“You were using me, Grayson.”
He looks away, unable to meet my gaze. That’s all the answer I need.
“I wish I never met you! That way, I wouldn’t have been thinking about you while all this was happening. I wouldn’t have come back for you.”
“Celes.” The force of those words are enough to make Grayson look like he’s been slapped. Good. Paler now, he says, “I deserve that. But you have to know… I didn’t know anything about this until you left. All that was real. We were real.”
His father shakes his head. “Get on with it, Grayson.”
Grayson moves towards me, and I decide to add a real slap in the face to the more metaphorical kind. He catches my hand, with reflexes that are far faster than I remember. He’s stronger than I remember too as he leans in close to me, looking like he might kiss me.
“Keep this fight going. They’re buying it.”
What? For a moment I can’t make sense of the words. Then it comes to me. This is still part of the act? All of it? I thought… I really thought…
I try to rip my hands clear of Grayson’s, but he holds me easily even when I struggle. Then I see it. All the Others nearby are watching. All of them. I’m still too confused to know what’s going on, but I know that this distraction is working, real or not. I guide Grayson’s hand’s down to my waist, and he bends close again.
“Kiss me, and then slap me, Celes. As hard as you can. That will get their attention better than anything.”
Gladly. I kiss him quickly, passionately, thoroughly. Then I pull back sharply and hit him as hard as I can. I don’t know which feels better in that moment.
“How
dare
you try to get back into my good graces with one kiss!”
“That’s not all I want to get back into,” Grayson says. That’s not something he would ever usually say, but right now I don’t know what is normal and what isn’t. I don’t know what’s an act for the sake of the men around us, and what is real. Right now, I’m not sure if I even care.
“After all this?” I say. “You’ve got no chance.”
“Really?” Grayson asks, raising an eyebrow. That gets a laugh from the men around him. Typical. “I think after all this, my chances have gone up. I had to be so careful before, so we never went all the way, but now I know that you’re strong enough to handle it, I don’t have to hold back anymore.”
The men snicker at that. It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating. And it’s distracting. Oh so distracting.
He
kisses
me
then. The first few seconds are firm, almost controlling. Then it’s softer as I yield to Grayson’s lips, growing to something truly passionate as the seconds go on. His hands are on me, pulling me close, holding me there. I dread to think what it must look like from the outside, or how much some of the Others around us must be enjoying the view. I have to admit though, I’m almost as distracted as they are. Grayson when he’s the nice boy next door is one thing. Grayson when he’s taking charge, powerful, and only just the right side of scary is quite another.
“What’s going on, Grayson?” I whisper, trying to force him to finally make things clear. In spite of my body telling me that it doesn’t matter so long as he keeps kissing me, I need to know. I
need
to.
He whispers back, in between kisses. “Celes, don’t worry, I’ll get us out of this.”
So he isn’t on the Others’ side. At least, I assume he isn’t.
“I know you’re confused,” he says, which is understating things just a little, in my opinion. “
I’m
confused. They memory faded me. They changed so many things…”
“Grayson.” His father’s voice is firm now. It’s the voice of a man who has business to get on with, and can’t afford to wait around for his son’s amorous adventures to finish. “That’s enough. Cuff the girl and get her into one of the cars out of the way. We don’t have all day if we’re going to finish the Underground.”
“…including this,” Grayson finishes, spinning away from me and pulling the gun from his pocket, training it levelly on his father’s chest. “If anybody moves, he dies.”
The Others are still for a moment, apparently trying to decide how seriously to take the threat. At the same time, they don’t notice the other threat, in the form of Jack and his team. Jack is racing forward, on the Others’ blind side, with his full team of Faders in tow, sprinting to keep up as Jack moves in on the Others rapidly, his weapon already raised.
That should be a reassuring sight except for two things. The first is that there is almost certain to be a gun battle in the near future with me somewhere near the middle of it. I know that’s what I signed on for when I agreed to be the distraction, but that still doesn’t mean I have to like the idea of bullets flying past my head.
The second problem is a lot simpler. Jack isn’t focused on the Others. I can see, just by looking at him, that his focus is on Grayson. And it looks to me like the only thing on Jack’s mind right now is murder.
*********
Celes, Jack, and Grayson’s stories continues in
Falling (FADE #2)
Releases
October 2011
Winner of 2 Awards
EXCERPT FROM
PULSE
By Kailin Gow
*****************************
prologue
S
he ran like an animal. Her clothes were wet, sopping, clinging to her thighs and to her chest, hollow and transparent around the curve of her shoulders. Her hair shook out droplets of rain; her cheeks were flushed and she was breathless. He could see her heartbeat throbbing at the side of her throat, see it in the rhythmic panting, hear it from across the street, pounding in his ears, intermingled with the thunder bolting from the sky. He could feel it – it felt like an earthquake to him, shaking his ribs, his shoulders, his legs. It had been so long since he had seen a heartbeat like hers – since he had felt a heartbeat at all.
The skies had opened up – as they so often did in North California – without any warning, without any hesitation. It was as if the smooth blue glass ceiling of the world had shattered all at once, letting the primordial oceans pound down upon the pavement. He could see her consternation, her irritation – she wanted nothing but to get out of the rain, to dry herself off, to curl up into
something warm and dry.
But Jaegar loved the rain. He loved the energy – the pulse of life beating down upon the earth. He could hear the scattered raindrops in their rhythmic approach to earth and pretend that each fall of rain was a beat of his dead heart. And she was alive with the energy, too –
alive
as he had never seen a woman alive, tossing her hair back, running into shelter, and her lips were pink and her cheeks were red. He remembered that his lips would never again be pink, that his cheeks would never again be red.
She was so young
.
Humans so often surprised him in that way. They looked no different from him – he could have been seventeen; he had been seventeen for so long – but their youth never failed to surprise him. The way the world was so new to them – that rain could still take them by surprise, when he had seen so many rainfalls.
He could smell her. The wind carried her scent to him like an animal's scent, and it was all he could do to keep his fangs in check. He leaned heavily upon the branch and parted the leaves to get a better look at her. He could feel the blood – stagnant in his veins – begin something like a torpid, sluggish, shift towards life – the closest thing he would ever get to a heartbeat. She was the sort of girl who made young boys' hearts pound, he thought – and they never knew how lucky they were to experience that sensation.
For it was the physical aspect of it, he thought, that humans understood least of all. They romanticized vampires, of course – how terrible it would be to live at night! To drink blood! To prey upon humans! These were things they could intellectualize, understand. Humans had been forced to commit murder. Humans had been forced to bite back their most natural, primal desires – and so they could almost understand, when they imagined vampires, what it was like to feel that insatiable hunger for a woman's throat, her breast, her wrist. But not a human in the world had ever been alive without
living
, without a heartbeat – and so they took it for granted – what it meant, that constant linear throbbing, clock-like, towards inevitable death. For Jaegar was a vampire, and he was not alive, and the dull ache in his chest where a heartbeat should have been was for him one of the most agonizing things in the world.
They don't know
, he thought.
They'll never understand
.
He had been told that she was the one. He had waited for her until sunset – the sun agonizing upon him, even with the ring around his finger. Vampires were not meant for light, and even the strongest magic could not take away the pain, searing, burning, aching, in his flesh. He was unnatural in sunlight, and only now that dusk was beginning to settle over him could he find relief. He sat perched in the tree, obscured by the leaves, staring at her as she ran down the street.
He leaned in too closely – the birds noticed at last that something was wrong in their midst and took flight; a flurry of wings beat up around him and the branch snapped from the tree and plummeted to the earth below.
It was enough time to make a distraction.
He concentrated, and in half a second he was behind her, so close he could feel the wind blow her hair upon his lips, and then he opened the umbrella above her.
“Miss,” he said.
She startled.
“What the...” She rounded on him.
“You looked wet,” he said. She did not seem amused.
“I'm warning you,” she said. “I know kung fu.”
He had learned kung fu once, many centuries ago. He thought it better not to mention it.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I was just trying to help.”
She softened.
“Thanks,” she said, lamely. “I'm sorry – I didn't mean to snap at you. But you need to learn not to sneak up on people like that. You scared me.”
Her eyes remained fixed upon the tree from which he had come. A suspicious glare clouded her gaze. Had she seen – was she wondering? He knew she knew something
was wrong. He tried to maintain whatever pleasant normalcy he could. The sequoias were tall, after all. No human could survive a jump from them – he knew she knew this. He knew she thought he was human.
From Top Author for Young Adults
Kailin Gow
PULSE
17 year-old Kalina didn’t know her boyfriend was a vampire until the night he died of a freak accident. She didn’t know he came from a long line of vampires until the night she was visited by his half-brothers Jaegar and Stuart Graystone. There were a lot of secrets her boyfriend didn’t tell her. Now she must discover them in order to keep alive. But having two half-brothers vampires around had just gotten interesting…