Vampire Debt - Supernatural Battle (Vampire Towers #2) - Kelly St. Clare Page 0,113

staring instead at the houses in Green. Frowning, I tried to find the middle and ended up back at the theme park.

Pressing my nose to the glass, I shifted my gaze backward by a whisker. “Ha! Got you, fucker.” I watched the cars zip over the freeway.

His pride swirled through me. Adoration. Humour. “Now to Blue.”

I managed after three tries. It was somewhere between short and long vision.

“Grey,” Kyros whispered.

Following his prompts, I tried with varying success to move my eyes. It was as though I was driving a car with touchy brakes compared to a car where I had to shove the pedal in all the way.

Blinking to return my gaze to the room, I carefully turned in his arms.

“Thank you,” I told him, tipping my head back. “I should do that with each sense?”

Kyros’s pride made me uncomfortable. Like he was a doting parent.

“Yes,” he said, smoothing the grin from his face. “Hearing will be hardest because it’s also your balance. You’ll need to practice locating where sounds are coming from and how far away they are. You must learn how to block out noise so you’re not overwhelmed constantly. This is something all Vissimo have to go through. That’s why we tend to raise our young in isolation—like Safina.”

Phew. I was nowhere near ready for this. “I guess our driving lessons are on hold for a while.”

He placed a finger under my chin. “Yes. But they will happen.”

A tiny bit of normalcy.

Right now, it was nowhere near enough to latch onto.

25

He wasn’t kidding about the overwhelming part.

I’d taken the last three days off work, barely able to manage my own agenda and estate with my exhaustion from trying to isolate and sort through everything.

For a segment of each waking hour, I forced myself to practice honing my new senses. Turned out there were a lot of waking hours when you could hear really fucking well. I’d taken to sneaking down to the noise-cancelling office to sleep on the chaise.

Touch and vision exercises done for the hour, I closed my eyes and tuned into my ears.

I could hear just past the edges of my property to the front, left, and right. My hearing pattered out about one hundred metres from the back of the estate. I’d had Kelsea walk out and stop every twenty-five metres to test it.

Focusing, I stretched my hearing as far as possible. Recognising a passing car was easy. Muted thuds—hmm, Indebted around the perimeter? I drew my hearing in and picked out Georgia and her team of gardeners spread through the lavender tiers and hedge-way. Splash. Pool. Squeals and shouts. Seven or eight vampires in the pool.

I listened a while longer and then checked the pool houses. I backed the fuck away at a rhythmic grunting. My head chef was apparently partial to an afternoon delight. With Rosie—that sly ol’ thing.

Drawing in again, I studied the area immediately surrounding the main house. Pretty quiet. A maid was cleaning windows in the west wing. I shuddered at the squeaking of cloth on glass. Daniel typed frantically in the security room. Fred was whistling.

Three people in the kitchen.

Oh my god, who was watching Truth Ranges? I was nowhere near up to date! Spoiler alert!

I latched onto Tommy’s voice in my suite upstairs.

“Tonight?” she said breathlessly. “I thought we weren’t leaving until morning. Where are you taking me?”

A man answered, and I strained to hear—eavesdropping without shame. I was yet to figure out some way to alert Tommy to the changes in me. She’d been absent every other night and exhausted on the nights she stayed in.

I wasn’t so jealous now that I’d gotten some. Though sex with Kyros hadn’t solved my problems one bit. I’d sampled the goods and couldn’t stop thinking about taking a bigger bite.

“Well, what should I wear, handsome?” Tommy pressed. “Or is this an activity that doesn’t require clothing?”

That’s my girl.

I backed out before she said anything more. Phone sex was only fun if I was involved. Though tuning out sounds was much harder. I could focus on another sound to block out another noise but blocking out everything was nearly impossible.

After the first day spent trying to block out one sound by focusing on another, I’d tried visualization—first, squishing the sound to nothing, then by placing an imaginary glass over the sound. In the end, stuffing my ears with figurative cotton worked the best. I’d shoved in more and more cotton until only whispers in the bordering rooms remained. The problem