Page 30 of Secret of the Vampire
She came to walk beside me, and we headed in the direction of the garden district. She didn’t say anything else for almost a block, and I imagined she was getting her thoughts together. I enjoyed the peace while it lasted. I loved my aunt, and I knew she loved me, but as the head witch of our coven, she sometimes enjoyed the rank of her position a little too much.
However, when she did finally start talking, it wasn’t at all what I’d expected.
“He’s here, isn’t he? The djinn.” She kept her voice down to barely above a whisper.
“Yes.”
She made an affirmative. “I thought I felt something.” She glanced over at me. “Has he approached you?”
“Yes.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “What did he tell you, Alex?”
“That he was my uncle. Well,” I amended. “My great-great uncle, I believe is what he said.”
She glanced over at me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Didn’t warn you. Youandyour sister. I should have, and that’s on me.”
“You’ve known all this time?” My voice was full of all of the disbelief and betrayal I was feeling.
“I did,” she told me. “And I should have told you,” she repeated.
“Why didn’t you?” I noticed we were heading to her house, not my apartment.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because I was hoping he wouldn’t find us. Or that he wouldn’t care enough to.”
“So, it’s true?” I asked her after a pause. “He is my uncle?” Even though I felt the djinn was telling me the truth when he’d told me, I still wanted the confirmation of someone I trusted.
“It’s true,” she told me.
My next inhale was shaky. I’d been sitting on this info for a few days now, and I’d known there was something different about me and Alice, but somehow it hadn’t seemed real until just this very moment. I’d hoped there was some kind of reasonable explanation. “Well…fuck.”
“I really am sorry,” she told me. “For not telling you.”
I didn’t respond. Yeah, she should’ve fucking said something. She’d had plenty of chances, especially after our mother died. But I could understand why she didn’t.
“So, what did he say to you other than to tell you who he is?”
“He wants me and Alice to come north with him.”
It was a few seconds before she could ask, “And what are you both going to do?”
I frowned as I glanced over at her. “What do you mean? Am I going with him?”
She nodded.
I opened my mouth to ask her how she could even think that I would do such a thing, but then I snapped it shut again. I’d never really considered what it would mean for me to take him up on his offer because I couldn’t see past the fact that he’d tried to kill Kenya. I still didn’t see how I could ever willingly be anywhere near that guy. That he was family didn’t mean shit to me.
But I hadn’t thought about the fact that he was the only one who shared this power I had inside of me. That Alice had inside of her. Which meant he was the only one who could teach us how to control it. How to use it. How to live with it. “I don’t know,” I told her in all honesty. “I hadn’t thought about it until just now. I haven’t even told Alice yet.”
“Because you’re too worried about Kenya,” she stated.
“Yes,” I told her.
We walked in silence for another few minutes. Then she asked, “Do the vampires know you broke our pact by encroaching on their territory?”
I scoffed at her choice of words. “I wasn’t encroaching.”
“You were in The Quarter, which is the safe zone allotted to them in our pact. The Garden District is ours. Unless permission is granted by the other party, we are to stay within our own territories or the neutral zone in between. Did you have permission from the vampires? From Killian?”
