Аманда Хокинг - Fate

The warm summer air slid in through the windows, filling the car with the soft, green scent of the park, and the foreboding sound of traffic rushing by on the highway. Fighting the rather childish urge to cover my face with my fingers, I settled for biting my lip and keeping my eyes focused out the window, where children were playing in the grass. That would’ve been mildly comforting if I hadn’t been imagining them getting completely flattened by the Lexus. Admittedly, the car was just idling in the parking lot, but I’m a notoriously paranoid person.

My younger brother Milo had just turned fifteen, and naturally, all he could talk about was getting his license. This is the same boy had spent the better part of the last year playing video games, or cooking elaborate meals, or studying for an exam he would surely ace anyway. This new obsession with cars I blamed entirely on Jack, who insisted on driving at excessive speeds in his family’s luxury cars. I sensed the change in Milo the instant he laid eyes on their Lamborghini. Things that beautiful tended to captivate people, even gay teenage boys, apparently.

Even though I was two and a half years older than Milo, I still didn’t have my license. In fact, I’d never driven a car of any kind before, despite Jack’s recent suggestion that I should. My mother didn’t own a car, so there was nothing for me to learn on and nothing to drive. This fact remained was just as true for Milo, so I had assumed that he would spend his teenage years riding the bus or hitching a ride with friends, like I had, but then he and Jack had got to talking, and here we were. I sat in the backseat, properly seat belted in, staring at Milo in the drive seat with intense apprehension.

Wearing gigantic sunglasses, Jack sat in the passenger seat next to him, explaining things to Milo. There were several major issues I had with this scenario, and I had become certain that nothing good could come of this driving lesson.

First of all, Jack doesn’t really explain things. He points to a pedal and says, “That one makes it go. So push on it and let’s go.” That’s it. Fortunately, Milo is a look-before-you-leap kind of guy, so he pressed Jack for more information, but that doesn’t make his answers any less vague. And Milo was starting to get that gleam in his big brown eyes, the one that says he’s feeling the need for the speed. On top of that, only six short months ago, I was riding with Jack in his Jeep, and he happened to roll it.

We managed to escape unharmed, but the Jeep burst into flames. This is the guy that’s teaching Milo how to drive. Plus, we’re only a few feet away from a park filled with children and a highway filled with speeding drivers. We live near Loring Park, and the parking lot next to it makes it a prime place to practice driving, but once he takes the car on the road, we’ll be bombarded by hurried cars and three-lane one-ways. One of the downsides to living in downtown Minneapolis (or probably downtown anywhere) is the chaos involved with learning to drive in area filled with so many cars.

Not to mention it’s mid-afternoon in August and the sun is shining brightly above us. Ordinarily, that would sound like the best time to drive, but sunlight makes Jack groggy. He’s already started to yawn, and his reaction time will be significantly diminished, should he need to grab the wheel or intervene in someway.

I can’t even really tell how much Milo is paying attention to the lesson Jack is giving, as in the actual words and meanings of things, or if he’s just mesmerized by Jack himself. They’ve been around each other a lot more since summer vacation started, so I’ve been hoping that Milo would start to get desensitized to Jack, but I don’t know how well it’s working.

The thing about Jack is that he’s not exactly like everyone else. He is attractive in his own right, with dancing blue eyes, perpetually disheveled sandy hair, and flawless tanned skin, but he’s not what I would call drop-dead gorgeous. The only thing about him that really gets to me is his laugh, which is clear and happy and perfect. It sounds like a weird thing to be hung up on, but perfection tends to get me.

Everyone else swoons over Jack like he’s the most enchanting thing they’ve ever seen, but then again, he probably is. I’m the only one that’s immune to his charms, or at least his unnatural ones. I still enjoy him immensely, probably more than I should, especially considering the way I feel about his brother Peter. That’s putting it a little simply, but everything about Jack and his family is rather complicated, thanks to one major fact: they just happen to be vampires.

Milo doesn’t know this, that it’s Jack’s vampire pheromones that make him so entrancing, so Milo doesn’t really get why he’s so attracted to Jack. Ironically, it has helped him come to terms with his homosexuality, but he feels guilty about it all the time because he thinks that Jack and I are dating. Which we aren’t. I don’t know for sure if we would be, even if things weren’t so insanely impossible thanks to Peter. But with things as they are, we might never find out.

Obviously, Jack and his family aren’t really threats to people, or I wouldn’t let any of them around my younger brother. I suppose they technically are, since they could pretty easily kill us if they wanted to, but I don’t think they want to. There was that one time with Peter last spring, but that was because I asked him to, but Jack and his brother Ezra intervened to save the day. While they do live off of human blood (animal blood doesn’t work for them anymore than it would work giving humans a blood transfusion from a cow), they either use blood banks or human donors, i.e. people who willingly let them eat. Vampires don’t have to eat until a person is dead, although they can and sometimes do. Jack, for example, has never killed anyone, but he’s still a relatively young vampire. He was twenty-four when he turned, but that was only sixteen years ago, in comparison with his brother Ezra who has been around for over three-hundred years and Peter’s nearly two hundred.

They’re not really brothers but rather brothers in the way vampires are. When Ezra turned Peter, Peter drank his blood, and they became bonded together. In order to turn, the human’s blood fuses with the vampire’s blood, and they became even more closely connected than actual brothers. Peter turned Jack, so his blood is fused with both Ezra and Peter’s. This makes them close in unusual ways. Peter is attracted to me, or rather his blood is, much to his chagrin. But because of his attraction, both Jack and Ezra are very fond of me, and Jack probably much more than he should be.

With this in mind, I know that realistically Jack won’t do anything put me in danger, at least not intentionally. Admittedly, he always saves me in the end, but his carelessness makes me a little uneasy about trusting his judgment. Or his ability to safely monitor danger in relation to human’s fragile little bodies, like my brother’s. Odds are that if we got in a crash, Jack would protect me before Milo, and that makes me nervous.

“Are you sure you really wanna do this today?” I asked, probably for the hundredth time that day.

In the rearview mirror, I could see Milo roll eyes, and I knew that I was getting on their nerves. But I couldn’t help it.

“We can just take you home if you’re gonna be this way,” Milo warned.

Jack chuckled a little at his threat, but I was too sour to see the humor in it. Despite his age, Milo had one of those distinctly baby faces still. His cheeks were puffy and his brown eyes were innocently large. His voice had changed, but when he threatened me, he looked more like an angry child then the teenager he was.