We made our way to the food court where I ordered my meal and sat opposite him. For once, he didn’t buy anything or pretend to eat, just moving the food around on the plate like he did when he “ate” lunch with us.
‘Do you think if I weren’t a vampire you would hate me less?’ Emerson asked.
The question had come so out of nowhere that I choked on my drink. It wasn’t one of those times where a few coughs and you’re alright. It was a full-on, eyes watering I don’t know if I’m going to be able to breathe deals. Emerson even had to pat me on the back to try and get some of the drink out from the wrong hole.
‘Why the hell would you ask me that?’
‘It’s the only reason I can think that you hate me so much and don’t trust me to be around Gi. I’ve offered to answer any of your questions, but you won’t take me up on it. If you did, I think you would have stopped being so ignorant and prejudice against me since we would have had all this misguided shite cleared up from the start. It’s not as if you’re best friends with everyone you meet, but you’re particularly hostile with me.’
‘Urm, pot meet kettle,’ I responded.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You actually are friends with practically everyone you meet and the only person you’ve actively been a prick to is me.’ I didn’t include Emma because that was like saying the nicest person in the world would still invite the Devil round for dinner, and I felt there were always some exceptions. ‘You can’t blame all the hostility on my part.’
Emerson rolled his eyes at me. ‘Shite, love. Did you really think I was just going to ignore you breaking-? Forget it. We’re going around in circles. I already told you that was getting boring.’
I’d stopped choking now so I shoved some French fries in my mouth. ‘I don’t hate you,’ I finally said after using chewing as an excuse to stay silent for a bit.
He raised an eyebrow. Everything about his expression told me he didn’t believe me.
‘I know you keep telling me that I’m so “misunderstood” or whatever, but I know a lot more than you think I do about lamia.’
He seemed surprised I knew the term.
‘The first time I met you… yeah, that might have come across as hate, or fear. I’ve only ever seen a vampire once before in my whole life. The night they killed my parents.’
I don’t know why I was being so honest with him. Perhaps because with him I could be.
Nowak had seemed shocked that I hadn’t talked to Emerson, even before Ali or he and checked out Emerson’s deal. So, I guess that meant I was okay to talk.
I’d come to realise that I didn’t hate Emerson any more than I would another attractive guy who had a weird power to make my body drawn to him. Sure, the second thing was entirely connected to him being a vampire, but it wasn’t like I hated him for being a creature. Even the same kind that had killed my parents.
Cassidy Grimm had made me realise that no matter how different lamia were to us biologically, they were still human in the senses that mattered: with rules, family, emotions. They might not be “human”, but they still very much had their “humanity” intact. They weren’t the soulless creatures of mythology – or my dreams.
‘I didn’t know,’ Emerson said.
‘What, you didn’t read the monthly newsletter about all the vamps who break the Code and the orphans they leave behind?’ I said, going back to my usual defence: sarcasm and dark humour.
‘No. I’m sorry,’ he said.
I didn’t want his pity. I hated that he didn’t react with some snarky comment.
‘If you ate this, what would happen?’ I asked, pointing a fry at him. I already knew the answer, but I’d do anything to change the subject.
‘I’d throw up,’ Emerson said, honestly. I didn’t expect him to answer.
‘How were you able to control yourself when Brett bled everywhere?’ I asked him.
‘You’re asking me questions now?’ Emerson asked.
‘If the “hostility” between us is over, then yeah. You keep telling me I’m so misguided and inviting me to talk.’
‘I know you’re deflecting what happened to you as a kid,’ Emerson said. ‘But I’ll answer your questions if you really want to know.’
I ate in silence for a bit. Emerson took my burger just as I was about to reach for it once I’d finished my fries.
‘How hungry are you?’ he asked.
‘A bit. All I’ve had is these fries since lunch,’ I said.
‘But if this wasn’t your burger, and it was mine, would you take it?’
‘If it’s yours-’
‘Fine, if it was Gi’s,’ he said, clearly understanding where I’d been going with my answer.
‘No. I wouldn’t.’
‘How hungry would you have to be to take Gi’s burger without her permission?’
‘Ravenous,’ I answered.
‘Then that’s why it was easy to control myself.’
‘But isn’t hunger different for you?’ I asked.
The Grimm files didn’t really go into much details about the blood craving exactly. Cassidy described it as a need stronger than hunger: because blood was solely what kept a vampire alive. Blood for a vampire was what sleep, water, and food combined was to humans.
‘It’s more intense, but it’s still not enough to drive you mad and forget all laws of consequence,’ Emerson said.
‘How can you tell what blood you can drink and what blood you can’t?’
The files had been clear that though the transformation had largely changed a vampire’s biology, one thing they kept was their blood type. Just like a human couldn’t have a blood transfusion from a different type, or from anything other than human blood, a vampire couldn’t drink from someone who wasn’t in their blood group.
It took a little while longer for Emerson to explain that one. ‘Hmm… okay. Give me a second.’
Emerson disappeared from our table. The same way he appeared fast sometimes. He was only gone for thirty seconds. After that I could feel him behind me. It was that same tug I’d felt numerous times. And then the vamp-glamour began again, and I could feel his presence more strongly.
I turned around.
‘It’s like that.’ He sat back down opposite me.
‘Like what?’
‘Like when you sense me being there even when you can’t see me. That’s what it feels like. It’s not something you can see or smell or touch exactly. It just is.’
I reached over the table and grabbed my burger.
‘When your parents were killed – is that when you were bit?’ I stopped eating. ‘Grayson told me.’
‘I didn’t tell Grayson anything to tell you.’
‘You say a lot when you’re not speaking,’ Emerson just said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Though you can probably work that out since I said I’d only ever seen two vampires before you.’
‘Two attacked your family?’
‘Is that strange?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Emerson said. ‘For one vampire to break the Code is rare, but two… crimes in our world don’t tend to be a group affair.’ Emerson tapped his bottom lip with his thumb, deep in thought. ‘What’s special about you, Liv?’
‘Gee, everything I suppose,’ I said.
‘You’re not lamia, but you’re not quite… normal either.’
‘I’m not lamia?’
Emerson tilted his head. ‘Did you think you were?’
‘How do you know I’m not?’
‘Why do you think you’re lamia?’
Emerson waited for me to answer his question, but when it became clear I wasn’t going to, Emerson answered mine. ‘Like with sensing blood types, we recognise each other on sight. It’s like a magnetic pull.’
‘Different to your vamp-glamour?’
‘Vamp-glamour?’
‘You know, that aura vampires have around them that says trust me, I’m beautiful. You want to be with me.’
‘Yo
u’ve had all those thoughts about me, love?’ Emerson teased.
I ground my teeth. He laughed.
‘Yes, it’s different to the “vamp-glamour”. It’s weird you can sense that. Can you sense witches, too?’
‘I’ve never met a witch.’
‘That’s a “no” then.’
‘But if I did feel a pull – just not with everyone, would that mean something?’
‘Me?’ he asked.
‘Self-centred much?’
‘You sense me before you see me. You do it a lot: knowing where I am when you can’t see me. But not with Grayson. I think you feel his… “vamp-glamour”, but you can’t sense him in the same way as you do me.’
‘Is it normal? What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘No, it’s not normal. Not for a human. And I have no idea what it means that you can see vamp-glamour and just sense me. As vampires go, there’s nothing particularly special about me for it to make sense that I would be singled out with this gift of yours.’
‘Grayson says my energy feels wrong. What does that mean?’
‘Like with how we recognise other lamia, you’re… different. You register as human, but the more you look, the more your energy shifts. Not lamia, but almost like something in between.’
Half-lamia would register as lamia, I knew that from the Grimm files. What did that make me? Human, but not quite all human. But not lamia. Was there something in between?
‘How old were you when your parents passed?’
‘Five,’ I said.
‘Did you know about our world before then?’
‘No.’
‘Your parents never spoke about it?’
‘No.’ I think I would remember if they’d told me vampires and witches were real. At that age I had a fear of monsters under the bed. Just giving me a nightlight definitely wouldn’t have been enough if they’d shared that truth with me.
‘What jobs did they have?’
‘My dad worked for an insurance firm and mom was a paralegal. What exactly does that have to do with anything?’
‘I’m trying to work out why you’re different. Is the healing and speed something you’ve always had?’
I hadn’t noticed that he’d noticed, but I suppose it was easier for him to spot. Especially since he must have seen me react by catching the baseball he’s sent to my head, and appear between him and Brett during the fight that never happened.
‘It’s only happened since the accident,’ I admitted.
‘Do you ever crave blood?’
‘I thought you’d just had your little explanation about how vampires don’t crave blood,’ I said, deflecting.
‘Not uncontrollable hunger, but we still feel the urge. Have you had that?’
‘Brett’s splattered nose didn’t exactly look like a three-course meal, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘Blood itself wouldn’t look appealing. Our taste buds don’t change during the transformation,’ Emerson said. ‘It’s not tasty. It’s more like that moment you feel when you’re so tired and you’re about to get into bed.’
‘No. Even then, no blood cravings.’
‘You’re a mystery,’ Emerson said. He was looking at me like I was one, too. All wonder and amazement in his eyes.
‘And a lot less misunderstood as you thought, am I right?’ I said, throwing my rubbish in the trash can.
‘You’re a lot more informed than I thought you would be.’ Emerson said something nice, but his tone told me something different. You have much left to be desired.
‘You can drive me home, now,’ I said.
We drove home listening to the radio. We’d pulled up in Maybelle’s drive. Like last time, I got out of the car and Emerson rolled down his window.
‘About what you said – the things the “vamp-glamour” tells you. You’re right about us giving off an air of trust, even beauty in some cases. But that thing you said about wanting to be with me: that’s all you, Liv. That’s not vamp-biology. That’s just regular old hormones.’
10
I’d still not given Maybelle and Ken a straight answer as to where my car was almost a week later. So far, I’d managed to put it off by doing that silent-teenage-grunt thing. Gi had taken up driving me to school again, although she kept hinting that maybe she could swap it up with Emerson occasionally as she needed to drop off her kid sisters on the days her dad went to work early.
I knew my avoidance of the topic to my foster parents and Gi dropping me off was only going to last for so long, so I’d asked Ali whether she’d could track the GPS on my car and find it. She’d not been impressed to say the least.
‘It’s not like I lost it on purpose,’ I said.
‘I should just be glad you haven’t killed anyone with it,’ Ali said. But she’d agreed to track it and text me the details later. Which could either mean later today, or later in the week. I’d just have to keep an eye out on that.
I’d asked her about what Nowak had found out about the Sons. I thought I’d been very patient waiting a week before I started bombarding her with messages to see if everything with the Sons was by the Code. She hadn’t divulged exactly what Emerson was doing at my high school, but she said it wasn’t for any nefarious reasons. She might as well have said “if you continue to hate on him and distrust him, you should just admit you’re a prejudice species-ist like Cassidy Grimm”.
I mean, she didn’t, because she didn’t know I’d read Grimm’s casefiles yet (or if she did, she wasn’t saying anything about it) and Ali wasn’t exactly one to stick up for vamps. That was probably more my own internal thoughts projecting than believing Ali would say that.
I wasn’t even going to open the Pandora’s box that was Emerson’s admission to me that it was hormones drawing me to him and not some sort of vamp-glamour. I would have sworn he was messing with me if I hadn’t tested out that theory by purposefully putting myself in Grayson’s path during school.
Like before, I sensed Grayson’s vamp-glamour the closer I got to him, and it did tell me to trust him. I even got hints that I found him physically appealing – but never to the level I found Emerson. And being around him didn’t make my heart race, or palms sweaty or give me the urge to get closer to him.
I was also starting to doubt that the symptoms I’d been having around Emerson were anxiety attacks. Because the more I thought about it, most of the time, those symptoms resembled ones you might have on a crush.
I went to bed practically banging my head against my wall. Was that it? Did I have a crush on Emerson? God. How could my stupid weak body be attracted to him? I refused to let my body’s reaction to him become a thing.
But the next day I started to notice how Emerson was slowly changing his attitude towards me since we’d spoken in the mall and he’d decided that our “whole hostility thing had gotten tiring”.
In class, I could feel his eyes on me, rather than actively ignoring me as he had been doing since I stole his sketch. His body was slightly turned towards me, too. I kept having to avoid his leg during class which would bump up against mine and send shivers down my traitorous spine. I would glare at him and tell him to quit it – but all that did was get a cocky smile from him.
He no longer actively riled me up, just included me in normal everyday conversation like I was Gi or something. But that managed to bug me in a whole different way to his active sabotage, back when he’d been pissed at me for breaking into his car. Emerson was the only one who knew that I was worried about my whole not-lamia-but-not-human thing and he was acting like it was completely fine. I mean, it probably was to him because he was a vamp, so weird was normal and all that… but it bugged me that he could be so blasé about it. It bugged me that he was fine to go on with life, cockily knowing that his vamp-glamour heightened a stupid unconscious, unwanted crush I had on him, whilst for me it was impossibly embarrassing.
It wasn’t even just how he acted towards me. Even his clothes had changed. He was no longer the preppy hot j
ock, but a casual, normal guy in sweats. He’d not gone back to the preppy look since our shopping trip. It wasn’t like he’d suddenly turned into Robbie, but he did wear the cap he’d bought from the mall a lot more. It was infuriating that it made him more attractive. I wasn’t the only one who seemed to agree as his usual girl-fans were still circling like vultures in class.
‘Why’d you stop wearing pants?’ I found myself asking one morning in science class.
‘What?’ he sounded genuinely shocked.
‘You’re constantly in sweats. Put on a little weight and afraid it’s showing?’
‘Oh, you mean trousers. Pants mean underwear in England, love. You might want to keep that in mind for the future. It’s not usually common place to ask someone in public why they’re going commando.’
The last thing I needed to think about now was Emerson in his underwear – or his lack of underwear.
‘Honestly, because you react to me better this way,’ Emerson said.
I’d almost forgotten my original question. ‘What do you mean I react to you better?’
Emerson twisted in his seat, so he was looking at me more head-on than in his peripheral vision.
‘I noticed it back at the mall. When I’m more relaxed, you relax. Your body stops being so tense and on the defensive. You still say the same shite, but your heartbeat says something else. I’d never seen you smile so much, and I figured I might try dressing this way and see if it improved your mood.
‘I wasn’t exactly going to wear those god-awful chav tops, but sweatpants and a cap I can do. Since I started dressing like this, you’re a lot calmer around me and less likely to jump into pissed off Liv mode, rather than just ordinary snide Olivia. So, I’d say it’s working.’
‘You’re changing how you dress to manipulate how I feel?’
‘Yes.’ Thanks for making me sound like a creep, his tone said.
‘Why make the effort?’ I said.
‘I like you,’ Emerson said – as though it were no big deal.
‘You do not like me,’ I laughed.
‘You’re so knowledgeable about what I like and dislike?’
‘A week ago, you couldn’t stand being in the same room with me unless Gi was there to buffer,’ I reminded him.
Twice Bitten Page 19