Mirage (11 page)

When I heard him groan, his body tensing beneath my touch, I knew I’d gone too far. I felt him pull away and braced myself for the sight of his transformation—the red-rimmed eyes, the elongated fangs. I waited a beat, gathering the courage I needed to open my eyes.

In the silence, his thumb brushed across my cheek, drawing lazy circles against my flushed skin. Finally, he spoke. “God, Violet. I love you so very much.”

“I love you, too,” I replied breathlessly, willing my eyes to open and meet his.

“Look at me, then,” he whispered, nudging my face with his nose. “Go on.”

And so I did. The eyes that gazed back at me were a pale blue-gray and thickly lashed, no redness marring their perfection. His lips parted with a smile, revealing straight, white teeth that looked entirely unremarkable.

There was not a single hint of bloodlust in his features.

9 ~ To the Manor Born

H
ow did you do that?” I asked, sitting up so abruptly that I nearly knocked Aidan over.

He reached up to brush back a lock of hair that had fallen across my cheek. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yes, but how? I mean, what’s changed?”

“Something that Dr. Byrne suggested, a slight alteration to the formula for the cure. The serum that I inject,” he clarified, “not the elixir.”

“You mean—you mean it worked?” I stammered, unable to believe it. “You’re cured?”

He shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. But there have actually been some significant changes at the cellular level. Not enough, but I can tell we’re moving in the right direction now.”

“Are you sure?”

He leaned back against the blankets, his arms folded behind his head. “I injected myself with the serum two days ago, and I can already feel the changes. I slept like the dead last night, and even though the elixir should be starting to wear off by now, it isn’t. I should be feeling the urge to feed, but I’m not. And you saw what happened just now. I knew I was taking a chance, but I was hoping that I was right. It looks like I
was
right.” He was grinning now, happier than I’d ever seen him.

“Wow,” I breathed. “So … what next?”

“More work, I suppose. We need to figure out exactly which systems we’ve altered and which remain unaffected, and then we can go from there. Here”—he patted the blanket beside him—“lie down.”

I complied, fitting myself against his body, my head on his chest. “How much time before curfew?” I murmured. Because this new development—this opened up new options.
Exciting
options.

“Not enough time.” His cool fingers found my neck, tracing a path down to my collarbone. “Your skin is so warm.”

“It just feels that way to you,” I said, but truthfully, it felt like my skin was on fire. Aidan always seemed to have that effect on me. Our connection was that visceral—it always had been, right from the beginning.

Insta-love, some would call it, but it wasn’t, not really. It had taken time for the initial attraction to deepen, to shift and grow. I did the mental math—two months, a little more. Long enough to know that Aidan was gentle and kind, generous to a fault. He’d experienced great loss in his life, just like me.

“Tell me more about your family,” I prompted. “Your parents and sisters.”

“Okay,” he said, reaching down to cup my hip with one hand. “My father … let’s see. Looking back, I realize that I didn’t know him very well. He had very little interaction with his children—at least, not while we were still in the nursery.”

“You really had a nursery?” I pictured the one from
Peter Pan
—Wendy and her brothers together in one big room, their beds in rows, the children tended by the giant dog Nana.

“We really did. Anyway, my father was a quiet man. Studious. He took his duties seriously, though he didn’t care for London. He much preferred our country estate in Dorset. I’m fairly certain that was a bone of contention between him and my mother. She loved town.”

I closed my eyes, succumbing to the hypnotic tone of his voice. “And by ‘town’ you mean London?” I asked sleepily, trying to picture London at the turn of the century. The twentieth century, that is.

“Exactly. My mother preferred the hustle and bustle of London. She liked to go to parties, to attend court. It was novel to her—she had Irish roots, grew up a commoner. Being a viscount’s wife was everything she’d dreamed of, and luckily for her, society adored her. And why not? She was beautiful and charming, always smiling.”

“And your sisters?” I asked, suddenly aware of the fact that I didn’t even know their names.

“Georgiana and Elizabeth,” he said, his voice swelling with affection. “Both as beautiful as our mother, with her dark hair and eyes. Georgie was just thirteen months my junior, more like my twin. We did everything together—fought, played, tormented the nursemaids and governesses. Lizzie came six years later, the little plaything that Georgie had always wished for. She turned out be a troublemaker, our little Lizzie, always getting into scrapes.”

The pride in his voice was unmistakable. “Go on,” I said, wanting to know more about these long-lost girls who shared his blood.

“Georgie hadn’t even had her coming-out when I was turned. I’ll always regret not getting to dance with her at her ball. I watched, though,” he said, his voice quiet now. “I stood outside in the shadows, watching her through a window. She’d never looked more lovely.

“At one point, I saw her glance at the window where I stood, as if she somehow knew I was there. Her thoughts were full of me, missing me.” His voice was thick now. “And yet I could not show myself. She died in childbirth five years later, giving her husband the son he’d always wanted.”

“And Lizzie?” I asked, my eyes suddenly damp. I only hoped her story was a happier one.

“Little Lizzie continued to get into as much trouble as possible, including a situation with a married man that didn’t end well. Let’s just say I had to take care of that unpleasant business myself.”

My eyes flew open. “You mean you … what? Killed him?”

“Trust me when I say that he full well deserved what he got. After what he did to my sister …” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I take great comfort in knowing that I perhaps saved other women from suffering the same cruel fate as Lizzie did. Anyway, Lizzie finally married years later, after the scandal died down. I think she had a happy life. She outlived my mother by just a few years, the last of my family to go. Only then did I present myself as my father’s rightful heir, claiming to be my own grandson. I had fabricated papers to prove it, and I was able to use them, along with a bit of mind manipulation, to see that the estate in Dorset passed to me. I kept it up for a while, eventually donating it to the National Trust. It still stands—Brompton Park, a historic site.”

I tried to picture it, some grand English estate like Mr. Darcy’s in
Pride and Prejudice
. “Will you take me there someday?”

“If you’d like.” He pressed his lips to my temple.

“Definitely. Maybe next summer, after graduation. I’m sure Patsy wouldn’t care. She probably wouldn’t even notice I was gone,” I added.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Next summer is a long way away, isn’t it, love?”

I knew he didn’t like to think of the future, didn’t like to hope.

I would have to have hope enough for both of us.

I stared at my laptop screen, waiting impatiently for the search engine to load.
Brompton Park
, I typed into the box. Then I added
viscount
and
Dorset
just for good measure.

And there it was, at the top of the search results. A UK National Trust listing for a Brompton Park in Dorset, England, the former seat of Viscount Brompton. My palms suddenly damp, I clicked the link.

The page loaded, filling my screen with images of Aidan’s ancestral home.

I let out my breath in a rush.
Wow.
Aidan had grown up
there
?

“Hey, what’s that?” Cece asked, looking over my shoulder at the screen. “Research for your history class or something?”

I tapped the screen with my finger. “No, it’s—well, it
was
—Aidan’s house. His family’s estate back in England.”

“Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding!” Cece sat down beside me. “Whoa, can you say ‘posh’? Does he still own it?”

I shook my head, clicking on the gallery link. “No, he gave it to the government. It’s like a tourist attraction now or something.”

Cece’s chin resting on my shoulder, I clicked through the photographs, one after another. A marble-tiled foyer. A curving staircase. An enormous dining room table set with an elaborate china and crystal setting. A bedroom with a short-looking four-poster bed draped with velvet curtains. More bedrooms, each as decadent-looking as the one before. Another room that could only be the nursery, looking much like the one I’d imagined from
Peter Pan
. And then I began to click through several paintings, mostly portraits.

One portrait made my breath catch in my throat—two dark-haired girls sat on an ornate purple velvet couch, a golden-haired boy standing stiffly beside them. The face looking back at me was achingly familiar, despite the old-fashioned clothing and formal pose.

There was no doubt in my mind that it was Aidan, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, with his sisters. He was gazing at the artist with a bored expression, his posture radiating a careless arrogance. It was him, and yet it wasn’t.

“That’s—that’s
him
,” Cece stuttered. “Whoa! Keep going; maybe there’s more.”

I reached for the mouse again and continued to click through the remaining photos, but the rest showed only the estate’s gardens—a fountain, a hedgerow maze, manicured flower beds.

With a sigh, I clicked back to the main page.

“Oh my God, look at that.” Cece leaned closer to the screen. “You can actually rent the place. Twenty-eight hundred pounds a week—what’s that come to? Four thousand dollars, maybe?”

I nodded. “Something like that. Can you imagine?”

Cece stood, unfolding her long, trim legs. “Hey, I’ve got an idea! We should go in together, all of us, and rent it out for a graduation trip next summer.”

“Tyler too?” I asked, raising my brows.

“I guess. Last night seemed promising, right?”

“I don’t know—you tell me,” I prodded. “I mean, I think he’s a little obnoxious sometimes, but he was pretty funny last night. He
did
make you snort coffee up your nose, you were laughing so hard.”

She eyed me dubiously. “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

“Well, you two seemed to be getting along.”

“Yeah, it was fun,” she agreed. “But … we’ll see. Anyway, back to Aidan’s house. Excuse me, his
mansion
. How cool would that be, to rent it out? Do you think he would go for it, or would that be too weird for him?”

“I don’t know.” I glanced back at the screen, shaking my head in amazement. “But I
would
like to see it.”

“Well, get to work on him, girlfriend! Use your persuasive feminine powers, if you know what I mean.”

I had to laugh at that. Yeah, that was the only weapon I had to use against him. Well, that and my stake.

And then something clicked in my mind. The bed!

Hastily I clicked on the back button, going through the gallery of photos in reverse order, until I found what I was looking for.

“That’s it,” I breathed, my eyes widening as I stared at the image on the screen.

It was a bed—an antique mahogany bed with four spindly posts and a blue damask duvet trimmed in gold cording spread across it. I’d seen it before, in one of my visions.

That
vision—the one of Aidan and me in a bed. Together.

“That’s what?” Cece asked, glancing at the screen. “A bed? Yeah, that’s a bed, all right. Looks pretty comfy, too, I’d say. Look at all those throw pillows.”

But I couldn’t answer her—I couldn’t say a single word. I was too busy trying to remember what I’d seen, to recall the details. Mostly, I came up blank.

That was the vision I’d work on retrieving next with Dr. Byrne, I decided. Because I needed to know, once and for all, if I’d seen myself there in that bed.

Or if I’d somehow seen Isabel instead.

10 ~ Inked

I
closed my eyes, concentrating on the now familiar sound of the clock. No more than thirty seconds passed before I fell into the vision, moving around inside the images in my head, searching for clues.

As far as visions went, this one wasn’t particularly interesting or illuminating. Kate was sitting on Cece’s bed crying; sobbing, really. Cece and Sophie were there with me, comforting her. I’d deduced that she and Jack had broken up. Which was awful, yes, as far as Kate was concerned. Still, I’d seen far worse.

I’d already decided I wasn’t going to tell her about the vision—I just couldn’t. But, I don’t know … maybe I could learn something useful, something that I could use to redirect whatever was going to happen or maybe soften the blow somehow.

I hadn’t had that many visions since the beginning of school, so there wasn’t much to choose from when it came to my sessions with Dr. Byrne. I’d managed to master the vision recall on our third session, and now I was an old pro. I’d gone through the vision with the bed—it was definitely the one in Brompton Park, I was sure of it now—and pretty much every other vision that wasn’t too painful to relive, just for the sake of practice.

An entire month had passed since the beginning of school, mostly in a blur of textbooks and pop quizzes. Cece had been elected student body president by a landslide. Temperatures had dropped, leaves had changed colors, and jackets had come out of closets.

And every single Saturday I’d met with Dr. Byrne. In all that time I hadn’t been able to recall the vision with Whitney and Aidan. Not once, and not for a lack of trying. Which meant it had been a dream after all, I’d concluded.

Thank God.