want to shower and change your clothes,” he tells me, effectively shifting the subject of our conversation to something else as he nods to the chair by the window.

  Lying across the back of it is a plain white T-shirt on top of a pair of blue jeans.

  “She put some toiletries and undergarments in the bathroom for you also. After you get ready, come down to the kitchen. I’m sure you’re hungry again.”

  As he leaves the room, he shuts the door behind him before I can give a proper salute. Sometimes he sounds just like a drill sergeant: do this, do that. I can only assume he’s used to telling the people around him what to do. Something will definitely have to be done about that.

  Helen seems to have thought of everything I need. She bought me items for my shower (shampoo, soap, razor, shaving cream) and girly essentials I normally use to get ready with (makeup, hair dryer, curling iron, hairspray, mousse, and deodorant). Apparently, she even made a trip to Victoria’s Secret to buy me some panties and bras. I definitely owe her one.

  After having slept in the same clothes for two and a half days, my body is in desperate need of a good cleaning and grooming. A little over a half hour later I walk downstairs, smelling a lot fresher than when I woke up. I find Julian and Helen in the kitchen. Julian is looking out the windows by the French doors that lead out onto the patio at the back of the house. Glancing outside I see Adrian, now dressed in a pair of white swimming trunks, lying on a lounge chair, soaking up the summer sun by the pool. There is also another man outside I haven’t met yet. He’s lean and of average height, with shaggy light-brown hair. He isn’t as handsome as either Julian or Adrian, but he’s cute in an athletic, soccer player kind of way.

  “Well, I’m glad everything fits,” Helen says approvingly as she eyes me in my new outfit. She’s standing behind the kitchen island, stirring up a bowl of what looks like freshly made potato salad.

  Julian ends his pensive ruminations and turns away from the window to look at me. I can feel his eyes traveling over me from head to toe and have to wonder what he’s thinking. Feeling uncomfortable under his scrutiny, I start to fidget with my hair self-consciously.

  “Thank you for buying me all that stuff,” I tell Helen, forcing my eyes to look in hers and not at the bowl in her hands. I know if I look at it, I’ll probably start salivating like a rabid dog.

  How can I still be hungry? I ate more that morning than I usually do in a whole week! At this rate,
I’m going to weigh a ton by the end of the month.

  “If you ever need anything, just ask,” she says with a wink and small smile of satisfaction. She sticks the spoon she was using to mix the potato salad with in the middle of it and slides the bowl over to me across the counter of the island.

  “Go on,” she says grinning wider. “I made it for you. There’s no need to be shy about eating around here. You’re going to need your strength.”

  I can’t help myself. I pick the bowl up and hold it in front of me with one arm wrapped around it and the other hand eagerly lifting the spoon to my mouth. Thank goodness Helen is a good cook.

  I walk over to where Julian is standing and can feel how tense his body is as he returns his attention to the two men outside.

  “You don’t like him very much, do you?” I ask, looking out the window at Adrian.

  “He’s not my favorite person in the world,” Julian admits, staring pointedly at the cause of his tension.

  “Why? Is he one of the bad ones you mentioned?” I remembered Julian speaking about the vampires who chose to feed on humans rather than their chosen companions.

  Julian sighs. “No. He hasn’t gone that far yet,” he concedes. “But I feel like it’s only a matter of time with him.”

  “Is that the person he’s bonded to?” I ask, nodding to the man I haven’t been introduced to yet. We both watch him walk to the edge of the pool and dive into the clear blue water with his arms stretched over his head.

  “Yes. Hhis name is Daniel Bartran.”

  “So why is Adrian going to see your sister? Are they friends?”

  The corner of Julian’s mouth twitches up, like I’ve said something amusing.

  “I suppose you could call them that. They’re occasional lovers.”

  “Oh.” I slowly turn my back to the window and walk over to the kitchen table. I set my bowl down and pull out a chair to sit in. I do my best not to show how embarrassed I feel for inadvertently asking such a personal question about people I don’t really know. I guess I didn’t turn away fast enough for Julian not to notice.