Chapter 4 Maeve
Maeve
Isat and listened to the silence around me. Penelope had given in and fallen asleep in the bed next to Ciara, and now I was just watching them both.
Penelope fidgeted in her sleep, and occasionally she whispered or talked. She was rarely still, but that was to be expected. This was a stressful situation. No sign of any sort of trauma at would be odder.
Which brought me to Ciara. I glanced at where she lay, perfectly still. Perfectly quiet.
Perfectly… I floundered as I searched for a word that captured her best. Absent. It was like she wasn’t even there right now.
I sat back. She looked perfectly human. But that was their thing, right? All creatures of the night looked human? But Ciara? It seemed so unlikely.
Still, there was something about her. Beautiful, flawless skin, clear eyes, a way she held herself and grace in how she moved.
And vampires were why I was here in New Orleans, anyway, right?
It had been one more lead for the blog. Maybe the big one that could prove everything Granny had always told me. I laughed quietly. Granny had always insisted I had the sight but I sure as shit wouldn’t have made this trip if I’d foreseen being abducted.
Oh, the things I’d learned from Granny. Well, not so much learned as learned about.
She’d told me so many stories in the summers I’d spent with her.
She’d spoken of fae and leprechaun and other tiny folk, and at the other end of the scale, she’d mentioned creatures as big as giants—what any other person might laugh off as bigfoot—and I’d been fascinated by it all.
But while Gran had claimed to see them, even while we were together—sometimes she described the delicate wings of the fae as they danced their way over her worn kitchen table—I had never seen anything.
The ghosts were the most unsettling. The figures that she said visited us or stood behind me, or peered out from walls as we passed by. I didn’t see any of those either, but sometimes the prickle of my skin as she described what she could see was worse.
Even now, it seemed the harder I looked, the less I saw. Yet I knew these things were out there. I just knew it.
And I wanted to prove it.
As I continued to watch Ciara, her eyes sprang open. The woman literally went from being asleep to being alert in the time it took her to open her eyes.
She sounded confused, though. “Maeve? Why are you watching me?”
I shrugged. “Just wondering, that’s all.”
She sat up slowly, careful not to disturb Penelope, and slid from the bed until she was opposite me, both of us on the floor. “What were you wondering?”
She seemed to have woken up even more beautiful, if that were possible.
“About you.” I doodled my finger through the thick, dusty pile of the carpet. Once upon a time, this would have been expensive.
Hell, this whole room, although it was stuck in a time warp, probably contained more antiques than I could count.
“About me?” She laughed, although a flicker of unease crossed her face. “Not even about how we’re all going to escape?” Her casual tone wasn’t entirely reflected in the small crease that appeared between her eyes, and I shrugged.
“Can’t you do something?” Vampires were supposed to have incredible strength, right?
“Me?” This time her eyes widened. “Do we even know how many of them there are? What they’re capable of? How could I do something?”
I opened my mouth to explain I knew exactly how she could do something to help us, but I paused.
Maybe I was better not to say how much I knew just now.
If I told her that I knew she was a vampire, she could just shut me down with a denial, but if I remained silent for now, I could watch and learn so much more.
Instead, I changed the subject slightly. “How did you get here?” We’d talked a little but always Penelope was awake, and talking about her abduction always rendered Penelope almost speechless.
Penelope would describe the side of her apartment building being blown off and floating through the air, and that was all she would say before her eyes widened and filled with tears and she started to shake at the memory.
From time to time, she wouldn’t even answer properly.
“Who cares?” Penelope always said it with a careless shrug. “No one would believe me anyway.”
But those stories were my bread and butter.
Forget the red topped tabloid magazines and the headlines about Elvis returning home to Jupiter or the latest woman to have Bigfoot’s baby…
Give me the small things. The events that should have been mundane except for that one thing that couldn’t be explained.
Those events were where I would find my truth.
Those were what I needed to propel my blog from being written in the shadows to being mainstream.
They were also what I needed to anchor my own belief to, because so far in my life, I was chasing fragments and silhouettes when I knew there was far more out there than that.
Ciara shrugged. “I was taken from my…” She hesitated. “My boyfriend’s house. Well, it’s where he lives, anyway. He’d gone to investigate a noise and I…I suppose I just wasn’t there when he got back.” She looked slightly haunted as she finished speaking, and she pressed a hand over her chest.
Vampires…vampires… I racked my brains. They didn’t really have boyfriends. That wasn’t the right language. Not as I understood it anyway. She’d have a mate. A fated or true one if she was very lucky. Maybe that explained her hesitation over the word.
“You been together long?” I tugged at a fiber of the carpet as I spoke, untwining it so it looked fuzzy and frayed. Hopefully no one would notice I’d done that. Not that it really mattered. Who paid attention to antique carpet in a kidnap house?
She cleared her throat. “I guess.” Her tone was so noncommittal, so deliberately casual that I looked up.
Her face had paled and her eyes weren’t the same shade of green they’d been before. They looked more red, but perhaps that was just a trick of the light.
“You don’t know?”
She waved a hand. “It’s one of those things where it hasn’t been a long time but it feels like we’ve known each other forever, you know?” I nodded, but I didn’t really know.
I’d never experienced any sort of instant connection or immediate familiarity with anybody.
My mind wandered to the man we’d been briefly trapped in the room with. Something about him, though. Something. I wanted…
I shook my head. I wanted to know more. Like I always did. Like I wanted to know more about Ciara. I wanted to know more about my situation but if I couldn’t escape, I could sure the hell investigate and keep my mind busy so I didn’t go crazy with it all.
“What about you?”
We’d all exchanged our stories before. I’d only really asked her to see if she might change a detail or an event. But she hadn’t said anything specific enough for me to know, and now she’d switched the subject to me. Still, I could play along.
“I came to New Orleans for material for my blog. I run a sort of…sort of news and reviews type blog.” I hesitated the same way she had before leaning on the lie I’d used before.
“Food and restaurants and similar.” It fit for New Orleans, and it was convenient and common enough that no one would really question it.
“And I don’t know why I followed the beautiful woman except she was all dressed up and looked like she was headed to the most popular, happening place.
And if she was, that was where I needed to be.
” I chuckled, but it was hollow as I recalled my own stupidity.
The impossibly pale woman, her skin almost alabaster in tone, her hair white-blonde, had winked at me as her lips had curved into a smile of promise, and I’d followed her immediately. Hell, I would have followed her anywhere.
“It was like I lost my mind,” I muttered.
When I remembered it now, I couldn’t even recall why I’d followed her.
She hadn’t said anything to me. One moment I’d been minding my own business as I tried to figure out which direction a nightclub I’d heard about was in, the next nothing had been more important in New Orleans than a woman I’d never met.
Wait, had she said something? I bit my lip as I tried to recall. Maybe just one word.
“Clémence,” I blurted.
“What?” Ciara drew her eyebrows down into a shallow frown.
“I think she gave me her name.” I shook my head and pressed a finger to my temple to ease a sudden ache there. “But it’s all a bit blurry. Maybe she drugged me.”
“Maybe.” Ciara shrugged, and her stomach rumbled. She jumped to her feet, the movement so fast that if I’d blinked, I might have missed it, and she turned from me before heading to the door.
She banged on the heavy wood. “Hello!” she called. “Hungry in here. And I don’t just get hungry, I get hangry.” She banged again, and the door shook under the weight of her attack.
That was interesting, too.
Then she paused as though she was listening and stepped away from the door. “Someone’s coming,” she said.
I listened but couldn’t hear whatever Ciara had. I didn’t move closer to the door, though. Something in her gaze had changed, like she was hyper-focused now, and her cheeks looked pinched. The woman definitely looked hungry…and a little predatory.
Could I take her?
Hell, no. Not if she was what I thought she was, anyway. My curiosity about her was tempered by a healthy dose of caution about how much attention to bring to myself by asking questions.
Just as I was assessing my chances of surviving the day, the door opened and a woman I hadn’t seen before dragged in a rolling rack of dresses. It stuck on the carpet and she tsked and half-lifted it to bring it the rest of the way into the room.
Two pale-faced women followed the rack into the room, their dark hair unkempt, purple shadows beneath their eyes.