A Shade of Blood (A Shade of Vampire #2)(23)

All I knew as I sat across that table from her in the library, was that I was losing her by the minute. You never know what you got until it’s gone, Ben. You treated her like crap and now, you’re scrambling to fix things with her.

“I’m not trying to pressure you, Sofia…” I began to say.

“Really? That’s exactly what it feels like.”

I wasn’t used to her being so assertive around me. She normally always heard me out – yet another thing that changed about her since we left The Shade.

“I can’t take this.” I got up from my seat. “I’ll see you after practice.” Like I always did when forced into situations I had no idea how to handle, I ran.

Had it been any other guy, I would’ve been happy for her, but this was Derek Novak. I watched him kill Eliza, drain her of every drop of blood in her body. No hesitation. No hint of shame. He preyed on her remorselessly. I didn’t care what he did or whether or not there was still any hope of good in him. He didn’t deserve my best friend. Sofia deserved far better than him.

And yet, it felt as if I were losing her to him.

As I sped through the corridors of our school, weaving past people waving at me and calling my name on my way to the football team’s locker room, anger began to consume me as I thought of what I lost at The Shade. The island took everything away from me. I had to break it off with Tanya, because I couldn’t even make out with her without thinking about Claudia. Even if I could, I doubt I would’ve even felt much of it. I barely had a sense of touch after what that vampire wench put me through.

By the time I reached the locker room, I was raging mad. Sofia and I were pretending that we could gain back what we lost. That was a lie. There was no going back to the life we had. Why can’t you see that, Sofia?

“Hey, man. Coach has been looking for you,” Connor, one of the guys in the team, approached. “You okay?”

I brushed past him and went straight to my locker.

“Ben!” another one of the guys hollered as I dialed my combination. “Heard you broke it off with Tanya. You don’t mind if I start hitting on her, do you?”

I grunted in response as I pulled my locker open.

“Whatever. We all know he doesn’t give a hoot about Tanya, dude. I think he’s finally ready to move on to Rose Red. So Hudson…” Jed, one of the biggest guys on the team, leaned against the locker next to mine. “Are you finally going to man up and tap Sofia like you always planned on doing?”

The hollers and crude jokes that began to fill the room rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t know why it all got to me. Jokes about me not going after Sofia were standard fare inside the boys’ locker room. This time, however, it just grated on my nerves.

As if I was not irritated enough already, Jed prattled on. “I hope Rose Red’s worth your wait, Ben, but just one look at her… and you got to believe she’ll make a good lay.”

I began seeing red. I ground my teeth in a failed attempt to maintain self-control, but it was a lost cause. I slammed my locker door shut and faced Jed. “Don’t talk about her that way.” He didn’t see it coming but Jed’s face quickly got a violent introduction to my fist. Connor tried to intervene, so I punched him too.

They came at me and I didn’t care if they were attacking me or simply trying to hold me back. I fought back, fully aware that it wasn’t really the guys on the team I was fighting. Every time I threw a hit, it was at Claudia, at Derek and at every other bloodsucker at The Shade. I was hitting them back for taking everything I held dear away from me.

By the end of the whole bout, I was bruised and bloody, and though I was burning up with anger inside, keenly aware of the pain and the desire for vengeance taking hold of me, my body was as numb as my soul was aware.

No matter how I got beat and cut up, my body could barely feel a thing.

CHAPTER 17: SOFIA

“Sofia?”

Still in the library, I looked up to find one of the people I least expected to find there – the football team’s linebacker, Connor James. The first thing I immediately took notice of in the tall, dark senior was the fresh new shiner on his right cheek.

“Hey…” I muttered, not quite sure what to make of him approaching me. “What happened to you?” I pointed to his assaulted cheek with my pen. I was absent-mindedly fiddling with it while I read the same paragraph in my book for the fifteenth time.

“This? It’s nothing.” He looked almost timid, a reaction I found strange. He was usually one of the loudest, most outgoing guys in our class.

Is he blushing? I was beginning to find the encounter uncomfortable. Connor had barely spoken a word to me before. “Aren’t you supposed to be at football practice with Ben? Did something happen?”

He twisted his body to one side, the expression on his face showing his discomfort. “That’s kind of why I’m here… We had this epic battle at the locker room… Well, Ben’s at the clinic. He got banged up pretty bad. Thought you might want to know.”

What did you get yourself into, Ben? I urgently gathered up my belongings and stuffed them inside my bag. It’d been years since Ben got himself into a fight. It was way back in middle school, when one of the guys in class – a bully I always did my best to avoid – tried to kiss me against my will. The bully came out of the fight with a few scratches and a broken nose. Ben, on the other hand, got for himself a broken arm and rib.