Life's Blood (The Cordelia Chronicles) (14 page)

Chaseyn mouthed the words “thank you,” then guided me down the hall at a quick clip, his hand on the small of my back in a show of affection. I knew the gesture wouldn’t go unnoticed by the agent. Women always noticed that kind of thing. She was probably sneering at me right now and wondering what a guy like Chaseyn would see in a girl like me.

***

“I was so worried you guys weren’t going to make it,” Addie cried as she ran down the corridor to greet us. “They called final boarding like ten minutes ago.”

Addie was, literally, crying. She was far too sensitive, and I shuddered at the thought of what she would have done if we’d actually missed the plane. We walked briskly arm-in-arm the rest of the way. As we approached the gate, Eli stood from his seat, grabbed his and Addie’s carryon bags, and gave Chaseyn a manly half-handshake-half-hug greeting. We all walked onto the plane together.

“I think this is us,” Addie said just steps inside the door.

“Not a chance. Keep walking,” I replied. “We’re another twenty rows back.”

“Don’t be mad,” Chaseyn said, and I knew he had done something I wasn’t going to like. “I upgraded our seats.”

“What? You know how I feel about wasting money on things we don’t really need. Besides, my plane ticket was the only contribution I made to this trip. You’ve covered everything else as it is,” I said, but I was only moderately upset.

First class was a mighty fine way to travel--especially on a nine-hour flight overseas. And I’d always wanted to sit in one of those funky pods. Not to mention the full-sized bags of chips they hand out instead of the snack packs of pretzels.

“I just chipped in a few extra bucks to get us prime seats,” Chaseyn said, planting a kiss on the tip of my nose and dropping his messenger bag in the pod next to mine. “You may not be footing the bill for the trip, but you’ve done more than your fair share to contribute.”

He was right…I had spent months holed up in a library researching theories. If he wanted to repay my hard work with a first-class ticket, who was I to complain. I gave him a peck and settled into my pod. Addie and I synchronized our movie selections so we could be sure we were laughing or crying at all the same moments. Eli and Chaseyn grabbed a couple of pops and settled in for a nap. I doubted Chaseyn would actually get any shut-eye, though. He needed less and less sleep these days, so I handed him my iPod and a magazine.

“Ah, this is a fine piece of literature,” he said as he perused the cover. “Who wants to contemplate the state of the economy or the climate crisis when there are so many more important matters to ponder--the sexiest man alive, for instance.

“Just think of it as sizing up the competition,” I laughed. “If I fall asleep, be sure to wake me in time to eat.”

“That reminds me,” he said, standing to grab a container from the bag he’d placed in the overhead bin. “I had a heck of a time concealing this through security.”

He didn’t have to tell me what was inside the container. Over the past few days, Chaseyn had come to rely heavily on the nutrients he gained from drinking blood. If he went so much as a few hours without it, he slipped back into a sickly state. I watched as he chugged the contents, then carefully brushed away the remnants from his lips--a blood moustache was just about the only thing worse than the real deal.

I wrapped the fleece--not at all scratchy--airplane-provided blanket around my shoulders, tore the top off my bag of paprika chips, and waited for Addie’s signal to press play on the first of the three movies we’d planned watch while in flight.

Eight hours, fifty-seven minutes, three bouts with moderately frightening turbulence, and one proposal to join the mile high club--and not from Chaseyn--we had landed safely in Romania.

“Let the games begin,” I whispered in Chaseyn’s ear as we debarked the plane. From behind, I saw his cheeks puff up, and I knew he was smiling. This was going to be one wild adventure.

When I was twelve, my parents put me on a plane to visit my paternal grandparents in Grand Forks, North Dakota. It was a small, college city with minimal tourist attractions. In other words, people only flew there for a reason. The airport was tiny—it only had two gates.

The Bucharest airport reminded me of the one in Grand Forks. It seemed small. I don’t know if it actually was or if it just felt that way. Not that I had traveled many places, but I knew an international airport should seem more grandiose than the confined space where I currently stood.

There were people everywhere I looked--crammed up against the edge of the baggage carousel, shoving through customs, frantically looking through the crowds for the people they were here to meet. I suddenly felt claustrophobic.

“Lia, are you okay?” Addie asked as she twisted the cap off a bottle of water and handed it to me. “You don’t look so good.”

“Not everyone gets off a nine-hour flight looking as good as they did when they got on,” I jabbed, drinking deeply from the cool contents of the bottle.

“Seriously, Lia, you look a little green. Why don’t we let the guys get the cases so we can sit down a while?”

“I’ve been sitting for hours. I don’t want to sit anymore,” I whined.

Just then, a brute of a man knocked me from behind. My purse flew off my arm to the floor a few feet ahead of me, and it took everything I had to keep from falling to the ground with it.

“Hey, watch it, pal,” I shouted after him before looking back at Addie. “Maybe I will take that seat after all.”

Chaseyn and Eli had already started gathering our belongings, so Addie wrapped her arm through mine, and we made our way to a bench down the hall. I felt better instantly.

“London wasn’t like this,” I said after a few minutes of watching the people move like cattle through the building.

The last time I was in Europe, we’d traveled by train to most of our destinations. Heathrow was the only major airport I’d been to outside of the United States. Sort of. Technically, I’d been to this airport before, but it seemed different this time. Maybe the departures area was more spacious, I thought to myself.

“Of course not, silly. Heathrow is one of the biggest airports in the world,” Addie laughed. “A lot of the airports are like this in Europe.”

Addie had been nearly every place there was an airport. Her family was filthy rich, and for as long as I could remember, she’d spent her summers globetrotting. Romania, however, was one of the few places she had never been with her family.

“I’m super stoked we’re here,” she said. “I’ve wanted to come since we read Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
back in tenth grade. Remember when I played Lucy in the school play? That was so much fun.”

Addie kept clamoring on and on about vampires—if she only knew. Our exact purpose here was to find out more about the origins of the vampire race and how to help Chaseyn overcome his “curse.” As Addie rambled on, I daydreamed about Chaseyn and I growing old together, generations of our children and grandchildren running and playing around us. I was torn from my happy thoughts by the sound of a loud thud. My eyes scanned the room searching for the source, only to find Chaseyn lying on the ground across from the baggage carousel wincing in pain. In a heartbeat, I was at his side.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I just tripped,” he said, pushing himself upright.

“Can’t blame the guy,” Eli said. “What do you have in this suitcase, Lia? If I had to lug this thing around I’d be on the ground too.”

“You think my bag’s heavy, just wait until you try lifting your girlfriend’s case,” I laughed.

The truth was, I had packed a half dozen hard-cover books that I hoped would aid us in our mission. Still, their extra weight should have felt like nothing more than a feather to someone with Chaseyn’s strength. I was seriously concerned.

A few moments later, we had all of our bags on the cart and were making our way to the car when I noticed Chaseyn was walking with a slight limp. He was doing his best to hide his pain, but I could tell he was hurting.

“This is it, isn’t it?” I asked when we had fallen far enough behind Eli and Addie to be out of earshot. “It’s the beginning of the end.”

“I’m fine, Cordelia. Stop fussing,” Chaseyn replied curtly.

“You’re not, and I wish you would stop pretending that you are. Stop being so stubborn,” I pleaded.

“You freaking out isn’t helping the matter,” Chaseyn said.

“I can’t help it—I’m scared.”

Chaseyn stopped walking and turned to face me. He cupped my face in his soft hands and pressed a kiss to my forehead.

“So am I.”

***

“Did anyone think about how we’re going to get around this place?” Eli asked.

“Seriously, man, you don’t trust me by now?” Chaseyn replied. “You didn’t think I’d travel halfway around the world without arranging for some sweet wheels to get us from place to place, did you?”

Eli was pushing the cart with all of our bags as we followed Chaseyn out to the parking garage. He clicked the key fob, and the taillights on a black Charger blinked to life--the same one we’d driven the last time we were in Romania. Chaseyn tossed Eli the keys.

“You better not be toying with me, man,” Eli warned, staring at the keys as though they were burning a hole right through his palm.

“Be gentle on her,” Chaseyn said wryly. The corners of his lips turned up in a crooked smile. “If you so much as put a scratch on it…”

Chaseyn left the sentence unfinished--the threat evident in his silence. But we all knew he was just kidding around. He loved fast cars, and he loved to ride them hard. There was nothing Eli could do to that car that would top anything Chaseyn was capable of doing. Eli watched in awe as Chaseyn disappeared between the cars packed like sardines inside the cement structure, presumably on a mission to feed the meter.

“Is this the only American car in here?” Eli said to no one in particular, looking around the parkade. How the car had come to be at this place, I didn’t know, and I didn’t dare question it.

We popped the trunk and proceeded to jam our bags inside. The boys had packed light. An extra pair of jeans, a couples of tees, and a sweater or two, and my bag was small but heavy. But when we limited Addie to one bag--despite her constant pleas for more--she decided to teach us all a lesson by bringing the largest bag she could get her hands on. I could fit my entire body inside--zipped up. It was massive. And, it was all we could do to close the trunk of the car.

Chaseyn returned, and he hopped in the backset beside me. With Addie planted at his side, Eli turned the key, and the engine roared to life. He looked like a kid in a candy store as he crept out of the parkade and onto the main road.

“You might want to go a little faster,” Chaseyn said. “I think that snail is about to catch up.”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” Addie replied.

“Yeah, but fast and hard is so much more fun,” Chaseyn taunted.

“That’s what she said,” Addie and I said in unison. “Jinx.”

We’d been sitting at a stoplight, but when it turned green, Eli floored the gas, and our heads whipped back against the seats. With the wheels squealing, burning rubber on the pavement, we took off like a bat out of hell.

“That’s more like it,” Chaseyn shouted over the rev of the engine.

***

Eli’s turn to the dark side lasted only a few minutes at most. Any courage he’d mustered fast disappeared when we got onto the open road and he realized cars shared the narrow two-lane highway with old-school buggies pulled by horses.

“I can’t do it,” he said, shaking his head.

“Want me to drive?” Chaseyn asked.

“No way,” Eli replied. “I’m not stepping out from behind the wheel, but I’ve got to keep it reasonable. What if one of those horses gets spooked?”

I understood his logic, and I elbowed Chaseyn in the ribs to keep him from saying anything more. We’d only been on the road a few minutes--in fact, we weren’t far from the airport--when we witnessed our first cliché come to life.

“Is that a wolf?” Addie asked skeptically.

“Where?” I said, squinting my eyes against the sun as I stared hard into the forest. There were so many trees, it was hard to see anything else.

“Over there,” she said, pointing out the window. “If it’s not a wolf, it’s the biggest, scariest dog I’ve ever seen.”

That’s when I saw it. And, she wasn’t exaggerating. It was massive--like the kind of wolf you read about in fairy tales. You know, the kind that could blow down houses built by pigs or eat a grandma for lunch.

“Are you sure werewolves don’t exist?” I whispered to Chaseyn while Addie’s attention was focused on getting her iPod to sync with the car stereo.

“Positive,” he confirmed, kissing my forehead.

I watched the dichotomy of two worlds pass by my window. On the one hand, Bucharest was a buzzing, modern metropolis. As we drove farther and farther from the capital, skyscrapers and cell phone towers gave way to corn crops and hand-built houses. Gypsies talked on cell phones while driving horse-drawn carriages, while farmers toted canisters of milk on hand-pulled wagons. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before--almost like half the population had made a quantum leap while the rest were stuck someplace in the middle, between past and present.