A Shade of Vampire 28: A Touch of Truth by Bella Forrest Page A

Lawrence.
    Orlando stooped to his mattress and lay down. He turned his back on me, facing the ceiling. I watched through the dim lighting of the one gas lamp he had left on as his breathing grew slower and heavier.
    Although my body was completely exhausted, and I needed as much rest as I could get, for the life of me, I couldn’t fall asleep. I stayed up, tossing and turning and worrying and speculating about the next day—what if Maura refused? Would Orlando stand up to her? Would I be left out on my own?—until eventually, as the morning hours drew in, I managed to nod off for a couple of hours.
    I was woken up by a chilly breeze touching my face. I opened my eyes to a loft streaming with pale daylight. I heard the siblings’ voices, faint. They weren’t in the loft. They were up on the roof. As I rubbed my eyes, coming to consciousness, I caught onto more of their conversation. They had already started discussing the issue. My stomach clenched. It didn’t sound like it was going well so far.
    Pushing aside my blanket, I crawled directly beneath the skylight and stood up, hoping to glean more of their conversation from this position. I didn’t want them to think that I had woken up yet.
    “We’ve worked so hard to get what we have,” Maura was saying, her voice unsteady. “Why can’t we just be happy with what we’ve built?”
    “Happy?” Orlando spat back. “We’re not happy, Maura. You’ve forgotten what happiness is.”
    “Happiness is peace,” she replied pleadingly. “We have peace here. We’ve figured out how to get by. We have enough food to last us. We have a warm, dry shelter. We—”
    “Like I said,” Orlando steamrolled over her, “you’ve forgotten what happiness is.”
    There was a pause, as perhaps Maura was at a loss for words. I heard her blow out in exasperation. “Well, maybe I have, Orlando. Maybe I have!” At this point, it seemed that she had forgotten about me supposedly sleeping down here. Her voice rose to an almost desperate pitch. “But I’m not willing to risk what we have for something so… unreachable. You know what could happen if we got caught—”
    “Yes, I know,” Orlando growled. “But I would rather die fighting for something better than spend our final days in here, in ‘peace’… rotting. We’ll have enough time in our graves for that.”
    I was taken aback by the fire in his voice. When talking to him last night, he had appeared completely pessimistic, even right up until the end of our conversation. Maybe I had managed to spark something in him after all, more than I’d thought I had.
    Maura didn’t respond for a couple of minutes. I heard the sound of footsteps above me, pacing up and down.
    “And all this… because of her ?” Her tone was disbelieving now. “How can you even trust her? She’s a total stranger. Even if we agreed to go along with her and help her find a phone, she could just be using us. She could abandon us the minute she manages to make contact with her family.”
    “She wouldn’t do that,” Orlando retorted so quickly and firmly, even I was taken aback.
    “How can you say something like that?” Maura spluttered.
    “I just… I just know, okay?” he shot back. “I can see through people. I know when someone’s BSing me. I believe that she is from where she says she’s from, and I believe that she will take us in, if we help her…” He drew in a deep breath. “Maura. Please. Let’s at least try to live again.”
    Another pause. When Maura finally spoke again, this time, her voice was lower, deeper. “If I said no, would you leave with her, without me?” As she asked the question, she sounded like a child again, the way she had last night, when she had seemed afraid of being left alone. Clearly, the girl had abandonment issues.
    Orlando groaned in irritation. “No, Maura! What makes you even ask that? Of course not. Of course I would not abandon you. That’s why I’m busting my balls trying to convince