Covet (Clann)

swallowed hard against the knot tightening in my throat and looked out the window as Dad took off north on Highway 69 for Jacksonville, going fast enough to make the pine-tree-covered hills feel like a roller-coaster ride through the woods.
    I spent the trip into town silently wrestling with the guilt crawling over my skin and clawing at my insides.
    What had I done?
    I never should have let Tristan talk me into breaking the rules with him. If I hadn’t, Nanna would be safe right now.
    And yet I couldn’t even begin to imagine going through life without having felt Tristan’s love. What we’d shared was a part of me now. It had changed everything…how I looked at the world and the future, how I felt about myself and others. When I was with Tristan, I felt solid and real and grounded and…good. Like being half vamp and half Clann was just circumstance, not who I really was. Like I could become anything I chose, not what others chose for me.
    Except that wasn’t true, because I couldn’t change or choose what I was. Believing otherwise was every bit as much a lie as the ones I’d told my family for the last six months in order to be with Tristan. Which meant, no matter how much Tristan and I loved each other, this relationship was wrong. It was a selfish love that had nearly killed Tristan and might be hurting Nanna even now.
    How had I gotten here?
    I used to think of myself as a good person. But the truth was I was a monster inside and out, and not just because my vamp side was starting to take over. How many people had I hurt? Maybe I could excuse accidentally gaze dazing those boys from my algebra class last year, and even gaze dazing my first boyfriend, Greg Stanwick. I hadn’t understood what I was then. But I had always known dating Tristan was wrong, and still I had made that choice over and over for months. There was no excuse for it, no matter how wonderful it had felt.
    I just prayed I had the strength and enough time left to fix what I had done.
    Once we reached the center of Jacksonville, Tristan directed Dad to turn right on Canada Street and stay on it all the way out of town past our high school and still farther to the Coleman house, where apparently the Circle was located. Today was the first time I’d even heard of the Clann’s secret meeting place.
    I knew when we reached the edge of the Coleman property, because all the houses on the right side of the road ended. Five minutes later, Dad slowed the car and turned onto a gravel driveway barred by a huge wrought-iron gate. Tristan rolled down his window, leaned out and punched in a code on a pad housed on a gunmetal-gray pole near the driver’s side window. The gate slowly rolled open.
    I wanted to jump out and shove it open faster.
    The driveway was long and curving, lined with some type of hardwood trees I couldn’t recognize in the gloom, their branches lashing in the wind. A few raindrops pattered on the windshield and roof. Dad didn’t bother to turn on the wipers. The trees ended suddenly as the drive circled in front of a three-story brownstone mansion, its every light blazing. I tried not to compare it to Nanna’s single-story, single-bathroom, three-bedroom brick home where I’d grown up.
    At least thirty or more vehicles lined the drive in front of the house. We added one more to the collection as Dad parked. We got out of the car, and Tristan led us around the outside of his house. More threatening raindrops fell, surprisingly cool on my skin despite the humidity. Once in the dark backyard, we all broke into a jog. I had time to recognize the yard as the same one in the dreams Tristan and I had shared many times over the last few months. Then we plunged into the even darker forest that ringed the yard. As soon as we did, I could feel it…a too-familiar prickling sensation of pins and needles down my neck and arms. Youch. A sure sign that descendants were using power nearby.
    The woods seemed familiar, intensely so, as if I knew the location and size of every pine needle above me and just how the springy green moss below my feet would feel if I weren’t wearing shoes. The moss grew everywhere, carpeting the forest floor and growing up the sides of the pines. When I caught glimpses of the clearing up ahead, I realized where I was.
    This couldn’t be the Circle.
    We were in Tristan’s and my dream woods, the ones where we met when our minds connected while we were asleep. Even the clearing was almost exactly the same.