Wake of Darkness (9 page)

She didn’t dare open her eyes. She
sat with her forehead still on her knees.
Please, please don’t let that be
him,
she prayed silently.

Without raising her head, she
peeked with one eye at the person in her doorway. She breathed a sigh of
relief. Laney skipped over to her bed and planted a kiss on Sophie’s cheek as
she stared at her in wonder.

Laney frowned. “You okay?” she
asked.

“Yeah,” Sophie replied
absentmindedly. “Thanks.”

“Who’d you think I was?” Laney
asked, cocking an eyebrow at her. “Wait. Never mind. Dante said dinner’s ready,
so I want to show you something really quick.”

Sophie smiled at her and thought
she had to be the most adorable girl she’d ever met.

“Thank you!” Laney replied with a
big grin. “Now listen: you’re gonna love this! We all have a special gift. Well,
more than one, but whatever! The vampires can run really, really fast…almost
fly, fly, fly, right? So…we can move from one place to another
without
running
!”

Sophie watched her warily. Laney
laughed at the look on her face.

 “The only catch…” Laney began to
say, but her eyes glazed over. She was lost in a wayward thought, but was back
to normal just as quickly.

“Are you okay?” Sophie asked.

 “Yeah, sorry!” She grinned
sheepishly at Sophie. “What was I saying? Oh, yeah. The only catch is that we
have to have seen where we want to go before we can get there, and sometimes
we’re too far from where we want to go, so it does limit us
a little
,
but it’s really cool. We call it jumping ‘cause we don’t know what else to call
it, and it happens just like that”—she snapped—“Like a blink of an eye, quick
as a jump!” She giggled in the middle of her breathless chattering.

“What are you talking about?”

“Watch this. I’ll think about
standing in the hallway.”

Sophie watched as Laney closed her
eyes, took a deep breath and then a split second later was standing in the
hallway. Sophie gasped in complete disbelief as Laney smiled at her, several
feet away from where she’d started.

“Now you try. Come to me. Just
close your eyes and envision the hallway. Then all you have to do is want to be
there,” Laney instructed.

Sophie didn't completely trust her,
but she figured it was worth a shot. She closed her eyes and thought about the
hallway. Almost an instant later, she felt a sudden breeze hit her face.

“Whoa!” she exclaimed.

Laney reached out to grab Sophie as
she took a step backwards in shock.

“You okay?” Laney asked.

“Uh…” Sophie began, “yeah, I’m
okay.” She giggled to herself. She was more than okay; she was elated.

Excellent job,
thought Dante,
now that they were all in sync with one another.

Way to go, Sophie!
Jim
thought from somewhere else in the house.

“Is that how Alexander got me here
so fast yesterday?” She asked Laney.

“Yeah. Pretty cool, huh? Now, try
it again, but try to go downstairs this time,” Laney said.

The only room she’d seen downstairs
was the front room.

Okay, here goes nothing
,
she
thought to herself.

Laney nodded in encouragement.

Sophie drew in a breath, trying not
to worry that everyone would be watching or listening for her next move. Closing
her eyes, she saw the front room in her mind's eye. She felt the air move out
of her way, but she was prepared for it the second time.

What she wasn't prepared for was
what happened next. She opened her eyes with a gasp and stumbled backwards from
Alexander. He was so close that she could feel his breath on her cheek. She
tripped over the rug behind her in her haste. Without thinking, he reached out
and caught her hand before she could fall back into the glass table. He pulled her
into his arms in an effort to steady her.

Her sharp ears heard the steady
beats of his heart in his chest, obviously unaffected by the encounter. Sophie,
on the other hand, had to hold her breath to keep it from escaping her lungs
too quickly.

Out of the corner of her eye, she
caught Catherina shoot a sideways glance at Dante. She’d missed the silent communication,
but Alexander hadn’t. He frowned and roughly dropped his arms from Sophie and
marched into the dining room, leaving her behind, stunned. She let out a shaky
breath and hugged her arms around her chest, rubbing them where he’d held her.
She turned around, and her eyes widened in shock. He had kept her from crashing
into the glass table behind where she stood.

“That was awesome!” Jim yelled from
the top of the staircase, snapping her attention back to the moment.  

Sophie could feel a smile spread
slowly across her face as she looked up at him. “Thanks, Jim.”

Zoey was there instantly and laid
her arm across Sophie’s shoulders. “You’re doing very well,” she said.

Sophie remembered what Jim had said
about the redhead – she wasn’t very talkative, but what she did say meant
something more. Sophie smiled to herself; she didn’t think Zoey would have said
anything complimentary just to be nice.

You’re right,
Zoey answered
her silently.

Sophie nodded gratefully.

“Come on,” Zoey said aloud and
walked with Sophie into the dining room.

Catherina smiled vaguely at Sophie
as the pair walked into the vastly windowed dining room. Laney and Jim were
already there; it would take her a while before she was comfortable traveling
in any other way than her slow, human method of transportation.

Catherina took her place at the
head of the table with Dante on her right and Laney to her left. Alexander sat
at the foot of the table. The chairs to his left and right remained empty. From
the opposite ends of the table, the two exchanged a cold look but didn’t say
anything to each other.  

Chapter 8

The room was hauntingly quiet and
Sophie was alone. A library in and of itself was nothing unfamiliar to her, but
she sat silently in this one for the first time, playing absentmindedly with
the silver cross that hung around her neck. Zoey had brought it to her soon
after her arrival, but it had been unclear who the gift may have been from.

She ran her fingers along the edge
of the book’s pages where it was spread in front of her on the table. The musty
odor of ancient books hung in the air with the dust motes that danced in the
slanting sunlight. She had, of course, been given free reign of the house and Dante
had encouraged her to come here almost immediately after her arrival. She’d
made a habit of studying there; learning everything she could about this new,
alien life in the few weeks that she’d made the Leone family home her own.

She perused the shelves in search
of something promising and was about to give up for the day, when her eyes fell
on a very thin, dusty book in the corner on one of the highest shelves. When
she’d pulled it down, she found that it was an old journal of Catherina’s, all
but forgotten. It was really more of a memoir than anything; she wondered if
Catherina had written it for herself or for others. Its words were sentimental,
but they sounded oddly instructive at the same time, as if the writer had
suspected that she might not always be around to tell the tale.

Flipping the pages aimlessly, the
book fell open arbitrarily near the middle of the volume. There was no date for
the entry, but the words caught Sophie’s eye and she began reading Catherina’s
musings. She learned more about the woman in a few paragraphs than she ever had
in talking to her, but it felt voyeuristic to be reading something so personal.

I shall always remember the
first time I saw him. I stood on the pier in Venice; the day was bright. His
name came to mind once more and I closed my eyes. The beautiful breeze from the
water rose up to run through my hair; the sun was warm on my face, bright on my
eyelids. I breathed in the sweet smell of the Mediterranean and was lost in the
beauty of such a place. When I opened my eyes, I knew I was being watched and
there I beheld him. It was like coming home.

After our first meeting, it was
difficult to be separated from Dante, and the feeling was mutual. It is as if
the human emotion of love is greater within us. I do not truly understand the
reason, but I do know that our companion is not a choice, not a conscious
decision. He or she is shown to us in a time which is not our own. I believe
that we are paired with another in order to help strengthen us.

Dante’s strengths compliment my
weakness and my strengths compliment his. Thoughts flow more quickly between us
than between any other beings, and we are intimately attuned to one other. At
any point in the day, I know exactly where Dante is and what he is doing, and
the same may be said about him with regards to me. There have been times that
Dante and I have faced an adversary together, and in those instances, we have
functioned as a single entity, rather than two individuals. The alliance
between companions is stronger than any other I have ever experienced – it even
rivals the relationship I had with my father. Given the choice between one’s
companion, and another individual, it is one’s companion who invariably is
chosen in the matter. That is the choice I would make; I would choose him over
any of my other acquaintances or family. This is not to say that I do not love
the rest of my family. It simply means that Dante is my other half and without
him I would cease to exist.

Below this entry, in Catherina’s
antique handwriting, was a translation of Dante’s name:
everlasting.
Sophie
was surprised that Catherina hadn’t filled the rest of the page with girlish
scribbles, like the kind girls always scratched on their notebooks in high
school. Sophie half expected to see lines and lines of “Mrs. Dante Leone”
filling the page.

She sighed, stretched, and rubbed her
eyes as she leaned back in her chair. She’d been reading for the better part of
the afternoon, catching up on the common knowledge already shared by those of her
new family; she felt alarmingly behind the learning curve.

“Ugh,” she mumbled, rubbing her
head. “My brain is fried.”

She needed a break and some time to
think. She wasn’t about to try “jumping” up to her room though. She needed a
little more practice with that, since the last time she’d tried it, she nearly
landed in Alexander’s lap. She probably would have too, if he’d been seated.

She pushed back from the table, and
was about to stand when the door creaked open and the subject of her current
thoughts stood in the entry. She jumped.

“You scared me,” she said
automatically. She still couldn't hear his thoughts; she'd had no warning that
he was just feet away from her.

“My apologies,” he replied. He
looked about as uncomfortable as possible, watching her from the doorway. “Er…,”
he said, finally finding the apparently elusive words, “Are you finding all
that you are looking for?”

“I think so,” she responded slowly,
sitting back in her chair.

She wondered what he wanted, but
she didn’t ask.

He cleared his throat and deliberately
walked around the table to look on the shelf behind her. She refused to look
around and struggled to keep her breathing even. Her hyper-sensitive ears heard
his breath, his whispering footfalls, and then the nearly silent scrape of a
book being pulled from a shelf behind her.

“Ah, these are so dusty,” he said
to himself regretfully, blowing the dust from the cover.

He placed the book on the table in
front of her. Sophie looked down to see that it was one of the volumes that she’d
intentionally skipped.

“Yeah, I can’t read Latin,” she
blurted out matter-of-factly.

“I can.”

Her jaw dropped open before she
shut it with an audible snap. She resisted the urge to get lost in the
confident smile he wore as he spoke to her.

He turned away from her to look at
the dusty tome, and he started turning the pages. He was still standing over her,
leaning over her, really. As he slowly leaned on the table, his hand almost
touching her arm, Sophie was extremely aware of the closeness of his body next
to her own. She glanced briefly over her shoulder at him, but his eyes were
steady and serious as he thumbed through the pages from above.

“These are Dante’s memoirs,” he
explained, glancing at her quickly.

She caught her breath as she stared
back into his very green eyes. Thankfully, her mind was blank so he couldn’t
read her thoughts, but her heart audibly pounded in her chest. She could hear
it, so she knew he could as well.

He turned back to the book as if he
hadn’t noticed the flush in her cheeks and the catch in her breath. She tried—unsuccessfully—to
ignore the warmth of his body, so close to her own. She rolled her eyes. This
was getting ridiculous.