Wicked Blood (Blood Witch Series #1)

Chapter 2

Camille was obviously angry at me, judging from the way she'd just texted 'whatever', when I'd texted to let her know I was heading home. I couldn't blame her. I wasn't being a very good friend toward her, and I knew it.

I would make it up to her, somehow.

After my rendezvous with Arthan, he'd offered to drop me off at home, but I'd refused—I wondered when he'd started doing that, offering to take me home, like what we were doing were some kind of messed-up make-out sessions rather than what they really were.

Wrong. Evil. Vile. Unholy.

I felt dirty, tainted, and I needed the walk home to get rid of his smell, which was lingering all around me. Thankfully, it started raining when I was still three blocks away from home, and I was soaking wet and smelling more like wet dog than vampire.

If my father knew the truth, he'd kick me out, I realized as I turned the corner to our house. If my mother knew, it would break her heart. My family would consider me a traitor.

But I had started all this with the best intentions. A deal, that was all it was. A deal with the devil. And now I was drowning in a swamp of trouble of my own making.

The house was bathing in darkness, so hopefully I would be lucky and both my parents would already be asleep. If they were still up, they might start wandering why I was back so soon, since it was barely past midnight and curfew was only at one thirty—a 'victory' Camille was responsible for.

Our house was an eighteenth-century townhouse that had belonged to my family for many generations. It stood out like a sore thumb compared to the more contemporary seventies' and eighties' residences in our street. Camille always commented how weird it was that my grandparents, their parents, and several generations of Silvermanes back, had all lived and grown up in the same house. It was quaint, she said, like something the Addams family would do, while 'normal people' moved out and bought their own houses to start their own families.

Once upon a time, the house had been one of the few houses on this street, but as time went by and more and more people had come to populate our town, the empty lots were conquered one by one. Now, my house looked like a fairytale dropped in the real world.

Stepping through the gate of the front garden was like stepping back in time, and I could easily imagine another Silvermane, living decades, centuries, before me, stepping through these very same iron-wrought gates and walking down the cobblestone path up to our home.

I turned my key in the front door, and it screeched open. My footsteps were loud in the quiet hallway. Closing the door behind me, I inhaled deeply and focused.

Two heartbeats upstairs, in the master bedroom. I recognized them right away: the calm, steady beat of my father's heart, and the slightly faster beat of my mother's heart.

A faster, more hurried heartbeat in the kitchen; our cat Snookie trying to catch a mouse again. The mouse was running for its life, its tiny heartbeat going impossibly fast.

Last but not least, in the room adjacent to mine, another heartbeat. Slow. Too slow. And so very faint I had to strain to hear it.

Disappointment weighed me down while I climbed the stairs, each step creaking under my weight but not enough to wake my parents up. For all I'd done, for how badly I'd gotten myself into trouble, it hadn't really helped. Not enough.

The last room to my right was Samantha's room. I softly pushed the door open, letting a ray of light enter the otherwise pitch-black room.

Samantha was in bed—as if she'd be anywhere else—a frail phantom of a girl with alabaster skin and dry, cracked lips. She looked like a broken, porcelain doll, too fragile for this world that was slowly killing her from the inside out.