Original Sin (The Order of Vampires 1)

“Trust me, my life is far from rich.” By any sense of the word.

“Then why return to it?”

She shrugged. “Because it’s where I belong.”

“Is it?”

Annalise lowered her gaze. According to Adam and everyone here, this was where she belonged. But she had a home, a life, and a job waiting for her. People were probably looking for her right now.

Although, in this day and age it wasn’t unheard of for friends to simply ghost in and out of friend’s lives. What if Kyle thought she was ghosting him? Dodging his calls?

Taking him out of the equation left only Karen and her friends at school—but those people weren’t really friends. She didn’t even have their contact information programmed into her phone. They communicated through little hearts and thumbs up, on social media. To the world, it might look like she’d just decided to go off the grid for a while and take a break. No one would guess how far off the grid she traveled. At least not for a while.

How long would it take for someone to actually realize she was missing? Did anyone truly care enough to look for her? Did anyone care? Miss her?

Her spine stiffened as something feathered over her, the softest brush against her thoughts. She searched the room, but no one was there. “Did you feel that?”

Grace looked at her. “What?”

She touched the back of her head. “It was the strangest sensation, like... a touch, but inside of me.” Soothing, the way a doctor with good bedside manner might calm a patient with only the press of a hand.

“It was probably Adam. Were you thinking about him? He can sometimes feel people’s thoughts, not like me, but if you were wishing he was here, he might have felt it.”

She had been thinking about her life at home, what she had to go back to. But maybe on a subconscious level, the thought of returning to her lonely life made her miss Adam.

She sucked in a breath. “I felt it again.”

Grace smiled. “Are you thinking about something upsetting? I’d check for myself, but I’m trying to keep my word to block your thoughts.”

“I was thinking about home.”

“About leaving?”

She shrugged. “About...” If her mom was still alive, nothing could keep her here. But her mom was gone, and her father wanted nothing to do with her.

Her spine stiffened and she hissed in a sharp breath. “How is he doing that?”

“It’ll get easier the more time you spend together. Bonded mates have incredible connections and Adam has the added bonus of being an empath. He’s likely just trying to comfort you.”

It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. Just disorienting. Strange, like a breeze cutting through a room with no windows.

Grace flipped over the needlepoint hoop, revealing a mess of knotted thread. “Do you see this mess? From below it looks like a disaster. Sort of like what we see.” She turned the hoop over, once again displaying her beautiful work. “But from up here, it makes perfect sense. I imagine God has an even more stunning view as he watches over us. But it’s not our job to see what he sees. We only have to trust that a bigger picture’s there. That we’re an important thread tied into his masterpiece.”

It was perhaps the prettiest explanation for faith she’d ever heard. In all of her searching for answers as she dredged through the grief of losing her mom, she never found anything but chaos tangled on top of more chaos. But according to Grace, it all depended on perspective.

“I don’t know what to do,” Annalise confessed. “I don’t fit in here. It makes no sense for me to stay.”

“And where is your place at home? Don’t mistake familiarity for any sort of guarantee. Sometimes the things that challenge us most bring the greatest rewards. Maybe you’re here because it’s time to strip away all the artifice and find out what will truly make you whole.”

The thought of pushing it all away for a while, taking a break to catch her breath and figure out how to stand her thoughts again... It terrified her, but also tempted her. Strangely, when she thought of going home to her mother’s boxes still needing to be unpacked or seeing her last message to her father had been read but ignored, she questioned her sanity. Why would anyone want to go back to that hollow existence where every empty corner seemed more pronounced with every passing day?

To be honest, sitting here with Grace, talking about relationships and not having the distractions of screens and notifications, felt wonderful. “You make a good friend to talk to, Grace.”

“Thank you.” Her head turned with a sharp twist, her attention on the window.

“What is it?”

“Someone’s coming.”

Anna listened, but didn’t hear anything. Then, off in the distance, came the faint clip-clop of hooves.