Shadow School Ch. 11

Kristie watched silently as the woman set her glass on the table, reached up under her long tresses to pull at the material holding her dress up. The yellow fabric fell, revealing even more of her back, before she bent over and slid the rest down her legs.

Realizing her mouth was open, Kristie closed it with a snap and turned to put her glass on the table, her next move taking her closer to the exit she sought. Daman was there before she could walk the last few steps.

"Let me leave."

"Why would you want to do that?" he asked, his breath coated with the sweet mixture of rum and fruity syrups.

"Clearly you don't need me."

"I need you."

Kristie stared up into the vampire's gray eyes. She knew they had to tell the truth, so he had to have meant it. Need her for what? "Whatever you need me for it's clearly not necessary at this point in time."

It didn't really matter what she said, Daman wasn't about to let her leave the room. Her bravado fell.

"Let me go," she said, slightly dejected. "Whatever you have planned with that girl in there, you don't need me here to do it."

"Kristie," Daman said, his hands barely touching her as he wrapped his fingers lightly around her arms, "she's not here for me."

Come again?

Kristie's eyes jerked up to Daman's and her face had to have been displaying the incredulity she was experiencing at that moment. "Me?"

"You need release. And you have made it apparent you will not take that release with me. Nicole is a friend. She was with Sokar House several years ago and she was in town."

Kris fumbled for a response. "I thought... if I... Didn't you just get all irritated at the thought that I had been with someone else?"

Daman turned his head. Kristie looked in the same direction and could see the woman, Nicole, sitting on the side of the bed, completely naked now, unlacing the straps of her high-heeled shoes. "That you were faithful impresses me. But if you will not have me, I offer one of my choosing. Nicole was one of the Seven. I have... known her body."

"So you just called her up and said, hey, come fuck my new recruit?"

"Manners, Kris." Daman said, his eyes returning to her. "She knows what a blood urge can do over a lengthy period of time. Yours will return eventually, despite what you just did in the bathroom. She understands the release you need. As a member of my House this is keeping your situation, and your dismissal of me, under wraps." Daman left her then, crossing to the pool table to finish off the last two balls, an orange stripe and the eight ball.

Kristie stared at him, then glanced toward the bedroom door and saw the woman looking at her. From this angle, Nicole's body was turned in a way that bared her full breasts to Kris, her stomach muscles showing the results of countless hours in the gym. As Kristie stared, Nicole swung a leg up on the bed and leaned back, her entire body on display.

It was the most erotic thing Kris had ever seen in person. A woman, the kind Kris always imagined she wanted, splayed on a bed ready to be tasted.

Nicole brushed a hand over her breast, her fingers tweaking her nipple before sliding down her taut stomach to dive between hairless, swollen pussy lips. A finger disappeared inside her, emerging with a glistening sheen that she brought to her lips. The finger disappeared once more, this time between the berry lipstick-covered lips of Nicole's mouth.

When it was clean, the finger pointed right at Kris, and curled upward several times.

***

Cameron closed Brandy's passenger side car door easily so she wouldn't wake her parents; they weren't exactly the wait-until-you're-safely-home types. They just assumed she would be in by curfew, which was midnight now that she had graduated from high school.

Her watch told her it was one fifteen.

To avoid any confrontation, Cameron crept around to the side gate and let herself in, knowing full well she was safe despite the darkness because of her hidden bodyguards, wherever they were. She took care to walk in the grass instead of the cobble stones, and crossed around back, along the pool, to the doors to her room.

The pool lights came on and Cameron froze as blue lights bounced off the house in reflective waves. She was surprised, yes, but already knowing there were people around made her reaction a little subdued. She thanked God she wasn't much of a screamer.

Instinct would have had her turning to the pool to see who was in it, but her own brand of logic told her the first place to look would be the actual switch that turned it on. That switch was in the pool house.

Turning to the small stone structure at the other end of the pool, Cameron saw Elias emerge, his clothing appropriate for a night on the town, not a warm spring evening by a pool. She raised her eyebrows as he walked toward her, his graceful, confident movement mocking the men of catwalks around the world.

The father of her child, ladies and gentlemen.

She had to admit, he looked damned good. Damned being the keyword, though, since his nature was considered to be demonic by those who believed vampires were a myth. Yet he seemed to be on some middle ground between the angel he looked like and the demon humans would consider him to be. So far he was simply... ambivalent.

And despite all the things Cameron learned the last time she saw him, Elias was still a mystery.

When he stopped in front of her, half his face in shadow, the other side painted light blue by the lights of the pool, he simply looked her over as if studying her every feature. She wanted him to speak first, so Cameron silently studied him back; the curls of his blonde hair, the shape of his nose, the curve of his lips and edge of his jaw... His eyes, she saved for last, because in the night she knew their green depths would hold her attention.

"I'm sorry," he breathed.

She didn't know what she expected, but it wasn't this. She had hoped for it, sure, but had not expected it.

"I'm sorry for putting you through this nightmare," he said.

"It's not a nightmare," she inserted, shaking her head.

"For the way you have been introduced. The situation you have been put in. For leaving for the week without telling you why I have been gone."

Now that Cameron was getting all the apologies she could ask for, she found herself not wanting them. She could only shake her head.

"For everything," he whispered, still not touching her, "except the passion I have felt for you. And the child you carry. I am not sorry for those things. But the rest..."

Cameron stepped forward and pressed her fingers to Elias' lips. His own fingers covered hers and pressed them to his mouth, his lips kissing the tips before clasping her hand and bringing it down to his chest. Cameron's eyes followed the movement of their entwined skin rather than looking back up at him; she wasn't prepared to forgive him so easily, even with the apologies flowing so freely.

"I thought I would see you the following day. What kept you away?" she asked.

"Pride. Your dismissal angered me. It is my own fault. This... feeling toward you that has flared up inside me is fighting with years of ritual and expectation. I wanted you to be as passionate about me as... as I am for you."

Wow. There was that truthfulness again, which, when confronted with its absoluteness, was a daunting thing to hear.

"But it was one-sided on my part. My nature is strange to you and you have had everything thrust upon you in a way that must have been unappealing."

"No."

"You cannot help it, Cameron, you are human. It takes weeks to learn things that were thrown haphazardly at you by two men, not a sisterhood that will embrace you no matter you reaction. It was naturally too extreme for your sensibilities to learn the way you did."

"My sensibilities? Elias I-"

"This is my punishment for breaking the rules. There are reasons we introduce girls slowly to life at Shacrow, so they are not startled by what is asked of them. It gives them the chance to think they have a choice, which they do but only in how involved they want to be. It sounds horrible, I know, but when fully explained and understood it is not as bad as it seems. You on the other hand, were pregnant before you even learned of this lifestyle and feel you have no choice. You still do. You can choose to end things now if you wish."

"Elias!"

Everything she wondered about was spilling from his mouth like he took some sort of truth serum and couldn't help but tell her everything she wanted to know. It was disconcerting and now that she had the immortal's attention, she looked up into his eyes and wondered how to express the jumble of thoughts and feelings that were clogging in her throat.

Instead she said, "Just... wait a second."

They both stood there, shrouded by night and the rippling effect of the pool lights. Elias still held her hand and she returned her focus there as she had moments ago.

"What rules did you break?" She peered up at him then.

"When you hit the barrier... the witch-shield guarding my domain from those outside my House, I thought at first you had been claimed already. But it was your... your virginity that stopped you from entering. When I... inserted myself... it was a claiming I couldn't take back. You were mine from that moment on. It is how we were able to make our exit. It stopped Gavin and it stopped anyone else who approached."

"Yeah, I got that part."

"We... that is, the other Heads and I, set up a school based on the natural course of separation."

Cameron shook her head, not understanding.

"By all accounts I was still with Nellie when I took your virginity."

Cameron's mouth opened a little but not words emerged.

"I had ended things with her long ago, and... the proof is your... current condition."

Looking down at her still-smooth belly, Cameron knew she was in for more vampiric revelations. Elias was right. The answer to one question creates countless more.

Elias lowered the hand that clasped her own and his eyes searched hers, asking her permission she thought, as his fingers neared her abdomen. She was okay with it - it was his child after all - and she held back every emotion that attempted to surface when Elias's palm pressed against her.

"A week ago you learned how we were able to create life. We live a certain way. Such a lifestyle is difficult when taking into account our true nature, but it is possible. A lie is a setback of several weeks, a murder can take months to a year to recover from, but infidelity we perfected to a mere eighty-nine days."

When Cameron didn't say anything, he added, "A summer vacation."

Cameron scowled as she put this information together with everything else she had learned so far. No wonder they opened a school; not only could they educated their children at a college where they could be themselves, but they could get the mothers of their offspring away from their parents, keep them close, then discard them when the school year was up.

She was appalled, but it was hard to argue with logic when looking at it from their point of view. Her damned logic-guided brain understood. It still didn't mean she had to agree with it, however, and Cameron let her hands fall to her sides as she looked at the pool.

Elias didn't take his hand away but he didn't move closer to her either. "Each year I watch girls come to our institution. Each year I must choose for my own House, and each year there's the hope for positive results. It... seems insensitive to a young woman experiencing it for the first time, but to us... to me... it, more often that naught, rankles."

Cameron was braced for such statements now, but it still hurt a little to know she was the means to an end.

"But that is where you are wrong," Elias said, his hands going to her shoulders. "The rules I broke are two-fold. One, I should not have been able to father a child with you were I still with the chosen of that year. But more importantly, I should not have approached you in such a manner until you were firmly ensconced in my House, well protected from the outside world not to mention informed of what would happen between us. Don't you see?"

No, Cameron didn't see. And she was getting a little tired at not being able to understand anything.

"I broke the timeline to be with you. I stepped outside centuries of order to create disorder. For you. So, no matter what you were intended for by being a part of my House, I took your virginity and then entered you again and again before you were even declared publicly to be mine."

Cameron blushed and Elias pressed his forehead to hers whispering, "I wanted you. Before I even knew you. Before you were a necessity for the school. Before you were meant to provide me with a child as part of your time at Shacrow. I broke the rules for you. To be with you."

Cameron felt the sting of tears just as a lump in her throat made it hard to swallow. Rather than stand there, before this beautiful immortal, sobbing into his clothes, she turned and pressed a hand to her mouth as she walked to one of the cushioned chairs near the shallow end. She turned and sat and gave her body something to do to break free of the tumble of thoughts in her head; she took off her shoes.

Elias watched her from where he stood, one hand in a pocket and the other scraping through his blonde curls as he exhaled his frustration. Cameron purposefully ignored it since the frustration was his own making. She wasn't about to make this easy for him, no matter what her logic, or his truthful words, told her.

Cameron stepped forward and eased her feet into the pool's tepid water before sitting on the edge of the steps. She put her head in her hands and looked out at the small waves her legs created, deciding to speak her thoughts since he could hear them in her head anyway. This way there was no assumptions as to her thoughts or meaning.

"I suppose..." she started, trying to speak passed the damned lump lodged in her throat, "That were I to have been a founder of this school several hundred years ago... and each year I watched girls come and go, winning the baby lottery some years or facing disappointment..." she didn't care if she sounded crude; it was matter-of-fact. "It could get old."

As she spoke, Cameron found it easier to separate her own feelings from the words – the way of the world was not always the way one wanted it to be and humans more often than not tried to shape the world into the way they wanted then had the nerve to be disappointed when the world uncaringly moved forward without a care for their feelings. Fate. Nature. Whatever it was, it was a force to be reckoned with. No. It wasn't even something you could reckon with. It was a force you could ride if you wanted, it didn't care how you reacted. Nothing you could do could alter the momentum of life.

Cameron blinked at the negative thoughts; she was usually such a positive person. She realized she hadn't been speaking aloud like she planned and continued.

"They say a fly lives only 24 hours," Cameron said, watching Elias watch her out of the corner of her eye. "I suppose as long as you have lived, humans seem like bugs. So you created your own personal ant farm. Bringing in girls for breeding is what you do each year. Seven doesn't seem all that much compared to billions. But each person you bring in has a plan for their life, even if they have no idea what that is.

"So here's me. One of hundreds, chosen to be in your special Seven. I should be grateful, right? You'll give me the life I've always wanted. All I have to do is provide you with a child. And keep your secret. I can even be a part of the child's life if I want, or I'm guessing, I could hand the child over, duty done, and move on with my new glamorous life unburdened by a kid I may not have wanted. I may keep in touch with you or I may not, but it's not really me that matters. It's the secret. Oh and the children. This army of half-breeds you and the others are creating to protect you day and night. Those who may even be listening right now as I speak." Cameron raised her voice with the last few words and looked out at the surrounding foliage.

"Yet you, an immortal, misunderstood by stories you probably even helped create, every year you have to do your duty. It's probably like eating the best steak you've ever tasted, then being told you'll eat the same steak for dinner for the next hundred years. I can see how bored you must be."

Elias took a step toward her but she held up a finger.

Cameron looked at the water and said, "I understand. Trust me... my way of looking at the world is a blessing and a curse." She looked at him then. "Tommy Wells died in a car crash last year. Everyone was shocked and people cried. Except for me. I thought there was something wrong with me because I should react like them, right? He sat next to me in Chemistry. We did a history report together freshman year. It was tragic. So why didn't I cry? Because my stupid logical mind connected the dots. People die in car crashes every day. I could be next. Statistically speaking Tommy had just as much chance as I did in being part of that statistic. So I never cried.

"Then I went to his funeral. I saw his mother clutching a girl I guessed was his sister or someone close to the family. I still felt nothing; I liked Tommy, but he was a statistic. It was horrible, tragic, but my stupid mind told me fate had to prune the herd somehow. So believe me when I say I understand how you see us. Ants that go about our business even after you give our world a little shake. We stand back up and move on. I would get over Tommy's passing. But standing there, watching his mom, I realized what she must be going through, and I finally cried. Not for him. For his mother. Because for the rest of her life, she'll have to deal with the loss of a son to a stupid statistic. All her hopes for him were ripped away by a careless driver. I cried for crushed hope. Not for death.

Cameron was amazed that she had held Elias's gaze for so long and finally looked back at the water. "I don't fear death. I don't fear you. I don't fear the future. No threat I may be under is causing stress. My mind doesn't work that way. So why would I possibly be upset?"

She looked back up at Elias who was studying her with fascination, or what she hoped was a little curiosity. "Because I just graduated high school. I had a whole future ripped out from under me. Things I didn't even know I hoped for have been altered against my will. And perhaps part of this is because my logic also tells me I'm an eighteen-year-old girl with foolish fantasies of a knight in shining armor sweeping me off my feet and I got caught up in a whirlwind meeting with a handsome vampire who was thrilling and sexy and showed me pleasures I haven't experienced.

"Am I naïve? Probably. And I can't bring myself to hate you for what you've done to me because I not only see my gut reaction as childish but mixed with your side of things I can do nothing but scream at fate and the trouble it's caused." It was hard to keep hysteria from creeping out of her but Cameron managed to keep her voice on this side of crazy.

Reining herself in, she wrapped her arms around her legs and looked at her toes as they soaked in the water. "Right now, I can't help the way I feel. I'm young. I may be logical but I'm still a teenager. One that just had life slap her up-side the head. It's not every day a girl gets pregnant by a vampire. Immortal. Sorry." She bit her lip and glanced back up at Elias for a second as she took a breath and said, "Perhaps watching girls react to this same situation every year has numbed you to our responses but please try to understand that though I may actually get what you are going through and how you have done this against your rules,... I don't have to accept it.