Tales of Aradia The Last Witch Volume 1 (31 page)

“Apparently not,” she
replied. “Okay, so the nurse gathers my blood. Is she a
vampire?”

Roy shook his head.
“No, she’s human, but vampires can have human allies. Especially
Mr. Dayton. He’s very progressive, as vampires go.”

“It also explains why
Dax has been holding back from me.”

Roy squirmed
unhappily.

“Roy!” Aradia chastised
him. “Look, I know you don’t like hearing about this, but if you’re
really my friend I need you right now.”

This time he blushed.
“You’re right, Rai Rai. I’m sorry. Okay, uh, go on.”

She didn’t need to go
into vivid detail with him, of course. “Okay, so we’ve been dating
a little while now, right? Dax has always held back, though. He
hasn’t even kissed me when I tried.”

Roy wasn’t sure whether
to be relieved that they had not kissed, or saddened that she’d
tried. He decided to go with a little of both.

“He’s hardly even
touched me, really. I think I have more contact with you than
him.”

Roy replied, “I’m not
sure I didn’t want to hear this, actually.”

She rolled her
eyes.

“Look, are vampires
really all sex-crazed like on TV?”

“Not really,” Roy
replied. “But they’re not priests.”

“That’s good to know,
but I wouldn’t expect them to have sex with young boys.”

Roy laughed and said,
“Now who’s not taking this seriously?”

“Touché,” she
acknowledged.

“Okay, so you’re
thinking he was after information on you all along?”

She didn’t want to say
it, but she had to. “The way my personality is, Roy? I’ll blab
about intimate details of my life to almost anyone. I’d be an easy
target for Dax to coax secrets out of me.”

Roy squinted and shook
his head slowly. “You don’t have much of a filter sometimes, I’ll
give you that. But you’re really good at protecting your
secret.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. So I only knew
you for a few days and I already knew everything from your favorite
candy bar to your childhood fear of your toys coming to life and
dancing around your bed. I didn’t know anything about what you
were, though.”

“I don’t really know
much about what I am,” she countered.

“I didn’t even know
that, then. I mean, look at the nurse thing. You’ve kept your
secret hidden for so long, I doubt the first vampire to run along
could just sweet talk you into divulging that kind of
information.”

She ran over every
conversation she’d ever had with Dax as well as she could. “He’s a
subtle bastard,” she muttered.

He nodded. “He’s old,
Rai. Vampires are master manipulators.”

She clenched her fists
so hard that she could hear her knuckles crack. Roy looked at her
and said, “I’m sorry, Rai.”

“Are you?” she replied.
“Are you sorry really? Aren’t you relieved I won’t be seeing Dax
anymore?”

“I am,” he admitted,
“but I still don’t want to see you hurt. I figured you had a right
to know.”

“You're damn right I
did.”

“So you’re canceling
your date with Dax, then.”

“Quite the contrary,”
said Aradia. “Dax wanted to date me for information. I’ll do the
same. I’ll use the date as an opportunity to find out how much he
knows and what his plans are.”

“How are you going to
do that? Ask him?” Roy proposed sarcastically.

“No,” said
Aradia.

“Then how?” he
persisted.

Aradia thought about it
until a wicked smile played upon her lips. “I’ll handle
that.”

Roy made a conscious
decision to open his fists and calm down. “Okay,” he said. “That’s
tomorrow night, right?”

She nodded.

“Just don’t forget we
have a date of our own tonight.”

She grinned. “How could
I forget? First full moon of my first lunar cycle as a
werewolf.”

“Aradia, this is
serious,” he replied. “You could very well turn
tonight.”

She understood his
concern, but she didn’t share it. Her arm had healed completely
after a few days, and she wasn’t seeing any of the early onset
werewolf symptoms Roy had described. She hadn’t had any strange
visions or cravings for raw or undercooked meat, and her senses
were just as human-level as they’d ever been.

Still, she agreed it
was better to be safe than sorry. The last thing she’d want to do
was turn into an out of control werewolf.

“I’ll be over tonight
well before sundown,” she promised. “Okay, back to the other thing.
Can vampires read minds or control people or any of that
stuff?”

“Nah,” Roy shook his
head. “Not really. That’s been way played up in pop culture. Some
vampires have special mental powers, but that’s rare, and I think
it’s mostly in the really old vampires.”

“Good,” Aradia
nodded.

She was already
beginning to formulate a plan. She smiled at the concept of turning
the tables on Dax and his father, but she was still depressed. She
realized that almost regardless of what she learned, she and Dax as
a couple were doomed.

“Is anyone else
coming?” Aradia asked.

She was locked in a
cell in the Morales’ basement.
Funny,
just a couple months ago, this would have seemed like a really bad
situation
. Also imprisoned were Roy in
the next cell, D in the next cell down from him, and across the
walkway, Al and Mr. Morales.

There were about a
dozen more cells unfilled.

“Not tonight,” Mr.
Morales replied. “My brother and his family have decided not to
spend full moons in Salem for a while, in light of what happened
with Reynaldo.”

Roy hung his head at
his father’s words. “It was not your fault, Roy,” his dad
added.

“And as long as I don’t
turn tonight, no harm no foul!” Aradia said, trying to cheer her
friend.

D had stripped to his
funny werewolf undies precisely at sundown and posed a bit before
neatly folding his clothes. At first Aradia assumed the posing was
for her benefit, but considering the size of his ego, he probably
did it all the time.

Roy and the others
waited a bit. Aradia had no intention of disrobing. Instead she’d
worn old, loose fitting clothes she didn’t care much about, and
brought a change of clothes which she set just outside her
cage.

“So… What next?” Aradia
asked.

“Now we wait for the
transformation,” Mr. Morales replied.

“Oh, of course, sir,”
she replied, “but we could have hours for that, right?”

Everyone
nodded.

“So what do we do now?
You know, to pass time.”

“Usually we sit in
pensive silence,” D replied.

Al nodded. “More or
less, yeah.”

“Yeah, okay,” Aradia
replied, “you all might not have noticed, but I’m not so good with
silence. Come on! Let’s play a game or something.”

Roy proposed,
“Charades?”

“Again,” Aradia
repeated, “not so good with silence. What about the famous name
game?”

She received blank
stares.

“Oh this’ll be great!
I’ll teach you. It’s more of a car game normally, but I think it’s
perfect. I’ll say a famous name. It can be anyone, real or
fictional, living or dead. It just has to have a first and last
name, and you can’t make it up. Then the next person takes the
first letter of my person’s last name and says a new name. We go
around in a circle until you all turn. So if I say Stephen Moyer,
Roy, you might say Miley Cyrus.”

“I would never say
Miley Cyrus.”

“Oh, hush.”

Roy said, “Marlon
Brando.”

Next was D. “Bigby
Aarons.”

“Who?” Aradia
asked.

“Alpha of a big pack in
New Hampshire. I spent a summer up there. Cool guy.”

Aradia replied, “Oh,
okay. Mr. Morales, that’s an A to you.”

Mr. Morales replied,
“Abraham van Helsing.”

Al asked, “Is that a V
or an H?”

“Definitely V,” Aradia
replied confidently.

“Okay…” Al thought for
a moment. “V, from V for Vendetta.”

“No go,” Aradia said,
“needs a last name.”

“Oh, right. Victoria
Beckham.”

“Nice one,” D
complimented his brother, with whom he exchanged an air
fist
pound.

The game went on like
that for just over an hour before the beastly transformation came.
Aradia watched in fascination as the four males all seemed to seize
up at once. She saw as their skin tightened and rippled, their
backs spasmed, and they started to change.

They screamed out in
pain as their bodies sprouted wolf hair. After just a few moments,
she was no longer in a room with her friend, his brothers, and his
father. Now she was in a room with four prowling, growling,
ferocious werewolves.

“Well that was
different,” Aradia spoke. Apparently she drew Roy’s attention, for
he turned and swiped at the bars on her side of his cage. He could
not reach his arm through the bars, of course, but he definitely
tried, swiping and gnashing his teeth.

“My, what big teeth you
have, Roy.”

She sat like that for
about five minutes.

“I guess that’s that!”
she said, rising up and unlocking the door to her cage using the
one key.

“Guys, it’s been fun.
Mr. Morales, here you go,” she said, sliding the key under the door
to his cell. He pounced at the door, banging his head hard on it.
“Oooh… well, at least you won’t remember that, right?”

Chapter
Twenty-Five

“Is something wrong?”
Dax asked Aradia as they drove his 335d into the city of
Salem.

“No, what makes you
think that?” Aradia responded.

“Since I picked you up
you have been so quiet,” said Dax. “Normally you never shut
up.”

He smiled after the
statement, hoping to encourage a laugh from Aradia. She said
nothing. She knew she was supposed to be acting normal to keep Dax
off balance. In the back of her mind, though, she knew that this
was probably the last time she would ever be with him.

Even given the
deception, how could she be anything but sad?

“I just feel sick
today, that's all,” Aradia replied.

“You should have said
something,” Dax replied as he pulled into the mall’s parking
garage. “We could have rescheduled if you are feeling under the
weather.”

Aradia forced herself
to look at him when she said, “I wanted to see you.”

She smiled up at Dax
who replied very stoically as they walked towards the mall’s
entrance.
I guess I was wrong to think
you and I had something special, Dax
,
Aradia thought to herself,
so very wrong
indeed
.

So far, it had not been
much of a date. All they had done was walk around the entire
shopping mall in awkward silence. Aradia was giving Dax one final
chance to come clean, hoping he would admit the truth about his
motivations and declare that because of his feelings for her he
could not keep lying.

He didn’t, though. Dax
just walked along at her side, saying very little, looking
everywhere besides directly at her.

When he finally did
speak, it was to say, “I believe I should take you home.” They
hadn’t even been out a full hour.

As they were exiting
the shopping mall, Aradia noticed a group of scrawny, seedy guys
following them. There were four of them, and they all wore dirty
black clothing and beanie caps. They followed Aradia and Dax into
the parking garage. In the closer quarters, Aradia noted they
smelled heavily of weed and beer. She had to assume Dax had noticed
them as well.

Really? Is it going to
be every date I go on I get accosted by some group of
no-gooders?

When they stopped in
front of Dax’s car the scumbags closed in on them. Aradia decided
confrontation was the only option left. Regardless of what else was
going on with them, she trusted Dax would be good with the
decision.

The two of them spun to
face the group.

“Hey sweetie, what’s
up?” one of the jerks asked her, completely ignoring
Dax.

He smelled more foul
then the rest of them put together, but worst of all was the way he
looked at Aradia. He was leering at her with intense sexual hunger
reflecting in his eyes.

“Don’t call me
sweetie,” Dax replied dryly.

Aradia laughed
aloud.

“Not talking to you,”
he replied, still leering lecherously at Aradia.

“What do you want?” she
demanded.

“Look in the mirror and
you will see," he joked, revealing his yellow teeth and making his
friends all chuckle.