Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,71
wave was immense. Nearly overpowering. The energy I felt from Kwan in those early interactions was now multiplied twentyfold.
This. This was our power.
And it was amplified when we were together.
“How can you trust them?” Mami asked, her hands outstretched toward me like an offering. “They’re just strangers!”
“Because of people like you,” the girl spat out. “You kept us apart. You told Cisco he was alone.”
I rounded on my parents, my mouth open in horror. “You knew? You knew this entire time?”
Papi was crying. “We would have told you,” he said, his mustache twisting on his face. “Someday, we would have told you everything.”
My body raged, but Kwan placed a hand on my chest.
The surge.
The power.
Our power.
“When?” I crossed over to Papi, stood nose-to-nose with him. “When was ‘someday’ going to come? When were you going to tell me that there were others like me?”
“When the clan told us to,” he answered, his face quivering. “When they figured out what all of you could do when you were together, they were afraid! They were afraid of all of you!”
All of us.
I was not the only one of my kind. I wasn’t alone.
Kwan squeezed my hand. “Cisco, I brought you something to prove that we mean what we say. That we know what you’ve been through. That proves that we care.”
He let go. Reached into his back pocket.
I saw it flash in the low moonlight.
Papi cried out, and he made to move toward me, but he was surrounded moments later. I counted them: seven vampires, all young, all like me.
Strangers.
Strangers like me.
“Don’t do it,” Mami begged. “The rules are…”
But she didn’t finish. What did the rules matter anymore? My parents had constructed them to keep me trapped, and now … Tears streamed from Mami’s eyes. I was free. And she knew it. She could not put me back in the box I had lived in.
I had to believe. In myself.
I grabbed the mirror and held it up to my face as my parents’ screams filled the desert air.
There I was.
Cisco.
Me.
The tears threatened to blur my image. My clear image. I wiped at them, and there I was.
My eyebrows were black. Thick. They nearly joined in the center. I used my other hand to trace down the bridge of my nose, to my wide nostrils, to my lips, then over my cheekbones. There was a dusting of facial hair across the lower half of my face. Would I have to start shaving? Did vampires shave? Papi had to cut my hair, so …
There was so much I didn’t know. So many questions I had not thought to ask before.
But I had also never seen this.
This was me.
“You told me I would die,” I said, speaking to my parents without looking at them. “You told me that if I didn’t follow your rules I’d be taken away.”
Papi started to say something. “Cisco…”
“What else is a lie?” I yelled. “What else isn’t true?”
“You have to understand,” said Mami. “We had to protect you.”
“What else isn’t true?” I repeated.
“It doesn’t matter,” Papi said. “Some of it. Enough that you’d trust us.”
The irony. They lied to make me trust them.
“There’s more,” Kwan said. “So much more about us that you don’t know. So much about yourself.”
Papi stopped crying. Wiped at the remnants of tears. He stood straight, lifted up his chin, and examined me.
I wore it on my face: A declaration. A plea. Please, I have to do this.
He shook his head. “It’s too soon,” he said.
But then Mami spoke.
“Is it?”
And my Papi, who was always so certain, always so pleased by history, always in possession of the answer, had nothing to say to that. I could see words forming on his lips, but nothing came out.
Their faces were etched with pain.
And then … resignation.
Mami smiled at me.
Papi uttered a word.
“Hazlo.”
Mami cried harder, but she nodded, too.
Almost imperceptibly.
I gave Kwan my hand.
Fingers looped around mine.
A desire bloomed there, not just born of our collective power, but of lust, too. When had a boy touched me like this? Never. I wanted that, too.
Do it.
He whisked me away, and I looked back at them, just once.
They smiled.
Was it a blessing? Perhaps. But they did not chase me. They did not follow.
They let me go.
We’re in a car now. I’ve never been inside one before. Kwan said it’ll get us to our next stop faster. We’re picking up someone on the way.
Another one of us.
The battery on Kwan’s phone is low. I gotta give it back.