Chapter Sixteen #2
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?
” I hear myself, and I will confess that ten days of Dragonfire, Null Pulses, fear conditioning, wolf-pack sitting, and breathing exercises have put a certain edge on my patience for discovering I’ve been doing it wrong.
“Because I have put in what I would describe as a significant fucking amount of effort on that particular strategy.”
Something moves in Crave’s expression that isn’t quite amusement but is adjacent to a recognition of it. “I know you have.”
“Ten days!” I add, in case the number wasn’t clear.
“I know.”
“I’m past the deadline you originally gave us.”
“Charlotte.”
“I’m not a fucking science project, you know?”
“Noted.” The not-quite-amusement holds for a moment, then it settles back into that flat, certain calm. “Suppression is not what you’re supposed to be doing. And it’s why ten days of every technique we have has bought you windows and not control.”
My eyes snap to Rogue, and he’s watching Crave with an expression I can’t fully understand, something between absolute trust and tension of him hearing a verdict he already knew the shape of but hadn’t heard spoken aloud.
Which is deeply unhelpful from where I’m standing, because I would very much like someone to argue with Crave right now, and Rogue is clearly not going to be that person.
“You cannot suppress the hunger,” Crave says.
“You’re a vampire, Charlotte. Hunger is not an intruder in your body.
It’s not an illness. It’s not a malfunction.
” He tilts his head, and the weight of what follows fills the space before he says it.
“It’s part of you now. It will always be part of you.
Every technique this week works on the premise of reduction, pushing it down, burning it back, dampening it at the edges.
And every technique has failed by the same mechanism.
You cannot remove what you are from what… you are.”
The room falls quiet.
I want to argue.
Fuck I want to scream.
The part of me that has been grinding through these days on pure stubbornness would like very much to argue, because if he’s right, then everything I’ve been doing has been built on a wrong foundation, and I do not have the energy reserves for a structural renovation right now.
I am running on fumes, spite, and whatever Rogue’s shoulder-warmth translates to as a nutritional category.
But…
I have known he’s right since the second day.
I knew it when I surfaced from Hades’ Null Pulse feeling hollow, fractured, and told Rogue I’d rather fight it conscious.
Because the Null Pulse was suppression, and suppression felt like disappearing, and every method they’ve brought here has been trying to make me less of what I am, rather than showing me how to be it differently.
And I’ve known it, underneath the white-knuckling, the breathing exercises, and the sheer volume of effort I’ve thrown at being less, but knowing a thing and being ready to say it out loud in front of a five-hundred-year-old vampire are different levels of commitment.
“So, what am I supposed to do with it?” My voice comes out rawer than I intend, which, frankly, is on brand for this entire week.
Something shifts in Crave’s expression. Not softening, I don’t think softening is a significant feature of his operating range, but a quality of recognition.
“I’ve lived with bloodlust for five centuries,” he says.
“The desire to hunt. To feed. To take what my nature tells me I’m built to take.
” He holds my gaze without any performance of ease about it.
“I have felt it every day since I was born. It has not dimmed. It has not become background noise. The hunger a vampire carries does not fade with age the way you might hope it does.”
“How?” I ask, the tone sounding more whiny than I intend.
“I transformed it.” Simple. The certainty of a method, not a miracle.
“I did not suppress the hunger. I did not learn to live despite it. I took the drive, the focus, the absolutely consuming intensity of what the bloodlust demands, and I redirected it… into discipline. Into purpose. Into the conscious, daily, deliberate act of choosing what I am rather than being chosen by it. The hunger is energy, Charlotte… enormous, relentless, consuming energy. You cannot delete energy. You can only decide what it moves.”
I don’t reply immediately, sitting in the silence, letting what he said breathe.
But eventually, I reply, “Right,” I say slowly.
“So instead of spending every waking hour trying to shove it in a box and sit on the lid, I’m supposed to, what?
Take it out of the box? Shake hands with it? Give it a hand job?”
The corner of his mouth moves. It is, I will note for the record, the most expression I’ve seen on that face since he walked through the door, and I’m choosing to regard it as a win. “More or less.”
“That sounds insane,” I say. “And I’m saying that as someone who has spent days attempting to white-knuckle her way through supernatural bloodlust using breathing exercises.”
“It’s not insane,” he says. “It’s the only thing that works.”
Sloane makes a sound near the window that might be agreement, or might be something else, and the resonance she’s been producing in the hunger continues to do its strange, stabilizing thing.
I still don’t know what it is, but I remain committed to asking about it when I’m not in the middle of an existential turning point.
“I can teach you,” Crave says. “It will not be quick. It will not be comfortable. I won’t dress it up as something easier than it is.
” His voice stays flat and even, like sugarcoating isn’t worth the effort.
“You have to be willing to stop running from what you are and turn around and actually look at it. The full size of it. Not the parts you’ve been managing, not the edges. The whole thing.”
I breathe, and the hunger breathes with me.
Which is, now that Crave has said the quiet part out loud, the most honest thing about tonight.
It’s not separate from my breathing. It’s in the breathing.
It’s in the heartbeats I track without choosing to, in the warmth I map in every room, in every sense I have that has been rewired to serve it.
I’ve been trying to cut it out since the moment I understood what I was.
I’ve been trying to perform surgery on myself with the thing I was trying to remove.
“Are you ready to face the monster inside you, Charlotte?” The question is quiet, without drama, and it is absolutely a real question with real weight behind it, not a rhetorical device. “Really face it?”
I take a moment, not because I don’t know the answer.
I’ve known the answer since Brynn sat at the edge of the trees and told me I wasn’t broken, I was evolving.
I’ve known it since I surfaced from the Null Pulse and chose conscious and difficult over hollow and managed.
I’ve known it underneath every breathing exercise and every grinding hour of holding the line.
But I take a moment because the monster is enormous, and I’ve caught its edges enough times to know exactly how enormous, and the part of me that is still, in some essential way, the woman who sat on the hood of a car in the dark and picked names for strangers would very much like to lodge one final, formal objection before we proceed.
For the record… I tell myself I had plans. Normal plans. I was going to figure out my job situation, call my mother back, and finally finish the second season of that show everyone kept recommending. I had a whole human life, and I was moderately okay at living it.
Just for the record.
Rogue’s shoulder is warm against mine. He’s still, holding that quality, which means he’s letting this be mine and not carrying it for me, not filling the silence, but trusting me to get there.
I look at Crave, then I push off the wall.
My fangs retract slowly, imperfectly, the way they do when the trigger hasn’t cleared, but I’m choosing the motion anyway. I stand without the wall behind me, which sounds like a small thing, but it is not.
And then…
… I nod.
Terrified, and running on empty.
Ten days of the wrong fight with the wrong map, and a monster inside me that I have been steadfastly refusing to look at directly because looking felt like accepting, and accepting felt like losing an argument I wasn’t ready to concede.
But I’m also done.
Done with the boxes, the lids, the suppression, the forty-minute windows, and the breathing. Done with fighting the wrong war on the wrong terms with every tool except the one thing a millennia of evidence suggests actually works.
Crave holds my gaze for a moment after the nod. Then something settles in his expression, like he’s gotten the answer he needed and is already two steps into what comes next.
“Good,” he says. “We start now.”
I roll my shoulders.
The monster moves with me.
For the first time in days, I don’t pretend it doesn’t.