Rising Tide: Dark Innocence (The Maura DeLuca Trilogy Book 1) (25 page)
Read Rising Tide: Dark Innocence (The Maura DeLuca Trilogy Book 1) Online
Authors: Claudette Melanson
“Dad?” I squeaked—not how I wanted
my first word to him to sound.
He nodded, and I noticed even in
the dim, his eyes welling. But they weren’t tears. I felt panic as
I saw the spill from one eye, and it was just the color of blood.
My mind was reeling. I
couldn’t make sense of any of it. Of his sudden appearance, of the
ghastly red tears in his eyes…My mind flashed back to the day I’d left
Pennsylvania. The day I’d been crying over leaving Ron. That moment
he’d thought a tree branch had hit my eye…the red stain on his shirt. The
welling red swimming in my eyes, the night Ron’s mom had gone into the hospital.
I fought to gain meaning from the
images running though my head, from the image right in front of me. There
had to be only one explanation. Whatever disease I had, whatever was
wrong with me…it was inherited. My dad was sick too, and he’d come back
to help, or at least let me know what was wrong with me.
Whatever the reason, I was overcome
with relief he’d finally come back. Overcome with questions too, and with
love at the sight of the man who’d helped create me. I started to cry, my
body wracked with great, heaving sobs I couldn’t control. I buried my
face in my hands, hoping that my father wouldn’t get the wrong idea from my
tears. I wondered why he’d been gone for so long, yes. But at this
moment, I was overwhelmingly filled with the exhilaration of laying eyes on him
for the first time. I put my hands down, away from my face, so I could
tell him…so he wouldn’t go away again.
I stopped, unable to speak.
My gaze followed my hands, smeared and pooled with the same red tears as the
man standing in front of me. I looked up at him and my mother, my
expression begging an answer for the bloody tears staining my palms.
“I’m sick…that’s why you came back,
right? Are you dying? Am I dying?” I could barely speak, my
voice straining to break though the crying.
The man, *no, Maxwell,* some part
of my brain said to me, stepped over and his arms claimed me. He pulled
me close, painfully close, to his body. He felt oddly cold through the
front of his coat. Then he held me away, so he could look into my
face. His eyes glittered like black jewels, through the red haze of his
tears. His fingers traced lovingly, and like ice, across my face.
“No my
daughter,” he said, his voice like dark music, “you are not dying. In
fact you will live forever.” The next words he spoke crept over me like a
rising tide. They thrashed and rose over my whole being, threatening to
drown me in a surreal
dreamworld
, from which I might
never return. “I’ve come home to tell you what you are, Maura. This
may be very hard for you to comprehend, but you were created from a very old,
very elite bloodline. Very soon, my dear loved-one, you will complete
your transition into what you were born to become. A vampire.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claudette
Melanson lives in Guelph, Ontario, with her husband Ron and four bun
babies: Tegan, Pepper, Butters & Beckett. She graduated from
Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English and an MA in
Literature. Vampires have been a passion since age five. She hopes
to one day work full time as an author, since there are many, many books living
inside her head.