Page 49 of Half-Blood


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‘Why would anybody be so calculating and scheming?”

“I don’t know. Why would Malone try to frame you for his murder?”

He dropped his fork in his plate. “Is that what you think he did?”

“He threw some attention your way, at least. If he’d just wanted to disappear—say from loan sharks like you first thought, or someone who might be after him—it would have been easy enough to do without casting suspicion on the person he claimed to love. The one he came to Atlanta to be with, according to what you say he told you. It all goes back to motive, and we need to dig for more background. The only records we could find of Malone in Georgia was a diploma from the Ryland Center for Performing Arts. It’s an acting school in the suburbs of Atlanta. Malone would have been in his early twenties.”

Jace looked surprised. “What? You found records of Dylan in Georgia? He told me that he’d never been to Atlanta.”

I shrugged. “He’s a liar. He lived with his family here, though not his parents. They died when he was a kid, and an aunt and uncle took him in. They’ve moved from the address he gave back then, and we’re still trying to run them down. Malone seems to have left the area soon after he finished his courses at the Ryland Center, and the next place we located him was when he turned up in New York.”

“Dylan told me he was on the streets for a while when he first came to New York.”

“That part might have been true. It would explain the gaps in his history.”

Jace put his fork down and pushed the plate away because his appetite seemed to fail him. “It’s hard to believe how much I was taken in by Dylan’s stories and outright lies. Why would he lie about never being in Atlanta? That makes no sense.”

“He flunked out of his acting classes, and he probably wouldn’t have wanted you to know it. He erased the whole thing from his past, as if it never happened.”

Jace sighed. “It makes me question everything I thought I knew about him.”He reached over and took my hand, stopping it as I raised my fork to my mouth.

“Logan, won’t you please tell me who you really are and why you’re investigating all this? I know you’re not with the police. Who are you, really, and what does it have to do with Dylan? Please, Logan. If you care for me at all, please tell me.”

I blew out a breath, hating to disappoint him, but I couldn’t break my oath and tell him. I couldn’t—could I? I looked into those beautiful eyes and started to tell him that and I couldn’t get the words out.

Dylan Malone had come into his life like a whirlwind and tore everything apart. He was owed the truth. I put my fork down again and took his hand.

“I need to tell you a story first. One that’s hard to believe, but I swear every word is the truth.”

His eyes round, he nodded. “Okay.”

“Ten years ago, I graduated from Virginia Tech. I had a shiny, new degree in Computer Science. My roommate and I and some of our friends decided to take the summer off before graduate school, and we wanted to backpack across Europe, staying in hostels or camping when we could. We had decided to stop in Lier, Belgium, not far from Antwerp to spend the night in a small camping area. That night, as we slept, we were attacked.”

He gave a small sound of surprise and distress for me, but I kept going. It had been a long time since I’d told this story. “We didn’t know what was attacking us at first, only that they were so strong and vicious. I watched as one of them tore out my best friend’s throat with his teeth.”

This time Jace tensed, looking shocked and pulled his hand sharply away. I could feel his incredulous gaze burning a hole in my face, but I kept doggedly on. “I saw another of my friends being dragged by his ankle into the woods, his head bouncing on the ground. And another lying on his back with three of them on top of him. He wasn’t moving. It was dark, and pure chaos. I felt one of them swipe my face with his claws and blood started streaming down my face. The scent of my blood made them even wilder. I fought the best I could, but one of them slapped me hard enough to knock me back into a tree and I was knocked out. When I came back to, I saw them feasting on the blood of my friends, and I felt drained and near death. Instinctively, I crawled up under one of my friends’ bodies. They still found me, and I was bitten by one of them. He had blood on him though, from where one of my friends had used a small knife on him. That vampire smeared his blood on my mouth as he took me, and I think that ingesting his blood was just enough to keep me alive.” I laughed bitterly. “Or maybe it was stubbornness, and the fact I didn’t think any of it was real.

“It was like being trapped in some kind of nightmare. Morning sunlight was what saved me, I was told later on. They had left it too long and the sun was coming up on the horizon. They all fled into the shadows of the trees, and I was left behind, half dead and pretty much out of my mind. I was found by Hunters, and they saved me. They gave me their medicines and now I’m a Hunter too. A half-blooded vampire, not fully changed into a monster, but close enough, I’m afraid.”

I glanced over at Jace and found him staring at me like I was insane, and he was on the edge of his chair, ready to run. I took his hand, though he tried to pull away.

“I know how this must sound to you, and I sympathize. I really do. But you have to face it. It’s the God’s truth and deep down inside you, you must know it. You know what happened to Dylan Malone. It’s the same as what happened to me, only he’s too far gone to be saved. The place they sent him to wasn’t a hospital. It was a monastery run by the Church. They found that he was too far gone, and they decided to put him down. But it was too late. He killed all but one of them. All we can do now is find him and kill him. Then stake his heart and cut off his head so he won’t rise.”

Jace scooted his chair back so violently, it fell over backward, his face a mask of horror. But he had to face this and believe me. I held onto him, though he struggled with me to get away, and I shook him a little.

“Settle down and listen to me! He’s bitten you too, Jace. He’s used you for his thrall and he’ll keep on until he kills you or turns you into what he is. That’s why Conway and I came looking for him. That’s why I kept my distance from you so long. Conway thinks you’re already compromised, but I think you can still be saved. Dammit, you have to be!”

****

Jace

Of course, I thought he was crazy. I tried to run from him, but soon discovered he wasn’t going to let me go anywhere. Maybe it was when I realized just how strong Logan was, or maybe some of my mixed-up memories and half-dreams were telling me all along that what he was telling me was true, but finally, I began to run out of steam and the adrenalin drained out of my body. By then he was holding me in his lap, letting me rage and cry and scream as the reality washed over me. When he saw I was calming down, he carried me over to the sofa and just held me by the fire for the longest time, letting me get it all out.

Some of the memories I’d buried about that night in New York when Dylan and that other man tried their best to kill me came flooding back. I think I’d mostly suppressed them until then, and they had returned to me before only as half-remembered flashes. Now they came flooding back in, and I remembered that man’s yellow eyes, and how incredibly fast he was. Howinhuman he was.

After a while, I sat up beside Logan. “What was it you said I was? A thrall? What is that?”

“A person that a vampire goes back to again and again for blood and-and for sex. Since Medieval times and into the Renaissance period, legend persisted that semen was the same as a man’s lifeblood and vampires feed off both.”

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