Dark Diary (5 page)

Astounding.

Kathera was a courageous young woman with a heart clearly burning with passion and inquisitiveness, but there was no need for her to beg of me so. I was no more impressive a creature than she, and possibly even less.

I knelt down on one knee to meet her and her eyes rose
to mine. Her lip trembled and her deep, sapphire eyes begged
for my honesty.

“Calm yourself,” I whispered. “You are correct in believing that I am not like you, but you’re not ready to learn the truth about what I am.”

I stood and politely stretched my hands out to her. She grasped them and pulled herself to her feet.

I squeezed her warm fingers.

“You shall stick to your promise, Kathera.”

“The same for you, I hope.”

I released her.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“Your name.” She lowered her hands to her sides. “May I please know your name?”

It had been a long time since anyone had asked.

“Matthaya.”

Her smile broadened, exposing her teeth.

“Matthaya,” she echoed, lovingly. I’d never heard it spoken so melodically before. “That’s a beautiful name. Where does it come from?”

“I don’t know,” I replied with a partial shrug. “I never knew much about my family. As a child, I learned little of my heritage and, as an adult, I have never had the urge to do research.”

Who I had been back then hadn’t mattered after I had become the wretched thing I was now.

She bit her lip and looked off into the distance.

“What is it?” I asked.

She hesitated.

“Kathera?”

“I take it you’re not
really
twenty-one. Are you?”

A faint chuckle flitted through my lips.

“
Anatomically, yes, but chronologically, I am much older
than you. In fact, I have been around for more years than this city has been in existence.”

Kathera sat back down on her bench and gazed at her dying candles with a sullen glance. “It must be hard living so long… losing many friends.”

It
was
very hard.

“I’ve learned that it is by far easier to
not
make friends than it is to lose them.”

“Oh.” She sighed as if she already feared that she, too, would someday be lost to me. “Are there others like you?”

“There are few,” I replied. “I’ve rarely run into a pair or two in my travels, but they are not the best companions.”

I hated what I was, but I hated what
they
were even more.

“We choose our own paths. We make our own decisions about how we treat mortals and… immortals. Some prey on humans and some do not.”

Kathera’s eyes widened and the word “prey” formed silently on her lips. She shuffled an inch closer—nearly on the edge of the bench.

“What do
you
see them as?” she asked.

I scanned her face. In comparison to her peers, she was quite pretty. There was uniqueness in the rounded curves of her ivory features that made her beautiful in her own way. Her full lips were colored with deep brown stain and her cheeks were barely pinker than the rest of her skin.

Going back to her question, I recalled my limitations and formed a response.

“Frozen visions of the life I cannot have… the things I cannot do, and the friendship I shall never possess.”

LISTENING TO HIS WORDS MADE
my heart ache. They were full of passion and disdain. I wanted to reach out and touch him—to comfort him somehow—but he’d likely recoil if I tried.

His head fell and his hands dangled haplessly in his lap.
A few fine locks of hair tickled the front of his ears, but he pushed them away from his face a moment later.

“You have my friendship now,” I said, in an attempt to ease his pain. “I hope I can prove to you that it is worth having.”

He looked away stoically, a master at hiding his feelings even when it was probably healthier for him not to.

“Life is not worth living when you have no one to share it with,” he spoke. “A friendship, no matter how long it lasts,
shapes you and makes you who you are.” Matthaya’s eyes met mine
again;
they had been doing that a lot tonight. Their beautiful green color put me at ease.

“So,” he began, softly, “why do you hate your life so much?”

I had never hated life.

I had only hated
her.

“I
don’t
hate life. I hate my stepmother. Everything was fine until she came along and made every day hell.”

There was a subtle movement of his feet and I noticed him fighting the urge to move slightly closer.

I ignored the hope that he would do so, just in time for him to ask me another question.

“What has she done that has made you so miserable?”

Opening old wounds made my chest tighten. I swallowed
the pain in an attempt to be strong in front of Matthaya.

“
When I was fourteen, my father gave me an adorable little
collie puppy to keep me company. I named her Reverie
—
Dream
. She would sleep beside me on my bed every night and help chase away my sorrow. Then, my father remarried when I turned sixteen and
Aldréa, my stepmother, told me the dog had to go because of her so-called allergies.”

“Did you give her up?”

“No.” I gritted my teeth. “But I should have. She might still be alive today.”

Matthaya’s brow wrinkled and his lips curled with disgust.

“She killed Reverie. Aldréa did.” My fingers curled around
the edge of my bench and tightened even as the concrete dug painfully into my palms.

“Why?”

“I refused to give her away. So she poisoned her and told my father it was an accident. ‘She got into some rat poison,’ she told him. It was a lie. Ever since that day, I’ve been tormented by nightmares. All of my good dreams died with that dog.”

The memory of seeing poor Reverie’s dead body sprawled
across the backyard was painful, and as much as I sucked in my tears, a few still escaped my eyes.

I just
had
to be strong in front of him.

I
had
to be brave.

I took a deep breath. “It was just a dog, I know, but…” I cleared my throat and wiped my face quickly, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

A cold sensation swept over my knuckles and I turned. Matthaya’s mystic green eyes penetrated mine and his outstretched arm rested a set of fingers atop my hand.

“A friend is a friend… no matter what kind.” His soothing voice was assuring. “She had no right to take her away from you.”

His touch, however cold and unusual,
was
comforting.
He looked into my eyes and I could almost feel the softness of the face I’d never touched.
One sincere look from his hauntingly beautiful eyes left me feeling like I had known him forever… like I could trust him with my life.

What the hell was I thinking?

I’d known Matthaya for only a few days, but my inherent fascination with him was obvious. Too obvious.

The smoothness of his voice enchanted me and his glances
sent me reeling into the majestic green sorcery that was his gaze.

This wasn’t a crush.

I had a dozen logical reasons to fear him and yet I didn’t.
I refused to. He was a shy creature, indeed, but my courage had rewarded me with his trust. And now… his touch.

He pulled back and took a broader look at my face. An unsettled expression washed across his face; his fingers slipped from mine and he stood.

“I have to go.” He withdrew several feet from me in an instant.

“What? Why?” I stood. “What have I done?”

I could barely make out the shaking of his head in the fading light of my candles as he moved further and further into the shadows.

“Matthaya, please!” I strained. “Where are you going? What did I say?”

“Goodbye,” he said, his voice nearly inaudible from within
the darkness.

He was gone.

In the blink of an eye, he was gone.

I couldn’t get used to it—the way he’d come and go like the wind. Frightening one moment and concerned the next, but so wary of his presence that he wouldn’t stay long. He was nervous, reserved… whatever you want to call it.

Had I said something? Had I looked at him the wrong way?

There was no telling.

I took a deep breath and exhaled. My heart was racing.

I wanted to understand him. I wanted to know what secrets and treasures he clung so tightly to. Somehow,
I knew he had told me them before. I knew his eyes had once put their trust in me—and that he would learn to trust me again.

I struggled with this thought. How I could know him and he not know me? How could I feel so right by his side and so unnerved by my inability to recall why?
When I looked into his eyes—those electric green irises—I felt something: a closeness I couldn’t explain. They were familiar somehow.

Why?

The candles burned out and I poured off the excess wax before tucking them back into my bag.

How had I upset him so quickly?

My stomach churned with nausea as I contemplated what I could have done and what had driven him away. I was angry with myself.

It felt so empty in the graveyard without him there and it wasn’t something I had felt before we had met. I had always felt soothed and comforted by the dead of night and the memories of my mother, but now
…

I felt so empty…

IT WAS WARM, POWERFUL, AND
spiced with the richness of her pheromones. I had smelled similar essences before but never with such potency
.
Kathera
was
radiating attraction,
suddenly and without the slightest
forewarning.

A few words… a glance and… it hit me. She drew toward me with instant passion, and I was caught completely off
guard. Stunned by her subconscious motion, I had no choice
but to leave and to do it with haste.

Attraction was a fatal game to play with creatures like myself. The scent of her fear was soft and well-hidden, but the intense desire welling up inside her breast was utterly unnerving.

I don’t think she even recognized it—most people can’t. But it was impossible to misinterpret with my uncanny ability to detect variations in mortal scents. What mortals may observe in a glance or an expression, took only a sniff for me to decipher.

Something had changed in her, and the soothing peace of her company had become dangerous territory.

The rest of my night was spent pacing, lost in thought within my quarters. The thick piled carpet beneath my feet began to show a dashed trail from my footsteps.

It was too soon.

I had scarcely grown accustomed to this new city and I already found myself entangled in a mess of emotions with a mortal girl. I’d felt the air of delicate crushes before, yes, but this was powerful.

The last time I’d dealt seriously with something of this magnitude had been before—back when I had still been human.

I had never had more than a few possessions with me at any one time, but my most prized and coveted piece of all was suspended gracefully at the center of the wall above the fireplace.

Misplaced for many years but finally acquired, it was a very old oil painting of a girl I had once known. The thick curls of her glorious copper-red hair fell delicately across her shoulders and her restrained smile was hardly what I had known her for. There was such innocence in the gentle curve of her fair-skinned face and faintly blushing cheeks. Her mischievous sky-blue eyes concealed a dark secret from the artist who had painted them that day.

Faded and weathered from centuries of travel and mistreatment—not by
me—I still remembered what it had looked like the day it was made. The colors had been radiant.
The detail had been superb and the model… uncooperative
at best.