Page 12 of Last Hope
“What are you staring at?”
She squealed and jumped as Antonio materialized beside her, staring at her with a raised eyebrow. “You scared me!”
“Noted,” he mumbled.
She rolled her eyes. “Has that been here the whole time?” Ezzy pointed to the ceiling, where the outline of the attic door was.
“Yes. I had important stuff stored up there after the house rennovations.” Antonio followed her gaze. “Did you just notice it?”
She glared at him for using a sarcastic tone but ignored the question. “So can we get a ladder to open it or something? I’m curious…”
He sighed but smiled. “So needy,” he teased and as quick and as swift as a panther, he jumped in the air, his long arm grabbing ahold of the knob and pulled it down with him as gravity took over, him landing gracefully on his feet. As the attic door opened, a long staircase fell down with it, along with dust and spiders, in front of Esmeralda.
“It’s cool how you do that,” Esmeralda complimented. “I wish I could jump that high.”
“And again I say, so needy. So you gonna go up or what?”
Esmeralda stared down at the spiders that had fallen from the ceiling and shuddered. She had never liked spiders; they were one of the many things she was afraid of, that and Rogues.
Which was ridiculous considering she had faced down Damien Santiago when he tried changing her, been attacked by Rogues and battled in Caesareon’s war while she was pregnant. It was actually rather foolish for her to be afraid of the dark, she thought, and spiders…
She shuddered.
“I’ll go up first, if it makes you feel better.” He winked at her before bounding up the stairs. They creaked under the weight of his heavy boots and Ezzy felt as though the steps would break beneath him. “You coming up or what?” he called after her. Taking a deep breath, she followed him.
When she reached the top step, Antonio reached a hand out to help pull her up into the small opening and into the darkness. Esmeralda blinked a few times in an attempt to adjust to her surroundings.
“Uhm, care to turn on a light,” she demanded when she stubbed her toe against something hard. “For those of us withhumaneyesight?”
“You need to calm down,querida.”
A light blinked on and Esmeralda looked around the room. A small light bulb hung from the ceiling above Antonio’s head, illuminating his figure. He was in his dark leather jacket with a burgundy T-shirt and dark pants, a smile of accomplishment on his face.
“Wipe that look off your face, Santiago.” She stuck her tongue out at him and then took a look around the room. There were boxes covered in cobwebs stacked on top of each other practically over every inch of the room, leaving very little space to move around in.
“Are you planning on digging through each box until you find something interesting?”
“Probably.” Esmeralda went over to a corner and grabbed a box at random. “I’ll start with this one.”
“Yeah, well, while you have fun up here I’m going to go pack for the trip. If you need anything just yell for me, okay?” He bent down and pressed a quick kiss to her forehead before heading back down the attic stairs.
Smiling to herself, Esmeralda took the box and sat on the floor, ignoring the dust, and began to open it. Inside of it were a bunch of records, cassettes, and CDs. Ezzy, now curious, began looking through the titles. There were classic symphonies, jazz, and the blues. All of her father’s favorite selections in front of her. She knew her father had been a musician, knew that music ran through her blood but she’d never known what his favorite songs were.
This was a part of her parents’ past.
Katheryn and Ignacio had been friends with Antonio for years; Katheryn had met both of them on a trip to Spain and she had fallen in love with Ignacio, who left his home country for America to be with Katheryn and, Antonio, not wanting to be left without his best friend, followed close behind.
Unfortunately, in America, the Blood Drug craze had become practically an epidemic and when Katheryn began working on a cure for the virus, a bounty had been put on their heads by none other than Damien Santiago, Antonio’s twin brother. He had succeeded in killing her parents, leaving her an orphan at the age of eight.
Before their death, however, they had succeeded in creating a cure and they hid it in a place that not even Damien Santiago could find: inside of Esmeralda’s own blood.
She would have remembered the location of the cure, were it not for the fact that when Damien pulled her out of the mahogany closet the night her parents were killed, he had also put a mind block on her, making her forget everything about her parents.
When Damien had made an attempt to change her, he had taken the block from her mind and all of her memories came rushing back. But they were only memories in the mind of an eight year old child, and there weren’t that many. Needless to say, she wished to know more about them.
Without wasting another minute, Esmeralda began pulling the CDs out, one by one, reading the title of each. Most of contained classical music, names she recognized like Beethoven and Mozart, and then there were ones that she had never even heard of before. Carefully, she set the music to the side, one on top of the other until she reached something even more interesting.
It was a small wooden mahogany box, much like the color of the closet she hid inside of on that dreaded night years ago; red, like the blood that vampires liked to feast upon. Gingerly, she pulled it out of the cardboard box and set it on her lap in front of her. She looked down at it, it was probably a music box, she thought with interest.
