Vampiric: Chapter Six, Part 5

It dawned on me I could have read him instead of waiting for an answer. That had to be what Mom had done. But I also realized that I wanted more to hear than to take it from him. “What do you need to tell me?”

His face burrowed into his hands momentarily, before he raked his hair with his fingers.

“You're being tested this week. But they're rumored to be trying a different approach. They started last week, and the people they tested then aren't moving around yet. They're just…lying there…staring at the wall, but they don't say anything. One of the three looked at me today when I came in; it was creepy how empty his eyes were.”

“What are they doing to them?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t hear the tremor in my voice.

“From what the guys are talking about, they're trying to tap into the element itself.”

“That doesn't make sense. We are the element, it's us. We can use it—”

“So why can't it use you?” he interrupted calmly.

That shut me up. Not so much the idea of it, but the memory it triggered: losing control in high school. Before I had run away with Drei and left my Dad and everything else behind. In my indecisiveness, something inside me took over and fought for me; it wasn’t me, but it was a part of me. I'd been afraid of losing control ever since.

“But why? They could end up destroying someone.”

“They don't care about the person; they only care about how to harness and use the element against any who resist the government and the country.”

Remembering what Mom had told me about the air, I said, “The elements have the will to support life or let life die, but they don't tolerate people who think they should be able to choose which it is.”

“Abriel,” Nick asserted, gripping my forearm and holding my eyes. “They don't care.”

My gaze bore into his hand, touching me, but not really seeing it. A thousand thoughts swarmed my mind as to why they should care; a million combated as to why they didn't. Despite all the words filling my mind, none seemed to fit my lips well enough to escape. So I abandoned thinking about it, unable to quell the mixture of emotions beginning to overwhelm me.

“What—what else did you need to tell me?” I asked, struggling to stay calm.

His hand slipped down into mine, and I could tell he wasn't watching me anymore. “I can't. Everything else is from Gloria, and I promised not to.”

I would have nodded—used to hearing that I couldn't be told what Gloria, a clairvoyant vampire, had predicted in my future—but I couldn't even manage that. After having spent years avoiding losing control again, I was about to be dragged off amongst people who would try to induce it. It petrified me, to say the least, but it also angered, sickened, worried, and upset me.

Nick pulled me into his arms, running his fingers through my hair and whispering words that didn't make sense. Not among the hordes of emotion and thought concerning what was coming. No matter how I tried not to think about it, it came back—twice as forcefully and unnerving as before—until I couldn't help but cry into his shoulder, hoping my fears were for naught.