The Stone of the Eklektos

by Britney Jackson

  Rose laughed, her bright blue eyes sparkling. “Yes, that’s a no.”

  “Okay, but just so you know, if I happen to encounter him, and my fist accidentally hits his face, it’s not my fault,” he said as he walked toward the fridge.

  She rolled her eyes. “Well, in that case, I should probably warn you that Ethan’s dad is the best lawyer in the state. He wouldn’t hesitate to sue you.”

  He opened the mini-fridge and grabbed another beer. “Not a problem for me. I imagine it’s difficult to file a lawsuit against someone who doesn’t exist.”

  “Oh. Right. Good point,” she said, frowning. She eyed the beer bottle with disapproval. “Uh…should you be drinking another beer before you drive?”

  His brows furrowed. “What does beer have to do with driving?”

  Rose scowled at him. “It’s against the law to drink and drive.”

  He shrugged. “It’s against the law to do half the shit I do.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Well, it’s also dangerous to drive while intoxicated, and I’m not letting you endanger us and other people by getting behind the wheel.”

  Kallias snorted, “You’re not going to let me?”

  “Don’t underestimate me,” she said, pointing her finger threateningly.

  He laughed. “Alcohol doesn’t intoxicate vampires, Rose.”

  She frowned. “Really?”

  He nodded. “Our metabolism works too fast. It doesn’t even affect us.”

  She scowled suspiciously. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” he chuckled. “Don’t you think I would know by now? Blood, on the other hand, can intoxicate us, as you saw at the diner.”

  “So, what is the point in drinking alcohol?” she asked curiously.

  His eyes darkened suddenly, flashing with that spark of hunger, as his gaze drifted down to her neck. “It burns the throat. Only a little, but it’s enough to distract me for just a moment from the constant fire in my throat. The hunger.”

  “Oh,” Rose said sympathetically.

  He popped the lid off of the bottle. “Your coffee is ready.”

  “Yay!” she sang, hopping off of the bed and dancing over to the counter.

  Kallias leaned against the wall, raising an eyebrow in amusement as she danced happily while stirring her coffee, her hips swaying from side to side.

  She turned with her coffee and almost ran directly into him. She cradled her coffee against her chest, glaring at him. “You almost made me spill it!”

  He laughed, “I didn’t do it. You’re the one off in your own little world.”

  Rose sipped her steaming cup of coffee, humming a classical tune. After several sips of her scalding, magical, caffeine-infused liquid, she suddenly remembered that he was standing there, watching her. “Do you want some?”

  He arched an eyebrow, a smirk playing at his lips. “Not of the coffee.”

  She scowled at the suggestive remark, but only for a moment, because then, the coffee passed through her lips again, melting away her irritation. She walked past him, making her way back to the bed, where she sunk down onto the mattress with her cup cradled in her hands. She glanced back up at him with a euphoric smile. “So…” she trailed off awkwardly. “Are you hungry?”

  His smirk grew. “Are you offering?” he asked, his gaze on her neck.

  Her eyes widened, and her hand flew to her neck, as if her small hand could somehow protect the pulsing carotid artery. “What? No! I just meant…”

  He pushed away from the wall and strode over to the nightstand beside the bed. “Relax. It was a joke,” he chuckled as he picked up the phone.

  “Hilarious,” she muttered, “especially the part that involves killing me.”

  Kallias held the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he thumbed through the phonebook, searching for a number. He flashed a playful grin at her and teased, “Even if I did feed from you, I probably wouldn’t kill you.”

  “You probably wouldn’t kill me,” she repeated. “How comforting.”

  He laughed as he dialed the number that he’d found in the phonebook.

  Rose leaned over the bed to peek at the book. “What are you doing?”

  “Ordering us a pizza,” he answered as the phone line rang several times.

  She leaned back against the headboard and smiled playfully at him. “You mean you can eat pizza? I thought vampires were afraid of garlic or something.”

  His brown eyes shifted toward her as he waited for someone to answer his phone call. “Hilarious,” he muttered, mimicking her sarcastic tone perfectly.

  Rose flashed a sarcastic smile at him. Then, she grabbed her novel from the nightstand. She flipped it open to her bookmarked page and started reading.

  —

  After she had been reading for a while, Kallias asked, “Did he die?”

  Startled, Rose glanced up at him. He leaned casually against the wall with his arms crossed, watching her read. “What? Who? Did who die?” she sputtered.

  “The protagonist of your book,” he answered. “The last I heard, you were worried because he was going to be skinned alive by some crazy serial killer.”

  She laughed. “Nah. They rarely kill main characters when the books are written in first-person. It’s too awkward. He did lose a finger, though.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s promising,” he joked.

  Rose set the book aside. “So, the garlic thing is a myth, too, huh?”

  “Of course it’s a myth,” he muttered. “Humans have this need to control things. That is how your kind deals with fear. Superstitions were born from that need for control. Humans can’t accept that bad things just happen, so they create myths about four-leaf clovers and rabbit feet and good luck charms, things that make them feel as if they can control what cannot be controlled. Vampires are powerful, horrific creatures. If we want to kill you, we will. Humans can’t stop us. In the past, many human cultures knew of our existence. They rarely got the details right, but they still knew that we were there, in the shadows, waiting to kill them. You can imagine the kind of fear that created. So, in order to cope with that fear, humans needed to believe they could protect themselves from us.”

  She nodded. “Hence the myths.”

  “Exactly,” Kallias said. “But I will admit that those myths are usually based on some form of reasoning, even if that reasoning is often misguided. For example, garlic does have a strong, unpleasant scent, and considering vampires have such sensitive olfactory senses, garlic is obviously not a pleasant scent for us. But it certainly doesn’t scare us away or repel us. I do like pizza, after all.”

  “And the myths about crosses and holy water?” she asked curiously.

  “Those originated with the Christian church when they hunted vampires during the eighteenth century. They believed vampires were demons, and I guess if that were true, then, perhaps holy water and crosses would repel us,” he said.

  “Vampires obviously aren’t demons,” Rose scoffed. “Demons were fallen angels. Before you were a vampire, you were a human, not an angel. And your human self—your soul, as they say—is still there. It’s just…different.”

  “It’s less than human,” Kallias muttered under his breath.

  He hadn’t meant for Rose to hear that, but she did. Her chest tightened at the bitter loathing laced in his voice. He obviously hated vampires, which, by extension, meant that he hated himself, too. “You’re wrong. You’re not less.”

  He looked at her, surprise lightening his eyes for just a moment before his face returned to that impassive mask. He continued, as if she hadn’t said anything, “A vampire is certainly a different creature from the human, a more animalistic creature and, in many ways, a more advanced creature, but no, we are not demons, if those even exist. The truth is that most of the weaknesses that humans believed that we had were just myths. Except for the sun, of course.”

  She nodded. “I can see how that might have been difficult for people to accept,” she admitted. “It’
s actually a pretty terrifying fact when you think about it: that there are powerful, attractive creatures with barely any weaknesses, hiding in the shadows, waiting to kill us, and there is nothing we can do about it.”

  “Exactly. The truth about vampires is that we are not glamorous or weak. We are humans’ worst nightmare in the most brilliant disguise,” Kallias stated.

  Rose stared at him for a moment, stilled by the sense of dread that twisted at her gut. She noticed that his expression had become wary and guarded, as if he were worried that she was afraid of him. She leaned back against the headboard and crossed her arms, smiling wryly. “You don’t sleep in a coffin. Your heart beats. You touch crosses. You eat garlic. And you don’t even speak with a fake Transylvanian accent. I hope you realize that you are ruining my childhood.”

  His lips twitched. “Your childhood consisted of corny horror stories?”

  A wistful look passed over her face. “Oh, I have always loved scary stories,” she told him with a smile. “Bram Stoker was like my Dr. Seuss.”

  He raised his eyebrow at her. “No wonder you’re so strange.”

  “I’m strange?” she countered. “You’re one to talk, vampire.”

  Kallias smiled. “Touché,” he chuckled.

  Rose sighed. “Please tell me that you at least have a cape.”

  He scowled at her. “Do I look like the kind of person who owns a cape?”

  “If I were a vampire, I’d totally wear a cape so that I could stand on top of a building with my cape blowing in the wind like Dracula or Batman,” she said.

  He snorted, “I imagine this is why people call you a geek, Rose.”

  She grimaced. “I know,” she sighed. “I can’t help it.”

  A smile tugged at his lips. “Good. I like that about you.”

  Her eyes widened at the unexpected compliment, but before she could respond to it, four knocks at the door of the hotel room interrupted her.

  Kallias straightened at the sound and sniffed. “It’s the pizza.”

  “Oh,” she sighed. She’d halfway expected it to be another vampire that wanted to kill her. She watched as Kallias pushed away from the wall and strode over to the door. He turned back toward her, his hand still on the doorknob.

  “Get your bags. Quickly,” he urged. “We’ll eat in the car.”

  Her worry returned with a vengeance. “Is something wrong?” she asked. The thunder outside seemed to punctuate her question, filling her with unease.

  “Not yet,” Kallias assured her. “But we shouldn’t stay here any longer.”

  —

  Rose watched the downpour of rain that cascaded down the car windows as Kallias drove. She wondered how he could even see through the opaque layer of water that constantly covered the windows. “Can I ask you another question?”

  Kallias scowled at her. Despite the storm that raged outside the car, he seemed to be completely at ease, one hand relaxed around the steering wheel and the other lying idly on the gearshift. “Rose, you have been asking questions nonstop for the last six hours. How could you possibly have any more questions?”

  “Just one more,” she pleaded, holding up one finger for emphasis.

  “That’s what you said two hours ago,” he muttered under his breath.

  Without waiting for an answer, she flipped open the notebook in her lap and straightened the reading glasses on her nose. Her pen poised above the paper, she asked, “Okay. So, you said you were in England during the 1500s, right?”

  “Something like that,” he grunted noncommittally.

  She frowned at him. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that I have been alive for 2,511 years,” he muttered, rolling his eyes at her. “Do you honestly think I know exactly where I was in any given year? After a few centuries, the years—and decades, even—began to blur together.”

  She sighed disappointedly. “Fine. Well, if you were in England during the 1500s like you originally said, my question is: Did you ever meet Shakespeare?”

  “No, Rose. I never met Shakespeare,” Kallias sighed, exasperated.

  She dropped her notebook in her lap and glared at him. “How could you not meet Shakespeare? He was such an important historical figure!”

  As he pulled the car to a stop behind the long line of traffic that was inching slowly along the wet Interstate, he turned to look at her, his eyebrows lifting. “Rose, I read minds. I don’t see the future. How could I have known that some raggedy playwright would become a famous historical figure?”

  “How do you know he was raggedy if you never met him?” she asked.

  “I glimpsed him when I fought a vampire outside his theatre,” he said.

  Her eyes lit up with excitement. “That is so awesome!”

  He laughed. “I didn’t meet Jesus either. You didn’t scold me for that.”

  “That’s because you already told me that you were in Africa during those years,” she reminded him. She flipped back several pages in her notebook and held it up for him. “See? It says right here that you lived in South Africa from 100 B.C. until 20 A.D. So, you couldn’t have possibly met him because you were nowhere near Nazareth, Jerusalem, Rome, or anywhere else that he went.”

  He scowled at her notebook. “You’re writing down everything I say?”

  Rose shrugged. “I’m a Type A personality.”

  He chuckled at her and turned his gaze back toward the road as the traffic began to move again, still barely crawling across the partially flooded Interstate.

  Rose scribbled something in the notebook and then flipped to another page. “And in the 1600s, you were in France. So, my question about that is…”

  “Rose! You said one more question!” Kallias complained.

  She winced. “Well, yeah, but then I thought of another one.”

  “No,” he said. He snatched the notebook out of her lap and tossed it in the backseat. “You’ve reached your quota of questions for the next century.”

  “But I won’t even be alive a century from now,” she whined.

  He shrugged. “Then, I guess you’re done asking questions.”

  “You can’t stop me from asking questions,” she said stubbornly.

  “Fine. Ask, if you want,” he said easily. “But I won’t answer.”

  She stared straight ahead, glaring at the windshield for several moments. They’d been driving all night, only stopping occasionally at gas stations so that Rose could use the restroom and so that Kallias could fill the backseat with more snacks than she could ever eat. He’d also stopped at several fast food restaurants. Over the past two nights, Rose had realized that after all of his years of being a vampire, Kallias severely overestimated how much food a human needed to eat.

  She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It read: 3:27 A.M. She began to wonder if Kallias had overestimated how far he could drive in a thunderstorm. The sun would rise within the next few hours. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Rose,” he grunted. “That’s a question.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine. We are at a place of which I don’t know. Therefore, I hope that the rude, grumpy person, who happens to be sitting next to me right now, will tell me where we are. There. Now, it’s not a question.”

  He grinned. “We just crossed the New York state line.”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “So what are we doing for the rest of the ride?”

  He teased, “I think I’ve earned the right to question you relentlessly now.”

  Rose frowned. “But I’m not as interesting as you are.”

  “I find you extremely interesting,” Kallias stated.

  She blinked in shock. These compliments he kept throwing at her, all of the sudden, were completely blindsiding her. She waited for him to correct himself or add a “but” to that statement, but instead, he acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “You already know me better than anyone else.”

  This time, it was Kallias who looked stunned. He glanced at her. She exp
ected him to respond, but he didn’t, not at that moment, anyway. Instead, he turned his attention back toward the road. Then, after a while, he muttered, so quietly that she wasn’t sure if she’d heard him right, “I know what you mean.”

  Neither one of them spoke for a long time after that.

  Finally, Rose broke the silence. “I need to use your phone.”

  He glanced at her curiously. “Is something wrong?”

  “I just realized,” she said anxiously, “tomorrow is when Audrey was planning to come home. I need to warn her that Theron knows where we live.”

  He nodded. He shifted to one side so that he could remove his phone from the opposite pants pocket. He held out the phone to her, but when she started to take it from him, he pulled it back. He looked at her, his expression gravely serious. “Just promise me that you won’t tell her where you are.”

  She glared at him. “You can’t tell me what I can and can’t say.”

  He sighed. “Fine. Find another way to call her, then.”

  “Am I your prisoner now? Are you going to handcuff me?” she snarled.

  A smirk curved at his lips. “Only if you want me to,” he quipped.

  “Not funny,” she muttered. “Kallias, you can’t just order me around.”

  He sighed, a long, exasperated sigh. “Must you always be like this?”

  “Yeah. Apparently it’s my superpower,” she sassed.

  He suppressed a smile. “I know it seems like I’m just being an ass…”

  “Seems?” Rose interrupted.

  “But I am just trying to keep you alive,” he finished.

  “By not letting me call Audrey?” she asked skeptically.

  He sighed irritably. “I told you that you can call her. I want you to call her, but more than that, I want you to not get yourself killed. Theron knows everything about you. He knows where you live, where you work, where you attend classes… If he knows all of that, don’t you think he also knows about your friends? And if he wants to know where you are, who do you think he’ll ask first?”

  “Audrey is my best friend,” she said. “She’d never tell him where I am.”

  “You are so naïve,” he muttered bitterly. “Under the right circumstances, people will say anything. Even your best friend. Tell me. How long do you think your friend can handle utter agony before she answers a simple question? A few hours, maybe? Most humans don’t even last that long. And Theron won’t even be warming up by then. He will torture her for days, weeks, if necessary.”