Moon Tortured (Sky Brooks Series Book 1) (19 page)

By the time we got to the car, Ethan was angrily pacing in front of it. He continued to rub his irritated inflamed nostrils. She must have used something to throw off her scent.

“Skylar, what the hell was that?” Josh snapped turning from the driver’s seat to look at me.

“What?”

“That dumb ass stunt you pulled,” Ethan interjected from the passenger seat. “It’s bad enough we have to protect you from the vampires, a hunter, but now from your stupidity as well,” he continued. “Must I give you lessons in safety and self-preservation?” he reprimanded. “I thought you would have the good sense to know better, but guess I was wrong. Let me help you with common sense: don’t step in front of sharp objects, bullets or anything in the firearm family because they can actually kill you! Or do you think of yourself as invincible?” he yelled, berating me as he shot me dirty looks from the front seat.

“Demetrius wants me alive. She wasn’t going to kill me, but I wasn’t so sure about Josh. While you were busy having verbal foreplay and making goo-goo eyes with your ex, I thought it would be a good idea not to let him get shot in the process. And since you feel so inclined to give me lessons in self-preservation, maybe I should give you some in appropriate choices. For instance, when your ex is threatening to kill your brother, it’s not a good idea to provoke her. Just a little suggestion,” I snapped back.

Ethan glared at me and I was glad we were separated by the seat.

Josh sighed, “The situation would have been handled.”

“Before or after she used your face for target practice. I didn’t realize you fancied being shot. I will remember that,” I snapped at him as well. I hated this world I was snatched into. It was a house of mirrors, where acts that others would have considered kind or maybe even brave were distorted into sources of irritation and reprimand.

Josh rolled his eyes, Ethan grumbled. Steven’s lips meshed tightly together; his dimples deepened, suppressing a laugh. “Just don’t do anything like that again,” Ethan ordered. The tone of his voice made it apparent he wasn’t in the mood for my rebuttals. I let out an exasperated sigh.

We drove back in silence while I spent the ride evading Ethan’s reproaching glares. I was just about to tell him I got the message and he could stop with the looks when Josh said, “Chris has switched teams.”

Ethan nodded his head slowly, “I guess. She’s trading now; I smelled Demetrius all over her,” he stated disgusted. “She was always too fast to be just human, but now she’s … ” his voice trailed off as though the thought was too sickening to say out loud.

“She’s a vampire?” I asked. She didn’t look like a vampire and walking in daylight definitely wasn’t vampirey. She didn’t even smell like a vampire. No, she definitely smelled human—human with expensive perfume.

Ethan’s growl resonated through the car.

“She’s performing blood exchanges with him. Through the exchange, she gains some of his abilities, like the supernatural speed exhibited today., Steven explained in a low whisper. I am sure Ethan knew what it was, but hearing the specifics was going to take him over the edge.

“She found a loophole I guess. She always wanted the speed, strength and advanced healing abilities of were-animals without the sun-vulnerability that the vamps have,” Josh said, glancing over at Ethan, who had retreated to his angry place where it seemed like he was planning to stay for a while.

“Josh, don’t,” Ethan stated through clenched teeth.

“Chris was going to get what she wanted by any means. You should’ve just changed—”

“—I said don’t,” Ethan snapped, giving him the same reproaching and threatening look I thought was just reserved for me. Just when I started to think I was special, I find out he’s handing those looks out like lollipops.

Josh clamped his mouth shut as he struggled to keep his words to himself.

I stood in the sunroom, trying to block out the events of today. “She shouldn’t be here” reverberated in my head as Nathan’s attack tugged at me.

“Here. You look like you need this,” Josh stated as he handed me a mixed drink of something fruity with a significant amount of vodka. He had one in his hand too.

I didn’t drink often, just an occasional glass of wine during the holidays. But I wasn’t opposed to a drink or anything that would dull the pangs of my anxiety. I took a big sip from the glass and immediately started coughing. The strong liquor burned as it slid down, setting my chest on fire. No, I definitely wasn’t a drinker. “Josh, what’s wrong with my
sergence
and why shouldn’t I be here?” I asked once I had the coughing under control.

He was silent for a long time.

“Josh,” I urged.

“Nathan is—
was
very talented. Most necromancers can read your sergence—your aura. Nathan was one of the most gifted. Many of them can’t detect witches and mages, but he could.”

“My sergence is wrong, so wrong that he want to kill me?”

He took a long draw from his glass as his troubled eyes stifled me for a moment. “No—let’s just say it’s murky. No one has a sense of what you really are—it’s troubling. You’re a were-animal but you have a
terait
. In the corner of your right pupil, there’s an orange quarter ring. Ethan noticed it the first day you arrived. I saw it yesterday. It’s only seen in vampires and half-breeds when their bloodlust hadn’t been fulfilled,” he admitted with a heavy voice.

“Bloodlust? Should I have a bloodlust?”

“I’m sure you do. But I doubt it would overtake you as it would a vampire or even a dhampir because your survival isn’t based on its consumption. I’m sure a rare steak would satisfy your lust for an indefinite period of time.” That explained why Ethan was always gawking at my eyes. He was just looking for the
terait
. I guess he wasn’t an eye man.

I considered the way I liked my food prepared, rare to the point I was surprised it didn’t move off my plate while I was eating it. I always thought it was a wolf thing—but now—no, that thought was too sickening to continue.

“So what does this mean?”

He bit down on the side of his lip as he considered my question. “By all accounts, you shouldn’t exist … ”

“ … I’m not a vampire. I couldn’t be cursed to be both—I just couldn’t.” My chest felt so tight that breathing was a task. I leaned against the post and took several big swallows from the vodka. It wasn’t helping.

“Were-animals have natural immunity and can’t be changed into vampires.”

“Then can you explain this terait that seems to warrant me dying for?” I asked in a forced voice.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, shaking his head, his frustration apparent.

“Could I be like this if one of my birth parents was a vampire?”

Staring into his almost empty glass, he deliberated over my question. I doubted anything good could come from such extended consideration. “The probability is highly unlikely. Vampires maintain their ability to procreate about a week after being changed. Unless your mother was pregnant with you when she was changed, you couldn’t be the offspring of a vampire. Becoming a vampire requires death of the human body and rebirth into the vampirism. It’s a process that takes several days, and I doubt the most resilient child could survive it. To my knowledge, there aren’t any known cases of a child surviving as a result of a vampire mother. All known dhampirs are the result of a new male vampires and a human mother. But if you were a dhampir, you would not be a were-animal.”

He was still rubbing his forehead as though he were trying to work out a complicated equation in his head. “Were-animals and vampires/dhampirs have mated in the past, but there has never been anything documented nor even a plausible rumor that supports that an actual birth occurred. The conflicting processes kill the child.”

“So I am an anomaly that shouldn’t exist,” I finally admitted.

He gave me a small sympathetic smile. “You’re an anomaly that does exist. Just like in the human world, anomalies exist all the time. Maybe not to this extent, but they do.”

“Perhaps that is the reason Demetrius wants me: to either be part of his seethe or to get rid of me because I am an anomaly?”

Josh chuckled. “I can assure you that they don’t want you in their seethe. They don’t regard dhampirs. You are tainted with the blood of the were-animal. Centuries ago, they punished their own for fraternizing with were-animals, and a tryst of a sexual nature was penalized with death. That is not the case now, but they have extreme superiority complexes. They would never accept you as one of theirs. Demetrius prohibits association with dhampirs because he considers them “deplorable half-breeds” and just as revolting as were-animals. It’s rumored that Demetrius killed the child, the mothers and the vampires for producing such half-breeds. It’s rumored that he even killed his own and its mother. I assume the stories are true because new vampires are quite impulsive and reckless, yet exhibit extraordinary control when it comes to reproduction. Like were-animals, control usually comes with age and experience. I can only speculate
what
and
who
is responsible for compelling such control in young and inexperienced vampires,” he stated concisely.

He began to pace the area, anxiously biting on his nails. He didn’t strike me as the type of person who could sit idle for long. “They tried to abduct you, not kill you, when they attacked. Under any other circumstance, you would have been under their radar and barely worth acknowledging. In my dreams, there is a distinct feeling of desire. They want you for something that will benefit them—that’s the only reason they care that you exist. I need to figure out the link between you, Demetrius and the Gem of Levage.”

“And Chris? How worried should I be about her?”

“No worries; as long as you stay here, you’re fine. She wouldn’t attack you here.”

“I shouldn’t worry about Ethan’s ex-lover? Then maybe I should worry about Ethan?”

He scowled, eyes flaring. “Don’t ever underestimate my brother. He wouldn’t let anything like an ex-lover keep him from doing his job well.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t trying … I didn’t mean to imply anything bad,” I mumbled

“It’s cool. Be assured that the turbulent thing they once called a relationship won’t keep either one of them from doing what they set out to do.”

“What were they like together?” I asked. There wasn’t any denying that there were some very intense emotions between them—somewhere between sheer longing and avid disdain.

Chortling, he found amusement in something he decided not to share. “The two of them together were like watching a forest fire and a tornado consume the same space. We watched their relationship crash and burn with morbid fascination. Their fights were so intense that you wondered who was going to snap first and kill the other person. And their make-ups were so passionate they could melt the paint off the wall.” He looked away, his attention once again focused on his empty glass. When he looked, he seemed pensive. “They shouldn’t have been together. I think for that very reason, they tried so hard to make it work. Neither one of them was willing to admit defeat as they should. But eventually, Chris saw it for what it really was and ended it.”

He shrugged off the memories. “The love or whatever you would call what they had won’t prevent them from doing what needs to be done. They were always odd that way,” he admitted. There was something in his voice, perhaps bewilderment over how they functioned as they did.