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Chapter One: Whisper
Maybe, Val thought, it was just her. She swore she saw Whisper across this wide Chicago street, but she didn’t…again she had hallucinated.
“Val?” Eli asked. “Are you okay?”
Val snapped out of her incoherent state and turned to face the brown haired boy next to her. “Sorry, Eli,” she apologized with a sigh.
He raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “You’re going to get hit by a car if you don’t focus. You’d be surprised to know that crossing the street takes a large amount of concentration, which,” he pointed at her, “you are lacking.”
She stared at him, his brown eyes and silky coffee colored hair could make any girl drop dead. Every girl except Val. She never thought of Eli as attractive, more like annoying.
“Ugh, I thought I saw Whisper again…” Val moaned. The pedestrian light turned green and they walked across the painted white strips on the road.
“Again,” Eli asked with a groan.
Val nodded solemnly.
“You need to forget that loser.”
“You know he was my first, like, actual true love, right?”
Eli let out yet another thick groan. “Yeah, yeah I know about that stupid true love crap.” They stepped onto the sidewalk and continued down the dimly lit streets. “Too bad your first was also a total psycho.”
“He was not a psycho!” Val argued back. Whisper was anything but psychotic. He was everything in every way. He made the sun come up in the morning and moon come out at night. He lit the dark alleys; he made the next day seem alright. He was her knight in shiny armor. He was her everything.
“Val,” Eli said reasonably. “He was a psycho. He totally ditched you because you didn’t want to join Avion with him.” Eli threw his hands up in the air. “I mean what guy, in the right mind, would dump his perfect girlfriend because she didn’t want to join some crazy shifter gang with him?”
She didn’t say anything, mostly because Eli was partially right. Whisper did leave her for some random shifter gang. They weren’t the type of gang that planted flowers and sang to cancer patients either. They were the bad ones, the ones who got into trouble. But the thing Eli was wrong about, was that Val didn’t consider herself as a perfect girlfriend. Nobody was perfect.
“Can’t we just have fun tonight?” Val finally asked.
Eli gave a large smile and nodded. “You can’t have a fun night if it’s not at Midnight!” He sang out loud and played an invisible guitar. A few people gave him weird looks but Eli didn’t exactly care, he just continued making whimsical guitar noises.
Club Midnight wasn’t just your regular club. It was an underworld club. Everyone but humans came there to party and to forget their complicated lives back home and that was exactly what Val wanted to do. Forget.
Val and Eli passed a few Vampires who took turns drinking out a large plastic cup. Val had always hated Vampires; she thought they were all rude and shameless, not to forget prideful.
They walked up the large deck where a few other shifters and werewolves had bundled together picking fights on whether the movie Underworld Evolution portrayed lycanthropes better than the movie Skinwalkers.
Eli leaned over and whispered a rude remark about werewolves and wolf shifters being in the same relationship. Thank god, none of them had heard that.
“Eli, you’re evil,” Val noted.
He smiled as if he had just gotten a compliment. “I try,” he said with a shrug.
They entered the large club through the second floor entrance and the loud techno music erupted the second they opened the door. Underworlders were yelling and screaming, laughing and joking. The music probably wasn’t even on full blast yet.
“Wow, it’s like totally loud!” Eli yelled over the ruckus.
“And it’s still early!” Val yelled back.
As if she couldn’t hear him, Eli forced out a loud laugh. “Wait until midnight, this place is going to be packed!”
She laughed, making her way down the large glass steps. They crossed the crowded dance floor and made it to the bar, which seemed to be a bit quieter.
“I’ll have a bloody sparrow,” Eli said to the bartender. The tall skinny man nodded and began mixing drinks.
“Lizard clan?” Val asked the tall dark haired man.
He smiled and nodded. “Iguana.”
Val grinned at him. She could tell by the way Lizard clan members always had scaly skin. Shifter eyes were a lot better than human eyes so she could see the small distinctions in skins.
“Would you like anything?” the bartender asked her.
“Give me the same as my friend.” She bumped Eli’s shoulder. The bartender handed over the finished drink towards Eli and began mixing hers.
Eli rolled his eyes. “You suck at flirting you know?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Oh really, says the boy who stumbles on words when he talks to pretty women.”
Eli gawked. “Excuse me, Valerie Hawk. That happened just once!” He took a shot of his blood red drink and set it down. "And besides, you were ruining my game with your nagging."
"Really?" She shrugged and looked across the dancing bodies. She figured she had hurt his pride and decided to let him cool off a little. Her eyes roamed the room and she instantly recognized a large cloaked figure talking to another teenage boy around her age.
Eli turned around and followed Val’s gaze. He gave a snort. “Who the hell wears a stupid cloak to a club? He must be a burnt Vampire trying to hide his face. Man, I wouldn’t go out into public if I was him.”
Val narrowed her eyes on the tall figure. She drowned out Eli’s annoying and rude comments so she could concentrate. Eli had noticed her annoyance and turned around to finish his drink.
The cloaked figure reached up and pulled down his hood, revealing a long pale face, raven black hair, shiny ebony eyes and curved lips.
No, Val thought. She was hallucinating again. It couldn’t be him. She hadn’t seen Whisper for an entire year, how could he have just reappeared? This boy could just be someone who looks similar, she persuaded herself.
He turned his head a little, and she froze in her seat.
Whisper.
It was really him, and this wasn’t just a random glimpse in her mind or a passing thought. It was really him, he was right there, only a dozen feet away from her. . .
