Slowly the left side of her mouth curved into a sly smile. She raised her hand ever so slightly and flicked her fore and middle fingers into the air.
“Oh, come on!” Jude complained, looking up at the deluge of rain that suddenly cascaded over his clothes and favorite shoes. “Can you believe this?” he asked Gillian who stood only a few feet away from him, completely dry, watching him with her mouth hanging open.
Finally, Jude glanced at her and saw that only he was being rained on. Startled, he spun around, looking at all areas of the courtyard and its lush greenery, fresh and deep green from the weeks of rain they’d been getting, but were at the moment dry from the respite they’d been given that afternoon. Then he looked again at Gillian who was still dry, before turning back to the front door where Solange stood with a sly smile on her face, waiting for him to figure out she was the cause of his own personal rain shower.
When his gaze met Solange’s and she unabashedly smirked at him, he dropped all signs of surprise and just raised his hands in the air, palm up while trying to focus on her as the rain coursed down his face from his personal rain cloud. “Really?” he asked calmly.
Solange didn’t change her expression at all. But she said the only words that would allow him to know exactly why she’d decided to soak his fancy designer clothes. “My bad,” she said by way of disingenuous apology. “Should have rained on the plants.” Solange flicked her fingers again, and the rain cloud currently drenching Jude moved over to the foliage planted along the far wall.
“I didn’t say you were bad,” Jude said irritatedly.
Solange didn’t answer, she just lifted an eyebrow before stepping back inside her home and closing the door, leaving them to see themselves out of her family’s courtyard and off their property.
Gillian and Jude resumed their walk toward the street, with no words spoken. Finally when Jude ventured another look toward Gillian, he couldn’t help but add to her grin with one of his own.
“She is more powerful than we ever expected,” Gillian said, still grinning.
“She just commanded the weather, Gillian. I never imagined such a thing was possible,” Jude said, clearly in awe.
“Let’s hope she joins us,” Gillian said.
“And let’s try not to piss her off if she does. It’ll cost me a fortune in dry cleaning if she keeps raining on me,” Jude said with a resigned smile of his own, clearly very impressed with Solange’s abilities.
~~~
Sometime later, Solange sat at the vanity in her bedroom, examining her reflection in the mirror. She opened her mouth as widely as she could, pulling her lips tight to examine her teeth. No pointed incisors, no elongated fangs. She leaned closer and peered at her blue eyes, using her thumb and forefinger to open her eye wider. Nope, no indication she was anything other than a young woman on the verge of starting her life on her own terms.
Solange reached behind her neck, unclasping the golden chain that held the bespelled cross and kept it securely on her person every day of her life. She felt the clasp open, and caught it in her hand, holding it up and watching it loop itself into her other palm as she carefully allowed it to fall into her opposite hand.
Then slowly she lifted her eyes to the mirror. She was expressionless as she leaned forward and lifted her lip again. There it was, not large, but very easily seen if you knew what you were looking for, her incisors had become somewhat more pointed and slightly enlongated.
Gradually she raised her eyes to take in the rest of her face reflected there in her vanity mirror. Her heart shaped face, her naturally pinked, plump lips, her flawless, pale complexion, and her heavily lashed eyes, fringed with lashes that were so dark and so long that she seldom bothered to wear mascara. Even now, in the shadows of the room, they perfectly framed her beautifully almond shaped, red glowing eyes.
Solange was so close to the mirror that her nose almost touched it. She could see herself reflected in it because she was half human, the same reason she could walk in the sunshine, eat garlic and collect crosses to the point of obsession. Had she been fully vampire, the mirror would not have cast her reflection. She looked deep into her own eyes — red since puberty. She looked deep inside herself, peering figuratively into her own heart, into her soul. She took a shaky, slow breath and spoke aloud. “I am not bad. Not all ‘others’ are bad.”
Solange reached behind her neck, refastening the chain that held her cross. She looked at herself in the mirror again, her blue eyes once again peering back at her. She smiled and saw no evidence of the small points of her incisors. “I may not be good, and I’m certainly cursed, but I’m not evil,” she whispered.
Chapter 7
The sounds of whimpering and the scent of fear hit Crispin hard as he wandered the streets of London. He was barely noticed as he kept to the shadows on his nightly hunt. His senses now alert to the target of his hunt, he closed his eyes, focused on the source of the whimpers and fear. Once he was sure of their origin, he teleported to the scene he hoped wasn’t as bad as his imagination and past experiences told him it could be.
As Crispin materialized in the darkened room, he looked around quickly to get his bearings. There were children huddled in a corner as one of his own terrorized them — no, that was wrong — this vampire was nothing like him, not anymore. This creature, this vampire that wreaked of death and decay, was evil beyond any level of the imagination. He was soulless, merciless, and brutal. And there he stood, holding an infant aloft by one leg, watching its squalling, crying, little face and its helplessly flailing arms and legs curiously.
“Put the babe down, Alastair,” Crispin said calmly from across the room.
Alastair glanced over his shoulder at Crispin, snarling at him like a wild animal, before returning his attention to the infant.
“You know that even you do not hunt infants. You told me yourself, ‘What’s the sport in one who cannot fight?’. Those were your words. Do you remember, Alastair?”
Crispin moved closer to the insane vampire carefully, intent on saving not only the baby, but all the children in this orphanage, though it would not be easy to do. Alastair had lost all sense of himself, his insanity taking him over the brink into an almost rabid state of being. The more brutal and senseless the kill, the more his inner demon was satisfied. There was little to nothing anyone could do to stop him. So, Crispin had made it his duty to track Alastair, as best as he could anyway, and try to intervene at each chance that presented itself. True, Alastair like all vampires needed to feed. But it was not necessary to decimate entire villages, entire families, even one person for that matter in order to sustain oneself. One could feed without causing death, but for the time being, until Crispin could find a way to contain Alastair, he’d accept one death at Alastair’s hands instead of many senseless kills just for the sake of killing, that had become Alastair’s preference.
“Leave me,” Alastair croaked, low and deadly as he brought the infant closer to himself.
“Have you truly fallen so low that you would rather bleed defenseless babes than those who make the hunt itself truly exhilarating?” Crispin asked haughtily.