Something Witchy (Mystics & Mayhem) (11 page)

“I frightened you,” he said, sounding downright miserable, and I saw his eyes had returned to their previous mesmerizing hazel.  I tried to pull away when his fingers trailed down my cheek to my chin, but he gently grasped it and turned my face back to his.  “Ember, look at me.”

“No,” I whimpered.  It was only then that I realized that I was actually crying.  Jerking my chin free, I leaned my head against the window and whispered, “Just do whatever you’re going to do with me.  It isn’t like there’s much I can do to stop you.”

“I only want to save you,” he said, his voice so sad that I could almost feel the misery coming off of him.  I knew he was staring at me, but I refused to look at him. 

I heard him sigh sadly when I didn’t respond to that line, and it only seemed to make the tears come faster.  He started the car and got us back on the road.  When he didn’t try to talk to me again, or touch me, I let my head fall back against the head rest and kept my eyes closed.

With nothing better to do while I waited to become an Ember-flavored bloodshake, I thought about all the things he had told me.  Okay, he was
obviously
a vampire—the glowy eyes were kind of a dead giveaway—so that was one truth he had told at least.  I still had a hard time picturing Jack as a demon, though.  It was just too surreal. 

As for my being a… yeah,
that
.  I wondered if I should be worried that that was so much easier to buy into.  There was no doubt I was weird.  I mean, for one thing, I was a corpse magnet.  I was on a first name basis with most of the dead people in my zip code.  If you ask me, that is the very
definition
of weird.

It wasn’t only the ghosts, though.  Strange things happened when I was angry or upset.  For example, all of the dishes had once shattered when I was fighting with my mother in the kitchen—and I do mean
all
of them.  I will never forget the sound they made, like tiny bombs going off in the cabinets.  My father had explained it away as a power surge in the lights that ran along the bottom of the cabinets, and, since they were also shattered, I guess that was a plausible excuse.  Somehow, though, I had never really been able to make myself believe it. 

I also knew where things were when people lost them, something I had realized when Kim lost her grandmother’s cameo when we were in fourth grade.  She wasn’t supposed to touch it, but she had borrowed it from her mom’s jewelry box so she could try to sketch it and had lost it.  To say she had been hysterical was an understatement. 

I could never explain how I knew where it was, but I had walked into her house the next day and headed straight for the laundry room.  With Kim standing there watching me like I was crazy, I got one of the metal hangers Mrs. Val always saved from the dry cleaners and started fishing around between the wall and the washer.  Nobody was more surprised than I was when I snagged the stupid thing and brought it up, covered in lint and missing one of the pearls from around the edge, but relatively all in one piece. 

Since Kim lost
something
on an almost weekly basis, I had been doing that trick ever since.  Mostly I just chalked it up to coincidence, but that cameo I never could come up with a reasonable explanation for.  The strange part was that Kim never asked me to find it.

But, the worst of my weirdo talents was that I
knew
things about people I shouldn’t.  I had become the best secret-keeper of all time, and nobody even knew I knew their secrets to be keeping them.  I knew my chemistry partner made herself throw up if she ate so much as a grape.  I knew the quarterback of the football team was gay.  I knew my Economics teacher had a bottle of whiskey hidden in a secret compartment in her desk that she took a sip from about fifty times a day.  Hell, I even knew my parents hadn’t had sex in two years—and that was something I
really
hadn’t wanted to know.  Ever.  

I had learned long ago to keep my mouth shut about the secrets that came my way, which had saved me a lot of friendships—and my Econ teacher her job—but I had never figured out how I knew them at all.  They just popped into my head, like they had whispered them in my ear.  Sometimes they even came complete with visuals.  Not in my parents’ case, thank God, but often enough that I walked around with a reality TV program running in my head most of the time. 

I groaned aloud at that thought.  I hoped I wasn’t reading their minds.  Of course, the only person available to ask one way or another was the one person I didn’t want to talk to.

“You’re not reading their minds,” Nathan said quietly.  I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, but he was concentrating on the road with an intensity that seemed a bit
too
intense, if you know what I mean.  “You know because you can see things about them when you touch them or when you get too close to them.  Believe me, if you were reading their minds you wouldn’t have to wonder if you were.”

 “And how do I
stop
seeing them or whatever?” I asked grudgingly.

“Become a hermit,” he said, totally serious.

“Wonderful,” I muttered, dropping my head against the window again with a groan, “just
wonderful
.”

Figuring I’d had enough self-exploration for a while, I closed my eyes and tried not to think about my strange little talents, or how totally freaked Kim was going to be when she found out I was missing, or the fact that I was probably destined to become a juice box for my hot vampire kidnapper. 

I don’t actually remember falling asleep, but I will remember the dream I had for the rest of my life.  It was one of those dreams that sticks with you even after you’ve woken up to find you’re back in your own personal hell—better known as reality.  It was the kind of dream that makes you feel like you were really there, playing your part, if only for a little while.

I was walking through this park and the hedges were cut like a maze.  I felt very serene, hidden from the world around me by nothing but shiny green leaves.  The sky overhead was a deep blue, so perfect and beautiful that it was like someone had painted it there just for me. 

But there was also this feeling, this feeling like I was waiting for something.  Or, maybe someone…

“Simone.”  I turned, smiling like all my dreams had just come true, to see someone tall and broad striding toward me.  The sun was behind him, making it hard to see the man’s face, but I knew who he was.  He was the one, the man I’d been waiting for my entire life, the one I had given up everything to have the chance to find.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised when he drew close enough for me to realize that my dream man was none other than the very man who had kidnapped me in real life.  Nathan looked absolutely ridiculous in the clothes he was wearing—a long coat, short pants, stockings, and a cravat with enough lace to make a wedding dress—but I ignored his fashion uh-ohs in favor of staring at his face.  He looked almost innocent with a boyish grin on his lips and his beautiful eyes sparkling with happiness.

“You were supposed to meet me at the entrance to the gardens,” he scolded me, still smiling.  “Must I always chase you?”

“That is part of the fun, is it not?” I asked with a teasing grin.  “Now that you have found me, what will you do with me?”

With a wicked smile, he caught me around the waist, pulling me close.  My whole body tingled when he ran a finger down my cheek, letting it trail down my neck before twirling a strand of my hair around it and pulling it over my shoulder. 

I looked down and was surprised to see that the strand was raven black, a striking difference to my usual fire-red.  Looking closer at the dream me, I noticed I was wearing a gown in a shade of lavender I never could have worn with my hair.  I was practically spilling out of the extremely low cut bodice—at least part of me was smart enough to notice how hideous the thing was and was trying to escape, even if it was just my breasts—and the voluminous skirt made my already big butt look ginormous.

And resting just above my over-exposed cleavage was the very cross Nathan had given me.  Suspended from a long gold chain, it rested against my skin like it had been made for me.

“Do you like the new gown?” he murmured, referring to the god-awful dress I was wearing, as his finger slid along the edge of the lace at my neckline and started drifting toward my more-than-visible cleavage, causing every nerve ending in my body to light up like a Christmas tree.

“It’s lovely,” I breathed, my eyes fastened to his full, soft-looking lips.

“Shall I show you how pleased I am with it?” he asked, the wicked promise in his voice sending a thrill of anticipation down my spine.

Oh, yeah!  This is getting good!
I thought as his lips started to close in on mine. 

Just before he could kiss me, though, the scene changed and I was in a different room.  Gone was the butt-ballooning gown and I was wearing nothing but a thin cotton slip.  My hair was down, floating around me like a velvety-black cloud.  There were tears on my cheeks, and I was begging someone to let me go.  But, what really caught my attention was the stark terror in my eyes.

That, and the fact that I was tied to a post of some kind and the room around me was in flames.

Vampire Vanquish

I jerked myself awake without bothering to wait for the end I somehow sensed was coming.  I was breathing hard and my heart was racing like I’d just run a marathon.  With a shaky hand, I reached up to wipe away the sweat beading on my forehead.

“Are you all right?” Nathan asked, causing my head to snap around in surprise. 

I had forgotten all about the real Nathan for a second.  I had forgotten he had kidnapped me and was taking me God-only-knew-where to do God-only-knew-what with me.  I couldn’t seem to think past the all-consuming terror of the flames in my dream to remember anything at all.

I’ve always had a, shall we say, rather
unhealthy
fear of fire.  I won’t go into a room if there’s a fire in the fireplace.  Kim and Blake used to drag me to bonfires, but when they realized I spent most of the night watching the fire in terror like it was going to jump out and get me, they stopped subjecting me to the stress.  I stay away from the grill at cookouts.  I don’t burn candles at all—unless you count the little battery operated electric tea lights Kim gave me for Christmas last year as burning candles.  I will flinch if someone even lights a
match
near me.  Seriously, it’s not normal.

“Yeah,” I croaked out, my throat so dry it felt like I’d been chugging down sand in the desert.  Swallowing hard, I tried again.  “Yeah, I’m fine.  Just a bad dream.”

“A nightmare?” he asked quietly, turning back to the road again as his fingers tightened around the wheel.

“No,” I murmured, remembering the way I had felt when I thought he was going to kiss me.  “No, the end just sucked.”

They had a name for someone like me, someone who falls in love with their kidnapper—besides idiot, that is—but I was still too messed up from my nightmare to remember what it was.  I wasn’t going to fall in love with Nathan, though.  I was going to wait and watch, and the first opportunity I got, I was going to run like hell. 

Yeah, keep telling yourself that, babe,
a traitorous voice whispered in my ear. 

Vampires and smartass ghosts.  My life was a real nightmare come true.  I suddenly wished for that ghost tank thing the Ghostbusters toted around.  The idea of vacuuming Snake into an ectoplasmic Dirt Devil was almost enough to make me smile. 

“This is a nice car,” I said, looking around at my kidnapper’s mode of transportation as a way to distract myself.  “Who’d you say you stole it from?  Batman?”

Seriously, it was sleek enough to be the frigging Batmobile.  It was jet black and purred like a well-fed cat.  The inside was as black as the outside, the only break in the color scheme being the yellow Aston Martin logo stitched into the headrests, and so spotless you would have thought he had driven it straight off the assembly line that morning.  Every electronic gadget known to man that would fit in a car was there to be played with.  I found myself itching to try the stereo just to see what the sound system in a car that nice would be like.   

“No, I didn’t steal it from Batman,” he said, laughing softly.  “Like I told your friend back there, it’s just a car.  It’s a pretty toy, that’s all.  I have a weakness for beautiful things.”

His voice changed at the end of his explanation, became deeper, more intimate, and I found myself blushing for no reason whatsoever.  Really, I needed to get a grip.  I was an
abductee
, not this guy’s girlfriend.  Besides, he had said he had a weakness for
beautiful
things.  If that was the case, he should have kidnapped Kim instead.  She would have been more his speed.  Though, knowing Kim, she probably would have crushed his scrotum and been drinking lattes at the Coffee Bean by now, not panicked, fainted, and then crawled back into his car like a complete chickenshit just because he yelled at her.