Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 112849 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 564(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 376(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112849 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 564(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 376(@300wpm)
“That’s not true,” I point out for argument’s sake. “I’ve heard of non-slayer witches killing vampires before. Hell, I’ve heard of normal humans killing vampires before.”
“By luck or accident. Believe me, if Bellamy or anyone in the guild thought that I could be the one to take out Dracula, I would have already done it. I can’t glamor myself as well as you can and I don’t know how to get close enough to kill him, let alone actually have it stick. In the end, you’re the one with the blade.” She pauses, taking a sip of her coffee. “There’s not many of you out there.”
“I know,” I say tiredly. “I keep getting reminded of it.” When Bellamy showed up at my aunt’s house, days after my parents were killed, he told me I was needed because there were so few of me left in the world. If I didn’t take vengeance on the vampires who did this to my parents, who would?
“Then you understand how important you are and that we’re all relying on you.”
I sigh heavily and tear open a sugar packet, pouring it in my cup to soften the blow of the coffee. “Gee, no pressure.”
“Listen,” Livia says, placing her hand across the table and leaning forward, her expression softening. “I don’t want to scare you. It’s just that when I talked to Bellamy on the phone, well, he scared me. The longer that portal is open, the more that…things will come out. I’ve seen them, Dahlia.”
I frown at her, that chill returning. She looks scared for once. “What?”
She presses her lips together tightly, until her mouth resembles a line of chalk. “The monsters,” she whispers. “I’ve seen them come out of the canals.”
Her eyes dart to the canal beside us and my eyes follow. A gondola has just finished passing through, the gondolier singing in Italian to the selfie-taking couple on the boat, the dark, murky water filled with small whirlpools from the gondolier’s oar. Though the sun sparkles off the surface, I get these uneasy feelings, as if I’m sensing the depth beneath the water. I’m seeing the limestone walls that form the foundations for the buildings, sunken boats, tires, thick clay at the bottom, and this sense of something hiding in the muck.
“What did the monster look like?” I ask her.
She just shakes her head and looks back to me. “I didn’t want to say anything in case it turned out to be nothing.”
“In the event that it is something…what did it look like?”
“I don’t know. It was dark out and I was walking back to my apartment at night and it…at first I thought it was a black garbage bag floating in the water. I was ready to head over to it and pull it out, I thought it was some garbage from tourists, you know? But then it moved. It reached out of the water with long black fingers,” she holds her hand out, fingers stiff in exaggeration, “and I…I froze. And then it pulled itself up into the shadow until I couldn’t see it anymore but I could hear it. I could hear it walking, this wet, dripping…slithering sound. It was big, Dahlia. It was very big.”
I’m no stranger to the supernatural. My parents were witches and my mother was big on holding séances in the attic, but it was to contact our relatives and nothing scary or bad ever happened during those times, usually just my grandmother turning the lights on and off or my grandfather’s disembodied voice coming through the spirit box, telling us he was fine. Later, when I was at university, my dorm room was haunted by a ghost called Mary, but again, she was harmless. Annoying, when she was trying to talk to me in the middle of the night and I had an exam the next day, but still harmless. What Livia is talking about though, that’s something else entirely. Monsters. The only monsters I knew of were vampires. They were the only ones I’d seen with my own eyes. Everything else was just myth.
“It’s probably a vampire,” I say, trying to reassure her. “You know that some vampires have other forms. Their original selves. The mad ones.”
“And if it’s not? If it’s one of the creatures that has come out of the portal? Then what?”
“Then…” I say, exhaling as the weight on my shoulders gets heavier, “I guess I need to try harder.”
She straightens up, putting on a brave face. “Good. I’ll let Bellamy know.”
“Is there a reason he’s not contacting me about any of this?” I ask carefully.
“He seems to think that if you talk to him, it will make your glamor fade. Better not to take the chance.”
Hmmm. I only talked to Bellamy briefly when he called me up to tell me the guild was giving me a second chance. That’s all I needed. I’d be happy if I never talked to him again. We didn’t end things on good terms. He went from being my substitute father to being a stranger faster than I could blink.