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“You pretend to care?” I sneer. “You threw Dahlia to the wolves.”
“And you are the wolves,” the girl says through a gasp. “The wolves that tore her apart. I should have known she’d fallen in love with you. I should have known you were using her this whole time. I don’t know how you vampires can live with yourselves.”
I don’t know how either.
The rage inside of me breaks and bubbles over and I’m not only seeing red, I’m feeling it too. Towards the witches, towards this girl, towards myself.
I take her head in my hands, palms pressed against her skin, fingers digging into her scalp, and before Solon has the chance to yell “No!” I twist my wrists quickly.
I break the girl’s neck with a sickly crack that seems to bounce off the walls of Dahlia’s apartment.
I step back and the girl crumbles to the floor, dead.
Chapter3
Rose
NOW
My parents gesture to the kitchen table. My brother and I sit down and my attention is briefly stolen by the clouds on the horizon outside the large bay windows. Our house isn’t huge, but it’s on the beach just north of Newport, and every day the view seems to change. I liked to think that I could control the weather with my moods and now, with the ocean roaring, dark gray and aqua curling into a powerful spray of white seafoam, I wonder even more. With the way the clouds are hanging low and charcoal gray, I feel a thread of electricity between me and the sky, like we are both plugged into the same socket.
Like it used to be, I find myself thinking. When I was Dahlia.
Did that mean that whatever witchcraft she had is still in my veins? God, I hope so.
“Someone tell me what’s going on,” Dylan says, sounding utterly annoyed.
“Rose,” my father explains to him, “has discovered something about herself.”
Dylan looks at me with a dry expression. “That she’s a vampire?”
“I’m remembering past lives,” I tell him, and his glassy eyes widen with disbelief. “But that’s not the point of all of this. It’s that I remember people, vampires, talking about mom and dad before I was born.”
My brother slowly blinks. Even if he isn’t drowsy from a nap, or possibly high, this would still be confusing to him.
“And,” I go on, “I remember that their names aren’t John and Yvonne. It’s Wolf and Amethyst.”
Dylan snorts. “Dad’s nickname is Wolf.”
“That’s not his nickname. That’s his real name.”
“And who told you that?”
I glance at my parents who are hovering near the table, my father rubbing my mother’s back.
“An old friend of mine,” I say carefully, looking back at him. I don’t want to bring up the whole Valtu/Dracula thing right now, because I know my brother has a fascination with him and all sorts of vampire lore, and I need things to stay on topic. I’m sure there will be endless questions in the future, and I’m more than happy to divulge them because I know the more I talk about it, the more I’ll remember.
And the more I’ll make sense of it.
The more I’ll understand all the people I’ve been.
Because right now, it’s just percolating beneath the surface, waiting to bubble over.
“Okay, so what’s the danger then?” Dylan asks Mom and Dad. “If what Rose is saying is true, which is just far out, what does that have to do with us being in danger? You literally used the worddanger.”
I stare at my parents, waiting for the truth. My stomach gurgles a little, a mild feeling of thirst passing through me, but I ignore it.
My dad runs a hand through his hair, a perfect mix of light brown and dark blond. I was always told that I got my red hair from his Norwegian side, but now I wonder if that’s true. I’m starting to wonder if he really is my father. If what I remembered is true, how is it that they had me? My mother said I’m her child, but we were always told that vampires that were created by other vampires couldn’t procreate.
