Electric

by Stokes, Tawny

  Electric

  by Tawny Stokes

  Published by Tawny Stokes, 2013.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  ELECTRIC

  First edition. August 28, 2013.

  Copyright © 2013 Tawny Stokes.

  Written by Tawny Stokes.

  Table of Contents

  ELECTRIC

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  To all my Wattpad fans. Without you this story would never have happened.

  I especially want to thank, Betsy, Katelyn, Julio, and Aditi for your incredible ideas and trusting me with them.

  ELECTRIC

  You can't out run the shadows....

  Back in Boise, Salem and Trevor try to find some normalcy. Salem goes back to school, hangs out with her friends, and gets an after school job. Trevor gets an apartment and a job and the two continue to date and see each other like normal teenagers. But they will soon learn you can't outrun your past.

  A teen girl is found dead in a dumpster. The exact same dumpster Salem had been left for dead in. It's no coincidence and the two find themselves face to face with Merlin who is out for revenge and will settle at nothing to find it.

  Chapter One

  When the dream came, I knew it was one instinctively, but it still felt as real as anything else in life. The dark was encompassing. It caressed me as if I’d been made from it. And I suppose I had been. I felt at home in it. So when I found myself in the deep dark, in the tunnel of a shadow-way I wasn’t afraid. I’d traveled them so often.

  Not until I saw the empty glass-like coffin, that is.

  My heart hammered in my throat, and my hands shook so bad I stuffed them into my jacket pocket. Thankfully in this dream I was wearing one. Each step I took toward the coffin made me more nervous, more afraid, but I couldn’t stop my legs from lifting and setting down, moving me forward, ever closer to doom.

  I remember looking around for Trevor. Hoping he was nearby. But I was alone. As I often was in my dreams. Especially dreams about them and him.

  I kept walking until I was standing right next to the box made of ice and looking inside. He was there. Lying there like a corpse in his dark blue robes. This time he didn’t clutch the sword. I did. I looked down at it in my hand, and tested the weight of it.

  It was his sword of course. Excalibur. The sword given to him by the Lady of the Lake. And I’d taken it from him months ago so I could kill the members of the band Malice before they killed me and Trevor. They had already tried and failed to kill me once. I hadn’t wanted to give them a second chance.

  So I had snuck down into the shadow-ways, found the coffin made of ice, broke it open and took the famous sword. The only thing that would kill a cambion. And he was the granddaddy of all cambions. The stronger and fiercest of us all.

  This time when he opened his eyes and spoke, “Niviane.” I was ready for him.

  I hefted the sword over my head and brought it down. But the blade didn’t cut through Merlin the magician, the druid, the first cambion, but through me. For I was lying in the coffin, eyes wide, and the sword imbedded in my gut.

  I jolted awake, and as per usual when I was in any kind of distress, I had floated up to the ceiling and was now glued to it. This was a common occurrence for me since being turned into a cambion months earlier. Trevor had been working on controlling it with me, and I’d gotten much better especially when I was aware and conscious. But when I slept, I was vulnerable to the new powers I’d developed.

  “Trevor,” I whispered, not wanting to wake my mom, but knowing he would hear me. We were psychically linked since we were both of the same species now.

  While I waited for him to show up through a shadow in my room, I dog paddled through the air to the window so I could pull myself down by my curtains. I was half way down when I realized that Trevor wasn’t coming.

  I grabbed onto my desk and yanked hard. It was enough of a force to break the air bonds keeping me afloat, and I fell to the ground, landing on my knees again. I had a bad habit of that and I had the constant bruises to prove it.

  Slowly, I got to my feet and slumped back into my bed wishing Trevor had shown up. In the past he’d cuddle in bed with me and stroke my hair until I fell asleep again. Lately, though, he hadn’t been popping in when I called. I had an urge to dissolve into a shadow-way and travel to his apartment. But I wouldn’t. I always feared I’d pop in at the wrong time and catch him doing something, or someone, that I didn’t want to see.

  I’d been worrying lately that I’d become too clingy. Hard not to do considering I’d been raped, turned into something inhuman, been kidnapped and then killed two other cambions. Mind you, they had tried to kill me and Trevor first, so I figured it had been justified. Trevor had saved me then. So yeah, I might’ve been clinging to him for dear life. I just felt better, safer, when he was around.

  “Trevor,” I murmured again into my pillow.

  The shadow near my bed undulated, then he emerged, his dark hair sticking up in every direction. I told him he needed a haircut, but he liked his out of control mess. I secretly did too. I liked running my hands through it.

  “Are you all right?” he sat on my bed next to me.

  I nodded. “Bad dream again, and I was on the ceiling.”

  “You got down okay, right?”

  “Yeah, but damn it I’m sick of floating around all the time. What if my mom had heard me and come into my room?”

  “Then you’d have to finally tell her the truth about everything.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, you don’t...,”

  His eyes darkened and I knew I’d made a mistake.

  I reached for his hand. “I’m sorry, that was stupid to say.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  But I did worry about it. Trevor had lost everything when the members of Malice came rocking into his life. He’d been seduced by the four member band as I had and turned by the only female member, Devon. Then he’d been forced to flee his home after his twin sister had been killed by Thane, the lead singer, and Trevor had been blamed for it. He’d had nothing and no one when I’d met him. I knew I couldn’t replace his family but I’d hoped that I had something to do with his relative happiness now.

  I pulled him closer to cuddle with me. He didn’t resist. He opened up his arm and I nuzzled into the crook of his arm and chest. I sighed into him as he played with the ends of my hair.

  “Was it Merlin again?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” I snuggled in closer to him. Just thinking about the old world cambion gave me the shivers. “It’s the same one from before. He’s in the coffin and I have the sword and when I swing down its me in the coffin with the sword in my gut.”

  “It’s just your fear of him that’s all.” He stroked my hair. “It’s only been a few months Sale, since all of this happened. You’re still trying to work it out.”

  “Yeah maybe.” I looked up at his face. “But what if it’s more than that? What if he’s trying to mind meld me?”

  “Mind meld?” he smirked.

  “Yeah, you know, how Voldemort and Harry were linked by their minds.”

  He poked me in the side, where he knew I was the most ticklish. “You are no Harry Potter.”

  Laughing, I sat up and tried to tickle him back, but he didn’t have any
ticklish spots. So basically I just ended up lying on top of him, grabbing random chunks of him. He didn’t really have many chunks, Trevor was a lean mean fighting machine. It was just an excuse to touch him.

  When I looked down at him, I stopped laughing. He was looking pretty intensely at me. His breathing was a bit labored as well. Mine too as a matter-of-fact. Trevor never failed to make my heart pound and my breath catch in my throat. He was just that beautiful to me.

  He reached up and brushed a stray hair from my cheek. I had a lot of stray hairs, but still the gesture squeezed my heart just a little bit more. I leaned down to his mouth and pressed my lips to his.

  It was a sweet kiss, nothing too heavy. We’d been having problems with our making out. We hadn’t quite figured out to do it without sucking the life out of each other. This was the curse of being a cambion. The tendency to want to draw the life from another person. The urge to do so, constantly gnawed at my insides. But I’d been getting better at keeping that part of me at bay. Especially when kissing Trevor.

  Sometimes I would suck a little life out of him, but he didn’t mind. He knew I needed it to feel remotely human. Which I guess was an oxymoron, considering neither of us would ever be fully human again. But I had to feed. And he knew it, so he let me do it to him now and again to help me keep the urges at bay.

  Because we hadn’t quite figured out the kissing part, we hadn’t even thought about having sex. Well, we’d thought about it. At least I had, a lot. I wanted to be with him. I knew it would be beautiful and loving and mind-blowing, but also understood that I had no idea what it would do to either of us. I was sure that cambions had sex, I just didn’t know how. And there was no research on it either. Believe me, I scoured the internet for any inkling of information. There was none.

  Trevor pulled back. He always did. He was stronger than me. “Sale. You know we can’t.”

  “I know,” I sighed, then kissed his chin. “But I want to.”

  “I do too.”

  And I knew he did. His body definitely responded to mine. It brought a thrill to me to know that he had these reactions.

  I kissed him again. I couldn’t help myself. He was too tempting to deny another taste.

  While our lips were locked, he rolled me over onto my back. He pulled back and looked down at me. His eyes had gone full black, and I knew he was aroused. The longing in them made my belly clench. God, I wanted him so much. It wasn’t fair that we couldn’t be with each other in the way we wanted. It was just one more thing Thane had ripped from both of us. If I could’ve killed him all over again, I would’ve without hesitation this time.

  “One day we’ll figure this out.”

  I smiled up at him. “I know. It just sucks.”

  He tapped the end of my nose with his finger. “Yeah, it sucks.”

  A sound just outside my bedroom door had me bucking him off. “My mom. Get under the bed.”

  Trevor rolled off me and dropped to the floor.

  My door opened and my mom, her newly purpled pixie hair standing straight up, shuffled in. “What are you doing?”

  “I had a bad dream.”

  “I thought I heard voices. Who were you talking to?”

  “No one. Just myself. Trying to talk myself down.”

  She eyed me for another moment, then yawned. “Okay, baby doll. Go back to sleep.”

  “I will, Mom. Night.”

  She turned to leave, then rubbed at her eyes. “Night Trevor.” She went out the room and shut the door.

  He popped back up. “How does she always know?”

  I shrugged. “I think she has super powers.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me.”

  I grabbed his hand again. “Will you wait until I go to sleep again?” I cringed at the desperation in my voice.

  He smiled. “Sure.”

  I slipped down under the covers, and he climbed onto the bed beside me. I rolled onto my side, snuggling into him. He stroked my hair and I closed my eyes.

  I tried to think of good things instead of Merlin and the rest of the Malice band members who had escaped before we could kill them. I also tried not to think about school the next day either. That wasn’t as bad as being hunted by homicidal demons but it was damn close. High school was a hell in its own right.

  Chapter Two

  I yawned again as Chloe and Jamie found me waiting at the bottom of the school stairs for them. Chloe hugged me as was her way. Jamie, on the other hand, just smiled and nodded. He was having a more difficult time accepting me back into the fold since my unhinged attack on him.

  It wasn’t really an attack in my mind. I just tried to suck out his life force after he’d been so awesome about coming to pick me up in the middle of the night all those months ago when I was just starting to turn. My powers had just started kicking in and I didn’t have a handle on them. In fact, I didn’t even know I possessed them really. I didn’t know much of anything at that time.

  When I returned home and saw him for the first time, he said he’d forgiven me. But I witnessed it in his eyes. He didn’t trust me one iota. I didn’t blame him really, as some days I had a hard time trusting myself. Every day was work trying to control my urges.

  “You look like crap,” Chloe said as she wrapped her arm around mine. “Didn’t you sleep again?”

  I shook my head. “Nightmares.”

  “Maybe you should talk to someone about them.”

  “Oh yeah, I can see talking to Mr. Greer the guidance counselor. Oh by the way I’m not sleeping because I’m dreaming about Merlin the magician and some demons I killed a few months back.”

  She laughed. “You never know he might give you some great drugs to help with that.”

  “The last thing Salem needs is drugs.”

  We both turned and looked at Jamie. A serious and intense look pinched his narrow face. He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Well it’s true.”

  “Dude, I was totally kidding.” Chloe shook her head. “When did you get so serious?”

  He didn’t answer, and he didn’t look at her or me either. He hefted his backpack higher on his shoulder and started up the stairs.

  “He’s never going to forgive me.”

  Chloe rubbed my back. “Give him more time, Sale. He’ll come around. The three of us will be friends forever. Nothing’s going to change that, not even your, ah, condition.”

  I turned slightly and threw my arms around her. I hugged her close. Chloe had been completely unflinching when I returned home. Even after I told her that I was now a cambion, a half succubus, half human monster who wanted nothing more than to suck the life force out of people. She just told me no one was perfect and hugged me tight. I loved her for that.

  “Maybe his new ‘friend’ will help him relax.” She air quoted friend.

  “Does he have a new girlfriend?”

  “I think so. He won’t tell me who though. Keeps telling me to mind my own vagina.”

  I laughed. That totally sounded like a Jamie come back. It warmed me a little to know that he hadn’t changed that much in my absence.

  Arm in arm, we went up the stairs. Everyone else pretty much gave us a wide birth. Although I’d been exonerated from any wrongdoing with putting Josh into a coma, the students at Boise High were still afraid of me. It bothered me a little. I didn’t want to be some monster that was whispered about in the dark. I didn’t want to become a Bloody Mary legend where stupid drunk teens whispered my name into a mirror scared shitless that I was going to pop out of it and slice their throats open.

  When we reached the doors, the plastic posse, including their silicone injected leader, Heather, gasped with their tiny little cupid bow mouths and jumped out of the way and let us go on in first. Okay, maybe being a frightening monster had some perks even if it was just scaring the living shit out of the local bitches.

  Chloe opened the door and I was about to go in, when an icy tendril zigzagged down my back. I stopped and turned to look around. Was there a storm coming? I co
uld feel electricity in the air. But when I looked up there wasn’t a dark cloud in the sky.

  “Are you okay?” Chloe asked. “You’re paler than normal.”

  I shook off the trepidation and nodded. “I’m fine. Let’s go get educated.”

  But as I went through the door I wasn’t fine. A sense of ominous dread filled my gut and it churned and roiled and I thought I was going to get sick. Something was wrong. Like when black storm clouds roll in and sink the world into darkness, this was the feeling that settled over me.

  After school I needed to put in my hours at my job at the book store. Obviously, I’d lost my job at the coffee house since I disappeared for a couple of weeks without notice when I went to Seattle with Trevor and planned to kill the members of Malice. The owner did give me a nice reference though, but only after I practically glamoured him with my cambion powers. Which I wasn’t necessarily proud of.

  I liked working at the book store. It was quieter and not nearly as busy. It gave me time to be still. Since turning I needed those tranquil moments more. To tame the wildness swirling inside. It was getting easier over time, but I definitely did struggle.

  For the most of my shift I picked up the books and magazines lying around that people took out, read for a bit then discarded and re-shelved them. Sometimes it was more like a library in here than an actual store. I was surprised the owner broke even some days.

  I did my rounds through the store, then to the little area where there were tables and chairs and cheap coffee and pop. I picked up a variety of books off the tables. A few of the latest bestsellers, including one I kept meaning to read, a couple of books on screenwriting, and one book about the history of sex. It was an eclectic mix. Often when I was picking them up and shelving them, I would try and match the books to the people I saw sitting at the tables. But I skipped on guessing the one about sex. I really didn’t want to know who had been browsing those pages.

  I stacked the books on my little cart, and then collected the random newspapers to put them back in the free pile. And that’s when I saw the headline from today’s paper. DEAD TEEN GIRL FOUND IN DUMPSTER. And there was a picture of a green BFI bin in a back alley. A bin and alley that looked all too familiar.