Chapter 21 Something in the Air
Something in the Air
Liam’s POV
At the academy, I felt someone looking at me through the window. That’s one thing about being a vampire, my body recognizes threats immediately and that’s what had kept me alive long enough to know when to trust.
I ignored the person looking through the window and continued practicing. I pushed myself doing drills, covering for all the fatigue my body had accumulated within the period I missed practice. At a point my body was asking for a pause and I decided to give it, stepping off the ice and sitting on the bench at the tunnel entrance while the others ran the drill.
As I opened my water bottle, I looked toward the back of the building and saw the same person I saw the first time I arrived, standing just outside the tree line where the academy grounds lead to the service path that ran behind the building. He was just standing there, watching the rink through the glass.
I put my water bottle down and went through the side door.
I walked along the wall of the building, keeping my steps quiet, taking the long way around so I was coming at him from the side rather than straight on. He didn’t move as I approached, which meant either he hadn’t heard me or he wasn’t concerned about being heard.
I closed the distance fast when I was close enough, the speed I rarely used openly, and had him against the wall with my forearm across his chest before he finished turning around.
He was older than I expected with a weathered face, calm eyes, dressed in nothing that distinguished him from anyone who might have been walking a path behind a building on a winter afternoon. He looked at me with an expression that should have been fear but wasn’t.
“Who sent you?” I asked.
He said nothing, and started chuckling.
I pressed harder. “Don’t make me lose my patience. Who sent you?”
“This is just the beginning,” he said. His voice was accented, Eastern European. “You must have heard it from your teammate yesterday.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Soon, you will find out how foolish you were for trusting the wrong person.” He tilted his head slightly. “Look at the field.”
I turned instinctively, and looked at the teammates training, I didn’t find anything unusual about them.
When I turned back he was gone, he disappeared while I looked away. The space where he had been against the wall was empty, the air undisturbed. I looked around the tree line in both directions and found nothing. I stood there for a moment with the winter cold pressing against my face.
I went back inside and I felt uncomfortable throughout.
I went back to practice. Anybody that saw how busy I got on the ice would think I was serious, but underneath, my eyes and thoughts kept drifting back to the man. I kept looking towards the window to know if the man would appear again. If he was a spirit, he would probably possess someone here, maybe he was the one who possessed the teammate yesterday? I used my scent ability which I used sparingly when I’m deeply confused about something. I opened it carefully in my head while moving through the rink, reading the layers of whoever the man might have possessed. By the end of training, I got nothing but a throbbing headache that was almost splitting my head in half.
I went off the ice and sat in the corridor. I pressed my palms against my eyes and waited for the pain in my head to reduce.
“Hey.”
Dylan crouched in front of me, already changed, he placed his bag on the floor beside him. Someone had told him, or he had noticed, either way he was here with that particular expression he wore when he was trying to stay practical about something that was worrying him.
“What happened?”
“I saw a man behind the building, he was watching me through the window and he said something disturbing.” I said.
“What did he say?” He asked.
“That I would regret trusting the wrong person.” I replied.
I watched his expression change, like he was thinking a lot in his mind. He sat down beside me on the floor and leaned against the wall.
“Even though we didn’t have a sweet beginning, you are the only one close to me here. I promise to protect you.” He said with a voice filled with sincerity.
“I used my scent power today. My head is banging so much.” I said.
“You’ve been using your senses all practice?” He asked.
“I needed to know if he left anything behind.”
“Did he?”
“Nothing I could pin.”
Dylan was quiet for a moment. Then he stood and held out his hand and I took it, he pulled me up and we walked out of the building together.
We decided to walk home instead of taking a cab or bus. That way, we got to talk and enjoy the winter’s cold. The street was filled with commuters, shop light and the smell of delicious food somewhere nearby. I stayed close to Dylan and kept my awareness open at a low level, enough to catch anything that crossed the baseline of normal.
We were two streets from his building when a kid on a bicycle came fast around the corner, cutting across the pavement without slowing. Dylan stepped aside and the wheel caught the edge of the kerb and the bike swerved, the handlebar clipped Dylan’s arm and sent him sideways into the low wall at the edge of the path.
“Dylan!” I screamed.
He caught himself with his palm. He looked at it, a graze, shallow, the skin broken in a thin line across the heel of his hand. He made a sound of mild irritation and straightened up.
I felt it immediately. The blood was little but the air carried the scent to me and my body responded before I finished thinking, my senses sharpened and the world snapped into higher resolution the way it always did when blood entered the equation. I controlled it, breathed through it, locked it down the way I had learned to across decades of practice.
But something else was underneath it. I looked up slowly and saw a man on the opposite pavement, looking at Dylan with an attention that wasn’t normal. Two store fronts, a woman who had been walking in the same direction as us had slowed her pace. Behind us, someone was standing inside the shadow of the building entrance… All of them were watching Dylan and reacting to his blood the same way I did.
I moved closer to Dylan without explaining why and scanned the street again, slower this time, and counting. That was when I saw her.
She was across the road, maybe fifteen meters back, and she was walking toward us with purpose, her pace increasing with each step. Her hands were at her sides and as the streetlight caught them I saw it clearly.
Her claws had extended, curved and sharp, catching the light and that had no business being a human hand.