Blood To Blood Read online

  I grabbed my boots from the corner where they lay drying. They’d gotten soaked when I’d stepped in a slush puddle earlier, and instead of tracking water through the room I’d changed into my track shoes. Thank goodness I decided to bring them home for washday, I thought as I took the sneakers off and stuffed them back into my knapsack.

  My cell blared “Madame Butterfly” and Julietta’s smiling face popped up on the screen. “What’s up, giiirrl?” I asked.

  “Giiirrrl, we’re doing the Garden!” Jules was the group’s broadcaster of good news, and the ever-conservative Nina used that enthusiasm to save time by making one phone call instead of three.

  “Wow. That’s over fourteen thousand people!”

  “Yep! So...you’re, like, telling your folks tonight, right?”

  “Yeah.” Ultimate resign. “Guess so.”

  Jules was my best mortal friend, which meant I could tell her everything… except the truth about my family or my pending immortality. Unlike me, she was optimistic. Maybe it was because her mom was super-supportive of her singing in our group. I envied that support. How cool would it be if, after I told them the truth, Mom and Dad came to the Garden gig? But then again, they’d probably question my sanity. After all, why would I put our way of life in jeopardy for a chance to have my voice heard by mortals if I weren’t insane?

  “LaLa and I can come over if you need us,” Julietta was saying. “You know. Moral support.”

  LaLa and Julietta had been over to the house many times for sleepovers, homework, and writing sessions, but they had no idea my family was immortal and would probably die of fright if they saw Mom’s Shimshana reaction to my news.

  “Thanks, girl. I think I’ll be okay though. Maybe you guys can come over tomorrow to scrape what’s left of me off the wall.”

  Unaware I was serious, Julietta laughed. “Okay, girl, we’ll be there.” She clicked off.

  A movement caught the corner of my eye. Glimmering in one of the classroom’s large windows was Reflection. She was staring at me, but I hadn’t given the usual mental permission that allowed her to take on a life of her own.

  “I didn’t call you!” I exclaimed.

  “You don’t have to. Now, what was I saying before? Oh yeah, you’re a nut job, attention-freak, doofus.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated, but she was still there, smirking, when I opened them. This couldn’t be happening. Even worse, what if Reflection was right?

  What if all the attention from Quake and the Garden gig ended up hurting my family by exposing our true nature? I anxiously paced while imagining the online media blitz; the posts and tweets about the Beacon Hill mom, my mom, who drank the blood of willing donors.

  I felt Reflection's eyes following me as I agonized. “Hmph,” she said, “Jules isn’t the only one who thinks the blond dude’s hot, huh? Mom’s really gonna kill—”

  “Enough!” I yelled. I glanced at the window and Reflection was gone. Sigh of relief. Then I heard the front door open. I turned to see her there, three-dimensional and with a hand on the doorknob.

  I nearly screamed.

  “You have no control—actually, you never had any control over me,” she said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. “I'm leaving now. It's really for the best.” Reflection started changing then. Her skin became a more golden shade of brown. The length of her hair shrunk and got curlier. Her body grew rounder and fuller in certain places...

  “What do you think you're doing?” I said through my teeth. “Get back in that window now!”

  But all she did was peer at me with a weird little smile, as if her upper lip was partially stuck to her front teeth, before waving her hand goodbye and softly closing the door behind her.

  Racing to the door, I flung it open and scanned the hallway. No one was there. I slammed the door shut, leaned against it, and exhaled. My stomach felt like it had broken into a million tiny pieces, and each little shard of what used to be my lucidity floated around my insides like tiny islands of foreboding. Sweat broke out everywhere I had skin; and my hands shook like they belonged on someone else’s body. I remembered I hadn’t slept for almost two days. I tried to breathe, deep and slowly the way Dad taught me to do when I felt like this; like I, and the world, were both falling apart. His technique didn’t quite work this time.

  I need Mr. C., I thought.

  With an overwhelming need to escape whatever doom I just knew was gearing up to steamroll me flatter than an oil stain in the middle of the street, I snatched my keys, cell, and knapsack, and ran out of that room like a bat out of you know where.

  4. MUSIC

  Outside, snow drifted down in fat flakes that stuck to my hair and nose as I sprinted through rush hour Harvard Square traffic to catch a taxi.

  Inside the cab, the driver flashed me a puzzled look before I gave him the address to the studio of my singing coach, former international concert pianist Sheridan Caulkins, and a.k.a., “Mr. C.” The cab driver shot me more weird eye action before finally pulling away from the curb. What’s his problem? I wondered, looking down at myself for an answer only to realize, with a gasp, the reason for the guy’s behavior.

  I’d just run through the snow barefoot. But the forgotten boots didn’t trouble me as much as the fact that my feet were warm and dry.

  I decided to fix it with a glamour—a spell designed to make things appear anyway you want them to. Dad, who’s like a guru of illusion, taught me how, but I could never be as good as he is. Dad can make himself, or any of us, look like any race or even gender we want. It’s his ability to conjure up radical illusions that make him and Mom look, to mortal eyes, as if they’re aging (a pretty handy skill to have, since our family’s lived in the same Beacon Hill brownstone since the early 1800s). I quickly performed a simple glamour for “shoe” that would have made Dad proud. “Shoes,” I whispered to seal the spell into place.

  By the time the cab arrived at the rehearsal studio, I could barely breathe with all the anticipation. It had been five weeks since my last session, and during that time I hadn’t known how much I missed the place until I pushed through the squeaky metal door.

  Mr. C. was sitting at his polished grand piano, finishing up with another client. I sat down in the corner to wait. Soon, he gave me the kind of firm hug a grandfather would. “Congratulations on the contract, my dear. The first of many I’m sure.” His hawk-like eyes took in my appearance from head to toe. “You’ve been sleeping less,” he said, before his gaze stopped at my feet. “Interesting,” he mused.

  Mr. C. sometimes didn’t act like a normal mortal. I was positive my glamour for “shoe” worked perfectly, because no one looked at me sideways since I got out of the cab. But Caulkins’ gaze, zoned in on my feet, was accompanied by his signature “enigma stare”—a peculiar set of his face that never gave away anything of what he observed.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been away too long,” I replied.

  “You’ve been performing so much, you may not even need me for practice anymore.” He winked at me before lowering himself onto the bench to pound out a scale in the key of C.

  The stupid, the scary, and the confusing immediately evaporated as I reveled in the cleansing act of breathing in, letting my breath slowly flow back out through my diaphragm and lungs, and expressing my jumbled emotions with just the right sound; using breath, throat, gut, and tongue to form aural bubbles through lips and teeth. It was these times, during the execution of song, when I felt complete. Normal. My voice caressed high C as I watched the sound waves flow from my mouth…

  Mr. C. once said he thought my octave range was well above fifteen. We both knew this was allegedly humanly impossible…and he never mentioned it again. He always made me feel like he had my back, like he completely accepted me, even though he didn’t completely understand me.

  We climbed higher along the scale ladder until he reached the end. “How about a song,” he suggested with that twinkle in his eye.

  “O Mio Babbino Caro!” I sq
uealed before his knotted hands delicately introduced the first chord. Bubblegum pop lyrics were what I belted out on stage, but my first love was opera. Only my family and Mr. C. knew that. To me, its soaring arias were the closest thing to aural perfection known to mortal or immortal. For the longest time, I thought everyone also saw musical notes the same way I did; as rays of light before my eyes—some darker than others and some as bright as a quasar—that danced together in rhythm with the melody. Beyond the light show, Mr. C. arched over the grand, his nicotine-stained fingers hung in mid-air before dropping forcefully on the keys. Pushing out the highest note in the song, and climbing from there, I emitted the note-for-which-there-was-no-name and watched the light rays bend…

  And then, Mr. C’s eyes bulged like they’d pop out of his skull, right before he crumpled to a dead slump all over the piano keys.

  5. DECISION

  I yelled his name, but there was no response. He had a pulse, his chest rose up and down, but for once Mr. C. looked every one of his seventy-seven mortal years. His eyes fluttered opened as he slowly raised himself into a sitting position.

  I reached for his water glass. He glanced around the room as if he didn’t know where he was and, with shaky hands, gripped the glass, emptied it, and handed it back to me.

  “What happened?”

  Was that accusation in his voice? No, of course not, I thought. I was nowhere near him when he passed out. So why did I feel guilty? I placed the empty glass back on the piano. “You passed out, Mr. C. How do you feel?”

  “I’m fine, girl, fine,” he replied brusquely while stubbornly straightening his back and ancient tie.

  “Mr. C—” I cut myself off because I didn’t know what to say. Would I say sorry? Sorry for what? Could I confide in him? Say I was scared of getting massacred by my Shimshana Mom before I had the chance to morph into an immortal?

  He stared at me but his gaze seemed off-center. “You seem different,” he said, “in a way I was unable to name earlier, but can now. Innocence is disappearing from your face.” I hated when he said weirdo fortune-teller type stuff like this. His eyes were now refocused and bore into me. “Keep telling yourself why you want to sing, Angel. Keep telling them who you really are.”

  # # #

  I contemplated his words later, before getting out of the taxi and forcing my feet to walk down the narrow, brick streets toward home. Despite the fainting incident, Mr. C. had refused to stop our session. As a result, I felt strong enough, calm enough, to go home and face Mom’s killing wrath. The straps of my overloaded knapsack dug into my shoulder as I took in my surroundings with the heightened awareness of a death-row prisoner making that final trek to the electric chair. Ironic. I felt like a dead girl walking, but was probably now, or soon to be, immortal.

  I let my mind roam while breathing in the crisp winter air. The feeling of my toes catching in the crevices between the uneven bricks made me appreciate, again, the history of my neighborhood. The gas lighting, colonial architecture, and sense of danger in the dark, centuries-old alleyways always fascinated me. Again, I imagined what it was like when Mom and Dad first moved here masquerading as British white people.

  Adopting the common name of Brown, Dad posed as a wealthy tea merchant with abolitionist tendencies. He built his Beacon Hill brownstone mansion, where he settled with his genteel wife (Mom – ha!) and several people that everyone thought were freed slaves who worked for him as servants, but were actually my older sisters and brothers who came and went through the years. After a couple decades, Mom and Dad were safer in their own skin, literally, since a number of affluent African-Americans had established residences, schools, and churches on the Hill. They emerged as a young couple with a baby girl (my sister Cecilia, or Cici for short) whose parents had allegedly worked at the estate and bought it once the Brit merchant and his childless wife “died.”

  For the next one hundred and seventy years, my family masqueraded as their own descendants so we could live a normal life among the cobblestones. Through the 1900s, Mom and Dad went back to school. Again. This time, she studied “modern” U.S. law while he studied Western medicine, both adding to that massive pile of diplomas, writs, and papyrus. Dad says his “new” knowledge of mortal anatomy, and his practice at Beth Israel, helps him conjure up solid, long-term age glamours.

  And, as Dad predicted almost two centuries ago, this neighborhood was the perfect choice for them. The Massachusetts Historical Preservation Society protects the surrounding buildings, and as a result, the neighborhood’s suspended in a time bubble, with virtually no new construction. Despite the modern indoor conveniences of electric light, Wi-Fi, and dish TV, non-resident parking was almost non-existent and there wasn’t a vacant lot to be seen. Modern-day Beacon Hill was not only charming, it was perfect for a family of immortals. And it was perfect for me.

  My feet came to a stop. I was home. I rocked back on my heels to peer up at the blood-red door at the top of the flight of steep, wide steps.

  In the midst of climbing up, I stopped and listened. Mom was in the kitchen, humming an old Beatles song, probably cooking dinner for me and Dad, since we were the only ones in the house who ate mortal food. I took a deep breath and wondered what tonight’s announcement would do to my relationship with my parents. It was a betrayal, but it was necessary. Sighing, I turned the key in the lock and reached for the doorknob. I stopped. Dang it, I grumbled, I nearly forgot about shielding my thoughts from Dad and Cici before going inside.

  Steadying myself, I visualized a haze fixing itself around my mind, shielding my thoughts from the pull of their telepathic abilities.

  Alrighty then, it was now or never. My heartbeat kicked up a few notches. The thought of them hearing me out here, agonizing over the revelation of my upcoming bombshell, filled me with panic. Drat, I was supposed to stay calm.

  I nervously grasped the doorknob. But my hand kept going, through the knob and through the door itself as if neither were there. “Whoa…” I’d never done that before. Was I immortal now? This was something I’d seen Mom do millions of times…

  Wow, I was immortal! Wait a minute… Oh no! I was turning into Mom! I drew my hand back and flexed the fingers. Was I supposed to understand anything that was happening to me anymore? I stuck my hand back through the door. “Cool...” At least I didn’t have to worry about Mom killing me anymore...did I? I steeled myself.

  Well, I’ll never be the same. So, I’ll make a new kind of entrance, I thought.

  With determination, I took another deep breath and proceeded to step, literally, through the door.

  6. MEET THE PARENTS

  As I pushed my left arm, shoulder, and foot through the door, a strong hand grabbed me from the other side and yanked. Before I could blink, I was standing inside the foyer facing Mom.

  “Angelica Isis Clarissa Brown, what on earth do you think you are doing?”

  Mom, wearing a red holiday apron decorated with a huge smiling turkey, looked the equivalent of twenty-eight mortal years. We shared the same medium brown coloring and height, but unlike mine, her hair was flat-ironed and shaped into a nifty bob, kind of like the hairstyles seen on the figures of men and women painted on ancient Egyptian structures. Made sense, since she was born in Alexandria, Egypt somewhere around 12 B.C.

  “I just had to sort your molecules so you would not get stuck halfway in the door,” she lectured. “What would the neighbors think if they saw that? And where are your shoes?” She kissed my forehead and hugged me close. Tonight her cat-like eyes were the color of toffee and, as always, had the intensity of laser beams.

  “Mom, I have something important I need to say. To the whole family.” No need beating around the bush. And I wasn’t sure how long I could keep up the shield before passing out from exhaustion.

  Mom’s eyes narrowed and swept me from head to toe. She was scanning me. Great. “The Change,” she said. “It is commencing. And you are shielding. What do you want to hide?”

  At that moment, Cecilia
swooshed in. “Howdy Angel. Oh, you’re shielding. Hmmm...family conference?”

  Mute nod.

  “I’ll get Dad,” she said before flying, literally, up the stairs. After a cryptic glance at me, Mom disappeared, not literally, into the kitchen.

  I hung my coat up in the coat closet, right beside the small hook placed there by Mom for Dad. He was notorious for losing his keys, and I smiled, remembering his multitude of mad stomps through the house searching for them while stubbornly refusing to use magic to find them.

  I ran my hand along the two-foot tall iron sculpture of a goddess—a family heirloom created by granddaddy around 1000 B.C.—as I made my way to our official “conference room,” the dining room. The clattering of plates and other cooking sounds from the kitchen suddenly made me feel so hungry I could eat my hand. But when I inhaled the aroma, I almost puked my intestines (the only thing in my stomach). Did this mean the blood-drinking part of The Change had kicked in?

  I turned into the dining room and tossed my bag onto an altar Dad had carved back in 17th century China. Falling into one of the sturdy chairs surrounding the mahogany table, I stretched my legs out in front of me and reveled in the warm smells of orange oil furniture polish, incense, and fresh flowers.

  It was wicked good to be home.

  Mom entered with the food. “Did you eat anything today, honey?” I shook my head, but hesitated over the oven-baked potatoes, grilled chicken breast, and string beans. She gestured to two pitchers. “Drink?”

  “Milk.” I watched her pour it into one of the glasses she’d brought. Picking up the second pitcher, she filled half of a glass with blood for herself. I sniffed and wrinkled my nose.

  “Try?” she asked.