A Shade of Novak (A Shade of Vampire #8)(17)

I didn’t even need to think. I just had to move where he was positioning me.

Oh, this is much easier.

Why couldn’t Jake have just done this?

This guy was good. He was making me look good.

I glanced around at the crowd until I finally caught Ben’s eye. I gave him a huge wink.

He laughed and got Kristal’s attention. Kristal, her cheeks pink and forehead shining with sweat, looked over the stranger I was dancing with and gave me a thumbs up.

Okay, now we’re finally back on track to this being a good night.

“How did you learn to dance so well?” I shouted into the stranger’s ear.

“I dance a lot.” His voice was deep and husky.

“Oh,” I said.

I couldn’t think of further conversation. But it didn’t feel awkward not talking, because he kept me moving and barely even gave me a chance to talk even if I had wanted to.

I found it a little disconcerting the way he kept looking around at the other men he’d arrived with as we were dancing. I thought that perhaps he was checking out the girls they’d hooked up with. I looked around myself. Each of them seemed to have found partners by now.

He bent down and whispered into my ear, “Care to take a walk outside?”

“Yeah,” I slurred. “Sure.”

He gripped my hand and led me away from the crowd. It was getting hot and the cool sea air felt welcome. His muscular arm wrapped around my waist as we walked along the sand.

“So,” I said, looking up at his face. “What’s your name?”

“Caleb.”

“Caleb,” I repeated. I liked the sound of his name rolling off my tongue, so I said it again. “Caaaa-leb.”

We walked side by side for about fifteen more minutes, the disco music and lights draining in the distance, until we were approaching a quiet part of the beach. When I looked around, I found it strange that his friends had all left at the same time with their girls, and we were all walking in the same direction.

Even in my drunk state, I found this odd. I stopped in my tracks. It was only now in the natural light of the full moon that I noticed just how pale his face was.

My breath hitched.

I’d seen enough vampires in my life. There were small differences in the formation of the upper jawbone—extremely subtle, but noticeable.

“A-are you a vampire?”

I felt crazy saying the words out loud. But his eyes widened and he took a step back from me. “What?”

“I’ve never seen you before in The Shade, but—”

“The Shade?”

He gripped my arms so tightly it hurt, his deep brown eyes narrowing on me.

“Who are you?” he whispered, barely breathing.

“Rose Novak. My parents are—”

Before I could even finish my sentence, he swore and let go of me with such force that I stumbled onto the sand.

He called out to the other men, “Do it now! We need to leave!”

The men pulled out needles from their pockets all at once, and in a whir of motion, the girls lay limp in their arms. They all ran into the ocean, carrying their victims over their shoulders. I could barely shout out before a black submarine emerged from the waters. They piled in through the hatch.

Caleb glared down at me and, without another word, raced into the water and leapt through the hatch after them.

Seconds later, the submarine was gone.

Chapter 5: Rose

Ben didn’t believe me last night when I told him. He said that I was just drunk out of my mind and hauled me back to the condo, leaving Kristal and Jake to continue partying until dawn.

Only when we switched on the local news the following morning to find out that almost a dozen girls had gone missing from that beach that very night did he start to take notice of what I was saying.

He pulled me into his room and shut the door.

“So you’re telling me that vampires are responsible for this?”

“Yes,” I said irritably, rubbing my head as I tried to relieve my hangover. “I saw a group of vampires steal them away. The guy—Caleb, his name was—would have stolen me away too if I hadn’t told him that I was a Novak.”

Ben heaved a sigh and sat down on the bed next to me, resting his own head in his hands.

“And you are sure that you didn’t recognize any of these vampires from The Shade?”

“No way.” I shook my head, recalling how hot Caleb was. “Trust me, I would have remembered them.”

“Then who the hell are they? And why are they going around stealing people?”

I paused and continued to massage my temples with my fingers.

“Ben, we should call Mom and Dad to tell them about this.”

He stared at me.

“You do realize that if we do that, our two months of freedom will be over before they’ve even begun?”

“Obviously. But what other option do we have?”

“What would Mom and Dad do about this even if they knew?”

Ben had a point. We couldn’t dictate that another coven should live without human blood like everyone did in The Shade. Drinking human blood was just a part of life for most vampires—no different than humans eating animals for their flesh.

I supposed that I would have been more horrified by the thought of all those girls being kidnapped had I not grown up all my life around vampires. Although the vampires of The Shade no longer fed on humans, it was part of their nature to crave human blood and I knew that it was a daily struggle for The Shade’s vampires to exercise restraint and sustain themselves only on animal blood. It was rather macabre to realize how desensitized I was to the situation.