I wasn’t hungry anymore. With all the stomachaches I was getting lately, I wondered if I was getting an ulcer.

“Gemma are you okay? You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “My stomach just feels a little queasy.”

“Food looks that bad, huh?” He joked, trying to lighten the mood.

I summoned a small smile. “No, it looks really good.” I took a bite. It did taste good.

Laylen scrapped the leftover bits and pieces of egg out of the pan and into the garbage, and then rinsed the pan off in the sink.

“You’re not eating,” I asked, scooping up another forkful of eggs.

He shut off the faucet. “No…I don’t eat.”

“Oh.” I felt so stupid. Of course he didn’t eat. He was a vampire after all. “Gotcha.”

I ate my eggs and watched him with curiosity as he wiped down the countertops and stove. If you’d have asked me a day ago whether I would’ve ever thought that I’d be sitting in the kitchen with a vampire, eating eggs, all while trying to unravel the secrets that belonged to a group of people whose mission it was to save the world, I’d have told you no. Then I would’ve run for my life because I’d have thought you were a total psychopath.

“Laylen,” I dragged my fork through my eggs. “Can I ask you a question?”

He tossed aside the towel he’d been wiping the counters off with and turned to face me. “Sure. What’s up?”

I hoped I wasn’t crossing a line here. “How exactly did you get turned in to a vampire?”

He crossed his arms over his chest, muscles flexing, and leaned back against the counter, looking confused. “I don’t….I can’t remember.”

“Is that how it normally works?” I shoved another forkful of eggs into my mouth.

He shook his head. “Memory loss isn’t a side effect from getting bit. Something else had to of happened to me…the only thing I can remember about that night is coming out of a club alone and thinking I heard a noise from behind me. When I turned around, everything went black.  I’m not sure if I blacked out or what, but when I did come to, I was sprawled out in alley with a bite mark on my neck.” He pointed at the immortality mark on his forearm. “And of course this lovely little thing was on my arm. It took me a few days before I figured out I’d been bitten by a vampire. I started getting all of these weird…cravings. But luckily, because I was a Keeper to begin with, the cravings were fairly easy to control.” He made his way around the island and took a seat on a barstool next to mine. “What’s really strange is that I’ve been told by other vampires that the change is supposed to be this big, memorable experience, yet I can’t remember a single thing about it.”

I had a flashback to when Alex had opened up one of shoji doors back at the Black Dungeon, and I’d witnessed the vampire about to bite the seemingly willing man. My gut instinct told me not to ask, but curiosity got the best of me. “Do humans let vampires bite them?”

His eyes widened. “Wha—why would you ask that?”

They say curiosity killed the cat. “Because when we were in the Black Dungeon, and Alex and I were running from the Death Walkers, he opened a door and there was a woman vampire getting ready to bite a man. And the man seemed…well, he seemed really relaxed for someone who was just about to get bit.”

By the look on his face, I could tell I was making him uncomfortable. “Yeah…some people do.”

“Why?” I scrapped the last of my eggs off of my plate. “Wouldn’t that mean they’d turn into a vampire themselves.”

He shook his head. “That’s not how it works. They’d have to bite you, and then you’d have to drink their blood. Really, it’s this whole big ordeal. See, and there’s another problem with me turning into a vampire. I know I wouldn’t voluntarily drink vampire’s blood.”

“That does seem strange...” About as strange as me not being able to remember the details of my life. Hmmm…are we seeing a connection here? “So when you turned into a vampire, did you have to die or anything?” The reason I’d asked was because in a few of the vampire-themed books I’ve read, the humans who would drink the vampires blood would have to die right after in order to turn into one.

“No, I had to die,” he said charily.

I choked on my eggs, bits and pieces spewing from my mouth and nose. Ewe…so gross. “You died?” I coughed.

“Yeah, but I don’t remember that part either. I just know that I had to die in order to be what I am now,” he said with a matter-of-fact attitude.

I eyed him over, taking note of his pale skin, his extremely red lips, and his abnormally bright blue eyes. As bad as this was going to sound, I had to admit, for a dead guy, he looked pretty good.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “So I still don’t get it. Why would someone let a vampire bite them?”

He gave a quiet laugh. “You really ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“Sorry,” I said, feeling stupid.

“No, it’s okay.” He took a deep breath, which puzzled me. I mean if he was dead, then why was he breathing? But since he’d just pointed out that I ask a lot of questions, I decided to stick a tack in that one for now. “Human’s let vampires bite them for a few different reasons. There’s the whole thrill of the danger that being bit brings. Sometimes it’s out of sheer curiosity. But most of the time, people do it to stimulate their…desires”

Okay, so I’ve felt embarrassed before, but never absolutely mortified. Wow. It had been awhile since I’d felt the prickle. I could feel my face heating up, so I let pieces of my hair drift down across my face.

“Yeah…so anyways,” Laylen said, in an attempt to change the subject and remove the awkward silence that had gripped the air. “Going back to that prickle thing you were talking about. Do you feel it every time you experience an emotion? Or does it just happen every once and awhile?”

“It only happens when I experience a new emotion,” I told him and then shivered, suddenly feeling cold.

He considered this. “Hmm…I don’t think I’ve heard of anything like that. But seeing as that there are hundreds of different forms of magic out there, there are a lot of things I haven’t heard of.”

“So how can we find out?” I shivered again. It was getting really cold.

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you cold?”

I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. “I’m freezing. Aren’t you?”

“I always run cold.” He glanced around the kitchen, and then he jumped up from the stool and sprinted over to the window.

“What are you looking at?” I stood up and walked over beside him. “Is there something out there?”

“What the—” He jumped back, curse words flying. “How the heck did they find us?”

“What are you…Oh!” I panicked. “The Death Walkers are here!”

He looked at me, his beautiful bright blues eyes flooding with a sea of fear. “Yeah, there right outside.”

Chapter 24

“Shouldn’t we be hiding or something?” I asked Laylen.

After discovering a swarm of Death Walkers marching across the desert toward the house, Laylen had grabbed me by the arm and sprinted down the hall back to the room where Alex and Aislin had transported from. Then he’d started throwing books off of the shelves. What was the purpose of this, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe he was having a momentarily lapse in sanity—too much stress or something. I don’t know

But what I did know was that I was freaking out.

“Laylen!” I hollered over the thudding of the books hitting the floor. “What are you doing?!” A book flew straight at me, and I had to dodge to the side to avoid getting smacked in the face by it.

“There’s a key somewhere around here…” He glanced inside a book and tossed it on the floor, “To a trapdoor just below that rug.” He nodded at a black and red checkered rug on the floor. “We can hide you there until…” He chucked a book over his shoulder and it landed on the floor right in front of my feet.

“Until what?”  I asked anxiously. Jeez, would he just finish a sentence already. There were tons of Death Walkers heading right for us, burning with the desire to kill me.

He ripped an old leather-bound book from the shelf and flipped it open. “Until I can lead them away from here…get you out of dan…” His blue eyes lit up as he plucked a small, silver object out of the inside of the cover. He dropped the book on the floor and hurried over to me. “Here we go.” He held up the silver object, which as it turned out was a key.

“What’s it for?” I asked, my voice taking on that high, pitchy sound that seemed to come out whenever I was in a stressful situation. I flitted a quick glance over at the window, wondering how close the Death walkers were, but couldn’t see anything because of the curtains. “Laylen, I really think—”

“Just a second.” He went over to the rug and flipped it over. There was a small square carved in the hardwood floor that had a key hole and an indent for a handle. It looked like one of those trapdoors used on stages back in the olden days. He knelt down and slipped the key into the keyhole. Click and then he raised the door up. “Hurry up and get inside.”

Was he kidding me? I stared down at the mysterious dark hole, my feet glued to the floor. “You want me to do what?”

“Get inside and hide.”

I stole a glance back at the curtain-covered widow. The air was getting chillier by the second. Goose bumps dotted my arms and legs. They had to be getting close.

“Gemma.” The sound of Laylen’s angry voice snapped my attention away from the window and back to him.

“But what are you going to do?” I asked.

He gave me a duh look, and I understood. He was going to stay up here and fight while I hid like a coward. My gut twisted with guilt just like it had back at the Black Dungeon when Alex and I had run away and left Aislin and Laylen behind.

I started to argue. “But I—”

He cut me off. “Look, I know it’s hard—always being the one who has to hide. But that’s just the way it has to be. You can’t change who you are no matter how much you want to. Trust me.”

“This isn’t right.” I told him.

Ignoring what I said, he held out the key for me to take. “This key also locks the door from the inside. Make sure you lock it when you get in.”

Frowning, I snatched the key from him, stomped over to the trapdoor, and sat down on the floor with my legs dangling in the hole. “I still don’t think this is right,” I said as I lowered myself down into the hole.

It was dark inside, and the ceiling brushed the top of my head. If I’d been a sufferer of claustrophobia, I’d have been in trouble.

Thankfully, I wasn’t.