The Vampire's Release, A Paranormal Romance (Undead in Brown County #4) by S.J. Wright Page A

some frightened child.  And maybe I was.  I didn’t have very many bad dreams, so experiencing one in which Michael was in real trouble was a shock to me.
    “Are you okay?”
    The room was dark, but I recognized Alex’s voice instantly.   He was close.  Probably sitting on the bed, I thought.  Then I heard the springs of the bed creak and felt a lift.  He had gotten up.  A few moments later, there was a clicking sound and the light of a small lamp filled the dark space of the bedroom.
    Alex looked different.  There were dark shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there before.  His face and hands weren’t just pale.  They were almost translucent.  It was obvious that something was seriously wrong with him.
    “Alex, what’s happening to you?”
    He reached into an inside pocket of his denim jacket and pulled out of a pair of sunglasses.  He slid them onto his face and then came back to sit down beside me.   His posture was all wrong.  He seemed to be slouching, which was unusual for him.
    “I don’t know.  I started getting headaches not too long ago.”
    “In South America?”
    He shook his head. “No.  When I first came back to the states.”
    Reaching out to him, I grasped one of his hands . “Is there a lot of pain?”
    “ Yes.   Light and noise seem to make things worse.”
    I rose from the bed and went to the lamp to turn it off.  He got up and opened the heavy drapes, letting the muted city lights wash over the room.  There was no hint of sunlight.  I could only assume that it was very early in the morning.  He stayed by the window, but averted his face from it.  I wanted to comfort him somehow, but wasn’t sure what I could do.  He seemed so lost. 
    “Selena’s here,” he said in a hollow-sounding tone.
    That was a surprise.  I hadn’t seen or talked to my mother in a long time.  I had assumed that she knew about Katie’s transformation, but she hadn’t yet made any attempt to contact me.  I wasn’t sure what I would say to her anyway. 
    “What does she want?” I asked.
    He went to the chair by the bed and sat down with a sigh.  He took off the sunglasses.  When he looked over at me, his eyes were bloodshot and his face looked drawn with worry.  “She wanted me to get a message to Vincent.   There’s going to be an uninvited guest at the hearing.”
    “Who?”
    He paused for a second and then lowered his head.  “The Breath-Giver.”
    My mother had told me only a little about the supernatural being who had changed Alex from a vampire back into a human, but I’d heard from others that all of it was just a story.  Of course, they couldn’t explain the physical c hanges in Alex that had happened either.  I hadn’t spent much time thinking about it, to be honest.  I knew that Michael had considered the possibility of asking for her help.  With everything that had happened since we first met, there hadn’t been a chance for us to talk about it at length.  So I had pushed it to the back of my mind.
    “Have you seen her?” I asked.  I crawled back onto the bed and pulled the covers over me.
    “ No.  And S elena said she would never appear in her natural form in front of a group of people.  She will show up at the meeting as a human.”
    “A human would probably raise just as much attention.  Why is she going?”
    “Apparently, she feels she has a stake in this.”  He chuckled without humor.
    “ You should probably take everything my mother says with a grain of salt.  How did you get in here, anyway?   Teddy locked me in.”
    “She knows you,” he said, smiling a little.  “She was afraid if you knew that Isaiah was somewhere close, you would do whatever you could to find him and kick his sorry ass.”
    “She’d be right about that.”
    “It was also for your protection.  There are some problems that have come up.  Serious problems.”
    I sat up.  “What?”
    “Michael made some mistakes after the car accident.”
    The memory of