Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1) (15 page)

“Focus, Stephen.”

“Look, I will listen around, okay. Just don’t expect
anything. I’m almost certain this isn’t one of my guys. My coven knows you and
that your school is protected. I don’t even know how one of my vampires could
get through your wards.”

“What if a vampire that isn’t from your coven got
in?” I asked.

They both looked at me. “Then we all have a major
problem on our hands, because the school is covered under my territory. Is that
what happened to your head? Were you attacked by a vampire?”

“Do you know something you have not told me?” Hunt
asked.

Since Hunt seemed to trust the vampire, I didn’t hold
back. I told them about the vampire I ran into at the school, the two
conversations I overheard with Mrs. Ashcraft, and the vampire that attacked me
by the dorms. Hunt never looked angry, startled, or suspicious as I informed
him of what was going on under his nose in the school.

“Damn, you should be a spy,” the vampire said when I
was done.

“I’m a private investigator.”

“You look very familiar, by the way.” He rubbed his
chin thoughtfully. “I could use an investigator sometimes to deal with some
human complications. You would be well compensated, of course.”

“I don’t work for vampires,” I said.

He looked a little offended. “Why not? You don’t
strike me as prejudiced.”

“I will never trust a vampire.”
Danger.
My
instincts screamed that I was in danger like they had only once before in my
life. I pulled my gun, switched off the safety, turned, and aimed.

“Hello again, Devon.” Her voice was as smooth and
calm as ever, joyful even.

“Astrid.”

Astrid and I saw each other
every night for more than a year. If I was tired, we would just sit and talk,
but we never missed a night. That was why I knew that Astrid was missing. For a
week, I went outside and waited every night. On the seventh night, I fell
asleep in the snow because I was afraid that I would miss her coming home if I
went inside. I woke to the strangest sensation I had ever experienced.

Astrid was lying next to me, her skin pale like a
corpse and her eyes open, staring at the sky. She was completely silent, but I
could
feel
her crying. Blood stained her lips, nose, and ears. Her
fingernails were red and bloodied like someone had tried to tear them off. Her
hair was dull as if graying with age. Yet she wasn’t shivering. As always, she
was wearing a white nightgown, but it was dirty with blood and mud.

I climbed to my feet and tried to pull her up, but
she was no smaller than me and she was completely limp. “You have to come
inside. I can’t carry you. Stand. Please stand.” She finally did, barely, and I
was able to get her in the house. The clock on the stove said it was three in
the morning. I helped her sit in a chair by the kitchen table, wet a cloth with
warm water, and then started cleaning the blood off her as gently as I could.
“What happened?” I asked. She was still staring out into space.

“Grandfather. He found out that I was seeing you. He
locked me in a cage and drowned Seda in the river.” Her voice was monotone and
lost.

“Oh my god. I have to get you to the hospital.” I
turned to grab the phone by the sink, but she grasped my hand.

“I can’t go to a hospital.” She looked out the
window. “The sun will be up soon. I need to go home.” When I put my hands on
her knees to hold her in the chair, she finally focused on me. “I have to
leave, Devon. It’s not safe to ever see each other again.”

My heart was breaking. At eleven years old, emotions
are simple but not weak. “No. Stay here with me. You can hide in my room.”

“You can come with me. I would never hurt you.”

“I… we can’t. We don’t have any money. My parents
would call the cops. Just stay here.” She pitched forward and cried out in
pain. I didn’t understand the blinding pain that shot from my head down my
spine. I didn’t understand that I was feeling her pain. All I knew was that I
was on the floor, panting and trying desperately to stay conscious.

“I need to eat,” she said when it subsided enough for
her to speak. She fell from the chair to kneel next to me. “I won’t hurt you,
but I need to eat.” I started to turn to the fridge, but she stopped me with a
nearly painful grip on my shoulder. “I can’t eat that kind of food.”

“What do you eat then?” I asked, completely clueless.
After all, I was only eleven.

She took my left wrist and raised it to her lips. I
saw the fangs and gasped, but I couldn’t say a word to stop her. She was my
friend and I knew she would die if I stopped her. There was a sharp pinch as
her sharp teeth broke the skin before it went numb.

*          *          *

I woke up in my bed, shivering and cold, but alive. I
wasn’t surprised to be alive, because I knew Astrid wouldn’t kill me. I knocked
on the wall beside my bed and waited. Just as my heart started to fall, the
knock finally came, but it wasn’t at the wall. Astrid hadn’t run off and left
me, she was merely hiding from the sunlight in my closet.

I crouched in front of the closest. “Are you okay in
there?” I asked.

“I’m okay.”

“I have to get ready for school, but I’ll put
something over my window when I get home so you can come out later.”

I really felt it in my mind when she put her hand
against the door, so I hoped she felt it when I put mine there, too. Astrid
would stay and everything would be fine. At school, I thought of nothing but
her. One of my semi-friends looked up the closest blood banks on his phone for
me. It seemed so simple and easy.

As soon as I got home, I put my blanket over the
curtain rod and made sure that no light was showing. “You can come out now,” I
said.

Astrid did, cautiously, and I was sad to see that she
was still hurt. Although she had some color back to her skin, there were cuts
across her chest and neck. Her nightgown was torn down her left sleeve and
showed a long scratch on her arm.

“Why didn’t the blood help you heal?” I asked. In
movies, blood always healed vampires.

“Grandfather cut me with silver. I can’t heal them.
They will never heal on their own.”

I took her hand and made her sit on the bed, then ran
to the bathroom in the hallway and wet a washcloth with some warm water. When I
returned, she was still sitting on my bed. I closed and locked my door, then
started washing her wounds. While I did, I imagined them healing as I washed
away the blood. I imagined the pain that it must have caused and wiped it away,
mentally, with the water.

I loved her and I trusted her. What’s more, she could
read my mind, so I knew she could feel my love and trust. It wasn’t strange to
me at all when I felt similar feelings erupt in my mind. She felt the same for
me, but she was also hurt. It wasn’t just physical pain; everyone else in her
life had been killed or had tried to kill her. I was the only one who ever
wanted to help her.

There was an odd heat in my chest and when I took the
cloth away, the cut I had cleaned was healed. I did this with her other cuts,
careful to focus on my emotions. Soon, her wounds and bruises were gone. She
got up and looked at herself in the mirror over my writing desk.

“I thought vampires couldn’t see their reflection in
the mirror.”

She grinned at me. “That’s a myth.”

“How did you become a vampire? Are you really a kid?”

“I am eleven years old. I grow just like you and I
have been this for as long as I can remember. Grandfather said my parents were
human, but I don’t know that I believe him. I believe that I will stop growing
when I’m an adult. I know that children who are turned don’t grow at all, so I
don’t know why I am aging.”

I smiled. “It’s because of me. It’s because we were
meant to be friends and grow up together.”

She didn’t smile back. “Do you really want to stay
with me? Do you really trust me?”

“You’ve never done anything to hurt me.”

Slowly, she returned and sat beside me on the bed.
For a minute, it looked like she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t
figure out how. What she was feeling was hard to express; she never had anyone
who trusted her before.

And then she kissed me. It wasn’t like in the movies;
it was soft and hesitant and her mouth was closed. It was perfect though.

I told Astrid about the blood banks and she said she
was willing to try it. As soon as the sun set, I pulled the blanket down and
she slipped silently out my window. I followed her out onto the flowerbed and
hesitated, afraid to make the three-foot hop across to her flowerbed. From the
safety of her window, she smiled and held out her hand for me.

“Even if you slipped, I wouldn’t let you fall,” she
said.

I took her hand and jumped. My shoe slipped on the
slick metal and I closed my eyes as I started to fall, only to feel Astrid’s
arms close around me and pull me in through her window. She was strong. That
wasn’t a myth.

“I told you I wouldn’t let you fall.”

Her room was empty; there was nothing on her walls
and only a blackout curtain over her window. Her closet was bare except for a
box, from which she poured out clothes in front of me. They were all old
clothes, as if she had found them somewhere.

“Pick something out for me,” she said.

I picked up a bright pink dress, about ten times too
big for Astrid, and cringed. I understood why she always wore the nightgown.
There was a brown boy’s sweatshirt and a pair of dark blue pajama bottoms, so I
told her to wear them.

“Are you sure your grandfather isn’t going to come
home? Or did you kill him?” I asked.

“He won’t come back at night.”

“Your grandfather isn’t a vampire?” She just shook
her head and started to change.

Out of curiosity more than anything else, I explored
her house. There was nothing to find; all of the rooms were empty except for
the grandfather’s room, which I feared entering. He had clothes and books
strewn across the floor and a makeshift bed of blankets and a small pillow.

Yet there was nothing in the kitchen. I understood
Astrid not eating, but what did her grandfather eat if he wasn’t a vampire?

“When do you eat?” I asked loudly as I searched her
empty cabinets. The large white fridge and small black microwave were plugged
in, but bare and spotless.

“When you are asleep,” her voice was a whisper and
right behind me, but I didn’t jump.

She was wearing the clothes, which were way too big
for her. The way she fiddled with her sleeve seemed odd because I didn’t think
vampires did that. There was something too human about her.

*          *          *

We made our way through the most deserted streets.
Although some people shouted at us to get home or asked where our parents were,
we ignored them. Astrid told me there would be alarms and cameras, but that she
could get around them easily.

We never made it.

We were passing an alley when I heard a gunshot and a
woman scream. I turned and tried to see what happened, but Astrid stopped me
with a grip on my arm that was tight enough to leave bruises. “Leave it. Never
go towards a gunshot.”

“But someone could be hurt.”

“Most likely, they’re already dead.” There was no
sympathy or worry in her eyes because she had seen death too many times. It was
just a fact to her.

Before I could do anything, the gunman emerged from
the alley. “Shit!” he cursed when he saw us.

He looked like a typical bad guy; scruffy hair,
scruffy face, torn and dirty clothes… I could never have remembered his face or
picked him out of a lineup. He didn’t need to aim the gun at me. I knew even as
he did it that he was trying to cover his tracks. That was what they did in the
movies. Begging was pointless.

I didn’t even cry.

I reached for Astrid’s hand because I wanted hers to
be the last hand I felt… but she was already too far away. Faster than I could
see, she crashed into the man and tore out his throat with her teeth. I was
still frozen when she was back in front of me. Her hands were so gentle on my
face as she tried to get me to focus. The man was lying dead on the ground and
blood was pooling. She hadn’t drunk his blood. It wasn’t about that. She killed
him to save me.

Am I okay with that?

“Yes,” I said softly. I forced myself to focus on
her. “I’m okay. You saved me.” We shouldn’t have been outside in the city at
night anyway. It was our fault. “Let’s go home. We’ll try again tomorrow, but
we’ll go a different way.”

An hour later, we were in bed and Astrid was cuddled
against my chest, but she was cold. While she never felt temperature herself,
she hadn’t gotten enough blood from me and it made her skin cold to the touch.
I asked her why she didn’t feed from the man and she told me his blood was bad.

I didn’t feel danger from Astrid because she would
never hurt me. Still, I had trouble sleeping that night. Something was wrong.

*          *          *

I woke not to my mother’s gentle knocking but to her
scream. I shot out of bed and down the hallway before I knew what was
happening. My parents’ door was opened and their room was empty, so I went
downstairs.

It was still dark out and the absolute silence made
me shiver. “Mom?” I called. Something soaked into my socks on the bottom step.
It was warm and slimy, not like water. “Mom?” I felt dread. Deep, dark,
all-consuming dread of what I was about to see. I wanted to stop time right
there so that nothing bad could happen.

I stepped off the stairs onto the carpet of the
living room and felt the horrible squish. Tears dripped down my cheeks, yet I
couldn’t make a sound. I was waiting, holding my breath, for my mother to
answer me.
If she would just answer me, everything will be okay.

The kitchen was open to the living room, so I saw my
fears realized the moment I turned. I saw the blood first, and then my father’s
arm on the tile floor. Just his arm. Still silent, I went into the kitchen.
Astrid sat cross-legged on the floor, covered in blood. My parents were both
dead, my father in pieces, as was another, older man. She looked up at me. Her
eyes were lost like they had been when she was injured.

I prayed that she hadn’t done this.

I knew better.

“Now you don’t have parents either,” she whispered,
blood drying in clumps on her chin. The blood looked like tar on her dark brown
sweatshirt. “Now I can take care of you and we’ll go anywhere we want. You can
do magic and I can protect you. I’ll take care of you. Grandfather can’t hurt
you like he did Seda.”

The dead stranger was her grandfather who had locked
her in a cage. Had he come to kill her? Had he come to protect my parents? He
had been right to lock her up, but this was also his fault. She wasn’t like this
before.

Most of all, it was my fault. I trusted her. I loved
her. I saved her. I let her into my home.

I turned without a word and went back upstairs. I
flipped on the light of my parents’ room, opened the closet door, and fell to
my knees. My legs couldn’t hold me up anymore. I pulled out a box— the furthest
box in the corner. The next thing I knew, my hand was shaking as I held my
father’s gun. It was heavier than it looked when I saw him put it up. He was so
sure it would save us if there was a break in. I raised the barrel towards
myself. I couldn’t stop shaking.

Then her hands closed over it and she lowered it
gently. “No,” she whispered against my ear, as if she could soothe me. She put
her arms around me and pressed her chest against my back. “I’ll take care of
you. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”