“At least it’s Friday.”
Michelle brightened at the thought. “We should totally party and get totally smashed!”
“Good night, Michie,” Elizabeth said. She rolled over and faced the wall, hoping against hope that her roommate would finally pick up on her signals.
Michelle was never one for subtlety. “I’ll see if Lindsey and Emily want to go out, and you can come with us.”
“Chemistry,” Elizabeth said. She yawned so widely that she was certain that her head was going to split open. “Sleep.”
“Fine, I’ll let you sleep,” Michelle said grumpily. “But you are going to go out drinking with me tonight.”
Elizabeth did not respond. She closed her eyes and let sleep finally overtake her.
Chapter 3
Elizabeth woke up a few hours later feeling delightfully refreshed. Michelle must have already gone to breakfast. Her desk was still strewn with chemistry notes. Elizabeth smiled fondly at the sight. She really did like her roommate even though she was always totally unorganized.
She took an especially long shower that morning, enjoying the hot water running over her stiff muscles. Hopefully she would not have to sleep on the ground anytime soon. It was just too uncomfortable.
She slipped into a clean shirt and jeans and checked her watch. There was still time for her to get some coffee before class. As she gathered her books and packed her backpack for the day, she wondered if she should even bother going to class. She doubted that she would be able to concentrate and absorb anything right now. Her brain still felt like it was in overload from last night and then this morning with Romulus and the crazy visions. She still couldn’t quite wrap her head around everything that she had seen and heard. Maybe a strong cup of coffee would help. It would at least be tasty.
She was so distracted as she walked towards the campus café that she didn’t even notice him until she had already walked right into him.
“I’m so sorry!” He caught her just before she fell; his muscular arms steadied her. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m sorry,” she said quickly as she looked up at him. She wanted to explain that it was all her fault because she hadn’t been paying attention but found herself tongue tied. She had never considered herself to be one who was particularly boy-crazy or easily smitten, that was Michelle’s job, but she found herself immediately drawn to this guy. He wasn’t that tall, maybe a few inches shy of 6 feet, but he was still a head taller that her. His dark grey shirt was just tight enough to suggest that underneath he was well toned and fit, but not so tight to leave nothing to the imagination. There was a solidness to him that made Elizabeth feel comfortable and safe in his arms.
“Thanks,” she said at last in a breathless voice.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” he asked. His voice was friendly and concerned, but the way his lips were pressed together in a crooked little smirk suggested that he was trying not to laugh.
“You can let me go now.” Elizabeth realized that he was still holding her.
“Oh, sorry.” He released her and took a step backwards. His dark eyes sparkled with amusement.
“Go ahead and laugh,” Elizabeth said in an effort to ease the awkwardness between them. “I won’t think any less of you.”
He bit his bottom lip and looked away in embarrassment. Elizabeth could not help but chuckle at the sight. He looked at her and a second later, began to chuckle himself.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out as he vainly tried to stifle his laughter. “I know it’s mean.”
Elizabeth shook her head and smiled. “I said I wouldn’t think any less of you. I definitely don’t blame you. That had to have looked hilarious.”
“Especially the part where you lingered in my arms.” He gave her a roguish wink and returned her smile with a cockeyed one of his own. “That was nice.”
Elizabeth felt heat rise into her cheeks.
“I’m Chase,” he said.
“I’m Lizzy, er Elizabeth that is.” She was surprised with herself. Why in the world had she introduced herself as Lizzy at first? She usually didn’t like when people called her that. Michelle had been the first person to call her that, and she had only allowed it because she was her roommate.
“Pretty name for a pretty girl,” Chase said and then winced. “That sounded creepy didn’t it?”
Elizabeth nodded.
“I can’t seem to catch a break.” He shook his head sadly. “First I almost run you over and then I creep you out.”
“It could have been worse.” Elizabeth tried and failed to hide her amusement. “But then again, you also laughed at me.”
“What’s a guy to do?” he said with a dejected sort of shrug. “If we were near a bar, I’d offer to buy you a drink to make up for it.”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. Was this guy for real? “It’s barely 10 am. I’m not actually old enough to drink in a bar, and I don’t think I would accept a drink from a total stranger.”
Chase threw his hands into the air in surrender. “I just keep striking out don’t I?”
Elizabeth giggled. She felt totally foolish, but there was nothing else that she could do. She was disarmed by his easygoing personality.
“I got a laugh though,” Chase said. His expression brightened. “That’s got to count for something, right?”
“Right, Chase,” Elizabeth said. “It was nice to meet you.” She began to walk away towards the campus café, but Chase started walk with her.
“I don’t give up that easily,” he said in response to her questioning glance. “Plus, I’ve got to make sure that you get to wherever you’re going without another collision. It’s my duty as a nice guy.”
“So now you’re a nice guy?”
Chase gave her a flirtatious grin. “Only if you want me to be.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes but did not reply.
“So where are we going?” Chase asked eagerly.
“I’m going to get some coffee and then go to class,” Elizabeth said. “Where are you going?”
“Where is anyone going in this life?”
“Getting philosophical now?”
Chase shrugged. “Figured I’d go for the intellectual nice guy who occasionally is inadvertently creepy.”
“I see. Well, you do that.”
They walked in amiable silence for a moment before Chase said, “you could always invite me to get some coffee with you.”
Elizabeth smiled when she replied. “I thought that was the nice intellectual guy’s job to ask.”
“Oh, I see how it is. A bit old fashioned are we, Lizzy?”
“A bit. And it’s Elizabeth by the way.”
“Well, Elizabeth,” Chase said, dragging her name out so it would sound more dramatic. “May I accompany you to get some coffee?”
“I don’t see why not,” Elizabeth said with a chuckle.
“Hurray!” Chase said. “Let’s go!”
Chapter 4
The campus café was always crowded in the morning. Filled to the brim with confused looking freshmen trying to look cool with their shiny laptops, disheveled frat boys and sorority girls needing caffeine to recover from their hangovers, classmates meeting for some last minute studying, but Elizabeth and Chase had managed to find a tiny table in the corner that was just big enough to hold their steaming mugs of coffee. They had talked flirtatiously all the way to the café about nothing of any significance. It was strangely soothing to Elizabeth. She felt like she could disconnect her brain and just relax with this friendly guy.
“So what are you doing on campus, other than knocking people off their feet?” Elizabeth asked.
“Maybe I’m a student,” Chase replied with a shrug.
Elizabeth, who had just closed her eyes in lazy enjoyment as she had taken a drink, had to struggle to
keep from choking on her coffee.
“What?” Chase asked. His teeth flashed as he grinned crookedly at her reaction. “Don’t I seem like a student?”
Elizabeth snorted. “You didn’t even know where the café was. You kept trying to go in the opposite direction.”
“Maybe I just transferred.”
“Oh please, it’s obvious that you’re not a student here or anywhere.”
“Just too cool to be student, right?” Chase asked with a knowing look.
“Nah,” Elizabeth said. Her eyes glinted mischievously. “Too old.”
It was Chase’s turn to almost choke of his coffee. “Too old?” He said, feigning offense. “That’s not nice at all.”
“You’re the nice one, not me,” Elizabeth said. She tried and failed to suppress a smile.
“Is this payback for me laughing at you and then hitting on you right away?”
“And for calling me Lizzy.”
“But I got you coffee.” Chase made a ridiculous pouty face.
Elizabeth giggled. “Okay, I guess that makes us even.”
Chase smiled. They both sat drinking their coffee and watching the steady stream of humanity coming in and out of the small café. There were so many people, and yet suddenly Elizabeth felt so alone, isolated from the rest of the world and lost in thought. No one here would believe her if she told them about the strange things that had happened to her last night. She had wanted to try forget, even for a little while, that there were things in the world so horrible and wonderful that they defied the imagination, but the more she tried not to think about it, the more she could see Romulus’ eyes burning blue as they looked at her from the inside of her mind. She could still smell the cold deadly smell that seemed to follow Lord Reginald and Sir Marcus. What did it all mean? What was the point of sitting here talking about nothing with a complete stranger surrounded by people who she felt no connection with when there was a completely different world hiding in the shadows? Suddenly she longed to be alone. She could hardly wait for the sun set, but at the same time she dreaded the night. What was wrong with her?
“What are you thinking about?” Chase snapped her out of her thoughts with his question.
“I don’t belong here,” Elizabeth said before she could stop herself. “I don’t know if I really belong anywhere. It’s like I’m waiting for something to happen, something to change. Like there’s something wrong with the world that I need to try to fix, but I don’t know what it is. But then I realize how crazy that sounds. I’m only a small person in a wide world. What could I possibly do to make difference? And where would I even begin?” She stopped abruptly, her face glowing red. “I can’t believe that I just told you that.” She was relieved that she had been able to stop when she had. Another minute and she would have spilled everything about Lord Reginald and Sir Marcus and Romulus. And of course he would have thought that she was even crazier than he probably already did.
Chase finished his coffee and set his cup down with a gentle chink. “You’re definitely an odd one, Elizabeth. It’s not every day that you meet someone who gets so distracted that she runs into a complete stranger one minute and then next starts talking about changing the world the next.”
Elizabeth let out a nervous chuckle and glanced down at her watch. “I have to go to class, and for the record, I didn’t run into you. I walked into you.”
“What’s the difference?” Chase asked with a grin. “Maybe we could walk or run into each other later today. Say around dinner time.”
“Sounds painful,” Elizabeth said. Her embarrassment was beginning to fade.
“We could wear helmets.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t tonight.” Elizabeth was genuinely sorry, but she didn’t want to be late for her meeting in the groves. She laughed inwardly as the scenario played in her mind. Sure we can get dinner, but then I’m going to go meet my undead friends that I just met, so I we’ll have to be done by the time the sun sets.
“Got a hot date?” Chase asked. He looked as disappointed as she felt.
Elizabeth shook her head. She worried that as soon as she opened her mouth, she would say something that she didn’t want to say. There was something about Chase that she instinctively trusted. He wasn’t like Michelle, who was as interested in hearing gossip as she was in spreading it. Part of her screamed at her to tell him everything, but she had no idea why. She hastily tucked that part of her far in the back of her mind. Where was the impulse coming from?
“How about tomorrow or maybe next week?” Chase asked.
“Lots of studying to do,” Elizabeth managed to say. Her head was spinning. There was something wrong that she just couldn’t quite put her finger on. She had to get out of here. “Thanks for the coffee,” she said hastily as she hurried away.
Chapter 5
Elizabeth struggled to catch her breath as she sat in the rose garden behind the Goldberg Memorial Hall. She vaguely remembered a tour that she had taken just before her freshman year where the guide had said something about the garden being a gift to the school in memory of someone’s mother. It hadn’t seemed important then. It didn’t seem important now either. It was just a random memory.
She had run all the way from the campus café, looking for a quiet spot where she could just sit in solitude and gather her thoughts. She cursed inwardly. What had it been about Chase that made her want to spill her guts to him? It was so strange. She had liked him from the moment that she had met him. There was just something about him that made him seem completely trustworthy. Maybe it was just because everything was so fresh in her mind. Yeah. That had to be it.
Part of her wished that she could somehow avoid going to the grove tonight. But she had to. It was like there was some invisible line tethering her to the vampires and to Romulus. It was so frustrating that there was no one that she could talk to about everything that had happened. There was no one to ask for advice or support.
She sighed and pulled her journal out of her backpack. She would write down everything that she was feeling. After all, that was the whole point of a journal, right? She laughed out loud at the realization that there was finally something interesting enough going on in her life for her to want to write about it. Surely that would at least help her to organize her thoughts.
She ripped out all of the pages that she had already written on. They were boring anyways. There was a part of her that felt like her everything that had happened in her life before this point was completely unimportant.
#
It took her hours to write down everything that she remembered about last night, starting from when she first heard Sir Marcus’s voice, but she hardly noticed the passing time. Her hand ached by the time she had finished. As she looked back over everything that she had written, she couldn’t help feeling like there was something very important that she had left out. She was frustrated at how poorly she had described what it felt like to be in Lord Reginald’s presence, but she did feel much better know that she had gotten her thoughts out on paper.
She realized that part of what was missing from her account was exactly why Lord Reginald had wanted to meet her in the first place and what was so important about him telling her about Lady Anya. That must be why she had to go back.
Chapter 6
“So who’s Chase?” Michelle asked with a smirk as soon as Elizabeth walked into their room. She was sitting on the ground by her bed with her laptop computer on her lap.
“Hi Michie,” Elizabeth said, pointedly ignoring the question. “I’m fine. How was your day? And how’d your chemistry exam go?”
“Don’t talk to me about chemistry, Lizzy. Tell me about this Chase fellow.” Michelle looked up at her with a mischievous glint in her eyes. She loved playing matchmaker even though she wasn’t very good at it.
Elizabeth frowned. She had spent the better
part of the afternoon trying to put Chase out of her thoughts. Her life was too crazy right now to have to worry about some guy that she had randomly met.
“He’s a guy that I met this morning,” she said. “But how the hell did you find out about him? Do you know him or something?”
“Obviously I don’t know him,” Michelle said as she rolled her eyes. “If I did, do you think I would be asking you about him?”
Elizabeth dropped her backpack by her desk and went to sit next to Michelle.
“I don’t know, Michie,” she said with a sigh. “We met this morning and got some coffee and then he invited me to dinner. I said I was busy, and that was it. Nothing to get too excited about.”
“Really?” Michelle asked like she knew something that Elizabeth didn’t know. “Well, he called asking for you a few hours ago.”
“What?” Elizabeth’s voice jumped an octave. Michelle looked at her in surprise.
“I never gave him my number. I didn’t even tell him my last name.”
An evil grin appeared on Michelle’s face. “I know,” she said. “He said that he asked around in the café after you have left to see if anyone knew your last name or who your roommate was so that he could look you up in student records, and then he sweet talked to switchboard operator into giving him the number to our room phone. He said that he had a lovely time with you this morning and that he was sorry that you had plans tonight, but he hoped to see you again soon. And I hope you’re not just blowing him off by saying you have plans because he sounded super cute, and it’s super adorable that he went to so much trouble to find you.”
“Super creepy, you mean,” Elizabeth said. “Did he leave a callback number?”
“No, he said that he’ll call again tomorrow.” Michelle’s expression was dreamy. She sighed. “So romantic.”
“Again, creepy,” Elizabeth said, though she found it hard to keep from smiling. It was nice to be pursued even if she wasn’t even remotely available. “And even more so that he didn’t leave his number. Then at least you’d have some sort of lead when I turn up missing.”
Michelle giggled. “You’re so jaded and melodramatic!”
“Me, melodramatic?” Elizabeth poked her playfully in the ribs. “This from the girl who spent a week eating nothing but cookie dough and marshmallows and listening to nothing but the soundtrack to Titanic after Bob the bum broke up with her.”