Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) (12 page)

“I attacked you because I needed to
evoke a response from you,” Arisella continued.
 
“I needed to be absolutely sure you were Divinblood, and not some human
with colored contacts, before we could tell you anything.
 
We also needed to make sure you could be
trusted… and if not, taken care of.”

I gaped at Arisella.
 
So somewhere in the back of her mind, she
truly
was
considering killing me.

“We can’t just invite anybody in
here.” She indicated largely to the house around her.

“And, luckily, it looks like you
can be trusted,” Adrian pointed out, relieving some of the anxiety from my
rapidly beating heart.

I nervously wove my fingers through
my hair and realized that, in the dim lighting, the thin strands looked
charred, almost the color of coals rather than their normal warm brown.
 
“What do we do now?”

“We prepare for the worst-case
scenario,” Arisella said lightly, almost flippantly, while she bounced in her
chair to tuck her tiny feet underneath her.

I stared at her, openmouthed.
 
“Which is?”

“The Bloodbourn find us, of
course.” Arisella said it like I was stupid.
 
“Someone’s going to get awfully suspicious when he finds out his caecus
demon mysteriously vanished.”

Adrian groaned.
 
“I don’t think anyone has figured out we’re
here yet.
 
After all, it’s not unusual
for a Bloodbourn beast to go missing on a hunt.”
 
Adrian turned to me.
 
“But we still need to be careful.
 
Even if the Bloodbourn don’t know we’re here,
they’ll definitely be monitoring the area more closely now.
 
We’ll have to train you to defend yourself,
in case they find us.”
 
Adrian watched me
carefully, waiting for my reaction.

“Okay,” I said.
 
It seemed like something reasonable to agree
to.

“You’ll also have to learn how to
attract as little attention to yourself as possible,” Arisella said with
severity.
 
“You will meet us before and
after school, and in the afternoons and on weekends you will come directly
here.”

“That’s not happening.”
 
Training was one thing, but spending every
moment of my free time in the company of that witch was another.

Arisella looked offended. “In case
you weren’t aware, learning to defend yourself against the Bloodbourn doesn’t
just happen overnight.
 
The Bloodbourn
have spent every waking moment since childhood training to kill, so if
anything, I’d put in some extra hours if I were you.”
 
I opened my mouth to respond, but Arisella
waved me aside.
 
“Oh, and, by the way,
since you’re Irisbourn, your head is worth considerably more to the Bloodbourn
than ours are.
 
Maybe you should learn to
value your life as much as they’d value your death.”
 
Arisella glared at me.

She made a point.
 
“Fine, fine,” I grumbled.
 
“I’ll do it.”

Still not satisfied, Arisella
tapped her fingers against the arm of the chair.
 
“Don’t forget, if you’re found, we’re found
too.”

“Most likely,” Adrian added.
 
He looked disapprovingly at his sister.

“I get it!” I said in exasperation.

“If they do find us,” Adrian said,
“we’ll need to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
 
If they start hunting us, it’ll be safer for
us in our homeland than here.”

“Easier to hide,” Arisella pointed
out.

“Also, there are Beastbourn in
Fallyre who we might be able to take refuge with.”
 
Adrian’s expression turned thoughtful, and I
could see him contemplating the idea in his head.

“But I live here,” I reminded
them.
 
“I have a sister and a brother.”
And Dylan, now
, I realized.

A pained look passed over
Arisella’s face.
 
“And if the Bloodbourn
find you here, they’d kill your family just as easily as they’d kill you.
 
By coming with us, you’d only be protecting
them.”

I closed my eyes and released a
tense breath.
 
As much as I hated to
acknowledge it, everything she was saying made sense – sort of.

“But we only intend to leave if the
Bloodbourn find us, or if it becomes too dangerous to stay,” Adrian clarified,
optimism hovering in his voice.
 
Arisella
glanced at her brother peculiarly.

“I might as well start preparing,”
I sighed.

“Actually, you might as well go
home.”
 
Arisella created a miniscule
crack in the tightly sealed shutters and peeped outside.
 
No light fought through the tiny opening.

I cursed under my breath.
 
“It’s already dark?
 
My brother is going to
kill
me.”
 
That was only an
exaggeration though.
 
My brother never
punished me.
 
He barely even scolded me.
 
It wasn’t that he didn’t care; I just assumed
that he felt uncomfortable with taking the role of my father figure.
 
Dylan
,
on the other hand, might be motivated to kill me for disappearing two nights in
a row.
 
He was completely comfortable
with letting me know when I was doing something irresponsible and stupid.

I hopped up off the bed so quickly
that I almost tipped the glass over on the nightstand.
 
“You’re done telling me the important stuff,
right?”

“Mostly,” Adrian said.
 
“You’re free to go.”
 
He rose from the bed with me and handed me my
bag.

“Thanks for the permission,” I
muttered as I left the room.
 
I had no
idea what time it was, and I couldn’t believe they had kept me trapped in their
house until nightfall.

The house had been laid out exactly
like mine, so I didn’t have much trouble finding the front door.
 
I fled through the halls so quickly – and
impolitely – that I didn’t expect anyone to take the energy to follow me out.

When I reached the front door, I
turned around to call out a brusque farewell, only to find myself standing
face-to-face with Adrian.

“Bye.”
 
The air whooshed out of my mouth in a
surprised squeak, rather than the confident, pissed way I’d been planning.

Adrian cocked his head to one side
and looked at me.
 
He seemed slightly
puzzled by my angry expression.
 
“We just
told you that an entire race of people is out to kill you, and you’re
completely fine with walking alone at night?”

“I live right next door.
 
Literally,” I breathed in disbelief.
 
I looked behind him to see if Arisella had
chosen to tag along.
 
Thankfully, she was
nowhere in sight.

“You can never be too
careful.”
 
Adrian swung open the front
door to reveal the cool, dark night.
 
Not
a trace of sunlight was left in the sky; the only spots of brightness in the
sea of gloom were the occasional streetlight, faintly flickering stars, and the
softly glowing moon.
 
“After you.”
 
He gestured to the driveway.

I gingerly made my way down the
crumbling cement steps, cautious not to twist an ankle or let an overgrown
shrub curl itself around my leg.
 
When I
glanced back, I thought I could see Adrian smirking.
 
Of course, he had no trouble maneuvering his
death trap of a dying driveway.

Now that Adrian wasn’t dragging me
around like a stuffed animal, I mentally noted how broken and worn the front
gate was.
 
I was surprised the entire
thing didn’t just fall over when Adrian pulled it open.

I was so concentrated on getting
home with as much speed and dignity as possible, that we managed to get to the
gate of my house without talking at all.

“So,” I said, trying to alleviate
the awkwardness.
 
“Tomorrow morning I
should stop by, right?”

“Right,” Adrian said.
 
“Just try not to do anything… risky until
then.”

What trouble did he expect me to
get into at night?
 
I rolled my
eyes.
 
“You know me.
 
I’m a thrill seeker.”

“Also, don’t tell anyone a word of
what we told you today,” Adrian said urgently.
 
“Not even your family, no matter how much you trust them.
 
That would create too many problems for us,
not to mention compromise our safety.”

“I know, I know.”
 
I bounced up and down on my toes restlessly.

“We’ll be watching you more closely
from now on.”
 
I could feel Adrian’s icy
eyes tracing my anxious expression.

His fair skin stood out against the
shadows of the night, which only made me more frustratingly conscious of his
presence.
 
For a second, I stopped caring
about how late it was and where I should be going.
 
As I stared back at the flawless dark-haired
boy, I felt my brain piece together a key realization.

In that moment, I was suddenly
aware of the fact that Adrian could kill me, if he wanted to, and that as a
Bloodbourn, he should have wanted to.
 
It
probably would have been easier for him to let his sister kill me.
 
After all, I would have been less of a risk
to them if I weren’t alive to arouse suspicions.

But they had chosen not to kill me,
and that meant something.
 
They trusted
me with their lives, and I trusted them with mine.
 
We barely even knew each other, and yet our
existences had already become so intertwined.

I trembled slightly, and came back
to my senses.

“Right, bye,” I said.

I unlocked my gate and went
inside.
 
I turned around to wave, just so
I could have an excuse to look back.

Adrian was still watching me as I
went in.

Chapter
Fifteen

“Guys, I’m alive.
 
No one call the police!” I shouted, as I
burst in through the front doors.
 
I
swiftly unwound the bandage from around my wrist before anyone could notice
it.
 
The white dressing was more conspicuous
than the cut, and I didn’t need my siblings asking too many questions.
 
But while I hid the dressing in my bag, I
noticed my wrist bore no traces of a wound.

Huh.
 
How strange.

“Amber!” Heather wasted no time
flying into my arms, effectively breaking my train of thought.

Matt appeared in the corridor
behind her. “Got lost in the woods again?”

“No.
 
I was with the neighbors, actually,” I
clarified apologetically.
 
“We must have
lost track of time.
 
I’m really sorry for
coming home so late again.”

Just as I was about to dive into a
long, last-minute apology that I had prepared between the gate and the door, I
realized that my siblings didn’t look nearly as irritated as they should have
been.
 
I held my tongue and waited for
one of them to speak.

Matt only shrugged. “You’re not
that late.
 
It’s only seven-thirty.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.
 
I had thought it was much, much later than
that.

“Although we decided we’d
officially start panicking at eight,” Heather informed me as she detached
herself from my side.

“So, you aren’t angry?” I asked
hesitantly.

“Well, we were a little worried
when you didn’t come home and refused to answer your phone,” Matt
confessed.
 
“But you have a terrible
habit of not answering your phone when you’re out, and it’s before curfew, so
we technically shouldn’t be angry.”

My lips curved into a thankful smile.
 
If my mother were the one waiting at home,
she would have spent the next five hours thoroughly letting me know how
disappointed I’d made her, and she wouldn’t have been satisfied until I’d
apologized at least a dozen times.
 
I
wasn’t happy my parents were gone, but I was grateful that my brother was the
one who had stepped up to take care of us.

“Dylan, on the other hand,” Heather
said, “we’re more worried about.
 
He said
he was going to go look for you.
 
And
that was two hours ago.
 
We haven’t heard
from him since.”

My relief instantly disappeared,
along with the feeling in my stomach.
 
“Did he say where he was going?”

“He just took off into the
woods.”
 
I could see the worry in Matt’s
face.
 
“He could be anywhere right
now.
 
He left so quickly, I don’t think
he realized he forgot his phone in his bag.”

“Am I the only one who actually
uses her phone?” Heather muttered.

I sucked in a sharp breath.

If he really did believe what I had
told him last night, he would still be in the woods looking for me.
 
There was nowhere else that he would have
thought to search for me, because lately the only two places where I really
existed were my school and home.
 
I knew
what I had to do.
 
The only problem was
that, after my most recent “panic attack,” there was no way Matt would let me
do it.

“He’s probably fine.”
 
I struggled to make my relaxed façade seem
convincing.

Heather looked at me
sympathetically.
 
“Don’t worry,
Amber.
 
We’ll start looking for him now.”

“No!” I blurted, a little too
adamantly.

Heather eyed me suspiciously.
 
Dylan stumbling all alone through the woods
with sadistic monsters was bad enough; adding Heather and Matt to the mix would
only make matters worse.

“Give him a while.
 
Night fell quickly.
 
It must have taken him by surprise, that’s
all.”

“We can give him thirty minutes, I
guess,” Matt suggested warily.

“That sounds good,” I said without
thinking.
 
I rushed toward the
stairs.
 
“I’m going to... shower and take
a nap.”

The disbelief stood out in Matt’s
eyes.
 
I shouldn’t have been surprised; since
when did people take naps when their best friends were missing?

“It’s been a really exhausting
day,” I said.
 
It wasn’t exactly a lie.

Matt hesitated but made a small
nod.
 
“We’ll let you know if we hear
anything.”

“Thanks,” I smiled widely at
him.
 
I really should have said, “Thanks
for your slightly irresponsible but fully appreciated hands-off parenting
style.”

I flew up to my room and deposited
my bag onto the floor with a noisy bang, as if I thought that the more noise I
made, the less suspicious my siblings would be.
 
I moved with the frenzied speed that made my hands tremble, which really
worked against me as I struggled to stuff my phone into my pocket after
dropping it three times.
 
When all signs
of movement in the house had dissipated, I seized the opportunity to sneak
downstairs and out to the backyard, back into the chill arms of the night.

I never thought I would voluntarily
enter these woods again, not after nearly – I gulped – being eaten the night
before.
 
Yet here I was, wandering past
the same bare trees.
 
I was no less
afraid than I had been the last time; if anything, my surroundings seemed even
more menacing than I had remembered.

Everything cast endless, contorted
shadows upon the decomposing leaves that coated the earth.
 
It struck me that the elongated shadows
looked almost like arms clawing out of graves.
 
I shuddered.
 
My own imagination
frightened me, the way it could take the horrors of my reality and distort them
into something even worse.

I traveled along the stream,
knowing that as long as I walked with the current, it would be nearly
impossible for me to get lost.
 
I
searched the mud for any sign that someone had been there, but, unfortunately,
finding Dylan wouldn’t be as easy as following a trail of footprints in the
dirt.
 
After ten minutes, I still had
found no trace of Dylan, but that was mostly due to my pitiful survival
skills.
 
I wasn’t even sure what signs I
should have been looking for.

I cursed under my breath for
forgetting to bring a flashlight.
 
I
would have used the weak light from my phone, but I knew it was almost out of
battery, so I deemed the glow of the moon sufficient to illuminate my way.

“DYLAN!” I screamed, once the house
was no longer in view.
 
“DYLAN, YOU
IMPULSIVE, DIMWITTED MORON!”
 
My
earsplitting yells only amplified the eerie silence of the night.
 
I continued to shout his name, angry that he
had so willingly chosen to go running into the woods that I was so desperate to
run out of.
 
I knew that Adrian had said
that the caeci weren’t supposed to be dangerous to humans, but I couldn’t help
but think that a nice, tall, confused teenager might look appetizing to a
starving demon surviving off a scanty population of rabbits.

My tired feet carried me farther
than I thought I had ever gone before.
 
As I walked along the bank of the glinting black stream, the soft dirt
below one of my feet fell through.
 
I
stumbled forward, managing to keep myself from falling face-first into the mud.
 
Dazed, my eyes glazed over the site where I
had stopped.

Something about it looked
familiar.
 
I crouched down to examine the
unusual compressions in the mud and marks that looked like the tread of
sneakers.
 
My sneakers.

My eyes widened in
realization.
 
This was the place where
the caecus demon had attacked me.
 
I
jolted into a standing position, my pulse pounding against my veins.
 
Against my better sense, I forced my
trepidation from my mind and continued forward.
 
Any danger that I was in, Dylan might be in as well.

“Dylan?” I called quietly into the
night.

Immediately after I had spoken,
something behind me cracked.
 
I snapped
around, my eyes straining to see anything in the blackness.
 
The cracking became louder, and I recognized
the sound of leaves being stepped on.
 
Whatever it was, it was big, and it was coming closer.
 
And I couldn’t tell what it was at all.

My body began to quiver, as my
muscles contracted painfully in a way that I had only experienced twice
before.
 
However, this time, I knew what
was happening, and I didn’t fight it.
 
I
crouched on the ground as I had seen Arisella do, waiting for the change to
overtake me.
 
This time, whatever
appeared in front of me, I would be prepared to face it.

I watched a tall patch of ferns a
few yards ahead of me bend back, and a feral hiss escaped my lips, surprising
me.
 
Physically, I hadn’t changed into
anything yet, but mentally I was already beginning the transition.

For a moment, the shrubs became
still, and I thought whatever it was had gone.
 
But the shrubs started moving again, and I watched a tall human-like
shadow emerge from between them.

I lowered myself closer to the
ground and released another warning growl.
 
To my surprise, the invader tripped backwards, landing promptly on its
behind.
 
It appeared to be frantically
crawling away from me.

In some savage way this entertained
me, and I, curious to see what it was, approached it.
 
But as I came closer, I recognized the
familiar brown hair, the sweet cologne that suffocated my sense of smell on a
daily basis.

“Dylan!” I cried.
 
I raised myself from my animal crouch.

“Stay back.”
 
His voice quavered.

“Dylan, Dylan, be still.” I moved
toward him slowly, holding my arms to my side to show that I had nonviolent
intentions.
 
“It’s Amber.
 
I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Amber?”
 
He moved tentatively forward, like he wanted to
see my face more clearly.
 
“It can’t be,”
he whispered.
 
“It didn’t look like her;
it didn’t sound like her.”

He started to crawl away.
 
I would have to convince him who I was
quickly, without actually telling him the truth.

“Stop being silly, Dylan.
 
Now you’re the one having the panic
attacks.”
 
I knelt next to him so he
could see my face.
 
“Do I look like
Amber?”

“Before, you didn’t.”
 
Dylan was subtly trying to squirm away.

“What about now?”
 
Impatience colored my voice.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Do I sound like Amber?”

“Yes.”

“And would anyone but Amber know
that on the first day of elementary school, you accidentally went into the
girls’ bathroom?”

Even in the dark, I could see the
blood rush to Dylan’s face.
 
“I thought
you said you’d never bring that up again.”

I couldn’t help smirking. “Get
up.
 
Let’s go home.
 
You were clearly delusional.”

He nodded and stood up,
shaking.
 
I patiently waited for his
breathing to slow.

“I found you,” he grinned weakly.

“Actually, I found you,” I
corrected.
 
“I’ve been at the neighbors’
all afternoon.”

Dylan’s jaw dropped.
 
“The weird neighbors?”

I nodded.

“So, I’ve been lost in the
wilderness like an idiot, while you were secretly hanging out at the house next
door?”
 
His voice was overflowing with
disbelief.

“I wouldn’t say secretly…
 
It was more of an accident, really.”

Dylan raised an eyebrow.

I sighed.
 
I would have a multitude of questions to
evade when we got home.
 
“We need to run
now.
 
Can you run?”

“Yeah, but I’d prefer to walk.”

I groaned.
 
Dylan’s mind was working a little too slowly
for our situation.
 
“Last night the cae—
monster,” I caught myself at the last second, “pinned me against the mud right
there.” I pointed to the compression in the mud.
 
“You still want to walk?”

Dylan blanched.
 
“No.”

“Wise decision.”