by Ada Adams
Or was I? Was my theory about Aurora wrong? Just moments ago, I was sprinting to the Scarlet House, thinking that she was going to be here, but I had clearly been wrong about that. What else was I wrong about? Did Aurora even exist?
She had to exist, I told myself, because if she didn’t, that meant…
I pushed the conflicting thoughts out of my head. Aurora—real or not—wasn’t my biggest concern right now. I needed to stay focused on the task at hand, regardless of how confusing it appeared to be.
“I didn’t hurt Lena,” I repeated, but my voice wavered.
Charlotte was still holding the gun out of Sophie’s sight, but she placed her unarmed hand on the tiny girl’s shoulder. “Your beloved friend tried to kill Lena because she was jealous. She wanted Sebastian all for herself and that lovesick, bubbly redhead was getting in her way. Ask Lena, if you don’t believe me. Oh, wait…you can’t. Because she fled from Angel Creek. Fled from the very same girl you seem to have placed on some impossibly high golden pedestal.”
Sophie’s dark eyes widened in surprise, but she quickly regained control of her emotions. “I know Dawn,” she told Charlotte. “If she says that she didn’t do anything, then I believe her.”
Charlotte feigned distress. “You know me too, Soph.” She reached out to touch Sophie’s cheek, raking her nails across her skin.
“Sophie, please come here,” I said, my voice taking on a more frantic tone. “There’s something wrong with Charlotte.”
I wanted to go as far to say that Charlotte was the villainous puppet-master behind the Born kidnappings, but it made no sense. Charlotte, the frightened little bird we’d rescued from the house in Lisbeth Grove; Charlotte, the weak vampire who couldn’t even go out in the daylight; Charlotte, the innocent girl Sophie vouched for with all her heart.
Why did she have a gun in her hand? How did she know about what happened between Lena and me? Why was she trying to turn Sophie against me? What was her agenda?
None of it made sense.
“Dawn’s the only villain here,” Charlotte whimpered, grabbing onto Sophie’s arm. She placed a blood-bullet gun in Sophie’s hand, then cowered behind her. “She hurt Lena, and now she’s trying to do the same to me. Please don’t let her, Soph.”
Sophie’s hand shook as she clutched the gun to her side.
“Soph…” Charlotte’s eyes welled with tears. I had to give it to her, she was delivering an award-winning performance. “If you truly love me—and I know that you do—please protect me.”
“Sophie, I would never intentionally harm any of you.” I held out my hand to her. “You and the team are my best friends, the only group of individuals in this crazy world that I care about. I would never lie to you. And that’s something that Charlotte has been doing for a very long time. Ever since we took her in.” As the words escaped my lips, they boomeranged back to me.
Charlotte had been playing a sick twisted game with us ever since we took her in.
Sophie took a small step toward me.
“No, Soph!” Charlotte stuck to Sophie’s back. “Don’t listen to her lies! If you really care about me—”
“Oh, drop the act. No one’s buying it,” I lashed out at Charlotte. Withdrawing my dagger, I lunged toward her. “I don’t know what you’re playing at but next time I advise that you leave my friends out of it!”
A wicked smile spread across Charlotte’s face. “Don’t worry, I’m quite capable of taking care of things on my own,” she said “I just despise getting messy.”
She snapped her eyes shut, and when she opened them again, I felt the dagger in my hand tremble. It vibrated, fighting my grip, until I could no longer hold onto it. It dislodged from my grasp, soaring through the air towards Charlotte’s outstretched hand. She caught it, releasing a loud gasp as her forta gave way.
Stunned by the display, Sophie also gasped. “Char! How did you do that?”
“I’ve been saving up my power for this very moment,” Charlotte said, panting. She narrowed her eyes at me, slicing the air between us with her malicious glare. “I’ve been searching for you for nineteen years, Dawn. Nineteen years of living as a weak little thing, nineteen years of being pathetic and fragile, just so that I could savor this very moment.”
Nineteen years?
I was now certain that I had been transported into an alternate dimension—some surreal reality. Charlotte, a girl I had no connection to whatsoever had apparently been searching for me since my birth. Why? How? Nothing made any sense. Nothing, except the obvious—I had to get Sophie out of her way.
“Sophie, come here!” I pleaded, closing in on the duo.
“Sophie is staying.” Charlotte wrapped her arm around Sophie, pressing the dagger against her heart. “Spoiler alert: in the end, my little Sophie always does whatever I want.” She nicked the lace of Sophie’s dress, chuckling as Sophie cried out. “She’s been in love with me since the day we met. She can’t bear to live without me. Right, Soph?” With her free hand, Charlotte yanked Sophie’s jaw, turning Sophie’s head as she pushed her lips into her cheek.
Sophie flinched. “I’m…done,” she whispered through gritted her teeth. Then, gaining control over her voice, she said, “I’m done being your puppet.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them away as she slammed her heel down on Charlotte’s foot. Charlotte’s eyes widened and she released her grasp. Sophie followed up with an elbow to Charlotte’s jaw.
“You don’t know how to be your own person,” Charlotte snarled, grimacing at the pain. “You’ll forever be my meek, little shadow.” She used the back of her hand to wipe away the blood trickling down her lip.
Sophie aimed the gun at Charlotte’s chest. “For as long as I could remember, you were my world, Char. But things change, people change. I don’t need you. I have friends who treat me better than you’ve ever treated me. I have Dawn. I have Seth and Brooke and Hunter. And most importantly, I have myself. Maybe people think that I’m a meek little shadow, but I don’t care. Those that matter know better. I know better.”
“Ugh.” With an exaggerated sigh and another blink of her eyes, Charlotte forced the gun from Sophie’s hand. The weapon hung in mid-air, firing off two shots in Sophie’s direction. I lunged forward, pushing Sophie out of the way. The first bullet missed me, but the second embedded deep in my arm. As I fought to regain my balance, the weapon clattered to the ground, bouncing once before settling on the hardwood floor.
Charlotte grabbed hold of Sophie, pressing the dagger into her stomach. “This really didn’t have to be so bloody if you’d just listened to me, Soph.”
“Leave her alone!” I yelled, fighting dizziness. “Take me instead.”
For a brief second, Charlotte forgot about the dagger. “That was my intent from the beginning,” she told me sharply. “If only you weren’t so hard to take, life for your friends could have been so much easier.”
“Why are you doing all this?” I wanted to know, but I also just needed to keep her talking. The more she focused on me, the less attention she paid to Sophie. My eyes connected with Sophie’s, silently begging her to run. I turned back to Charlotte. “What do you want from me?”
“Your forta.”
I froze upon hearing those words. “I don’t know what you mean.” I looked over at Sophie, motioning for her to inch to the right.
“Your forta,” Charlotte repeated. “The one you don’t have? I want it.”
“If I don’t have one, how could I give it to you?” Move, Sophie, move!
“It’s now your turn to drop the act, Dawn,” Charlotte shot me a cold, calculated smile. “You have the power to heal—everything and everyone. You brought Lena back from the brink of death.”
The poisonous blood was quickly spreading through my arm, affecting my vision. I focused on blocking out the pain. From the corner of my eye, I watched Sophie escape Charlotte’s grasp.
“I need to you heal me,” Charlotte said. “I’m tired of being sick. I wan
t to be strong. Powerful. The way I was supposed to be.”
“You’re trying to get me to help you, by threatening my friend?” I asked. “Not the most clever approach, I have to say.”
Sophie was now halfway across the room. Soon, she was going to be in the clear, and I could pounce on Charlotte. Run! I motioned with my head. She sprinted toward the door, just as it swung open.
“I’m not threatening your friend,” Charlotte spat as I lunged toward her. “I’m threatening all of your friends.”
I pulled back mid-strike, turning to follow her gaze. Surrounded by nine rogues, Hunter, Brooke, and Seth were marched through the door. On top of their formal attire, each wore a vest strapped with explosives.
“They spiked our drinks with vamp blood,” Brooke slurred. “They poisoned everyone at the party.”
“They also threatened to blow up the Scarlet House if we didn’t surrender willingly,” Hunter mumbled, his words distorted from the effect of the poison.
The foreign blood in my own veins had spread to every corner of my body. It only was my sheer determination to protect the team that kept me from collapsing.
“I already said that I’ll surrender to you,” I told Charlotte. “Let them go.”
She chucked. “You’re not in a position to bargain anymore. If only you and your little minions followed the rules in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Back at the house in Lisbeth Grove,” I said as more things fell into place. “It was all a setup from the start, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. My body may be weak, but I’m quite—”
“A cunning brat, as Hunter would say,” Brooke shot, scowling in pain. “Seth has another b-word that would be very fitting for you.”
Charlotte nodded to one of the guards by Brooke’s side, and he slapped her across the cheek with the back of his hand. I winced as Brooke groaned and bit down on her bloodied lip.
I placed myself between Charlotte and the team. “Okay, you won. You got me. Now let them go.”
“I’m no longer interested in letting anyone go,” Charlotte snarled. “Like I said, they really made me work for this. If they’d followed my instructions and hadn’t accompanied you to Lisbeth Grove, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”
I desperately wanted to get to Charlotte—I could take her down in one strike, I was sure of it—but the fact that the lives of my friends lay in the hands of her rogue underlings, rendered me helpless. Right now, our only hope for survival was to play to Charlotte’s vanity and keep her talking.
“That was a smart ploy,” I told her. “You pretended to be one of the captured Born when you realized that your rogue guards had been defeated.”
She scowled. “I had to cut my own wrists. That wasn’t in my plan. I’ve already told you how much I hate messes.”
“You came back to me…you moved in with Dawn…was this all some kind of a twisted game at our expense?” Sophie whispered as two rogue vamps strapped an explosive vest to her body.
“It was a perfect ploy to get close to Dawn,” Charlotte told her. “The girl is impossible to entrap. We sent our rogue weres to Angel Creek to capture her, but they were defeated; the ambush after the funeral we blackmailed Twitbrook into organizing failed—in case you weren’t aware, your president is a useless idiot; the attack in Lisbeth Grove was supposed to be our saving grace, but then you all had to come along and ruin the plan.” She stared down at Sophie. “I simply couldn’t rely on the stupidity of others anymore. I had to take matters into my own hands. And what better way to do that than to infiltrate your little group of losers?” Charlotte’s blue eyes flashed in anger as she turned her attention back to me. “I have to say, I thought it would be easier than this. But you were never alone. Always surrounded by one of your little admirers.” She nodded her head toward the team, then brought her attention back to me. “I couldn’t take you on, so I moved in and bided my time, seeking out the perfect opportunity to pounce, trying to turn your little cult against you. Too bad they never faltered.”
“You said that you’ve been after me for nineteen years. How did you find out about me?” I asked.
How had Charlotte found out about the forta even I hadn’t known I possessed until mere weeks ago?
“I suppose it was serendipity,” she said, her cold tone taking on a hint of sorrow. “Almost a century ago, when I lost my daughter, I was going through a very dark time. I blamed myself for the miscarriage and hated my body for it. After all, if it hadn’t been so faulty in the first place, my little girl would have lived.” The sorrow vanished and her voice was once again as cold as ice. “I hated being so weak and helpless...I knew I had to do something drastic. I embarked on a crusade in search of a cure for my condition. I practically lived in underground vamp hospitals, underwent countless painful experiments, only to have nothing at all to show for it!”
“Then, nineteen years ago, while in yet another hospital, I signed up for a medical treatment that was being conducted by Carl Jacques. The procedure was supposed to alleviate some of my symptoms—the weakness and fatigue, especially—but, as always, it failed.” She scowled.
“Disappointed that his treatment wasn’t successful, Dr. Jacques dumped me on another scientist at a nearby research facility. Amelia Summers was a big-shot back then, working on a secret cloning experiment.”
Oh, no…
“She was burning through suitable surrogate candidates and needed to find more Born vampires to take part in the procedure.”
No, no, no, no, no!
“Since it was a top-secret project, the money offered was very lucrative. At that point, I’d burned through most of my inheritance and needed more funds to continue paying for my treatments, so the opportunity was an appealing one. Since I was a Born who hadn’t carried her own child to term, Dr. Summers was skeptical that I could be a good candidate, but it turned out that I was the answer to their prayers. After losing my own daughter, my body was stuck in some unnatural biological limbo, neither a fully transformed Born, nor a newbie one. So I became pregnant with a baby vamp clone.”
Oh, God…
I tried to keep down the sharp stinging in my chest, pushing all of my emotions deep into the pit of my stomach.
“Immediately something incredible occurred. During those months, I was the healthiest I’d ever been. I had so much strength and energy. I don’t suppose you’d know what it feels like to go from being so weak to suddenly having it all.” A pained smile flashed across her lips. “I could use my forta, even my sun allergy was gone. It was like the baby was nourishing me from the inside, healing all of my flaws. When it was time for the birth, things got complicated. I wasn’t awake for the delivery, but I had flashes of the procedure. Things went wrong. Very, very wrong. Just as I was drifting away forever, something miraculous happened. The baby’s blood healed me, filling me with a surge of life and power. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. At the same time, it was everything I’d been searching for. After that moment, I knew what I had to do.”
“What?” Sophie gasped as she began to hyperventilate. I didn’t turn around, but I could hear her dry heaving in the background.
“I decided to take the baby,” Charlotte told her. “I wanted to raise her as my own until she was old enough to heal my maladies.”
“But you didn’t take the baby,” I said, knowing full well that I was the child she was referring to.
Charlotte’s face twisted into an angry grimace. “I took the wrong baby. You weren’t supposed to have a twin. Dr. Summers had kept that little piece of information a secret from me during the entire course of my pregnancy.”
My chest felt like someone had plunged a knife into it, twisting it around and around until there was nothing left. Finding out that I was Aurora’s clone was one of the most painful moments of my life. Finding out that I had a twin was a shock I was still struggling to comprehend. Finding out that my surrogate wanted to kidnap me so that she could drain my blood an
d use me as a personal healing machine wasn’t painful at all. At this point, the knife had already carved out my insides, leaving me too numb to feel.
“The explosion in the lab…” I recalled Amelia’s story.
Charlotte smirked. “I staged our death and fled the country. I settled in England, named the little girl Maya, and got ready to reap my rewards. But at age ten, the child began to insist that I call her Aurora. Life went on, though I can’t say that I was the best mom in the world. After all, I was raising her so that I could drain her.”
My mind flashed to the gruesome scene at the slaughterhouse. “What did you do to her?”
“I suppose I wasn’t exactly the Mother of the Year,” she snapped. “I drained her frequently in an attempt to extract whatever healing power I thought she possessed. When she was fourteen, she rebelled, forcing me to stop. That’s when I realized that she could glamour…and couldn’t heal.”
Sophie dropped to the floor and began to gag. I ignored the revolting sound, trying to keep my own stomach from betraying me.
“This summer something odd happened to Aurora,” Charlotte continued. “Her memories suddenly came back. All of them. All the way from the eighteen hundreds. She began to experience a connection with another girl; one who was very much alive. That’s when things finally clicked for me. Two months ago, I set out in search of Aurora’s twin. The girl with the healing power. You,” she said. “When I was at the hospital under Dr. Summers’ watch, everything about the cloning operation was classified information. I didn’t know who the babies belonged to so I had very little to go on.”
Listening to Charlotte was like being stuck in limbo. My brain was telling me that I needed to find a way to rescue the team and escape, but my heart forced me to stay glued in place and listen to her every word. I needed to know. Each sentence she uttered was slowly connecting the threads of my past, solving the mystery that surrounded my entire existence.
“Aurora’s memories aided me in my search for you,” Charlotte explained. “She figured out that she was President Alastair’s daughter. She knew that she belonged at the Scarlet House. She even went as far as to approach her father at the election yacht party, but she came back early, muttering spiteful things about being replaced by his new daughter.”