Rising Tide: Dark Innocence (The Maura DeLuca Trilogy Book 1) (15 page)

By the time the third set was over,
it was very late when Ron showed up at our house.  Caelyn went to bed,
allowing me to wait up for him without argument.  It was as if she’d let
go of me a little bit, which was nice.  My mother had always bordered on
psychotic overprotection.  I understood her worry, what with my lack of
social skills and peculiar ailments, but now that I was getting older, I was
enjoying this newfound freedom.  I didn’t know what had brought all this
on.  Maybe it was that I was growing up.  Maybe she finally thought I
was more capable of making decisions for myself. Or she could just be feeling
extremely sorry for me, after everything she’d gone through with my father.

I guessed I would be going through
some of that in the months to come, but for now I wanted to focus on the last
few weeks I had left with Ron. 

He was just as happy as I was about
the being ungrounded thing.  We’d both been kind of worried about skipping
so much school to be together, especially so close to finals—me more so than
Ron.  Now we could stay caught up and see each other every night, if we
wanted.  I wanted that….a lot.

Once we’d settled in on the couch,
I kept waiting for him to run screaming away, at first.  I had tried to
bite him earlier, after all.  As usual, Ron was acting like nothing
strange had happened.  I tried to relax, and he made it very easy.
 
We made a few tentative plans and then curled
up to watch a creepy vampire movie together.  I feigned being scared so
that I could cuddle into Ron’s warm chest more closely, but vampires didn’t
really scare me.  I thought they were beautiful and fascinating.

I made sure I didn’t fall asleep
with him out on the living room couch.  I didn’t want to push my luck with
Caelyn’s generosity.  And I wanted to keep her trust, show her I could be
the adult she was beginning to see in me.  I did, however, linger to kiss
him goodnight, tilting my face up to his, trembling with anticipation, as it
was the first I’d receive that wasn’t from my mother.

Turned out Ron was even more
nervous about Caelyn than I was. 

“Not now, Maura, ok?”  His
eyes flicked to the hallway.

I knew why he was nervous, but I
couldn’t help feeling a little rejected.  My face must have belied some of
the turmoil I was feeling, because in the next instant he lifted my lowered
chin with a finger.

“Hey, it’s not that I don’t think
you are simply the most kissable person on Earth,” his eyes bore into mine to
drive the point home.  “This is our first kiss.  I don’t want to do
it with one eye open waiting for your mother to come down the hall and murder
us both!”

“Yea,” I agreed reluctantly, “I
guess you’re right.”  Caelyn might have a coronary if she came out to the
kitchen for a glass of water and saw her sixteen-year-old daughter, making out
on the couch with a boy, at 3:00 a.m.  “Wow, it
is
really
late!  I’d better get to bed before she knows we’re up together.”

“I already know!”  Caelyn’s
voice resounded from upstairs.

“Oh crap!!! Goodnight!”  I
struggled to get up from the couch like my pajamas had caught fire.

Ron made me pause, taking my head
into his hands.  He leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on my forehead
with those perfect, brown-pink lips.  My skin burned, I was guessing with
embarrassment, as much as I could put thought together in this moment.  I
somehow managed to get to my feet and mumbled, “Goodnight,” feebly, as I
stumbled to my room.  I tripped over my own steps as I mounted the
staircase.  “I’m okay!”  I called out before anyone could ask me the
question.

I went to my bed and lay down, the
dizziness almost consuming me.  The silence was so heavy; it felt like it
was crushing me against the little, twin mattress.  I had to get up to
turn on my sleeping playlist.  Ron’s kiss still burned on my forehead, and
I felt, suddenly, lethargic.  But I couldn’t take the stillness of the
room.  I staggered over to my computer and pulled up iTunes, wishing Ron
were here to share the music with me.  My forehead was still
burning.  Wow…what would a real kiss from him do?

I always chose the shuffle option
and this time, Muse’s “Endlessly” came up first.  I considered this,
secretly, to be mine and Ron’s song.  At this moment, it served to confirm
my belief that we were meant to be.  I felt a momentary lapse of my
continual sadness, reveling in the conviction that, somehow, some way, we
were.  I had to have faith.  I had to hold on to that.  The
kissmark burned fervently, as if in response. 

I rose and went to lie on my
bed.  I cuddled my Timothy rabbit close and tried to sleep, but the
thought of Ron downstairs was like caffeine, keeping me awake and
restless.  The sheets and blanket broke free from their tuck at the bottom
of the bed after a couple of hours.  My forehead still burned where he had
kissed me, disturbing me, and I wrote it off as a figment of my
imagination.  But much as I tried to dismiss it, it burned on, as if
someone were holding a lighted match to my skin.

The burning seemed to find its way
into my blood, as the night wore on, and I kicked the blankets free.  The
heat coursed through me, and when I finally found sleep, infected my dreams. 
The first thing I noticed was the heat, like flames licking at my skin,
climbing higher and higher.  My dream awareness sharpened, and I realized
where the fire was coming from.  I was kissing Ron, and this time it
wasn’t my forehead his sweet lips were pressed against.  His mouth was on
mine, making a fire within me that radiated out onto every surface of my
skin.  The heat was so intense, I could feel each bead of sweat swell up
in the small of my back and tickle as they slid down my skin.

Ron broke the kiss to murmur my
name, “Maura….”  Even the sound of it was heated.

But then there was cold, a cold so
intense it burned my skin, as well…just in a much different way.  It was
my wrist.  My right wrist had the sharp contrast of something icy wrapped
around it.  I didn’t want to pull myself from Ron, from the intense,
all-consuming kiss, but I had to.  The iciness was painful and made me
want to escape.

I wrenched my mouth free to look
up.  There was a pale man gripping my arm.  His eyes were an
impossible shade of grey, bringing to mind midnight clouds stretched across a
full moon….mercury threading its way up a thermometer.  His light brown
hair was just a shade darker than blonde.  He was beautiful. 

Ron’s hand came up to my cheek to
burn me again.  He was so warm… I closed my eyes and pressed my face to
his hand.  The ice around my wrist intensified until it was
unbearable.  My eyes flew open yet again, and the young man’s face was
closer.  His eyes bore into mine. 

“What do you want from me?” I
shrieked at him.  I was angry he was trying to steal my attention away
from Ron, but at the same time, drawn to him. 

The strange boy smiled at me,
parting his slender but perfectly shaped lips.  They were blood-red and
behind them emerged teeth as shiny as pearl.  The canines were sharp, like
deadly, little daggers.  And as I watched they grew, becoming a lethal set
of full-fledged fangs.

“Come with me, Maura,” he purred
like a large, dangerous cat.

I awoke with a sharp start, sitting
upright in my bed and stifling a short burst of scream with my Timothy rabbit
I’d been holding in my arms.  It wasn’t enough to keep Caelyn, and then
Ron, from bursting into the room.

“Maura??”  Overprotectiveness
at its finest and in tandem.

“I’m fine,” I half sighed. 
“Just a nightmare.”  I was trying very hard to resist the urge to roll my
eyes.  I smiled at Ron, “Guess we shouldn’t have watched that vampire
movie last night.”

We were down to the last week of
school.  A week after, was the move.  But, today was Saturday, and I
was determined to push all other thought aside and enjoy it.  I decided to
try and forget completely we were moving away. 

“You know, we really should study,”
Ron said, being the responsible one for once.  It felt like a buzzkill,
after the stunningly large breakfast we’d enjoyed.  Caelyn had outdone
herself.  Waffles, eggs, bacon…but she was in her home office drinking a
protein shake.  I was proving to Ron that I could annihilate him in any
bacon eating contest.  He proved the opposite in the waffle
department.  I was finding more and more that carbs just weren’t my thing.

“That’s a good idea,” my mother
called in response, “don’t you think, Maura?”

“Sure,” I answered,
begrudgingly.  I grimaced and rose from the table to put the plates in the
dishwasher.

“After all the school you’ve been
skipping, I’d think you need to play a little catch up today.”  I couldn’t
miss the menace in her voice.  Ron and I looked at each other, both
wearing the same expression of disbelief. 

“How did she…” Ron started to
whisper.

“Oh,
Caelyn
knows all.” I answered.  I thought I heard a smug chuckle come from the
living room area.  My mother, way smarter than I gave her credit for,
even.

“Well, let’s hit the books,” I said
as I closed the dishwasher door.

“I just have to run home and grab
mine.”  I must have made a face.  “Don’t worry, Maura, I won’t be
gone long.”  Ron chuckled himself and ruffled my hair, much the way Caelyn
did when I was upset or sad.

I did use the time he was gone to
my advantage.  My puffed up hair from the night before needed to be tamed,
not to mention the lingering, dark eyeliner and heavy mascara.  After my
shower, I put on appropriately boring jeans to protest the activities of the
day—albeit it was studying with Ron—but chose a vibrant red top that screamed
to me with its appeal when I saw it while rifling through my closet. 

By the time I got downstairs, Ron
was already on our living room couch, book in hand.  But…he was talking to
Caelyn.  They both became mysteriously quiet as I cleared the stair
landing.  I had to fight the urge to accuse them of conspiring against
me.  I had a replay of that weird feeling that there was something my
mother wasn’t telling me. 

I brushed it off and asked, “Do you
want to sit at the dining room table?”

“Sure!” Ron was agreeable about pretty
much everything.  “I guess that’ll make it more businesslike.  We do
need to be serious.”  He made a very stoic expression, and I had to laugh.

Ron pulled my kitchen-table chair
out for me, and I sat down with as much grace as I could muster.  “Ow!”

“Maura?” he queried.

“I sat on my hair!”  I noticed
Caelyn was in the room immediately, hovering, expectantly.

How could it be so long?  The
last time I’d examined it in the mirror, about a week ago, it had fallen to
about the middle of my waist.  I was absolutely sure it hadn’t touched the
top of my jeans’ waistband.

More weirdness.  At this point
though, it was just more than I could bear.  My voice was shaky as I mused
aloud, “Hair just can’t grow that fast.  It just can’t.”  I eyeballed
both of them.  “How fast does hair grow?  Like a quarter to a half
inch a month right?”  They both just looked at me like I had purple horns
growing out of my forehead.  “Mom!  Ron!  My hair is...” I
reached down to verify, “more than three inches longer than it was last week!”

Caelyn
came over to me. and I had my second hair ruffle of the day.  “Now, Mink,
I think you’re imagining things.”  I didn’t miss the nervous twitch in her
mouth and eyes. 

Ron was, however, narrowing his
eyes and looking at the hair that disappeared under my body.  He looked
suspiciously, to my surprise, at Caelyn, then back to my face.  His
expression was unreadable.

“Mom!” I exploded, “what is going
on?!!  My teeth, the hair, the cravings!!”  I was close to the point
of tears.

I could tell Mom was determined to
calm me down.  She looked at Ron and spoke to him in the same way he had
to Shane last night, when insisting I’d been trying to help the boy who’d hit
his head.  “Ron, you haven’t noticed anything strange about Maura,
right?”  She was pleading with her eyes.

“There’s nothing strange about
Maura.”  He said this with utter sincerity. 

I started to whimper and rock back
and forth in my chair, pulling my knees up into my chest.  They were lying
to me and something horrible was going to happen.  I’d wake up one day in
the hospital…or worse, one day I wouldn’t wake up at all.  Didn’t they
respect or love me enough to tell me the truth?

“Maura!”  My mother came over
to put her arms around me. “You’re completely overreacting.  You’ve been
eating so much meat lately and growing so much!  It’s normal! 
Teenagers have growth spurts and your diet’s been better….Ron, don’t you think
she’s overreacting?”

Ron looked down at me.  It was
almost like he was examining me.  He pushed my hair out of my eyes and
looked deep into them….and started a bit.  He couldn’t cover that
up.  He’d seen something that made him react.  Something in my
eyes?  But his lips said, “You look fine, Maura.  Better than fine.”

I must not have looked
convinced.  He asked my mother, “Ms. DeLuca, can I borrow your laptop?”

She wordlessly went to retrieve
it.  I eyed him with suspicion.  I still thought my mom was sharing
something with him, she was failing to reveal to me.

He sat down with the MacBook and
did a Google search.  A few seconds later he called me over.  “Come
here and look at this, Maura, Ms. DeLuca.”  He had a very confident air
about him as he opened up links from the two browser windows open on the
computer . “See.  The effect of hormones on the body, they can do all
kinds of strange things.”  He showed me an article about how a flux of
hormones could cause strange cravings.  The next web page was about a girl
who experienced very fast hair and nail growth by adding extra protein into her
diet.  As I read, I started to relax.  As it turned out, hormones
could cause extreme changes in the body.  And as Ron pointed out with
another site he’d found, one of the most volatile times for hormone production
was during the teen years when the body became flooded with them.