I avoided mirrors these days and, except for when I was alone with my Coven-mates at Nocturne Academy, I kept to myself as much as possible.
I wished I was there now—wished I could reach out to Emma or Megan, the newest member of our little clan—for some comfort or at least some distraction from my bleak thoughts and the awful memories.
But it was the weekend and I was home. Well, at Mr. and Mrs. Breedlove’s home, anyway.
I had been babysitting their little girl, Allegra, almost from the time she was born. After The Fire and the weeks I spent in the hospital, I had no home of my own to go back to so Alastair and Anastasia Breedlove had taken me into their house and given me a room of my own—right next to Allegra’s. They had even sponsored me for Nocturne Academy—paying the extremely expensive tuition out of their own pocket.
I was grateful for their kindness though, being Nocturnes, neither one of them was exactly very warm. But Allegra made up for her parents’ coolness and distance by being sweet and bubbly and incredibly lovable. I knew what my friend Avery said—that I was basically the Breedloves’ nanny, at least on the weekends—but I didn’t care. Allegra was a ray of sunshine in my dark life and I loved her as though she was my own.
As though my thoughts of her had called the little girl, I heard the light patter of footsteps in the hall outside my room and then the door creaked open. In the darkness of the hallway, I saw the soft glow of her pale blue eyes.
“Katy?” she whispered, approaching my bed. “Katy, I had a nightmare. Can I sleep with you?”
“Sure, sweetie.” I opened the covers for her and she slid into bed beside me and snuggled close. Like all Nocturnes, her body temperature was about ten degrees below human normal so she felt like a cold little lump beside me until my body heat warmed her.
“Was it a bad one?” I asked as I wrapped my arm around her. “Your nightmare? Do you remember what it was about, Allegra?”
“Don’t know. Just…it was scary.” She snuffled and pressed closer, her back to my front. She had on the expensive white lace nightgown her mother insisted she wear and her long, pale blonde hair mixed with my own black hair on the pillow. In the moonlight spilling through the window, I thought it looked like silver.
I barely noticed when she pulled my wrist to her mouth and sank her little fangs in. The skin there was deadened and knotted with scar tissue—it was a wonder she could find a vein at all. But she always seemed to manage and though she never took more than a few mouthfuls of blood, it relaxed her enough to go back to sleep.
This time, however, I felt a strange little tingle run up my arm as she sucked my wrist. I frowned in the darkness—what was going on? I usually didn’t feel a thing after she had first sunk her fangs in. Maybe some of the nerves in my deadened skin were regenerating at last? It seemed like too much to hope for so I shrugged the idea off and ignored the burning tingle.
If this sounds weird—the babysitter letting the kid she’s watching bite her—well, it was pretty routine for us. As I said, I’d been watching Allegra since she was a baby and she was four now—almost five and a “big girl” as she liked to point out. But big girl or not, she was a Nocturne and they live on blood—though they mostly drink bagged and chilled animal blood. Allegra, however, tended to get hungry between meals and I didn’t mind letting her “snack” on me from time to time.
I knew my friend Megan got wonderful intense sensations when her Nocturne boyfriend, Griffin, bit her. But when Allegra bit me, all I felt was a mothering-kind of love for the little girl. In fact, I had been surprised when Megan talked about how pleasurable she found it when Griffin sank his fangs into her flesh—“better than sex” she’d called it. Though, as Avery pointed out, she wouldn’t know since she was still a virgin and Griffin refused to do anything about said virginity until she turned eighteen and was completely legal.
“Oh, shut up, Avery,” Megan had snapped, half-laughing as she shot him a glare. “Like you’ve had so much experience yourself.”
“Like any of us has,” Emma sighed, staring into the fire—a fire I stayed well back from, despite the fact that it was small and friendly—nothing like the blaze that had taken my parents and house and changed my life forever.
We had been staying up late one night, not long after Megan and Griffin had Blood-Bonded—which was supposed to be a big no-no, since the main law of Otherkind—the Edict—stated that Others of different races must never mix. However, Megan had broken the magic of the Edict when she became the Witch Queen and Griffin became her Blood Knight. They tried not to flaunt their new relationship but it was easy to see, by the way they looked at each other, that they had found a love that would last forever.
I sighed and shifted in my bed as I thought of my Coven-mate and her Nocturne. I was never going to find a love like that. Not with the ugly scars I wore.
You might think that as a human going to a magical school, I could have the scars removed easily but it wasn’t so. Both medical and magical treatments had been tried and even Megan’s immense magic hadn’t been able to make them fade, though she had
