Donor House: Alice: Visiting Cate

[k_a_webb]

Echoes had become the place Alice went if she needed some time away from the house. She was happier than she had been in years and things seemed to be going well, but that didn’t mean being around the same people all the time didn’t get too much occasionally. Especially with Nick, because they’d been together for decades, and slowly their relationship was getting back to what it had been before she became a vampire. The last thing she wanted to do was damage it again by being impatient with him or snarling at him for no reason. So she was going to talk to Cate.

It was strange for Alice to think that her first female friend since she’d left home was a human. All of Nick’s vampire friends and acquaintances had been male, so having any female in her life was amazing. She had occasionally sent letters to her mum, but their relationship had been broken in a way that couldn’t be fixed when Alice had become a vampire. The loss of her family still hurt, even though she was building her own family around her, because it wasn’t the same. Until they’d told her to leave and not come back she’d believed deeply that the love of your family was immutable.

Alice knew the shop was closed. Cate had started keeping it open two nights a week, for the vampires and donors of the house, but couldn’t afford to do it more often. That was something Alice wanted to change, because Echoes was important to her for many reasons. Cate was important to her. If it hadn’t been for Cate walking into the house and asking for a vampire to give a history talk at Echoes then things would have been very different. Slowly the people of Bognor were beginning to accept them, thanks in part to the work Cate had done. Unfortunately there would always be humans who hated vampires because of what they were.

The shop itself was somewhere Cate spent almost all her time, whether it was open or closed, because her empty flat couldn’t be called a home. It was simply a place she had rented in order to get away from her family. Home was Echoes, which Alice understood, and she had Lewis watching the property above the shop. When it became available it would become another cog in the machine that made the house work. Thinking about Lewis made her smile, because he believed in the house even more than she did, so did everything he could to keep it working, even though there had been a time when he wasn’t sure.

Gently Alice knocked on the door. Cate knew that she was heading over and had the door opened moments after she knocked. Alice was grateful, because she never felt totally safe unless she was somewhere she knew or was with someone she trusted. Nick wouldn’t let her walk to Echoes alone to begin with, in case something happened to her. Sometimes she hated him being overprotective, but she knew what had caused it, so she never got angry with him. Venting at Cate helped.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.