I remembered back to that moment in the woods with Grayson. Him entreating me to go talk to Emerson – the closest he could do to explain what he considered might be going on with my weird energy.
‘You wouldn’t let them talk to me?’ I scoffed.
‘You weren’t exactly jumping for joy at sharing your class and friends with one vampire. I thought limiting your interactions with lamia might keep your psychopathic tendencies in check a bit.’
I swore at him, but without the normal level of malice I had when I usually used those cuss words.
‘Plus, it doesn’t matter whether you have her permission or not to investigate her family history, now or then. You said-’ Emerson addressed Grayson, ‘-that none of the experiments were successful. Their energy would have remained mortal, so even if she did have family that linked back to South America that doesn’t explain what’s going on with Liv now. I prefer Charlotte’s idea.’
‘Of course you do,’ Grayson tossed up his hands, exasperated.
‘What’s Charlotte’s idea?’ I asked.
‘Witches, what else with these two?’ Grayson answered for them with an exaggerated roll of his eyes.
I had a feeling that either Grayson hadn’t enjoyed being a witch and had chosen to become a vamp on his eighteenth because of it, or he’d never been one in the first place and had been born mortal. I was leaning towards the latter. I had always thought that there was something about Grayson that was so entirely vampire. Perhaps it was because Charlotte and Emerson still retained some of that witchy energy about them.
‘A witch might possibly be able to read your energy and trace back its source or understand if it’s possible for lamia blood to somehow be diluted in a way that you don’t become a full-blooded lamia,’ Charlotte said. ‘Witches are the only ones who can commune beyond this world, so they might have the answer to things we don’t understand here.’
Emerson hadn’t believed it possible, and even Cassidy’s experiments had said there was no such thing as a “half” lamia. I’d never met a witch before, but I was open to it if it meant that what I was no longer had to remain a mystery. I thought I was happy with it being just one of those things I didn’t know – but if I could get answers, then my curiosity would take over.
‘If a witch can figure out why this stuff’s happening to me, I’m down. Plus, you know, might be good to have a witch look into why dissociation doesn’t work when Emerson’s around me. Maybe then you could figure out how to make it so that when I leave you don’t dissociate again.’
‘You’d really let a witch figure that out – use you – for him?’ Charlotte asked.
I didn’t like the way she phrased that. Like whatever witch they were going to choose was going to use my entrails and shrink my head or something.
‘Urgh, if it can help Emerson with his head, sure. As long as it doesn’t… urm, kill me or something.’
I looked to Emerson to answer what sort of stuff was going on in Charlotte’s head, but it was Grayson shaking his head that reminded me. The conversation we’d had before. Me being Emerson’s emotional fluffer for Charlotte. She wanted me to be able to “cure” Emerson so that he’d be able to feel for her. Maybe even find a way for the way I effected Emerson to be transferred over to her. These were two vampires who never asked for any of it – the perks along with the awful mental health side-effects.
But that thought led me down another one. Charlotte had been a witch. One, according to my dreams, who had been able to see the past. Not unlike the way I kept on having visions when I went to sleep.
I knew that they were dreams – probably. They were probably just dreams. But there’d been more and more things that turned out to be true to just be coincidences. Emerson had seen me move fast like a vampire, sense him before I saw him, and knew that his dissociation acted differently around me – but what if there was one more thing on that list. It made sense that I should tell them, just in case it cleared things up a little bit more. They were trying to help figure me out, after all.
‘How would I know if a dream wasn’t a dream?’ I asked Charlotte.
Emerson and Grayson looked at me strangely. Probably because the question came out of nowhere. Charlotte tilted her head, like a curious animal studying an unusual sound.
‘Lamia exhibit signs before their eighteenth with their powers acting up and stuff, so could dreams be like… magic visions for those lamia. Is that possible?’
‘Yes, certainly,’ Charlotte said.
Okay, so I wasn’t batting out of my league here. Screw it. I was just going to ask the question and if I was wrong, what harm was there?
‘You wouldn’t by any chance have had retrocognition when you were a witch before you were turned against your will?’ I asked.
‘You told her?’ Charlotte’s voice broke as she looked at Emerson with betrayal in her eyes.
‘No. I swear, I didn’t.’
Charlotte’s cool composure broke and I saw anger in her expression for the first time. Before she decided to claw Emerson’s eyes out, I said, ‘He didn’t. I dreamt it.’
‘You… dreamt it.’
I nodded. ‘Around the same time my senses started going weird I started having dreams about vampires. In the past few weeks, they turned to dreams about Emerson’s coven, and then to a time when he moved to New Orleans and met you and you tried to break his dissociation and turn him back into a witch.’
‘Your senses are going weird?’ Grayson asked.
‘Did I not mention that?’ I said, thinking back to when Emerson and I had once talked about why I thought I was lamia… oh, right. I’d hated him back then, so I’d not exactly been very open.
Grayson and Emerson swore. It was kind of eerie that the Sons both chose the same word, but it kind of did fit the situation.
‘There are moments I keep having, infrequently, where my sight or hearing gets stronger; how I imagine you experience with preternatural senses. Sort of like I move unnaturally fast sometimes.’
‘That’s… I thought this was all impossible when all we had to figure out was her energy,’ Emerson said.
‘It makes sense,’ Charlotte said.
‘Does it?’ Emerson asked, his voice a little odd. He seemed – stressed?
‘She stops your dissociation, too. That’s why I thought we needed a witch to help us. Only a witch’s supernatural ability was ever able to do that before. I never thought it had anything to do with vampirism in the first place,’ Charlotte said, snubbing Grayson’s idea on the South American lamia-human experiments.
‘Despite her showing preternatural abilities?’ Grayson sniped back. ‘What does your friend on the Order think?’ Grayson asked, before Charlotte could respond.
‘What? Ali? Nothing. She doesn’t think anything. It wasn’t until I came here that all this strange stuff started happening. But, I mean, it could just be because I’ve never been around vampires before. Maybe that triggered it.’
‘We figured you might have just been bit and were going through the change at a decelerated rate; as if the crash that hospitalised you hindered the change somehow,’ Grayson said. ‘But that’s obviously not it.’
I recalled Emerson’s questions about whether I craved blood. But since I’d been bit when I was five, that was immediately dismissed as one of the theories.
‘Could near death experiences even do that?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Isn’t turning into a vampire a death in its own right?’
‘There’s never been any record of it,’ Grayson admitted.
He looked deep in thought for a moment. ‘But what if that near-death experience catalysed a type of change. You were bit as a child and the venom lay dormant in your blood because you had some watered-down witch ancestor and then boom! Nearly died! And the venom was triggered and you start to exhibit signs of being lamia.’
I laughed. Not just at Grayson’s delivery or how he was trying to compile every theory into one. It was strange how this was a guy who worked for the Ord
er and clearly had some serious authority to have all those classified files, but he acted and spoke like a teen most of the time. Vampire brains…
‘No offence to your theory, but it’s definitely not that.’
Charlotte gave a small smile. She liked to be right, but she certainly liked Grayson to be wrong more.
‘I’ve had tons of near-death experiences and it’s only now that I’ve started dreaming and having my senses go haywire.’
Grayson waved his hand at me. ‘I don’t just mean: I slipped and nearly broke my neck falling down my stairs. I mean near-death like you’re about to see the white light and you turn back.’
I didn’t like how belittling that sounded. Like me, Olivia Morgan, BFF to Death didn’t understand what near-death meant. I shocked myself, as well as the three vampires in the room, by standing up from my chair and moving away from the table, lifting my borrowed hoodie and top, to show the smattering of scars and deformed flesh beneath.
‘Shot, stabbed, car crash, suffocated, and hospitalised for numerous life-threatening illnesses. I know what near-death is like. I live near-death every day of my life. This was just one in many.’
I lowered my top, refusing to look at Emerson, not wanting to see what his expression would be.
Grayson and Charlotte were speechless. I knew it wouldn’t last long. Soon, their dissociation would take over and their embarrassment or pity or whatever they felt in that moment would disappear and belong to a version of themselves that no longer existed.
‘Okay. Okay. Back-track. What if we continue with that theory but go a little further? What if this time it wasn’t just near-death you experienced? What if this time it was actual death and you somehow came back?’
16
Charlotte had said she wanted to have a look at my dream journal. She believed there might be clues there that could lead to an answer about how I was having those dreams in the first place.
I’d been embarrassed – especially when it came to the dreams where I’d seen her and Emerson… up close and personal, but as it seemed like they were based on reality, I had shrugged it off. They’d been a thing. Like I told Gi, they were probably going to be a thing again in the future. I was just the blip in Emerson’s timeline.
I gave my journal to Emerson when he dropped me off at Maybelle’s so Charlotte could read it that night. It wasn’t like they would be sleeping.
Once more, the question of what am I? swirled around in my mind before I went to sleep, and again when I woke up. But also like before, the normal everyday high school life pushed that thought to the back. AA Team gossip, classes, baseball practice, homework, Maybelle’s hovering – it was an accumulation of things that kept that lamia question in the far recesses of my mind.
The Sons had a load of theories of why I might be the way I was, but nothing sounded right. I wasn’t sure even if I did have the right answer that would sit well with me. How did a human who had always believed they were human somehow reconcile the fact that they were something completely different?
‘So… tonight there’s a bonfire party going on at the beach park.’
‘Don’t you have practice?’ I asked Emerson.
‘Yeah,’ Emerson leaned back on his chair.
He wasn’t going to get into trouble because our science teacher practically kissed his ass after the last project he’d handed in. Retaining decades of information was apparently amazing for grades. Prick. Not that I’d tried with my homework, but still. I knew he hardly broke a sweat over that stuff… no matter if he literally couldn’t sweat.
‘It’d be after practice.’
I nodded my head. That made sense since Gi would be swimming in the school pool until around six.
‘Isn’t it a bit cold for a bonfire party at the beach?’ I asked.
This wasn’t exactly Cali and I was putting it mildly when I said “a bit” cold. When I’d walked to Emerson’s car this morning, there had been mist coming from my mouth and I was pretty sure that if it rained, we’d be pounded with hailstones.
‘The football guys are doing it for Grayson. It’s Bonfire Night back home. Grayson was talking about the fireworks and stuff we have and they jumped on the band wagon.’
‘Bonfire Night?’
‘To celebrate the thwarted attempt to blow up parliament.’
‘What?’
‘Not recently,’ Emerson laughed at me. ‘Back in the beginning of the seventeenth century these guys tried to blow up parliament, they failed, were hung, drawn and quartered and every year since on the fifth of November, Brits celebrate by having a bonfire, burning a “Guy” effigy and watching some fireworks.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Nope.’
‘You’re not even British!’ I said, exasperated.
Emerson ruffled his hair. ‘I wasn’t born there, but… I am.’ The way he said it made me not want to press, so I didn’t.
‘So…’ Emerson said again, the same way he had before. ‘The bonfire?’
‘What about it?’
‘Do you want to go with me?’
Considering my night, after Emerson dropped me off after practice, would be filled with distracting myself with homework and possibly reading The House of Mirth, I nodded. Emerson grinned. It was quite overwhelming. I sometimes forgot how god-like he was until the full force of his vamp-glamour was directed at me.
‘Are we meeting the AA Team there or will they be catching a ride with us?’ I asked.
Emerson’s smile shuttered a little bit. ‘Urgh,’ he took off his cap, ruffling his hair. ‘Oh, right. Yeah. Meeting us there. They’ll meet us there.’
‘Okay, cool. That’ll give you time to drive me home beforehand so I can change. I am not dressed for braving this weather without the sun as a buffer. Tonight is going to freeze my ass off.’
‘Sure thing,’ Emerson said, putting his chair back on all feet and grabbing my pen, pretending he was taking notes when the teacher looked our way.
Wrapped up warm, hours later, Emerson parked on the grass near the beach park. It was well-worn and muddy, clearly used as an impromptu carpark often.
‘Is this legal?’ I asked, as I watched teenagers I probably would have recognised from school, if I paid attention, make their way to the grassy plain on the edge of the bank which dropped off at Pontiac Bay.
‘The underage drinking, public intoxication, public indecency, possible drug-deals or the bonfire on the beach?’ Emerson smirked at me.
‘Just let me know if you hear the police coming with those preternatural senses of yours,’ I said, unclipping my seatbelt. ‘The daughter of one of the local cops really has it out for me, remember?’
It took another ten minutes for us to have a reason to get out. Gi eventually parked up beside Emerson’s car. We exited. It was bitterly cold, but wasn’t raining and my many layers actually did help. Emerson looked fine in his hoodie and high school baseball jacket, his cap on low across his brow.
My feet squelched slightly as they sunk into the mud. The downpour we’d been caught in the evening Emerson had taken me over to his place was a few days ago, but the water hadn’t had much time to go anywhere considering the vast volume of it and cold weather.
‘I thought this was supposed to be a da-’ Gi said, as she stepped out of her car, but Emerson cut her off.
‘Where are the other guys?’ he asked.
‘It was too short of a notice,’ Gi said.
She almost tripped up on the long length of her scarf. Emerson righted her before her face smashed into the floor. She pushed her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose.
‘Martha’s dealing with the results of the election, Jen’s at one of her extra-curriculars and Robbie’s grounded.’
‘What for?’ I asked, since this was the first time I was hearing about it.
‘His science grades are slipping,’ Gi said.
I was just glad that my hovering teachers had picked up after the first week that I didn’t care if I had
to repeat a grade. They also hadn’t informed Maybelle about my own terrible performance. I wasn’t sure that she’d ground me, but she’d expect me to work harder at pulling up my grades and care a little more about where I spent my time outside of the house.
‘I thought the votes were cast Tuesday,’ I said, in reference to Martha not being here.
‘Oh, they were. And only one district changed party hands, but her mom’s going through the lecture phase. Lasts, like, all week about how many people actually turned up to vote, the decline of democracy…’ Gi trailed off. ‘You can kind of see why Martha is the way she is with parents like hers.’
We walked away from the parked cars onto the “beach”, drawn to the fire like moths to a flame. The bonfire was a huge structure, made up of broken wooden pallets, panelling that looked like it had once bordered up windows and other useless bits of junk. It had only just been lit, so the flames hadn’t gotten to the outer edges of it yet, just a slow burn and a promise of true warmth and power to come.
‘Not exactly inconspicuous,’ I said.
The thought of the cops coming to crash the party was on my mind particularly since I kept seeing the cheer uniform in my periphery.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Gi said, understanding. ‘The guys might flatter Grayson and say it’s all to celebrate that weird British holiday or whatever, but there’s always a fall bonfire party for seniors. It’s NRHS tradition. The cops will only break it up after one, and by then all the booze will be gone and so will we.’
‘But why fall? It’s so freaking cold,’ I said.
Gi just laughed, wrapping her scarf around her neck another loop. ‘The beach is deserted because it’s cold. And people are less likely to go out for a stroll and stumble upon this madness.’
‘Here, this might warm you up.’
I hadn’t realised that Emerson had disappeared until he came back, handing me a drink in my gloved hand.
‘Rum and Coke,’ I smiled, taking a sip, glad that he remembered.
‘Just take it easy this time. My car insurance can’t handle another drunk Liv situation.’
Twice Bitten Page 35