Life Bound: The Shadow World Book 1

by Aubrey Winters

  I saw red, but closed my eyes and took a deep breath before responding. I had been wrong; this man had no answers for me. He was clearly on a mental breakdown of some sort, and I let him into our house, and I still had no idea what had happened to Nana. When I spoke, I couldn’t keep the ice out of my words. “I don’t know how to break it to you, but curses aren’t real. She probably pitied you because you clearly need professional help.”

  He worked his jaw and stared at me for so long that I almost poked at him just to make sure I wasn’t the delusional one.

  “Curses are real,” he drawled, enunciating each word like I was a child.

  I blinked.

  “No,” I said just as slowly. “Curses aren’t real. Let me get you some help.”

  “How is it you made it this far without knowing about this?” His brows pulled together as he studied me like he was seeing me for the first time.

  “Look,” I paused. “Is there somewhere I can get you? A safe place maybe?” I talked slowly, realizing that while this entire mess was technically his fault, he wasn’t in his right mind, nor was he to be blamed—as much as I wanted to.

  A quiet voice in the back of my head asked what about Nana? What about the defenestration? How did all that happen? I ignored that voice; I could figure out the explanation later, but he was the one who needed help right now.

  He snorted. “Curses are very real, darling. I don’t know why Anna never told you, but she was not doing you any favours.”

  “What are you even talking about?” My brow furrowed and my knuckles turned white against the glass. Against Nana’s glass. As I thought about her, a heavy rock dropped in my stomach. For a quick minute, I had almost convinced myself that he was the one who was out of his mind. But I distinctly remembered Nana disappearing in a flash of light—hadn’t she? I wanted to go upstairs to check, but fear held me back. What if she hadn’t disappeared? What if I were the one having a mental breakdown, and I imagined the whole thing and then let a killer into her house? What if, when I opened the doors, Nana was lying on the floor this whole time, turning cold?

  “Okay.” He ran a hand through his hair again. “Let’s start over. Lesson one: all the legends are real. Vampires, witches, werewolves, and faeries. We’re real.”

  “What do you mean we’re real?” I squinted.

  “I’m a vampire. Are you not following along? I thought you were all healed up already. Do you need more?” He started pulling his sleeve up again, but I stopped him immediately.

  He shot me a quizzical look, but rolled it back down.

  “Um,” I looked him up and down. He was nothing like how the Twilight books said vampires looked. He did not sparkle, nor was he abnormally pale. He definitely didn’t look like the classic vampire from horror movies. But memories flashed of his glowing red eyes and unhuman fangs. Despite myself, I flinched. There was no way my mind could have conjured everything that had happened in the last few hours.

  “Look, I know it’s hard to believe for a person outside of the Shadow world. Lesson two: when regular mortals encounter any Darkness from the Shadow world, their minds automatically muddle up what they see. It’s like a fog that clouds their mind’s eye, and so they become confused.” Kol didn’t have deception in his eyes. He looked as though he were telling me facts about the colour of the sky rather than the existence of an entire world of supernatural races that belonged only in fantasy books and movies.

  “Are you sure there isn’t—”

  He growled and showed his teeth; eyes turning red, his canine teeth elongated until they looked like something straight out of a teenage TV drama.

  I dropped my glass without hearing the shatter. My heart leaped into my throat, and ice spread through my veins. I froze in my seat, not knowing whether I should run or call for an ambulance to take me away. Maybe both? This wasn’t real—

  “Stop living in denial.” His deep voice rumbled, shaking me to my very core. “This is what’s real. I’m here. I’m a vampire. A Shadow standing in front of you.”

  I gasped, the rush of air bringing me back to real life. “But how can I see you? How did Nana see you?” I almost choked up again from saying her name as I felt the gravity of reality setting upon me. What was I going to do with her disappearance? How would I explain anything if anyone asked?

  He sighed.

  “Anna was a witch from the old days. She was a part of the Shadow world.”

  His words were muffled like I was in a bubble and he talked from the outside. I wanted to wrap a blanket around me, bundle up, and fall asleep. Maybe then I would wake up and this would reveal itself as the world’s weirdest nightmare. But I knew that this wouldn’t go away. Instead, I gave him the side eye.

  “Nana mentioned nothing about Shadows or other supernatural creatures to me. We were very normal people.”

  “Creatures?” He feigned hurt, but upon realizing I wouldn’t indulge, he continued. “Anna was anything but normal. That’s why I sought her out after decades of other witches’ failures. But I don’t know why she kept you from the Shadow world, especially when we have such handsome creatures like me running around.” He grinned, and I glared.

  “Anyway, I spent such a long time tracking her down because she was one of the most powerful Shadows, so I figured she could break my curse. Unfortunately for me, I was right.” He frowned and crossed his arms.

  “You keep saying curse. What curse?”

  He sighed. “I was cursed a while ago, and it repressed my full powers. That doesn’t matter now, because your grandmother broke the curse, only to...” he trailed off, like he was unsure of how to continue.

  “Good god!”

  If I hadn’t been so frustrated, I’d have found his surprise comical.

  “You just broke in here and you did something to my grandmother—the only family I have! Can you just tell the whole stupid story without me asking a million questions? I think I deserve at least that!” I grabbed the closest thing to me—a jam jar—and threw it at him. My aim was true, but he ducked in time. It shattered against the backsplash and a deep purple smeared across the kitchen. Like he’d flipped a switch, his ruby eyes and fangs appeared, and he snarled. Somewhere deep inside, a small part of me wanted to shrink and hide, but my anger was all-consuming.

  “Quit barking and show some bite! Kill me! I have nothing left!” Tears leaked again. I was lying. I didn’t know where Nana was or what had happened to her, and I needed to find out. If she was in trouble, I had to help her. But at that moment, my emotions were overwhelming—like a weighted blanket dragging me under the waves of a raging sea. Reality unfolded before me and I was untethered as it crumbled.

  Something I said startled him. He shook his head and backed down, eyes turning back to a steely grey and his face looking human once more. I hated myself for noticing, but even with everything going on, he was devilishly handsome both with his human face and his vampire one.

  “I can’t kill you,” he growled through gritted teeth.

  “You had no problems doing it before!” I felt confidence rising—or maybe it was hysteria. It was probably hysteria.

  “And I had to save you,” he glared.

  I scowled back at him, daring him to continue.

  “Because Anna removed my original curse only to curse me with another.”

  “Did she curse you with the inability to be succinct?”

  His shoulders tensed. I knew I was testing him, and yet a small part of me wanted to keep pushing. Maybe I had a death wish.

  “The old hag bound my life to yours,” he ground out.

  “Bound our lives?” I repeated.

  “Yes,” he worked his jaw. “You repeat things a lot. Are you sure you’re well?” He narrowed his eyes.

  My eyebrows shot up, and I suddenly remembered Nana’s words before he threw her across the room.

  You will protect her with all your years.

  No wonder he’d changed his tone. Even when I pushed his patience, the most he did was
snarl at me. All bark and no bite. He truly believed that if I died, he would die.

  “You’re saying that if I get hurt, you get hurt?”

  He grumbled a response I could only make out as a yes.

  “I’m not entirely sure yet how it works because until now, I thought a curse like this was only a myth. I thought I felt your injuries when you fell, but I heal fast, so I wasn’t sure I had even felt it. But then I felt my own life slipping presumably when yours began to fade.”

  I shuddered. Whether he knew it, he had just confirmed that I hadn’t dreamed the incident. He really had thrown me out of the window, and I really had been dying. And somehow, he brought me back.

  Call me stupid, but as much as I wanted to believe him, I still wanted to wake up and realize this was all a nightmare from some rotten food I’d had on the plane.

  “And the—?” I gestured to my wrist, waving it in front of my mouth. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say the words just yet.

  “Vampire blood heals humans. It’s handy for when we want to keep our victims alive for longer while we feed.”

  “Oh, that’s,” I paused, searching for the words. “That’s efficient.” I didn’t bother to shutter my shiver.

  “It’s just how things are.” He put his hands into the pockets of his jeans and leaned back against the sink.

  “What did you do to Nana?” I whispered, peering up at him through my lashes.

  “I didn’t do anything to her,” he tilted his head.

  “What do you mean you didn’t do anything? I watched you attack her,” I wanted to wrap my hands around his neck and shake the answers out of him. How was he so cavalier about this?

  “Be that as it may, I didn’t flash her away.” He crossed his arms. “I don’t know who—or what—might have done that. Maybe it was her own doing.”

  “It wouldn’t have—she wouldn’t have left me.” My hands twisted in my lap. Nana and I had lived together my entire life; she took me in when my parents died in a tragic car accident. She raised me. She was my only family. We knew everything about each other.

  Or so I thought.

  Suddenly, a wave of nausea hit and I clamped my hands over my mouth, jumping out of the chair. Kol took a few steps back, alarmed, and I lost my lunch in the sink.

  I thought I knew everything about my grandmother. Nana and I shared our entire lives with each other—except, apparently, an entire history and life as a witch in a Shadow world hidden from humans. Which she wasn’t. He called her a Shadow. How could I have lived my whole life with Nana and not known that she wasn’t human?

  What else did she hide from me? As much as my heart ached with betrayal, my mind told me something different. There had to have been a reason she kept an entire life and world from me. I needed to find her and ask what that reason was.

  “She wouldn’t have left me,” I rinsed, spat, and wiped my mouth, feeling a little better. Despite the tendrils of hurt trying to edge their way in, I knew in my heart that Nana must have had her reasons. “She could be in trouble right now.”

  “Look, darling,” he stretched his arms over his head and rolled his shoulder. “People do all sorts of things for many reasons. Sometimes for no reason at all. There’s no need to get worked up over it.”

  “If she’s in trouble, we need to help her,” I glared and insisted.

  “Why? There’s not much you can do, anyway. Let’s just find someone to break this irksome bond instead.” He rolled his neck as if annoyed.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Is this an inconvenience to you? To help me with a situation you caused?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Look. Whatever happened to her happened, but it wasn’t my fault.”

  “It definitely is your fault,” I shook my head, barely containing my anger. “You came into our lives and demanded that my grandmother break some curse, and when she refused to help you, you hurt her. And then you hurt me!”

  In two strides, he was up in my face. His eyes glowing, his fangs elongated, a growl vibrating in his chest so deep that I thought I could feel it in my own. “She was the one who—”

  He shook his head. “Never mind,” his fangs shortened, but his eyes still tinged with red. Kol took a step back and ran his hand through his hair, sighing.

  My heart thundered so hard I was afraid it would fly out of my chest. I’d just yelled at him and he restrained himself from throwing me across the room. I thought for sure he was going to retaliate, but I stood by the sink, breathing and alive.

  “Forget this,” he muttered to himself. Before I could respond, he started speaking again, but his voice had changed. Distorted, somehow. “Get up and let’s go.”

  My jaw nearly dropped. The audacity of this man. “Are you kidding me?”

  He froze and studied me, eyes fully grey and narrowed.

  “Are you kidding me?” I repeated. “You want me to just get up and go—go where? Just follow you, a complete stranger who’s just dropped a knowledge-bomb on me after trying to murder my grandmother and then successfully throwing me out a window?”

  He gathered his composure and squinted at me like he had heard nothing I’d just said. Again, he distorted his voice as he spoke. “Stop rambling and be quiet. Get up.”

  “Who are you to tell me to be quiet?” I asked, nearly screaming as heat rose to my face. “Just who do you think you are?” My chair tumbled over as the back of my knees ran into it from how quickly I stood up.

  “I—” Kol cocked his head. “It doesn’t work on you,” he muttered to himself.

  “The nerve of you—” I reached for my shoe only to realize I’d taken it off when I first entered the house and hadn’t had a chance to put them on again.

  He chuckled to himself, amused by my emotions. “You’re immune to my powers of persuasion. That’s very interesting.”

  “What, your vampiric abilities mean you can control people and make them do whatever you want?” I snorted, crossing my arms.

  “Yes. That’s exactly what it is,” he stared at me blankly. “It’s very efficient. Just adds to your intrigue, I guess.”

  I blanched. I did not need this dangerous vampire intrigued by me. But, I realized with dread, I needed this vampire. I wanted to waltz into the Shadow world to find Nana, but I didn’t even know where to begin. Was there a door of some sort? He was my only tie to this world. My closest chance at finding Nana.

  “We’re going to find Nana,” I pursed my lips, ready for protest.

  “What do you mean we?” He snorted.

  “We as in you and me. Us. Commonly used pronoun,” I said, alluding to the words he’d used earlier today. The anger in my veins had cooled from a rolling boil to a quiet simmer, dampened by an icy determination to find Nana. I would not be returning to college; I would not be returning to Bella and Rose. The only family I’d ever had was missing and possibly in trouble, and I would do whatever was necessary to find her. The one who raised me, loved me, and protected me with her last breath before she disappeared.

  “You want to break this curse. I want to find Nana. You can’t exactly let me go traipsing around in this Shadow world without protection considering your life, quite literally, rests with mine.” I stared him down, my green eyes daring his grey ones to refuse me.

  Disbelief written on his face, he was speechless. I took his silence as an opportunity to get a head start on him.

  “I’m going to pack up some stuff.” Leaving the table, I turned my back to him. “You should empty your car, because we’re going to take mine.” Technically, the car was Nana’s, but I didn’t think she would mind if we drove it to rescue her.

  “My name is Elle, by the way. It’s short for Elizabeth.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I’D BANKED ON KOL STAYING because he needed to make sure I stayed alive, but my heart still pounded with anxiety as I searched through my old room for some things I’d want to take. What if he tired of waiting and left while I was up here? What would I do then? I wasn’t sure where to begin my search f
or Nana. I cringed, imagining myself asking random people on the street for an entranceway to the Shadow world. Definitely not an option. In hindsight, it would have been both smarter and more efficient to start with searching Nana’s room, considering I hadn’t even surveyed the scene since the incident.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. A small part of me still worried that I’d see Nana in the corner of her room, lying there...

  I shook my head. I’d better grab my stuff quickly and get a start on the search. Nana wasn’t here, but she could be in trouble.

  Tears almost slipped out when I realized Nana had left my bedroom exactly as I remembered, but I forced away the memory of her seeing me off the college. I wondered how many things she’d hidden from me by then.

  A black-and-white photo of a younger-me and Nana with an orchard in the background caught my eye. The photo sat on my desk without a speck of dust. We’d just picked some apples that day and asked someone to take the photo of us with our buckets. I remembered little before and after the picking, but it was hot, and we laughed a lot about the funny-looking, lumpy apples I’d picked.

  I carefully slipped the old photograph out of its frame and folded it neatly before tucking it into my wallet. If I looked at it for a second longer, more tears would threaten to pour out. But I wanted a piece of Nana with me.

  Most of my things were still in boxes because we got good at only opening the ones with stuff we needed or stuff that held sentimental value. Nana said everyone needed two things in life: stuff to help us survive, and stuff that gave our lives meaning. Without passion, there was no point in living. That’s why I wanted to carry her with me; I had a feeling that survival was going to be high on my list of priorities for the foreseeable future.

  Steeling my heart for the sight, I peered into Nana’s room. A breath of bittersweet relief escaped when I saw that Nana’s body was still nowhere to be found. If she wasn’t dead here, she might be alive somewhere.

  I couldn’t think that way. Nana had to be alive. She had to. No ifs, mights, or maybes. She was.