Read Online Confessions of a Vampire's Girlfriend by Katie Maxwell - Free Book Online Page B

Absinthe liable to finish putting away her stuff any second, I didn’t have time to brace myself for the onslaught of images. I just grabbed the handle and hoped for the best.
    It was awful. Worse than I thought. At least seven different people had touched the safe in the last few weeks: Absinthe and Peter were the strongest, but I could also feel Karl, Elvis, Soren, even Imogen and my mom had touched the safe at some time or another. Inanimate objects can’t hold on to memories the way people do, but if someone was feeling a very strong emotion when he or she touched it, sometimes that was imprinted onto the object.
    Indecision and frustration were there on the safe handle, but the overwhelming feeling, the emotion that swamped my mind was a cold, quiet desperation, the kind of desperation that makes your palms prick with sweat. One of the people who’d touched the safe was emotionally in a state so bad that touching the memory of it now left me slightly sick to my stomach.
    I pulled my hand away, but didn’t have time to get the glove back on before Absinthe popped into the room. “I am not seeing how you can help us if you vill not tell me how you work. Do you read the minds, eh? Can you see someone’s guilt in their aura? Are you a human . . . what do you call it . . . lie detector?”
    I gave her a feeble smile and shoved my bare hand behind my back, slowly backing down the narrow aisle of the trailer so she wouldn’t see it. “None of that, sorry. Mom just thinks I can help. I read a lot of Agatha Christies.”
    Absinthe crossed her arms and glared at me. “I don’t think that is at all the amusing. How vill you help us now?”
    I reached for the door with my gloved hand, still keeping my back away from her. “I’ll probably talk to everyone and see if anyone has noticed anything.”
    â€œBah!” She threw her hands in the air in a gesture of annoyance. “Useless, that is useless. I have questioned everyone and no one sees anything—no one notices anything wrong. This is a vaste of my time.”
    I let one shoulder twitch in a half a shrug. “Yeah, well, I made a bargain with my mother, and I’ll stick to it.” No matter how much it destroys me , I added silently. “I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”
    Absinthe thinned her lips at me, her eyes glittering brightly. I stood with one foot on the step, one in the trailer, suddenly unable to move, locked into place by that look. My scalp tingled as I realized what she was doing. I could feel her nudging against my consciousness, trying to find a way into my mind. I wanted to yell at her to stay out of my head, but I felt as if I were caught in a big vat of molasses, as if everything going on around me had been switched into slow motion. Panic, dark and cold, gripped me as I could feel her sliding around me, surrounding me, suffocating me. She was going to get in, and then she’d know everything about me! I couldn’t breathe; my lungs couldn’t get any air in them. I felt squashed flat by her power, by her ability to just push aside my feeble resistance and march into my head. Everything started to go gray as I was swept up in wave of dizziness.
    No! my brain shrieked.
    Fran?
    Warmth filled me, eased the stranglehold Absinthe held on me, allowed my lungs to expand and suck in much-needed air. I clutched at the warmth. Ben?
    Is something wrong? He sounded sleepy, a warm, comfortable sleepy, as if he were snuggled down in a warm bed on a cold winter morning. The touch of his mind on mine was reassuring, pushing away the gray dizziness, blanketing me in security.
    Absinthe is trying to get into my mind. She’ll find out about me—about you, too.
    She already knows about me. Don’t worry; she won’t get in. Imagine yourself in a sealed chamber, with no way in and no way out. Just you. Imagine yourself in that, and she won’t be able to get into