Chapter 5: Rose
Ben didn’t believe me last night when I told him. He said that I was just drunk out of my mind and hauled me back to the condo, leaving Kristal and Jake to continue partying until dawn.
Only when we switched on the local news the following morning to find out that almost a dozen girls had gone missing from that beach that very night did he start to take notice of what I was saying.
He pulled me into his room and shut the door.
“So you’re telling me that vampires are responsible for this?”
“Yes,” I said irritably, rubbing my head as I tried to relieve my hangover. “I saw a group of vampires steal them away. The guy—Caleb, his name was—would have stolen me away too if I hadn’t told him that I was a Novak.”
Ben heaved a sigh and sat down on the bed next to me, resting his own head in his hands.
“And you are sure that you didn’t recognize any of these vampires from The Shade?”
“No way.” I shook my head, recalling how hot Caleb was. “Trust me, I would have remembered them.”
“Then who the hell are they? And why are they going around stealing people?”
I paused and continued to massage my temples with my fingers.
“Ben, we should call Mom and Dad to tell them about this.”
He stared at me.
“You do realize that if we do that, our two months of freedom will be over before they’ve even begun?”
“Obviously. But what other option do we have?”
“What would Mom and Dad do about this even if they knew?”
Ben had a point. We couldn’t dictate that another coven should live without human blood like everyone did in The Shade. Drinking human blood was just a part of life for most vampires—no different than humans eating animals for their flesh.
I supposed that I would have been more horrified by the thought of all those girls being kidnapped had I not grown up all my life around vampires. Although the vampires of The Shade no longer fed on humans, it was part of their nature to crave human blood and I knew that it was a daily struggle for The Shade’s vampires to exercise restraint and sustain themselves only on animal blood. It was rather macabre to realize how desensitized I was to the situation.
“I suppose there’s not much they could do about it,” I began slowly. “Though I still think that we should tell them when we return. Mom and Dad have never mentioned any other covens still existing today except for our own. They always told us that the other vampires were taken back through the portal into Cruor—and those who weren’t joined us in The Shade. It’s really very odd.”
“Okay, I agree,” Ben said. “We’ll tell them when we get back.”
There was a knock on the door. Ben got up to open it and Kristal walked into the room in her bathrobe.
“How did you both sleep?” she asked.
I rubbed my throbbing head and muttered, “Good.”
“You really scored last night,” she said, sitting down on the bed next to me and squeezing my knee.
“Yeah.” I sighed. “I did.”