Аманда Хокинг - Wisdom

“The sky is really brilliant.” I took a few steps over to him.

“It is.” Peter leaned forward to admire the sky. “It’s not something I’ve gotten accustomed to yet. I’ve spent too much time in the city.”

“Is that why you came out here?” I leaned up against the porch next to him, and he kept looking up. His face was impossible to read, the way it always was.

“You know why I came out here,” Peter answered quietly.

I dropped my eyes and kicked at a stone on the ground. He had come here because of me, and I didn’t have anything to say that.

Shortly before he left, Peter had confessed his love for me, but I couldn’t reciprocate. Well, maybe parts of me could, but I refused to. Not when I had Jack, and I loved him. Then everything had happened with Mae and Daisy, and Peter had seen his chance to escape from me. Again.

“So you like it out here then?” I asked. “Away from all the hustle and bustle of the Cities?”

“I don’t know,” Peter sighed. “The weekly flights to Sydney to visit the blood bank are irritating, but the silence and isolation is nice.” He paused, thinking. “I don’t suppose I like it anywhere very much anymore.” I felt his eyes searching me. “I’ve been worse places, though.”

“Was that some kind of dig at me?” I asked sharply.

“Alice, I’m not trying to fight with you.” His eyes glowed green in the darkness, even without any light, and he let out a long breath. “I can’t win with you. I’m either being cruel, or I’m asking too much of you. Whatever I say, it’s never the right thing.”

“You didn’t say anything wrong.” I shook my head. “I was just asking if you were happy.”

“Don’t ask me that,” Peter said gently. “Don’t ask me because you don’t want to know the answer.”

“How are Mae and Daisy doing?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Not well,” he said. “Daisy isn’t getting any of her bloodlust under control, and Mae refuses to admit that that’s a problem.”

“Oh yeah?” I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Daisy has been doing stuff like today?”

“She’s never around humans, or it would be far worse.” He lowered his voice, in case Mae might be inside listening. “Daisy went after a wallaby or a koala a few nights ago.”

“A wallaby and a koala don’t look anything alike,” I pointed out.

“It was something small and furry and gray-ish,” Peter shrugged, not caring what it was. “It was a bloody mess by the time I got of a hold of it.”

“You mean she killed it?”

When he said that she went after it, I had assumed that she chased it down because she was a little kid and they were cute. I had chased down hundreds of bunnies and squirrels when I was young in an attempt to make them my friends.

“She tried to eat it,” Peter said.

“No way! That doesn’t even… I thought animal blood wasn’t edible?”

“It’s not.” He gave me a meaningful look. “She just gets so crazy when she’s hungry, she can’t even differentiate animal blood from human.”

I had been around animals since I turned. Jack has a Great Pyrenees, Matilda, but I never once wanted to eat her, no matter how hungry I got. Her blood didn’t even smell right.

“Holy hell,” I said. “That’s intense.”

“She’s attacked both Mae and me on several occasions,” Peter said. “We feed her every day, but it’s not enough. I know she’s only been a vampire for a few months, and she was so young to start with, but I would’ve thought she’d gotten better by now. If anything, it’s worse.”

“What’s gonna happen with her?”

“She’s going to live out here forever, and we’re going to hope for the best,” he said.

“There’s not much else we can do.”

What had happened today with Bobby wasn’t a fluke, and as cute and innocent as Daisy looked coloring at the table, she was equally as dangerous.

I stood outside with Peter for a while longer, but a tense silence fell over us, and I escaped back into the house. My bedroom was still too warm to sleep in, so I tried to put a fan in my window. Peter had brought a giant old metal box fan up from the basement, and it had to have come with the house.

Spider webs clung all over the fan, and when I tried to brush one off, I felt the familiar burning sting of a spider bite. It scurried away, not that I would’ve killed it anyway, and I stared at the red bump on my hand.

“Did a spider get you?” Bobby grimaced and leaned in my doorway.

“Yeah. The damn things are everywhere,” I muttered.

I went back to trying to get the stupid fan to fit in my window, and Bobby came in and sat down on my bed, as if I’d invited him in. Once I got it wedged enough where I thought it could work, I turned the fan on, and took a step back as dust sputtered out.

“Nice.” Bobby waved his hand in front of his face.

“I had to do something before I died of heatstroke,” I said once the dust explosion settled. The fan seemed to be working, so I shrugged and lay down on the bed. “I am so sick of this. It’s ridiculous.”

“Tell me about it.” He leaned back against the wall with his legs crossed underneath him.

His commiserating would’ve been more convincing if he wasn’t wearing purple jeans and a tee shirt. Admittedly, the tee shirt was paper thin, and I could see the black designs of his tattoos through it.

“You’re wearing pants.” I looked over at him. “You can’t be that hot.”

“Yeah, but they’re purple pants,” Bobby said as if that that made some kind of distinction. “Hence, I’m awesome.”

“Do you even own shorts?” I puffed my pillow up under my head so I could look at him more easily when I was lying down. “I don’t think I’ve seen you wear any.”

“Just swim trunks. Shorts aren’t my thing.”

“How does Jack’s wardrobe make you feel?” I asked, smiling sadly at the thought of him. Jack wore Dickies shorts almost every day of the year, regardless of the weather. He was ridiculously awesome that way.

“It works for him, so more power to him.” Bobby scratched at the bandage on his arm that covered up Daisy’s bite, and he wrinkled his nose at it. When he looked down, his black hair fell more into his eyes, and he brushed it back. “She bit down right into my nautical star! I bet I have a scar that totally wrecks it.”

Bobby had a sleeve of tattoos that ran all down his arms, but most of them were black and shades of gray. The only one with color was a green nautical star on the back of his arm, and that was the one that Daisy got.

“She bit the back of your arm?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Nasty little brat,” he said. “I don’t even know what she was thinking. All the good veins are on the underside of my arm. She doesn’t know anything about being a vampire.”

“She certainly doesn’t,” I agreed wearily. “You need to stop picking at it, though, or it will scar.”

Bobby continued scratching at it, so I kicked him gently in the knee, and he stopped.

He leaned back, resting his head on the wall, and sighed.

“Between the spiders and Daisy, this trip is gonna be the death of me.”

“I really wish I hadn’t let Milo talk me into it.” I stared up at the ceiling. “What is he doing anyway?”

“Sleeping. He says it’s too hot to sleep during the day,” Bobby said. “He’s probably right. But luckily for me, I never sleep anyway.” Bobby’s insomnia had made him a perfect fit for our lifestyle. “I can’t believe I’m wasting my last week and a half of winter break here.

When Milo asked me to go to Australia, I was thinking Sydney hot spots and kangaroos and coral reef diving.”

“I know, right? Mae said they were living off the grid, but I thought we’d at least visit the grid.”