by Lucy Smoke
“Ah Steph, let me call you back.” She hung up her phone, even as we could hear Steph still talking. Hayden’s look of shock transformed to weariness and then to defensiveness. Which cut me deep. I knew she wouldn’t be expecting us and that she wouldn’t think we were here for friendly reasons, but I thought she would know that we would never hurt her, at least not on purpose.
You did yesterday. You wanted her to hurt the way you were.
I closed my eyes for a second, trying to stop the guilt from eating at me.
“What are you all doing here?” she asked quietly, as she stood there holding her chin up.
“Uh, can we come in?” Christian asked. “We just want to talk.”
She glanced over her shoulder real quick. “No, just say what you came to say and then leave. I’m missing the Christmas parades.” Her eyes regarded us with so much hurt, but there was a little bit of curiosity there. I jumped on that, knowing that I needed to get her interested in talking.
“Scoop, please, we really do just want to talk to you,” I pleaded with her, giving her my best smile, the one that had always made her laugh.
She just stared at me, her eyes getting sadder. “Don’t call me that. I’m Hayden. Not Scoop, not anymore.”
My chest ached as I watched her eyes start to fill with tears.
No, no, no, this was going so wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be crying, at least not sad tears.
I turned to look at the other two for help. Justin caught my eye and understood that I needed to be rescued.
44
Hayden
Monday 25th December – Christmas
Justin stepped forward and held out the heart that I had spent all of last night turning my room upside down looking for. I’d given up and left all of the stuff lying around since I figured I had a week to put it all back together.
I could take a day to live in my own misery.
My eyes widened when I saw the note as well. Oh my God, they’d read it. Holy shit, were they here to tell me that I was delusional? That I couldn’t have them? That none of them wanted me back? Because I had gotten that message pretty clearly yesterday, and totally did not need a repeat of that
My heart was pounding, the Chinese churning in my stomach. The voices of the presenters who announced every float of the Christmas parade faded into the background as I struggled to breath.
“H, we found your note, and we just all wanted to come and say…” Justin took a deep breath, quickly glancing back at the guys before he reached up and cupped my face with one of his hands. “…that all we want for Christmas is you.”
My heart stopped beating and seemed to swell within my chest to an almost painful level, pushing up into my throat, causing my breath to become stuck. I could feel a tear slide down my cheek.
To be continued…
Pre-order Their Midnight Kisses to see how things turn out with Hayden and her guys!
CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR COPY
About Anita Maxwell
Anita Maxwell is from Newcastle, Australia and is a wife and a mother. She has one dog, a cat, and wishes she actually had a pet kangaroo. With a Bachelors degree in Information Technology, she never intended to go into the world of writing, always thinking that it was a nice dream for some day. Now she has her very own office to write in, with a beautiful red door that she can shut, and lock, when words are demanding to be written. She loves to write slow burn contemporary romance, but don’t think she can’t get down and dirty.
If you would like to follow her for updates, she can be found here…
Website: www.anitamaxwellauthor.com.au
Newsletter: www.subscribepage.com/anitamaxwellnewsletter
Light Me Up
Rebecca Royce
Ruth has been a vampire for sixty-five years after being assaulted by a vampire during World War II while her family hid from the Nazis. One night, she is drawn to a house where they are celebrating Hanukkah and the candles are burning in the window. There, she meets a man, Benjamin Fox, who is immune to her vampire charms. Ben is thirty-five years old and dying of a heart problem he's had since he was a child.
Together, they will form a friendship that could be so much more if either could allow it. But when Ben is about to succumb to his illness, Ruth must decide whether to give in to his wishes and make him a vampire too. She is, he's decided, his ultimate Hanukkah gift.
Light Me Up © Rebecca Royce 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except for in the case of brief quotations for the use in critical articles or reviews.
The characters and events depicted in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
1
Ruth stood on the roof of the building across the street and watched them. It had been sixty-five years since she’d heard the words spoken, and yet she still knew them as she’d known them as a human, which surprised her, she had to admit. Most of the time, she wasn’t easily astonished.
In terms of time, it was sixty-five years since the Nazis had found her family’s hiding place in the fake bottom of a barn in rural Poland and taken them all away to be killed in the nearest concentration camp.
The Nazis had taken her, but they hadn’t killed her. No, the vampire had done that. And then he’d changed her so she would never draw another breath, never see the sunlight, and need to feed off the blood of others to survive. In this day and age, with the cinemas showing love stories about young girls and glowing vampires, it wasn’t a story that would shock and awe anymore.
She was a vampire, and while she was now a creature to be worshiped in the church of pop culture, she would live forever and knew that sometime in the future, she would be feared as a monster again.
It didn’t matter. Only the blood mattered most of the time.
Tonight was one of those rare exceptions.
The chanting of the children as they lit the Hanukah candles mattered because it made her remember things she’d long ago ceased wasting time thinking about.
Needing to be closer, she dropped off the roof with one easy step and landed on the ground in front of the house that drew her attention.
Three children spoke in unison.
Borukh Ato Adoynoy Eloyheynu Melekh Ho-oylom Asher Kiddeshonu Be-mitsvoysov Ve-tsivonu Lehadlik Neyr Shel khanuko.
Inwardly, she translated the blessing into English.
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by His commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the lights of Hanukkah.
Her father had made them learn it both ways. He’d been so sure that someday, they’d come to America. He’d told her stories, tons of them, about what their life would be like when they did. He wanted them to be able to pray in the language of the country he told them would be their home.
She didn’t think of her family often, and when she did, it was as if she remembered someone else’s life. Her mother with her round, soft face and gentle voice had been the keeper of all the traditions in their lives. She made sure they got to synagogue on Saturday for services, she made sure they went again on Sundays to study, even the women, she had told them, had things to learn.
Her brothers would make Bar Mitzvah…well, some of them would. The ones who had lived to be thirteen. The others had studied but never had their turn to do the ceremony. Well, she didn’t think they had. It was possible some of them survived the Holocaust, although it wasn’t likely. She’d thought it best she not find out if they lived, as she was technically not alive, her undead arrival might cause them stress.
They’d been a big family. Five girls, six boys. She could no longer remember all of their names. One by one, they had slipped away into the oblivion where her mind put her human memories. So few coherent thoughts about those dead children remained. She was the oldest. Twenty-two when she’d had the blood drained from her body, replaced by vampire veno
m that had made her a creature of the night.
Her father, grey haired, stooped over from sewing all day, was a tailor, a highly respected member of their community.
He had never gotten to the United States. His little Ruthie had, but not in any way her dead papa could possibly have imagined.
The three children, whose voices beckoned her from her darkness, stood in front of the window of the house facing the night. Ruth hunted for blood on this block a lot. Beautiful colonial houses that had seen better days lined the quiet street. The neighborhood was what she’d heard called ‘run down.’ It was a favorite spot of hers. The elderly tended not to report aches and pains or strange bite marks they found on their bodies, dismissing most things as just being part of old age.
All blood tasted the same to Ruth. It didn’t matter if she got it from a baby, a marathon runner, or a person on death’s door. All that she cared about was that she got to feed.
This particular house, the ones with the shutters she thought of as yellow—and even then, that was a guess because she hadn’t seen that shade in sixty-five years—was home to an old woman who seemed to reside by herself. Tonight, however, and maybe that was because of the holiday, it was filled with people. She could hear their heartbeats inside. At least four adults to accompany the three children who stood by the window.
Ruth looked up at the sky. It was after dark. They’d done the prayer late. When she’d been a child, it had always been done at sunset. Apparently, it was her lucky night. If they’d done it when they should have, she wouldn’t have seen it. Being a vampire meant staying hidden until complete darkness. Unless you wanted to die.
So far, Ruth had no interest in that.
She heard the cab approach seconds before any regular human ears would hear it. Ducking back into the shadows, she smelled the two humans—both male—inside of the car. The driver, an older gentleman, took the money from his passenger—a man she would guess to be in his mid-thirties—and left him out on the curb.
Standing with his back to her, she couldn’t see his face. His posture, however, spoke volumes. His shoulders were slumped, and his head hung low. As he stood facing the house, she saw his back start to shake. A low sound caught her attention, and she slid forward.
The man sobbed on the side of the road. Each silent step she took gave her new pieces of information about him. First and foremost, there was something very wrong with his heart. At first it beat too fast, and then it skipped a beat, resuming its struggle again too slowly. There was no way he wasn’t aware of it, and for a second, Ruth wondered if he would expire as he stood there on the street.
As she crept closer, his heartbeat regulated itself, sounding more normal, although still off. She might expect this kind of thing from an older person, but the unknown male, who still could be her dinner for the evening, was only in his thirties. What a shame, she thought distantly, it was never nice to see a person cut down in their prime by human weakness.
Suddenly, the man ceased his crying and whirled around. Ruth stopped her approach as she regarded him. How had he known she was there? She hadn’t made a sound he would be able to hear.
Inwardly shrugging, she decided she didn’t care. She’d wanted to see him, and she was getting to. He wouldn’t remember his encounter unless she wanted him to. Being a vampire was convenient in that way.
He was dark haired, dark eyed, with dark stubble coloring his cheeks and chin. She could see him perfectly, as if it was daytime, thanks to the streetlight next to the house. His face circular looking, his frame was thin, even as his muscles were well defined. It was only the dark circles under his eyes that gave any outward evidence of the illness within.
“Hello.” She spoke first, because she knew he would not. Prey never did.
“Hi.” His voice was low and musical. She wondered if he sang.
“What is your name?”
Ruth spent so little time speaking to others, truly less and less as the years went by, that she still held the accent of her human youth. Anyone who listened would think she was a Polish immigrant. This suited her fine. She never stayed in the company of anyone long enough for anyone to care.
“My name is Ben.” He cleared his throat. “Benjamin Fox.”
“Hello, Ben.”
She stared in his eyes for a moment as a strange longing hit her stomach. How nice would it be to be just a girl meeting this young man on the street? But longings were for people with futures, something she did not have since she was dead, and something she suspected he had run out of.
“Are you aware you are sick?”
“I am. I have been nearly my whole life. I was born with a heart defect. It’s gotten worse. There isn’t much time left.”
Well, that answered her question. She reached up and touched the side of his face. This period of time, the moments when she could speak to him, ask him questions, and get the answers to anything she wanted to know, she thought of this as the ‘enthralled time.’ It didn’t last forever.
Eventually, his human mind would push through, and his fight or flee response would be enacted. Most vampires didn’t bother to speak to their prey. They ate, decided whether or not to kill the subject, and moved on.
Usually, she didn’t talk much either, but since she wasn’t going to feed off Ben—it most certainly would kill him, considering his health issues—she thought one conversation wouldn’t hurt anything. Tonight was such a different experience for her from start to finish. She might as well make it a doozy.
“What are you doing here tonight?”
“I came to see my grandmother. The whole family is gathering. It’s going to be my last holiday. I have weeks left at best.”
Not that long, but she wouldn’t tell him that. As a giver of death, she was acutely knowledgeable on the subject. Benjamin Fox had days.
“Do you celebrate Hanukkah for all eight nights or just the first few?”
He shook his head. “I’m not very observant, wasn’t raised that way, but Grandma does. I wanted to make sure I saw her this year.” He paused. “Do you?”
Startled, she wasn’t sure she heard him correctly. “What?”
“I asked if you do all eight nights?”
“No.” What had just happened? He shouldn’t be able to think clearly enough to ask her questions, not while he was enthralled. “Not since I was a human.”
He raised a dark eyebrow before he snickered. “Since you were a human? What are you now? A snake that walks instead of slithers?”
“No, a vampire.”
Ruth couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. In sixty-five years, no humans had ever asked her any questions about herself while they were enthralled. Why was this dying, dark human so different?
The smile dropped from his face, and his mouth became a thin line. “You know, even two years ago, I would have thought that was either really funny or really dumb. Now, I know firsthand that evil things come out at night.”
She could hear the air coming in and out of his lungs, the blood rushing too slowly through his veins. What she didn’t hear was fear, something that should have been present if he wasn’t enthralled.
“You’re different.” It wasn’t a question. She didn’t make it one.
“Because I’m not running away from you?” He was perceptive too.
“That’s correct.”
“I have fought back death so many times since I was a child. Part of the reason I know that this time it’s the end is because I can see things I never could before. Just last week, I thought I saw a vampire crossing the street in front of my house. Ghosts walk among us. I’ve seen them and things in the shadows.” He turned briefly to look at the house behind him. “My sweet grandmother has no idea. These ideas would shock her.”
“But you know they’re not ideas, they’re truth.”
He nodded and ran a hand through his hair. Tired, his body language screamed out to her, this man was so tired.
“And yet you came to light candles and
celebrate a children’s holiday with your family?”
“What else is there in life? I’ve learned the hard way there isn’t much else.”
He had a good point. What else was there? Humans lived for such brief periods of time. As she never aged and would look twenty-two years old for the remainder of her days, until she walked out into the sun or died by fire, she never had to face getting older. Neither, it seemed, would Ben.
He spoke again. “Are you going to kill me before I make it through the door?”
“No.” It was an easy answer. As far as vampires went, she was a relatively harmless one. It had been a very long time since she’d taken a life. She didn’t need to kill in order to survive, even if it always left her a little bit hungry. Like all things, you could learn to ignore a small amount of discomfort.
“Good luck to you, Benjamin Fox. I hope you cheat death again.”
Knowing she needed to leave, that she could spend no more time staring at lit candles in a window of a home she would never enter, she turned and moved away. Both Benjamin Fox and Hanukkah were things long lost to her.
Benjamin walked unsteadily through the front door of his grandmother’s house, assaulted immediately by the smell of latkes and brisket. He smiled, all malaise from the end of his life pushed aside by the familiar aromas of his childhood. It was much warmer inside than it had been out. He was used to balmy California. Upstate New York felt arctic to his thin skin. Not that it mattered if he was hot or cold anymore.
What was there left to worry about, really? He’d just conversed with a gorgeous vampire on the curb outside his grandmother’s house and lived to tell the tale.