Black Sunshine (Dark Eyes 1)

” he says. “There’s a lot of house to see.”

I leave the dead roses, feeling foolish, though it’s the lightest I’ve felt since I woke up in this house of horrors.

Though, as we walk down the hall of this floor, the more I realize it’s not as creepy as I first thought. It’s just old. Okay, and there’s a weird feeling in the air, but it’s probably the fact that it’s a vampire lair.

“It is a little creepy,” Wolf says as we pass old paintings of people on the indigo papered walls, their eyes seeming to follow us.

“You said you couldn’t read my thoughts.”

“I pick up on energies, feelings,” he says.

“You’re an empath.”

He laughs. “No. That would mean I take on your feelings as if they were my own. I would be a piss poor vampire if I let myself feel sorry for everyone.”

I swallow hard. “Because you kill them.”

He glances at me. “Sometimes. I don’t go out of my way to do that.”

I hold my arms close to my chest. I’m not cold, I actually feel hot, but I feel weak and vulnerable and small. “Yeah, well Solon told me had I not turned out to be what I am, he would have sucked me dry and left me for dead.”

Wolf nods. “That sounds like something he’d say.”

“What, so he wouldn’t have killed me?”

“Solon likes to think the worst of himself. Defense mechanism.”

That wasn’t really answering my question. But I let it go.

We go down the staircase to another floor that looks like the one above, only the wallpaper is dark green. From the way I can tell, the house is narrow and Victorian. Very San Francisco.

“Where in the city are we?” I ask him, not expecting him to tell me.

“Western Addition.”

I stop dead in my tracks. “What? I live in Hayes Valley. You mean I’m that close to home?”

Home. It sounds weird now.

But no, it has to still be my home.

“You’d be surprised at how close we are to your apartment,” he says. “Mind you, we’ve been in this house a lot longer than your parents have been in theirs.”

He opens a door at the end of the hall, and we step on in.

“This is my room,” he says.

I stop and look around as he heads over to the shut curtains, candles everywhere. It’s roughly the same shape as my room, but the design is different. Sparse, mid-century furniture, lots of greys and browns, a thick woollen rug on the hardwood. Very Scandinavian. Makes sense.

Then he opens the curtains, sunlight flooding through. Actually, when my eyes adjust, I realize it’s overcast, but the light feels like I’m standing on the surface of the sun.

“Take a look,” he says, staring out the window.

I walk over to him, wincing, until I’m right beside him.

I gasp.

We’re right across the street from Alamo Square, the famous Painted Ladies just to the left. Which would make this house…