Vampire Music

VAMPIRE MUSIC

by Michelle DePaepe

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

Michelle DePaepe on Smashwords

Copyright © 2012 by Michelle DePaepe

Smashword Edition License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

Summary

Kristal falls in love with Saxon the first day she lays eyes on him, but someone or something is torturing him, and she fears for his life. Though he becomes a major source of joy in her life, the stress of her parents’ divorce, and her own demons begin to drive her into the dangerous arms of anorexia. Their relationship is going well when Saxon’s uncle from Romania sends him an electric guitar for his sixteenth birthday, but just a few months later, on Valentine’s night, he mysteriously disappears. Three years later, he comes back changed. He’s a successful musician in a band called Dragos; he also wants nothing to do with her. Kristal is heartbroken, but even though her body is weakened, her will is not. She vows to find out the mystery behind Saxon’s changed behavior. Even learning that he is part vampire is no deterrent to her quest to be with him. On the night of what may be his final concert, they face the greatest challenge to their love...and their continued existence. Neither one is prepared for the showdown with the Dark Ones.

PART I

Chapter 1

In April in southeast Texas, rains don’t bring May flowers—they bring crackling black skies and torrents that fall like rivers pouring from some cosmic mouth. Water fills the ditches to their banks and lightning kisses them with magical energy that cooks up a green primordial soup, teaming with life.

Forgetting about breakfast, I was ready with my plastic buckets on Saturday morning when the sun slashed its way back through the clouds, and a rainbow beckoned me outside. My hot pink galoshes had tiny black skulls on them, and as cool as they were, I was ready to muck them up good.

Going fishing? my mother said, with her nose peeking over her laptop on the kitchen table.

I pretended not to hear her as I walked towards the front door. I knew what came next…

Kristal…don’t bring them in the house.

I slipped out the door, thinking that if my dad was home, I wouldn’t get a scolding for keeping a bucket or two in my room, at least not until my new pets started hopping out of them. He was gone a lot these days, traveling for his business. I missed him, but when he was gone I liked not having to tiptoe around the house like it was a battlefield, dodging verbal arrows and missiles.

When I stepped onto my front porch, the air outside was muggy and smelled like pine and mildew. I looked down the road towards my destination. It was the skeleton of a former house, halfway down my block, on the other side of the street. Its charred timbers were a daily reminder of the tragedy that had happened there eight years back. I was only six then, but I still remembered the sirens, the flashing lights, and the firemen frantically trying to put out the flames. No one ever told me what had caused it even if they had figured that out. All I knew was that the family didn’t rebuild; they left its black bones behind and fled to start life anew somewhere else.

Even though the place was kind of like a graveyard, I loved it because the cattails, wild grasses, and Godzilla-like weeds on the property made a great haven for wildlife…and my imagination.

Sunlight gleamed like diamonds as it reflected off the water in the ditch out front. As I walked towards it, it seemed to beckon me like a spotlight flashing in my eyes. My excitement didn’t last long though. When I reached my favorite fishing hole, I saw an immediate monkey wrench in my plan to spend the next hour capturing tadpoles and the ones that already had tiny legs that I called in-betweenies.

There was an intruder in my fantasyland.

He was bent over in the middle of the ditch, standing perfectly still, and at first I thought he was a statue. He wore a pale blue t-shirt, a black bandana around his neck, and shorts with knee-high galoshes; there were whitish-blond curls framing his dark eyebrows, and his complexion was as pale as the mushrooms that had sprouted overnight on the banks of the ditch. As I approached, he suddenly thrust his hands into water.

You can’t catch them with your hands, I said, rolling my eyes. They’re too fast. Any idiot knew you had to sink a bucket in and catch them off guard when they swam into it.

Really? He held his cupped hands up and showed me the fat black wriggly inside.

How’d you do that?

Lots of practice. He leaned over and dumped the tadpole into his metal pail on the bank.

As he straightened up to his full height, he was easily three inches taller than me, and I guessed that he was least a year or two older. He stared at me with amber eyes that had brilliant gold flecks and a strange rim of red around them.

How come I’ve never seen you before? You don’t live around here.

I do now. We just moved here from Baton Rouge. I’m at the end of the street, he said as he pointed. Tan house on the right.

It dawned on me that I’d seen a moving van down that way a few days ago before the rains started. I’d been hoping that someone was moving in who had a girl about my age, someone who liked to play computer games and go shopping at the mall, but any newcomer was surely preferable to the grumpy old Petersens who had lived there before behind thickets of Wax Myrtle and Blackhaw and had never given out candy on Halloween—not even once.

What’s your name?

Saxon.

Cool name, I said, imagining he was descended from a clan of medieval knights who rode on big white horses and saved damsels in distress. That was the beginning of my inner fairy tale about him anyway. Maybe he would get the first human role in my next frog play. Each four-legged actor got a name like Prince Charming or Guinevere, but Saxon could keep his own name, because it already had a mythical sound to it.

What’s yours?

Kristal.

That’s pretty, he said before he turned his attention back to the water.

My face flushed as I realized that my heart was fluttering. It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced that sensation. I was close to finishing the eighth grade and was no stranger to the chemical reaction that a cute boy could cause. I was seven the first time it happened. When Jaime Cortez gave me a large ring with a fat silver band and an aqua-colored gemstone and told me that it was a diamond engagement ring, I knew that it had probably been pilfered from his father’s dresser, but my heart fluttered all the same. (It stopped fluttering on the afternoon that I threw the ring at him after recess, and he told Becca that he’d wash it off and give it to her.) I’d had half a dozen crushes since then, so at the wise old age of fourteen, I knew that Saxon would probably be just another blip on the radar of infatuation.

Even so, I found myself staring at him. There was something unusual about his delicate appearance—something odd like a rare extinct bird that you only see in a museum, because they had been too fragile to compete with the rest of the species.

He returned to his quest, and I forced myself to tear my eyes away from him so I could catch my first tadpole. After all, that’s why I was here, wasn’t I? I hadn’t set out to waste my day by flirting with someone who either wasn’t interested…or was destined to break my heart.

There were hundreds of black wigglies in the shallow area, but every time I tried to catch one with my hands like he did, it darted away. Saxon was already on his fourth trip to his pail. His seemingly effortless success made me mad at first, but then I had to admit that I probably wasn’t holding my hands still enough, because my legs kept wobbling as I snuck glances at him. Of course that meant that it was his fault. You’re stirring up the water. You’re scaring them!

He ignored me as he kept fishing. After a few minutes, his bucket had the entire cast of Cinderella in it, and mine was still empty.

Crap! I said as I missed a huge bullfrog baby that already had its first stubby legs.

You can do it. Cup your hands like this and hold them under the water. Now…stay very still. After a minute, they’ll think you’re just a part of everything around them and come right up to you.

I tried it again and was surprised when a dozen tadpoles wiggled right over my hands, allowing me to scoop them up before they knew what was coming. Before long, I had enough cast members to produce a half dozen Broadway shows.

After setting our haul in the shade, we entertained ourselves by freeing the down from cattails and blowing it into the wind like dandelion fluff. I told him what little I knew about the charred house and what had happened there. He countered with a theory that it had become infested with monsters, and the family had burned it down to get rid of them. I wasn’t too keen on that story; it made the house seem even more sinister than it already was.

When the sun was directly over us, he glanced up at the sky, frowning and crinkling his brow. I gotta go. If you meet me here tomorrow morning, I’ll teach you how to catch salamanders and crawdads.

That sounded like wicked fun, so I agreed.

Before he picked up his pail, he whisked his sweaty shirt off. I can’t believe how hot it is already. Don’t know why I thought it would be a little less hell-like here.

I nodded, because I was unable to speak. As he walked away, I stared at the pairs of pea-sized scars that covered his torso. He seemed lucky to have survived whatever had caused them.

Bee stings, I thought. Maybe he had been attacked by a swarm of killer bees.

By the time I got home with the captives in my bucket, I’d decided that the scars had a darker source. They were perfectly round and looked like they could have been made by cigarettes.

I made up a new play that night in my garage—my first tragedy. Saxon was the hero, a white knight who’d escaped death many times because of his fast thinking and quick wit, but in the end, he could not bear the number of arrows shot at him by the black knight’s bow. He died in the arms of the princess, and she wept so many tears that the castle flooded. It only became dry again many years later when a good witch turned the water into tadpoles, and they turned into frogs and hopped away.

###

The next morning when I came back to the ditch, I waited an hour for him to show up. After catching a few more tadpoles and trying to catch a salamander and ending up with nothing but its tail in my hand, I was thinking about taking my bucket and going home. Then, the wind bent the cattails back and I caught a glimpse of something red amongst the black timbers of the house.

My curiosity dictated an investigation—at least from a careful distance. I stepped over the weeds in the cracks of the driveway and pushed some aside that were as tall as my armpits. When the remains of the house came into view, I could see that the red color was from a shirt, and the shirt was on a body lying amongst the thistles. My first thought was that a homeless person had spent the night there…and died. Then, I saw Saxon’s blond locks spilled out between a wild patch of bluebonnets.

What are you doing in there? I yelled.

Looking at the stars.

It’s daytime. There are no stars.

There’s stars in my head.

That didn’t make sense to me, so I thought I hadn’t heard right. How long have you been here? I’ve been waiting for you.

I dunno. A while.

Why didn’t you say something?

I think I fell asleep. I don’t feel too well.

There was something wrong about a boy just lying underneath the charred timbers like that. Part of me wanted to run over to him and see if he needed a doctor, but my mother’s stern warning flashed in my head. If she caught me in the burnt house, I’d be banned from fishing in my magic ditch forever. I can’t go in there. Can you come out?

He groaned. Then, a few seconds later, he stumbled towards me, lurching first to the left then a few paces to the right. His face was so white that I wondered if he had makeup on. No one’s skin was that white unless they were an albino. Even with his dark eyebrows and beautiful metallic eyes he didn’t seem that far removed from the white-furred, red-eyed rabbits I’d seen.

He looked at me with an odd smirk then slumped down to a crouch—a move that seemed calculated to prevent a fall. I looked down at the top of his head, feeling that I wanted to pet his soft curls. What’s wrong with you? Are you sick? Are you on drugs or something?

No, he said as he grabbed his knees and began to rock back and forth. Nothing like that. I just had a rough night.

That confirmed my suspicions. His scars were cigarette burns; I just knew it. I wanted to march up to his house and give his parents a piece of my mind about their abuse. But, if I was going to do that…and maybe turn them in to the authorities, I had to get some more evidence first. At this point, I really didn’t know much about him, and the thought that his wounds might have some other cause or be self-inflicted crossed my mind. Wanna talk about it?

He looked up at me as if he was considering it...for just a second. I can’t.

What about looking for salamanders and crawdads. You said—

Maybe I should just go home.

No! I covered my mouth, realizing that the word came out sounding too loud and bossy. I just didn’t want him to go back to a house of torture and—I suddenly realized—I didn’t want him to go anywhere. I wanted to hang out with him for a while and find out more things about him, like why he’d moved here and how come he didn’t sound like a Cajun if he was from Louisiana? How about coming to my house? We could have a snack. Play a video game…

When he didn’t move or speak for a couple of seconds, I was