Chapter 20

It felt as if only seconds had passed between closing my eyes and opening them again. I was still exhausted and I didn’t want to get up but it was hard to disobey Alizya. She was always so insistent and pushy.

The rest of the days went by in a blur. I remember Alizya guiding me through meditation and I remember controlling the flame but I was still so tired that everything else felt less important. So I did the bare minimum with her until she finally gave up and left me in peace.

At night I had nightmares that would fade the moment I opened my eyes. On the third occurrence, Alizya spelled a notebook to record all of my dreams so that I could read what had happened and interpret them. The dreams weren’t pretty.

There was death and bloodshed by my own hands.

There were fights with Warren. Always shouting, never physical because he knew that I would destroy him if I was given the chance.

There was Kris’s brother in a hotel room.

There was pain and frustration in a training room with either Kris or Leo.

There were never any answers to my missing memories.

Reliving the dreams every morning made my skin crawl and brought tears to my eyes.

On the fifth day, Kris arrived with blood in a briefcase. I could smell it the moment he pulled up to the house in his car. He didn’t even have to open the car door but he did and he knocked on the door politely only for Alizya to hiss at him.

“I told you not to bring that. She has been fine since we started training,” Alizya scolded.

“She’s a vampire; she needs to feed.”

I stood there in the hallway, not looking at Kris as he entered the safehouse, a bit terrified of the feeling in my gut yelling for blood. Then the confusion rolled in and I didn’t know whether I wanted blood or physically needed it. Was it possible to survive without blood?

“She’ll be fine without it. Go do whatever it is you’re going to do with her,” Alizya continued, before waving us off as she headed up to the library.

Kris rolled his eyes and motioned for me to follow him to the garage. I obeyed slowly, unsure about the blood he carried or what he wanted with me in the garage. He set the case near the door as we came through it and ran me through fundamental training as if he thought I had forgotten. He tried to push me harder through some kind of imagined routine but I kept looking over at the briefcase, distracted.

I took his left hook to the jaw, knocking me to the floor before he stopped pushing me through the routine.

“Raven! Where’s your head? You know how to do this,” he exclaimed.

I looked up at him, acutely aware that the space between me and the briefcase containing blood had shrunk. If I turned around or even just slid a hand back across the concrete floor, I could have touched it.

“I know you can do better, Raven. Tell me what’s going on in that head of yours.”

I looked over my shoulder to confirm the proximity of the briefcase then couldn’t look back at him. I couldn’t peel my eyes from it. I was having a hard enough time holding myself back from grabbing it and tearing into it already. One tiny movement could have made me lose the concentration it took to keep my hands off it.

Kris sighed. “Go ahead. I knew you needed it before we began.”

Permission granted, I snatched up the briefcase and pried it open only to find a handful of long skinny vials. Disappointment only held me for a fraction of a second, before I was yanking off the stopper with my teeth and dumping the contents of the vial onto my tongue. I held the vial over my mouth to get every drop I could before melting into the pavement floor like a drug addict getting their fix for the first time in a long time.

To my pleasant surprise, I didn’t burst into the flames of uncontrolled magic the moment I relaxed. I was nothing more than a puddle of bliss on the cool concrete.

“Feel better?” he teased.

I nodded, my eyes closed.

“Can we try again, now that you’ve had a drink?”

I jumped to my feet instantly with a smile on my face, going after him to demonstrate that I was beyond the fundamentals. He let me hit him hard but easily tossed me aside, beginning a tussle that made Alizya come to investigate.

“What’s going on in here?” she shouted from the doorway, terror etched over her wrinkled face. “I thought you were taking it easy on her to begin. She’s not one of your soldiers.”

I snorted as I let Kris push me off of him and onto the floor.

“She’s fine. She just needed some blood.”

Alizya came to my side as if I were mortally wounded. Laughing, I waved her off and got to my feet on my own. “I’m fine, stop fussing!”

Then they looked at each other and I knew Kris was being sent away.

“Can he stay a little longer? I was having fun.”

Alizya shook her head. “Kris needs to get back. They will be calling any minute now. You and I need to do some more training with your magic.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes, feeling like a child who wasn’t old enough yet to make their own decisions. I didn’t want to be inside, hiding anymore.

Kris’s phone rang in his pocket as if on cue the next moment. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said before disappearing.

“You two are no fun,” I complained.

Alizya bent over and collected the briefcase from the floor, holding it to her chest as if it were a dangerous weapon. There were three more vials in it and she was going to keep them from me the best she could.