That might be how they wanted to deal with it, but that wasn’t going to fly with me. I couldn’t hang around Gi, acting as her friend and simply let it go on. At least Emerson had stood up for her, even if he’d broken Brett’s nose in the process. You couldn’t let shit like this slide.
Gi must have noticed the look of fury on my face.
‘You don’t need to get involved with this. It’s best if you just stay out of it,’ Gi warned.
‘Does Emerson stay out of it?’ I asked.
Gi couldn’t say no since he’d gotten detention because of his interference. She used that point against me – that he could have gotten a suspension and was lucky all he had ended up with was detention.
‘And has Emma ever gotten detention because of her bitchy ways?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ Gi said in a small voice.
‘Then you can’t expect me to just stand by if she starts her BS routine with you. Or starts on me because I’m friends with you or thinks we’re dating. I’m not really the no-detentions, church-going type who turns the other cheek.’
‘You’re not going to… do what you did to Brett to her, are you?’
‘If she doesn’t mess with us, she won’t have a problem.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘That’s not you telling me not to,’ I pointed out.
I told myself that if Gi was hanging out with Emerson, she was already putting herself in some form of relationship with Death. It wouldn’t hurt that I was her friend, too.
And maybe I could make a positive out of this whole not sticking to the shadows thing. Try my hand at socialising like Brianna had wanted me to. I mean, I was literally socialising with a group who called themselves “antisocial”, but it was still widening my crowd by four hundred percent (I wasn’t going to count Emerson).
If I could keep Emma from hounding Gi – that was all a positive, right? It meant that whilst I checked out Emerson, I wasn’t really using the AA Team as cover for vampire stalking, but actually participating in the friendship a little. I told myself that, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.
It took a while for the conversation to move away from the more serious topic of the BS Gi’d had to go through with Emma. But Gi was easy going in general and made talking easy, something which I’d always found difficult with strangers since I tended to be overly sarcastic and keep people at arm’s length.
‘What crowd were you in at your last school?’ Gi asked. ‘I don’t think we really have had much of a chance to talk about you,’ she said, apologetically. I knew she was hinting at the way Martha either monopolised the conversation or Jenny’s incessant debates about anything from TV shows to astronomy.
‘I’m fine with not talking about me,’ I said honestly.
Gi gave me a look that said she’d still like an answer. Part of me wanted to tell her. I wasn’t sure what about Gi it was, exactly, but she made you want to open up and please her. Not impress her or a twisted attraction like vamp-glamour, but something. But part of wanting to be her friend meant shielding her from the horror that was my shitty history.
I’d tried to have friends when I was younger – not fit into any “crowd” or clique, but just ordinary friendships. My foster homes had tainted most of those experiences. In a home, everything was a competition. Stealing, fighting, bullying. That’s not to say outside of the foster homes I didn’t occasionally venture into a friendship. I’d had a few friends but had never been able to form a real attachment. As soon as it seemed like I was about to – they disappeared. All it did was add to my theory that Death was a jealous guy.
The closest I’d come to “friends” were Ali and her gang – but since I only ever spent one week in person with them and spoke rarely via text or email, I wasn’t sure if that counted. It counted so little that Death hadn’t taken them from me, and I refused to admit it might be more in case he was let in on that secret. If Ali was my “crowd”, then how did I answer Gi: hacktivist secret keepers belonging to the Blood World…?
I’d never had a crowd and knew I never would. But once, for a brief moment, I’d had my person. He had been more than a friend. Friend wasn’t the right word for Christian. And he’d meant more to me than belonging to any crowd could.
I still recalled the first time I’d seen him, like it had happened only an hour before. I’d been fourteen, two months away from my fifteenth birthday, and had just moved into another group home. I’d walked down the hallway to my room and had passed by a half-open doorway. In it, Christian had been lying on his bed, looking up at the ceiling, tossing this ancient football up in the air and catching it again.
I’d only just finished putting my stuff away before our foster dad had started yelling at Christian for something. That much I couldn’t remember. I just remembered how loud it had been. So loud it had shaken the wall of my bedroom, that thin bit of plaster that separated my room from his. We’d developed a tapping code to talk to each other through that wall later on.
At the time, it had only been me, Christian and Audrey, a five-year-old, at the home. I used to think that’s why he’d come to me after the shouting had stopped, because he had no one else to hang with.
He’d breezed into my room, this devilishly messed-up, broken seventeen-year-old kid, and asked me if I wanted to head out. I’d accepted simply because I could see in his eyes how much he needed an escape. It was a look I saw in the mirror often enough. We’d headed to the arcade where we’d played games for hours. He wasn’t competitive, but he’d pretend that he was since it was clear I loved to win – but only if the other person cared that they lost. It had become our regular go-to over the months that followed. Our safe space whenever things got bad at the home.
‘Any friends you left behind?’ Gi asked again, rephrasing.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been a loner.’
I couldn’t help but feel the lump in my throat as I said that. Because if that had been true, if I’d not been selfish, Christian wouldn’t have… After Christian, I swore I would never be selfish enough to have friends again.
I smiled at Gi, asking whether she’d always gone to NR High School, changing the subject seamlessly.
This wasn’t like then, I told myself as I continued to play the normal role of a teenage girl talking to her friend. Death wouldn’t get jealous over the AA Team because he was already precariously standing by due to Emerson’s involvement in their life. It wasn’t me who introduced Death to them. This wouldn’t end badly. I wouldn’t let myself get as close as I had done to Christian. History would not repeat itself.
I might as well have said everything would be fine.
7
The next day, I decided to take a walk instead of joining the AA Team at church. Especially since Emerson would be there and joining them after the service. The last thing I needed was more questioning looks from Gi, pondering our relationship status from Jenny, general moodiness from Martha over how negative Emerson got around me and… well, actually, Robbie acted the same no matter what. He was oblivious to the Emerson/Liv drama.
The town was cold, grey and wet as usual as I walked through it. It’d been three weeks since I’d had the accident and, despite the scars and CAM boot, I felt like my body had returned to normal. Or had at least healed. Normal wasn’t the right word anymore.
Since I’d gotten off the pain medication, I was still having auditory hallucinations where things seemed impossibly loud. Also, moments when the world slowed down and it was like I was moving impossibly fast.
I’d Googled the symptoms. Apparently, I was suffering from anxiety. Probably was about time some mental health problems started rearing their ugly head. I’d suffered from panic attacks off and on – seemingly random things triggering me, but a general state of recurring anxiety was a new one for me. Acute stress induced apparently. Well, there was nothing cute about having three vampires in school reminding me of exactly how lonely I was in the world and how shit life could be.
Th
e fact my symptoms kept appearing around Emerson didn’t go unnoticed. I knew he was the cause of my anxiety. He made my heartbeat uncontrollably fast; my palms would get damp whenever he was around and my head felt so light it someone prodded it, it would no doubt burst like a bubble.
Since I’d broken into his car a few days ago, he’d been more bitchy than usual. Surprisingly, that didn’t lessen or increase my symptoms of anxiety. It was just an ever-present annoyance whenever Emerson was visibly near me. He either ignored me outright, ergo not spending lunch with us/pretending I didn’t exist in class (that I didn’t mind, it wasn’t too different from what we’d been doing before) or antagonised me for answers as to what I had been doing with his laptop. I really hoped his long lifespan had gifted him with endless patience, because hell would be more likely to freeze over than me admit what I’d been doing breaking into his car.
Whilst Ali had gotten all the information she needed to implant a bug into his software, she still hadn’t contacted me. I didn’t really expect her to. We rarely spoke to each other and she was insanely busy with the other parts of her life. Since she said she’d be sending Nowak over, I supposed I was likely going to get an update then.
That didn’t stop me from worrying over whether she’d known what I’d taken from Emerson’s computer. I didn’t know what her reaction would be if she did. Was there such a thing as classified information in the Blood World? Were Cassidy’s experiments a secret the Order didn’t want to get out? I understood they weren’t to be found by the general public, but what about people like me? The ones who worked on the in between? Not part of the cover up like Ali, but not unaware of the lamia’s world, either.
I also couldn’t help but wonder why Emerson had those files – how he’d gotten them.
I’d read the extent of the files on the first night and had referred back to them numerous times since. I wasn’t sure it was a reaction from going to sleep with those words and thoughts of vampires in my mind or what, but the dream of the Divine and war during the plague kept returning to me.
Since I’d put the paper and pen by the side of my bed last night, I’d taken my own advice and written down the details of the dream as soon as I woke up in the morning. As I’d written what I could remember from last night’s dream, bits and pieces from the previous nights had come back to me, as though jolted into recognition.
Some of the immune humans weren’t born in the plague times, but simply became aware of their immunity as the lamia weren’t able to stick to the shadows as much as they would have pre-plague. If they were immune, then their children would be, too. Like it was a dominant inherited factor (phrasings like that kept coming to my mind since I was reading Cassidy’s files).
The Mors Exercitus were the part of my dream that I struggled to recall as I woke from my sleep. The details disappeared quickly. They were a squadron made of less than twenty vampires, selected as they were about to turn eighteen (the age where they would make the choice). With one purpose in mind – to rid the world of those mortals immune to their glamour and venom – they were entirely ruthless.
Last night, I had seen them rip out the throats of the immune hunters with their bare teeth. Part of me almost wished I would go back to being haunted by my own parents’ deaths – simply because at least then I knew the horror I was about to witness.
I could only imagine that if these dreams continued it would only contribute to my rising anxiety around Emerson: seeing what a vampire was truly capable of if they wished to inflict harm. The extent of their blood thirst.
Because honestly, the more time I spent with him, the more normal he seemed. I knew it could all be an act, but whilst my dreams made me fear vampires more, Cassidy’s casefiles made me understand them on a biological level and see that besides their different genetics, their minds were the same as humans.
It was a very confusing and stressful time considering for the first time in my life I was now attempting to be social on top of all the weird vampire/dream shit I was dealing with.
Meditation was a recommendation to help me cope with the stress and anxiety attacks, but I was never good at shutting off my brain, so instead I opted for the mindfulness option. I didn’t care much to be present in the city, or the room at Maybelle’s house which was as personal to me as no doubt it was to the hundreds of other foster kids who had lived there. Honestly, I was surprised Richard’s football trophies weren’t still up considering how much Ken and the town loved him – I expected a shrine.
When I imagined “calm” and “tranquillity” I always thought of a forest. Never the sea, for some reason. So, I’d headed to the woodland that situated itself on the perimeter of the town. It was a dense, thick woodland; populated with trees that had existed back to the days before we’d colonised the land and screwed with the peace and harmony of man and nature.
Mindfulness, I reminded myself. Think of the senses.
Sight and sound came easily enough. The oranges and browns on the floor mixed with the moss that clung to trees not yet willing to shed their leaves. Leaves crunched under foot as I walked through the greenery. Birds twittered above me, squirrels’ claws scraping up the trunks of the trees, then leaping from the high branches above.
Smell… you didn’t often think about smell unless it was to do with food or flowers – the obvious things your brain already associated with scent. But I could smell the rain on the wind in the air, just as I could feel the chill on my bare legs.
I couldn’t wait until this boot was off and I could wear my jeans again. I had an appointment at the end of the next week for them to see how it was progressing: I seemed to be healing faster than most would, or perhaps they’d misdiagnosed the severity of my injury.
Stop. Mindfulness!
I went back to my senses, but they started to go weird again. The birds became obnoxiously loud in the trees; the crunch of the leaves under a sparrow’s foot sounded like the crush of a car in a compactor. The light filtering between the branches and leaves was absurdly bright. I had to shut my eyes against it.
It wasn’t until I sensed the glamour that I realised why my anxiety had flared up. I opened my eyes. But it wasn’t Emerson in front of me. It was Grayson.
He stood with his hands in his pockets. It was cold out, but he only had on a hoodie, jeans and boots.
‘Do you often walk around the woods with your eyes closed?’ he asked.
It had been a while since I’d heard him talk – not since a couple weeks back and he’d pulled me from Emerson. We’d seen each other around school, but he mostly ignored me and hadn’t tried to engage me in conversation since I’d broken into Emerson’s car. I had a feeling Emerson might have told him not to.
‘Yes. I find it’s great for blocking out annoying sights that might otherwise interrupt the tranquillity of my solitude,’ I bit out.
A slow smile crept across his features. ‘Emerson said you have a mouth on you.’
‘I’ve also got a nose, a pair of eyes – a whole set of features.’
Grayson appeared in front of me. Unlike Emerson who always used his speed to sneak up on me, Grayson made a point of not bothering to hide how fast he travelled. I tried not to flinch; I might have failed. He trailed his finger across my cheek, though he didn’t touch. ‘That you do.’
‘Don’t touch me.’
‘I’m not touching you,’ he said.
I stepped back; he took a step forward.
‘What are you doing all alone in the woods?’ The big bad wolf said to the little girl.
‘I’m never alone.’
I don’t know what made me say it. The ridiculous honesty and the bare-faced lie all wrapped in one. For as lonely as I was, as much as I ostracised myself from everyone, I never was alone. Death constantly hung on my periphery. Waiting over my shoulder. This time, alone in the woods, Death had come to meet another killer.
I took a step back. Grayson stepped forward. Like some sick dance I didn’t want a part of.
‘Why
did you break into Emerson’s car?’
I couldn’t deny it, so I didn’t say anything.
‘Why won’t you talk to him?’ Grayson asked.
‘What would we have to talk about?’
Grayson smiled, knowingly. ‘What can you not talk about with anyone else?’
More steps, more failures to get any further away from him.
‘Your energy…’
‘You said that before,’ I said.
It was easy to recall the things that other people had said, even weeks ago, when they were the only things they’d ever said to you. He’d commented on how odd my “energy” was. I wondered if human energy was anything like vamp-glamour? Could they view our life force like humans could see a vampire’s glamour if you paid hard enough attention to their unnaturalness?
‘I have, haven’t I? But you haven’t asked Emerson about it.’
His hand fluttered over my face again, then down to my neck. I tried not to flinch or show how uncomfortable I was with him being so close to me, almost touching me. I remembered I had my rings. I was wearing a scarf, as I had done most days with my coat, so he couldn’t see or touch the skin, but the last thing I wanted was for him to see the damage left by a vampire before. Like my Achilles heel, I always felt more vulnerable there.
I grabbed his hand before he even had a chance to think about whether he was going to try and remove my scarf to get to my neck.
Unlike Emerson, Grayson managed to step away using his preternatural senses and avoid the contact with my silver rings. He gritted his teeth at the damage I’d almost done to him. Grayson tried to pretend that it hadn’t unsettled him, but I could see in his eyes that, like all vampires, he feared being burned by silver.
‘Have you ever been bit?’ He asked anyway, like he was going to get the answer from me whether he saw the scars in person or not.
Twice Bitten Page 13