I shrugged. “If you can call it that. They want Selene dead and then they never want to talk to me again, even if our interests align. Porsche working with me so closely was a blasphemy, remember? She was excommunicated by her community. Even if we are working for a common goal, they wouldn’t want Sarah actually befriending us.”
“It’s a bit late for that.” Sarah’s eyes were sparkling.
I could tell she thought this was the greatest thing to ever happen to her. It wasn’t in my heart to tell her that it was going to likely be a terrible thing.
“What do we do now?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t think you’re the active De Ritter Shield. I know what that blood felt like and it was… more powerful.” Amy gave me a sympathetic smile as I spoke. “But I do think you should be looking into your history, your genealogy.”
Sarah nodded and I reached my hand out.
“Would you… would you mind?” I know my hand was trembling, but it had been so long since I had relief from this pain.
She took my hand again, holding on tight as my fangs slowly sunk back into my mouth. I heaved a huge sigh.
“Do you want me to unlock you?” Amy asked.
I shook my head. “No. No offense, my dear.” I smiled at Sarah. “But the last Shield we had could affect a whole room. For now, it’s only your touch that slowly takes away my powers. Thank you.” I pulled back. “But Sarah… don’t feel like you have to get involved in any of this. It’s not a good life, you can ask Amy. This isn’t all fun and games. There’s a lot of danger and pain involved in this.”
“Are you kidding?” Sarah exclaimed. “Look, Mister, I don’t know who you think you are, but Amy’s my best friend in the whole world. So if she needs my help, you can bet your life, immortal or not, that I’m going to be there for her.”
Amy beamed at Sarah, and I could see the love and loyalty between the two girls clear as day.
“Well then, we have a lot to discuss,” I said. “Please, have a seat.”
Chapter 5: Amy
“This one.” Sarah pointed to one name in an endless list of names on what seemed like an endless stack of papers. We were lying on her bed, going through print-outs of her entire genealogy. There was a place outside of town that took DNA samples and cross-referenced it with their database. It was incredibly pricey, and to have it cross-referenced with other databases was even more expensive. But Liam had paid for it all, fast tracking it to the front of the line with another fee. When I saw the four figure bill, I had nearly passed out, but he assured me it was fine.
“We need to know who she is before they do,” Liam had told me, as he pocketed the receipt.
“Is there a whole science to this?” I had asked, watching as they put Sarah’s blood sample in a bag and seal it shut. “Like, if she’s not the active Shield… is there a possibility she can become one?”
Liam shrugged. “There’s a possibility she can hone her powers, and if they can be focused well, it could be an indicator that she’s next in line. But there’s nothing definite.”
“And if she’s not an active Shield?” I asked, eagerly. “How strong could she be?”
Liam’s face darkened as he held the door open for me and we left the medical building.
“She will never be Porsche, Amy. Even if she’s active, Porsche was dying, remember? And in a Shield’s weakness, in their utter mortality, comes strength. I doubt, even at her most powerful, Sarah could help us against Selene.”
“But she wants to try.” I protested. “She wants to try, for us.”
“And so she shall,” Liam said, as we got in the car. “But let’s see what the results say first.”
Now, with the results, Sarah and I were trying to make sense of any of the hundreds of names and lines.
“Cameron?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s a whole different bloodline.”
“But look at the date. This guy was born in 1325. Records sucked back then.”
I shook my head. “So it needs to be more recent than that, if we want to know for sure.”
“Problem is Cameron and McIntosh are common names. De Ritter, not so much, but there’s nothing even remotely close here.”
“Sarah,” I said, suddenly noticing the top of her head. We have known each other for years, but I had never seen her hair undyed. Against her dusty white skin, Sarah’s jet black hair stood out, but as I noticed the top of her head, I realized her natural color wasn’t even close. “If I shaved you bald, what color would your hair grow back in?”
She giggled. “You’d never know, because I’d kill you before then. But your ghost might learn that it’s a fire engine red. Horrible color. You know the kids at school used to tell me that gingers had no soul? Are ghosts real?”
I choked, ignoring her question. “Your hair is red?”
“Sure. Why? You hate gingers too?”
“No.” I examined her roots. “The Shields had red hair. I remember at Porsche’s funeral, all of them standing together, it was creepy.”
“So…” She scrunched up her face, trying to come to the same conclusion I did. “It’s not some long lost ancestor that only appeared once.”
“No.” I sat up, looking at the time. “Hey, I have to go.”
“Noooo,” she howled, grabbing onto my wrist.
It made me grin. I didn’t really want to go, but I had booked time in the library to work with some of the original plays Liam had stocked in the archives. I wasn’t sure what my graduate thesis was going to be yet, but it had something to do with those old plays, written on parchment that had drawn me in with their smells, the crinkles of the paper, the running ink. But I was also so glad to have her here: to finally have a best friend beside me.
“I’ll come back later. Liam and I are going to have an early dinner and then you and I can do whatever.”
“Is that weird?” she asked, rolling over and making several papers fall off the bed.
“What?”
“Never being able to spend the evening with him? Or the night for that matter? I mean, don’t you want to?”
I pulled on my shoes as we talked, tying the laces.
“Of course I want to. But what exactly can I do about it?”
“Well.” She thought, as she scraped her hair into a tiny ponytail. “Can’t Shields make a vampire human?”