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“Lucky them,” I mutter. “Then what is he? Or is this some kind of big secret?”
Wolf stops walking and I nearly run right into him. “There are no secrets in this house.” He looks damn serious, sinister even.
I shrink back. “Okay.”
The darkness on his face fades and he gives me apologetic look. “We’re mercenaries,” he says to me. “Solon, me, Ezra. We’ve been in this house for a long time. Maybe not long in the sense of our lives, but to be in one spot for so long, it’s nothing short of a miracle. People don’t like vampires. They may not believe in them, but they instinctively don’t like them either way. And other vampires, well, we’re not all that popular with a lot of them either. Solon is able to keep us hidden in this house, safe, because of what he’s able to do. As a result, we owe him.”
“So what can he do?”
“We don’t keep secrets, but we also don’t overstep our bounds. That’s for him to tell you.” He starts walking again. I follow him down the hall.
When we pass by the candles, they automatically get snuffed out.
When we pass by bouquets of roses, they automatically shrivel up dead, right before my fucking eyes.
“Wait a minute,” I say, coming to a stop by the roses. “This happened in my apartment. My father bought me fresh roses. Later that night, they looked like this.”
“Solon told you he was in your apartment,” Wolf says. “Can you bring them back to life?”
I blink at him. “Me?”
Wolf points at the candles and suddenly the flames are lit again. “That’s the extent of what I can do. What can you do?”
“What do you mean what can I do? I’m not a…I can’t. I don’t have magic.”
“Sure you do,” he says. “You’re part witch.” He nods at the roses. “Give it your best shot.”
I shake my head. “That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re not even curious?” He pauses. “Then again, Solon wouldn’t be able to do it either. Drives our housekeeper nuts, but she keeps bringing in the flowers anyway.”
He’s said the right thing if he’s egging me on.
“Fine, let me try,” I say. I look at the dried roses and wave my hands in front of them. What the hell am I supposed to say? Abracadabra? Accio?
“Excelsior!” I say with a flourish of my fingers, trying to imagine them filling with water, no, blood, and then growing flush again.
But nothing happens.
They remain dry and dead.
Then I look at Wolf over my shoulder, who is, once again, trying in vain not to laugh. “You were pulling my leg this whole time, weren’t you?”
“I prefer the British saying, taking the piss.”
I shake my head. “Fucking hell.”
“Come on,” he says. “There’s a lot of house to see.”
I leave the dead roses, feeling foolish, though it’s the lightest I’ve felt since I woke up in this house of horrors.
Though, as we walk down the hall of this floor, the more I realize it’s not as creepy as I first thought. It’s just old. Okay, and there’s a weird feeling in the air, but it’s probably the fact that it’s a vampire lair.
“It is a little creepy,” Wolf says as we pass old paintings of people on the indigo papered walls, their eyes seeming to follow us.
“You said you couldn’t read my thoughts.”
“I pick up on energies, feelings,” he says.
“You’re an empath.”
He laughs. “No. That would mean I take on your feelings as if they were my own. I would be a piss poor vampire if I let myself feel sorry for everyone.”
I swallow hard. “Because you kill them.”
He glances at me. “Sometimes. I don’t go out of my way to do that.”
I hold my arms close to my chest. I’m not cold, I actually feel hot, but I feel weak and vulnerable and small. “Yeah, well Solon told me had I not turned out to be what I am, he would have sucked me dry and left me for dead.”
Wolf nods. “That sounds like something he’d say.”
“What, so he wouldn’t have killed me?”
“Solon likes to think the worst of himself. Defense mechanism.”
That wasn’t really answering my question. But I let it go.
We go down the staircase to another floor that looks like the one above, only the wallpaper is dark green. From the way I can tell, the house is narrow and Victorian. Very San Francisco.
“Where in the city are we?” I ask him, not expecting him to tell me.
“Western Addition.”
I stop dead in my tracks. “What? I live in Hayes Valley. You mean I’m that close to home?”
Home. It sounds weird now.
But no, it has to still be my home.
“You’d be surprised at how close we are to your apartment,” he says. “Mind you, we’ve been in this house a lot longer than your parents have been in theirs.”
He opens a door at the end of the hall, and we step on in.
