The Heart's Ashes
Page 57

“My God. Why?” Her lip turned up; Mike laughed aloud.
“It’s better than you think,” I said; David added nothing. He didn’t need to defend what we did. Neither did I, but at the same time, I also did. In the daylight, I couldn’t see any sense in it either.
“So, if you’re a vampire—” she pointed to David, “does that mean Ja—”
“Yes,” David said, keeping his serious eyes on her.
“Jason was a vampire, too?” she confirmed.
“Yes,” I said as well.
“How come you’re not then, Ara?”
Everyone went quiet.
“She can’t be changed.” Mike finally said it for me.
“Why?”
“You have to have a specific gene.”
Her face folded in confusion. “Is that why you left her, David? Because she doesn’t have the gene?”
He nodded.
She sighed, rolling back into Mike’s arms. “That makes so much more sense—all those things you told me, Ara, about it not being your choice to be apart.” She considered then, for a second. “Wait, how do you know you don’t have the right gene?”
“It’s not why he left you, Emily.” David answered the question she obviously truly wanted to ask.
“Who?” Mike asked.
“Jason,” I said, more familiar with the way David would start conversations not usually based on spoken words.
Emily looked down. “Then, why did he leave?”
“I couldn’t say,” David lied, and it was so obvious he was lying that even Emily frowned, but she clearly chose to accept that for now and turned to me.
“Ara, did you know Jason was a vampire—when we talked in your room that day—when I told you about him leaving me?”
“Yes.”
“You could have told me.” She folded her arms.
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“I’m not allowed to tell anyone. I almost did.” David looked up at me quickly; I took his hand, reassuring him. “But I couldn’t.”
Emily nodded and looked more closely at my face, then my neck—both sides.
David stiffened. “Yes,” he said unexpectedly.
She glared at him. “What’s yes?”
“Yes, a vampire attacked Ara last year.”
She covered her mouth, her eyes tearing. “Oh, Ara. I’m so sorry. Wait—how did you know what I was thinking, David?”
His crooked smile gave him away; Emily’s face went blank and pale before crimson rose up in her cheeks. “Have you always been able to do that?”
His smile became wider, his head moving in a yes.
“Oh, God.” We all heard the shame she tried to hide behind her hands. “Oh, my God!”
David and Mike both laughed.
I didn’t, because I knew exactly how she felt.
“And—can he read your thoughts too, Ara?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, my God! How embarrassing.”
“Trust me, I know.”
“So, you’re not like Bella then? You know, you don’t, like, have a shield?”
We all laughed, well, except Mike, who never read Twilight. “Um, no.”
I think David was rather amused at the fact that Emily could no longer look at him; I wondered exactly what she’d been thinking about him in the past that would mortify her that much. And I think Mike wondered the same thing, but didn’t make it obvious.
Then Emily asked the question we had all asked once, the question no one wanted to answer. “So, where were you, David, while Ara was being tortured?”
He nodded to himself. “I...was at a meeting.”
“A meeting?” her voice almost made her head fly off with incredulity. “A meeting! While my best friend was being—”
“Em.” Mike wrapped her tighter. “Stop.”
“But. But that isn’t fair. What good is a vampire boyfriend if he can’t protect you?”
“Em,” Mike said again.
I felt her small sliver of hatred for David pass over the room then.
David looked down.
“It’s not his fault.” I said, defensive. “He had no idea Jason was capable of tha—” I gasped my words to a stop.
Emily looked up, eyes wide, lips open. “Jason? My Jason?”
A great hole tore into Mike’s world; he covered his mouth, wiping a hand over his chin as he closed his eyes and turned his face away.
The heat of rage boiled through him, floating easily past Emily, wrapping my shoulders with a sudden rush of dread, fear and regret.
This was not the way I wanted him to find that out.
I pulled the bloodstained sheet closer and sat with my legs crossed under me. “Yes, Em—the same Jason.”
“You knew? All this time—” She stared at me, heartache behind her tear-filled eyes. “You knew who it was, and you never told me?” She looked at David then. “What happened to him? What made him hurt so bad that he’d do that?”
“Em?” Mike tried to turn her around.
“No!” She shoved him off. “You don’t know him. He’s not capable of that. He would never—”
“He did, Em.” David nodded, his voice flooding with sympathy.
“But...no. No, you got it wrong, he isn’t like that.”
“I know, Emily. Okay, I know it’s hard to understand, but he did, and that’s all there is to it.”
“But, I—” She touched her cheek with the very tips of her fingers. “I can see his face so clearly; see how he looked at me, held me. He’d never, never do something as horrific as what was done to you.”
I felt David cringe beside me.
“He snapped.” I shook my head to myself, going a little numb, struggling to understand the two versions I knew of this guy. “When he did that to me, Emily, it wasn’t the Jason you knew.”
“How can you say that! How can you sit there, next to him—” she stood, pointing at David, “and excuse this? Any of this. He needs to leave. He needs to go and never come back!”
“Emily, stop it, okay.”
“No! You can’t just forgive him, Ara. He let you get hurt. Don’t you see? Am I the only one that sees?”
I looked at Mike, who had not made eye contact with me since the truth about Jason slipped out. He sat tall, his arms crossed, his lips thin over a tight jaw. The last time I saw him look that mad was the night I showed up drunk at his house when I was seventeen.