My Blood Approves: Fate Part 1

Fate.

My Blood Approves [2].

Amanda Hocking.

About the Author.

Amanda Hocking is a lifelong Minnesotan obsessed with John Hughes and Jim Henson. In between making collages and drinking too much Red Bull, she writes young adult urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Chapter 1.

The warm summer air slid in through the windows, filling the car with the soft, green scent of the park, and the foreboding sound of traffic rus.h.i.+ng by on the highway. Fighting the rather childish urge to cover my face with my fingers, I settled for biting my lip and keeping my eyes focused out the window, where children were playing in the gra.s.s. That would've been mildly comforting if I hadn't been imagining them getting completely flattened by the Lexus. Admittedly, the car was just idling in the parking lot, but I'm a notoriously paranoid person.

My younger brother Milo had just turned fifteen, and naturally, all he could talk about was getting his license. This is the same boy had spent the better part of the last year playing video games, or cooking elaborate meals, or studying for an exam he would surely ace anyway. This new obsession with cars I blamed entirely on Jack, who insisted on driving at excessive speeds in his family's luxury cars. I sensed the change in Milo the instant he laid eyes on their Lamborghini. Things that beautiful tended to captivate people, even gay teenage boys, apparently.

Even though I was two and a half years older than Milo, I still didn't have my license. In fact, I'd never driven a car of any kind before, despite Jack's recent suggestion that I should. My mother didn't own a car, so there was nothing for me to learn on and nothing to drive. This fact remained was just as true for Milo, so I had a.s.sumed that he would spend his teenage years riding the bus or hitching a ride with friends, like I had, but then he and Jack had got to talking, and here we were. I sat in the backseat, properly seat belted in, staring at Milo in the drive seat with intense apprehension.

Wearing gigantic sungla.s.ses, Jack sat in the pa.s.senger seat next to him, explaining things to Milo. There were several major issues I had with this scenario, and I had become certain that nothing good could come of this driving lesson.

First of all, Jack doesn't really explain things. He points to a pedal and says, "That one makes it go. So push on it and let's go." That's it. Fortunately, Milo is a look-before-you-leap kind of guy, so he pressed Jack for more information, but that doesn't make his answers any less vague. And Milo was starting to get that gleam in his big brown eyes, the one that says he's feeling the need for the speed. On top of that, only six short months ago, I was riding with Jack in his Jeep, and he happened to roll it.

We managed to escape unharmed, but the Jeep burst into flames. This is the guy that's teaching Milo how to drive. Plus, we're only a few feet away from a park filled with children and a highway filled with speeding drivers. We live near Loring Park, and the parking lot next to it makes it a prime place to practice driving, but once he takes the car on the road, we'll be bombarded by hurried cars and three-lane one-ways. One of the downsides to living in downtown Minneapolis (or probably downtown anywhere) is the chaos involved with learning to drive in area filled with so many cars.

Not to mention it's mid-afternoon in August and the sun is s.h.i.+ning brightly above us. Ordinarily, that would sound like the best time to drive, but sunlight makes Jack groggy. He's already started to yawn, and his reaction time will be significantly diminished, should he need to grab the wheel or intervene in someway.

2.

I can't even really tell how much Milo is paying attention to the lesson Jack is giving, as in the actual words and meanings of things, or if he's just mesmerized by Jack himself. They've been around each other a lot more since summer vacation started, so I've been hoping that Milo would start to get desensitized to Jack, but I don't know how well it's working.

The thing about Jack is that he's not exactly like everyone else. He is attractive in his own right, with dancing blue eyes, perpetually disheveled sandy hair, and flawless tanned skin, but he's not what I would call drop-dead gorgeous. The only thing about him that really gets to me is his laugh, which is clear and happy and perfect. It sounds like a weird thing to be hung up on, but perfection tends to get me.

Everyone else swoons over Jack like he's the most enchanting thing they've ever seen, but then again, he probably is. I'm the only one that's immune to his charms, or at least his unnatural ones. I still enjoy him immensely, probably more than I should, especially considering the way I feel about his brother Peter. That's putting it a little simply, but everything about Jack and his family is rather complicated, thanks to one major fact: they just happen to be vampires.

Milo doesn't know this, that it's Jack's vampire pheromones that make him so entrancing, so Milo doesn't really get why he's so attracted to Jack. Ironically, it has helped him come to terms with his h.o.m.os.e.xuality, but he feels guilty about it all the time because he thinks that Jack and I are dating. Which we aren't. I don't know for sure if we would be, even if things weren't so insanely impossible thanks to Peter. But with things as they are, we might never find out.

Obviously, Jack and his family aren't really threats to people, or I wouldn't let any of them around my younger brother. I suppose they technically are, since they could pretty easily kill us if they wanted to, but I don't think they want to. There was that one time with Peter last spring, but that was because I asked him to, but Jack and his brother Ezra intervened to save the day. While they do live off of human blood (animal blood doesn't work for them anymore than it would work giving humans a blood transfusion from a cow), they either use blood banks or human donors, i.e.

people who willingly let them eat. Vampires don't have to eat until a person is dead, although they can and sometimes do. Jack, for example, has never killed anyone, but he's still a relatively young vampire. He was twenty-four when he turned, but that was only sixteen years ago, in comparison with his brother Ezra who has been around for over three-hundred years and Peter's nearly two hundred.

They're not really brothers but rather brothers in the way vampires are. When Ezra turned Peter, Peter drank his blood, and they became bonded together. In order to turn, the human's blood fuses with the vampire's blood, and they became even more closely connected than actual brothers. Peter turned Jack, so his blood is fused with both Ezra and Peter's. This makes them close in unusual ways. Peter is attracted to me, or rather his blood is, much to his chagrin. But because of his attraction, both Jack and Ezra are very fond of me, and Jack probably much more than he should be.

With this in mind, I know that realistically Jack won't do anything put me in danger, at least not intentionally. Admittedly, he always saves me in the end, but his carelessness makes me a little uneasy about trusting his judgment. Or his ability to safely monitor danger in relation to human's fragile little bodies, like my brother's. Odds are that if we got in a crash, Jack would protect me before Milo, and that makes me nervous.

"Are you sure you really wanna do this today?" I asked, probably for the hundredth time that day.

In the rearview mirror, I could see Milo roll eyes, and I knew that I was getting on their nerves. But I couldn't help it.

"We can just take you home if you're gonna be this way," Milo warned.

Jack chuckled a little at his threat, but I was too sour to see the humor in it. Despite his age, Milo had one of those distinctly baby faces still. His cheeks were puffy and his brown eyes were 3 innocently large. His voice had changed, but when he threatened me, he looked more like an angry child then the teenager he was.

"I'm just saying," I grumbled.

Leaning back in the seat, I crossed my arms over my chest and went back to staring at the little kids playing in the park. One of them was flying a kite, and I remembered in that not-too-distant past when Milo would have much preferred flying a kite than driving a car. But he was growing up, and while that was theoretically what I wanted, I didn't exactly approve.

"Alice, everything will be fine," Jack promised, suppressing a yawn as he talked.

"I'm the sensible one . So if I think something is okay, it probably is," Milo reminded me.

Since our mother spent all of her time either working, sleeping, or gambling, that left us home alone a lot, and somehow, Milo was the one in charge. He made the meals, did most of the cleaning, reminded me to do my homework, tried to enforce a curfew, and got me up for school in the morning. It was an odd relations.h.i.+p we had, but it worked He actually had a point, so I gave up on my protests. Besides, we'd been sitting in the parking lot for twenty minutes while Milo made Jack explain every part of the car to him. Naturally, since it was Jack explaining, a disproportionate amount of the time had been spent on explaining the stereo and the seat warmers (which seemed like a really logical conversation for August), but Milo was getting antsy.

When he finally put the car in drive, my heart locked up. For the first time since the accident with Jack, I felt unsafe in a car, but I knew that strangely, I would've felt perfectly safe if Jack were driving. Before I had even agreed to the lesson, Ezra's wife, Mae, had carefully gone over all the safety features of the Lexus. The car was actually Ezra's (since Jack had totaled his own Jeep) and he'd chosen it because it was so safe. Everyone had rea.s.sured me as much as possible, but my stomach did a flip as Milo unsteadily drove across the parking lot, jerking on the brake unnecessarily several times.

"Just ease into it," Jack said calmly, and Milo responded. Just the same, I couldn't fight the nauseous feeling growing in my belly. Jack, on the other hand, was mostly bored and tired and getting vaguely annoyed by me. His calm usually swept over me, but I was too nervous and it was overriding him.

"Maybe he's not ready," I spouted, leaning forward between the seats.

"Alice!" Milo groaned.

Jack lowered his sungla.s.ses enough so he could peer at me over them, giving me a severe look.

"Alice, you've got to lighten up. Or we really take you home. And I'll let him drive all the way back."

"Fine!" I threw my hands up in the air and fell back in the seat.

Initially, Milo drove around the parking lot in awkward circles filled with more starts and stops than a circle should require. We had yet to hit anything yet, and when his driving became smoother, I finally allowed myself to settle into it. By nature, Milo was a cautious person, and I shouldn't worry about him. But this was precisely the reason I was sticking around. Jack had offered me a chance at immortality, but I had temporarily declined. I wasn't quite ready to ditch out on my brother yet.

Jack yawned loudly again, and his fatigue washed over me thickly, and I had to fight the urge to yawn myself. To wake himself up, he started fiddling with the radio, causing the Cure to come 4 blasting out. I opened my mouth to say something about that being too distracting, but Milo was already slapping his hand away and turning it off.

"I can't concentrate with that," Milo explained when Jack looked offended.

"See?" Jack groaned, thudding his head tiredly on the headrest of the car. "You've got nothing to worry about with this kid."

"No thanks to you," I muttered. Jack turned towards me, grinning his mischievous, crooked smile.

"What?"

"You know, someday you're going to have to learn to drive." This idea obviously delighted Jack, and it only deepened when I grimaced in response. "What? You didn't really expect me to drive you around forever, did you?"

Forever carried an entirely different weight with vampires. In truth, I hadn't really thought about driving in terms of spending the rest of my existence with him and his family, but it wouldn't really make sense to have them chauffeuring me around until the end of time.

"No. But not today." I went back to looking out the window, where the world went by in a very slow circle.

"Fine by me. It's all on your time anyway." With that, Jack turned back to watching Milo drive.

He'd been trying to hide his ever growing impatience, but he could hide very little from me. For some inexplicable reason, I could feel everything that he felt, and sometimes, it made things awkward, but it mostly made things better. He tended to be happier and more relaxed than me, and that would rub off on me.

Jack was definitely ready for me to turn. They all were, really, except for Peter, but that was a whole other story. Jack understood where I was coming from and tried not to pressure me into such a major life decision, but it was hard for him. In fairness, our whole relations.h.i.+p was difficult for him, and I didn't know how me turning would really make it any easier.

"Should I take it out on the road?" Milo had paused by the exit of the parking lot and looked at Jack hopefully.

"Sorry, kid." Jack shook his head sadly, and Milo looked disappointed but accepting. "You did really well today, but I'm pretty beat, and I think your sister's had all that she can take."

Milo hopped out of the car, and Jack grumbled something about the sunlight before he got out and switched places with him. It probably didn't help that he was wearing a tee s.h.i.+rt and shorts, exposing even more of his skin to the sun, but that was his standard uniform, even in winter.

Today he'd gone for a white tee s.h.i.+rt with neon ca.s.sette tapes on it and black d.i.c.kies with pink Converse. He wasn't exactly the image I'd had in mind when I thought of vampire, but there was very little about him that was stereotypical. As soon as he hopped in the driver's seat, he fumbled with the stereo until "Mexican Radio" came blasting out. Milo wrinkled his nose at him, but he hadn't grown up in the eighties like Jack had.

When we pulled up in front of the brownstone where Milo and I lived, Milo thanked Jack again before getting out. I stayed behind, wanting a minute alone to talk to him. Leaning forward between the seats, I turned down the radio and smiled at Jack.

"Thanks for taking him out like that. I know he really appreciated it."

"Anytime." He smiled at me, but there was something droopy about it, and I knew the sun was really starting to get to him.

5.

Vampires didn't burst into flames or anything like that, obviously, but they were nocturnal. The sun tended to tire them out, and besides, it was the opposite of his normal schedule. It was basically like keeping a normal person awake at three in the morning when they were used to going to bed at nine or ten.

"You should probably get going." I unbuckled my seatbelt and started sliding to get out of the car, hoping that he could make it home before he fell asleep. "So, I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Nah, I can't. I'm going on that business trip with Ezra," Jack reminded me. "But I should be back in like two days. We aren't doing much more than signing some papers."

In the past few months, Jack had stepped up and started helping Ezra with the family business.

What that entailed, I wasn't entirely sure, except that they owned a few companies overseas and had lots of stock holdings. Every now and then, Ezra would leave for a few days to work on something, and Jack had finally decided that he should learn the ropes. Also, he'd rolled his car, and Ezra demanded that he work for his money to pay for the next one.

"Oh. Right. Well... call me when you get back."

"I always do," Jack grinned, and I got out of the car.

Before I had even made it inside the doors of building, I heard the tires squeal as the car sped off.

I was glad that Milo was inside so he wouldn't get any ideas. Milo was waiting in the lobby, pus.h.i.+ng the call b.u.t.ton for the elevator, and he shook his head at me.

"What?" I asked, wondering what I could possibly do that had offended him "What did you and Jack talk about? My driving?" The elevator doors opened, and I followed him inside, laughing at his paranoia.

"No, of course not." I leaned back against the wall, and he turned to me, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

"Well, did you talk about why you're not having s.e.x yet? Because you really need to discover the reason for that." Milo was a tad in love with Jack, and he couldn't grasp why I wasn't. Neither could I, really, but I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that maybe I was. A little.

"You really need to get a boyfriend so you can stop hounding me about my lack of one," I rebuked him, and he scoffed loudly.

"You don't have one because you spend all your time with Jack! And you keep insisting that he isn't one." He sounded completely deflated by the time the elevator reached our floor. "What is wrong with you, Alice?"

"There's nothing wrong with me," I sighed and walked down the hall to our apartment. There probably was something wrong with me, but not the way he meant. "Things are just a lot more complicated than they appear. Alright?"

"If it's because he's older than you, I don't think that matters. He's pretty immature for his age."

"You don't know the half of it," I laughed.

"That's only because you won't tell me!" Milo whined. I hadn't brought my keys, so I waited for him to unlock the apartment door, and we went inside.

6.

Since I had met Jack, I'd been hanging out with him nearly everyday. He was nocturnal, so while I'd been in school, that required many late nights. Ever studious, Milo had declined joining us, but once school let out for the summer, he'd decided to go with us a lot more. For the most part, that was great, because I didn't have to feel bad about leaving him home alone all the time. But he'd started to pick on some of the things that had alerted me that Jack and his family were different.

Like the fact that they never ate, their skin temperature was oddly temperate, and they were insanely attractive. Just like me, he had a lot of questions that I couldn't answer. We had all agreed it would better for Milo if he didn't know what they really were, so I stuck with it.

Milo continued to try and interrogate me about what my deal with Jack was, so I blew him off and went into my room. Putting Lou Reed in my CD player, I grabbed my copy of Pride and Prejudice and settled into my bed. The window was open, allowing the warm summer breeze to blow over me. Over the music, I could hear Milo straighten up the living room indignantly. But it was a beautiful summer day, and I didn't want to spend anymore of it arguing about vampires.

Chapter 2.

Part of Jack's work schedule allowed me more time to spend with Jane, my supposed best friend.