Page 141 of The Midnight Order
“You do not become a part of our community until you’re baptized into the church. You don’t exist until you are. But if they were trying to hide you…”
“Why did they baptize me?”
He finally breaks his eyes away from the page. “That’s what we need to figure out. Where is this box you found now?”
“Upstairs still. I didn’t go through anything else.”
“Good. It’s probably best to do so together and in a safe space.”
“Safe?” My voice cracks.
“Someone drugged you and, in turn, drugged us. Someone knows we’re close to something bigger than us. We need to secure whatever you’ve found. Also, some of these pages are bound to be very old. To maintain their integrity, they need to be in a dry, acrid space.”
He’s making complete sense, but something in my chest urges me to hoard the documents. To tell him to fuck off and hide them away.
“In the hidden room, then?” I ask him.
“The hidden room?”
“In the manor. The one with a key and everything from your past lives.”
His eyes narrow. “Who took you there? How do you know about that?”
“Jasper took me. He wanted me to see what triggering my gene could do. Wanted me to see how many lives you’ve lived.”
“He doesn’t want you to feed,” he whispers, looking down at the document in his hand as if it’s growing heavier by the moment.
“He didn’t seem like it, no.”
“He’s always been the wisest of us.”
He hands my baptism record back to me and takes a step down the stairs away from me, and I feel like the gesture allows me to take the first deep breath I’ve been able to since I opened that damned box.
“What you do with the contents of that box is up to you.” His tone is guarded and sharp, and I feel my lip warble at the change.
Telling him what Jasper said to me has triggered a change in him, and I don’t like it.
“You don’t want me to change either?” I forget the paper, letting the hand that holds it drop to my side. “If I start the testing all over again, do you even want to know if I’m the key to the curse? Will you refuse to test me again? Is this all for naught?”
He takes another step back. “Silver, you know I can’t partake of your blood.”
“I know little about you, Lowell. You won’t let me in!” I know my voice will carry to the other vampires I can feel lurking in the woods beyond the house, but I don’t care.
A whoosh of air deposits Lowell nose-to-nose with me. “The last time I let someone in, I nearly died!
“Lowell, I would never…” My voice is cut off by his hand surrounding my throat.
“You don’t know that. You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep, little lamb. You don’t know who you’ll become when your undead heart beats for the first time. One can never know.”
It’s the first time any of them have let on that the change will do more than just give me fangs.
Knowing that triggering the gene will changemehas me questioning if I’d ever do so for the first time since I found out about it.
Even if it’s who I am at my very center, I have a choice.
“I can’t lose you, little lamb,” Lowell whispers, pressing his forehead against mine, and the emotion in his tone clenches my heart in its grip like a vise.
“You won’t.”
