Promise (2 page)

Then the wolf flew backwards again and fell
to the ground a second time. The bigger man's hand hung in the air,
palm straight out facing the wolf, as if he'd hit it, but I never
saw the contact.

Both women eyed me with obvious greed. Then
their eyes shifted back to my brawny protector and confusion and
even fear flickered across their faces. He turned his hand toward
them. Their eyes widened, looking as terrified as I felt.

They disappeared with two
pops
.

"I got Alexis! Take care of that one!" The
lankier man easily lifted me into his arms and sprinted toward my
house. The beast's stench continued to fill my head, a persistent
odor that wouldn't leave even as distance separated us.

A wolfish howl behind us diminished into a
human cry of pain. I shuddered in the arms of the stranger.

***

"Alexis, honey." Mom's voice, soft and
distant, pulled me out of unconsciousness. "Honey, it's time to get
up."

"Huh?" I mumbled, disoriented, my eyelids
fluttering as I came completely awake.

"We need to go."

I squinted at her against the brightness of
daylight. She knelt on the floor next to me, where I was wrapped in
a blanket, a pillow under my head.
How did I get here?
The
last thing I remembered was the stranger running with me in his
arms. Renewed fear gripped me and I sat up with a gasp. Pain shot
from the base of my skull to the backs of my eyelids. I pressed my
fingers to my temples.
Was it real?
I examined my hands. No
scrapes. I touched my head. No bump or cut. It meant little,
though. They would have been healed by now anyway.

"What happened last night?" I asked, my voice
husky.

"Hmm?"

I started to tell her about my night. Her
brows pressed together as I told her about the boys with the
knife.

"I can't believe how mean kids can be," she
interrupted. "You should have let me move you after the burn."

I shook my head, just once. It hurt too much
to move it more than that. She misinterpreted it, though, thinking
I still protested her offer to move to avoid my humiliation. I
hadn't wanted to leave so close to graduation. But that happened
months ago. It didn't matter anymore.

"I know," she said. "We're moving now and you
can have a fresh start."

"No, that's not it. There was this couple in
the street, too. And the man…he changed into a…a
werewolf
.
And the woman—I think she was a
witch
."

Mom's eyebrows arched. "Honey, do you realize
what you're saying?"

I did. And it sounded ludicrous. In fact, in
the morning light, I knew it was more than ludicrous—it was
absolutely impossible. But it had felt so real….

Confused, I studied her inhumanly beautiful
face. She always said we had similar features—chestnut hair,
almond-shaped, mahogany eyes, smooth, light-olive skin—her words,
not mine. It described her in an understated way and was overkill
for me. I resembled her, but she looked like an angel and I looked
like her very human daughter.

She also looked, impossibly, twenty-six years
old. Mom didn't age. By the time I was fifteen, we had to tell
people we were sisters because she looked too young to be my
mother. I called her Sophia in public, but Mom in private.

"You have the wildest dreams," she said with
a small smile. She nodded and patted my arm.

"But—" I pulled my arm from her, knowing what
she was doing.

"It was a dream, Alexis. We don't have time
to discuss it," she said, an edge to her voice now.

Right. A dream. That makes more sense
.
Something deep inside, past the throbbing in my head, denied that
theory, but there was really no other explanation. Witches and
werewolves…people appearing and disappearing….
How can that be
real?
Logic told me it couldn't but…my intuition knew
something
happened.

I broke my eyes from hers to hide my denial.
It just didn't feel right to challenge her now. My head hurt too
much to argue, feeling like someone jabbed around in my brain while
I slept. Also, the stony look on Mom's face told me to drop it.

I glanced around the living room and noticed
the emptiness for the first time—no furniture, no boxes stacked
against the walls, nothing. "Where is everything?"

"Packed in the moving truck." She sounded
nonchalant, as if it made perfect sense.

"
What?
"

It didn't make sense at all, actually. That
wasn't the plan. Mom was supposed to break up with her boyfriend
last night and we would pack the truck today and leave for Florida
tomorrow.
Why the sudden rush?
She didn't believe my story,
so that couldn't be it. It had to be the boyfriend. It was almost
always the boyfriends.

"We need to get out of here," she said.
"
Now
."

I knew the tone and moved as quickly as my
aching head allowed. Our moves always felt like forced escapes.
Sometimes it was because of an accident, but most often because of
the boyfriends. Though this move had actually been planned, it now
had the familiar feeling we were once again making an escape. At
least this time I knew where we were going and why.

I still felt sluggish as we traveled south on
I-95. Images of the werewolf and the witch flashed through my mind.
I fell asleep and dreamt about them, but they were good in this
dream. Not monsters. And they fell in love. I spent a good portion
of the trip outlining a book about their supernatural romance, my
first full-length novel that I felt compelled to write
immediately.

As the drugged feeling lifted and I could
think clearly, I analyzed those strange events. People tried to
hurt me and possibly wanted to kill me. I thought. Maybe the
werewolf and the witch and the other bizarre parts weren't real.
Maybe I hit my head harder than I realized and imagined those
parts. Or maybe the real events mashed up with an actual dream and
I had everything confused. But I was certain I was attacked. Fairly
certain, anyway. And the way the white-blonde said I was "hers"
told me it wasn't the last time I'd see her. If she was even real.
There seemed to be missing pieces in my memory. Some details, like
the wolf's terrifying eyes, were so clear, while others, like my
protectors' faces, were blank. This made me question the reality of
it all, but I couldn't dismiss the fear. It was too deeply embedded
into my memory.

If someone had attacked me, though, Mom would
know. She wouldn't have dismissed it so easily. She was too
protective of me. Even going off to college on my own was never an
option. She gave up her job in corporate sales because, she said,
she was ready for a change. She'd been in sales for as long as I
could remember and was quite successful at it. One of her quirks
was her power of persuasion—she could sell a truckload of beef to a
vegan. But she had always wanted to own a bookstore and there
happened to be one for sale just ten miles from the college I'd
chosen. We were both looking forward to this move and the new life
it promised for us. I was glad she was coming with me. She was my
best friend, after all. My only friend for years. I had to wonder
now, though, if she was really coming to protect me.

Hundreds of miles passed under the truck's
wheels before I built the courage to ask.

"Mom…are there people who want to hurt us? I
mean, because of who we are?"

She gave me a sideways glance. "Alexis, I
would not let anything happen to you."

"I know, but if there are people out
there…shouldn't I know? Don't you think it's time I knew things
about us?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
The corner of her lips turned down in a frown. "I can't tell you,
honey. I just can't. Not until the
Ang'dora
."

Right. The
Ang'dora
. The enigmatic
"change" that was somehow connected with our quirks and everything
that made us weird. I knew little about it. I knew little about
us.

"Are you asking because of your dream last
night?" she asked. "Because you know it's–"

I cut her off with a sigh. "Yeah, I know. Not
real."

I
wanted
to believe her. That was the
easy and safe explanation, but I just knew it was wrong.

Mom held our secrets tightly, even from me,
and I'd given up begging for information years ago. She had told me
many times she was bound to a promise made when I was an infant. I
couldn't know our secrets until I went through the
Ang'dora
and became more like her. I pretended I didn't care and allowed
myself to live behind a façade of normalcy.

Now I did care. Whether I was really attacked
or not, it was time I knew who we were and why we had strange
quirks. I hated snooping behind her back, but her refusal to
explain left no other options.

The move made the first step easy. I
volunteered to unpack the house while Mom prepared to open the
bookstore. When she took me up on the offer to do her room, I
didn't expect to discover anything she didn't want me to. And I
didn't. I found false identification for both of us—drivers'
licenses, birth certificates, passports and the like—giving us
different last names, but they weren't helpful. I grew up with
several surnames, a different one each time we moved, though most
often we went by "Ames," as we did now. I was pretty sure that was
the real one.

I couldn't even research Ames and our other
surnames. Besides Sophia and Alexis, I had no first names to go on.
We had extended family somewhere, but I'd never met them and Mom
rarely discussed them. Without knowing their names, I could have
searched genealogical records for years and never known if I was
even in the right family. By the time the first day of classes came
around, I knew nothing more, but I had a new plan and the college
library would be perfect for it.

That was the day the dreams stopped. Until
then, I repeatedly dreamt of that strange night, particularly of
one of my heroes. Not the one who carried me away, but the other
one, the bigger one. I still never saw his face, just a shadowy
figure, but it was him.
Who are you?
My dream-self asked
every time. I never received an answer and he stopped visiting my
dreams the first day of classes. Perhaps because a very real guy
entered my dreams…and my life.

Chapter 2

I dropped two classes before school even
started. It was actually Mom's idea. I had a novel to write. When
she read the outline I developed during our move, she said school
could wait, the book couldn't. An unexpected statement from her,
but she had more weird quirks than I did, including her own sixth
sense. Mine told me if people were unusually good or bad, as if I
picked up on a brainwave revealing their overall intentions. Mom
could feel truths—and she was never wrong. She felt the truth my
book would be published. She even said, mysteriously, it
needed
to be written.

On the first day of college, with several
hours between my morning classes and my one night class, I took the
opportunity to do some research and planted my butt in a hard
plastic chair at a library computer station. I wasn't researching
for my book, though, and not for class either. This time was for
me. I finally concluded that all I really could research were our
quirks—I knew nothing else about us. I found a somewhat promising
trail on the Internet and spent the entire afternoon researching
telepaths.

When I was done, I stared at my notes and
felt like an idiot.
Telepaths?! I seriously wasted hours on
telepaths
?
I shook my head at the absurdity. Mom and I had
quirks, but we certainly couldn't read minds. Besides, telepaths,
well,
didn't exist
. Did they?

I sighed and glanced at the clock, then
bolted out of my seat, grabbing my bag and papers. Communications
started in five minutes. I rushed through the library, rounded a
corner and slammed right into a large, hard body.
Sweet and
tangy. Mmm…mangos, papayas, lime, sage…and a hint of man
.
Having a powerful sense of smell was often unpleasant, but it was
worth suffering through bad body odor and nasty garbage for this.
He smelled delicious. But he sounded annoyed or angry as a low
growl rumbled in his chest.

"Sorry," I muttered.

I looked up to see the face belonging to such
yumminess.
Whoa! Talk about yummy!
He was absolutely
gorgeous. Too gorgeous. I looked away immediately, embarrassed by
my behavior. I bent down to gather the papers I dropped—and so did
he. To complete my humiliation, I shocked him with static
electricity when our fingers touched. I blushed. He chuckled
quietly.

"Alexis Ames," he murmured under his breath.
If it hadn't been my own name, I wouldn't have even understood—he
said it so quietly. His thumb underlined my name on the class
schedule he handed back to me. I took it, mumbled "thank-you" and
bolted.

I hurried across campus, slipped inside the
classroom with a minute to spare and took the closest open seat. A
syllabus was already on the desk. The instructor stood at the head
of the class, carefully watching the clock above the door. He
started his introductions at six o'clock sharp and rudely rebuked a
couple of students who arrived late, commenting that tardiness was
a sign of disrespect. As if his tone was not.
Note to self: Be
on time for this one
.

I'd felt the burn of eyes on me when I walked
in the door and took my seat. Normally I would have disregarded it.
I was used to it, especially the last couple months of high school,
when everyone was curious about my burn. But as I sat there, trying
to listen to the professor as he monotonously listed his
credentials, I could feel the eyes again, making the back of my
neck tingle. It wasn't the same threatening feeling I felt at the
Jefferson Memorial. This was the uncomfortable but familiar feeling
of curious eyes. I glanced over my shoulder, pretending to check
out the classroom.
Oops.
I was caught. But I couldn't tear
my eyes away for several seconds.