Gifts of the Blood (4 page)

His hands formed into fists against the glass counter and he closed his eyes tightly. Whatever heightened senses this man triggered within me flamed and roared. His body was taut, radiating anger; if his rage were a scent, I thought, it would be cinnamon and sour wine. The air around us became thick with faintly shimmering air and a sweet scent so heavy it was almost unpleasant. I had been shivering only minutes before. Now, I was hot even in my thin t-shirt. He kept his head bowed as he struggled for control. His words, when they finally came, were strangled thunder. “It is true I know of you and your… brother. But I did not buy your cards, nor do I have need of a
private commission
,” he snarled. He almost choked on the phrase, as if he found the idea obscene. My eyebrows shot up, and Mrs. Alice stirred uneasily beside me. My brain had time to wonder who
had
bought them, and what scandalous other thing might be wanted from me. I wondered if it paid well. He actually growled. “I had no idea, when I came, of the grief you carry, the depth of your love. It seems a sick, cruel thing, that your love for him tortures you, as well. I am not pleased.”

Before I could ask him what the hell he was talking about, he finally looked at me. Lifted his head and really looked at me.

I screamed. Coffee just short of scalding exploded from my hand and pooled on the floor. I had crushed my cup in my fist. I backed slowly away from the sofa, from Mrs. Alice, from the man with the light, glowing eyes. He stood perfectly still, watching me with a mixture of concern and despair. Dimly, through the roar of pounding blood and adrenaline, I heard Mrs. Alice calling my name, telling me to be careful, to take my money, but I ignored her. I ignored everything but the stranger’s eyes on me as my back hit the door, easing it open, feeling the cold rush in and wrap itself around my body as I inched backwards out of the store like frightened prey.

He held out a hand as if he would stop me, but he didn’t move. “Caspia. Wait. Please.”

My name from his lips was like white lightening straight to my brain. This had never happened before; it couldn’t be happening now. “
How the hell do you know my name
?” I heard myself screaming at him. “How are you even here?” I realized I was sobbing, screaming, falling. The door had opened behind me; my heel caught the doorframe, dumping me on the cold concrete. My head slammed into the ground but I kept going, kept crawling backwards. “
How can you know my name when I only drew you a few hours ago
?” I demanded.

Then he was leaning over me, his warm hand on my forehead, his eyes the same intense light of my sketch. “Caspia,” he said again, as if repeating a name he had no business knowing would frighten me any less. “I didn’t come here to frighten you.” Could he read my mind? He was close, now. He was so close I could see the delicate arch of the eyebrows that had been so angry in my sketch. I could count each individual eyelash, had I wanted to; his eyes, nothing but light and fury in my drawing, were the lightest blue-green, more a tint than a color. I skittered backwards, scraping my palms and my side against cold concrete, desperate to get away from him. I heard something tear, but I kept going.

My terror confused him, I could tell. I don’t remember seeing him move, but somehow, he knelt right beside me on the concrete. His hand encircled my wrist, a band of steel, and I whimpered at the strength of him. The bones in my hand twisted against each other as he held me. I pulled, but it was like trying to escape solid stone. Skin and tendons pulsed with hot pain against grinding bones, and still I tried to escape him. He looked beyond confused as I whimpered; he looked helpless, and finally, afraid. His fear grew as he realized I was whimpering in pain as much as fear. He looked at my hand in his, swollen, now, and red. He let go abruptly. With a fear in his light eyes that now echoed mine, he reached out with his other hand and brushed my eyelids with the pad of his thumb. I felt them grow heavy, so heavy.

White. Everything was white and heavy and warm. I slept without dreaming.

Chapter Three:

In the Shadows

I woke surrounded by feathers.

Warm, soft, and slightly springy, I burrowed deeper into my imitation down comforter. I loved my bed with its rounded oak frame, its sheets with obscenely high thread counts, its piles of pillows and blankets that didn’t match. My bed was about comfort, not coordinating. It wasn’t even a bed so much as a nest; I sleepily wished I could spend a whole day in it, emerging only to forage for food and make brief treks to the bathroom. How much time did I have left before the alarm went off again and I had to get up or be late for school?
Snooze button
, I resolved drowsily, burrowing deeper into my cocoon of soft warmth.
If it’s not Dr. Christian’s class today, I’ll hit snooze. He’s so uptight. Don’t understand why all the girls think he’s so… attractive…
Next to the curve of my spine, the mattress dipped with someone’s body weight. I smelled familiar juniper and cedar aftershave. Logan.

“Mmmph,” I objected halfheartedly when cold hands tried to dig me out of my burrow. “Too early for school, Logan. Go ‘way.”

The hands paused before withdrawing entirely. I still smelled the aftershave I had given him last Christmas, so I knew he hadn’t left. Despite my best efforts, I was slowly waking up anyway. Some part of me suspected I really didn’t want to do that. “Caspia,” he finally said, patting where he thought my head would be underneath the comforter. He managed to bang my nose. “Hey. What time do you think it is right now?”

The question was strange. Didn’t he know? Wasn’t there a clock? “Um. I’m not sure. Early?” The voice he used alarmed me even more than the question itself. He spoke with the careful, even cadences of someone addressing a child, or a crazy person. With a sinking feeling, I scrambled to get out of my self-inflicted wrappings, sitting straight up to stare at him in the pitch dark. I couldn’t see the clock. Logan looked deathly pale in the wash of moonlight through my big bay window. It was the only light in the room.

His dark eyes glittered in deepest shadow under his baseball cap, making it difficult to see his exact expression. Only the slant of his mouth told me he was worried. He reached out long pale fingers and skimmed my hair back from my eyes. His touch on my cheek was slow, almost languid, like all his movements these days. His fingers were cold, but the gesture warmed me anyway. Even his smallest touches spoke volumes. Small gestures were really all he had left. “You don’t remember, then? What happened?” He lay back against the headboard with a sigh of frustration. The glitter under his baseball cap disappeared. He must have closed his eyes. “How about your hand? How does it feel now?”

“My hand?” I echoed stupidly. I looked down at myself in the moonlight. The blankets had fallen away to my waist. My skin, pale and abraded in the moonlight, peeked through a gap in my t-shirt where the side had ripped from hem to waist. A bandage encased my wrist from knuckle to forearm. I tried to bend it, experimentally, and felt a sharp pain as my wrist met the resistance of bandages and a splint. I yelped. “Ow! Holy hells, Logan!” The entire evening came flooding back to me as I stared at my wrist. Caramel latte; Mrs. Alice; selling all five tarot decks; total stranger; me, screaming my head off, crawling backwards, trying to get away from…

…from a total stranger with inhuman strength who knew my name and approached me in Mrs. Alice’s store who had come from a sketch I’d drawn earlier this afternoon. I exhaled like someone punched me in the stomach, and then grabbed my brother with my good arm.

“Caspia?” he asked, alarm plain in his voice now. “Are you all right? Should I get someone? Amberlyn?”

“No! Logan! Listen. This is
very
important.” I pulled him close, trying to keep my voice level and low. After the way I acted earlier, the entire town probably thought I was insane, but it was vital Logan take me seriously. “I was at the Riverwalk today, and I…”

“I thought you were supposed to be in class,” he interrupted. I could hear the reprimand, barely suppressed by his concern.

“Dr. Christian told us to go draw the St. Clare River. So we did. Except I didn’t. I mean, I did. I tried. At first. And then,
it
happened. You know.
It.
” I gave him a gentle poke in the ribs, expecting him to understand me. We didn’t talk much about how I sometimes drew the future. He knew it happened, but Grandmother had been the only person who seemed really comfortable discussing it with me. Since her death, I almost never spoke of it, and I was at a loss as to how to do so now. Logan shifted uncomfortably.

“It?” he echoed.

“Yes! It!” I finally exploded. I poked him again. He flinched away and I pulled back, angry that I might have caused him pain. “I drew someone,” I finally admitted, reluctant, afraid he wouldn’t believe me. I needed him to believe me. There was no one else.

“You’re not making any sense,” he snapped back.

“It’s not supposed to make any sense! It never does!” I flopped back down on my bed, frustrated that I couldn’t communicate with him. I couldn’t make him understand the significance of something I didn’t fully understand myself. I just knew it was important, and I had a bad feeling about it. I sat up, ignoring the scrape where my shirt had torn, and tried again. “Only it
wasn’t
an ‘it’ this time, it was a
person
, a guy, the very same guy from Mrs. Alice’s store, so when he walked up to us and started talking, naturally I freaked out.”

Logan was silent for several long breaths. His slim pale fingers drummed impatiently against his jeans. It meant he was thinking, trying to digest. It meant he was trying to phrase his words carefully, using the good communications skills our dad, a therapist, had drilled into us. “I’m hearing you say…” he started. I gritted my teeth in annoyance. Logan threw up his hands. “Oh, to hell with it. I’m still confused. You freaked out because some guy started talking to you? And what does Amberlyn and the Riverwalk and skipping school have to do with it?”

I leapt out of bed, infuriated. I was wearing the same outfit I’d left the house in, minus my socks. “I was not skipping school!” I yelled as my bare feet hit the carpet. “I was supposed to be drawing the river, but I drew…” Too late, I realized how wobbly I was. Too late, I realized I must have been given a sedative of some kind to make me sleep so deeply, at the wrong time of day. My legs buckled underneath me, pitching me into my closet on my side. I silently blessed my slovenly ways as a pile of clothes on the floor cushioned my fall. I followed this almost instantly with a scream of pain when I instinctively tried to push myself up with my injured right hand. Logan’s arms reached for me, pulling me up in the darkness, but I pushed him away. I didn’t want to strain him any more than I already had. Plus, I was mad at him.

“Caspia,” he said, a note of pleading creeping in. “I’m worried about you. You went hysterical and passed out right on the square. You’re hurt and not making sense. You scared the hell out of me.”

A familiar soft sigh floated into the room over his shoulder. “Me too, Caspia,” Amberlyn seconded. “No one could get any sense out of you. Mrs. Alice said you went from crying to hysterical in less than a minute, and after you got nothing but good news, too. Thank goodness she was there to dress your arm; you burned it when you crushed your coffee. And if that nice man hadn’t been there to help carry you back here, I don’t know what we would have done.”

I sputtered in my closet. I absolutely ached to tell Logan I had drawn a stranger standing in a storm of talons and blood and planes of light by the St. Clare River earlier today, but doing so would mean letting Amberlyn know all about my freakish ability. I didn’t need her to think insanity was a permanent condition of mine; bad enough she thought it a temporary one. I kicked a pile of clothes in frustration and tried another route. “What
nice man? The one who just came up out of nowhere and knew all about me in Mrs. Alice’s store? That nice young man? He’s the one who upset me in the first place!
He
did this to my arm! Logan, I’ve been trying to tell you!” I fumed. Logan went rigid. Something in his face, his stance, even in the deep shadows of my darkened room, made my insides freeze and my body still. Logan looked more than shocked; he was hiding something. Years of silent communication between siblings warned me he had a secret. Well, I had one, too. I desperately needed to get him alone. I began to pace.

“Oh,” Amberlyn said softly from over Logan’s shoulder. “Mrs. Alice didn’t say anything about that, Caspia.” She twisted a huge rose quartz ring on her delicate finger. “Are you sure? You were really upset, you know. Nobody blames you; we even kind of expected it, actually.” She and my brother exchanged quick, guilty looks. I suppressed a surge of annoyance. They’d been talking about me, then. “You’ve been pushing yourself so hard, and been under so much strain,” she began, her voice softening as she retreated underneath her curtain of spiral curls. “We were worried about you.”

Logan’s stance had gone from confused to protective in the space of a breath. “Amberlyn’s right. We thought maybe you were just over-stressed or something. Mrs. Alice told us about selling all your cards, and how much it upset you.” He gave me a reassuring squeeze. “It just didn’t make sense, that a big sale would upset you so much.”

“It wasn’t the sale,” I insisted, drawing on reserves of patience I didn’t know I possessed. My mind raced ahead, planning ways to get Amberlyn out of the apartment as fast as possible so I could tell Logan about the vision and show him my sketch. Then he’d have to believe me. “It was…” I took a deep breath. “Look, you’re just going to have to trust me on this. That guy scared me, ok? You have a point about me being over-stressed and all of that, but if you’re looking for a catalyst, he’s it.”

That guilty, furtive look traveled quickly between my brother and my best friend again. They didn’t believe me. I groaned. My hands curled automatically into fists. I shrieked when my right wrist twisted in pain. I sagged against the doorframe, feeling the impact of my day fully hit me. It didn’t matter what I did or said; they didn’t believe me, and they wouldn’t, unless I showed them. I needed a bath and fresh clothes. I wanted food and ibuprofen. Eventually, Amberlyn would finish plotting with my brother behind my back and leave so I could show him my drawing and explain that I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t care what the whole town thought of me, as long as Logan knew I was all right. I tried to push past them, but Amberlyn blocked my way.