And I came face to face with a bat, curled up on вверх of a shelf.
My eye twitched, and I slowly sat down on my bed. The bat slowly unfurled its wings, then opened a black eye at me. I tried to calm down, but my сердце was racing. The bat opened both eyes, then…
Blinked at me. The bat blinked at me like a human would.
I felt my eyes grow wide, but the bat ignored me, laying its body sprawled out along the wood before sleeping again. I was stunned. Bats were ones to hang on ceilings like the ones behind that black door…
The pieces connected in my head. This was the bat that escaped last night.
A plan formed in my head, but the bat must have sensed something before hand. It woke itself up and rolled clumsily over so that it was standing, then flew up to the вверх of my door, perching itself on the вверх of the frame. Its claws were hooked onto the wood so that it wouldn’t fall. I felt as if I understood the idea of it all, and I walked over to the door carefully and opened it. Like I suspected, the bat flew around the door when opened and perched itself in the same position along the black door, waiting patiently for my Далее move.
I smiled, wondering how I could understand a blood-sucking creature so well.
I walked over and opened the door, and the bat swooped inside and took the position that was missing last night. He blinked at me for a moment before folding his wings and hanging upside down, falling into a gentle sleep. I looked around the room, baffled at the fact that all of the bats were missing despite this one. I varied the weight of the room as safe, then stepped in and took a look around.
This would have been considered the attic of the house, obviously, with the interior decorated with dust-coated carpets and old paintings covered with white drapes to hold the coloring. The small window to the right of the room was covered with a black drape like my room was, only it seemed еще fabricated so that less light could come in. The floorboards creaked when I moved around, and I breezed around the artifacts and brushed my fingers over the material, sensing a long presence within them. These were not just any antiques that were preserved. There was something powerful lurking in their depths, and part of me wanted to shrivel up and cower back to my room. But I felt that there was something here that would help me perfect the perfect plan for my hotel, whether it be a diagram или just a small item that would trigger an idea in me.
Something sharp pricked my finger, and I looked away from my dazed state down to my finger, which was bleeding a small drop of blood. There was a white rose there, and fragments of thorns were crawling along the surface. One of the thorns was coated in a smidge of my blood, which looked strangely dark compared to the light of the object.
I heard a shuffle from the back of me, and I turned in alarm. I was too late.
The instant it took my muscles to strain a Переместить was all it took for a hand to press against my throat and a rough hand locking my right palm against the wall, which the impact created a crater-like depression into the dry wall. I was too shocked to think of anything, and that may have been the opposite if I understood what was thinking, only knowing that the creature was cutting off my circulation fast, and within секунды I would be dead with loss of oxygen to my brain. I looked into deep black eyes that glared, but that’s all they did. They didn’t move, and neither did the body. And they didn’t need to. I would be dead before the monster could utter a breath.
“Salem?”
Another wave of shock passed me when the creature disappeared automatically, leaving me slumped on the floor and straggling for breath. I stumbled to lean against a painting, which crashed mercifully to the wood-planked floor. I saw Sam’s eyes under me the Далее instant, looking into mine before sitting me against the wall, which was a clammy cold against my sweated skin. I rubbed my neck, gasping, never realizing how much I was glad that we didn’t live on another planet for any reason.
“Salem, what the hell happened?” Sam asked, his eyes darting to me and back to where the creature had stood.
“Sam, remember the stories Dad used to tell us when we were little, and how we always believed them?” I asked thoughtfully, looking at the ground, then up at the ceiling. Just like I guessed, the whole вверх was vacant of presence. No bat.
“Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“Remember the story about vampires?” I scratched at my right palm, feeling the little hole where the thorn had pricked. There was no blood there to Показать evidence. Of course it got what it wanted.
“Yeah…” Sam turned my shoulder so that I was looking at him, but I lingered a moment on my palm before staring into light green eyes, eyes that were as soft as fields that lit imaginary places. безопасно, сейф places. Now they were a dense green, demanding and worrisome. “What does the story relate to? Your attacker?”
“Yes.” I grimaced, rubbing my neck. “We just witnessed the creatures of myth.”
Sam was leaning against the sink, his body flagged out so that his arms were leaning a good diameter from each other, and his head was bent low enough that from where I was sitting, it could almost be mistaken that his nose was touching the faucet. He turned his head slightly so that his right eye met mine. “Are Ты telling me that we have Вампиры living in the…” He pondered for the right word, then game up. “You’re telling me that their living in the hotel?”
I nodded. “I’m absolutely positive.”
I watched Sam round on me, folding his arms under his chest. I knew Sam my whole life, minus the two years that I was an infant and he wasn’t born. I knew that Sam would believe any story that I told him, anything at all, as long as there was some sort of look that I showed that proved I was confident with my answer. Mostly, that look surrounded me all the time wherever I go, but now, seeing him like this, it almost made me wonder if he was giving up some sort of hope that he encountered with me all these years. As if now, one of the most serious and life-threatening proclamations I told him wasn’t enough to make him believe. As if the attack wasn’t enough. или the fact that we had a minimum of two hundred bats living upstairs in the attack for no apparent reason that would seem logical.
I started to panic.
“Sam, there are Вампиры in the hotel.” I stated clearly, my lips pursed.
“I need proof this time.” Sam countered.
“There’s tons of proof. The attack, for one. And the bats upstairs, they are just there---”
“There are millions of reasons as to why that can happen.” Sam tackled, his voice cold and on edge. I backed out, leaning against my chair and watching him carefully. “We have no clue who attacked you, или at least, Ты have no understandable memory of what the person looked like. Therefore, we are going to file this to the police on some account, in some way. As for the bats…they could have been living here before we came. And of course, there’s a window there, so they are leaving at any time.” Sam leaned his arms back and gripped the countertop as if to be bracing himself. “Salem, Ты can’t live in the fairy tale that Dad created so long ago. Ты need to enter reality that none of these things exists, Вампиры или Волколаки или whatever I missed on about.”
“They are real, Sam!” I shouted, standing up angrily. I pointed at the door. “Ask our friendly neighbor, who just happened to drop by when a bat flew out of our house! Does that not seem suspicious to Ты at all?”
Sam hardened like stone, and this time I did watch his knuckles go white from restrain. “You need to stop. Ты can’t continue on Dad’s legacy of his happy-hunting games. He used to go mad about saying he was going to kill those blood-sucking fiends, and that just cost us our cherished lives to be put in jeopardy because of his foolish money mistakes! Even worse, he persuaded himself that if he goes to the bank to borrow money, they will just let him do as he pleases to save his family that is in harm’s way! Well, Salem, that didn’t work, and now he’s…” Sam’s fingers were curled into fists at this point, and his eyes were a bit bleary with water. He turned away from me to conceal the tears, then сказал(-а) with a crippled voice, “go talk to Nikolai. Let him convince Ты that Вампиры aren’t real, and get Ты back to the Salem that I know. To the Salem that would accept the mess we made just by coming here so that we can go back Главная to San Francisco to see Mom and Darrell.”
I flinched, my сердце twisting in spirals that hurt me, made me want to fall to the floor and break down. I downed them out and gravely moved to the door, opening it and stepping out into another gloom of rain and slammed it hard to break the life that started within that damned house.
I waited out in the rain at the doorstep, twisting my fingers lavishly in different positions, then flicked my eyes over to the window where a hazy light was hidden behind the drapes. There was an average red кресло there, and Nikolai was sitting there, sipping чай and Чтение a book. An average seventeen year-old would be making out with his girlfriend at this time, not drinking чай and stuffing his nose into a book. I rapped on the door.
I watched him Переместить over to the window, Переместить the drapes aside to look at my face, then hastily opened the door. He looked at me with confusion. “Salem?”
I frowned, knowing he heard my name only once and it seemed like he had it shaped perfectly along his tongue. “Sam сказал(-а) I need to come over.” I made sure to keep away the reason behind it, only because my head was still spinning with adrenaline about the Назад attack and my theories.
“Come in.” Nikolai said, stepping aside to open the door for me. I walked briskly in, taking in all of the bookshelves that were blind to me before outside in the rain. There was no inch of Стена that wasn’t covered by the black-wooded shelves containing multitudes of books, except for the ceiling. There was a modern Фан attached to the ceiling that was turning in a dizzy way, making the огонь in the fireplace flicker with еще vitality than what it normally would. Nikolai came in after me, gesturing me to the sofa across from his red armchair, and I calmed a bit when he sat in it, sipping some чай and watching me. Then he stopped, put the cup down, and adjusted himself so that he was leaning вперед as a good psychologist would, though I could barely imagine him as one of the many elderly men wearing spectacles. “So, are Ты going to tell me what is going on, или do I have to make predictions? Which, I might say, are pretty much accurate.” He leaned back. “Your call.”
“You are letting me chose even though it results in the same fate?” I asked, a wry feeling of amusement settling in me. That would be the perfect line for a vampire to say.
Nikolai smiled a bit, and nodded once. “Of course. I’m not a murderer.”
“So Ты say.” Clearly I was going to have to start from the last piece of information to the first piece. “A normal vampire would state that he’s hurt many lives while concealing the truth as some hidden meaning that the human would have to figure out. Yet, Ты are concealing it all, или trying.”
Instead of turning serious, which is what I suspected, he laughed and smiled, his eyes gleaming with that blackness that I only saw moments ago. I clenched my palm so that I wouldn’t flinch, but Nikolai caught the motion and moved like a blur before my eyes. Before I could catch my breath I was looking into those eyes full view, and hands were wrapped around my face, cupping my cheeks. My body quaked and my head swam, and all the while I was there, not uttering a word, Nikolai understood exactly what was going on just by looking into my eyes and knowing that nothing was good. Something was wrong. “Salem, what happened?”
“I…” I bit my lip, my chin quivering, begging me to spill tears. But I straightened myself out strongly enough to say, “one of yours attacked me.” The waterworks came, and I was concealed with a gray fabric рубашка against my crying eyes, and a warm body covering mine, light and feathery. I knew he wasn’t like the others; there was something about humans that he wanted to cherish, and that probably defined him as being the most human out of any of them. It was simple to identify the others by merely sensing their aura, but Nikolai was so concealed as a regular human that it took me this long to realize what he was. He really was…a human.
“Salem, look at me.” Nikolai abruptly pulled me back. “Don’t deny your theories. You’re right; I am a vampire. I have killed in the past, but the past is past, and whether I can age или not, those pasts are just like the setting sun; they Переместить on. But if Ты convince yourself that I am human, then everything around Ты will crumble. Ты don’t realize how much danger Ты would be in for not believing.”
I blinked at him, confused. I remembered the request that Sam told me to come over for, but Nikolai beat me to it. “I know he wants Ты to come over and accept that I am a normal being, but I can’t lie to you; it’s in any nature I have, to be loyal. Telling Ты that I can age normally is a lie. Saying that I haven’t killed hundreds of humans in the past by sucking the life force from them is a lie.” He paused, a grave look sharpening his pale face. “Saying that my brothers and sisters live in your attic would be a lie as well.”
“So it’s true then?” I wanted to say it as a question, but the tone came out as a statement. I leaned back against the arm rest of the chair, realizing that the shadows of the fireplace was reflecting over his black, glassy eyes, giving him a remarkable look that would only be classified as abnormal. Seeing this was nothing compared to the creatures that popped into my head when Dad used to tell us stories about the vampires. Those were much worse. No wonder I considered him so much human…I wasn’t afraid of the simple, physical features that defined him. Nikolai was just as normal as a white волк was compared to a black wolf; different backgrounds, but same history. I thought about the bat that appeared in my room, thinking how when he got back into the black-doored room he was the only one there, yet it was his home, his place of shelter. He wasn’t leaving, and neither were the rest. “Which bat are you?”
I wasn’t surprised with his response. “The one that came in your bedroom.”
“And the one that flew out.”
Nikolai shook his head. “No. That’s what Ты aren’t getting.” Nikolai got up from the диван, мягкий уголок to kneel on the floor so that he was within direct sight of me. He looked right into my eyes, and I saw flames in them even though the огонь was behind him. “Look at me, Salem, and compare me with the vampire that attacked you. What are the differences?”
“Well, Ты aren’t---”
“Not that. It has nothing to do with choices. I’m talking about features. Do I look any different compared to the others?”
I studied him for a moment, taking in the black ponytail tied in the back that wavered in sight with the fire. His skin was pale, but there was a stubble of chin hair below his lips, and his eyes were an acid black, piercing and edging. There was a flashing in his eyes that reminded me of the same pair that held me hostage before my death loomed over. He was still persuading me that no matter what, he was like his brethren in all ways, a monster but yet an innocent. How could I accept both?
“You aren’t helping me with the situation at hand.” I intervened, feeling stubborn.
“You are right, but what is there еще to do?” Nikolai let the Вопрос hang in the air before getting up and brushing himself off. He sat on his glass coffee table, shoving aside the normal debris of magazines and clippings of articles. He folded his hands and leaned back, keeping those obsidian eyes on me. “Now, I don’t like going into your mind by any means, and at times I am slipped into it anyway whether with my consent или not. So I am going to make this simple but yet hard. Tell me what happened, but try this time not to…”
“Succumb to my emotions.” I bleakly finished, nodding. He tensed his jaw, but other than that, expected me to start. I took a breath, then began.
“I was up in the attic; there was another bat there, hanging up on top. I was fairly knowing that he was asleep, but didn’t care either way…what could one bat do to me without me screaming and Sam killing the life out of it?” I laughed at my joke a bit, but Nikolai didn’t even flinch. I cleared my throat, going on.
“I was browsing about the room, since I was curious ever setting foot up those steps and seeing the door down the hall. There was magical things in there…everything was just so ancient, but it held secrets that just wanted to be said…” I frowned, trying to focus. “I remember the rose that was sitting there, but I knew I was reaching for something behind it…the thorn must have latched onto my рубашка and…” I looked down at the long sleeve of dark purple on my right arm, and like I predicted, there was a large tear at the end. “The thorn got stuck there and ripped the fabric so that it could touch my skin. It was a small dot of blood though, a mere scratch that was еще red-inflamed than anything. Sam put some ointment on it before to heal it from infection, so that was a good thing…” I struggled hanging onto what came next. “Then he lunged at me; I knew it was a guy, no woman, vampire или otherwise, would have a grip that tight.” I started to run my tongue over my teeth, thinking hard. “He had me almost out of oxygen the moment his fingers touched my throat, so I was a bit hazy…I remember a little of blonde hair, almost white with Золото streaks in it. And it was a black shirt, much like your’s, only not gray.” I turned back to Nikolai, but froze, seeing the plain fury on his face. Clammy sweat came over me again, watching his body not Переместить for two минуты before he finally moved and sighed.
“I’m sorry. I know the vampire that attacked you.” He moved his jaw again, standing up in an almost mechanical movement, as if he was a statue that just came to life. “Cress. He’s my brother.”
I couldn’t manage anything better than, “he’s nothing like you.”
Nikolai’s serious face lighted with wry humor. “Oh, believe me, he’s everything like me. That man has a way with the vampire life, and just like me, can’t keep his nose out of human business. That’s why he couldn’t kill you.” He smiled a bit, looking down at the floor before he whispered, “he’s a coward. He couldn’t stand up to your brother because he will only focus on one enemy, and that alone. He won’t allow for any unfair game.” Nikolai looked up gravely, and I did not like that look he gave. “That’s why I am going to challenge him.”
I blinked again, trying to digest the words. “You are…challenging him?”
“Yes.” Nikolai said, grabbing his пальто which was resting on his arm chair, and pressing his feet into a pair of boots that were near the door. I followed him as he continued. “I can’t let Cress kill one of the members that owns the house that they live in.”
“But, how do Ты know that he was intentionally killing me?” I thought about the blood, thinking automatically to the urge of a vampire. If he was just as human as his brother, then he hasn’t fed in ages. The way that Nikolai claimed he killed hundreds of lives, just by the feeling in his voice that it was a past event, not something that he had done recently, went to Показать that they both haven’t made a successful kill in decades, it could seem. A small cut such as the one that I received would be еще than enough to trigger the urge.
“He was purposeful. I know. He was the bat that swooped down at you. If Ты hadn’t been so quick to duck, your head would have been defragmenter that instant. He’s been laying eyes on Ты ever since Ты set your scent against the metal gates closing the mansion.”
Gates. My head spun. I forgot about the grates…
“What’s wrong?” Nikolai asked, serious and worried. His hand was caught along the brass knob of the door, tensely holding it in place.
“I forgot to lock the gates.” I mumbled bleakly.
“Let’s go.” Nikolai grabbed my arm and we headed back over to the house.
~~~~
I ran out of the courthouse, tears streaming down my face. I kicked and screamed as reporters came by, asking me Вопросы and causing me to get worked up. They were all asking things, and I couldn’t take it, I couldn’t breathe…
Suddenly, I felt arms enclosed around me, picking me up. I hadn’t realized that I was on the ground at that point, curled into a ball and crying. The stranger cradled me like a child and moved the crowd out of the way, gruffly growling at them, “move.” They all abided, but they followed them as far as they could before the police came by and moved them aside. One of the officers took me from the stranger’s hands, but I felt those hands wanting to hold on more, to grasp me forever and eternity.
Daddy.
