Rath’s eyes grow distant and dark. There’s anger there. Hate. Regret.
“It was just as the sun was coming up,” he begins. “Your father was preparing to go to sleep. I was just waking, still in the workers house.” He stops talking for a while. Takes a few slow breaths. “Someone broke in. Got past the security systems. They staked your father and drug his body out into the sun as he lay dying. I arrived at the scene as he took his last breath.”
Rath holds a fork in his hands, and he’s now bent it completely in half.
“I should have chased the attacker down, ended them. But I was…not in my right mind, after I found Henry. They got away.”
“Who was it?” Ian asks. His voice is low and serious. “Someone from the House?”
Rath shakes his head. “I did not recognize the attacker. The fact that they were able to take Henry down so easily says a great deal, though.”
He suddenly slaps the destroyed fork on the table, and I jump violently.
The message is clear. We are done talking about my father’s death.
“Okay,” I say, because it is obviously time to move onto something new. “Um…what about the turning into a bat thing?”
“Rumor,” Ian tells me with a slight roll of his eyes. He too seems to understand that the previous conversation is finished. “A seriously stupid one.”
“Okay,” I say with a nod of my head. “You said the stake through the heart is true. The beheading thing has to be, as well.”
Ian nods in confirmation.
“What about the sun?” I ask. “Do they really burn up in the sun?” I try not to think about how the attacker dragged my father out into the sunlight and what must have happened to him.
“Not like you’d think,” Rath says with a bit of a sigh. “The vampires have an extreme aversion to the sun because when they turn, their eyes change. We do not understand the science behind what the King put in his concoction that created the species, but it is a mix of predator DNA. They take good and bad traits from many different hunters. Vampires do love the night particularly because their eyes stay almost completely dilated. You could compare them much to a bat, I suppose. They can see almost perfectly at night. But because of the dilation, their eyes can not stand much sun.”
“They can go out during the day,” Ian says. “But not without some serious shades and a killer headache.”
“But no burning skin?” I ask.
“No burning, flaming bodies,” he says, that mischievous smile returning as he shakes his head. “They’re fast, strong like a bear, tough as a rhino, and quiet as cats. They really are the evolution of the perfect predator.”
I nod, feeling like I’m starting to get a small grasp on this whole thing. “Okay, so the Born are immortal, the Bitten age as normal. Both can be killed with a stake to the heart or a quick beheading. There’s a King who sounds pretty badass. My father was a Born vampire, my mother was a human, which means when I die…” My words slow as all the puzzle pieces start falling into their right order. “I’m not really going to die…”
I say this last part slowly because it’s only now that I’m starting to realize the impact of what I just said.
“I’m going to be a vampire someday,” I breathe.
“I’m afraid so,” Rath says quietly.
But it’s Ian who surprises me when I look up. His eyes are intense and dark and conflicted.
There’s so much to him that I don’t understand.
“Alright,” I say with a deep breath. “Anything I’m missing?”
This brings the smile back to Ian’s face. “Oh, baby doll, we’ve barely scratched the surface.”
“THE BAGS ARE PACKED,” BETH, one of the housekeepers, interrupts the all too quiet dining room. I turn to see her not quite looking at any of us, holding a packed suitcase in her hands.
“Thank you,” Rath says. She gives an uncomfortable smile, leaves the bag on the floor, and leaves.
I turn questioning eyes on Rath, who stares at me for a bit longer than he should to be innocent.
“Mr. Ward and I talked last night while you slept and came to a decision,” Rath starts. He places his elbows on the table and laces his fingers together. “As he mentioned last night, there is no way the House won’t hear about your attack. They will come for you and while I don’t believe it will be to the extreme that Ian does, they will sway you with you being so uninformed, and I know your father wouldn’t have wanted that.”
“What do you mean by house?” I ask, every survival instinct in me perking up. I don’t like where this is heading.