Gifts of the Blood

Gifts of the Blood

Book I of the Gifted Blood Trilogy

by Vicki Keire

Copyright 2010 Vicki Keire

Website: http://www.vickikeire.com/

Blog: http://vickikeire.blogspot.com/

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, business establishments or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1:
An Assignment

Chapter 2:
A Visitor

Chapter 3:
In the Shadows

Chapter 4:
Involved

Chapter 5:
Neighborly

Chapter 6:
The Lighter Spectrum

Chapter 7:
Light and Promises

Chapter 8:
A Dark and Terrible Beauty

Chapter 9:
A Reason It's Called Falling

Chapter 10:
Declaration

Chapter 11:
Missing Time

Chapter 12:
The Orchard

Chapter 13:
Half Dark

Chapter 14:
Extraordinary Circumstances

Chapter 15:
Truths Laid Bare

Chapter 16:
D.N.R.

Chapter 17:
Not a Miracle

Chapter 18:
Life Sentence

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Excerpt:
Darkness in the Blood
, Gifted Blood Book II

Excerpt:
Jenny Pox
by J.L. Bryan

Chapter One:

An Assignment

The weather had just turned from unbearably hot to cool with occasional gusts of frigid as I sat with my sketchbook, trying to capture the change of seasons within its pages. The gathering chill made the sky clearer than the muggy haze of full summer; the warm palette of autumn leaves draped the trees every shade of red from blush to blood. I gripped my chunk of graphite, determined to get the assignment exactly right, and looked out over the St. Clare River.

Autumn was the time of year when my brother Logan and I pulled out long sleeves and boots for the first time and tramped through the woods together, just as we did with our parents before they died four years ago. The woods surrounding Whitfield became our own private, living cathedral. We filled our pockets with its offerings: quartz, oddly shaped pieces of wood, a feather. We linked hands just before sunset and took turns talking to our parents about our lives as we walked. Logan always said he felt them more strongly in the woods than in the graveyard. Then we’d rush home, racing the darkness, and drink hot chocolate and fight over the remote until one of us fell over, dead asleep.

But not this fall. Things were different. Darker. There was no time for long walks through the woods, and no energy even if time could be found. At night, the stars were sharp as paper cut outs in indigo parchment. The crickets and cicadas had a spectacular backdrop against which to sing their last songs of the year. With luck, I could snatch a few minutes to watch night fall over Blind Springs Park as I sprinted from school to work to home. This fall, I was a freshman at Andreas Academy of Fine Arts with an almost full-time job at the coffee shop two buildings down from our apartment. It didn’t cover all the bills, but it did help keep us in health insurance. Things like insurance were actually important to me now. I kept the local bookstore steadily supplied with hand-painted tarot card decks for extra cash, and did all the other things running a household required that Logan couldn’t. Which was almost everything.

This fall, Logan had cancer. I watched it leach his brown eyes and his tall, compact carpenter’s body of life and vitality as surely as the approaching winter would rob the forest of color and life.

My brother’s once strong, sure hands trembled when he did something as simple as open a stubborn jar of pickles. His kind brown eyes were constantly ringed with purplish bruises. Logan, always so active, now had to sit down and rest halfway up the stairs to our third floor apartment. The chemotherapy affected his scent, somehow. I didn't really notice, but our cat Abigail sure did. When Logan came home from a session, she paced the floor and yowled, bewildered as to why he didn’t look, smell, or act like her beloved person. That killed him. Abigail was his baby.

Worst of all, there was nothing I could do about any of it. I felt so powerless and angry most of the time. Logan had been eighteen when our parents died. I had been fifteen. We were barely old enough to live on our own, but we tried. We took care of each other. Now I wasn’t yet nineteen, and I was doing my best to take care of everything while inside, I was falling apart.

So when my “gift” decided this was the perfect time to make its reappearance, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Everything else was coming unglued. Why not my head, too?

I was sitting on a wrought iron bench, graphite in hand, overlooking the St. Clare River, when I sketched a piece of my future. I’d been drawing the future for as long as I could hold a crayon.

“It’s a gift of your blood, Caspia,” my grandmother used to insist. She was the only one to speak to me about it, this "gift of my blood," back before she died. My family knew I had a strange ability, but no one else talked about its origins. “You’ll see,” she always said, examining the symbols or pictures that seemed to come from nowhere and always frightened me. “You just drew a vision of your future, honey.”

She was right. Every single ‘vision’ came true.

It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. It’s not like I draw lottery numbers or predict world disasters. Sometimes, it’s as mundane as a really bad grade or a burned roast that sets off the smoke alarm. Sometimes it’s good things, like picnic-perfect weather or when I drew a picture of our neighbors, who thought they couldn’t have children, with a pair of smiling twins.

But sometimes, I drew very dark things. Like Grandmother’s death. Or Logan, thin as a rail and sick in a hospital bed. The fire across the street that killed our neighbor’s dogs. The happy family where things got broken and people bruised behind closed doors. Some things I still don’t understand. Either they haven’t come to pass, or they’re just gibberish.

That autumn afternoon, when I drew a strange and furious man less than a dozen feet away from me, I was hoping for gibberish.

I was supposed to be sketching the river. I kept staring at the lines of light and dark across its surface, at the way it seemed to catch on boulders and drag itself around them in great huge ripples like wrinkles in muddy silk. My eyes followed the jagged contours of the distant limestone cliffs. The river below me sheltered fish that leapt, glittering, out of its depths, and nurtured the lush woodlands that were just now turning the brilliant fiery colors of fall. Every so often, a storm swept through, swelling the St. Clare River and making it angry enough to flood homes or even drown a person.

Powerful. Calm. Sheltering. Beautiful. These were the things I was supposed to be drawing, the things my Drawing II teacher, Dr. Christian, had actually assigned to us. “Go draw the St. Clare River in all its fall splendor,” the temperamental Dr. Christian ordered us, shortly after taking roll. A few of the girls actually made quiet sounds of disappointment. That’s how drop-dead sexy Dr. Christian is. Even though he’d just given us the day off, probably half the girls would have happily stayed just to look at him.

I wasn’t one of them. I loved the weather, and I loved the Riverwalk. I couldn’t wait to get started, couldn’t wait to lose myself in the sheer joy of creating something out of nothing on the blank page. I was the first one out the door, even though my best friend Amberlyn yelled at me to wait. Despite my freakish prophetic ability, or maybe because of it, I lived to draw and paint. And with all that was going on in my life, I was desperate for some physical and mental escape.

And yet I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t finish a simple assignment like a landscape sketch. I got the basics done quickly enough. Then I started to relax and focus in on the details, like the massive oak on the far bank charred and split by lightening. My fingers moved as if they had tiny minds of their own, drawing the graphite smoothly, fooling my brain into thinking that strange part of me, the part that had been creating prophetic images for as long as I could remember, had gone to sleep or something. But of course it hadn’t. It had been months since I’d drawn one of my visions, and it had never happened in public before. Ever. When I looked down at the sketch across my knees, an incomplete but distinct figure that had no business being there stared back at me.

It was male, and I had drawn enough of him to note his protective, even angry stance. He stood with his body squared and his hands loose but steady at waist level, as if he was ready to go for a weapon or block an attack. I had drawn a dark cloud swirling around him. Soaring planes of light and shapes I couldn’t completely make out pierced the dark cloud. The few I could recognize sent my stomach plummeting somewhere south of my ankles: a hand with nails like talons, dripping blood; a shattered knife; a tattered book; a heart-shaped box, smashed to bits. Sleek white lines swirled around the man, whirling with the dark cloud. I squinted. I couldn’t tell what they were, if anything. I had only half-drawn his face before I stopped, so he kind of looked like the creepy Twilight Zone character with no mouth. I shivered and zipped my hoodie up all the way.

I had managed to finish his eyes. It was only a charcoal sketch, so I couldn’t tell what color they were, but I had done a good job capturing the light in them. His eyes were so light they almost glowed at me out of the charcoal whorls. They were narrowed underneath arched brows, and they practically sparked with anger. His eyes were so angry, in fact, that for just a minute I wondered why my drawing didn’t catch fire right in my lap.

He stood on the Riverwalk side, just a few dozen feet from where I huddled with the rest of my art class against the October breeze. Of course, in reality, there was no one there. No angry mystery man with only half a face glared at me from the banks of the St. Clare River.

Instead, groups of art students, clad in thrift store chic, huddled all along the Riverwalk. Some worked and some goofed off. I had been part of the first group until my freakish ability manifested itself again. After that, I kind of froze in horror. Amberlyn sat with her striped tights pressed up against my knee, bent over her own sketchpad. Like me, she had cut the fingers off a pair of knit gloves to keep her hands warm but still allow her to draw. I had been hoping to finish quickly, with time left over to run home and check on Logan before work. Amberlyn was so into what she was doing that she didn’t notice, at first, when I stopped working.

I should have known better. Amberlyn is really, really observant. It’s part of what makes her such a good artist. And why she can be such an annoying friend.

“Caspia,” she purred, her voice low and throaty like she’d just swallowed honey. “What is
that
?”

“Well,” I heard myself say stupidly. “Um. Nothing. No one.”

Amberlyn just looked at me like I’d insulted her intelligence. I struggled to sound more convincing. “Really. I have no idea who that is. I just made him up.” Lame, but true. I tried to cover with a nervous giggle. That was my mistake. I wasn’t the giggling type, and Amberlyn knew it.

“Caspia, honey,” she drawled, prying the bar of graphite from my fingers. She looked at it in disgust and threw it in the trashcan the next bench over. I’d snapped it into pieces and ground part of it to dust. “I know you’re stressed out. It looks like you just drew a man being eaten by a tornado, or something.” She squinted and tilted her head slightly sideways, trying to get a better look. I flipped the drawing facedown so she couldn’t see it, trying to look nonchalant about it. She sighed and took my charcoal smeared fingers in her own and massaged them, not caring that I was getting black dust all over her cute pink fingerless gloves. “I just wish you’d tell me if someone’s tormenting you so much you need to devour him with an imaginary tornado. Instead of doing your homework, no less.” She clucked her tongue in mock severity. “I’m trustworthy. I won’t even tell Logan,” she taunted, emphasizing my brother’s name with a wink.