Gifts of the Blood by Vicki Keire Page A

lungs would explode. I pulled back slightly, my breathing deep and ragged. He stared at me with wonder and alarm. My lips stung in the cold night air, rubbed raw on his strangely rough skin, my face raw as well. I had a brief mental picture of how I must look, red-faced and wild haired and struggling for breath, backlit by falling dead leaves and patchy darkness. I wanted to tell him I was fine, he hadn’t hurt me, but I would have been lying. He moved me before I completed the thought. I found myself on the ground next to him before I could speak.
    “Hey!” I protested, and tried to climb into his lap.
    “You weren’t breathing right,” he said, pulling me firmly against him. “It scared me.”
    “I don’t want to breathe right,” I said, trying to wiggle out from under his arms. “Really, it’s ok.”
    “I’m not human,” he said darkly. “I don’t want to injure you again.”
    “Oh.” That was a really hard objection to overcome . “Right. That.”
    “Yes. That.”
    Long moments passed. Wind moved tree branches. Ethan was a warm solid presence beside me. “I guess I already knew,” I admitted, watching his profile. He looked up at the stars as if connected to them by an invisible string. He vibrated a kind of tense, quiet energy. It reminded me of the way Abigail got during thunderstorms. I found myself stroking his neck and speaking in low soothing tones. “It’s ok. I’m not afraid. You said you were here to protect my brother. You won’t hurt us.” He recoiled as if I’d struck him. “Ethan? Hey. Shh.” I wrapped my own arms around him. “I’m the girl who draws the future, remember? I’m not exactly normal, either. You can trust me.”
    He sagged against me. The warm, unexpected weight of him almost knocked me over. He checked himself in time. “Caspia, what do you know about your gift for prophecy? Is it common, in your family?”
    “No," I said, a little unbalanced by his abrupt change in conversation. But if hearing about my ability would help him trust me, so be it. “Only my grandmother could do something similar. She was the only person who knew what the drawings meant. She helped me not be afraid when it happened.” I wrapped my arms around my knees, sad as always when I thought of my grandmother. I missed her.
    “Tell me about her,” he commanded.
    “Well,” I said slowly, gathering my thoughts in the face of this odd and abrupt request I was beginning to resent just a little. I wiggled closer for warmth. The strange tension in him had not eased. “She was born right here in Whitfield. All my family has been, on my mother's side, anyway, all the way back to my grandmother's grandmother. She came though Ellis Island in the late nineteenth century. She's the real family mystery. She was sixteen years old, completely alone, didn’t speak a word of English, and pregnant. We don’t know anything else about Gran’s side of the family before her. It’s like she didn’t exist before Ellis Island. No birth certificate, no baptismal certificate, no papers or identification of any kind." I smiled into the darkness. “It was a shameful thing, back then, to be pregnant out of wedlock. But I’ve always been proud of my great-great-grandmother. She must have been very brave. I’m named for her. Supposedly, she came from the Caspian Sea.”
    “And this is also the bloodline that bears your gift of prophecy.” His voice was flat and cold. I wanted his hands on my waist again, his fierce eyes on mine, not this detached creature sitting next to me. I butted against him, frustrated.
    “Ethan, what are you trying to tell me? Why don’t you just come out and say it? What do you know about my ‘bloodline?’ What does it have to do with you being here?”
    “I think I Fell the moment I saw you,” he told me with the dark fervor of a man taking a deadly oath. I could hear the capital letter roll off his tongue. I wanted to tell him to stop, I wanted to go back to kissing him,