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k_a_webbWhen Alice stepped into the meeting room Nick and Issac were already sat at the desk, which was covered with papers, arguing about something. Three other people were also in the room. Lewis was pacing, because that was what he did when he was worried, thinking, or both. Their eyes met, so she could see the pain in them, before he turned to walk back the other way. Blake was sat in the corner, scribbling on a bit of paper. John seemed to be the only calm one, but then he was always calm, and she was glad he was there.
“What do we know?” she asked, crossing the room so she was standing next to Nick.
“Not enough,” Issac replied, running a hand through his hair, looking down at one of the bits of paper before looking at Alice. “We know who the vampire was because she signed in. It was her fourth time here and during the first three visits she seemed to be okay. Unfortunately we don’t know who her creator is, which would give us some idea of why she was here.”
“Is it something we can stop from happening again?” Lewis asked from across the room, where he was continuing to wear a hole in the carpet.
“Possibly, Lewis, but she was checked and deemed safe to be with the donors. She wouldn’t have been allowed in that room if she hadn’t been.” Issac shook his head. “I don’t know if there’s anything more we could have done.”
Alice looked down at the papers on the desk. “What checks were done?”
“The normal ones, Alice. The ones we agreed upon when we opened the house.”
“Issac, I’m not blaming you. We all need to keep calm and deal with this, because we cannot let the house be closed down. From tonight it’s business as usual. If we have to fight the council then we do it.”
Issac sighed. “I know, but how can we keep the house open. We let someone get killed on our property and it was negligence.”
“Prove it.”
“What?”
Smiling, Alice looked at Issac. “Prove to me that we were negligent in any way. If one check was slightly off then we were negligent, but if we did all of them, and she passed through them all, then we weren’t negligent. Too trusting, maybe, which is something we need to look at, but that’s something we think about later.”
“Alice…” Nick said, trailing off. “The council is going to close us down.” He sighed. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“No, Nick, it isn’t, because we can do something about it, and if you’re going to be a pessimist then you’re no good to me. Issac, go though all of the checks again. We need to know if it was something we did wrong or if she simply wasn’t known to be a danger to humans. If we can we need to find out her lineage, because that will give us a reason as to why it happened, and then we can work out a way to stop this from happening again.”
“I think we all know why it happened,” John said, making Alice jump, “but we’ve got to prove it. The house is becoming too big for the vampires who run the auctions and they need to close it down.”
“We can’t let it, if you are right,” Alice replied. “Convincing humans that the house is a good idea was always going to be difficult, and we knew that there was always the possibility that this would happen, so all we can do is keep working to make people understand why we made the decisions we did.” She looked over at Blake. “If we can’t keep the house open then we can’t help the addicts either, and I think that’s something we need to push if the council do want to close us down. The humans can’t help them in the way that we can.”
Blake looked up at her and smiled. “Caleb is an example of how long it does take to rehabilitate an addict. I know he’s done well, but he has a long way to go before he’s anywhere near normal and we don’t know if he ever will be normal. No one has ever tried to rehabilitate an addict in this way before.”
“If the vampires running the auctions do want us closed down then we won’t be able to do anything about it,” Nick muttered.
Alice shook her head. “What is the matter with you?” she asked. “The whole reason we set this place up is because you wanted to combat the auctions and after one set back you want to give up.”
“Alice… I just…” He shook his head, sighing. “I know the vampires who run the auctions and they’re not going to stop trying to get us shut down.”
“The humans haven’t stopped since the day we opened and you haven’t let that get to you. We might have vampires trying to get us closed down, so we do what we can to stop them, because we all believe in that the house is good for human-vampire relations. If you want to give up then do, but I’m not going to let anyone destroy all the hard work we’ve done.”
“I agree with Alice,” Lewis said, walking over to them. “I would never have agreed to work with you if I didn’t believe that the donor house really was a good idea. We talked about the possibility that something like this would happen, so I don’t understand why things are suddenly different.”
“When we were talking about what we’d do in this sort of situation it wasn’t real, but now it is. Someone we all knew is dead because of us and we’re talking about fighting to keep the house open.”
Alice should have known what Nick’s problem was, but she’d been too focused on what she needed to do to keep the house open to even think about him. It wasn’t something she could bring up around everyone, because they still hadn’t told them how she had become a vampire, so she tried to think of some way to get Nick out of the meeting room.
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.