Ruby tears, p.1
Ruby Tears, page 1
Ruby Tears
The Shades of Us Trilogy Book 2
by
Abby Farnsworth
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
World Castle Publishing, LLC
Pensacola, Florida
Copyright © Abby Farnsworth 2022
Smashwords Edition
Hardback ISBN: 9798354658268
Paperback ISBN: 9781958336724
eBook ISBN: 9781958336731
First Edition World Castle Publishing, LLC, October 17, 2022
http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com
Smashwords Licensing Notes
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.
Cover: Karen Fuller
Editor: Maxine Bringenberg
Acknowledgments
As always, thank you to Karen Fuller, Maxine Bringenberg, and World Castle Publishing! You guys are amazing! Thank you to Jason McCrady and M.J. Lemon. Your support is so helpful. And another thank you to all my friends, family, and readers for encouraging me. You all know who you are, and you’re awesome! I couldn’t do it without you.
To my readers, this is our 5th journey together – how thrilling! I hope you all enjoy Ruby Tears as much as you did my first four books. And thank you for all your reviews and ratings. They are so helpful! Make sure you’re prepared for some tears with this one. Happy reading!
PS: To my “inspirations,” thank you.
Dedication
In loving memory of Mildred Hedberg – I bet the ‘50s were great!
“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.”
- “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron
Chapter One —Broken
James looked at me, his emerald eyes sparkling. He tilted his head to the side. I placed my hand softly on the lower part of his face. This was a moment I’d imagined over and over again, a dream worthy of being wrapped in a ribbon. The idea that he was mine again made my mind full of flowers and gentle love songs. Beautiful, I thought. Moments later, I brought my lips to his. It was like powdered sugar had fallen upon my tongue.
I’d waited so long for this moment. When he was human, I’d been so afraid of hurting him. The idea of injuring his frail form had plagued me. Of course, he hadn’t been weak. James had been nicely toned with muscles that many teenage boys would have been jealous of. But compared to my immortal strength, he’d been a butterfly. James’s mortal form had been breakable, too much so for me to really show him all of my love.
Our lives had been so complicated. I had fallen for James when he was human and despised myself for it. Taking his mortality had seemed like a crime. But when Pansy, a deranged werewolf, had torn his body to the brink of death, I had been given no choice. I could have let him die, but that had seemed unthinkable. And so I had decided to change him, making him an immortal.
The choice had been difficult. Yet, in the end, I hadn’t regretted it. Our love was too strong to abandon. This was my chance. I finally had just the right moment to fall into this ocean of bliss. The contentment was beautiful. This brilliant moment was enough to fill my heart with sweetness.
Our lips crushed each others. I poured myself into him, relishing in our love. We had forever. This was our chance at happiness. His hands softly held my waist. They were strong now, even more than mine.
Every particle of his body had turned to porcelain. Like me, he was a stone statue. We were nighttime beings illuminated by the soft candlelight. I never wanted to forget this moment. In a hundred years, I could look back on this.
He pulled away, a look of confusion leaking into his eyes. “Who are you?”
For a moment, I was sure I’d heard him incorrectly. “What?”
James shook his head, pushing me from his lap. I fell onto the daybed beside him, absolutely clueless about what to do. James’s face was perplexed. He looked entirely lost.
“I don’t know who you are,” he replied.
I sat there completely silent. How was this possible? We loved each other. He was my everything. James held my heart. He was my boyfriend, my partner. We were completely and wholly infatuated with each other.
How did he not remember me? I hadn’t lost any memories after I’d been changed. My human life, and the people who filled it, were still firmly planted in my mind. Nina and Anya, my sisters, hadn’t lost their memories, either. This made no sense. He couldn’t forget this love. We’d fought so hard for this. How could it be over?
I felt as if he’d torn my heart from my marble chest and crushed it within his firm hands. Panic consumed my body. Every inch of my stone-like hands seemed to shake. It was as if I was falling into a black hole. My soul was practically screaming for him to love me, but his eyes held no compassion. I was nothing to him.
I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. It was as if my lips were glued shut. There were so many things I wanted to tell him. Yet how could I possibly communicate my love in a few simple words?
I remembered the way James had held me, the way his lips had caressed mine, and how he’d told me he loved me. He’d professed his love as if it was as natural as the sun rising in the sky. But now, he couldn’t even remember it.
“James, I love you,” I whispered.
He stood from the couch, holding his hands in front of him. “What am I?”
Would he be furious? If he couldn’t remember who I was, he certainly wouldn’t know what had happened. He had no idea what he’d become. James didn’t know he was an immortal. How would I explain what he’d transformed into?
He didn’t even understand that vampires were real. All the time we had spent wishing for this moment was nothing. It was all gone. Because if he didn’t remember anything, it was almost like it never even happened.
“The last thing I remember is...something about a beach and a girl. She was beautiful, with black hair and eyes a pretty shade of blue. It’s all so blurry, though,” James said.
I brought my hand up to cover my gasp. He remembered the night we’d had our first kiss. It wasn’t clear enough for him to know it had been me, though. His memory was fractured. James had forgotten our love.
If that was really the last thing he remembered, then I was just a stranger to him. He was still my James, but I was just a girl. To him, I was a mysterious vampire with black hair and blue eyes. There wasn’t any love in his brief memory of our time together. It was just a mess of fractured seconds.
“It’s me,” I whispered.
He looked at me with skepticism. “What happened to me? Why don’t I remember you?”
Tears were streaming down my face. I had to tell him. There was no choice. It was my responsibility to tell him that he was a—a vampire. He had become a child of the night.
My voice was small. “You’re a vampire.”
For a moment, he seemed to be in disbelief. Then his eyes grew wide as his fangs slipped from his mouth. They sliced his lip, causing a few drops of blood to fall onto his fingers as he reached up to touch them.
My stomach lurched as I witnessed it. I hadn’t really been prepared to see this. No matter how much I’d wanted to be with him, seeing him as a vampire felt strange. I handed him one of the glasses of blood I’d prepared for when he woke. My long, lavender dress flowed freely around my hips. It clung to my chest before falling down to the floor. I’d worn it to be beautiful for him, but he didn’t even seem to notice. My heart was writhing in my chest.
James took the glass from my hand with a look of disgust on his face. As he brought it to his nose, desire flooded his eyes. James lifted the glass to his mouth, gulping its contents down. His lips were ruby-red. A few drops of blood fell from his fangs. I couldn’t tell if I was disgusted or entranced.
I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wanted to run into his arms, while the more sensible side of my mind told me to wait. After all, he had no idea who I was. I wasn’t his girlfriend anymore, only a stranger. The reality of the situation was enough to make me freeze.
“James?” I whispered in a questioning manner.
He looked down at me, hunger evident in his eyes. “I need more,” he replied.
I nodded. At least I knew how to solve that problem. Gently I took his hand in my own. Though James looked at me strangely, he didn’t pull away. I led him away from my room and out the back of the tiny house.
He looked up into the night sky, gazing at the stars. They were beautiful, but I didn’t notice. My whole world had come crashing down. The man I loved had no idea who I was. Not long ago, James had begged me to let him have my heart. Now, he was clueless as to how much I loved him. The irony was overwhelming. We had switched places. How was I the one desperate for love? He’d become cold while I’d become a melted puddle of emotion.
He dropped my hand, seemingly uncomfortable with the prolon ged gesture. I felt my heart lurching in my chest. There didn’t seem to be much I could do to stop the tears from dripping down my cheeks. My heart was shattered. When I looked at him, tears drizzled down my cheeks like raindrops falling from a mournful sky.
This was a terrible nightmare. He should have remembered me. Yet somehow, his change had gone wrong. I was left alone to suffer through this. I hadn’t even considered such a possibility. It was foreign, something I’d never heard of before. No one I knew had lost their memory after the change. Most people turned out fine. Of course, it took some adjusting. But through my time as an immortal, I’d never heard of someone losing their memories.
Maybe he’d hit his head when Pansy had tried to kill him. She had tortured him and let him bleed slowly, all because she was jealous of my sister, Anya. It had been sadistic, twisted in a manner that would have made anyone feel sick. Even though Pansy was dead, I’d never hated any other werewolf as much as I despised her. It was an age-old rivalry that I had thought to be mostly extinct when my sisters had fallen in love with werewolf brothers, but I had been wrong. For some of us, it was still alive.
The horror of that experience had caused so many bad things, but I’d never suspected this. Perhaps he’d lost his memory before I changed him. That was the only explanation I could give myself. Pansy had taken James from me in more ways than I could comprehend.
No matter how it happened, it was heartbreaking. Loving someone who had previously loved you was so, so hard. I still felt every inch of the passion I’d felt when James was human, but he didn’t care. There was no longer a look of love in his eyes when they met mine. I missed his soft, human nature. Everything about him had turned to stone.
“Where are we going?” James asked.
“To hunt,” I replied.
Chapter Two — Helpless
I led James through the woods down to a small, secluded area we used for hunting. I usually preferred blood bags, but it was necessary for all vampires to learn to hunt. When resources weren’t available, we had to have backups. There was a sweet waterfall flowing into a little pond. The sound of clean, fresh water tumbling down from the rocks was loud enough to fill the uncomfortable silence. We hadn’t spoken for at least a half hour. Vibrantly colored grass sprung up around the small enclosure, allowing it to look like the entrance to a magical land. Of course, I didn’t need any more supernatural elements in my life. I already had plenty to deal with. Vampires and werewolves were complicated to the extreme.
The world stood still as I searched for the scent of an animal. Moments later, I caught the odor of a deer. James had evidently smelled it too. I looked at him, assuming he’d ask me what to do. But without a single glance in my direction, he took off running. I followed him immediately.
We flew through the woods at a speed too fast for any human to comprehend. James looked entirely natural in his immortal form. He wasn’t hesitant or scared. I was relieved that one thing seemed to be going all right. His memory loss was horrible. Even so, he didn’t seem to be entirely miserable. James had accepted his new identity. Unlike me, he didn’t seem to be bothered by the loss of his mortality. He had far more in common with Nina and Anya.
He halted in front of me, frozen in place. I stood behind him, waiting for his first move. James didn’t even seem to notice my presence. If he was aware of my body behind him, he wasn’t concerned with it. This new, uncaring behavior was so unlike him. I yearned for the love and attentiveness he’d shown during his time as a human. Before, he had never taken his eyes from me. Now, he didn’t even care that my heart was breaking.
James jumped forward, pouncing on a helpless deer. I stood there watching him sink his fangs into its frail form. This was a new James. He was no longer my love, no longer the man I adored. He had ceased to be the loving boy who had desperately craved my heart. I had turned him into this primal monster. The only thing he wanted was blood, and it was all my fault.
He stood up, leaving the blood-drained deer on the ground. Blood was splattered on his shirt and all over his mouth. I turned my eyes away from him, unable to look at what I’d caused.
The fact that he was a vampire didn’t bother me. No, that wasn’t it. If he had woken as my James, with caring hands and loving lips, I would have been happy. But he’d become a totally different person. Just like me when I’d first been changed, he was relying on nothing but his base instincts. Nina and Anya had never lost their personalities. They’d seamlessly transitioned into immortals. I had hoped the same thing would happen to James. And if he hadn’t lost his memory, James probably would have still been the loving man who held my heart. But he didn’t seem to know who he was, no less how much I loved him.
He gestured to the dead animal in front of him. “Are you going to eat?”
I winced. Seeing him with blood dripping from his mouth with crazed eyes was just too much. “No, I’m not hungry,” I replied.
He shrugged before sprinting back toward the house. I followed him, hoping he wasn’t going to do anything crazy before we made it back inside. He was a newly-changed vampire and, therefore, hard to control. James’s impulses and lust for blood were so strong they clogged his mind. The fact that he didn’t have his memory wasn’t helping him think rationally either. I wanted to help him, but I hardly knew how. I’d never done this before.
When I arrived back at the house, James was rummaging around my room, looking for a fresh pair of clothes. I released a small sigh of relief. At least he’d retained enough humanity to realize he shouldn’t be walking around in a blood-drenched shirt. We were making progress.
“Do you need help? I asked.
He nodded, “Please.”
I smiled slightly before turning to open a drawer in search of some of the new clothes I’d picked for him. After pulling out a pair of jeans and a lightweight T-shirt, I walked toward him. Before I had a chance to turn away, he ripped his shirt off. I wanted to avert my eyes, but I couldn’t. I’d never seen him without a shirt before.
James’s chest was nicely toned. Every part of his body was like stone. His abdomen gleamed like marble in the soft light. I was glad he didn’t seem to notice my staring. Before he slipped his pants off, I turned away. I faced away from him, but heat still rose in my cheeks. Nina and Anya would have giggled at my anxiousness, but I really didn’t know what to do.
He cleared his throat, evidently indicating that he was finished. I knew my face was red, but I turned around anyway. He tilted his head to the side as if unable to understand my embarrassment. It was too strange to meet his eyes.
“Who are you, again? How am I supposed to know you?” James asked.
There was a huge lump in my chest. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want him to see me like that. After all, I didn’t want him to feel guilty.
“Your girlfriend,” I whispered.
His eyes grew wide. “You’re my girlfriend?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
He walked over, so he was only a few inches away from me. “So, what happened to me? Why don’t I remember being with you?”
I wanted to run into his arms, but it didn’t feel right. He’d given no such invitation. James’s body no longer invited me closer.
“We were in love, but then this werewolf girl kidnapped you and—well—it’s a long story. If I hadn’t changed you, you would have died. But the werewolf, Pansy, tortured you. I think somehow you must have hit your head and lost your memory,” I replied.
I attempted to control the tears dripping from my eyes. It was hopeless, though. Just thinking about seeing his crumpled form on the floor of that dusty house was too much. It had broken me.
He took one of my black curls within his fingers and began twirling it around. I felt my breath catch. This was the first time James had initiated contact since he’d woken up. Perhaps something within his soul still loved me.
“You saved my life?” James asked.
I nodded. Tears were falling down my cheeks. He reached out to wipe them away, his snowy thumb brushing against my own pale face. I sighed, unable to prevent myself from crumbling against him. He caught me as I fell toward him, his arms hesitantly wrapping around my back.
