him. I will always love you. But I do miss the way you used to be. The Tristan I fell in love with, my first best friend, would never hurt someone like this. I purposely remembered the day he’d helped one of my best friends, Michelle, off the high school track at an eighth-grade track meet when shin splints made it nearly impossible for her to walk on her own to the stands after her long-distance run. He hadn’t even known her, and it had happened before we’d started dating when his parents were still forbidding him from being friends with me. He hadn’t helped Michelle for me. He’d done it because he’d seen a stranger hurting and no one else had stepped up and helped.
He frowned as he watched that memory replay in my mind and tried to adjust his faint concept of himself with that brief glimpse of who he once was. The seconds ticked by, his broad palm still firm beneath his prey’s chin as he wrestled with his instincts.
I have no memory of this person you say I used to be, he finally thought. All I remember are moments of the two of us sitting by a stream somewhere and in a mirrored room dancing together. And something about you in a white dress with...wings?
A tear slid down my cheek. I wiped it away as one corner of my lips twitched with the urge to smile. He remembered our dancing together at the Charmers masq ball fundraiser two years ago when we’d first begun to secretly date.
It was a Halloween costume, I silently explained.
Why can’t I remember much? His frown deepened as tinges of cold fear trickled from him. I feel like I should be able to remember more, but when I try, it’s like getting lost in a fog.
It’ll all come back. I promise. I’ll help you remember. But until your memory comes back, can you please just trust me and let this man go?
You won’t leave me?
I swallowed down the hard lump in my throat and shook my head. We’ll figure this out together.
Taking a deep breath, Tristan stepped away from the human, releasing him and moving to my side in a blur even my own eyes struggled to follow. The human started to slump down the bare hardwood tree’s trunk in shock. Dad darted forward and caught him before he hit the ground, pulling him to his feet then capturing the man’s gaze with his own. Under the thrall of the vampire gaze daze, the man’s eyes widened then went blank as Dad began to murmur instructions to him to alter his memory and send him safely home.
If only recovering Tristan’s memory could be as easy as making this human forget part of his.
My own knees weak with relief, I slipped an arm around Tristan’s waist and slowly led him through the woods back toward the cabin. And tried not to think about how much the sweet, delicious scent of blood on his lips made my stomach clench and my heart race with need.
We spent every waking moment of the next five months training Tristan to control the speed of his reflexes and movements using tai chi, because it had worked so well for both my dad and me. Dad’s theory was that a lot of a fledgling’s control issues came from the fact that our bodies moved even faster than our minds, so instinctual urges to feed kicked in and made us attack before we could even realize what we were doing and make a conscious decision to stop ourselves.
The longer Tristan practiced tai chi, the more I began to see hints of the Tristan I’d loved for so long. His movements became less like a bird’s and more fluid, like the human athlete he used to be. As Tristan developed self-control, he also gained something other than his memory loss to focus on, which allowed him to relax and gradually become more independent.
When I wasn’t helping Dad train Tristan, I was working on homework. And there was a lot of it. I’d figured Tristan and I could retake our junior year of high school someday after Tristan got his memory back. If we were both going to live forever, what was one year’s delay in our education going to matter? But Dad insisted on signing us up for homeschooling via the internet and having me do both Tristan’s and my homework so we wouldn’t fall behind. Once Tristan’s memory returned, the plan was to have him speed-read over everything he’d missed to get caught up.
I think Dad was just trying to keep me busy so I wouldn’t worry all the time.
But how could I not? Especially with Tristan’s sister, Emily, constantly texting requests for updates on Tristan’s progress. At first I thought she was just concerned about her little brother. But lately I’d started to wonder if maybe she wasn’t the only one in the Clann who was worried about Tristan.
One early April morning, my cell phone’s beep woke me up with an alert for a new text message.
Still half-asleep, I rolled onto my side, grabbed my phone, and cracked one eyelid to read the message before the beeping could wake anyone else.
My mother wants to know when you two will be coming back to Jacksonville.
Why would we return? I texted back.
You have to, Emily’s reply read. The Clann needs to be sure he’s in control and not a danger to anyone.
I scowled at the screen. As far as I was concerned, we were never going back to Jacksonville. How could we, when Tristan was still more animal than man? I wasn’t sure he could even control himself in a crowd full of humans, much less descendants.
Sighing, I propped up on one elbow, looked around and froze.
I was alone in the cabin.
Had Tristan run outside after another hunter? Maybe Dad had been in too much of a hurry chasing after him to wake me? If so, why hadn’t I heard anything?
My pulse racing, I jumped to my feet and rushed toward the door. But movement outside the window stopped me. Tristan and Dad were practicing tai chi a few yards from the cabin.
Blowing out a long sigh of relief, I moved closer to the window to watch them, and a sigh of a different kind slipped from my lungs.
In the cold morning air, still predawn gray, Tristan’s fiercely determined focus turned each motion into a thing of both beauty and danger, like a fighter in a martial arts movie preparing for a battle. I wrapped my arms around myself and watched him unseen and unheard for once, and in that moment remembered again why I loved him. It wasn’t just the way he moved, or the beautiful lines formed by his sculpted body, honed by endless football practices over the years and perfected by vampire blood. It was the look in his eyes, the firm set to his mouth and jaw, that single-minded determination to succeed at whatever he attempted. Just like he always had.
It was a rare glimpse of the old Tristan I knew and loved and had missed every waking day of the past five months.
When he smoothly slid down into a low right lunge in Form 16, I actually shivered. A minute later, as he progressed to Form 18 and his left palm slowly pushed forward as if pressing open an invisible door, my shiver turned into full-on goose bumps down the back of my neck and arms. But this time it wasn’t because of the beauty of the moment.
Tristan was about to use magic.
I had time to think Oh, no and rush for the door. By the time I opened it a half second later, a nearby tree had already gone up in a thunderous boom of flames. The morning’s tai chi lesson was definitely over.
Tristan stared at the tree. He glanced down at his hands then up at me, his eyes wide as I ran over to him.
“I... Did I just...” he sputtered.
“It’s okay,” I said, taking his hands into mine. “You did it with your willpower and that bundle of energy inside you. Can you feel that energy?”
He frowned then slowly nodded.
“Good. Now focus on that energy. Think about keeping it as a tight ball inside you if you can.”
“I didn’t mean to set the tree on fire. I just...I was ticked off. I got distracted. I was thinking...”
I read his mind. He was thinking that he was tired of not knowing who and what he was. And then his anger had triggered his willpower to kick in and spit out a bit of magic in the form of a fireball.