“I heal fast,” he said. “It won’t completely disappear, but most of it will.”
“That explains your scars, doesn’t it?”
He nodded.
I reached up and grazed the skin around the fresh wound. To see any part of him mangled like that, it broke my heart.
“You don’t have to tell me what the Vargas family is,” I said, “but which one of them was that? The one I saw in here.”
He couldn’t look at me then. “That was Sibyl.”
His mother. She attacked her own son? I felt so awful for him and so much hatred for her.
“You saved my life.”
“I didn’t save anything,” he said. I could hear the shame in his voice. “She would’ve killed you if Viktor had not of called her off.”
He added, “I’m really sorry, Adria, for what Sibyl did.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” I said. “I just hate that your mother would be so cruel. I don’t understand it....”
“Nothing much to understand,” he said while still looking at my arms for wounds. “Sibyl betrayed my father with Viktor when I was eight.”
I said nothing more about that.
“How did you know then?” I said after a quiet pause. “About Alex being home. I don’t buy that you all just happened to be in the neighborhood at the right time.”
“I could sense it in your voice on the phone earlier,” he said.
So, I sucked as a liar, after all.
“But you still saved my life.”
Sibyl was his mother and bound to be somewhat stronger than him. And as far as I saw, they both seemed neck and neck up until that last second. And I think it was my fault. I remembered just before the last blow which took Isaac down, that I had started to run for the exit.
“You were distracted by me, weren’t you?”
He tilted his head slightly to one side. “No, I was too preoccupied to be distracted.”
“And here I thought you were an excellent liar,” I said, “You saw me try to run out of the barn, didn’t you?”
Reluctantly, he gave up just to appease me. “I did see you, but Sibyl is much more powerful than me; not to mention older, and probably would’ve won still.”
“How much older?” I said. “And really, what does age have to do with it?” The way he said ‘older’ piqued my curiosity.
“By at least one hundred twenty years,” he said. “So it has a lot to do with it.”
My buzzing mind came to a sudden stop. Not that I knew a thing about real werewolves to begin with, but I least expected them to be immortal. I thought that they could be killed by silver bullets and fire. I thought that they could be killed by rusty machetes....
“I couldn’t have killed you if I tried,” I said, realizing.
Isaac laughed and stood me up with him, his free hand holding the blanket tight around his waist.
“No, that would’ve killed me maybe if it weren’t so dull and as long as you weren’t a bad aim.”
“So, you’re not immortal?”
“Not technically,” he said. “We can be killed by anything that can kill you except sickness and disease—we’re immune to everything. And it’s not quite as easy to kill one of us—better have something bigger than a shotgun.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, “So you didn’t really have pneumonia? None of you were sick? Then where—”
Isaac curved his big fingers gently around my wrist. “We can talk about this later,” he said. “I think your Aunt and Uncle are home.”
“Oh no...” I looked toward the broken barn window. Headlights shone brightly up the driveway, bouncing in the darkness as the car went around the pothole.
“Just tell them you went for a walk and someone broke in while you were gone.”
That was one excuse down, but I knew it wasn’t going to cover everything. Alex was gone and my shirt was covered in blood. I was going to have to hone my story-telling skills in less than two minutes.
“But what about you?” I didn’t want Isaac to leave. I had so many questions, but more than anything, I never wanted to be apart from him. “Where will you go? What about your clothes? What if they come after you?” I was a bit frantic.
Isaac took me possessively into a kiss.
He enveloped me in his arms, his lips pressed against mine so devotedly that it made me mad for him. The warmth of his arms, the smell of his skin, the taste of him; combined, it sent me over the edge. I pressed myself even further against his chest, my lips becoming heavier upon his own the longer he held me there. It was like a dream and I never wanted to wake up from it.
He pulled away reluctantly, staring into my eyes. “Adria,” he said, “I won’t let anything happen to you, ever.”
If he wanted me to walk away from him and do what I needed to do, he was not making it easy for me. But I knew I had to go. Uncle Carl and Beverlee were getting out of the car, ripping that eternal moment with Isaac Mayfair right out of the air.
We looked at each other, words unspoken that said so many things we both had wanted to say, passed between us. And I left him in the barn, feeling the rest of the night that the next day just wasn’t coming fast enough.
How I came up with such a perfect story to tell Uncle Carl and Beverlee and in such a short time, was fueled by betrayal. I knew without a doubt that Alex would never be coming home. She nearly killed me. Alexandra Dawson was no longer my sister. She and the Vargas family were, just as Zia and Isaac had tried to warn me, a danger to me and my family. Doing whatever I possibly could to keep her away from them was priority.
The story I gave them was that I suspected Alex was on drugs and I confronted her. Alex, angry and defensive, went into a rage and attacked me. We fought inside the house and she pushed me through the den window. Because of everything she had done, it was easy for them to accept drugs as the cause. The raw meat on the bar? Drugs could be blamed on many things.
I convinced them after an hour that I was physically okay and that a trip to the hospital was completely unnecessary.
But Uncle Carl was about to call the police after I told them my story so convincingly. I begged him otherwise. The police, no one, could get involved in this. I explained how it would only make things worse and that I couldn’t handle it emotionally. They worried about me. I was the only one of my sister and me they felt they didn’t fail. They agreed to leave it alone. But Alex was not allowed back. She was eighteen and responsible for herself now.
It hurt me to have to do this to Alex, to lie about her and get her banned from coming home. It was not in my character to smear someone’s reputation the way I did hers. I knew that Beverlee would innocently talk to her customers at Finch’s Grocery. Rumors would begin to spread. Alex wouldn’t be able to go into any public place in Hallowell without suspicious and hateful glares from the town’s residents.
Something told me that Alex wouldn’t care.
Sure, everything seemed resolved, but there was still one thing I couldn’t resolve myself: The Vargas family wanted me dead in order to protect what I knew about them.
A part of Alex was still my sister at one time, when she convinced them to give her a chance to talk me into living with her. That was what her threats were about at The Cove that night. But I knew now that all of the chances Alex had been given were used up and that time had run out.
Isaac was at my house before seven a.m.
“You should’ve told me what Alex really said to you at The Cove,” Isaac argued from the driver’s seat. “I had no idea you knew about our kind.”
“Why didn’t Nathan tell you?”
I sat quietly on the passenger’s side.
“He didn’t see both of you that night; said that it was dark and he was shifting—you sort of lose sight of everything in that moment.”
Isaac insisted that only he take me to and from school every day from now on. He even spoke with Beverlee and Uncle Carl and surprisingly they had no objections.
It was difficult hanging out with Harry only because he was the one out of the three of us that didn’t know. He could sense that something between Zia and I had changed. He knew something was wrong and that I was perfectly aware of it. Of course, I was, but what he suspected was far from Zia being a werewolf. By Geometry class, Harry felt snubbed and withdrawn. He probably thought I told her all about his crush and that she wasn’t interested. He assumed neither of us knew how to break it to him.
I hated that feeling. It wasn’t even the truth, but I felt like I betrayed Harry. In a way, I was betraying Harry by not telling him that his best friend, Sebastian, was alive and well. It didn’t matter that I had no choice; I was a horrible friend because of it.
Zia and I had to make up a quick excuse about why Harry couldn’t join us at Zia’s house after school that day. He wasn’t supposed to hear us talking, but he did as I stood at Zia’s locker.
“Uhhh, sorry Harry, but we’ve got plans,” I tried to say.
Zia interrupted, “We’re having a girl’s night.”
Lamest excuse ever, especially since it was obvious it wasn’t true. If anything helped Harry to confirm his suspicions then that was surely what did it. We couldn’t talk at all with him around and talking about ‘it’ was what I wanted to do more than anything. Having normal conversations just seemed so pointless anymore. How can a person sit next to a werewolf at lunch and act normal?
Harry didn’t talk to either of us for the rest of the day. It hurt me to see him that way, feeling ousted by me and the girl he liked. As much as I wanted to put his feelings first, I knew there wasn’t anything I could actually tell him that would fix it.
The day dragged by in a blur. I couldn’t remember anything that we went over in any class, and in Geometry, Mrs. Schvolsky made sure to point out that I looked ‘awful’ and needed ‘some serious sleep’. I quietly thanked her for those observations and laid my head down on my desk.
I just wanted the day to end. The whole thing was an act; school was the last place I wanted to be and Geometry, the last thing I wanted to learn. Unfortunately, going to school and pretending that nothing as preposterous as, I don’t know, werewolves, had attacked me the night before, was a necessity for Uncle Carl and Beverlee’s sake.
I just never imagined a seven hour day could truly feel like seventeen.
After school, I would be going back to the Mayfair house, but this time I knew the experience would be completely different from every other time before.
Part Two
13
“I'M NOT READY,” I said, standing at the door of the Mayfair house with Isaac. “I never felt welcome here before; now things are just—”
Isaac cupped my face in his hands, gently parting my lips with his own. “No one here will ever hurt you,” he said, slowly breaking the kiss. “And things are different now. In a good way; you’ll see.” He pulled away just inches from my face; the sweet smell of his breath only made me want to taste it longer.
I knew things would be different all right, but I couldn’t imagine how they would be any better. I knew their secrets. My sister was their enemy. I was with Isaac, whom many of the girls were a little more than fond of.