Chapter 3 #4
Sister? It was like a punch to the gut. He could have called me his girlfriend. Obviously it would have been fake, but to call me his sister? Is that how he thought of me?
“Sister? You guys look nothing alike.” The guy said as he puffed rings.
Hah. See? He should have said girlfriend.
Asher pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket. “Trade clothes no questions asked, or no?”
The girl shrugged. “I’m keeping my jacket. It’s my fav.”
“Trade clothes?” I whispered to Asher as the girl began to strip off her T-shirt and expose her black bra.
“Smell,” Asher mouthed.
Right. The fresh-baked croissant smell.
Asher gave us his back as the girl traded with me.
I pulled off Asher’s tank top, a little sad to have his smell leaving me, and struggled out of the leather shorts, careful to keep the wafer tin with me.
Standing in my bra and underwear in only my combat boots in the middle of Riverfront Park on my eighteenth birthday was not something I thought I would ever do.
“I look so hot in these shorts, don’t I, babe?” the girl asked her boyfriend as she slipped into my leather mini shorts. I didn’t spend much money on clothes, only shopping at secondhand stores or taking handouts from the group home, but those were one of the only brand-new things I’d bought.
RIP fifty-dollar shorts.
It took me over three hours of working at the library to afford them.
Once I was wearing the girl’s baggy low-rise jeans with cargo pockets and oversize Bob Marley T-shirt, I turned to see Asher had changed as well. He also wore overly baggy pants and a super loose black T-shirt. It was a crime to cover those muscles up.
We thanked them and then continued our run through the park, past the pavilion. Once we crossed the river and were back on Washington Street, we headed north.
“I have an apartment we could go to. I mean, it’s my friend Rae’s, but I’m staying there. I’m sure it would be fine if you crashed there tonight,” I told him.
He stopped walking and faced me, and for the first time under the bright lamplight, I really took in his features.
He was one of those pretty boys. He was not feminine in any way, but when I looked at him, all I could think of was how beautiful he was.
Sharp jawline, arresting green eyes with naturally thick and long lashes.
His lips were full and his nose was straight.
He could be a model if he’d stop murdering people for half a second.
“If we do that, we risk bringing the bloodsuckers to your friend. I assume you care about him and want to keep him alive?”
Him?
“Oh, Rae is a girl. But yeah, I don’t want any harm to come to her.” Or anyone for that matter.
He nodded. “Then we keep moving until sunrise.”
“Sunrise?” I asked, feeling sleep pull at my limbs. I luckily didn’t have work the whole weekend.
“That’s the next portal home,” he told me, eyeing a guy who was camped out on the sidewalk with suspicion.
“Wait. Home? This is my home.” I stopped walking, trying to process everything. “Right now, we’re not safe because we smell like freshly baked croissants to the bloodsuckers, so we have to take a portal in the morning to another dimension where we will be safe?”
The words sounded ridiculous even as they left my mouth, like I was reciting a bad movie plot back to him. My feet planted themselves on the pavement, refusing to take another step until my brain caught up with my body.
He nodded. “ If we can survive the night. Most hunters don’t visit the real world for more than a few hours on mission. And if they do, they have scent-blocking runes, which aren’t in our kit. This is going to break records for someone our age.”
My pulse hammered. My ears rang. My eyes bugged. “I have work on Monday!” I screamed.
The sound echoed too loudly in the empty street. He looked around as if my yelling might have woken someone. Reaching out, he pulled me closer to him, his grip firm but not rough.
“What’s your name?”
The question caught me off guard, stripping away some of my momentum. I swallowed hard. “Stella. Stella Adams.”
“Stella, you don’t work here anymore. You don’t live here. You don’t visit here. This place”—he gestured to the entirety of downtown Spokane—“is a vampire kitchen, and you’re the meal.”
His ominous warning sent chills down my spine, a cold ribbon sliding straight down my back, but I also couldn’t help but laugh. It bubbled out of me, sharp and hysterical. “You expect me to quit my job? Move away? I just got my freedom.”
“I expect you to disappear. Missing person. Never found,” he told me and then grasped my arm and began to drag me toward the flour mill on Mallon Avenue.
Panic flared, bright and sudden.
“Wait. I don’t understand. Others live here, like me. You’re not telling them to disappear.” I yanked out of his grasp.
He gave me a side glance, his jaw ticking as he clutched his sword tighter in his fist and scanned the streets before us for potential threats. “No. You’re a hunter. Hunters live in Veil Haven. Humans live here.”
The word hit like a slap.
It was at this point that I realized this whole charade had gone too far.
“Humans live here.” He was saying I wasn’t human!