Unnatural (39 page)

And when he felt the hand on his shoulder, he actually jumped.

“Don’t be afraid,” Nakano said. “I’m here to help you.”

Somewhere down there was The Well.

Thirty thousand feet below, beneath the Atlantic Ocean, was this well that Ronan had spoken about. This mysterious place that was supposed to grant him eternal life, untold power, and the chance to be an equal to his immortal partner. Michael had no idea if it really existed; he didn’t know anything any longer. His life, once again, was a mystery just when it was starting to be under his control. Just when his life was starting to mirror his dreams. Just when his life was about to begin, it ended.

He looked out the window of the plane and it was
like looking into a crystal ball to see his future—he saw nothing but darkness. He couldn’t believe he was flying back to Weeping Water and he couldn’t believe he was sitting next to Nakano. Nothing was right, nothing was the way he wanted it to be. And it was all Ronan’s fault.

   “Michael! Thank God you’re all right.” There was relief in Ronan’s voice that was unmistakable, but it wasn’t enough to make Michael want to look at him. “Please don’t leave. There’s so much more I need to explain to you, so much more we need to do.” Pleading wouldn’t make him look up either.

Snapping his suitcase shut, Michael looked out the window. He thought he heard a meadowlark singing, he thought he heard the familiar song he loved so much. But no, there was no lilting sound, nothing, only silence. “My grandmother died,” he said quietly. “I’m going back home for the funeral.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Ronan said, moving in front of the door so Michael had no choice but to pause and let Ronan take one last look at him. His heart ached knowing that he caused the pain on Michael’s face, he was the reason his skin looked so ashen, his eyes so bleak. “I’ll go with you,” Ronan said. “I’d love to see where you grew up.”

“He already has a traveling companion.”

Startled, Ronan didn’t even know there was someone in the bathroom. This is only because Michael is scared. He’s angry with me right now and he needs some space
away from me, but that will change. In time, he’ll know I acted out of love and I did what I did so our love could only grow and never die. “Michael.” He didn’t respond, but he did finally look at Ronan. “You won’t be away very long, will you?”

Will I ever be able to look at you again without anger and resentment and confusion? Michael wondered. “Only a day or two.”

“Good,” Ronan replied. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

If Michael had anything more to say, Ronan wasn’t going to hear it because Nakano ushered him out the door. “C’mon, mate, we’ve got a plane to catch. And it’s not every day I get to fly first class, thank you very much, Father Howard.”

Just before Nakano left the room, Ronan grabbed his arm, his fingers pressing deeply into his thin bicep, and he used every ounce of restraint he had not to cry in front of his rival. “You take good care of him, Kano, you protect him.”

Nakano pried Ronan’s fingers off of his arm and smiled, unmoved by the quiver in Ronan’s voice. “Don’t worry, Ro, I’ll do a much better job than you did.”

   That had been this afternoon. Now flying through the night toward his past, Michael had no idea if he had made the right decision to leave Ronan behind. There were so many unanswered questions, so many words swirling inside his head, banging against his brain. He wanted to strangle Ronan, punch him, grab his neck
and pull him closer so he could kiss him. No! Not that. No more kisses. How could he even think of wanting to do that?

Michael looked over to the boy sitting next to him, stretched out and reclining in his seat, a blanket tucked under his chin, wearing silver satin eyeshades like some experienced world traveler.
Well, he’s a lot more experienced than I am.
And he’s a vampire too. Not the same kind as Ronan, or so he said, just your regular run-of-the-mill vampire, which was not exactly how he described himself after he took Michael out of The Forest and brought him to an abandoned house with a cold cement floor. The place felt familiar, but Michael couldn’t remember ever being there before.

“ Ronan is different, part of a minority among our people, and not a particularly celebrated group, if you really want to know the truth,” Nakano explained. “For right now, you’re just like him.”

“What do you mean
for right now?”
Michael asked, suddenly aware that he was ravenously hungry.

“Well, we can get into all of that later,” Nakano cautiously replied, “but just know you have a choice how you’d like to spend your eternity.”

“A choice,” Michael spat. “All my choices have been taken away!”

That’s right,
Nakano had silently urged,
keep getting angry; get ticked off at what Ronan did to you.
However, when he spoke, it was in a much more empathetic voice. “That’s not entirely true. You can choose to live
among a band of half-breed renegades or alongside the people who really control all the power.”

So not only were there vampires, but there were different types of vampires? Michael was wrong. The earth had opened up and he was swallowed whole and had fallen into some alternate reality. He couldn’t think straight. It wasn’t so much the gibberish coming out of Nakano’s mouth, it was his own body. It was throbbing. He had never been so hungry in all his life.

Nakano recognized the signs. “But all that can wait. I have the feeling that right now you’re hungry.”

It was at that moment that Michael realized what his fangs were for. They were for feeding, taking blood from another human being, and the thought of it made him nauseous. He rolled over onto his side clutching himself; he felt the steel bars that supported the thin mattress of the cot he was lying on press into his shoulder and he remembered being in the closet with Ronan, feeling the shelf press into his back as Ronan held his face and kissed him. The faint taste of raspberry still clung to his lips. But now he craved another taste, and the thought of it was making him sick.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nakano roll up his sleeve to expose a pale, thin forearm accented with dark blue veins. Michael could feel his head throb and his mouth tingle. He could feel his fangs descend against his will and rest against his lips. The smell of blood consumed him. Two days ago he wouldn’t have known what blood smelled like, but today he recognized the
aroma, the thick scent. A mix of ripe berries and cold metal flooded his senses. He was disgusted and aroused at the same time. All he wanted to do was plunge his fangs into Nakano’s arm to see if the blood tasted as magnificent as it smelled.

“Aim for a vein,” Nakano instructed. “That’ll make it easier for you to drink.”

Nakano helped Michael sit up on the cot and he sat behind him, straddling his legs around him the way Ronan had once done. He placed his bare arm underneath Michael’s nose, and Michael thought he would faint. “Go ahead,” Nakano said. “I taste pretty good, if I do say so myself.”

As if he were watching himself in a dream, Michael saw his hands grip Nakano’s arm, one hand wrapped around his wrist, the other clutching his elbow. The veins in Nakano’s arm throbbed as it was brought closer to Michael’s waiting mouth as if the arm was just as eager to be bitten as Michael was to feed. All he had to do was open his mouth and bite down, and the hunger would be quenched, the pain that had spread through his entire body would cease. It was unconscionable what he was thinking of doing, biting into the flesh of another human being, but he was about to do it. And he would have if Nakano had not spoken. “Just imagine that it’s Ronan.”

That name brought him back to reality. A reality that he simply couldn’t deal with, that he simply couldn’t comprehend. A reality he didn’t want to make worse. “I
can’t,” Michael said, his fangs disappearing. “I can’t do it.”

Think before you speak, Kano; everything you say needs to create trust, a bond between you and this unsuspecting pawn.
“I understand,” Nakano lied. “You need time. Why don’t you try and sleep?” And so Michael did. Unfortunately, when he woke, the hunger still clung to him as it did now, but so too did an idea. As long as he could remain strong, like St. Michael perhaps, stronger than the hunger, and not feed, maybe he could change back to what he was, human, mortal, and not become this creature like the one sitting next to him now.

Michael looked over at Nakano sleeping so peacefully, looking so innocent. The irony of the situation made him laugh out loud.

“What’s so funny?” Nakano asked, rousing from his nap.

“Nothing,” Michael said, shaking his head.

Pulling his eyeshades off, Nakano pressed him further. “Fess up, Michael. You haven’t cracked a smile since we left home.”

Michael gazed out the window and searched for a response. “I swore I’d never go back to Weeping Water and yet here I am.”

“Don’t sweat it, mate, you just have to remember not to limit yourself,” Nakano said, with one eye following the handsome male flight attendant as he walked down
the aisle. “Because guess what. You no longer have limitations.”

There it was again, that pain. “Speaking of limitations,” Michael said, “how long does it take to get used to these contacts? They’re not the most comfortable things in the world, you know.”

It was Nakano’s turn to laugh. “You can blame your father for that.”

“My father? What’s he have to do with anything?”

“They’re a product of Howard Industries,” Nakano blurted out, now fully focusing on the flight attendant whose outfit was obviously designed to show off his fantastic physique.

“Nakano,” Michael said, raising his voice to gain his attention. “Why would my father’s company be making contacts for vampires?”

Backpedal, Nakano. Don’t let this newbie screw up your last chance to impress Brania and her old man.
“Did I
say
that? One of your father’s companies makes tinted contacts, a novelty item, that’s all. Our people were positively gobsmacked when they discovered the contacts could perfectly conceal our eyes without losing any of our enhanced vision.”
Now, where did that hot attendant get to?

Now my father’s company is involved? It’s just one complication after another, isn’t it?
“They block out the sun’s rays too, right?” Michael asked. “That’s why you can walk outside during the day.”

Don’t say too much, Kano, just keep it simple. “You
catch on quick.” No need to tell him that we can only walk in the sun on Archangel ground. Best to reveal that bit of information after he decides to become part of our race.
Nakano glanced at his watch. Local time was 5:25 A.M.; sunrise was in less than an hour. “Let’s go over some ground rules before we land,” Nakano said. “I don’t do funerals; never liked them before and now I find them extraneous.” As a member of the immortal world, Nakano considered death a means to an end, a necessity, not something that should be celebrated or honored in any way. But once again, he kept his thoughts to himself and merely smiled. “Extraneous. How’s that for a vocabulary word? Betcha McLaren would be impressed.”

Michael understood Nakano’s aversion to funerals. This would be his third in the past six months and he still wasn’t getting used to them. “Not a problem; you can stay at my house all day.”

With the windows shut and the shades completely drawn, Nakano added to himself. “Sounds like a plan, mate.”

Michael never thought Nakano would consider him a mate. And he never thought he’d relish returning to the simplicity of Weeping Water, even if it was just for a few days. Even if it was just to see his grandmother buried.

He remembered the last time he saw her, the night he left to fly to London. She didn’t say much, she never did, but he felt that when she said good-bye to him, she was saying good-bye to a piece of her life, a piece that she
would never get back. Hopefully, she’s with his mother now and they’re saying the things to each other they never got to say while they were alive. He wondered what he would say to them when his time came. Would he rush into their arms as he hadn’t done since he was a young boy or would he just wave to them from the other side of a stream as they each went their separate ways? Or would he never get the chance to see them again because as a vampire he would not have an afterlife?

Alarmed by such a disquieting question, Michael pressed his forehead against the window; the cold began to temper his fear. He closed his eyes and pushed such philosophical thoughts from his mind. He wanted to deal with something much more tangible. Like land. When he opened his eyes, he saw that land was getting closer. It looked like he could jump out and easily set foot on top of one of the buildings, and who knows, maybe he could. Nakano said he’d be amazed by how powerful and agile his body would become. Imperious and almost invulnerable. There they were, philosophical thoughts again, inconceivable notions just like the ones that filled his conversations with Ronan. Ronan.
Why did you do this to me? And why aren’t you sitting by my side?

Finally!
Nakano smiled back at the flight attendant and unbuckled his seat belt. “ ’Scuse me, mate. Before the tires hit the runway, I’d like to become a member of the mile high club.” Standing in the aisle, he leaned over
to Michael, not noticing his eyes were about to spill over with tears. “Always been a little fantasy of mine.”

   These days, Inishtrahull Island was like a fantasy land. Barren, unpopulated, windswept. Ronan remembered how different it was when he was a child growing up here with his family and, of course, the others. He knew they were different, undeniably special, and he knew that someday when someone loved him strongly enough, he would be altered so he could become just like them. Until that time, he had to be satisfied being human among the undying. And he was.

He climbed the mountains, played on the beach, swam in the ocean, and waited for his chance to drink from The Well. When that time came nearly three years ago, he was overjoyed. His family had suffered such pain when his father was taken from them that he was thrilled he could give them, especially his mother, a reason for celebration. One hand placed on the rim of The Well, the other holding the hand of the man he thought would be his soul mate, was, up until that time, the happiest day of Ronan’s life. He had no idea that man would ultimately betray him and his people. And he had no idea he would be given a second chance at eternal happiness. Until he met Michael.