Leesa repeated the breathing part, which was becoming more and more natural for her. When she was ready, she focused her eyes and thoughts on the light brown wall above her bed. She picked out one of the many small imperfections in the paint and concentrated all her thoughts on that tiny spot. She noticed how it was slightly raised, and that it seemed just a shade lighter than the section of wall around it. The outline was irregular, looking a little bit like…
“Well done,” Dominic said from behind her.
“Huh? Why did you stop me?” She turned to face him. “I was just getting started.”
“You were way beyond started,” Dominic said, smiling. “You were there.”
Leesa’s brow furrowed. “Really? How can you tell? You were behind me.”
“Your vibrations slow and soften when you reach the proper state,” Dominic said. “Plus, you didn’t move a muscle for over five minutes. I don’t need to be a wizard to see that.”
Leesa smiled, pleased with her success.
“I just focused on a little bump in the paint,” she explained. “Nothing else, just everything I could notice about it.”
“That’s the trick,” Dominic said. “Just like when your eyes are closed and you pick an insignificant sensation to focus on. Now try it again, looking at me this time. Don’t look at my face—that will come later. Look at my shirt. Pick out something in the material.”
Leesa went through her breathing again, then searched Dominic’s shirt for something to concentrate on. She found a tiny pulled thread on his right side and focused on that.
After a moment, her eyes began to slide up toward Dominic’s face, but she forced them back to the protruding thread. She tried to imagine she was examining it under a microscope, noting every miniscule detail. It was fascinating, how many things you could notice about a single thread.
“Well done, again,” Dominic said.
Leesa blinked, startled by his voice. Just like the last time, she felt as if she had barely begun. She must be getting pretty good at this, she thought.
“Don’t get cocky,” Dominic said, as if he was once again reading her mind.
“Are you sure you can’t read my mind?” Leesa asked, blushing slightly.
“Your mind, no. But I can read your face. You looked pretty smug.” Dominic’s voice took on a serious tone. “Beware the sin of pride. A little pride in oneself is good, but too much can be dangerous—very dangerous.”
“Sorry,” Leesa said. “I guess maybe I was feeling just a little bit too pleased with myself.”
Dominic smiled. “Yes, especially since you have not yet done this successfully while looking at my face…or with a battle raging around you.”
With a battle ranging around me? Leesa could not even begin to imagine that. What kind of battle was he talking about? Magical battle scenes from Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings movies began to fill her head. She pushed them away. Baby steps, she told herself. She was still only at the very beginning of her journey. There was a long way to go before she had to worry about any battles. At least she hoped there was.
“Let me try doing it looking at your face again,” she said.
Dominic nodded, so she launched into her breathing again. When she was ready, she focused on the pupil of his right eye. It was smooth and black, with a tiny pinprick of reflected light just to the left of center. His pupil seemed to grow ever so slightly larger while she watched, but she refused to let herself speculate why. She simply noted the change and continued her study. It was no longer a wizard’s pupil, it was just a tiny black dot, slightly convex.
Suddenly, Dominic’s eye narrowed. Leesa’s gaze slipped up to his now wrinkled brow. What had upset him, she wondered? She hoped it wasn’t anything she had done.
And just like that, her concentration was broken.
“Gotcha,” Dominic said, grinning.
Leesa couldn’t help smiling. He had tricked her. He wasn’t upset about anything—he had simply wanted to distract her. And it had worked.
She tried not to be too disappointed. Baby steps, she reminded herself again.
Dominic stepped over near the small sink protruding from Leesa’s wall.
“Come try it over here,” he said.
Leesa limped over beside the wizard. He nodded toward the mirror above the sink.
“Try it looking at that,” he said.
Leesa stared at herself in the mirror. She had never been very comfortable with her looks, despite the compliments she got from other people. She knew people admired her long blonde hair and her startlingly blue eyes, but she had never possessed the confidence necessary to fully appreciate her appearance. Her dysfunctional upbringing had seen to that. Her bad leg hadn’t helped, either. She was getting much better—it was hard not to feel good about yourself when someone as gorgeous as Rave looked at you so lovingly—but it didn’t take much to bring the shy and insecure little girl inside her to the surface.
“You haven’t even started your breathing,” Dominic said. He looked at Leesa’s reflection. “What do you see when you look there?”
Leesa took a deep breath. “I see a semi-confident young woman… and a very nervous little girl.”
“Hmmm…. Do you know what I see, Leesa? I see a very brave and very beautiful young woman. But I can only go by what I’ve seen and heard the past few days. I wasn’t there to see the little girl. I wish I had been.”
“You might not have liked her,” Leesa said softly. Sometimes, she didn’t like her either.
“Oh, I doubt that. Anyone who could grow up to become the remarkable young woman standing here beside me, I’m pretty sure I would have liked.”
Leesa smiled. She turned and looked at the wizard. “Thank you, Dominic.”
Dominic returned her smile. “Perhaps the mirror can wait for another day,” he said.
Leesa shook her head. “No, not yet. I may not be ready to reach everywhere/nowhere here yet, but I want to at least try the breathing part.”
Dominic stepped back, removing his reflection from the mirror. “Go ahead then.”
Leesa stared into the glass, trying to focus on the woman she was today, the one with an amazing boyfriend, a family who loved her, and a very cool best friend. She began to inhale deeply, counting to three before exhaling equally slowly. Next she did four and then five, all the while looking at her reflection. When she reached eight, she worked her way back down to three.
Totally relaxed now, she stared into her own eyes. She wasn’t ready to move on to part two just yet, but she promised her reflection she soon would be.
She turned away from the mirror.
Dominic gave her a single nod of approval. “Nicely done.”
Leesa smiled. “Let me do it with your shirt again,” she said.
Dominic smiled. “Be my guest.”
12. FEEDING
That same evening, Jarubu and Melissa reached the outskirts of the Hartford area. They had fed the night before, up near Springfield, but they were both feeling hungry again. Jarubu had noticed he felt stronger and more powerful since drinking Josef’s foul blood. His thirst also seemed to have grown more powerful than normal.
The farther south they went, the deeper the snow had become. In southern Vermont and Massachusetts, it had finally become deep enough to be an obstacle even for a vampire. They had been forced to leave the cover of the woods and travel in the open along the shoulders of the roadways, which slowed their pace considerably. Whenever there were no cars or buildings in sight, they moved at vampire speed, but when there was any chance they could be seen, they slowed to a walk.
Melissa possessed some slight familiarity with Connecticut. She had lived here with her husband more than one hundred and fifty years ago. He had gone off to fight with a Connecticut regiment in the Civil War, leaving his young wife behind. A marauding vampire had come across Melissa, alone in her home. Enamored with her beauty, he had decided to turn her rather than merely feast on her blood. When her husband returned from t
he war, his wife was long gone, happily roaming New England with her vampire master. Her master was long gone now, having been trapped and burned by a vengeful mob. Melissa had escaped to the north, where she had eventually fallen in with Maier and his coven.
Much had changed in a hundred and fifty years, of course, but the general lay of the land would be the same.
“South will be more populated than west or east,” she told Jarubu. “It’s much less hilly. Perhaps we should slake our thirst somewhere to the west or east before we continue south.”
Jarubu thought for a moment. He felt so invincible since drinking Josef’s blood he thought it hardly mattered where they fed, but a part of him recognized the wisdom in Melissa’s words. He planned to take up temporary residence in a more populated area, where they could feed whenever they so desired, but it made sense to satisfy their thirst one more time in a place where their handiwork would be less likely to be noticed.
“Very well—west it is, then,” he said. “But not far. Just until we feed.”
It did not take long to find what they wanted. The old, two-story wooden house sat a few hundred feet back from the road in the middle of a large, isolated lot. Lights shone from two windows on the ground floor. The rest of the house was dark. A long driveway led to a detached garage. The plowed drive provided easy access to the side of the house without leaving footprints in the fresh snow.
Jarubu and Melissa moved silently up the driveway, stopping alongside a dark window. Jarubu listened carefully and sniffed the air.
“Perfect,” he said. “There are two humans inside.”
Melissa understood immediately what Jarubu meant. With only two humans here, there would be no chance someone else would have time to raise an alarm when the vampires attacked. The ready availability of almost instant communication via cell phones and the internet was something that had become necessary to plan for in the last few decades.
They walked up to the front door and listened carefully once more. The muted sounds of a television reached their keen ears through the walls.
“Both humans are in the room to the right,” Jarubu said. “Are you ready?”
Melissa nodded yes, her eyes bright with anticipation of the coming meal.
Jarubu placed both his palms against the heavy wooden door. He gave a quick shove and the door gave way easily before his vampire strength. The two vampires swept in through the doorway.
The middle-aged couple inside barely had time to notice the door flying inward before Jarubu and Melissa were upon them, fangs sinking deep into their throats. The vampires drank greedily, but forced themselves to stop when the bodies were only half drained. They let the corpses fall to the floor.
“Break a few things and grab his wallet and her jewelry,” Jarubu instructed. “Make it look like they were robbed.”
Melissa smashed the glass coffee table with her hand and upended a small table beside the couch while Jarubu went to the kitchen and returned with a long knife. Kneeling beside the bodies, he slashed each of their throats into a bloody mess, obliterating the bite marks.
“Good enough,” he said. He hoisted the bodies effortlessly, carrying one over each shoulder. “We’ll bury them in the snow bank beside the driveway. When they are finally found, the human authorities can puzzle over what happened to the rest of their blood.”
Less than ten minutes after they arrived, Melissa and Jarubu walked back down the driveway. They had turned off all the lights in the house and propped the broken door back into place. From the road in the darkness, nothing looked amiss. By the time anyone discovered what had happened here, they would be long gone.
13. A PLEASANT SURPRISE
Saturday morning, Dominic did not take off his jacket when he entered Leesa’s room. Instead, he told her to grab her coat.
“We’re going for a ride,” he said.
“Where to?” Leesa asked as she pulled her parka from its hook in the closet.
“West,” Dominic replied. “We are going to try something new today, so I think it’s a good idea to do it far away from here.”
Leesa wondered what Dominic had planned for her. They had spent a few hours yesterday refining her everywhere/nowhere technique and she was becoming pretty good at it. Near the end of her session she even managed to complete the technique while looking Dominic in the eye, which was a major breakthrough. She still hadn’t been able to do it staring at her reflection in the mirror, though. She was pretty sure that was going to require a lot more work, and a bit more self-esteem, too.
Heading down the stairs, Dominic handed Leesa the keys to the Blazer. As they had agreed, she would drive any time they were together. Leesa did not get to drive very often, so she was very happy with the arrangement.
Outside, the sun was shining brightly, reflecting off the snow with an almost blinding glare. Leesa shaded her eyes with her hand as they walked to the Blazer, parked at the curb a short distance from the dorm. It wasn’t too cold out, so she didn’t bother zipping up her parka.
When she got into the car and switched on the ignition, classical music spilled from the radio, an orchestra symphony of some kind. Leesa had no idea who the music was by, but she kind of liked it. She guessed this was the kind of music Dominic had enjoyed a long time ago back in Europe and was glad he had been able to find a classical music station. She hadn’t even known there was one in the area.
“It’s Franz Liszt,” Dominic told her. “I had the pleasure of watching him conduct this very symphony once, many, many years ago.”
“Cool,” Leesa said. She wondered if a couple hundred years from now she would be casually telling someone she’d had the pleasure of hearing Coldplay perform. Somehow, she doubted it.
“Head toward Meriden,” Dominic told her, “and then get on the 691.”
Leesa drove slowly through campus, where the narrow roads had been further narrowed by the piles of plowed snow piled against the curbs. Once she turned onto highway 66 she was able to drive at a more reasonable speed. Traffic was light and they made good time.
As they neared Meriden, she was tempted to swing by and say hello to her Aunt Janet and Uncle Ralph, but decided against it. She hadn’t told anyone in her family about Dominic yet, and had not figured out how she was going to introduce him. Besides, she didn’t know how far they were going and how much Dominic had planned for her to do, so she didn’t know if they could spare the time.
Interstate 691 was completely free of snow and ice. Traffic was moving freely at sixty-five miles per hour. Leesa tried to remember the last time she had driven this fast and realized it had been almost a year ago, back in San Diego. The Blazer rode pretty smoothly, and she enjoyed driving it, perched higher above the road than she was used to. Now and then they crossed wide puddles formed from melted snow streaming across the pavement. Leesa knew the water would freeze into sheets of ice at night, making driving treacherous, but right now it was no big deal, other than when cars in front of her spattered her windshield, making it necessary for her to use the windshield washer. The wiper blades were in good condition and did a good job cleaning the window. She guessed that Walt had replaced them prior to selling the Blazer.
At Dominic’s instruction, she merged onto 84 West. After an hour or so of driving, they crossed the border into New York state. Leesa wondered how much farther they were going, and why Dominic was familiar with this area, as he seemed to be.
They followed another interstate south for twenty miles or so and then Dominic told her to exit onto a local highway. He guided her through a couple more turns, until she saw a sign for Whippoorwill Ridge Park.
“Pull in here,” Dominic told her.
“How on earth do you know about his place?” Leesa asked as she swung into the tree-filled park. They were more than an hour and a half from Middletown.
“I’ve been exploring places where we could work. I don’t sleep much, so I’ve got lots of free time. Turn here.” He indicated a small parking area to the left.
; As she turned into the empty lot, Leesa thought her eyes were playing tricks on her—but what a wonderful trick it was. Sitting on a large gray boulder, smiling and waving to her, was Rave!
He was wearing his black and white flannel shirt and black jeans. He looked amazing, as always.
Leesa almost fell as she scrambled out of the car and raced toward him. He got up off the rock just in time for her to leap into his arms and wrap her legs around his waist.
“What are you doing here?” she asked breathlessly. “How did you even know?”
Rave slipped his hands beneath Leesa’s thighs to support her weight. “Dominic told me yesterday and gave me directions. Traveling in the middle of the night by the less travelled roads let me get here without being noticed.”
Leesa squeezed him tight. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
“I told you, a hundred mile jog is nothing if you’re at the end of it.”
Leesa kissed him on the cheek then twisted her head around toward Dominic, who had joined them. “Thank you!”
“It never hurts to have a little added protection around, just in case,” Dominic said. “Besides, Rave will be a good test for you. Let’s see if you can do everywhere/nowhere when you are distracted by him.”
Leesa had not been expecting that. Could she possibly do it while looking at Rave’s handsome face? Dominic was right, she thought. That would be a really good test.
“You’d better put me down, Rave.”
Rave looked at Dominic, who shook his head.
“Do it right where you are now,” Dominic said to Leesa.
Leesa’s eyes grew wide. “You’re kidding, right?” No way was she going to try this with her legs wrapped around Rave’s waist and his face mere inches from hers. She could feel his heart beating against her chest and smell his sweet warm breath. This was crazy. She could barely even remember her name when he held her like this, much less do anything as difficult as everywhere/nowhere.
Helpless (Blue Fire Saga) Page 8