I stared at her for a long moment as she regarded me coolly.
“Never the less,” she continued after a long moment of silence, “I felt you. Whether it can be explained or not, I was drawn to find you.”
“But what does it mean, Elle?” I whispered.
She shook her head, gestured with her hand as she shrugged. “Why does it have to mean anything? I have satisfied the need to find you, and now you’re here, helping me conquer my blood addiction.” She gazed up at me with dark, piercing eyes that hid everything in their depths. “And for that, I am…” Her eyes trailed down my face, down my neck, to my breasts, “most grateful,” she breathed.
That didn’t explain anything. There was so much more at work here than us, and she wasn’t taking that seriously at all. I stood quickly. I smoothed down my skirt, the anger rising in me just as quickly as the need that uncurled deep inside me, the center between my legs growing hot, but that need was quickly being eclipsed by anger. I was taking this seriously—why wasn’t she? “So that’s it?” I asked her, words sharp. “It doesn’t mean…anything?”
She shrugged. “You humans always try to put meaning to the smallest thing. You are very superstitious. You play the lottery because you had a dream about numbers, or you knock on wood because you don’t want to ‘jinx’ yourself. But the truth of the matter is that there is little to no meaning to the random events that happen in your life, and you affix meaning to these random events, because meaning makes you feel important.” She fixed me with a piercing gaze as I curled my hands into fists. “What could my being drawn to you possibly mean other than a random, though enjoyable, meeting between two people?”
Anger made the words tumble out of my mouth quickly, before I had any chance to consider them: “I don’t know, Elle. Maybe that we were meant to be together?” My voice was sharp, sarcastic, but I stood my ground, clenching and unclenching my hands into fists.
Her eyes narrowed as she stood, too, rising elegantly as she placed her hands on her hips, her head to the side as if she wasn’t certain I was being serious. “What? Like in soul mates?”
I waited a moment too long to answer, and that’s when it all began to go wrong.
Elle began to laugh in derision, her head thrown back, holding her stomach because she couldn’t stop, and waving her other hand.
“Oh, that’s marvelous,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. “Oh, that’s really too much.”
I stared at her in stunned silence.
“What…you mean like soul mates, don’t you? Like a happily ever after, true love, the kind of love that stands the test of time?” Her words were starting to become sharper, the laughter stopping, and the smile on her face fading from her features as she stared me down. “Oh, God, you really did think that. I can tell from your face.”
My cheeks were burning, and I was still so stunned that I couldn’t think of anything scathing as a retort. I could think of nothing to say at all, though I desperately searched for something, anything, to make her stop.
But she wouldn’t.
“As if I could fall for a human. As if I even believe that such a thing is possible. Because it is not, Cassandra,” she hissed. “Love is biological hormones created in a person for evolution’s sake. It has nothing to do with feelings or connections. There is no such thing as a connection between hearts or souls. That’s a fairy tale. A laughable, ridiculous fairy tale.” She was staring down at me with flashing eyes, her mouth contorted into an ugly sneer.
“But you felt it too—the connection,” I found myself whispering.
“I don’t pretend to have all the answers,” she told me in a cold, sharp voice, “but I know the type of blood I like, and I can sniff out the women who have it, and I know the type of woman I’m attracted to and want. You are just the last in a very, very, very long line—”
“Don’t,” I muttered.
“—of women that I have drained. That I have fucked—”
“Don’t,” I shouted.
“—and that I have left,” she finished with a snarl.
Hot, angry tears were pouring down my face, and as I stood there, I knew that throughout all of the pain I had been through in my life, somehow—in every day I had lived—I had never felt so hurt or harmed or empty.
“Dinner!” Alec sang out, entering the hallway with a steaming silver plate, heaped with several steaming steaks. He paused in the entryway of the hall, holding the tray in front of him with a stricken look on his face as he stared back and forth between us in silence.
For a long moment, none of us said anything. It was the type of terrible moment that you relive in your nightmares over and over again, and I had to stop it. So I said the only thing I could think of.
“You are despicable,” I whispered to her, then. Elle stood before me strong and tall and haughty, her head thrown back, her long, dirty blonde hair curling around her shoulders like a lion’s mane, and her eyes flashing with a dangerous darkness. But as I said the words, again the stony gaze on her flickered as something moved beneath it. As something else but cruelty rose within her.
But I didn’t wait to find out what it was. Acting utterly on instinct, I turned on my heel and I walked out of the dining room, down the hallway toward the first great room in the house. The room was as cold and dark as the grave, but I could still make out the mantel in the far corner, and I crossed the room, grabbing my purse off of that mantel, and I kept walking right past it, holding the purse close to me in white-knuckled hands.
The front door with its odd metal doorknob opened easily for me, sliding soundlessly into the wall as the night air rushed in around me.
And I walked right out of that front door of the house into the darkness of a sweltering May night.
And I kept going, my heart pounding inside of me, even as the tears began to fall. I walked with resolution as they streamed down my face, as the anger uncurled inside of me like a tight fist that’s been held too long, and I was filled with heavy, endless sadness, the tears hot against my skin.
I kept going.
Chapter 9: The Beautiful Betrayal
I kept looking over my shoulder—not to see if Elle or Alec were following me, but because the hair was standing up on the back of my neck, and all I could think about was the men from the other night, hunting me down, drinking me dry and then casually snapping my neck like it was a very small, dry twig.
It was obviously the dead of night, though I wasn’t sure what time it was. My smart phone had run out of battery, and I didn’t have the charger with me, and it wouldn’t even bother turning on to grab the time. I kept a brisk pace up, walking quickly down the sidewalk, and I kept taking deep breaths, willing my heart to stop trying to pound itself right out of my chest. I just needed to get home, I told myself. If I could make it home, everything would be all right.
After all, did I even know for certain that the men were really out there hunting me? That I mattered even a little bit to them? Who’s to say that their coming after me was anything other than a random act of violence? Elle was the one who had told me that they were after me, that they would never stop hunting me.
What if she’d lied?
I hadn’t considered the fact that she might have been less than truthful with me because from the very first moment that I met Elle, I’d trusted her. Hell, I’d been falling for her, falling hook, line and sinker. And what a joke that had been. All this time, we had been thinking very different things, wanting very different things from our time together. From our connection.
I sniffed and angrily dashed away the unending tears from under my eyes, sniffing again as I stared up at the pitch black sky with blurry vision. It must have been cloudy out—even in the depths of Boston between the skyscrapers, you could usually see at least one or two stars, but there wasn’t a single star in the sky that night.
An endless black sky suited my mood perfectly.
God, I’d been such an idiot. A beautiful, captivating woman comes out of nowhere,
and suddenly my guard that I’d spent my entire lifetime building had somehow come crashing down in a matter of moments and kisses. That wasn’t like me. I was better than this. I was more careful than this. But somehow, she’d gotten past all my safeguards. There had been something about Elle that had earned my almost instantaneous trust.
I hadn’t been careful with her.
God, I’d really been falling in love with her, hadn’t I? I dashed my tears away again angrily, taking deep breaths, but doing little to calm the waves of fury that radiated through me.
I was so angry. At myself. At Elle. At my stupidity in believing that there might actually be someone out there for me. All of my life, I’d dreamed of falling deeply and madly in love with someone who would love me unconditionally. I really didn’t have a big laundry list of requirements that she’d have to meet. I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to feel loved. That was it.
But Elle had made me feel so much more than that in the short time I’d known her. I’d never known it could really be like that, the sort of intense attraction and connection that made me feel so utterly bound to someone else that it was as if we shared one heart.
I took a deep breath that caught in my throat, and I swallowed. Maybe there was still someone meant for me out there. I couldn’t stop believing in that, no matter what.
But it was obvious that that someone certainly wasn’t going to be Elle.
But even as I thought that, my heart ached so terribly inside of me that I had to stop walking for a moment, taking deep breaths and covering my heart with a hand and pressing down hard against it, putting pressure against my ribs. The pressure didn’t stop the pain, but it gave me a chance to think for a long moment as I stared up at that pitch dark sky, visible between the skyscrapers surrounding me.
I tried to reason with myself, my lifelong go-to when everything was overwhelming and terrible. Okay, so I’d been an idiot. But that was all right. We’re all idiots sometimes, and if I’d been an idiot for love? Well then, there are worse reasons to make terrible decisions. I’d fallen hard for Elle, and she hadn’t returned that feeling. That was all right. I’d go home, take a nice, long shower and tomorrow morning, I would try to scrape the pieces of my life back together, try to rebuild it like it had been before Elle came sweeping in
I was so busy convincing myself of all of this that, for a moment, I could ignore the piercing ache in my heart. But it was only for a moment. And when that moment passed, the pain flared up so terribly that I caught my breath.
This wasn’t some random pain that was roaring through me. This was my connection to Elle, I could feel that. And our connection? It wasn’t based on the fact that I had a tasty blood type to Elle, or that she found me attractive and I found her attractive. This was something else entirely, something that went much deeper than superficial things like looks and blood.
I took a deep breath, bit my lip. But Elle didn’t see it that way, she didn’t see the connection between us as anything other than biological. So there was nothing I could do about it. I wasn’t going to waste precious days of my life trying to convince her of something that she found so utterly laughable like love or the connection between two people. She’d laughed at me in derision, and I wasn’t going to put myself out on the line like that again. I had better things to do than waste my life chasing after someone who didn’t feel the same way.
After all, I’d already done that once. I couldn’t do it again, no matter the profound connection between us.
The connection that Elle didn’t even really think existed.
I walked down the sidewalk, my heels clicking on the pavement. I pulled my shoulders back, kept my chin up, but as I walked, I kept my hand pressed over my heart. It ached so terribly, but it was a manageable ache now. Maybe if I just kept living my life and not thinking about Elle the ache would fade over time to nothing. Yes. I could do this.
As I walked along, the hair on the back of my neck kept standing to attention at the tiniest of things, like a cat moving in an alleyway, or a crosswalk making a beeping noise at me. I kept making little furtive glances over my shoulder, but there were only your run of the mill pedestrians out tonight, business men and women who’d had a nice night out on the town. I was in a more affluent business district, and I even saw a few police officers and a couple of squad cars rolling by, so I was feeling pretty confident by the time I reached the bus stop. I didn’t have to wait long for the next bus, and I paid my fare and I rode the bus until I reached a corner pretty close to my house. The bus had been well lit, and there weren’t that many people on it—and there was certainly no one on the bus with me who looked like a vampire.
By the time that I was walking down the sidewalk on my block toward my apartment building, I began to realize that I never should have listened to Elle. She’d probably lied to me. There was no one out hunting me. It was a normal, beautiful spring night out in Boston, and I was walking my normal route back to my normal apartment. Put into that context, it was almost a joke to think that four big, burly vampires were after me, hunting me and ready to drain me dry. On a night like this, it was almost impossible to even believe that vampires existed.
Adrenaline from my fight with Elle was moving through me too quickly, but despite the adrenaline and rampant feelings, I was begging to be able to look at this logically. And if I looked at it logically, it made much more sense that Elle would have lied about all of this to me. Why not? After all, if a woman that she wanted thought she couldn’t go out the front door, then how easy would it be for Elle to turn me a living blood bag.
A new wave of pain moved through me as I considered the very real possibility that perhaps she’d even been lying about all of that withdrawal stuff to seem more sympathetic.
Perhaps she’d been manipulating me from the very first moment we’d met.
God, the very thought was so hard, I could almost not think it. And it didn’t feel right at all, but what else could it have been? She said that the moment I stepped out of her front door that the vampires would be after me, and I’d seen nothing on my very long walk and bus ride back to my apartment. Now it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world that she’d been lying to me. That she’d been lying to me about everything. And that hurt so much.
All I could do was put one foot in front of the other and remind myself that my apartment was close. Because at this point, all I wanted to do was get home, sit down on my couch after that long, luxurious shower that I kept promising myself, and then cry until there were no more tears left in me.
I’d thought I was so much smarter than all of this.
And I’d been so wrong.
When I finally reached my apartment building, I was wound so tightly that probably no relaxing shower in the world was going to do me a bit of good. I entered the building, took the creaky, archaic elevator up to the tenth floor, and stumbled down the familiar, well-lit hallway like I was in a dream. Because that’s what this all seemed like, if I’m honest. A dream. The worn carpeting that was that very particular shade of hunter green, the fake paintings on the wall depicting large bowls of flowers. It was all familiar, but in that hazy sort of way that made it seem like I was still dreaming. And that the time I’d spent with Elle was when I was really awake.
But it didn’t matter anymore I told myself repeatedly. Because my time with Elle had come to a painful and abrupt end. It was all over.
I fumbled with my purse, trying to dig my keys out from the bottom of it, rooting around the brochures and Tic-Tac boxes and breath mint tins and tubes of lipstick, and then when my fingers finally brushed against my old Mickey Mouse key ring, I still fumbled trying to get the right key into the lock. My eyes were too tear-filled to really see very well, but I finally managed to stick the right key into the lock and turn it. I stumbled into my apartment and shut the cold metal door behind me, leaning against it with a sigh of resignation and letting the chill seep through my shirt’s fabric and into my skin.
I leaned against that door
and I took a deep breath.
And that’s when I realized that the lights in my apartment were all turned on.
When I’d left the apartment a few days ago, it had been broad daylight. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I hadn’t left a single light on, not even that tall one I’d found at an estate sale that I keep by the couch, the one I always leave on. I’d purposefully checked it, because my electric bill had been so high last month, and it had been turned off.
But now, down the hallway I could see it, blazing bright, along with all of my other lights.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up—had I been robbed?—until I heard:
“Babe, is that you?”
If the President of the United States had come around that corner from the living room wearing a cowboy hat and riding on a very small pony, I would not have been more shocked.
It was Josie.
Her long, blonde hair was up in a messy ponytail, and her long legs weren’t covered in the slightest. She was in one of my Red Sox t-shirts, the extra big one that I usually slept in, and blue panties, and it looked like I’d just gotten her up because her hair was all mussed, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup.
She stared at me with wide, beautiful blue eyes before her face lit up like she was a kid at Christmas, and Santa Claus had just walked through the door.
“Oh, baby!” she cried and ran down the hallway and threw herself onto me. I was already leaning against the door, but I let out a little “oof” as she wrapped her arms around my neck and then her warm, soft mouth was on mine, and she was kissing me.
Dark Angel Page 13