Free Immortal Embrace by Charlotte Blackwell Page B

handle, Alexander can stop. You can read about it in your Book of Shadows rather than relive it as though you were there and it is happening to you,” Matilda tries to explain. “It can be too much to bear.”
    “Thank you. It’s hard, but I think we will better understand by experiencing it this way.”
    Once they return to the family room with a tray of drinks for everyone, Eliza encourages Alexander to finish.
    Alexander continues right where he left off.

    ***
    Everything around me was starting to go dark, and I was growing weak. I no longer had the strength to go on, to survive. That is when I heard their voices: two men and two women who told us everything would be okay. “Here...drink this. It will help,” one of the females said.
    It was thicker than water and had a strange taste, difficult to explain. It was sweet like nectar, so refreshing and so good. As I drank, I began feeling stronger. I opened my eyes to find myself drinking from her wrist, drinking her blood. I looked for my injured sister and saw she was doing the same. I couldn’t understand why we were drinking her warm blood, pumped right from her veins, without being mortified at the idea. I couldn’t fathom how it could taste so good.
    Suddenly the two men grabbed us and carried us away with no effort at all, as if we weighed no more than a feather. They took us back to their cottage to heal and I wondered why they didn’t take us to a hospital instead. It did not take long for us to transform and heal, but we did spend several weeks at the cottage, I don’t really remember much of our first days there. Little by little, our saviors explained what had happened to us. We learned that their names were Elijah, Florence, Isaac, and Constance, and they were vampires.
    They had explained that a rebel vampire (even vampires rebel against their parents) had attacked us. They had been trying to hunt him down and stop him for a while, but they were always just a few moments late. That is how they found us, because they were out looking for him. Constance also had a vision of our special abilities and of us joining their family, so when they found us and realized we were the ones she had seen, they completed the Embrace and began to teach us their ways.

    ***
    “See, some mortals have special qualities they are unaware of,” he explains, looking at the girls. “There are also a few who are aware of their abilities. When one with such abilities becomes a vampire, this ability grows and strengthens. For instance, if a person is a good judge of character as a mortal, they might be able to see others’ intentions very clearly as an immortal. Does that make sense?”
    The two coming-of-age witches nod silently, encouraging him to go on with his tale.

    ***
    Throughout the next few weeks, Elijah and his family provided us with the blood we needed to survive, animal blood, just until our transformation was completed and we could learn to feed ourselves. Our broken bones healed in mere days, and the bruises and cuts were miraculously gone in only a few hours. Everything we needed to stay alive slowed. Our hearts slowed beating, and I noticed we did not need to breathe as much and would sometimes go long periods without taking a breath. We started to lose our appetite for human food and gain an appetite for blood. At this point we don’t have our day crystals yet, and to digest human food can be painful, similar to those with lactose intolerance or celiac disease. Thanks to the day crystal your family blessed for us, it is possible to ingest food, although for us it has no nutritional value. Vampires are not dead like most myths believe, we are the undead. We still require the basic necessities to survive; it is just much harder to kill us, because of our healing abilities.
    And we don’t age, so that we can always look good to attract or prey.
    Being thirsty was a difficult new experience. A horrible pounding would start in our heads, a burning in our