Touching Smoke (17 page)

He winced. “I don’t mean for it to happen! I can’t control it; I’ve tried.”

“Great…” I slumped down on the cot. “Now I have to watch what I’m thinking
and
feeling.”

“No,” he murmured. “You only have to control yourself. If you’re calm, I can’t feel or hear anything. It’s been more frequent recently because…” he picked at his words carefully, “things have changed.”

I wasn’t going to argue that, but it also explained why he was always telling me to keep calm. It probably wasn’t easy for him to be sucked into my thoughts and feelings when he had to fight to keep us both alive.

“OhmiGod…” I rocked with the jolt of panic that sliced through me.
The diner!
How could I have forgotten
that?
He must have felt and heard every single embarrassing thought in my head about how beautiful his lips were and how much I wanted to…
do things
to him. No wonder he’d booked it out of there as if the devil were after him. He must have been so appalled!

“I wasn’t… appalled.”

“Oh God…!” I moaned, dropping my face into my hands. “This is so humiliating!”

The floorboards beneath his boots creaked as he shifted. “I should get the barrel before it gets too dark.”

I only groaned in response, wishing with all my might that a hole would just open up and swallow me already. Then, he said something that made me momentarily forget my shame.

He stopped at the door and, without glancing back, murmured, “I wasn’t appalled, Fallon. I was so
very
tempted.”

I did
not
stop him when he walked out. I threw myself face down on the lumpy mattress the second he was out the door and squealed my humiliation into the folds of my arms. The cot’s springs jingled with every beating of my flaring legs.

I could not believe he knew what I was thinking that afternoon in the diner. My emotions hadn’t even been that high at the time, although, I guessed, what I was feeling was pretty strong. It still shouldn’t have made its way to him. Those thoughts had been private! In all truth, it was all his fault! No one asked him to be model gorgeous. If he hadn’t been, I would never have been thinking those things, and I wouldn’t now be wishing to evaporate on the spot.

Wait… Tempted? What did that mean? How was he tempted? What would he have done if he’d stayed and given into his temptations? Maybe he wanted me to kiss him. Maybe he wanted to kiss me! No. I had to stop thinking about that! I had to keep my head straight, now more than ever. I was humiliated enough without having him hear my hopes and dreams.

A loud, metallic clang interrupted my self-berating. I quickly sat up just as Isaiah stepped into the hut, dragging a large, metal barrel with him. He paused on the threshold and lifted it easily in his arms. I had a sneaking suspicion that he could have carried it the whole way in, but had deliberately made noise to let me know he was coming in. Inwardly, I winced. Had I been thinking-feeling too loudly again? I would really have to work on that.

“You must be getting hungry by now,” he commented casually.

It didn’t take a degree in rocket science to notice he was deliberately avoiding my gaze while he set up the barrel.

“I have some granola bars in my bag,” I said, playing it as cool as he was. He wasn’t the only one who wanted to forget that conversation.

“They won’t hold you for very long,” he remarked, stooping forward over the barrel to adjust the mound of firewood already piled inside. “Normal food doesn’t fill you the way it should and you know that. It’s merely a bandage on an open wound. You need blood.”

“You can’t know that for certain!” I disagreed.

He glanced at me, his gaze level. “But I do. Every time you get hungry, I know exactly what it is you need, even if you don’t, because I need it as much as you do.”

I looked away. “Yeah, well, I can’t just go around nibbling on people’s arteries, okay? Normal food is the only thing I’ve got right now.”

“You have me.”

“You’re not my personal blood bank on legs.” I got to my feet and wandered over to the dark window. “I’ve lived without blood for this long. I’ll be fine. Besides, how do you know blood is the only thing that’ll satisfy me? Maybe there’s something else.”

“There isn’t,” he said, stalking into the kitchen and rummaging through the four drawers and three cupboards.

I spun away from the ominous darkness pressing in against the glass to confront a demon far worse than anything lurking out there. The bitter sting of reality burned on my tongue. Knowing and rejecting the truth alone, in the shadowy crevice of my own mind was one thing, but to have him privy to my bleakest secrets was a slap I couldn’t stand.

“Stop acting as if you know anything about me!”

He ceased his searching and faced me. “If I had the option of getting to know you the way normal people get to know each other, I would, Fallon,” he said solemnly. “I can’t control the things I can do any more then you can control your hunger.” He turned away. “We’re cursed that way.”

It
was
a curse, or maybe just one giant cosmic joke that I wasn’t in on. I knew I could never say my life had been normal before all this, or that everything had been going so well because my life had never
been
normal. But this was crazy, even for me.

The fact that terrified me most was the lack of terror I felt when I thought about drinking blood. There was no repulsion, no sick feeling in my stomach, not even a single shred of hesitation. The very idea felt as natural to me as deciding which restaurant to eat at. If Isaiah sliced open a vein at that moment, I probably would have jumped right on it — the hunger was
that
great.

But it was also his blood. It was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted, and even I couldn’t deny that it had filled me like no granola bar ever had. The demon hadn’t stirred once since my last feeding from him. His blood was my cure, and it was the last thing I wanted to take, willingly or not. He wouldn’t be around forever, and if I got addicted to his blood the way I was quickly becoming addicted to him… there was no telling what may have happened. The side effects alone terrified me. If one taste had made me longing for him with an appetite that left me burning, two tastes may have just killed me.

Oh, but what a sweet way to die.

Amalie was absent in my dreams that night. It was my mother’s face I saw filled with terror as she lay strapped to a white examination table, in a white room, surrounded by men dressed in white lab coats. Bright lights blazed overhead, making her once rosy complexion look chalky. Her wide, green eyes were the only color in the entire room. Her beautiful hair was tucked securely under a white shower cap. Tubes and wires jetted from her body, hooking her to all the beeping and flashing machines mounted to the wall behind her.

“Where is she!” The indistinct voice originated from all four corners of the room, as if the speaker had a microphone against his mouth.

Visibly trembling and bathed in a thin layer of sweat, my mother glared at the lanky figure standing with his hands clasped at his back at the foot of the table. “Bite me!”

He must have been the one in charge, because he shifted and said, “Insert surgical gag.”

It would have been impossible to pinpoint who was speaking when they all wore masks and goggles, but the male voice, full of authority, kept shifting just before he spoke, making pinpointing him all too easy.

The figure closest to the tray of sharp, shiny instruments lifted a curved device with a rubber ball attached at the front. It was passed over my mom’s head and handed it to the person across the table. The silver mechanism was slipped over my mother’s face with the rubber end forced between her teeth.

“Begin the first test!” the guy in charge ordered.

A small, square machine was rolled over next to the bed. It looked like a radio with a bunch of knobs and switches along the top. Twin prongs with sponges speared at the top were lifted off the sides and I knew instantly what it was.

“Commencing electro-shock!”

“Fallon!”

I bolted awake, my lungs just burning. The sound of my mother’s muffled screams followed me into reality, ringing like sirens in my ears. Sweat trickled down my face, stinging my eyes and plastering my t-shirt to my clammy skin.

“You’re okay now,” someone was saying into my temple when the fog of sleep lifted slowly. “You’re safe.”

It took me a moment to realize I was the one screaming. It took a second longer to recognize the feel of Isaiah’s arms around me and the lumpy mattress under me. The hut felt so much smaller than it already was, like an airtight bubble. The fire in the barrel was still blazing. He must have replenished the wood at some point in the night. Blue tendrils rose from the bin into the semi-darkness, choking the repugnant stench of the shack with the smell of smoked wood. I breathed it in, focusing mainly on the faint scent Isaiah gave off. It was just enough to calm the tremors in my hands as I reached for him.

“I’m sorry,” I panted into the slop of his bare shoulder; his skin warm and firm under my cheek.

“It was just a bad dream,” he said, never releasing me. His long fingers combed through my tangled hair, shifting the heavy strands aside to let cool air touch the back of my neck just the way I liked it when I was upset. “It’s okay now.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I mumbled, closing my eyes and succumbing to his closeness, to his caress.

“You didn’t,” he drew back a slit to peer down into my face. “I don’t sleep much.” He wiped away the moisture from my face with the back of his knuckles. “Tell me what it was about.”

I turned my face into the palm of his hand. “My mom was in it. I think she was in an examination room, being tortured…”

He hummed quietly when I trailed off. “You’ve had a hard few days.”

It was true. Losing my mom combined with everything Isaiah’s been telling me… I suppose it could just be stress playing with my subconscious. It had to be. I saw my mother die. I had her ashes. There was no way she was alive to be tortured by anyone.

“Why don’t you sleep?” I asked, needing something else to think about.

Isaiah shrugged. “I do, but not often.”

“Is that one of your powers?”

The sound of his laughter washed away the lingering remains of my dreams, filling me with light warmth. “No, I just don’t sleep much.” He smoothed my hair back, brushing a kiss to my forehead. My eyes closed. “There’s still a few hours before dawn. Why don’t you get some more sleep?”

My hands grabbed him before he could release me, before he could leave, taking his warmth with him. “Stay?”

The muscles of his forearm bunched beneath my hand. “Fallon…”

“Please?”

His jaw ticked, but he stayed, stretching out alongside me on the tiny cot. It took some maneuvering, some repositioning of limbs, but we made it work. We lay facing each other, his bicep doubling as a pillow for me. I hooked one arm around his bare ribs; the other was tucked half beneath me, half between us. He swung his free arm around me, after securely wrapping me in the blanket, stuffing it between us like some barrier.

“Thank you,” I murmured into the hollow of his throat.

His sigh tickled the top of my head, ruffling bits of hair. He combed his fingers through the strands at my temple. The slow, rhythmic motion had my eyes falling shut once more and my muscles relaxing.

“Isaiah?” The skin beneath my lips vibrated with his low hum in response. I took that to continue, so I did. “Why can’t I read your mind or your emotions?”

“You probably can,” he answered. “I’ve just had more practice.”

A smile curved my lips, even as I fought sleep back long enough to say, “To be a fly on the walls of your mind… hmm.”

His chuckle was the last thing I heard before I drifted back into a dreamless sleep.

A soft, pale glow was pressing against the windows, bringing with it the first kiss of dawn when I opened my eyes again. I was no longer cocooned in Isaiah’s arms, which was a relief and a disappointment. I already felt foolish for pulling him into the bed in the first place, waking up to find him upholding his unspoken promise only made me wince. In the same breath, the loss of not having him there hit me equally hard.