B006XVUCOY EBOK

by Dawn Gray

  I stood in front of a row of black motorcycles, loving myself for the placement of my "jump" through time. I grabbed the fastest looking bike that I saw and drove off towards Lourdes, and, though, I didn't know how to get there, my senses lead the way.

  Within thirty minutes, I was standing in front of the clock tower that sat in the middle of the town square. Lights burned in the top two stories of this funny looking structure and I decided that it was where I needed to go. I walked in the front door, almost invisible to the people who had gathered in the small assembly hall, and passed them to the long flight of stairs that led only one way, up.

  Candles and mirrors illuminated the room at the top of the flight of stairs, and a man smiled at me and stepped aside as I stepped through the doorway. I watched him carefully and he nodded, and then disappeared out the door that I had just come in. I watched as the small room connected to a larger one only by a small doorway and as I stood in this small open space, I spotted Isaac and two other men against the back wall.

  He was holding Cecilia by her throat, getting very close to her face. She could do nothing; chains in the wall behind her bound her hands. I could see her shaking, as she looked at Isaac, while he talked to her about something. My ear adjusted and I could hear what he was saying to her, faintly.

  "Are you afraid?" He had asked her. She nodded and whimpered a bit. "Don't worry, she'll be here soon."

  "I'm right here." I told him, forcefully. He turned and looked at me, the tall young man, with blond hair, which was spiked about an inch off his head. His eyes were a deep blue and were ones that I had stared in since childhood, his smile would melt any normal girl’s heart, and at that moment, I knew all he wanted to do was kill me. I stepped down into the room and watched as two other men stepped out of the darkness and grabbed my arms. "You can let her go now, Isaac. She has nothing to do with us."

  "Well, since you asked nicely." He smiled at me and snapped his fingers. The chains came off Cecilia's hands and she ran up to where I was being held. She stared me in the eyes, about to say something when I stopped her with my mental voice.

  Cec, there’s a bike outside. I told her and watched her nod. Head back towards Kingston, drive north and find Quinn and Julian. They know where to find the guardian and he knows how to find me if they take me from here. I watched her hesitate, wanting to tell me something important. Go! Whatever it is, it can wait. I’ll be fine.

  I watched her look at Isaac, quickly and then she took off out of the building. I followed her with my mind, and knew when she had found the bike and left Lourdes. I turned back to Isaac and he stepped back against the wall.

  "She'll be back." He said softly. "And, she'll bring Grandfather and Julian and then we'll have all of you just where we want you."

  "Yeah, well, I've heard that one before." I replied to him. He smiled at me and then looked at his hand. "So, what are you going to do now, just sit and wait?"

  "Well, actually, I've learned a new way of torturing people and I thought I would try it on you." He smiled at me, the same silly smile that he always gave me when he was trying to be funny. "Of course, we could just do to you what we did to your mother, which was cut out her heart, then cut off her head."

  My anger suddenly exploded and I wanted to strangle him, and what happened next was almost the exact same thing that happened when I learned how to manipulate space. I concentrated on him, on being directly in front of him and I watched as the space between us seemed to bend, like a piece of paper, in half. I wrestled out of the grips of my holders, stepped through this bend in space, and I let it go. In what must have looked like a blink of an eye to him, I was standing right in front of Isaac. I pressed myself against him, backing him up against the wall, snarling at him with my vampire fangs bared and ready to strike, but he looked at calmly, like nothing amazed him anymore.

  "My mother was not one of us." I told him sternly. "She was an outsider. I am who I am because of my father." I watched his eyes as he stared me down. “Where is he? Where is the bastard hiding? I can see it in your eyes that you don’t want to do this.”

  "Your father, yes, whoever that is?" He smiled at me, but he glanced up at the west wall, indicating that we were not alone. I pressed him harder and listened to the breath go out of him. "You're a mutt, Browne, and you will always be that."

  "I could kill you right now, Isaac." I told him firmly, grabbing the back of his blond head with my hand. "I could rip your throat out and watch you bleed."

  "You could." He said and smiled at me, looking over my face. "If I didn't do this."

  He said and with that, he moved quite quickly and had the tables turned on me. He forced me up against the wall that Cecilia had been against and he had his hand around my throat, and he squeezed, slowly. I let go of his hair and put both my hands on his one and looked at him. I could feel the darkness coming in, as I almost drifted into unconsciousness due to the fact that I was losing air. He laughed at me.

  "You’re probably wondering how I can do this, overpower you with such ease." He whispered as he came closer to my ear. I felt his breath on my skin as his lips brushed my cheek. "That's simple really, because I'm one of you."

  I looked at him one last time before the lights went out. The darkness took over swiftly, but then it seemed like it eased, just as quickly and I opened my eyes once again and looked around the same room that I had been in, but I was chained in the middle of it, hanging there like some sort of prisoner, which is what I really was.

  Isaac stepped into the room, followed by a man, who stood in the shadows and watched as Isaac walked up to me and grabbed my chin.

  "What are you going to do with me?" I asked him. He shook my head.

  "Your question should really be; how did I get this way?" He said and walked around behind me, touching my exposed stomach, sides and back from where my shirt didn't cover. His hands were like ice, but my skin seemed to react to it. He put his arms around my waist as he stood behind me and pushed his own body against mine. "Fate works in mysterious ways; doesn't it? You and I met when we were only children and I knew then that one day, I'd have you to do whatever I wanted with, like now, for example." He said as he ran his hand up into my shirt and touched my left breast gently. I squirmed against him, trying to get away, but that seemed to excite him more, so I stopped. "I could kill you right now, if I wanted too. Do you want to die, Angel?"

  "No." I whispered to him. "I want to live; the only thing I have ever wanted out of this miserable life was to live. Do you hear me, Bastard? I want to live."

  "Come now, Angel, who are you yelling too?" He said and moved away from me. I watched him move over to a table just to the side of me and grab what looked like a whip from the tabletop. "That's not true and you know it."

  "I don't know what you mean." I said as my voice began to shake as I watched him start to whip the long black cord around.

  "There's something, no, someone else that you want now, isn't there." He said and smiled at me. I glanced at him, and then up at the man who stood in the shadows. "What's his name; the man in black? The one that you dream such lusty dreams for, the one that you want to feel crawl up in between your legs under your covers at night."

  "Isaac, please, is that why you’re doing this, because you’re jealous?" I said as my lips began to quiver and I flinched every time he cracked that whip. "I don't know what you want me to say."

  That was when it hit me, the end of that whip sailed across my back and I screamed aloud as the searing pain flashed through my body. It was like the sting of fingers that hit across your wet skin when kids play, but ten hundred times more painful and it makes you bleed.

  "I want his name." He said and cracked that whip against my back again. I screamed and felt the anger of my weakness flowing to the surface. My eyes began to glow, and my body seemed to shut down any feelings other than hate, towards Isaac. "He, who comes to you at night and watches you from the shadows?" I quickly looked over to the man as Isaac whipped me again, my feet
gave out from under me and I hung there from my wrists. "If you tell me, then it will be all over."

  “Why? So you can hunt him down and kill him too?” I asked, through grinding teeth. “Never!”

  "That's enough!" The man in the corner screamed. I looked over at him as the light turned on and my eyes widened as I looked into Jason's eyes. He looked hard at Isaac and was about to step towards me when the two men beside him grabbed his arms. "What is this?"

  "Oh, come now, Jason." Isaac smiled. Jason looked at me as I turned away from him. "You didn't think that you would walk away Scot-free, did you?"

  "You told me that you wouldn't hurt her." Jason yelled to him.

  "Oh, I'm not hurting her; these wounds will heal over night." Isaac said and grabbed the chains around my wrist. I heard the sounds of keys then my wrist were free and I was falling to the ground. The cold ground was suddenly under my face and I could hear Jason calling to me. Hands were under my arms and I was being lifted off the ground before I could get my stuff together. I looked over at Jason and closed my eyes. "Bring her to the basement and put her in a room."

  "Isaac, this is insane, she's bleeding all over the place." Jason hollered. Isaac looked at him and smiled.

  "Don't worry, Jason, you'll be joining her soon." He laughed evilly. That was the last thing I heard before I drifted off into unconsciousness.

  When I opened my eyes, all I could see was the wall. I reached out with my fingers and touched its coldness. I was completely infatuated by it until I felt a presence in the room with me and I turned over slowly to look at the figure sitting in the corner opposite me. I was just going to lay there, watching until a wave of familiarity hit me, and I moved quickly to stand above him.

  Jason looked up at me, my eyes glowed a fierce red color. He stood up quickly and reached a hand out to touch my face. I growled at him and bared my teeth, then swung out and slapped him hard across the face. His head moved to the side and then he turned back to look at me.

  "Angel." He said and reached out for me.

  "Don't touch me!" I snarled at him. "I trusted you."

  "I didn't betray you." He said in his own defense.

  "That's not what it looked like from my point of view." I told him and stepped back. My back, where the whip had hit it several times that Isaac had swung it at me, stung quite suddenly and I dropped to my knees. Jason was near me suddenly and I looked at him as he reached out to move my shirt. I nipped at his fingers and he backed away.

  "You're bleeding again." He said and sat in front of me.

  "Everybody bleeds sometime in their lives." I told him and sat up, cringing at the pain in my back.

  "Can I explain to you what exactly happened back there?" He asked me. I looked at him and shook my head slowly. "Well, that's just being childish, Angel."

  "My grandfather was right." I told him. "You are just a vampire."

  "You're grandfather doesn't know anything." He said sternly. "He doesn't know all the times I protected you, how much I've gone through just to keep you safe."

  "Spare me." I told him and stood up. He watched me walk over to the small window and look out at the moon. "Did you know about her?"

  "About who?" He asked leaning up against the wall.

  "Cecilia!" I said and looked at him angrily. "It just strikes me as funny that you had just mentioned her and then, poof, here she is being held hostage by Isaac."

  Suddenly, I panicked and grabbed the bars that were over the windows. I pulled on then and wrestled with them violently until Jason pulled me off. He held me around the waist as I gave into the feeling that raced through me from him.

  "Why didn't you just leave me there to die?"

  "Leave you where, Angel?" He asked me. I didn't look at him as images flashed through my head of places that I had seen and died at in dreams.

  "Anywhere," I told him. "Maybe I wouldn't have come back last time if you hadn't saved me and helped me die." I sat up and turned to look at him. I reached out; he flinched away from my fingers as I touched his face. I stared him in the eyes and looked deep into the darkness of them. "Or, maybe it wasn't even you that did it; maybe, I just put your image there to feel like I knew who I was looking at."

  "It was me, Angel." He said sweetly, whispering against my hand as I placed it flat against his cheek. "Who told you these things?"

  "Why are you here?" I asked him. He closed his eyes and dropped his head back so that it touched the wall.

  "I came here to get you. Quinn said that you left in a hurry." He said softly, reaching out and touching my waist with his hands. "I confronted Isaac downstairs in the hall and he told me that if I came quietly no one was going to get hurt, especially you. I thought that he might be telling the truth, since he is one of us and I would have been able to pick up on the lie if he had been telling me one. When I got to the room that you were in, his men had gagged me and tied my hands behind my back then he lead me into the room and the two men there pulled me into the shadows. I had to wrestle with the rope around my wrist and by then he had already hurt you."

  I was watching him not move from that spot; his eyes never opened, his head never moved and I leaned down over him, pushed his head to the side and exposed his neck. I softly ran my fingers along his veins, until I found the beat that I had been looking for. If he was lying now, I could be certain that the blood would tell me. My teeth exposed, I bent over him and slowly bit into his neck. His arms slipped around my waist and pulled me into him. He moaned quietly and then his grip eased as I backed away. His blood was truthful; he was telling me the truth, but I hadn't tasted blood for a while and it made me feel weak.

  Jason opened his eyes as I fell back on my bottom and he looked at me oddly. I watched him as I laid down, first on my back, when I noticed the sharp pains that ripped through me, then, on my side, where I curled up into a ball. I felt Jason's hands on me as he moved my shirt; or what was left of the back of it, away from my skin and touched me with some wet cloths.

  "Some woman slid this through the door after I had been in here about an hour; she said it was for your back." He told me as I lay there quietly. I let him touch my skin with this medicine and he did so gently. "Don't worry." He said softly, in my ear as he leaned close to me. "Help will be here shortly, and I'll take you home, where you'll be safe."

  I didn't reply right away, but let him continue with what he was doing before I asked him, in a whisper, "can I stay with you?"

  His hands stopped on my back and he moved away for a moment, then he appeared on the floor in front of me, lying opposite of what I was.

  "Why would you want to come home with me?" He asked and looked at my eyes. "I'm not the type of man you're looking for, Angel."

  "I'm not looking for any one type of man, Jason." I whispered to him. He shook his head and then rolled over onto his back. "I'm looking for you."

  The cell door opened and Jason stood up. I moved, not as quickly, and looked at the shadow standing in the doorway. I felt the presence of another person behind him; a mortal, a girl and I stepped forward, as she pushed him aside and ran towards me. Cecilia hugged me tightly and looked at me as I pushed her away.

  "What is it?" She asked me.

  "It just hurts a little." I told her and looked at Quinn, who stepped into the room. "Don't worry about it." Jason looked at me, quickly, then turned to look at Quinn and the two men lead us out of the building. "What took you so long?"

  "I got lost." She said and smiled as we all piled into the limo. I watched Jason as he stepped back and walked over to his bike. "He's not coming?"

  "No." Quinn said and looked at me. I turned away and looked out the side window. Cecilia took my hand and held it tightly.

  Who is he? She asked me, using her mental voice. I had taught her how to use her voice to communicate with me when we were younger and I was on the move.

  The man in black. I whispered and looked back at her. Jason Finn. Her eyed connected with mine, and her brown eye widened. What?

&nbs
p; Are you infatuated with him? She asked and smiled. I smiled at her and looked away. Angel, that could be dangerous.

  So could life. I said and looked back at her. The only dangerous thing about it is that Quinn doesn’t seem to approve.

  Well, you are the last of Louis’ children. I can see why. She touched my arm.

  That doesn’t mean he can run my life. I said and cut off the connection, and spoke to her verbally. "How did you get lost?"

  "There was only about twelve thousand vampires in that building." She laughed exaggerating a bit. "But, have no fear; my loud mind found them, after about a hundred people pointed them out to me." I laughed at her and looked at Quinn who smiled at me. "So, how have you been?"

  "Sucky!" I told her and winked. I’ll tell you later about my new friend. I told her with my mind. She smiled at me.

  Cleo looked at me as Cecilia helped me peel the shirt from my skin. I looked up at her and sighed. She smiled at me with her golden eyes and laughed, reading my mind.

  "I think I'm going nuts." I told her and rolled my eyes.

  "He's safe, Angel, don't worry too much about him."

  "So, is this when you're going to start telling me that Quinn is right and I shouldn't trust him any more than I can throw him?" I asked her. Cecilia smiled at me as she walked me over to the bathtub and helped me sit down. My muscles in my back were stiff and I couldn't move. Cleo shook her head.

  "Jason is a big boy." She smiled and walked to the door. "I'm sure he knows what he's doing." She said and grabbed the doorknob.

  "As for you, Angel, I can only say this. Follow your heart, but lead with your mind." She replied and shut the door behind her as she left.

  Cecilia looked at me as I sat back in the hot water. "Why does everyone insist on treating me like a baby?"