William shook his head. ‘I did not ask Marianne and Thomas to come here, Elena. I apologise. They followed me here without my consent.’
‘Is mistrust common for vampires?’ I asked.
Marianne snorted. ‘It’s not him we don’t trust. It’s you.’
I nearly laughed. They were afraid of me? What a lovely notion. I instantly felt more secure. ‘Well, I’m here now. Either you want to talk or you don’t. But if we talk, William, it’s just between you and me. I didn’t agree to a group discussion.’
‘Like hell it is!’ Marianne hissed.
Lucas also looked less than pleased.
The silence that followed seemed to hang in the air as I looked from one face to the other, unable to gauge any idea about what they were all thinking. Their expressions remained icy as they looked to William for guidance, pursing their lips together in a hard line. It didn’t help either that I couldn’t see any of their eyes underneath the protection of the sunglasses. It was difficult to tell what they were really thinking, having only eyebrows and mouth movements as an indication.
‘Okay,’ William eventually answered.
Thomas turned to William. ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’
He patted his friend on the shoulder again. ‘It’s alright, Thomas—we’re just talking.’ He turned to me. ‘Shall we?’ he said, gesturing with his hand towards one of the benches at the far end of the mango tree allotment.
‘William. I think we should come with you,’ Marianne said, pouting again.
We’re just talking, Blondie, not planning marriage.
William held up his hands in front of him, which seemed to stop both Thomas and Marianne from approaching. ‘It will be fine.’ He gave his friend’s a long look. ‘I need to know for sure.’
‘William will you please just think about this for a second,’ Marianne murmured. ‘The family that cares for her are not the sort of people we want to be up against.’
‘Think about who I will be up against if I don’t follow this through,’ he answered her quietly.
Thomas and Marianne snarled at me.
‘Look, I’m not going to hurt him, if that’s what you’re both worried about.’ I almost laughed at the insanity of the idea. Instead I settled for shaking my head indignantly. ‘Besides, if there’s anyone here that you should be worried about, it’s my brother, Lucas. He wields magical capabilities above and beyond any Protector of his age.’
All heads swivelled to Lucas standing beside me. ‘Thanks for that,’ he muttered in my ear, ‘I so love having a giant red target stamped on my forehead.’
I jabbed him in the ribs. ‘Man up, badass.’
He grunted in earnest.
Marianne redirected her attention to me, her fingers curling into fists at her sides. The vein in the side of her temple was pulsing and I could tell by the way that her skin was slowly becoming translucent and her canines extending, that she was seriously considering whether William’s conversation with me was worth all the drama. Thomas was now looking at me with genuine interest as opposed to hostility.
‘Look, I understand that you’re all a little bit wary of me and that’s okay,’ I rushed on, a little more sympathetically. ‘But I promise you that I won’t hurt, William, if you don’t hurt my brother.’ It sounded like I was pleading, and I wasn’t surprised that when I looked up at Lucas he was shaking his head at me.
‘Why don’t you just cut my legs off so I can’t run away either?’ he whispered.
I grimaced and gave him an apologetic look. Hopefully he would just understand that I was nervous.
‘What? Are we supposed to just take your word for it?’ Marianne answered, her lips pulling into a vicious sneer.
‘No, but you can take my word for it,’ William answered quietly. ‘And I’ll hear no more about this. You know this must be done.’ He turned his back on both of them and motioned with his hand for me to start walking.
I looked at Lucas and suddenly had a real twang of guilt in the pit of my stomach. Besides being completely exasperated by my words, he suddenly looked like he was about to pee his pants.
I turned to him and placed a reassuring hand on his arm. ‘Now remember,’ I said, trying to make it all better again. ‘If they try anything, you can use your magic to incapacitate them, but otherwise play nice, okay? You don’t want to accidentally kill them like you did to that pack of werewolves last year.’
I bit my tongue to hide my smile, hoping they would buy the lie. It seemed to make Lucas feel better because he nodded.
Both Thomas and Marianne took an almost imperceptible step backwards. It was good to see they had a healthy respect for the power of The Protectors. ‘I’ll be back in a few.’
I took a few steps backwards before turning around and following quickly after William. He hadn’t gotten far. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, even though I’d already surmised we were heading to the furthest bench seat under the shade. I just wanted to fill the silence between us with something. That way I could distract myself from the weird jittering that was occurring in my body just from the sheer proximity of him.
‘It doesn’t really matter where we go,’ he answered. ‘We won’t get any privacy, anyway, so I just thought somewhere so that you can sit down.’
‘I’m fine. Do you need to sit down?’
He shook his head. ‘Not especially.’
‘Why is that?’
He looked at me oddly. ‘I would have thought that you would know everything that there is to know about us.’
I shook my head from side to side. ‘I know most things, but given that I only found out I was a born vampire four years ago and I live with Protectors,’ I grimaced. ‘Well, my knowledge is limited. Tuesday was the first time they even bothered to tell me I had werewolf DNA. And that was only because your sudden appearance at the IMI raised questions that couldn’t be ignored anymore.’ I shrugged, realising that I was rambling a little bit. ‘Relevant information is very difficult to come by when the IMI decides that it’s need to know only.’ I laughed bitterly. ‘Apparently I didn’t need to know.’
He smiled and motioned to the bench seat. I sat down and he took a seat right beside me, our knees briefly touching and energy surged between us.
‘Well, in that case then, let me educate you.’ He smiled and I briefly wondered if there had ever been a woman who had resisted him in the past. ‘I don’t need to sit down because I don’t get tired. It’s simply out of habit from our human days that we do it. There’s also the necessity to blend in with the rest of the human populace. It’s the main reason that we maintain these common practices. For instance, we don’t need to breathe, swallow, blink, scratch or perform any other instinctive human reaction to physical stimulus, but we still do. It would alert the unknowing to what we were if we didn’t.’ His smile suddenly became slightly lopsided. ‘It’s bad enough that we’re stuck with cold skin and a pasty complexion. We don’t want to make it too easy for humans to guess what we are.’
‘Do you sleep?’
He nodded. ‘Sometimes, but it’s not at all necessary because we never get tired. But it can be nice to black out for a while. If I didn’t shut my eyes occasionally and block out all the madness of the world, then I feel positive I would go mad from sensory overload.’
That made sense I supposed. ‘Do you like being a vampire?’
He frowned. ‘I never had a choice.’
‘So you are a born vampire, like me?’ I was so eager to learn what could not be learnt from those around me, that I was hurling questions at him even though we were not properly acquainted just yet. ‘I’m sorry,’ I quickly added. ‘I don’t mean to pry, I’m just tremendously curious.’
He nodded again and smiled. ‘Don’t apologise. This is the reason we met—so that we can understand each other better. And yes, in answer to your question, I am a born vampire.’
‘Do you know who your father is?’ I was doing it again. Did I have no buffer between my brain and my mouth?
‘Yes.’
‘Was he always around? Did he know when you were born? Did he love your mother? Are you close?’
He chuckled lightly. ‘That’s a lot of questions, and a no to all of them.’
‘What about your mother?’
He looked away and stared at the soccer match in the distance. ‘I’d rather not talk about that.’
A mystery. How interesting.
‘What about Marianne and Thomas?’
‘Yes, they too are born vampires.’
I sat quietly for a few moments before speaking. ‘I’ve never met another vampire before.’
His eyebrows showed his surprise. ‘Never?’
‘Nope. You three are the first.’
‘Actually, I probably shouldn’t be surprised. Given where you live I imagine it would be rare for you to encounter us.’ He seemed to look down at the ground as if suddenly lost in thought.
I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t help that Lucas and I have been sheltered from the truth our entire lives. We’re both very confused at the moment.’
He looked up again. ‘Confused?’
‘Ah-huh,’ I said, looking over to Lucas who appeared to have gotten over his stage fright. He seemed to be having a particularly animated conversation with the others, even if it was apparently one-sided. They were merely watching him while he talked with his big, expressive hand gestures. I wondered briefly what it was that he could be speaking about.
I focused back on William again. ‘Lucas and I don’t know whether or not you want to get to know us for the sake of friendship, or for the sake of bleeding us for information, pardon the pun, or just to kill us.’
He chuckled lightly. ‘How about we save the killing for the Vânâtors? Besides, I wouldn’t want to stop your brother now. It appears he is giving Marianne and Thomas a full descriptive lecture about the benefits that garlic has on the immune system.’
‘You can hear them talking all the way over there?’
‘Of course.’
I blinked a couple of times. ‘How far away can you hear a conversation?’
‘No more than five or six kilometres I should think.’
‘That’s quite amazing. So Thomas and Marianne can
hear what we are saying right now?’
He nodded. ‘If they are listening, which undoubtedly they are.’
Marianne chose that exact moment to turn and look in
our direction which immediately cleared up any doubt. I may not be able to hear her across great distances, but if she could hear me that would be karmic. ‘So if they can hear me now,’ I said, looking at her hateful gaze across the park, ‘then Marianne would know that I think her hairstyle looks like it belongs to a preschooler.’
She snarled at me and snapped out her teeth again, as if daring me to say something to tip her over the edge.
William chuckled lightly. ‘I think she heard you. She’s quite sensitive about her hair you know.’
‘So I gathered. Is that because it doesn’t grow and you can’t change it?’
He nodded. ‘How we look on the night of our turning is how we are destined to look for eternity.’
I looked at William’s short dark hair and frowned as a flash of images shot past my eyes that didn’t make any sense. William’s image blurred in front of me and I saw a version of him with soft, wavy shoulder-length brown hair and green eyes that were tinged with grey and silver, not the short dark hair and plain green eyes that I had come to recognise. It was weird. It was almost like I was looking at someone else for a moment, someone that I had met once before, someone who wasn’t William.
‘You’d look good with long hair,’ I said, in a daze as the image of the dreamlike apparition disappeared and William’s face came back into focus again.
He frowned. ‘No I wouldn’t.’
I held up my hands in surrender, but decided to keep future thoughts regarding his appearance to myself. Obviously it wasn’t just Marianne who was touchy about her locks.