Blaze (9 page)

Her mother stopped talking and stared at
Kira. But Kira wasn’t really listening. She had always believed
that people’s eyes couldn’t lie. They always gave the true emotions
away. And her mother’s eyes were blank and unfeeling. And it wasn’t
just the dark blue color and the fact that Kira had always pictured
them differently. And they weren’t vacant like someone possessed,
just indifferent. And it made Kira retreat back into her
memories.

One day, months ago after Kira had just
discovered the truth about her aunt, Luke asked her why she wasn’t
angrier. They were laying next to each other on the grass,
breathing heavily and exhausted from training, when he surprised
her with the question. At first, she hadn’t known what to say, but
after taking a minute to think it over, she realized what it was:
her aunt’s eyes.

Kira had wanted to yell at her aunt. Part of
her wanted to make her cry and make her hate herself for lying to
Kira for so long. She was angry, so angry, that Luke had known more
about her past than she did. After their initial talk, she had
ignored her aunt mercilessly. She refused to speak to her or even
look her in the eye. But after a few days of fuming, Kira was
finally ready to talk again. She had thought about the right words
over and over again, how she would scream at her aunt for lying and
never stop yelling out her anger. So when her uncle and Chloe were
gone, Kira cornered her aunt in the kitchen, ready to explode. But
when her aunt turned around, Kira finally looked into her eyes and
saw all of the pain and self-loathing she was looking for. Her aunt
was killing herself with hurt over keeping this secret. And Kira’s
anger disappeared. Instead she cried and her aunt rocked her back
and forth as though she were a child, and they stayed like that for
ages until they were both cried out.

But right now, looking into her birth
mother’s face, Kira felt nothing but anger. Unlike her aunt, her
mother had chosen this life. Had chosen to abandon Kira—and for
what? For an evil man? To become an evil thing?

Despite her mother’s words, there was no
remorse in those eyes. No pain or anguish. She was happy with her
decision. And to Kira, that was unforgivable. Actually, it was
downright suspicious.

“What’s your name?” Kira asked. She righted
her chair, sat back down and crossed her hands on the table. Across
the room, her mother rolled her eyes and did the same. Kira tried
to ignore the attitude resemblance.

“Lana,” the woman said quietly.

“Lana what?”

With a heavy breath, she replied, “Lana
Peters.”

“And what was my father’s name?”

“Andrew Dawson.”

Kira nodded, signaling she was correct and
reached for her necklace for comfort. “Where did you grow up?”

“With all of the other Protectors in
Sonnyville. Before you ask, it’s a very small, secluded town in
Florida that is completely off the grid.”

“Nice sidestep,” Kira said and leaned
forward to gear up the intensity. “What Florida city is it next
to?”

“Orlando,” her mother said, still sitting up
straight in her chair.

“What were my grandparent’s names?”

“My father’s name is Henry and my mother’s
name is my own.” Lana lifted her lips at that, smiling to herself.
Kira ignored the show.

“Tell me about my father. How did you
meet?”

“Oh, Kira,” her mother sighed and finally
leaned back in her chair. “You really are as stubborn as Aldrich
said. Something you get from me I suppose…”

“Just answer the question,” Kira said. She
gripped her fingers tightly together, keeping her palms clamped
inward. Her anger was rising and with it her heat, but she needed
to stay strong.

“Fine,” Lana said and leaned forward in her
chair, boring her eyes into Kira. Still blank, Kira thought quietly
to herself. “Your father and I were both twenty years old when we
met. We fought like children, bickered all the time and debated
politics until we had talked ourselves in so many circles that
there was nothing left to do but shut up. We called each other once
a week that first year, wrote soppy love letters to each other and
made ridiculous promises our parents would never allow us to
keep.

“Gradually, young love matured and we
couldn’t stand to be apart. So we got married. Our honeymoon was in
a log cabin deep in the forest where no conduit would ever go. It
snowed for days, until the piles were so high we couldn’t even
climb out through the windows, so we fought the cold in other
ways…” A small smile played on her lips again. Kira tried to read
her face, but the woman before her was a mystery.

“We never thought of the future, and when I
found out I was pregnant, we ran. We loved you, I loved you, more
than anything in the world—”

“Then why did you leave me?” Kira asked, her
voice cracking. It was getting harder and harder to doubt that this
woman was her mother. Maybe the coldness of her eyes was just a
side effect of the change? Kira continued the thought—Tristan had
had more than a century to figure out how to bring warmth back into
his icy blue irises, but her mother hadn’t even had two
decades.

“I didn’t want to,” Lana said, reaching her
hands across the table to lay them over Kira’s burning fingers. Her
white palms stopped one inch short of actually touching her
daughter.

“The only memory I have of you,” Kira said
softly while staring down at her lap, “is from the night that I
lost you. We were playing one second and then the next you were
gone, pulled away by vampires and killed.”

“Hurt, but not killed. Aldrich saved me.
Moments after you were pulled away by the conduits, Aldrich came
and stopped the other vampires. I don’t even remember it. I
remember waking up in a cell, weak, in pain, and unable to think
past my loss. At first, Aldrich kept me there, locked in a dungeon.
He used me for my blood, but like with your father, I soon changed
his mind.”

“How can you love him?” Kira whispered. She
didn’t want to believe this story or listen to the earnest tone of
her mother’s voice.

“You don’t choose who you love,” her mother
said while fiddling with the engagement ring on her finger. A
bright diamond sparkled in Kira’s eye and she knew that one was
from Aldrich, not her father. “If you could, my life would be much
different.” Lana stopped moving and dropped her hands back into her
lap, retreating from Kira and from whatever memory was playing
behind her calm features.

“But why didn’t you come looking for me? Why
did you turn into… into this?” Kira said, gesturing around the room
and dropping off. She still couldn’t finish the thought and say the
words. Once they were out of her mind and in the air, Kira feared
they would suffocate her: why did you choose Aldrich over me,
choose being a vampire over finding me?

“Oh Kira, this was for you,” her mother said
and stood up to cross the room. She walked slowly around the table,
never once taking her eyes from Kira’s face. Kira sat still, not
moving to even breathe. Her mother knelt next to her, wrinkling the
fine silk of her dress to place her knees on the ground and rested
her palms on Kira’s thigh.

“I was dying. You see, I never truly
recovered from the attack and with each passing day I grew weaker
and weaker. My love for Aldrich helped sustain me, but I was
content to die. And then,” she squeezed Kira’s leg affectionately,
“then we heard reports of a mixed breed conduit girl, a mere
defenseless baby, and I knew it was you. And I knew I had to live
so I could find you. But I was dying and the only way for me to
live was through Aldrich, through his blood.”

Kira fell back into her chair, completely
drained of energy, and reached up to grasp her father’s ring again.
She smoothed the pads of her fingers around the edges, feeling the
slight scratches in the worn metal, and tried to understand this
woman kneeling in front of her.

Logically, everything she said made sense.
The story was pieced together very well. The emotions in her voice
rang true. But still, deep down past Kira’s lingering anger was a
small ball of doubt curling around itself and settling in for the
long haul.

“Your father’s ring?” Lana asked, reaching
through Kira’s fingers to grab at it. “I haven’t seen this in a
long time.” She poked her finger through the opening. It was far
too big for her slim hands. “Mine was taken from me a long time
ago, but I still remember the words. Love will prevail—and it
always does,” she said and dropped the ring to hold Kira’s fingers
instead. Kira tightened her muscles, clenching her fingers around
her mother’s hand. Like Tristan’s they were cold, but that was not
how she remembered them.

In her dreams, Kira remembered her parents.
She remembered resting her tiny head on a warm bosom, tugging at
strands of loose blonde hair and poking at the freckles on her
mother’s face. Her mother’s skin always felt hot and alive, always
burned like Kira’s did now. Her hands were always tan and
sun-kissed, not pale and cold like the moon.

“What does it feel like?” Kira asked. “Being
a vampire, I mean.”

“Like perfection,” her mother said. “I’m
never tired. I’m never hurt. I never feel the ache of old age.
There is no distance I can’t run or length I can’t swim. I can see
past the horizon and hear the flutter of an insect caught in the
wind. There is nothing I am afraid of. Nothing that can hurt me.
Nothing that I fear.”

“But how does it feel?” Kira asked,
emphasizing the last word. She had asked Tristan this question
once, and he had said that until Kira had come into his life and
livened his senses, he had just felt empty and without purpose.
He’d had all of the time in the world, but no one to share it with.
He’d had all of the power in the world, but no good to do with it.
He was surrounded by life, but felt dead all of the time.

“It feels,” her mother began and took a deep
breath. She closed her eyes and slowly released the air. As it left
her lips they began to widen, pulling at the ends until her teeth
were revealed. Two sharp incisors poked out, lengthening with the
breath until they dented her lower lip. “It feels like bliss.”

Kira looked away and brought her hand to her
chest. One, two, three—she counted her heartbeat and felt the blood
pump through her veins. It was warm and circulated heat to the rest
of her body before crashing back into her heart to repeat the
process.

Kira thought of that spot, deep in her
heart, where the swirling blood cells came alive and turned to
flame, of the boil she felt crawl along her skin with her power.
The sun once stung her, once caused her pain, but now she welcomed
it. Whenever she was afraid, whenever she was lost in the darkness
of doubt or despair, she came crawling back to that spot in her
heart where the sun filled her with life. In that connection, she
knew there was nothing to fear and nothing that could hurt her.

Then Kira began to think of something else,
of something ripping that warmth from her and replacing it with an
icy chill that rippled through her limbs, a dead darkness that
needed the lives of others to survive. Kira imagined pulling for
the sun, attempting to gather her strength, and finding it
gone—vanished.

Bliss, Kira thought with a shiver. Losing
the sun was her worst nightmare.

Kira could understand fighting to survive.
She could almost understand falling for Aldrich under the
circumstances of her mother’s life. Losing a husband and a child
all in one day might make a woman seek out comfort in the most
unlikely of places. Even turning into a vampire wasn’t beyond
Kira’s comprehension.

But parting with her fire, losing the
flames, rejecting the sun—and feeling bliss? That Kira would never
understand and that Kira doubted any conduit would ever be able to
truly feel. The absence should be a gaping hole in her chest, a
pain that haunts her mother’s immortality.

Kira broke her thoughts to stare at the
woman kneeling by her feet, the woman still smiling with the
happiness of her existence. Her ivory skin had no hint of the sun,
not a single drawn out freckle. Her tightly pulled back hair was
devoid of any wildness. Her smile held secrets, but none that Kira
felt any connection to. And her eyes, Kira thought, were as dark
and monotone as the night sky at the end of the sunset, when all of
the glorious colors had disappeared but the stars still didn’t want
to come out and play.

The woman flicked her pupils at Kira as if
finally remembering her daughter was there. Kira watched the
candles flicker in the black of her eyes and watched as even the
reflection of heat rejected her. Deep in the ebony pools of those
unfeeling eyes, Kira finally found an emotion. Coiling at the base
of that bottomless pit, Kira saw hatred and it snapped her back
into her seat.

The woman blinked and it was gone, but it
was enough. Despite her flawless appearance, carefully crafted
story and emotionally charged words, Kira knew with every fiber of
her being that this woman was not her mother.

Now all she needed was proof.

Chapter Six

Slowly, Kira rose from the sturdy wooden
chair and excused herself. Calmly, she walked to the door and
looked back at the woman still crouching on the ground. She put as
much love as she could into that look, hoping it was enough for
that woman to believe Kira had been fooled by the show.

It took all of her strength to continue
stepping at a normal pace up the stairs and down the hallway. Her
muscles were tight, contracted. Her senses were alert and she had
to control her legs to stop them from stretching out in front of
her and sprinting the rest of the way to her room.

Aldrich and that woman, who Kira couldn’t
even think of as her mother, had to believe Kira was happy—maybe
tired and drained of energy, but happy deep down. In reality, all
Kira felt was despair. All of this, every second she spent
daydreaming of a future with her mother and planning a rescue
mission, all of it was wasted. Her mother was gone. Kira knew it.
And she suddenly realized just how stupid she had been to believe
in the fantasy, how naïve she had been to actually risk all of
their lives searching for a phantom dream.