Growing Wildflowers | WLW

Blanket Flower

"Tell me I'm wrong," Jamie demands. We're leaning up against her car, waiting for Sophie to pick me up since we decided it's safer than going back into the city and risking Jamie being seen with me.

I look her in the eye, a smile tugging at my lips. "You're wrong." We've been arguing, mostly joking, about Jamie's hunch that Sophie has a 'thing for me' since I put the phone down. "Besides Sophie's like nine hundred years old, I think."

Jamie's head tilts. "Wouldn't that make her an elder vampire?"

I clear my throat to cover the silence. Jamie talks about the vampire race as if she's known about us for years... Because she has, but something about it is unsettling. Every time she refers to an aspect of our society with more detail than I've given, it's a reminder she's been trained to kill us since birth.

"I don't know if she's actually nine hundred years old," I manage to say. "But I know she used to run with John and he had his one-hundredth birthday a while back."

Jamie taps her finger against the cold metal of her car. "Interesting. And you're—"

"Twenty. Vampire years included."

"I thought newborn vampires are supposed to be all crazy with thirst. Unable to control themselves and everything."

"We are," I tell her.

"You're not," she argues.

"I murdered a woman in an alley because you scratched your hand," I remind her.

She shakes her head. "But you don't kill everyone who looks at you."

"I want to."

I watch her, waiting for a reaction. Waiting for her to decide I'm not who she thought I was and reach into the car for her stake but instead she shrugs one shoulder.

"So, you've got the willpower of a middle aged woman on the Atkins diet in an Olive Garden." I let out an unexpected laugh and she faces me. "Are there others like you?"

I shake my head thoughtfully. "I'm not sure. I've never met another newborn." She's nodding slowly, her mind somewhere else when I take her hand in mine. I want to ask her why she's asking so many questions about us; why it seems like she's studying me but decide against it. She trusts me. I can trust her. She's not going to go home and tell her mom everything she learned tonight.

Jamie opens her mouth to ask another question when headlights cut through the inky night around the curve of the mountain.

"She always drive that fast?" Jamie mutters, looking at the ground.

I clear my throat. "Yeah." A tense moment passes as Sophie guides her Italian sports car into the turnout, rocks crunching under her tires as the car jolts to a stop. I swallow hard as the door clicks open and Sophie emerges. I can smell the leather from here. Her eyes flick to Jamie but instead of acknowledging her, she looks at me.

"You ready, girlie?"

Jamie's ahead of me though, extending her hand to Sophie like she's meeting my parents for the first time, Miss Polite. "I'm Jamie," she says. "It's really nice to meet the person responsible for saving Gwen's life."

Sophie stares at her, her eyes fixed on Jamie's outstretched hand. A beat passes. I clap my hands together to cut through the silence, mutter an 'okay' and put myself between Jamie and Sophie.

"She's not going to... It's a blood thing. The warmth." I shake my head, giving up on trying to explain Sophie's vacant stare. "You've gotta stop trying to shake hands with blood suckers," I tell Jamie after I pull her an adequate distance away.