Dawn's Darkest Hour

Sunlight glinted merrily off the tops of the trees and the leaves danced in its warmth. It was a beautiful day outside. But, she couldn't appreciate the spectacle of the glorious morning. Not when she felt so dead on the inside. This was the second time a man had killed her. Ramon...it wasn't his fault. He'd willingly given his life to protect her. Carter...blaming him, even giving him another second of her valuable time, was too good for him. He made a choice and now she had to. What she was left with wasn't a choice though. Her heart knew it had no other options. For the sake of her son, she had to patch her broken heart back together.

She was a pragmatic woman. To say she'd never trust or love another man again was premature. But, to say, whoever the lucky fellow was, would have a hard time getting past her newly reinforced defenses was fair. Good luck to him. He'd need it. A gentle knock on the bedroom door pulled her out of her self-imposed gloom. "Come in."

Ruby took a deep breath, expecting the worst, as she balanced the tray and turned the doorknob. Her sister had been through something that she couldn't imagine. To belong to someone so whole heartedly, both body and soul and then to be rejected, thrown away as Carter had done her sister...unforgivable. "I brought you some tea and a snack," she said with forced cheer, setting the tray on top of a dresser.

Shayla looked so small, curled up into a ball the way she was, dressed in an oversized robe that dwarfed her petite frame. Her long black hair hung limply over her narrow shoulders. Dark circles hung under her eyes as evidence of too many sleepless nights. The shadows made her sister's normally cherubic face look gaunt and distraught. God help Carter, Ruby thought. If she ever got her hands on him, she'd make him pay for what he'd done to her sister.

Carefully, she handed the steaming mug of tea to Shayla. "Evan is downstairs playing with R.J.," she said with a strained chuckle. "He's taking his role as adopted big brother very seriously."

Shayla briefly glanced up at her sister. So put together, dressed to perfection, not a hair out of place. She averted her eyes to stare out the window. Not that she didn't love her sister, but she just couldn't deal with her right now. "Tell him I said thanks," she muttered absently, waving off the tea.

Ruby placed a folded napkin on the end table next to the chair and placed the mug on top of it. Smoothing a place to sit on the rumpled bed, the springs creaked as she perched on the edge. "He's worried about you. We all are." Shayla wasn't one to be pushed. When she was ready to talk, she would.

Shifting her weight, Shayla met her sister's eyes, cringing at the concern she saw in them. "I'm fine."

Ruby sighed. So like Shayla, to deny the hurt she felt. Her sister would rather let her pain fester and suffer silently than speak her thoughts aloud. "Shayla...what you're going through...can't be easy. Talking about it..." she snapped her lips shut as Shayla cut her off.

"We could talk it to death and it wouldn't change a thing," Shayla hissed. "Really, what is there to talk about? Carter is out of my life. Permanently. He tried to tell me not to get involved with him. He knew that the only thing he had to offer me was pain. I wanted it too badly. I didn't listen. You were right about him all along...that should make you feel good."

"It doesn't. Shayla, I'm so sorry that you're hurting. I never wanted that. I'd give anything to have been wrong...anything." Ruby took a sip from her mug and set it down on the tray. There was no accusation in her sister's words, nothing, but the cold, unfeeling words of truth spoken aloud. "I made peace with Carter, for your sake. But...I'd make war with him...I will...if I..."

Shayla forced the bite she'd taken from one of her sister's cookies down her throat. The cookie might as well have been made of wood for all she tasted of it. "Don't. I'm not angry with him or with myself. I willingly took a chance. I lost. I don't regret a moment of what I had with him. But, it's over. He is no more. I can't mourn a man who didn't feel the same for me as I felt for him. He's gone, end of story."

Ruby studied her sister's newly found determination. The set of her jaw told Ruby that her sister meant business. Shayla was the more resilient of the two of them. In time, she would dust herself off and go on with life. Sure, Shayla would allow herself a few days to luxuriate in her pain. But, after that, she'd be ok. Shayla always was. Nervously, Ruby gripped the handle of her mug and cradled it between her fingers. "He knows our secret. He could use it to his advantage."

Shayla nodded in agreement. For almost two hundred years, her family had isolated themselves from the outside world for the very same reason. "I know." If their secret got out, much could be lost. There wasn't anything she could do to change that. Hiding wasn't the answer. Sequestering themselves from the world wouldn't keep them safe any longer. The world was simply too big. "I have to trust that Carter's noble enough. That he cares enough for me to keep our secret unknown."

"I hope, for all of our sakes, that you're right."

Chapter 23

Nora pretended to be busily arranging assignments when David sauntered into the classroom. She was even more determined than ever to find out who her mysterious student really was. Last night, sleep finally found her around two in the morning. The riddle of David kept her tossing and turning. After school today, she was going to gather up the pieces and try to haphazardly assemble them to figure him out.

He moved with such an easy grace, almost as if his battered Converse never touched the floor. His eyes surveyed the other kids in evaluation while he made his way to the back of the room. She felt him studying her as she studied him. Who was he, just another kid in her overstuffed classroom? Someone, she had never been able to let go of? An old friend, whose reunion had been long overdue? Maybe, she was just losing her mind. Was she becoming one of those obsessed teachers people read about? At this stage anything was possible. She was annoyed with herself most of all at being so stymied by the puzzle he presented.

Rachael glanced up from her book nervously as David took the seat across from her. After school yesterday, she'd tried to find him and hadn't. She felt as if she had to explain herself to him. Clue him into the cause for her rampant obsession about vampires. Maybe if he knew and understood her better, he wouldn't write her off as a total nut job and they could at least be friends. "How'd you do?"

"Huh?" David had been so fascinated by watching Nora pretend not to watch him; he hadn't noticed the paper turned face down on his desk. Confidently, he flipped the paper over and blinked in disbelief. "No way..." he muttered under his breath. The homework he'd turned in yesterday was littered with red slash marks and comments written neatly in the margins. How could she criticize his work, his interpretation of a body of fiction so vehemently? Furiously, he wadded the paper in his fist. He'd never gotten such a low score in his life.

Rachael shrank back into her seat and smiled at David consolingly. Her grade was as she'd expected, barely passing. Apparently, David had higher hopes than the score he'd gotten. "Ms. Temple grades really hard," she pacified.

David grunted and noisily smoothed out his homework assignment. He wasn't a high schooler and he wasn't here to impress teachers or earn good grades. As soon as his mission was complete. He was as good as gone. So, what difference did one C+ make in the whole scheme of things anyway? Rationalization wasn't easing his bruised ego...not at all. He'd never gotten less than a perfect grade in his life. This little homework assignment wasn't going to be any different. After class, he and Ms. Temple were going to have a little talk.

Rachael struggled to keep her eyes open. Last night, her mom had been especially hard on her. First, it was the dishes, and then it was supervised study time, and after that, her mother had stubbornly stayed planted in her room till she was certain that the medicine had been swallowed for real. Rachael was always so careful not to tip her mom off. She didn't know what had gotten in to her mother or why she was all of a sudden so suspicious of her. Probably some damn article from one of those lame women's magazines her mother practically inhaled with fervent enthusiasm. Ten Simple Steps to Handle Your Psychotic Adolescent Daughter, or some other such crap. With her mom, who knew where she got all those handy tips about how to be a perfect parent?

The medicine made her eyelids heavy and her head all fuzzy. Rachael felt as if she were sleepwalking through the morning. The teacher droned on and on and on. Rachael got sleepier and sleepier and sleepier. The sweep hand on the clock seemed to come to a complete stop. Maybe, if she laid her head down for just a few minutes her mind would clear. Just a few minutes...was all she needed. The sheet of notebook paper under her cheek was smooth and cool. Her lashes fluttered for a moment and then slid shut.

The sound of shuffling feet and rustling clothing snapped Rachael to attention. David's gentle nudge against her arm also helped. Self-consciously, she stifled a yawn and blushed apologetically. "Did I miss anything?"

David snorted and shook his head. "Not much." He shoved the thick book deep into his backpack and wiggled out of the cramped desk. The rings of Rachael's notebook left a deep red indentation on her pink cheek. He didn't say anything about it. Obviously, judging by her heated cheeks, she was embarrassed enough about falling asleep in class as it was. "I've gotta talk to Ms. Temple for a minute," he said.

"Good luck." Rachael gathered up her backpack and slid out the door in the back of the classroom, opposite the way David and most of the students were going. She was mortified that she'd fallen asleep in front of him. Humiliated, she rubbed the red welt on her cheek and ran her hand down her chin, wondering if she'd slobbered on herself during the nap. She gave David a sympathetic glance as she slid out the door. If he was going to talk to her about his grade, he was wasting his time. Ms. Temple never, ever changed her mind about anything.

David hovered over the teacher. Ms. Temple was casually pretending to ignore him as she shuffled through the graded homework assignments for her next class. Irritated by her lack of proper respect. Something he wasn't used to from humans, he cleared his throat. Usually, humans had an instinctive fear of him. From his vantage point, he had a good view of Ms. Temple's finer attributes. Two hills crested into a deep valley, dipping low into the lacy neckline of her blouse. Not a bad view. Maybe he'd take it easy on her. Given his endless imagination of exactly what sat nestled in the bed of peach satin beneath the V-neck.

Aware of the red blush creeping up those twin hills. Hell, she knew he was ogling her like a common schoolboy. He could sense her annoyance at the free show build. "Ms. Temple." Her desk was a mess of stacks of paperwork, scattered bits of broken, yellowed, chalk, tattered books, and dog eared writing utensils. In the far corner of the institutional imitation wood grain desk rested a small snapshot in a cheap, faux gilt frame. The crack in the glass indicated that it'd been crowded and pushed off onto the floor by the chaos on her desk more than once.

In the background was the front of the school. The picture was of Ms. Temple, long before she'd become Mrs. Temple. She stood smiling arm in arm with two people. David saw similarities between the three of them, in the shape of their mouths, the tilt of her chin, and slope of her pert nose; obviously her parents. A golden graduation tassel dangled off the corner of the navy blue graduation cap, covering a mane of light brown waves that danced at the tops of her narrow shoulders. For once, instead of other people seeing his ghost when their minds couldn't quite connect who he'd been with who he was. He saw the ghost. The ghost of who she'd been, of the girl he'd known, years ago. Nora.

My god, it all made sense. The way she watched him. The hint of recognition he saw in her eyes. How was he supposed to catch a drug dealer when he couldn't even put the simplest two plus two equation together? Nora Summers. How could he not have guessed it? After all, his fear of her rejection was one of the many things that had pushed him into the city that cold December night.

As a teenaged boy and a painfully late bloomer, he'd gone into the city in search of a woman willing to take pity on him and the hard earned hundred bucks in his pocket to transform him from a gangly, awkward boy who practically fainted every time a girl came near him, especially Nora, into a man. He thought if he could gain some experience and developed some confidence with the opposite sex. She'd see him as a potential boyfriend instead of just some random kid that sat across from her in class.

Nora's fingers trembled as she fumbled with the paper clip. She couldn't ignore the boy towering over her, obviously and annoyingly enamored by the peek of cleavage that was visible over her shoulder. When he was this close to her, she could sense what her mind refused to firmly grasp. He was David...Her David.

"Mr. Russ," she said, glancing up at him unblinking. "What can I do for you?" She had to pretend she didn't realize who he was. She had to feign cool indifference to him. For all he knew, to her, he was just another student. He might run and go back into hiding, leaving her always wondering, and never seeing a trace of him again. Until she could prove it, for a fact and confront him with hard, irrefutable evidence, she couldn't risk scaring him off.

David stared down at her. Catching the glimmer of what could only be recognition in her eyes. Even if her brain didn't realize it, she knew him, deep on the inside. He pushed back the impulse to give her a glimpse at the boy long buried in an empty grave in some cemetery marked by a headstone he'd never even bothered to lay eyes on. He crumpled his wrinkled homework assignment in his fist. He was close to achieving what he came here to do. He couldn't blow his cover, not even for her, especially not for her. "Never mind." Spinning on his heel at an awkward, graceless, human speed, he stormed out of classroom.

Nora pressed a hand to her chest and blew out a tremulous breath. For a moment, she saw confirmation in her suspicions in his eyes. David was alive, and well, trapped in the body of a teenage boy, a student in her English Comp 101 class.

Chapter 24

Bianca took the flat, white box out of the guard's hands and sat it amongst the mountains of paperwork on her desk. Her nose wrinkled in disgust at the stench that wafted off the box. Quickly, she dismissed the guard with a wave of her finely, coiffed nails, painted up in her favorite candy apple red polish. The reek of vampire blood and rotting flesh perfumed the air with a macabre, foul, sickeningly foul aroma. What in the hell? Carefully, she ran the edge of her nail across the tape that held the lid in place and lifted it in her fingertips.

"Son of a bitch," she hissed as she dropped the lid and it clattered to the wood floor at her feet with a noisy, papery thump. The item in the box, nestled in damp, white tissue paper, stained the rusty red of drying blood wasn't what shocked her the most. It was what the wrinkled, stained, rotting piece of flesh represented and whom it was taken from. Carter's tattoo, the very symbol he'd painstakingly engraved in his own flesh, rested in the bottom of the box. He'd skillfully cut the skin and underlying fat from his own body. Her heart pounded as her fingers traced the familiar shape on the layer of rotting skin and subcutaneous tissue.

She sank into the leather swivel chair behind her and pushed the box away with the point of her index finger. There was no note included amongst the wrappings. But, she didn't need one. She understood Carter's message loud and clear. A simple double spaced, typed resignation letter would have sufficed. The cutting of flesh was nothing more than a way to get his point across to everyone else. As a vampire, he'd regenerate the missing tissue. She almost hated that he'd made it so easy for her. Almost.

Bianca bent and picked the box lid up from the floor and placed it over the contents of the box. Carter was no longer one of them. The way was clear for her to get what she'd always wanted. Control. Her patience had finally paid off. Taking a moment to smooth her pencil skirt over her thighs, she contemplated her next move. The Great Father was no imbecile and she'd do well to remember that. Her steps had to be carefully planned if she was going to maneuver herself into Carter's place. The keys to her favorite toy jingled in her fingers. She snatched the box and locked the office up tightly behind her. She knew exactly what she needed to do.

Chapter 25

The chaos in the cafeteria was the same. The same offensive smells, the same inane chatter, and the same students, lumped together in their various cohorts. How David was going to get close enough to his mark to substantiate what he witnessed yesterday. He wasn't sure. He took the empty seat on the bench next to Rachael. For some reason he hadn't quite figured out. There was always plenty of space on either side of her. Leaning back on his elbows, he slouched against the edge of the table. "Who is that guy?"

Rachael slugged back her second Diet Coke in almost as many minutes and squinted into the crowd. She was still having trouble focusing on anything for too long without her eyelids drooping closed, thanks to her mother's sudden attack of parenting skills. "Who?"

"The guy in the hundred dollar t-shirt," David said, pointing.

Rachael gasped and pressed David hand down with her palm. "Don't let him see you pointing at him. God, are you stupid or something? Cole and his cronies are always looking for fresh meat." His fingers were warm against her palm. Shyly she withdrew her hand. "You want to stay as far away from them as possible. Cole Zimmerman and his band of worshipers are bad news. Did you know he's actually twenty years old? He flunked Kindergarten twice or something like that." Quickly, she dropped her eyes to the floor as Cole spotted her from his perch across the cafeteria.

David shrugged and snickered, "So."

"So nothing. Just keep away from him is all. He's in the Mafia or something. To all the teachers and parents, he's like God's gift. But, I'm telling you...he's bad news with a capital B."

All right, Rachael had his attention. "How do you know?" David asked casually. He had her talking and he was definitely listening.

"Because he's my neighbor. Trust me, his parents can't afford the kind of clothes he wears. I mean...come on, have you seen the car he drives? No way an after school job pays that kind of money." Nervously, Rachael tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and shrank into her hoodie as if Cole or anybody else besides David could hear what she said over the din of voices. "He has everyone believing he's an angel. But, he's as honest as the Devil himself. I know what he does. So do most of the kids in school. Believe me, one of these days he's gonna get caught. He can't keep everybody fooled forever."

David cocked his head. Rachael was hesitant to divulge information about the illusive Cole Zimmerman. She knew exactly what he needed to know. Exactly. How to make her spill it without blowing his cover? If she thought he was some kind of a narc, she'd clam up so tightly that he'd never get the answers out of her. "Oh come on Rachael. You can't be serious. Maybe his parents have more money than you think. Maybe he's some kind of a trust fund baby or something." He was baiting her and he knew it. The wheels inside her head were turning. She was debating on how much and how far she trusted him.