Page 14 of Born Reckless

"What have you told her?" Mason asks. Just like he was the other night, Mason is dressed in a well-fitted suit. He pulls off his suit jacket and lays it on the chair across from him. He unbuttons his cuffs and rolls them up his forearms. It's hard not to stare. He was beautiful before. But now my vision… I don't miss a single detail of him. Not the scar under his left eyebrow. Not the veins that trace their way up his forearms. The pulse under his jawline.

No human being should look so good in business attire.

"Nothing yet," Elena says. She leans back in her seat, directly across the aisle from me. She leans back in her chair and crosses one leg over the other, but I see the way her muscles are tensed. I see the intense way her gaze is fixed on me.

As she said, one wrong move, and she will detain me. Whatever that entails.

"What the hell am I?" I ask as it all comes exploding out of me. All of my insides are shaking like there's a five-point-two earthquake going on inside of me. Confusion and fear and maybe a little bit of anger are bouncing around in my brain. I need answers. I need answers right now.

"We are vampires," Elena answers. Her tone is simple and even. Like it's just a fact. Like how the sky is blue, and fish live in the ocean. "Well, you and I are. Mason isn't. Not yet, anyway."

Not yet. You and I. Vampires.

“That’s not funny, Elena,” I snarl. My insides are getting hotter, but it has nothing to do with the burn in my throat.

“I’m not trying to be funny,” Elena barks back. "Honestly, I didn't know what you were going to become when we very first met. So, don't think that I became your friend simply because I knew you were going to be like me someday." Her eyes soften as she speaks, but I’m still a hot, raging coal. But I can tell she’s not lying right now. I've known her long enough to be able to read her body language. "When I returned to Chicago after we first met, I talked to someone there who told me that I had met someone who would be my eternal friend. Eternal. As in someone who wouldn't die, just like me."

“Do you hear yourself?” I say with an annoyed laugh. “Elena, you’re the CEO of a huge company. You’re richer than the royalty of some countries. I don’t know what you’ve taken, but I suggest you stay away from it in the future.”

But even as I say the angry words, I realize I’m squeezing the arm of the chair so hard that it crushes beneath my hand.

I’m five foot three and weigh 130 pounds. I’m not strong enough to crush much of anything.

"Vampires were made," Mason's voice cuts through to my brain. My eyes slide open and meet his. He leans forward in his seat, bracing his forearms over his knees. The look in his blue eyes is intense. There's darkness there. His eyes are filled with knowledge that the rest of the world is completely unaware of. Restrained is the man who put his hands all over me at that party. I watch him transform into someone commanding, someone who can take charge of any situation, even one that’s absolutely absurd. "A long, long time ago. We don't necessarily know all the details. There was a man who was a… scientist, I guess. He was looking for a way to make himself the ultimate predator. He had this obsession with the supernatural. And in the end, he became what you are. What Elena is. He became the first vampire."

I want to stop this. I want to stop this entire conversation, rewind back into something that makes sense, and then press play.

But Mason doesn’t stop talking.

"This Genesis vampire had a wife," Elena moves on. "And while he was a vampire and she was human, she got pregnant. Before he knew his wife was carrying their firstborn child, he turned her into a vampire, too. Lo and behold, she still gave birth a few months later. The baby was born, and he seemed human. They raised him into an adult, but at some point, he died. Only four days later, he rose from the grave, and guess what? He was just like mommy and daddy."

"Turns out their son was an asshole," Mason continues. "He got a little obsessed with power. Realizing he could do so much more than the humans around him, all he could think about was dominating them. So, he ran around, sleeping with every woman he could, hoping to create others that were just like him. The bastard succeeded. Over the course of a hundred years or so, he had dozens of daughters and seven sons. And every one of them, after they died, Resurrected four days later, as vampires. Turns out, a male vampire can sleep with a human female, and someday, the child they conceived will turn into a vampire, too."

"Our dad was a vampire," Elena says. Her eyes slide over to me, and the look in them tells me that she knows that what she is saying sounds impossible. Yet, here we are. "We always knew it. Our grandfather was also a vampire. The business in Chicago has been a family legacy since the mid-eighteen hundreds. My father wasbornin 1903."

My brain starts doing the math. And it's impossible.

"Yes, Juliet, we’re immortal," Elena says, a slight smile on her lips. "So long as no one drives a stake through your heart, or cuts your head off, you're going to be the same age that you are right now for the rest of forever. So don’t go getting staked or beheaded, or you’ll be dead, this time for good."

"That Genesis vampire?" Mason continues. "The one who created all vampires thousands of years ago? The bastard is still alive. Lives in Austria. Literally calls himself the King."

I squeeze my eyes closed. It's all too much. My brain is trying to process what they're saying because they’re acting like they believe this, but how do you process something like this? How do you make sense of any of it?

"Anyways," Elena moves on. "No, you don't know who your dad was, but he was a vampire. Otherwise, you would have died on that sidewalk."

That fresh wound opens instantly.Your dadare words that have so very rarely ever been spoken in reference to me. My eyes slide over to Mason. From the look on his face, I don't think that Elena has told him anything about my past.

“Wait, you’re sayingyoudidn’t… turn me, or whatever?” I ask as everything the movies and books has told me about vampires runs through my head.

Elena shakes her head. “You can’t turn someone into a vampire, at least not the kind we are.” Of course there is more than one kind. “You have to be born this way.”

“People will refer to you as a Born vampire,” Mason interjects. “And that’s exactly what it means.”

"After you died in New York, we put you on the plane and we came here." Elena sits there, so casual and calm. And considering what she has told me, suddenly I wonder. Just how old is my best friend? "You've been dead for four days. The Resurrection process is a bitch, isn't it?"

And I instantly remember what it felt like before I opened my eyes and everything looked different. The pain. The burn. The acid. "Resurrection." The word leaves my lips. I test it out. I squeeze my eyes closed and shake my head.

The mugger. His knife. All the blood I was losing. And then all that burning. "I really died?"