Vicious (18 page)

Cat had been much like me. For decades, we neither took a lover, nor did we have any interest to do so. Physical attraction was just not something we felt towards humans or vampires. I had thought that maybe the human feelings of attraction and desire only transferred to some of us after the change. Some seemed prone to it while others felt nothing at all.

Then Cat had found Gabriel. He’d been a poor human soul ravaged by the savagery of other humans. She had confided in me that she had spotted him at a bar that very night and she had been so intrigued by him that she followed his scent through the streets after he left. She had never found someone else so attractive, and it had awakened something new inside of her. Unfortunately, she caught up to him too late, and poor Gabriel had already been beaten, mugged and left for dead. The decision had been hard, but she’d simply been unable to let that poor creature die when she felt so differently about him. We helped her turn him, and we were pleased he loved her right back the very first time his eyes met hers. He remembered nothing about his human life before her.

My attention and thoughts turned away from my memories and back to Grant who had finished his food and was now drinking a glass of iced tea. He was shirtless with only a pair of boxers on as he sat on the bed. I watched the muscles and tendons in his neck intently as they moved when he gulped down swallow after swallow. My eyes traced his neck down to his shoulders, and that is when I saw the bruises. I was up and beside him in a quick and urgent movement that seemed to startle him to no end. I had moved too fast and quietly for him to detect until I was right next to him.

“Anna, you scared me. I didn’t know you were up.”

I ignored his exclamations as I examined the small fingerprint bruises on his shoulders. Fear filled my body and mind. How had he gotten these?

“Are you okay? Where did these come from?”

“Good morning to you too, sunshine,” he said with a little laugh in his smile as he bent to kiss me.

I kissed him back but could not take my eyes off the bruises. Why was he acting so nonchalant? Had Lea gotten to him while I was asleep?

“Really, Grant,
what
happened?” I asked.

He looked at his shoulder and shrugged. “Don’t know. I think it must have happened last night. You did get a little intense once or twice,” he said with another sheepish grin.

He kissed me again.

Horror and understanding washed over me. I had done that to him last night. I had squeezed his shoulder in a fit of passion. Passion I was not used to feeling. I had hurt him. Suddenly I felt a little sick. Grant must have noticed the change in me, because he immediately started talking in circles.

“No, Anna, I don’t mind. It didn’t even hurt. They are little bruises. I didn’t even notice them until I looked in the mirror when I woke up, not that they are noticeable or anything. You won’t even see them if I have a shirt on. Please, it’s really not a big deal. I’ve had worse after a baseball game.”

I looked into his sweet face, and he gave me a reassuring smile while he put his warm hands on my shoulders.

“Last night was the greatest night of my life, and I don’t want you to regret any of it. Really. Please, Anna.”

I smiled back at him. I obviously had not meant to do this to Grant, and I would try to not beat myself up over it. It had been the greatest night for me too, and I would not dare ruin it this morning. I put my hand gingerly on his shoulder.

“I’ll just have to be more careful next time.”

I smiled my newly found coy smile at him, and he returned it with interest. He wrapped me in his arms, picked me up and kissed me in a way that suggested more was to come. Sure enough, we fell back into bed together again.

“You had better not.”

Chapter Twenty

Anna

I always rose before the others. In fact, Lea and I were the ones who always rose first. The explanation for this was the way we were made. Lea and I were made from a more potent dose of the infected blood, and the others were made from a slightly diluted form of our blood mixed with their blood. Consequently, Lea and I were a tiny bit faster, stronger and more agile than the others. While Lea was a slightly better fighter than me, I was a slightly better strategist than she was. Together, we would have made a perfect team.

The others also required more sleep to rejuvenate, so when Grant said he wanted to take me somewhere before the others rose, I knew I would not be missed for some time. It was still a good four hours before the sun set, so I doubted if even Lea was awake and moving about in her room. I slipped three notes under each door with the same message.

Grant and I went to do some research before sundown. Should be back soon. I will call you when we are returning.

I searched in my bag to find one of my pairs of extremely tinted sunglasses, and then I walked outside to find Grant waiting for me. He had gotten the Honda and pulled it around to the front entrance to pick me up. I smiled a little at him, still unsure as to what this was all about. He told me he had something special to share with me, but he had insisted it remain a secret for now.

I felt a little tense leaving the other vampires at the hotel alone, but Grant assured me we wouldn’t be long. Besides, I did have Marshall there. He was the strongest one in my group, and I was certain that with Lulu, Cat and Gabriel backing him up, he could subdue any sudden changes of heart on Lea’s part.

So I slipped into the passenger seat of the car, and we exited the parking lot of the little east Dallas hotel to hop back on I20 going eastbound.

“Why are we going back the way we came?”

“Because what I want to show you is about an hour in this direction,” he answered.

“An hour? Grant, really? What is this all about? We have to reach Midland by morning, you know.”

“And the others won’t be up until sunset at least. We can’t move until they are all awake. Please just trust me on this, Anna. Be patient.”

He put his hand on my hand and smiled a warm smile at me. I could feel his pulse through his touch, and it sang to me. Passion throbbed inside me again, but I held it at bay as much as I could. Even so, I felt it burn through my eyes when I looked at him.

I resigned to go along with this plan, no matter what reservations I was feeling. Once during the drive, I saw him pull out a printout of an internet map, and he studied the location where the little red star was placed. He kept checking his phone, but the signal wasn’t great near the pine curtain of east Texas. The car’s navigation system had never worked, which had made it more affordable. I leaned slightly to get a glimpse of where we were headed, and he jerked the map away as soon as he saw me move.

“Hey now. None of that.”

It was too late though. I had seen that the little star, which indicated our destination was placed over a small town northwest of Tyler called Swan, Texas. What on earth was in Swan, Texas? I did not let on that I had seen the destination, and I played along in somewhat faked frustration. I had learned to fake many normal human reactions from observing them for so long. Even though our nature leaned more towards the direct side of things, we had to learn these little human nuances in order to blend into their society as much as possible. I was pretty good at it.

It was not long before we exited I20 and Grant pulled out the internet map again. We followed a few paved roads before he turned right onto a graveled one. We were really going in the country. The car puttered along the gravel road for a little while before we came upon a faded-blue ranch-style house with a grey roof and wide front yard. Grant parked the car just on the edge of where the gravel met the grass next to a maroon Dodge truck before he killed the engine. I surveyed the house, wondering what on earth this little house in the middle of nowhere had to do with Grant’s surprise. He turned to me and took my hand.

“Anna, I took the liberty of doing something for you.”

The severity in his voice startled me, and I looked into his face. I felt his pulse begin to thud harder and faster through his hand. Nervousness filled me, and I looked around us for any sign of trouble.

“What have you done?”

“Here, I’ll show you.”

He reached into his bag and retrieved some more internet printouts. He handed me the papers and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Anna, this was your house when you were human.”

I looked down at the papers he had placed in my hand and saw an old photograph of a girl that looked just like me with longer hair. The young girl stared up at me from the page with normal blue eyes and blond hair that went past her shoulders. She smiled in a way that both showed her innocence and her willingness to go out in the world to make a place for herself. These were the looks of promise and hope that you could only find existing in the young and hopeful. The headline read
Tyler Teens Missing Since Friday
. I stared at the photograph hard and realized this girl did not just look a lot like me, this was me. This was the human me at the tender age of nineteen without the vampire eyes and the hardness of torture.

“Your name was Annabel Lee Mitchell. Your parents were Howard and Beth Mitchell. Howard Mitchell still lives in this house.”

My brain sputtered. I didn’t know how to process this.

“And Beth Mitchell?” I asked numbly.

Grant paused a moment. “She died twenty years ago after a stroke.”

I thought a moment about this, and my first conclusion was that Grant had been mistaken in his research of this girl. This girl was not me. She just looked like me. Surely there had been hundreds, maybe even thousands of blond girls that had gone missing when I had. There had to be a mistake.

“I researched you when I was researching the prison, and finding this was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Even though it was an old case, your mother and father had given tons of interviews and insisted on the police following leads even ten years after you went missing, so there was a huge paper trail to follow. I wanted to give something to you since you saved me, and I thought maybe I could help you by filling in the parts that you couldn’t remember. I thought you might want to know what happened to you, and what you used to be like when you were human.”

I was still thinking this was all some big mistake, and we had just wasted a great deal of time driving out to this poor man’s house when I noticed something about the picture I was holding. The girl in the photograph was sitting in a rope swing. My eyes widened and shot back up towards the house in alarm, and I saw it there. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before when we first pulled up. I supposed I hadn’t been looking for it before. The same rope swing was swaying slightly in the late afternoon breeze from a large tree in the front yard.

I hastily darted out of the car and raced across the yard towards the swing without a thought in my head about how fast and supernatural this would look to anyone who might be watching from the house. All I could think about was getting to that swing quickly. I reached it too quickly for a human, and I silently chastised myself for demonstrating my power in open daylight in front of people However, the thought vanished as I looked down at the tattered old swing.

It had once been painted red with yellow flowers and green leaves. I knew this only because I could remember it. The seat of the swing was far too worn to make out any real detail. It was the only memory I had retained from my human life other than the simple knowledge of my own name. I knelt slowly beside the swing to examine it further as Grant stepped to my side. The rope was tattered from decades of use and the battery of weather. The seat was ragged and appeared to now only have a faded version of its original vibrant redness. The paint was worn at the middle from someone sitting and swinging in it over and over again. When I turned the seat over, I could make out the faintest little flowers still painted with such care on the bottom. This was the same swing.

This house had once been my home. I stood and very gently sat in the swing to see if it would still hold my weight, and when I saw that it would, I relaxed into it and rocked back and forth a little. The swing creaked in a reassuring and nostalgic way, and I felt instantly comforted.

Grant knelt beside me slowly.

“They are expecting us. We can go inside and talk to your father. Or we can just leave, and I’ll make some excuse. It’s up to you.”

My head snapped up to him suddenly alarm. Was he serious?

“You told them about me? They are expecting us?”

“Well, I didn’t tell the truth obviously. I told your father’s nurse we were college students researching cold-case files of missing children. I said it was a psychology project where we were learning about how the families coped with unsolved cases such as these, and we wanted to interview Howard Mitchell about his daughter. I thought it would be a good way to ask questions about your abduction and your life before without sounding weird. He agreed to the interview.”

I thought about the logic for a moment and had to admit he was clever for the cover story. No one would suspect two college kids asking about how one lived through such an ordeal with no answers or explanations. The idea of possibly unlocking the mystery of my elusive human past was so enticing, but what if what I found in that old house was more than I wanted to know?

I stared at Grant for a moment and then looked at the front door of the home. I nodded, stood and started walking toward the door at a pace easily slow enough to be human. I did not know how long my kind lived, but I knew I would regret it for the rest of my possibly very long life if I decided not to at least try to find out what had happened to me.