The Survivors

Chapter Eleven: Intercontinental, pt. 1

11

INTERCONTINENTAL

I had been sitting in a hotel room for three painful months. Though I felt better about my future after Mark had comforted me that night in Bigfork, I was not satisfied. I missed Everett with every fiber of my being. The more time we spent apart, the more every molecule of my body desperately tried to reach out to him.

After Mark left, I gave myself a day to get my head together before retrieving my car from the end of the mountain road near my family's land. I packed everything in it and got on the road, heading west. I drove through the night to Seattle.

I booked a suite at the Four Seasons in downtown Seattle-if I was going to sit and wait in a hotel room, it might as well be a nice one. It overlooked Elliot Bay and had a view all the way to Puget Sound. I was happy to look at water again. I could sit on my couch and waste hours just staring at it, which was good. Because in three sleepless months, I'd had over two thousand hours to waste.

I explored the city by day and delved into my research by night. When I walked the busy streets, I was enthralled with what I could hear. My powers were getting stronger, my senses even sharper. I was able to hear clearly and even see into people's minds. I gained insights into humans by hearing what people were thinking, especially the way they phrased things to themselves before they said them out loud. People were so interesting! They were more like the characters I had read about in books than I gave them credit for.

  But my initial thrill with the city and with my developing powers wore off. After two weeks, I was useless. I couldn't focus on anything. By mid-August, I was a wreck-my nerves stripped, my soul aching. Some days I'd find myself combing iTunes and loading up my iPod to drive aimlessly around Washington, even into Canada. Most days I would waste time and money shopping or telling Corrina about my non-adventures on Twitter. Twitter was becoming very useful for feeling less alone. I began to update it incessantly. I didn't know if Corrina cared about everything I said, but I could pretend. It also helped that I had a forum on which I could share my thoughts and, if nothing else, pretend Corrina was listening because every forty-eight hours my cell phone rang and it was Cole Hardwick and it was getting harder to ignore him. I did ignore the calls ninety percent of the time, though. I was afraid of talking to him, afraid of liking it too much. Afraid of liking him too much.

  And I tried to sense Everett. But I couldn't find him. I couldn't find any of them. I questioned my ability to track at all.

  My research consumed me. I spent the majority of my time studying eastern European folklore concerning vampires, which I had stumbled upon in California. It was far more extensive than any other lore I'd ever researched. I focused on specific legends in which vampirelike creatures were born into their condition like I was. Many creatures in folklore were changed into their supernatural form in one way or another after having first been human and maturing or even dying. My family and the Winters had all been born the way we were. It seemed to set us apart.

  I had realized that in my quest to find an avenue for the destruction of my kind, I had inadvertently been studying different origins, too. Many in my family believed that we were created by God, that we had started as humans and then were each chosen to be Survivors. But I couldn't imagine it. I knew there was some sort of lineage, that there was a line that could answer at least some of the questions I had. My search, then, had shifted to a strange place in which I was studying destruction and creation, side by side.

  Some of the more obscure vampire lore out of Russia and Romania spoke of vampires who were born, not made, and it sounded promising. But the information was scant, and I kept hitting walls. I knew what this meant: I had reached this point in my research a number of times, and that's when it was time to get on a plane and go to the source. But this time, I couldn't.