He smiled and I saw his glowing white teeth. He quickly ran a circle around me and I started shaking with fear and awe at how fast he went. He seemed like a blur and I had a headache when he finally sat back in front of me.
“You’re afraid aren’t you?”
He sounded a little disappointed so I walked back to my laptop keeping a good distance away from him. Everything matched him perfectly. Eyes changing colors with emotions, White skin, Can’t go in water, strong, beautiful, drinks blood, fast, never ages, posses special powers.
“What is your so called ‘special power‘? Please tell me everything.”
“Ok? Well Paige teleports. Clide and Cynthia we don’t know yet. Will can erase memories. He did it to you once. Dakota can sense when someone has a power because not everyone does. James can heal- that’s how we fixed your wrist. Maria does the weather and it changes with her emotions. Logan isn’t a vampire but I will tell you her story one day. But she can do almost anything if she thinks about it that’s her power. And I can read what you are about to do.”
“How do you do that?”
“Well my mind senses the movements and then everything is opened up. Your past, future, sometimes mind, decisions, everything. I knew that you were going to touch me but I didn’t move in case it freaked you out.”
“I’m not scared!”
“Really?”
His eye turned black and he dropped his arms on my shoulder and let them dangle in front of my chest. He put his head on my shoulder with his face towards my neck. I tensed up and stopped breathing.
“I thought you weren’t scared.”
“I’m not.”
He opened his mouth and barred his teeth growling at me. He slowly traced my neck with his lips. I let out a tiny scream and moved away from him as quickly as I could manage. His stone arms were on my shoulder and held me back.
“Let go of me!”
“Not until you admit that your afraid.”
“I’m afraid alright! I’m scared of you! I don’t want to be but I am!”
“Good enough.”
He let go of me and I leaned against the pillow on the wall.
“Why am I afraid of you?”
“Because your human and you are supposed to be afraid. It‘s natural for you to be.” He spoke so clear and normal it didn’t sound like him.
“I don’t want too be afraid of you.”
“You need to be.”
“Why?”
“I can kill you instantly.”
“But you won’t.”
He flashed his teeth again and I backed up.
He stood up on the bed and I followed meeting his stare.
“Look I’m about to tell you everything. If you want me to stop just say stop.” There was kind of an edge to his voice like he didn’t want me to know something but he would say something just to get me to shut up.
“Got it.”
“Ok well my parents and I moved too the new world and they were killed by Indians when we moved westward. I moved to a house with a beautiful woman and her three children. They never ate, went out in the sun, aged, they barely spoke. When I was seventeen I asked her why and she bit me because she thought I knew to much. Well then I moved away as a new vampire and a hundreds of years later got married and had a kid.” I could sense a large lie somewhere inbetween there but maybe that was just my imagination.
“Who were you married to?” This was important information.
“Well you can’t tell anyone I said this to you.”
“OK.”
“Well I was married to Paige and our daughter is Logan.”
“What! Logan is your daughter! And you married Paige!”
“Shut up! Back to the story!” His eyes were green; a color I never saw before.
“Fine finish the story.”
“Well after the big struggle of taking care of a demon child and being married to a human, I changed Paige and told her all my secrets and how I tried to kill Logan. No comments. Well we all three moved to New Orleans and at Mardi Gras there was a booth that Dakota was running. Well Clide, Cynthia, Will, and Maria were there too inside the tent. Dakota had changed all of them except Cynthia and Will who we know nothing about. Well she took us to her house and taught us to fight.”
“Fight? Why would you need to learn to fight?”
“Vampire fights are common and with are powers, agility, and strength they are pretty complicated and known as ceremonies. We usually fight for something we want or just to kill an enemy. There has been a couple of vampire wars but they only lasted a couple hundred years. Well after that I went off to fight with my brothers and sisters and that was when Logan ran away. She came back the year we killed your dad and she stayed. Well then I saw you at school and I tried so hard to act normal around you. Then I saw your future and ran away. I knew you were special but not that special. I came back thinking of Dakota and when I got to school that morning I was set on killing you. I knew that you would follow me but instead I just dragged you off into the woods to kill you. Well you know the rest so there is no point in saying it.”
“You ran away! That was were you were at!”
“Yah.”
“But why”
“I was afraid of your future.”
“My future?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Fine but please tell me more about vampires.”
“Well I don’t really look like this at least not in sunlight. Guys don't change much at all but girls sparkle and glow. We are extremely pale but you should of known that already. We can bit anywhere but it's easier to attack at the stomach or the neck.”
“So that is why you attacked my neck.”
His eyes turned orange again and I was glad. The green was frightening especially because I didn‘t know what it meant.
“You had your laugh so back to my story. Girls sleep and guys don’t. Girls are faster but men are stronger. Most vampires are easily tricked. Only the leader of a pack of vampires has golden eyes. We usually are connected to someone. Like I am connected to Paige, Logan, and you.”
“How are we connected?”
“If Paige gets hurt I will feel the pain.”
“But when Logan was in the woods I didn’t feel it.”
“Then you two aren’t connected.”
“Can I ask you an important question?” I was serious now.
“What?”
“First can vampires swim and second how do you kill a vampire?’
“Well when we are wet we smell like blood and two I am not telling you how I can die.”
“Please?”
“No Claire!”
“Tell me or get out of my house!”
“Fine. You can burn us, tear the skin and burn it, and more that I don’t even remember. But the one that everyone remembers is that if you ever do anything-like for instance create an immortal child- Ace will come and most liekly kill you. He's basically the royalty of vampires. He and some other vampires decide when someone should be killed for an act.”
“Is it possible to…well…you know…have…a human…and…well.” I couldn’t find the right words to use but I’m sure he could figure it out.
“Claire if you’re afraid about something just tell me.”
“But I’m not afraid I just want to know if…vampires…and…humans-”
“No Claire. No. This is what I was afraid of.”
I had to figure out something before he killed me.
“No…that wasn’t what I was going to ask you. I wanted to know if…um…if you wanted to…um-”
“Claire, I know what you were going to say.” His eyes were that fearful green again.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t of said anything.”
“Claire, it’s not your fault.”
“Can we stop talking about this now?” I heard my voice cracking.
“Are you crying, Claire?”
“No I’m not!”
As I talked tears rolled down my cheek and dropped onto my shirt leaving it spotted. Kai wiped a tear off my cheek and sadly shook his head. I tucked my head back under my blankets and then when I got too warm leaned against the pillow and curled up in a ball. I sat up again and saw Kai just staring at me with his green eyes that I knew should be a warning sign. I stroked his arm and he froze. His eyes turned from black to green to hot pink over and over again. There were now pictures in his eyes and I leaned in to see what they were. The first one was him and a girl in front of a house. The next one they were holding a child. The third was a picture of a tombstone. I read the small letters and gasped. It had Paige’s name on it. That picture flicked by though and the next one was a man holding a girl and I recognized the dry river bed. There was a child with bunny ears and a bunny tail beside the woman. The child seemed to be yelling or crying. The pictures vanished quickly and Kai was holding my hands. I looked at him not knowing what to expect.
“Are you ok?” My voice sounded confused more than concerned.
“I’m fine, Claire. Don’t worry about it.”
“Who was the child that looked like a bunny?”
“It was Logan. She was a bunny when she was three instead of a bat like she is now.”
“Why was she a bunny?”
“I will show you all the tapes and pictures that Paige kept of her. It took Paige the longest to get used to making it seem like that never happened. She’s precious and rare so we couldn’t have her running off again.”
“You sound like a dad.”
His eyes turned my favorite: orange.
“You know Paige is mad at you. She thinks I’m going to run off with you and Logan. She still makes me regret doing that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I ran off when Logan was about ten and took her to a cave to get bat wings. Well I met a couple of people and well you should know the rest. But that was when I decided to change Paige.”
“I think Logan would make a better bunny than bat.”
“It was only cute when she was little.”
I laughed and looked over at my clock. I had to go to school in an hour and I had had no sleep. I looked at Kai biting my fingernails.
“Your skipping school and coming to my house today.” He sounded happy but I wasn’t sure.
We spent the next hour talking about him and when Debbie finally left I went downstairs to eat. I got in the warm shower quickly and got dressed. Kai fixed my hair then we got in his car and left my house. When we turned the many corners I realized I had no clue where he lived. It seemed like forever before we pulled into the driveway of a glass mansion. Kai clicked a button on the top of the car and the garage door opened up. He parked his car next to the many others and got out. Before I even opened the door he was pulling me out. He walked me to the steps of the house and opened the door. I gasped. The walls were glass all around but the floor and ceiling were a wonderful shade of white and cream. There were wooden steps in the corner that I was sure was a spiral staircase. There was a giant TV, wonderful cream sofas embroiled in gold lace. And in the corner there was an Ebony grand piano. There were pictures on the wall and I noticed that on the couch there was a toy bunny. The whole family came down the staircase at once except Paige who saw me next to Kai and ran back up the steps pulling her long hair. Logan was the first one to reach me. She looked at Kai, me, and then the staircase. She glared at Kai then lightly ruffled my hair and kissed my cheek. She looked back at Clide who was leaning on the piano farthest from me.
“She smells like cookies so you owe me six hundred thousand dollars.”
He nodded and she ran back up the steps calling for Paige. Nobody else moved but just looked at me and Kai.
“She knows the secret you guys, I told her.” He sounded kind of mad at them.
What he said brightened the mood though because everyone’s eyes turned orange and red and they all came up to greet me. Kai led me up the spiral wooden steps and into a long white hallway. We walked all they way down it past many doors each with a number on them. He stopped at a door that said twenty one on it and opened it. The room was black and white and it was the room I was in the day I hurt my wrist. What I didn’t notice before though was that the walls were bordered with gold and had tiny lions carved into it at the bottom. Paige was on the bed with Logan looking at pictures. They both looked up, nodded, and left the room without a word. He grabbed my hand and walked to the bed where the picture were laid out. He sat on the bed and I followed close behind. He grabbed a velvet box with gold lace saying Paige from under the bed and opened it. He poured the box’s contents onto the bed for me to see. I picked up a picture and laughed.
“Is this Logan?”
The picture had a little girl in a pink fluffy dress with bunny feature and a teddy bear in her hands. She had food all over her face and was at least two or three.
“Yah that’s Logan on her second birthday. Do you want to watch her childhood on tape?” He looked at me odd and I smiled not knowing if there was a hint to that that I should of noticed.
“Sure. I’m sure there will be some surprise in this.”
He leaned back on the bed and grabbed a tape out of the velvet box. He put it in too fast for my eyes to see if he really left but he grabbed the remote and the tapes started playing. I laughed at all of the stages she went through as different animals. From bunny, butterfly, bat, wildcat, raccoon, and at sixteen bat again. When the tape flickered off I looked at more pictures then looked up to see Kai gone. I worried for a minute but then he was next to me again with a glass of wine in his hands.
“I’m surprised you just noticed that I left. That was two hours of some girl’s life documentary that you barely know. I’ve only seen this once and in the first five minutes I left.”
I looked at my clock and saw that it was eight at night and sighed.
“Will you please drive me home?” The disappointment rang clearly in my voice.
“If you want to stay you can. I’ll take you to school in the morning.”
“Yay!”
“You sound too happy to be staying the night with a vampire. And half my family hates you. We are probably going to fight over you living or being killed.”
I buried my head in the pillows and the door opened. I looked up. Clide, Maria, Cynthia, and Will were in the doorway. Logan squeezed in from out of no where and jumped onto the bed. She ruffled my hair again and kissed my cheek then looked at the pictures growling at Kai. He barred his teeth and she dropped her head.