Precipice (Tribe 2) by Audrina Cole Read Free Book Online

shaking his head and looking away.  “You said you felt a connection…a bond.  But I wasn’t anything more than just your latest charity case, was I?”
    “No, of course not—!”
    “I get it now.  That’s why you keep telling me that my feelings aren’t real—that it’s just some kind of Florence Nightingale effect.  Because you don’t feel anything for me .”
    “That’s not true!”
    “I’m just someone you felt sorry for.  This has never been about us. It’s about you —feeling good about yourself, feeling like a hero.  You go around healing people without thinking, without even giving them the choice as to whether they want a fricking blood-sucking vampire to be hovering over them, when the bloodlust hits!”
    “Alex, please—” I reached out to him.
    He jerked back, evading my grasp.  “I can’t deal with this.  I can’t believe you lied to me.”  He backed out the door, pushing open the screen door and letting it bang shut.  “Stay away from my mother.”  He lifted a hand to point his finger at me.  “Don’t go near her.  She doesn’t need your kind of help.  Just stay away…from both of us.”
    He spun on his heel and stalked out the door toward his car. 
    My legs turned to rubber, and I sank to the floor, sobbing.  Pain seared my chest, and I could barely choke out a breath as sobs wracked my body.  My mother knelt beside me laying a hand on my shoulder. 
    “Get away from me!” I screamed.  “Look what you’ve done!  He’ll never come back!  He hates me.  He thinks I’m a monster.  You just had to get involved.  You had to stick your nose in where it didn’t belong, and now I’ve lost him!”  I clenched my fists, wailing in agony. 
    “There will be other boys,” she soothed, ignoring my outburst.
    “No,” I sobbed.  “There won’t.”
    I knew my mother would think I was being melodramatic, but I wasn’t.  We had a deep connection, Alex and I.  I’d never felt that kind of bond with another human being.  I didn’t even feel that close to my own family—and we were closer than any non-Healer family that I knew.  It felt as if my soul had been torn from my body, and I didn’t know how I would go on without him. 
    “Ember?”  River’s voice penetrated my fog of misery.  He must have heard the whole thing.
    I didn’t respond. 
    River tried to pull back the hair that had fallen into my face, and was now pasted to my cheek by the rivulets of tears.  “Mom, ” he said over his shoulder, “I think she just needs time alone.  Come on, Em.”
    All I wanted was to remain hunched over on the floor and be left alone.  But I knew he was right—I had to go up to my room.  My mom would never leave me alone while I was downstairs. 
    He took me by the elbow and helped me up, then followed behind as I walked woodenly up the stairs to my room. 
    When I got to my door, I went inside and tried to push the door shut behind me, but River stopped it with one hand. 
    “Hey, give him time.  It’s a bizarre thing to find out.  But he’s a good guy.  I can tell.  He’ll come around.”
    “No he won’t,” I said, turning away to sit on the edge of my bed, hugging myself and staring at the wall across from me.  “He just found out the girl he cares about has been lying to him all this time…and oh yeah, by the way, she’s a vampire.”
    “Don’t say that!  You’re a Healer.  It doesn’t matter how the world would see us.  That’s what we are.  You, more than any of us.  You have the heart of a true Healer, Ember.  You’re what we all were meant to be, before modern technology forced us to go into hiding.  In the old days, we could be shamans, medicine men, apothecaries, midwives—anything that would mask what we truly are.  But now, our hands are tied.  We’re forced to hide our abilities, to watch people die unnecessarily, in order to avoid the genocide of our race.  But all you care about is being who you really