Unnatural (28 page)

What was Michael talking about? Penry thought. “That’s the whole point.”

When the metal plate slid open, both Michael and Fritz jumped back. Penry was the only one who appeared calm and stood his ground. But once he realized the man behind the door was wearing sunglasses, he became excited and forgot that he was going to ask if they could enter. “Blimey! Is the sun bothering your eyes too? Just yesterday I felt the same way.” Penry turned to his friends to ask, “Could something be going around?” By the time he turned back, the metal plate was back in its original position, closed. Immediately, Penry knocked on the door again. “Hey, mister, do you mind letting us in?”

“Do you mind if we got out of here?” Michael asked. “Gay, straight, or whatever, I don’t think this is the kind of place for us.”

“I’m with Nebraska,” Fritz said. “Let’s go!”

As they dragged a reluctant Penry away from the door and back to the main street, they had no idea that the people on the other side of the door were as nervous and agitated as they were. “Are you an absolute idiot?! You’re not supposed to open the door unless you hear the password!” Brania waited a moment and then slapped the man so hard across his face, his sunglasses were knocked off. “That could’ve been one of them and not just a bunch of stupid kids from the academy.”

Alistair stirred in his chair. “The academy?” When he spoke, his lips barely moved and his eyes remained shut. When Jeremiah pushed his shoulder to remind him to keep quiet, he almost tumbled to the floor, but swayed back at the last second, his head falling backward. If Michael and the others gained entry into the room or saw their headmaster’s face outside, they would have been startled, frightened even. Once healthy-looking, vigorous, he now appeared ashen and gray, his skin colored only by the black circles beneath his eyes. The cleft on the left side of his chin was now so pronounced it looked like a groove, a deep etching. He was alive, but only barely.

“Careful, Jeremiah,” Brania chided. “Or I’ll take back your gift.”

Vaughan’s driver turned to face the voluptuous girl
who looked so incredibly out of place in such dreary surroundings. “My gift?”

“As a thank-you for handling the situation with Alistair so well.” Done with the club’s bodyguard, Brania walked over to Jeremiah, her heels clicking loudly on the cement floor and echoing throughout the windowless, tomblike room. “I left it in your apartment upstairs. It’s a marble planter filled with the most extraordinary white roses.”

“Flowers?” Jeremiah asked, his puzzlement understandable. Even before he became a vampire, Jeremiah was not the kind of man who would receive flowers as a gift.

Brania detested ingrates, but since the gift was from her father and not her, she didn’t have the power to take it back. All she could do was gather her patience and explain its worth. “Not flowers, white roses. Keep them watered and protected and they will thrive and bring you nothing but joy.”

Jeremiah still didn’t understand why Brania was giving him flowers, but he was grateful that someone of her stature felt compelled to give him a gift. “Thank you, Brania, really.”

Turning on Jeremiah to address the bodyguard one last time, Brania said, “And I’ll thank you to wear your contacts from now on. Do I have to remind everyone that we are trying to blend in?” Suddenly disgusted to be among such fools, Brania decided it was time for her to go. Thanks to the bodyguard’s carelessness, she
would have to take the long way; she couldn’t risk being seen by people who might recognize her. Before she opened the trapdoor that led to an underground passageway, she reminded Jeremiah of his final instructions. “Help him with his feeding and then bring him home. It’s time he got back to work.”

Jeremiah nodded dutifully and then said, “Thanks again.”

But Brania didn’t hear him; she was already underground.

   At the top of the stairs, Michael watched Ronan leave, his kiss still moist on his lips. What an eventful day. Even though their hand holding was cut short, it was another step in the right direction, a step forward toward the man Michael longed to become and away from the child he was. And then finding out that Alistair and Jeremiah were a couple. That was a shock. The group was split on whether they actually believed it, but Michael did. There was something distrustful about Jeremiah that led Michael to believe he was hiding something; his sexual preference could easily be that something, but Ronan wasn’t too sure. “Not everything is always as it seems,” he had said. Ciaran seemed to agree with him.

“You never really know what’s going on inside a bloke’s head,” Ciaran remarked, already in his pajamas and sitting on his bed.

“It’s not what we saw on the inside, but what was
going on outside,” Michael explained. “My father’s driver had his arm around Hawksbry’s waist, for heaven’s sake. They were, like, on a date or something.”

Ciaran shrugged and flipped through some celebrity magazine. “I don’t know. It’s like Ronan. You look at him and think he’s like us, but …” Ciaran flipped the pages faster and prayed Michael didn’t pick up on what he just said, what just slipped past his lips.

“What do you mean ’not like us’?”

“Bloody hell, look how fat she is!” Ciaran turned the magazine so Michael could see a photograph of a once-svelte Hollywood starlet who now looked like she was in desperate need of a fat farm.

“Answer me, Ciaran,” Michael demanded. “What do you mean Ronan’s not like us?”

Sighing, Ciaran put down the magazine.
Think fast, mate, so it doesn’t blow up in your face.
“We’re the outsiders, you and I; we have to try and fit in. But Ronan’s already at the center of everything. Yet when you look at him, all quiet, pensive, it can look as if he’s the one stuck on the outside looking in.” Ciaran went back to glancing at the pages of the magazine, hoping what he just said made some sort of sense.

“Do you even know your brother?”

By the incredulous tone of Michael’s voice, he guessed that he wasn’t buying his explanation. “Feel free to disagree with me.”

Michael felt his cheeks redden and he couldn’t control the impulse to come to his boyfriend’s defense. “Are you trying to say that he’s acting? That he doesn’t feel
out of touch, like he doesn’t belong? Because if you are, I have to say you really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Even though Ciaran knew that he’d made up that story to cover a slip of the tongue and he was still angry with Ronan for his careless actions today, he still didn’t like anyone accusing him of not understanding his brother. He understood Ronan better than anyone, at times probably even better than Ronan himself, so he found himself unjustifiably, but vehemently, defending his statement. “You might be his new boyfriend, Michael, but I’m Ronan’s brother.”

“Why are you so jealous of our relationship?” The words spat out of Michael’s mouth so quickly, he couldn’t stop them if he’d wanted to.

“I’m not jealous!”

Michael took a few steps closer to Ciaran’s bed, his legs shaking slightly. “Yes, you are! You have been since the first night I told you I met him outside the cathedral.”

He just couldn’t keep his composure any longer, he just couldn’t. Ciaran flung the magazine across the room and bounded right up to Michael, his legs quite steady. “I know you think you know everything and I know you’re damned pleased with yourself! You swoop into a new school, snag yourself a boyfriend within days, make the bloody swim team! But I’m telling you, Michael, you don’t know anything. Ronan is not like you and me! Go ahead and ask him yourself and see what he says!”

Unnerved by Ciaran’s outburst, but refusing to back down, Michael shouted back, “Maybe I’ll do just that! And then we’ll see who Ronan chooses!” Needing to escape, Michael found himself racing down the steps, two at a time, Ciaran shouting something after him, something that he couldn’t hear, possibly because his own voice was still screaming in his head.

“Go outside! See if I care!” Ciaran shouted from the top of the stairs. He ran back into his room, slamming the door behind him, but then remembered the promise he’d made to Ronan, to watch after Michael and help keep him safe. Cursing his inability to go back on his word to Ronan, he ran outside into the cold night air to rescue his brother’s boyfriend, hoping he wasn’t too late.

   Just as he rounded past St. Jerome’s, Michael thought he heard a cry, muffled, but definitely a cry. He stopped in his tracks and for the first time saw that it was quite dark tonight; the stars seemed to be hiding, the moonlight lost behind the clouds. He listened, but the only thing he could hear was his own breathing, growing more rapid by the second. He turned to head back home and heard the same sound again. This time there was no question, it was a cry. Someone or some thing was in trouble.

He started walking back toward St. Peter’s, his body moving in a straight line, but his head frantically moving from side to side to try and take in the entire campus at once. Then he heard a twig snap from the weight of
someone stepping on it; at least that’s what it sounded like to him.

Slowly he turned around but didn’t see anything, even though two people saw him.

Behind him was Ciaran, arms crossed, shaking a bit in his thin pajamas, and in front of him, hidden by the bulk of a dead deer, was Nakano. Unaware that Ciaran was a short distance away, Nakano made a split-second decision and decided to accept this offering from fate. He wiped the deer’s blood from his mouth and started walking toward Michael. But Michael couldn’t see him because in an instant he was covered by fog.

Not again,
Nakano thought.
What the hell is going on?!
The fog moved quickly, encompassing Michael and the surrounding area and stopping only when it reached Nakano’s feet. Enraged that once again, this fog, this barrier that had to be the result of some supernatural force, was blocking him, was getting in the way of his taking Michael, he lashed out, punching the fog with his fists. This time the fog was denser and Nakano’s hands couldn’t even penetrate the mist. He punched, but once they hit the gray smoke, his fist bounced back. It didn’t hurt; it was like he was punching a soft, rubbery surface. No matter how many times he hit it, he couldn’t pass through.

From where Ciaran was standing, he could see everything. He saw the fog appear out of nowhere, rise, and engulf Michael and then he saw Nakano repeatedly punch the fog, unable to pierce the smoke. None of it made sense, except that to Ciaran in a dark, twisted
way, it made perfect sense. “What have you people done now?” he asked the cold night air. And then he simply turned and walked home. Most people who had witnessed something so strange, who knew that a vampire, disgruntled and violent, was only a few yards away, would run at full speed, silently praying that they would make it safely home, but not Ciaran. He wasn’t afraid. He had his reasons that to some wouldn’t make any sense, but at least he was able to walk back to his dorm without fear. Whatever would happen to Michael was out of his control. But no matter what happened, at least he knew he’d tried to protect him.

Jeremiah was of the same mind. He looked down at Alistair sprawled on the ground before the Archangel Academy gate and gave him a little kick to wake him up. He had done everything Brania had asked him to do and had earned his gift. He made sure Alistair fed, he brought him back home, he even got him cleaned up since the chap was starting to smell, but he drew the line at putting him to bed. He was a driver, not a manservant. So before he drove off, he simply made sure that Alistair was standing. Whatever happened next was out of his control; he had done everything he could to get the man home safely.

   His eyes flickered to adjust to the moonlight after staring into the strong headlights of the sedan. Alistair looked around and for the first time in days he felt safe. He was home. He didn’t fully remember where he had been, but he was once again among things that felt familiar.
Suddenly, the wind howled and blew through Alistair, carrying his scent into the air and to Nakano. The boy breathed in deeply and was uncertain at first, but then, yes, he recognized the smell. Giving up on trying to break through the fog and reach Michael, he turned and ran toward what he recognized.

When he reached the headmaster’s cottage, he saw Alistair in the distance grab hold of the gate and pull it open. He then saw the electric current rip through his body, volt after volt of electricity pulsing through his skin, his body lighting up like a white-hot flame. But what surprised him even more was how gently Alistair closed the gate and continued walking toward his home. He was unhurt, completely unharmed by the burst of electricity that should have rendered him lifeless.

Nakano was in shock. “So they didn’t kill you, they just turned you into one of us.”

The thunderstorm took both boys by surprise.

When Michael left Professor McLaren’s British literature class, the only clouds that spotted the sky were large and white, hardly ominous-looking. But by the time he passed St. Jerome’s, they had turned dark gray, the sky behind them murky, shadowy, and not the clear blue it was just moments earlier. Before the first raindrop fell, thunder clapped from somewhere deep within the sky to announce the arrival of a sudden storm. And when Ronan grabbed Michael’s arm and pulled him under the awning behind St. Joshua’s, they were both soaking wet.

“Is everything in this place unexpected?” Michael asked.

“Only the good stuff,” Ronan replied with a grin.

The stone canopy over the library’s basement entrance was small, only a few feet wide, but large enough to give the boys shelter from the rain, and desolate, so it gave them privacy in the middle of a busy school day. Ronan ran his fingers through his hair, slicking back the loose strands so he looked like he just emerged from the pool. Drenched and alive.

A stream of rain slid down his nose, lingering at the tip to become a drop before falling and bursting onto Michael’s lips. Ronan grabbed Michael’s neck and felt the heat emanating from the boy despite the chill in the air and pressed his lips to his, not kissing him at first, just tasting the rain, but quickly the rain was forgotten and all Ronan knew was that he was quite unexpectedly alone with his boyfriend and he wanted to take full advantage of the moment.