‘Sing,’ Emerson said. ‘It’s just an audition. We won’t let anyone heckle you.’
‘Zero heckling, guaranteed,’ I assured her.
‘This isn’t one of those Emma-Brett situations is it?’ Gi asked me, wary.
I assumed she meant “are you going to physically beat up anyone who heckles me, because I’m not really into that plan”. Emerson teaming up with me didn’t bode well since he was the first one to draw blood – literally – defending her from a bully.
‘How I stop them from heckling isn’t really your problem is it?’ I said. ‘You just need to audition.’
She didn’t look like she was going to, but the longing we’d seen in her eyes as she’d watched other people get up on stage seemed to make her give in and she eventually strode up to the stage.
The only trouble I foresaw currently would come from Lisa, so I decided to plonk myself down next to her once I was out of Gi’s eyeline.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, surprised that I was next to her.
I pretended that I didn’t enjoy the fact that she cringed away from me, like she was scared I was going to hit her or something. Yes, violence was never the answer, bla, bla, bla. But it sure helped putting cheerleading bitches in their place. I’d never get into a fight just for the hell of it, but when it came to girls who thought they could manipulate and gossip and mentally bully people they considered less-than it was nice to have a simple solution.
‘Watching my girl,’ I said – just to piss her off.
Gi took to the stage, standing confidently in the middle, though I knew this must have been nerve-wracking for her.
‘She’s auditioning?’
‘I hear she’s good,’ I said.
I didn’t say anything more as Gi had begun to sing. I hadn’t been sure what she was going to sing – but “When You’re Gone,” by Avril Lavigne hadn’t been something that even popped into my head as a consideration.
There was no CD backing track, instead someone in the wings was playing on the piano to accompany her voice. As she continued to sing, there was no doubt in my mind that she would get a part. Possibly even the lead, much to Martha’s disappointment, I was sure.
‘She should have auditioned with Katy Perry,’ Lisa sneered beside me. She couldn’t exactly fault Gi’s voice.
‘Isn’t that joke getting a little old by now?’
‘She’s not getting a part,’ Lisa said.
I leaned in close to her ear. ‘And how exactly do you think you’re going to stop her?’
Lisa’s breath hitched, seeming to hear the dangerous warning in my tone. No doubt the image of Emma on the floor playing over in her mind. I stood up and left, so that when Gi returned I was sat by Emerson, like I hadn’t ever moved.
‘That was amazing,’ I told her. Gi smiled, it was the first real smile I’d seen all day.
‘Emerson Lark,’ Ms Phillips called. Emerson was already out of his seat.
‘You’re auditioning?’ Martha’s jaw almost dropped to the floor.
I was gobsmacked myself. Speechless, in fact. Which was a new one for me. If Gi had looked shocked when her name had been called, I had no idea what I looked like when Emerson’s was.
‘How exactly do you think we’re going to be able to stop shite from happening to her when she gets cast if we’re not part of the play, too?’ Emerson asked me, his voice barely a whisper as he passed my seat.
‘What will you be singing today?’ Ms Phillips asked.
‘Cry Me a River,’ Emerson answered. ‘Ella Fitzgerald.’ He didn’t look at Ms Phillips when he answered, instead he was looking me in the eye.
Whatever I’d been expecting had not been what came out of Emerson’s mouth. His voice was low, like velvet, both soothing and shiver-inducing as he sang the lyrics. His accent only added to the depth of his tenor, giving the words a unique edge, more so than an average American male singing Ella Fitzgerald’s song. Never once did he break eye contact with me.
The connection I’d felt on the baseball pitch was magnified between us now. His vamp-glamour shifted and spread as he sang – more powerful than his looks. Like the song of a siren, it called to me, just as Death did.
It took everything I could just to stay sat in the seat and not go to him. The lyrics were immaterial at this point – they meant nothing. Everything was about his voice. When he finished, I was surprised he didn’t get a standing ovation.
He sat back down in the seat next to me. Gi gushed over how amazing his voice was. Jenny was fanning herself with her hand and saying “swoon” over and over again. Martha looked even more determined. I assumed she wanted the female lead even more now that it was clear that Emerson would be getting the male – no guy so far had even come close to that amount of talent. I was still unable to speak.
‘Don’t worry, love. You’ve got time to get you voice back. You only signed up for the speaking parts, remember?’
I didn’t have a response. Not even when the second part of the auditions came around and Ms Phillips called my name, Emerson having signed me up along with Gi and himself. All I could think about was the hypnotic trance I’d been in, pulled towards Emerson by his voice.
If I already hated the way my body reacted just around the usual vamp-glamour he used; the feeling I now experienced was beyond hate. Beyond words. Because my body reacted in a way that was the furthest from hate as a person could possibly get.
8
The last thing I expected when Gi dropped me off at Maybelle’s after the auditions was Nowak sitting on the hood of a black Porsche 997 Turbo.
‘Who is that?’ Gi asked as she parked up.
Nowak was lean, athletic, in his late twenties, dark haired, dark eyed and looked like the bad-boy cliché you read about in books. His face was in a permanent scowl, except for when he was driving. Then his lips curled up into what one could say resembled a smile, but most would call it a sneer. His hair was a buzzcut to his head and he had a scar over his left eyebrow.
‘A friend,’ I said, hopping out of the car. ‘See you tomorrow.’
Gi didn’t look like she wanted to drive away. She very much looked like, instead, she wanted to give Jenny a run for her money with a persistent line of questioning. But I’d already waved goodbye and she didn’t have a legit reason for staying.
‘Liv,’ Nowak said, watching Gi’s Mini disappear around the corner.
‘Nowak,’ I said, adopting his borderline bored tone, except adding a mocking flare.
‘Nice look.’ His gaze travelled from my short skirt to my bare thighs. I was still wearing a knee-high boot on the foot without the CAM-boot, but it still left a lot of visible skin.
‘Eff off,’ I told him.
‘Touchy,’ he teased me, the slightest hint of a smile appearing. Nowak hopped down from the car. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, gesturing to the car.
‘Gorgeous,’ I admitted. ‘But she’s no Multistrada.’
‘Don’t trash your ride and you get to pick your ride,’ Nowak said simply.
‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ I said through gritted teeth.
Nowak shrugged at me; infuriating bastard.
‘How long is it gonna be ‘til you get that thing off your foot?’ he asked. He had a thick Brooklyn accent. I might have spent the better part of my life in Washington since my parents’ murders, but hearing it made me feel like going home.
‘I’ve got an appointment tomorrow. If I’m healing as fast as they think I am, it might be then.’
Nowak just grunted. In the past, I’d been known to take twice as long to heal than any normal person. My body was just naturally slow at healing from trauma: which was shit considering “trauma” was almost the permanent state it was in.
When I’d first met Nowak and Ali at thirteen, I’d been healing from a broken arm from when my foster dad pushed me down the stairs. Instead of two months, I’d taken almost three for it to heal. And even then, it had been too sore to have full movement for an
other couple weeks after.
‘Let’s take her for a drive,’ Nowak said.
He slipped into the driver’s seat and I opened the door to the passenger side. I knew he wanted to speak to me without the prying eyes/ears of my fosters.
‘Tell me about these vamps,’ he said once we’d ridden for almost twenty minutes in silence.
‘There’s three. All look around my age, and they started school here in September. They came to town at the beginning of summer; ingratiated themselves with the locals, attend church.’
‘Still right at the epicentre of trouble,’ he said, shaking his head, mouthing the word “three”.
‘You know me,’ I said, ‘I hate to miss out on the drama of it all.’
Nowak waved his hand, telling me to continue my story.
‘Grayson and Charlotte appear to be dating. They mostly keep to themselves. They hang out with the popular group. They don’t really bother me. The vamp who does get under my skin is Emerson. He’s chosen a group of loner kids – nice people, but social outcasts for one reason or another. He seems to be particularly attached to Gi, the quasi-leader of the group.’
‘What’s this Emerson guy like?’
‘On the face of it: charming boy next door. Though he happens to save the charm for everyone but me.’
‘He doesn’t find your presence a simple radiance of pleasure to be around?’ Nowak asked, sarcastically.
‘Har-har,’ I said. ‘We’re civil,’ I eventually said.
It was a lie, but I wasn’t going to tell Nowak about me breaking into his car and stealing his sketch and the animosity between us since. Ali would end up calling me and telling me how ridiculously dumb and stupid I’d been.
She’d designed the password hacker as a memory stick so you could simply slip it in whilst they sat next to you, or ask to download a file online borrowing their computer for a second. She hadn’t meant for me to, you know, destroy his property in the process of getting it.
‘When we met, he actually offered to talk,’ I added, noting how peculiarly weird Emerson’s friendly demeanour was.
‘The horror,’ he deadpanned. His sarcasm was almost a tangible thing it was laid on so thick.
‘You think I should have?’
‘What’s the harm in talking?’
‘He’s a vampire.’
‘And you’re a democrat,’ he said, as if we’d stated equally similar things.
‘I don’t like spending unnecessary time around him – especially alone.’
‘You know how unlikely it is that he’ll try and attack you. Especially since he’s aware you know of the existence of the Blood World. He probably knows you have connections to us.’
Us. For the first time, the nameless way Ali and Nowak referred to their group made me wonder. Were they the Order? The ones who had financed Cassidy’s experiments and hushed them up. The ones from my dreams who had ordered the creation of the Mors Exercitus and their disbandment.
‘I’m not afraid of that,’ I said. I was wary. What was the saying again? Once bitten, twice shy? Well, I’d been bit and I sure as hell wasn’t up for a second round.
‘Then what?’
‘His vamp-glamour gets to me,’ I admitted. ‘I hate the way my body reacts to their stupid thing.’
‘Vamp-glamour?’
‘Is that not what you call it?’ I asked. ‘You know, that aura around them that pulls you in: projecting that false sense of beauty and telling you to trust them.’
‘Huh,’ Nowak said. ‘I never noticed that.’
‘You’re joking!’ I said. ‘It’s like the most obvious thing about them. It’s how you can tell they’re vamps in the first place.’
‘I know it exists, I’ve just never been aware of it,’ he said.
Nowak’s inability to feel the glamour working on him made me think of my dream and the humans who had once been immune to all glamours. The snapshot I’d seen of the true faces of my parents’ killers had been horrific. I could only imagine how impossible it would be for me to spend every class with Emerson if the glamour didn’t work on me and I had to see what he really looked like. I could understand why the vampires had been sought out as monsters in the past by the immune hunters if all they had been able to see was the true visage of a vamp’s face.
Though no matter how awful that would be, a part of me would still prefer it to the way his glamour drew me in. I hated how I had no control over how my body reacted to him. The residual feeling of hearing him sing and how it had combined with the glamour was still affecting me. I could almost feel the anxiety creeping in – my palms sweaty, my heart beating fast.
‘Have you always been able to tell?’ Nowak was still on about the vamp-glamour.
I nodded, once. ‘Since the moment I saw them in my house when I was five.’ I paused for a moment. ‘Is that unusual?’
‘It’s not usual,’ Nowak said.
I felt that deep unsettling knot in my stomach once more. Like the strange way my senses had been acting, it was one more thing that made me different from any other human. One more thing that could identify me as lamia.
Nowak dropped me off an hour later, leaving me the car. I knew he was going to check things out with the Sons, do his job for the Order and see if they were following the Code or not. Part of me missed his company as soon as he was gone. The other part was glad to see him go. The further anyone was away from me, the safer they were.
‘Who was that who dropped you off?’ Ken asked when I walked in.
‘A friend from New York,’ I answered.
‘He left his car here. Will he be returning?’
Clearly Ken wasn’t a fan – of Nowak or having one of the drive spaces used up.
‘It’s my car.’
‘Where did you get the money for a car?’
‘Savings,’ I lied.
I quickly walked up stairs to my room before Ken had more time to grill me. It wasn’t like he should have a problem. It was only yesterday at church that Maybelle had been complaining I didn’t have my own ride, after all.
The appointment at the hospital ran on longer than I would have liked the next day. After a series of scans, numerous doctors prodding and poking me, I was given a clean bill of health and the boot could come off. From the lack of weight, I thought my foot would fly up to the ceiling.
The feel of pulling on my jeans the next morning was absolute bliss. I finally felt like me – fully me – again. Even if I was haunted by the doctors’ astoundment of how quickly I’d healed from my broken ankle and my injured lung. If they hadn’t had the original X-rays, they said they wouldn’t have believed it was possible. One more oddity to add to the “am I lamia?” list.
A great distraction from that was being able to drive myself to school. My foster mom had wanted to drive me straight to school, but her way to work was in the opposite direction of the hospital and went past our house, so I got her to drop me off so I could drive myself. It made more sense, I’d convinced her, then she nor Gi would need to drive me home after school.
Whilst I didn’t like driving as much as riding a bike, it still felt amazing to be in control behind a vehicle again. I also had to admit that the air-con was a bonus to cars versus bikes in this type of weather.
I parked up my car, shoving my new keys into my bag and walked into school, checking the time. Lunch had only just started with the seniors from my year heading out of the building to go find somewhere to eat off campus. I walked against the current, since I needed to hand in some form or other the doctors had given me to the main office, before I could head to the theatre and join the rest of the AA Team for lunch.
With my boot off I had hope that it would mean no more separate gym classes, but the doctors didn’t want me putting any extra pressure on it, so it was likely I was still going to have to swim for the next couple of weeks before I could join Jenny and Gi out on the field. Lightning wasn’t likely to strike twice in the same place; I figured I’d probably be safe from Emma’
s machinations regarding locker rooms at least. I hadn’t factored in public restrooms. The girl really had a kink towards sinks and smelly drains.
My mind had wandered to seeing Emerson today and what I should do as I walked towards the office. Nowak had said there was no harm in talking to Emerson. But that little piece of advice was about two weeks too late considering mine and Emerson’s relationship nowadays. I was pondering how I might possibly get back on Emerson’s good side (at least for the selfish reason of getting some answers about whether it might be possible that I was lamia) when I was abruptly pulled from the halls and into the girl’s restroom.
‘Thanks for dropping by, Olivia,’ Emma said as I righted myself.
Lisa and the third part of their trio, Hope, were standing in front of the door, Emma over by the sinks. She was leaning up against the wall, her legs and arms crossed. I noticed that she was standing as far away from me as possible, with her little cronies in between us. A thick layer of makeup was covering the fading bruising to her cheek. She probably had another few days before it disappeared completely.
I picked up my bag that had fallen to the floor. ‘Funny,’ I said, sarcastically.
‘Lisa tells me you and Gi were having some fun over at the drama rehearsals last night.’
‘A right barrel of laughs,’ I said, deadpan.
‘I thought I’d warned you not to mess with me.’
‘How exactly is auditioning for a high school musical messing with you?’ I asked.
‘Don’t push me,’ Emma said, stepping forward.
I stepped right into her personal space, too. I was a lot more menacing now that I was back to my usual black-on-black ensemble with combat boots – zero miniskirts in sight. Plus, she already knew how hard I hit.
‘Do you really want to go for round two, Barbie doll?’
A grinch-like smile crept across Emma’s face. Like she had just been waiting for me to chomp at the bait she’d dangled.
‘I would mind how you talk to me, if I were you. You’ve got quite an interesting history, Olivia. It would be a shame for all your dirty laundry to be aired in front of the whole school.’
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