Lailah (The Styclar Saga) (25 page)

I jolted, releasing my hands, and as I watched the people rushing past ahead of me, through the mass of bodies he stood like a monument, unmoving, in front of the giant wall-length windows at the opposite end of the room. His eyes blazed red and his dirty-blond hair was swept back, allowing me to absorb his sharp features. I didn’t move. I think my heart stopped as he began slowly pacing through the horizontal traffic of bodies, in a straight and purposeful line, coming right for me. It was the Vampire I had met the night Jonah and I had come under attack; the exact same one I had seen in my vision, disbanding from the Purebloods outside the blazing house in Creigiau. Still he wore dated clothing—a frilled white shirt tucked into straight-legged trousers—and as he neared, the sockets that held his flaming orbs broadened.

From just a few feet away he extended his hand, beckoning me to meet him in the middle. I didn’t dare move or flinch; if I ran there would be bloodshed. As he was on the cusp of reaching me, his eyes left mine; he was intrigued by something below my neck. I followed his gaze to my gemmed ring. Only then did he stop. His expression turned from menacing to intrigued.

“Jeez, do you gotta run off like that? We’re gonna miss the damn flight! Come on!” Brooke had emerged at my side, hauling me off the filthy floor.

I snapped back to where he stood, but he was gone, as if he had never been there. How had he disappeared so quickly?

Searching the crowds with my eyes, I couldn’t find him. As Brooke whisked me to the boarding gate, I reasoned that I might have conjured him myself, a figment of my imagination. I didn’t know anymore. I didn’t know anything.

She handed the flight attendant our boarding passes and passports and we met with Ruadhan and Jonah, who were waiting at the door. Jonah peered down at me, sensing that something wasn’t right. He gestured to Brooke and Ruadhan, and they walked ahead, leaving him to tighten his arm around my shoulders, steadying me onto the plane.

The flight was full and we had only just managed to get seats side by side. Jonah placed our luggage into the compartment above. I searched ahead to find Ruadhan and Brooke scattered on aisle seats a few rows ahead. I stiffened a smile at Brooke as she looked back unhappily at the seating arrangements. She wanted to be next to Jonah. Ruadhan made the same motion a few minutes later, with an equally disgruntled face but for different reasons. He was worried about me.

Jonah fastened my seat belt for me and I wriggled the iPhone free; still no messages. My connection to Gabriel was still present but like a horizon you moved away from—it was becoming a tiny dot in the distance. It seemed that the farther apart we were, the weaker our connection became. I couldn’t feel him near my invisible tunnel and I decided that the very fact he had handed me my phone meant he wouldn’t be able to meet me in my mind. Apparently that little trick didn’t work long distance, at least not properly.

For the first time in what felt a very long while, my thoughts were my own again. It felt desperately lonely.

“You gotta switch that off, we’ll be on the move soon.” Jonah took my rejected phone and handed it back to me; the screen turned black. “Cessie—”

I cut him off. “Just … just hold me, please.” I snuggled my face into his chest and obediently he slid his arm behind me. I got away with my silent sobs, but my chest-jerking gave me away.

“Shhhh, beautiful.”

I fell asleep nuzzled into Jonah. Bizarrely, on this frosty winter night, he was the only thing that would keep my soul warm.

*   *   *

H
E WOKE ME AS THE PLANE
came into a bumpy landing, hitting the tarmac and bouncing up and down before coming to a complete stop. I pawed my tired eyes with curled fists and reluctantly peeled myself from Jonah’s chest.

“Did you get some rest?”

“Don’t sleep, remember,” he said. He smiled a sweet, sincere smile that put me at ease.

“Right. Thanks for, well, you know…” I offered, unbuckling my seat belt.

Ruadhan and Brooke waited for the seats to empty before finding us and we traipsed down the aisle, the flight attendant wishing us a pleasant stay as we made our way down the steps. Brooke attached herself to Jonah, so I held back and joined Ruadhan.

“We’ll be out of here in ten minutes, it’s a shed of an airport. I’ve got a rental waiting for us. We’ll be in Neylis in less than an hour and a half.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that the French security might have a problem with my passport. Jonah and Brooke had gone through no issues with theirs, but when I stepped up to the window the old French woman with graying hair eyed my passport and me for a prolonged period of time.

She called over another staff member, who looked me up and down, at which point Ruadhan stepped in. When her tone didn’t respond positively I was rendered speechless: I witnessed him capture her stare, speaking extremely slowly in her native tongue. She then nodded, repeating what he’d said, and signaled for me to move on. The wrinkled lines of her crow’s feet ironed out as she moved on to the next foreigner.

“What did you do to her?” I whispered, pacing quickly to the baggage claim.

“Vampire ability, the power of influence … One of the few traits we have in common with our Angel friend.”

“What was wrong with my passport?” I asked, taking it from Ruadhan’s large hand and dropping it into the top of my backpack. I couldn’t remember how I had obtained it, sometime in a life gone by. Of course, it was fraudulent.

“Some confusion over your photo, she didn’t think you were the same person. I told her … young folk dye their hair, wear contact lenses and whatnot.” He rushed over to the conveyor belt, grabbing the first of Brooke’s suitcases coming through and chucking it to Jonah.

I bowed my head, confused; I looked the same as my photo. I didn’t have long to ponder on the mistake; Ruadhan was like a bat out of Hell taking my hand and dragging me to the waiting car. In exchange for a credit card swipe, Ruadhan received the keys to a matte black sedan. A few moments later, a bright yellow bumblebee-striped Mini Cooper convertible appeared.

Brooke dashed from the entrance to swipe the keys out of the young lad’s hand with an extended smile. “Come on, Cessie, you can ride with me!”

Obediently I stepped forward, but Ruadhan’s long arm moved over my chest, yanking me back. “No, the little love is with me. You take Jonah and follow. Keep your eyes on your mirrors, make sure no one’s behind you that shouldn’t be.”

Her face soured. “Ruadhan, I apologized. I won’t hurt her, freakin’ hell, you can’t tell everyone what to do!”

Ruadhan didn’t grace her with a reply.

As Jonah found his way to the car, suitcases in tow, she stopped complaining. Riding alone with Jonah wouldn’t be so terrible after all.

I opened the door and Ruadhan chuckled under his breath. “Other door, love, they drive on the wrong side of the road here, you know.”

“It’s the right side!” Brooke shouted at him, deliberately emphasizing her American accent.

I slammed the door shut.

“You ready?” Ruadhan asked.

I nodded as he pulled away from the curb, switching his lights on. The clock on the dashboard informed me that it was 6:27 a.m., and I found my thoughts wandering back to Gabriel. I switched on my phone and waited to see if any messages would load. They didn’t.

“He’ll be halfway over the Atlantic by now, he won’t be able to call you yet.” Ruadhan tilted his head in my direction as if he were reading my mind.

“Oh … Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“When he’s found who he needs to find and he knows what he needs to know.” Shrugging, Ruadhan circled several roundabouts, finally hitting a long stretch of road. I peered out at the side mirror to check that the Cooper was following us. Sure enough, they were there.

Ruadhan broke the silence between us. “I need you to keep your distance from Jonah.”

I let his words drift between us before I replied. “Says who, you or Gabriel?” Snuggling deeper into the seat, I rubbed my coat sleeves.

“Gabriel has concerns.… Jonah’s unusually taken by you; he drank from you and Gabriel’s worried he might try again.”

“He had the opportunity two nights ago. He didn’t,” I argued.

“No, but if Brooke hadn’t walked in, well, who knows…”

What actually worried me more was that night, in the kitchen, I was on the verge of asking him to do so.

“He’s a Vampire, sweetheart. He, like the rest of us, feeds on blood. Sometimes that urge supersedes even the strongest of wills.”

“He’s not a monster! He risked himself to save me, and I for one am most grateful for that.”

“I’m not saying he’s a monster. By all accounts, he’s a good lad. He’s trying his best to overcome the hand he was dealt, but he has many people’s lives to pay for. In the eyes of God, in a thousand lifetimes he’d still be hard-pressed to have redeemed himself.”

We continued down the motorway, breaking the speed limit and passing row upon row of plane trees. The branches were pointing at me like old, decrepit fingers poised accusingly. What it was they were accusing me of, I didn’t know.

“You know about the dimensions?”

“Yes.”

“Then how is it you believe in God?” I was walking a tightrope, but I had to know what he knew.

“However Gabriel puts it, whatever science is involved and by whatever name you would call these dimensions, to me they are Heaven and Hell. The mythology stems from what people witnessed all those years ago; different people interpret things differently. I still believe there is a God.”

“Have you asked Gabriel if that’s true?” I was losing my balance on the tightrope.

“He’s not able to explain to that degree. He’s an Angel, and I am one of the Devil’s. I understand and accept that.” He nodded, rubbing his hairy chin, the other hand placed rigidly on the steering wheel. He didn’t know about the crystal, about Orifiel, about the reason behind the existence of Angels.

Ruadhan had been deeply religious before he was turned, I had gathered as much from the conversation we had shared in the church back in Hedgerley. Shattering someone’s faith like his would never be easy and even if you could, why would you want to if it gave a purpose to his existence and provided some sort of comfort?

I swerved the conversation back to Jonah. If I was going to be spending some serious time with him, I needed to know more about him and his intentions. “How did Jonah become a Vampire? What happened to him, Ruadhan?”

“Would it help you understand him, help you understand the danger?” He was not one to gossip, but if it served a purpose he might tell me.

“Yes.”

He contemplated before he began, and I sat up straight in the passenger’s seat, ready to listen.

“Jonah has been with us just shy of seven years. He grew up in New Jersey, and by all accounts he was a perfectly normal lad—captain of the football team, and all that. He was granted a scholarship to Florida State and started in the autumn. He hadn’t been there long when he received a call to say that his family had been in an accident; they had all perished.”

He stopped there and I inhaled a sharp breath. “Poor Jonah…” I trailed off. “What happened?”

“A car accident … drunk driver knocked them clean off the road. From the account Jonah gave, it sounds as though they didn’t suffer. But he couldn’t accept it. Especially his sister. She was the baby, he loved her more than anything. He never went back to Jersey; he stayed down in Florida, but he went off the rails. Spent most of his time drunk, squandering his inheritance away in bars and by gambling. He got kicked out of college.”

“How do you know all this?”

“He told me once; some of us have shared our stories. He’s still haunted by his past life. He’s not the only one.…”

“How did he come to be a Vampire?”

“He was found by a Second Generation, slumped behind some dumpsters outside a biker bar, and was dragged back to their Gualtiero—Emery. Jonah was a light soul, and so Emery chose to turn him. Jonah took to his new role like a moth to a flame, enjoying his new powers. He moved up the Gualtiero’s ranks quickly, and was out stealing humans for him within a matter of weeks. Within months he was one of Emery’s most prestigious soldiers. Jonah took orders only from Emery and did his bidding directly. That is unusual with an army of so many.”

The rounded streetlamps that lit the borders of the mountains reminded me of army helmets. Ruadhan drove fast but steady; sheer drops into the forest on any other day might have scared me.

“So how did he come to travel with you, with Gabriel?”

“He savagely murdered and pillaged, Cessie. Worse still, he enjoyed it. Emery held him in such high regard that he would turn females specifically for Jonah to feed off, to grow stronger. He granted him the freedom to hunt for his own human meals and Jonah always sought out pretty little things like you. There’s your second warning sign.”

I tried to stop my heart banging against my chest as I imagined him feeding off young girls, chasing them down for sport.

“What was the first?”

“The very fact that he is a Vampire.”

I didn’t say anything for a while, letting this new information sink in. “You didn’t answer my question—how did he come to travel with you?”

Ruadhan was trying to highlight the evil in Jonah to scare me away from him; I would have to do more than scratch the surface in order to understand the entirety of his story.

“That’s not really important, is it, love? What’s crucial is that you recognize the danger and keep your distance.”

“It’s important to me.”

Looking at my expectant face, reluctantly he continued. “He was hunting with some of the others and found a house on the beach. Inside were a mother, father, and daughter. The girl was the same age as his sister and had the same disability.”

“Disability?”

“She was blind.”

“Oh…” I trailed off.

“He told the Vampires to leave, but they wouldn’t. Some went, taking the parents back to Emery, but a few stayed, turning on the girl. She was not worthy of presenting to their Master, so they set about tormenting and killing her. Jonah had to make a choice, and for whatever reason, he decided to turn on his own kind and tried to save her. Gabriel and I found them at the moment Jonah broke through the door, carrying her in his arms.”