“I get it!” I said in exasperation.
“If they do find us,” Adrian said, “we’ll need to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. If they start hunting us, it’ll be safer for us in our homeland than here.”
“Easier to hide,” Arisella pointed out.
“Also, there are Beastbourn in Fallyre who we might be able to take refuge with.” Adrian’s expression turned thoughtful, and I could see him contemplating the idea in his head.
“But I live here,” I reminded them. “I have a sister and a brother.” And Dylan, now, I realized.
A pained look passed over Arisella’s face. “And if the Bloodbourn find you here, they’d kill your family just as easily as they’d kill you. By coming with us, you’d only be protecting them.”
I closed my eyes and released a tense breath. As much as I hated to acknowledge it, everything she was saying made sense – sort of.
“But we only intend to leave if the Bloodbourn find us, or if it becomes too dangerous to stay,” Adrian clarified, optimism hovering in his voice. Arisella glanced at her brother peculiarly.
“I might as well start preparing,” I sighed.
“Actually, you might as well go home.” Arisella created a miniscule crack in the tightly sealed shutters and peeped outside. No light fought through the tiny opening.
I cursed under my breath. “It’s already dark? My brother is going to kill me.” That was only an exaggeration though. My brother never punished me. He barely even scolded me. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; I just assumed that he felt uncomfortable with taking the role of my father figure. Dylan, on the other hand, might be motivated to kill me for disappearing two nights in a row. He was completely comfortable with letting me know when I was doing something irresponsible and stupid.
I hopped up off the bed so quickly that I almost tipped the glass over on the nightstand. “You’re done telling me the important stuff, right?”
“Mostly,” Adrian said. “You’re free to go.” He rose from the bed with me and handed me my bag.
“Thanks for the permission,” I muttered as I left the room. I had no idea what time it was, and I couldn’t believe they had kept me trapped in their house until nightfall.
The house had been laid out exactly like mine, so I didn’t have much trouble finding the front door. I fled through the halls so quickly – and impolitely – that I didn’t expect anyone to take the energy to follow me out.
When I reached the front door, I turned around to call out a brusque farewell, only to find myself standing face-to-face with Adrian.
“Bye.” The air whooshed out of my mouth in a surprised squeak, rather than the confident, pissed way I’d been planning.
Adrian cocked his head to one side and looked at me. He seemed slightly puzzled by my angry expression. “We just told you that an entire race of people is out to kill you, and you’re completely fine with walking alone at night?”
“I live right next door. Literally,” I breathed in disbelief. I looked behind him to see if Arisella had chosen to tag along. Thankfully, she was nowhere in sight.
“You can never be too careful.” Adrian swung open the front door to reveal the cool, dark night. Not a trace of sunlight was left in the sky; the only spots of brightness in the sea of gloom were the occasional streetlight, faintly flickering stars, and the softly glowing moon. “After you.” He gestured to the driveway.
I gingerly made my way down the crumbling cement steps, cautious not to twist an ankle or let an overgrown shrub curl itself around my leg. When I glanced back, I thought I could see Adrian smirking. Of course, he had no trouble maneuvering his death trap of a dying driveway.
Now that Adrian wasn’t dragging me around like a stuffed animal, I mentally noted how broken and worn the front gate was. I was surprised the entire thing didn’t just fall over when Adrian pulled it open.
I was so concentrated on getting home with as much speed and dignity as possible, that we managed to get to the gate of my house without talking at all.
“So,” I said, trying to alleviate the awkwardness. “Tomorrow morning I should stop by, right?”
“Right,” Adrian said. “Just try not to do anything… risky until then.”
What trouble did he expect me to get into at night? I rolled my eyes. “You know me. I’m a thrill seeker.”
“Also, don’t tell anyone a word of what we told you today,” Adrian said urgently. “Not even your family, no matter how much you trust them. That would create too many problems for us, not to mention compromise our safety.”
“I know, I know.” I bounced up and down on my toes restlessly.
“We’ll be watching you more closely from now on.” I could feel Adrian’s icy eyes tracing my anxious expression.
His fair skin stood out against the shadows of the night, which only made me more frustratingly conscious of his presence. For a second, I stopped caring about how late it was and where I should be going. As I stared back at the flawless dark-haired boy, I felt my brain piece together a key realization.
In that moment, I was suddenly aware of the fact that Adrian could kill me, if he wanted to, and that as a Bloodbourn, he should have wanted to. It probably would have been easier for him to let his sister kill me. After all, I would have been less of a risk to them if I weren’t alive to arouse suspicions.
But they had chosen not to kill me, and that meant something. They trusted me with their lives, and I trusted them with mine. We barely even knew each other, and yet our existences had already become so intertwined.
I trembled slightly, and came back to my senses.
“Right, bye,” I said.
I unlocked my gate and went inside. I turned around to wave, just so I could have an excuse to look back.
Adrian was still watching me as I went in.
Chapter Fifteen
“Guys, I’m alive. No one call the police!” I shouted, as I burst in through the front doors. I swiftly unwound the bandage from around my wrist before anyone could notice it. The white dressing was more conspicuous than the cut, and I didn’t need my siblings asking too many questions. But while I hid the dressing in my bag, I noticed my wrist bore no traces of a wound.
Huh. How strange.
“Amber!” Heather wasted no time flying into my arms, effectively breaking my train of thought.
Matt appeared in the corridor behind her. “Got lost in the woods again?”
“No. I was with the neighbors, actually,” I clarified apologetically. “We must have lost track of time. I’m really sorry for coming home so late again.”
Just as I was about to dive into a long, last-minute apology that I had prepared between the gate and the door, I realized that my siblings didn’t look nearly as irritated as they should have been. I held my tongue and waited for one of them to speak.
Matt only shrugged. “You’re not that late. It’s only seven-thirty.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I had thought it was much, much later than that.
“Although we decided we’d officially start panicking at eight,” Heather informed me as she detached herself from my side.
“So, you aren’t angry?” I asked hesitantly.
“Well, we were a little worried when you didn’t come home and refused to answer your phone,” Matt confessed. “But you have a terrible habit of not answering your phone when you’re out, and it’s before curfew, so we technically shouldn’t be angry.”
My lips curved into a thankful smile. If my mother were the one waiting at home, she would have spent the next five hours thoroughly letting me know how disappointed I’d made her, and she wouldn’t have been satisfied until I’d apologized at least a dozen times. I wasn’t happy my parents were gone, but I was grateful that my brother was the one who had stepped up to take care of us.
“Dylan, on the other hand,” Heather said, “we’re more worried about. He said he was going to go look for you. And that was two hours ago. We haven’t heard from him since.”
My rel
ief instantly disappeared, along with the feeling in my stomach. “Did he say where he was going?”
“He just took off into the woods.” I could see the worry in Matt’s face. “He could be anywhere right now. He left so quickly, I don’t think he realized he forgot his phone in his bag.”
“Am I the only one who actually uses her phone?” Heather muttered.
I sucked in a sharp breath.
If he really did believe what I had told him last night, he would still be in the woods looking for me. There was nowhere else that he would have thought to search for me, because lately the only two places where I really existed were my school and home. I knew what I had to do. The only problem was that, after my most recent “panic attack,” there was no way Matt would let me do it.
“He’s probably fine.” I struggled to make my relaxed façade seem convincing.
Heather looked at me sympathetically. “Don’t worry, Amber. We’ll start looking for him now.”
“No!” I blurted, a little too adamantly.
Heather eyed me suspiciously. Dylan stumbling all alone through the woods with sadistic monsters was bad enough; adding Heather and Matt to the mix would only make matters worse.
“Give him a while. Night fell quickly. It must have taken him by surprise, that’s all.”
“We can give him thirty minutes, I guess,” Matt suggested warily.
“That sounds good,” I said without thinking. I rushed toward the stairs. “I’m going to... shower and take a nap.”
The disbelief stood out in Matt’s eyes. I shouldn’t have been surprised; since when did people take naps when their best friends were missing?
“It’s been a really exhausting day,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie.
Matt hesitated but made a small nod. “We’ll let you know if we hear anything.”
“Thanks,” I smiled widely at him. I really should have said, “Thanks for your slightly irresponsible but fully appreciated hands-off parenting style.”
I flew up to my room and deposited my bag onto the floor with a noisy bang, as if I thought that the more noise I made, the less suspicious my siblings would be. I moved with the frenzied speed that made my hands tremble, which really worked against me as I struggled to stuff my phone into my pocket after dropping it three times. When all signs of movement in the house had dissipated, I seized the opportunity to sneak downstairs and out to the backyard, back into the chill arms of the night.
I never thought I would voluntarily enter these woods again, not after nearly – I gulped – being eaten the night before. Yet here I was, wandering past the same bare trees. I was no less afraid than I had been the last time; if anything, my surroundings seemed even more menacing than I had remembered.
Everything cast endless, contorted shadows upon the decomposing leaves that coated the earth. It struck me that the elongated shadows looked almost like arms clawing out of graves. I shuddered. My own imagination frightened me, the way it could take the horrors of my reality and distort them into something even worse.
I traveled along the stream, knowing that as long as I walked with the current, it would be nearly impossible for me to get lost. I searched the mud for any sign that someone had been there, but, unfortunately, finding Dylan wouldn’t be as easy as following a trail of footprints in the dirt. After ten minutes, I still had found no trace of Dylan, but that was mostly due to my pitiful survival skills. I wasn’t even sure what signs I should have been looking for.
I cursed under my breath for forgetting to bring a flashlight. I would have used the weak light from my phone, but I knew it was almost out of battery, so I deemed the glow of the moon sufficient to illuminate my way.
“DYLAN!” I screamed, once the house was no longer in view. “DYLAN, YOU IMPULSIVE, DIMWITTED MORON!” My earsplitting yells only amplified the eerie silence of the night. I continued to shout his name, angry that he had so willingly chosen to go running into the woods that I was so desperate to run out of. I knew that Adrian had said that the caeci weren’t supposed to be dangerous to humans, but I couldn’t help but think that a nice, tall, confused teenager might look appetizing to a starving demon surviving off a scanty population of rabbits.
My tired feet carried me farther than I thought I had ever gone before. As I walked along the bank of the glinting black stream, the soft dirt below one of my feet fell through. I stumbled forward, managing to keep myself from falling face-first into the mud. Dazed, my eyes glazed over the site where I had stopped.
Something about it looked familiar. I crouched down to examine the unusual compressions in the mud and marks that looked like the tread of sneakers. My sneakers.
My eyes widened in realization. This was the place where the caecus demon had attacked me. I jolted into a standing position, my pulse pounding against my veins. Against my better sense, I forced my trepidation from my mind and continued forward. Any danger that I was in, Dylan might be in as well.
“Dylan?” I called quietly into the night.
Immediately after I had spoken, something behind me cracked. I snapped around, my eyes straining to see anything in the blackness. The cracking became louder, and I recognized the sound of leaves being stepped on. Whatever it was, it was big, and it was coming closer. And I couldn’t tell what it was at all.
My body began to quiver, as my muscles contracted painfully in a way that I had only experienced twice before. However, this time, I knew what was happening, and I didn’t fight it. I crouched on the ground as I had seen Arisella do, waiting for the change to overtake me. This time, whatever appeared in front of me, I would be prepared to face it.
I watched a tall patch of ferns a few yards ahead of me bend back, and a feral hiss escaped my lips, surprising me. Physically, I hadn’t changed into anything yet, but mentally I was already beginning the transition.
For a moment, the shrubs became still, and I thought whatever it was had gone. But the shrubs started moving again, and I watched a tall human-like shadow emerge from between them.
I lowered myself closer to the ground and released another warning growl. To my surprise, the invader tripped backwards, landing promptly on its behind. It appeared to be frantically crawling away from me.
In some savage way this entertained me, and I, curious to see what it was, approached it. But as I came closer, I recognized the familiar brown hair, the sweet cologne that suffocated my sense of smell on a daily basis.
“Dylan!” I cried. I raised myself from my animal crouch.
“Stay back.” His voice quavered.
“Dylan, Dylan, be still.” I moved toward him slowly, holding my arms to my side to show that I had nonviolent intentions. “It’s Amber. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Amber?” He moved tentatively forward, like he wanted to see my face more clearly. “It can’t be,” he whispered. “It didn’t look like her; it didn’t sound like her.”
He started to crawl away. I would have to convince him who I was quickly, without actually telling him the truth.
“Stop being silly, Dylan. Now you’re the one having the panic attacks.” I knelt next to him so he could see my face. “Do I look like Amber?”
“Before, you didn’t.” Dylan was subtly trying to squirm away.
“What about now?” Impatience colored my voice.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Do I sound like Amber?”
“Yes.”
“And would anyone but Amber know that on the first day of elementary school, you accidentally went into the girls’ bathroom?”
Even in the dark, I could see the blood rush to Dylan’s face. “I thought you said you’d never bring that up again.”
I couldn’t help smirking. “Get up. Let’s go home. You were clearly delusional.”
He nodded and stood up, shaking. I patiently waited for his breathing to slow.
“I found you,” he grinned weakly.
“Actually, I found you,” I corrected. “I’ve been at the neighbors’ all aft
ernoon.”
Dylan’s jaw dropped. “The weird neighbors?”
I nodded.
“So, I’ve been lost in the wilderness like an idiot, while you were secretly hanging out at the house next door?” His voice was overflowing with disbelief.
“I wouldn’t say secretly… It was more of an accident, really.”
Dylan raised an eyebrow.
I sighed. I would have a multitude of questions to evade when we got home. “We need to run now. Can you run?”
“Yeah, but I’d prefer to walk.”
I groaned. Dylan’s mind was working a little too slowly for our situation. “Last night the cae— monster,” I caught myself at the last second, “pinned me against the mud right there.” I pointed to the compression in the mud. “You still want to walk?”
Dylan blanched. “No.”
“Wise decision.”
Chapter Sixteen
I turned my mother’s necklace over in my palms, while Dylan impatiently scuffed his shoes against the cement beside me.
“If you’re bored, you should go,” I told him for the fifth time.
I was sitting cross-legged in front of the neighbors’ sagging gate, scanning their yard for Adrian. I’d even gotten up early, hoping that I could meet Adrian before school without Dylan knowing. Of course, Dylan found out and insisted on stubbornly tagging along. Now I couldn’t get him to leave.
Dylan scowled. “I can wait.”
“It’s probably going to be very unexciting. Mindless small talk. Nauseating graciousness. You’ll never get those minutes of your life back.” I intentionally came off brusque. I felt a little guilty. I wasn’t trying to be rude; I just didn’t want to involve Dylan in my problems.
“I don’t understand why we’re here. One evening with the neighbors and suddenly you’re best friends?”
I sighed. “I try to become lifelong friends with all my neighbors. It’s like collecting souvenirs. You of all people should know that.”
“Really?” Dylan asked, slightly offended.
“Of course not.”
“Amber, who is this?” an audacious feminine voice called from behind us. My teeth clenched. Arisella. Why was she here?
Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) Page 11