The Hidden (The Hidden Trilogy) (42 page)

He hesitated before saying, “After the accident, I saw the picture in your wallet… I recognized your mom.”

I gaped at him. “You
know
her?”

“Know
of
her is more like it. Her name is Vivienne d’Aubigne. She was born in fifteen-forty-eight, in Beauvais, France. She was kind of an ambassador between our people, and about twenty years ago, she disappeared. No one knew what happened to her, or what became of her. One day she was just gone. There were lots of stories, though, lots of speculation. Most people thought she’d been murdered.” He met my eyes. “I think she disappeared to have you.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She would’ve been killed if the others found out what she was pregnant with.”

My heart started to race, and I sat up. “Why? Is there something wrong with me?”

“No, of course not, but…” He looked away, not saying anything else.

“But
what
?”

His voice came out soft. “I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“Thomas, you’re scaring me. Just tell me.”

He sighed. “The others would see you as a monstrosity–a sin against nature that needs to be eradicated. That’s why your mother hid you.”

The feeling of unease in the pit of my stomach turned into full-on horror. “What am I?”

“A crossbreed. Your father had to be a Healer. That’s why you smell like us and why you were able to survive the accident. Vivienne, though…she’s a Feeder.”

A Feeder? What’s a–

My stomach clenched. “If Healers heal, then Feeders…”

He cleared his throat, looking anywhere but at me. “Feed.”

“What–” I swallowed the lump in my throat and shivered. “What do they…
feed
on?”

He still wouldn’t meet my eyes, and my heart plummeted. “Thomas, what do they feed on?”

“Humans. They feed on humans.”

I stared at him as my mind shut down. “Feed as in
eat
? Like cannibalism?”

“Technically it’s not cannibalism since Feeders and humans are different species, but yes, they do…eat them.”

My breath
whooshed
out of me, and I felt like vomiting. My biological mother
ate
people. I tried to reconcile the image of the beautiful woman in the picture and the image of her tearing into someone’s flesh, blood covering her mouth and chin–

I gagged at the thought, trying to keep whatever was in my stomach down as I squeezed my eyes shut. How could she
do
that? Moral implications aside, it was 
disgusting
. I would
never
–

Shit. What if
I
wanted to eat people now?

I looked up at Thomas, my eyes pleading with his. “Will I…” I couldn’t even make the words leave my mouth.

He glanced away, whispering, “I don’t know.”

“So there’s a chance I
will.
” 

“Yes.”

“Is that
all
they eat? What about regular food?”

“Their stomachs can’t digest it.”

I shook my head. “
No
. I won’t do it, Thomas. I
won’t
.”

He stroked my cheek, gently saying, “You don’t know what your body’s gonna need yet. You might have to–
feed
–to survive. I know that’s not something you want to hear right now, but it’s true.”

I pushed his hand away and frowned. “You make it sound unavoidable,” I muttered. “In
my
world, murder is not unavoidable.”

“Your world
is
my world, and it’s not human and it’s not pretty. It’s kill or be killed.”

I scowled. “Where the hell is this Vivienne chick? Why didn’t she come back for me?”
She
should be explaining this stuff. Instead, Thomas was stuck doing it.

“I don’t know, babe.”

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “So what now? I mean, what if the others find me? Will they kill me?”

He tensed. “I won’t let that happen.”

So that would be a “yes.” I ran my hands up and down my arms, shivering. This whole thing gave me the creeps. “Why do they think I’m so awful?”

“Do you remember what I said about the issues we have among ourselves? How we’re at war with each other?”

I nodded.

“Well, on one side of the fight are Healers, and on the other side are Feeders. They hate each other, and any crossbreeds are seen as an unholy union of the two.”

I’m unholy.

I pushed the thought away, refusing to dwell on something I had no control over. “Why do they hate each other so much?”

“There are lots of reasons. Feeders have always been sloppy when it comes to human relations. They feed much more than they need to, and they don’t always dispose of the bodies properly.” He shrugged. “For the most part, Healers think Feeders are going to get us all exposed, so the only solution we could think of was to get rid of them all. War ensued and decimated both populations.

“But all that stuff aside, I think the real reason Healers don’t like Feeders is because we just don’t trust ’em. There’s an old saying among Healers–‘Feeders won’t stab your back, they’ll eat it.’ ”

I cocked my head. “Wait… Do they eat Healers, too?”

“When they can get their hands on us.” He smirked. “They’re stronger than us, but we’re quicker. It makes us challenging prey, and from what I’ve heard, we taste better than humans.”

I frowned, remembering the dream where I attacked Thomas. It took on a whole new meaning now, one that I didn’t want to think too much about. “Okay… That explains why you hate Feeders, but why do they hate you back?”

He smiled ruefully. “It’s called genocide, Em. We’ve tried to systematically eradicate them for centuries. You’d hate us too if you were them.”

“Apparently I
am
them,” I muttered.

Thomas scowled at me. “
No
, you’re not. You’re nothing like them. You’re nothing like Healers, either.” His face softened as he put his hand around the back of my neck, pulling me into him so he could kiss my head. “That’s why I love you.”

I sighed, resting against him. “What else can you tell me about Feeders?”

“They’re unparalleled predators. Mankind has never truly seen anything like them. They’re also nocturnal, and they need more sleep than we do.”

“How long do they usually sleep?”

“About twelve to fourteen hours a day.”

“
Dang
.” That was a long-ass time to sleep every day. “Are they immortal?”

He nodded. “They mature about the same time we do, and after that, they stop aging.”

I gestured for him to keep going. I needed all the information I could get, even if I didn’t really want to hear it.

He sighed, though not impatiently. “Their night vision is a little better than ours, and when their pupils constrict in bright light, they appear feline.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“If you were to shine a light in my eye, my pupil would constrict into a little black dot, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, if you were to shine a light into a
Feeder’s
eye, their pupil would constrict into a little vertical slit, like a cat’s eye.”

I shuddered as I tried to picture a human with eyes like a cat’s. “That’s creepy.”

“
Very
.”

Shit, what if
my
eyes look like that now?

My heart began to race, the sound thundering in my ears from my new hearing.

Thomas’s brows pulled together. He must’ve heard it, too. “You okay?” he asked.

“Check my pupils.”

He looked me over. “They look fine.”

Huffing out an exasperated breath, I said, “No, I mean in the light. I need to know what they look like.”

“I already saw them.”

I frowned. “When?”

“When I first opened your body bag in the morgue. Remember how the fluorescent lights were too bright?”

I nodded. “You saw them then?”

“Yeah. They’re a little…oval.”

My eyes narrowed on him. “What do you mean
oval
?”

“They’re not quite circles, but they’re not as sharp as slits either.” He grimaced, like he knew I wouldn’t like what he had to say. “They’re…kind of in-between.”

Shit.
I bit my lip and stood, pacing around Thomas’s bed. “Will anyone notice?”

“Humans won’t, and that’s all that matters.”

“Okay.” I exhaled slowly, my panic dissolving.

“You ready to hear more? Or do you need a break?”

I sat down on the edge of the bed, fiddling with my hands. “No, I’m fine.”

Thomas cast me a dubious glance, but went on. “Their skin is incredibly hard, and acts as an exoskeleton. You can’t cut it, can’t burn it.”

“Then how do you kill them?”

“It’s not easy. It generally requires the strength of two Healers to rip apart one Feeder.”

“So you just rip them limb from limb and that’s it? They’re dead?”

He nodded. “They can’t heal like we can.”

I nodded absently, trying to think of more questions. “Do you know how Feeders came to exist?”

He started to shake his head, then paused. “Well, there’s a…
legend
about them.”

“What is it?”

He sighed. “Remember–it’s just a story, okay? There’s no proof to support it.”

I nodded, bracing myself for the worst. “Okay.”

“It’s said that the first Feeder came into existence by selling his soul for immeasurable physical powers. He gets his wish, and quickly becomes drunk with power. Now he’s desperate to keep a good thing going, so he starts looking for a loophole out of the agreement–a way to cheat death–and he finds it by devouring human flesh. The man goes on to have children, who grow up to have a propensity for tasting human flesh, and so on and so forth… It’s now a widely held belief that Feeders have no souls, and they make up for it by eating the souls of their human victims. It’s supposedly what gives them their immortality.”

Well, that’s just super.
“So I’m a
soulless
monster. Great.”

He took my hand in his. “You know that’s not true. It’s just a story.”

“Whatever,” I mumbled, sighing and rubbing my eyes. “So how long was I…
out
?” I refused to say the word “dead.”

“ ’Bout four hours. Normally it doesn’t take that long, but your injuries were pretty severe. You’re lucky you’d already started maturing. If this had happened before it started, you wouldn’t have come back.”

I thought back to the past couple weeks and frowned. “So
that’s
why I’ve been feeling like shit lately.”

“In a way, you got lucky tonight. You were unconscious for the most painful parts.”

I laughed without any real humor behind it. “I seriously doubt that. I bet maturing’s a walk in the park compared to what I went through tonight.” I shuddered as visions of the accident and my injuries flooded back to me.

He frowned. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that. I went headfirst through your windshield tonight, then fell about thirty feet to the forest floor, also headfirst. And I have to say, I’d take
that
over the last twenty-four hours of maturing any day.”

My eyes grew wide. “Jesus Christ,
that’s
what happened to you? Why are you just now telling me?”

He shrugged. “You had more important things to focus on, and it would’ve made you more upset if you knew that I died, too.”

“You
died
?”

He gave me a “duh” look. “Did you not hear what I just said about going through a windshield and falling thirty feet face-first? It’s kind of hard
not
to die when you do something like that.”

“That’s not something to joke about,
ass
.” I punched him in the shoulder as hard as I could and heard a dull crack, immediately followed by a shooting pain in my knuckle. “Ow, ow, ow!” I winced and bent over, holding my injured hand to my chest.

Thomas laughed and carefully took my hand in his, inspecting the damage. He put a small amount of pressure on my hand, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out.

He frowned. “That’s also not something to break your hand over.”

“It’s broken?” Hell, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Punching Thomas was like punching a brick wall. What did I expect?

He sighed. “Yeah, it’s broken. I’ll get you some ice.” He climbed off the bed and disappeared out the bedroom door.

I settled back against the pillows, careful not to jostle my hand, which was already starting to swell and bruise a
lovely
shade of dark purple–

A thud from somewhere inside the house made me freeze. Tilting my head, I listened as intently as I could. I was surprised when I actually heard Thomas suck in a quick breath and mutter, “
Fuck
,” from somewhere inside the house.

“Everything okay?” I called out, momentarily forgetting that I didn’t have to yell. I could’ve
whispered
and he would’ve heard me.

“Uh, yeah… I’m fine,” he said. Two seconds later, I heard a quick suctioning sound, followed by the rustling of…ice?

Holy shit, he was in the kitchen–downstairs and clear across the house–and I heard him perfectly.

Too absorbed with my new talent and lost in thought, I jumped when he came into the bedroom. I hadn’t realized he was on his way back.

He cocked an eyebrow, handing me a plastic baggie filled with ice. “You okay?” he asked as he got in bed.

I nodded and put the ice on my hand, wincing at the contact. “What was with the expletive I heard in the kitchen?”

“Oh, it was nothing,” he said, looking down. He wasn’t quick enough, though. I saw the pink tinge on his cheeks as he looked away.

I smirked. “You’re blushing, so it was
something
. Come on, tell me.”

He shook his head as a bashful smile broke out on his face. “I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s embarrassing.”

I rolled my eyes. “I broke my hand punching you in the shoulder. How’s
that
for embarrassing?”

He gave me a rueful smile and said, “It’s not as embarrassing as having your shoulder dislocated by your girlfriend.”