Anti-Hero || Leah Clearwater

8 - Sign of weakness

"We belong to the light, we belong to the thunder
We belong to the sound of the words we've both fallen under"

We Belong - Pat Benatar

As a child, and as a teenager, Leah had a lot of friends. She often spent weekends having sleepover with her two best friends and, occasionally, with her cousin Emily. When she graduated, her best friends went to college and eventually Leah lost any contact with them, since she spent her senior year constantly worried about Sam... and then heartbroken.

Leah had spent hours on the phone with Allison Uley the first three months since Sam had disappeared for the first time. Together, they tried to support each other, to understand why Sam was behaving that way. Was he abusing substances? Had he joined some motorcycle gang? Every kind of thought crossed her mind.

Of course, she could never have imagined that her boyfriend had become a shape-shifter. When Sam saw Emily and, consequently, the imprinting happened, Leah had experienced a week of apparent tranquillity. Sam seemed to be back to his old self, so attentive to her, caring. He was just feeling guilty.

In all those months she spent wondering how it could be possible that the boy she had loved so deeply had changed overnight, her parents had lied to her, and Leah, to some extent, had always been aware of it. Sue and Harry had started exchanging glances from one end of the table to the other when Leah explained to them that Sam had disappeared again for days. They never asked her how it was possible that Sam had suddenly decided to be with Emily.

Leah had spent months crying, getting angry, trying to find a way out of what seemed like a cruel twist of fate. Her mother had comforted her, sometimes even her father, in his somewhat gruff manner. Yet, neither of them seemed to be truly shaken by the matter.

Leah, completely consumed by the situation, hadn't paid much attention to her parents' behaviour until she discovered the truth herself.

That year and half of her life had taught her what a liar looks like, so she knew that, even if the book that Felix had brought was not in a language she could understand, he was telling the truth.

If that wasn't an imprinting, then what was it?

§

Felix explained to her that they could not stay at Emma's house anymore. Now that Demetri knew where she was, they needed to go to another safe house.

She wasn't surprised to discover that Felix owned a house in a nearby city. San Gimignano, to be precise. Leah had heard the vampire pronounce that name very easily, but she had absolutely no idea how to do it. She seemed to only see strange names on the signs on the sides of the road they were on: Mazzolla, Sant'Anastasio, Montemiccioli.

Felix's house was right inside the small town. Leah lowered the window to better admire the ancient towers that rose above the city. She had never seen anything so peculiar and unique in her life. San Gimignano was all the same color: a faded reddish, the color of the bricks in which the entire town was built.

The sunlight flooded the city streets as people strolled absentmindedly, observing the displays of small shops. Some restaurants had tables outside on the cobblestone streets, where customers chatted while sipping wine and smoking a cigarette.

Leah had seen very little of Italy and almost everything she knew was based on movies she had watched as a child. Yet, at that moment, reality didn't seem so different from those scenes she had often admired.