Copyright 2014 Wanda Lotus.
Part 2
Everyone thinks Kacela and I fell in love at first sight or some such sentimental drivel. “You two are so cute together!” they love to exclaim. I’ve seen photos of us together, and I have to admit we look good. But things between us didn’t start out as a love story. The truth is that things between us were downright dangerous. As in deadly.
It’s true that we saw each other across a crowded room. Scratch that: I felt her before I saw her. I had been curled up in a corner of Book Nook, a small independent book store in Liverpool, NY, alternating between reading poetry and writing in my journal. I was sitting with my back to the rest of the room. Most people tell me that is never a good idea; you should always face the room, so you can see who is coming up behind you. I am not most people, so I deliberately sit facing the corner to keep from being distracted too much by people’s comings and goings.
As soon as she walked through the door she was drawn to me. I felt her energy home in on me like a laser beam. My scalp had prickled under my closely-cropped, tightly curled hair, because most people’s energy is not that intense. Hers–I knew she was female from her frequency–was off the charts. And there was something else: she was ravenously hungry.
Shit! I had murmured under my breath. It had been a few years since I’d dealt with an energy vampire, and I was in no mood to deal with one that day. If she’d kept it moving, I never would have turned around. But the only moving she did was towards me, weaving slowly through the book displays. The room was small, so the only reason her progress would have been so slow was if she was trying not to be obvious.
When she was a few inches from me I murmured, “Don’t start nothing, there won’t be nothing, Princess.”
Her amusement was obvious in her voice. “I should have known I couldn’t sneak up on you.”
“No one can sneak up on me, especially not someone like you. I felt you before you even hit the parking lot.” I turned around and looked up at her. She was slender, with dark chocolate eyes and skin a shade lighter, like mine. She looked like she was in her early 30s. I couldn’t see her hair, because she was wearing a crocheted tam pulled low over her forehead. “You’re old enough to know better, or did your mama not teach you?”
“She never got the chance. She died in an unfortunate accident when I was 12.” By her smirk I knew it hadn’t been an accident.
“What about your father?”
“Never knew him. Never needed to.” She tossed her head, showing a stubbornly set chin. “I’ve done just fine on my own.”
It would be my luck to encounter an energy vampire with no home training and an ego a mile wide. No wonder she had tried to surprise me.
I pursed my lips at her defiant stare. “What’s your name?”
“Kacela. What’s yours?”
“Mya. You new here?”
“Moved here a week ago.”
“Well, Liverpool is a small town, and we’ll probably run into each other, again, so let me make something clear to you, Kacela. I don’t want trouble. I just want to be left alone to live in peace. You remember that, and everything will be all right. You ‘forget’ that,” I made air quotes, “and things will get very ugly very fast.”
“Are you always so bossy?”
“Are you always so arrogant?” She immediately bristled, fingers twitching. “What did I just tell you about not wanting any trouble? You don’t want to do that in here, anyway. Even if you won, which you won’t, you’ll out yourself to a bunch of people who won’t let you walk away like I’m going to let you do.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “How did you know what I was going to do? Can you read minds?”
I smirked. “As far as you know I do. Now beat it, before I reconsider letting you go.”
She had stared a moment longer, still bristling. Then seeming to think better of it, she had smiled and walked away without a backwards glance.
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