Read Tribe (Tribe 1) for Free Online

so when they did, it was a bit of a shock to our systems.
    I heard River’s footsteps as he went up to his room. I was glad he was gone—I didn’t need another person staring at me like I was a criminal. I was just glad my sister Meadow was living at college now, in Coeur d’Alene, because she would have given me more of an earful than Mom and Dad.
    Dad left me, to go talk to Mom in the kitchen. I could have listened in on their whispered voices, but I was too groggy and full to care.
    I rolled over and curled up on the couch. The high was beginning to fade now. It didn’t last very long when the blood wasn’t fresh. It wasn’t a drug type of high, like you’d get on “speed”. Just a dreamy, peaceful buzz, but with heightened alertness. If the blood came from a live donor, you’d also take on some of their emotions for a while. That didn’t usually happen with cold blood—over time, as it sat in storage, the emotions would dissipate. It left sort of an empty feeling when you consumed it—as if you can tell some element of the blood is missing. Like it or not, we all enjoyed feeding from a live host, rather than a blood bag, for that reason. Which only made us feel guiltier, when it was necessary.
    “Is the guilt starting to kill your buzz?”
    I cocked my head and opened one eye to see River standing over me, arms folded across his chest. Ugh. Stupid Healer empathy. If I didn’t put up some kind of shield, it was almost like advertising my thoughts.
    I nestled deeper into the couch. “Go away, River.”
    “I’m part of this family, too,” he whispered, crouching down beside me. “I have a life here. Why do you always have to go around doing stupid stuff that could get us all locked up in some government lab somewhere?”
    “What do you mean, ‘always’?” I mumbled with a sigh. “I’ve only done it once before. If I waited for permission, I’d never heal anyone.”
    “We’re not supposed to heal anyone completely,” he hissed. “You know that.”
    “What’s the point of having abilities if you can’t ever use them? If I can’t heal, then healing isn’t a gift. It’s a curse.”
    “Don’t let Mom hear you say that.”
    “Why not? It’s true.” I crossed my arms and flopped back on the sofa. “And look what happens when we do cure someone—we put other people at risk. It’s not fair.”
    “Well if you did it the right way, you wouldn’t have gone into bloodlust.”
    “That’s a cop out, and you know it. Mom would never let me do it the ‘right’ way. She doesn’t want me to cure anyone at all.”
    “She’s protecting the family.”
    “Yeah, but what kind of people does that make us?” I sat up, looking River in the eye. “If we hide in the shadows, when we have the ability to save lives, doesn’t that make us cowards?”
    River shifted his gaze away, picking at the seam of his jeans. “It just means we want to survive. What’s wrong with that?”
    “Nothing,” I sighed. “I just…I hate this. I feel so powerless. If I don’t heal people, then I feel like a selfish coward. But if I do? I’m putting the lives of everyone else around me in jeopardy. I end up feeling like a monster.”
    “You’re not a monster. None of us are. It’s not our fault that we crave blood after a major healing, any more that it’s our fault that we crave a burger when our stomachs are empty. We just choose the more humane path, and feed off blood bags after healing, just like we choose to be vegetarian rather than chow down on a burger.”
    “Which is fine, except Mom never wants to let us do it at all—proper way, or not. She does it herself at the hospital, but you and I aren’t allowed to heal anything more than the flu. So yeah, maybe I screwed up. But I just feel like…I don’t know…like sometimes I need to heal.”
    River stared at me in horror. “You aren’t saying you like feeding on people, are you?”
    “No!” I snapped, annoyed with his assumption. Yet I knew