Library

Chapter 19 - Veronica

I stare at my stalker, my mouth hanging open. Since coming to Rosecreek, it's been nothing but surprises and shocking revelations, over and over, and I suppose it's time to prepare myself for another.

For years, I've been dodging this guy, assuming he was your run-of-the-mill stalker, a man who gets obsessed and believes he has rights to a woman. I had a friend who avoided her stalker for twenty years before he finally snapped, breaking into her home and killing her in her sleep.

That has been my fear all this time, that the next time he showed up, it would be my last chance to escape from him, my last chance to get away from him.

And every time he found me, it felt like I hadn't done a good enough job. I'd had an Instagram profile growing pretty fast, and I had to give it up when I realized he was probably using it to track me, to know where to find me next.

"For the past few years," he says, ripping me away from my thoughts, "I've been keeping tabs on you. I realize now that I came off in a bad way—like a stalker. It occurred to me for the first time that you saw me that way when I approached you the other way."

"Men," I mutter, but he just keeps going. Percy reaches over and squeezes my hand. I sigh and squeeze his back, feeling alone. Suddenly, I wish Linnea was here with me. That day the stalker approached me, she had such a quick read on the situation, and I know she would back me up here and now.

"You and I have a lot in common," he says. "And the simple fact is that the vampires want to kill people—or beings—like us."

My skin prickles at the word being .

"I grew up in the same hometown as you," he says, taking my silence as the go-ahead to start telling his story. I want to interject with, yeah, I knew that , but I just want him to get it out so we can send him on his way.

The first time I ever noticed him following me was in that little town in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska. That was back when I was working as a CNA, trying to dream up ways to get away from everything. Ways to get away from that town.

"I'm not sure if you know this, given your—until recently—lack of knowledge about paranormals, but there were a series of vampire attacks on our town, spanning several years. Nobody knew why they were happening, but it consistently took place in very specific households."

Despite myself, I can feel myself leaning forward, listening with rapt attention to every word he's saying. I hate him for everything he's done to me, but I need to know what he's going to say. There's a voice in the back of my head that tells me this could all be complete bullshit, just a way to earn an audience with me, but deep down, I know that's not true. It's a sense that I can't shake, and the moment I have that thought, he smiles at me knowingly.

"Anyway," he says, looking like it pains him. "My mother was attacked a few weeks before giving birth to me. She died giving birth to me—the stress of having a child with the vampire venom coursing through her body was too much. But that event meant I came out immune to that venom."

My mouth goes dry, and I think of my father, explaining to me once I got older that my mother had been through a very stressful attack early on in her pregnancy, and he's always thought it was a huge reason why she didn't make it through the birth. He said the doctors blamed it on stress—that her heart rate and blood pressure were just too high.

But my father said that my mother was the most easy-going and high-spirited person he had ever met, until the day she was attacked coming home from the grocery store. He dealt with his grief by drinking quietly every day when he came home from work. He never did more than that; just drank until he fell asleep, woke up the next day, and went to work.

He was dependable, but he wasn't really a dad. My entire life, I was afraid of loving someone that much. Caring about someone so much that if they died, you might just waste the rest of your life away, waiting for the day you could join them.

"When I saw you for the first time in our hometown, I could feel that you and I were the same, but you didn't seem to know about the truth of your mother's attack. Then I realized—it was because you were human. Because my parents were shifters, they had always just told me that my mother was attacked by vampires. Your dad probably just believed it was random or done by some freak with a biting fetish."

My heart is stuttering in my chest, my breath coming fast, and I feel Percy reach over, settling his hand on my knee.

"I tracked you, like I said, to keep an eye on you," the agent says. "There had been several attempts on my life at that point, and I only survived because I was a shifter, and had the strength to fight them off. A few times, the vamps came after you, but I managed to get them before they could finish the job.

"Then, you fell off the map here in Rosecreek. I knew it would have something to do with the local shifter population here—it was too much of a coincidence that this is where you'd disappear. I'd check in occasionally, until I heard reports of a local shifter being dosed with what we're calling Serum X at the agency. He—well, you know. I knew you had to be one of the humans taken during that time. I came back here to investigate and ask after you, but the last thing I expected was for you to still be in town.

"It was stupid for me to approach you like that, I realize that now. But I had so much to ask you. I was so glad you were still alive. I had planned to come clean then, but then I saw you," he trails off, looking to Percy, "and I started putting the pieces together. You're the guy she was dating in New York, the shifter."

"Yeah," Percy says, looking down at his lap.

"I don't give a fuck," the agent says, surprising us both. "If you think I'm going to criticize you for dating a human, I'm not. The lines between paranormals and humans have been blurring for some time now. With social media and the age of the internet, there are scores of people online who know about us and don't care. Or, they actively seek us out. Half-breeds and part-magicals have been showing up for decades now, and pretending like that's not true is just ignorance."

"Wow," I say, laughing for the first time since he came inside. "You're really…passionate about that."

"There are a lot of paranormals with these antiquated views," he says, shrugging and taking another sip of his coffee. "It just contributes to the overall lack of progress in our community. I mean—can a shifter and human relationship be dangerous? Yes, of course. But I think a lot of shifters conflate that danger to keep our kinds separate. To avoid weakening the bloodline and all that."

I think of Maisie, a medical professional, and how she probably got her information about intimate relationships from humans and shifters out of a nursing book, how some old guy with the kind of backward thinking the agent is talking about probably wrote most of it.

"Well," I say, "this is…a lot to take in."

I still can't decide if I still hate him, but like earlier, I have this sense that there's nothing he's said so far that's been untruthful.

"Unfortunately, there's more," he says, setting his mug out and letting out a suffering sigh. "The Serum X development and the recent vampire attacks on shifters doesn't surprise me in the slightest. With the intel we've been able to gather, it seems like the vampires have been scheming for years to start taking on the shifters. My hypothesis is that the attacks on pregnant women in our area have something to do with that. I think they intended to target shifters, but one of them messed up and went after a human. I think they were trying to weed out the new generation of shifters, but what they didn't expect to happen was a whole segment of us who are immune to the vampire venom."

"Holy shit," Percy says, shaking his head, then dropping it into his hands. "This is insane."

"Yeah," the agent agrees, grabbing his mug again and finishing the last drop. Then he looks over to me sheepishly. "Any chance I could get another cup?"

"I think I need to call Aris," Percy says, standing, then sitting again when he cuts his eyes to the agent sitting on the couch. "Veronica," he says, clearly not wanting to leave him alone with me, "would you be willing to grab my phone?"

I nod and go for the phone, then brew another mug of coffee for the agent while Percy talks to Aris in hushed tones on the other end of the room. When I return, I make the agent hand over his badge so I can examine it for myself.

Weirdly, I can hear every word Percy says while on the phone with Aris, even though he's whispering and has his mouth covered with his hand.

When Percy finally hangs up the call and returns to the living room, Agent Rafael Diaz has made his way through almost all of our coffee supply. I've cut him off, taking the mug away, genuinely terrified that he might overdose on caffeine and stop his heart in Percy's living room.

Of course, I know how to administer CPR, but that doesn't mean I want to administer CPR to this man. Or being.

My mind is full of questions I want to ask him, but they're all piled on top of one another, making it too difficult to pull one out and force it through my lips. Instead, I just stare at him, and he stares down at the carpet.

"Well," Percy says, breaking us out of the silence that had started to become kind of comforting, "Aris is calling an emergency meeting, right now."

"I know," Rafael and I say at the same time.

Comments

0 Comments
Best Newest

Contents
Settings
  • T
  • T
  • T
  • T
Font

Welcome to FullEpub

Create or log into your account to access terrific novels and protect your data

Don’t Have an account?
Click above to create an account.

lf you continue, you are agreeing to the
Terms Of Use and Privacy Policy.