Altair
I should’ve taken another swallow.
Fuck, I should’ve let myself drink as much from Leo as he’d let me. I wasn’t going to kill him, and he hadn’t seemed put out by the idea of keeping me fed.
Maybe he was just worried about his pack, and yes, even the forest creatures surrounding the place. But I didn’t even last until morning before his blood was all that I could think about.
I wanted another mouthful. I wanted to feel sated, yes, but also to feel the warm thump of his pulse beneath my lips and hold his wrist in my palm and—
It wasn’t like I was starved for touch as well as just starved, but what contact I’d had had been .
. . transactional. There was a very specific role I was meant to fulfill, and while I tried to maintain that understanding with Leo—he didn’t want what the witches had wanted out of me, my blood and their awakened power and even some charm—I was still using him.
If he was generous and kind, it didn’t matter beyond that it suited my purposes. He’d never consider anything beyond feeding me.
I was a monster. Dead already.
What kind of future did a dead man have? I hoped that it wouldn’t be painful, that I could avoid future degradation. I didn’t want to cease existing entirely.
That was it. I had to keep my feet firmly planted in reality, focus on what was actually possible.
Even if Leo were precisely the kind of sap who wanted to keep me around for a while, for what? All I’d do was bring trouble down on him and his pack. Just to survive, I had to drink his blood. I had to take his life to sustain my own.
So he’d been kind, and he smelled nice, and I liked how warm he was. That was it. There was nothing more to consider.
And if, at four in the morning, all I could think about was his delicious blood, well, that was just because I’d gone without for so long. I was hungry.
He was worried about a raccoon, specifically, but I had an inkling that Leo wouldn’t much like the idea of me chomping my way through any innocent creatures, so when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went hunting.
For voles.
Damn me for a fool, but I scrambled around in the dirt, digging out little holes with my fingers for creatures barely large enough to pierce with a single fang.
It was a droplet and nothing more, but I feared that if I killed a larger creature, he’d find it and know right away that I was responsible.
The voles? They were short lived and little, and before the sun came up, I dug a deeper hole and buried twelve tiny corpses inside. I covered the disturbed soil with leaves and brush before I was satisfied that my secret would be safe.
At least my vole hunt kept me from coming out of my skin, or from doing something as stupid as shuffling my way toward the pack and trying to find Leo himself.
I’d ruin everything. So . . . death to voles.
I’d just finished burying them when a silvery light caught my eye. A raccoon waddled out of the trees like the specter of my own conscience, and I sighed. Maybe this was Leo’s friend, there to say hello or, more likely, to let me know that I had broken the rules and he knew about it.
“Are you Drew?” I asked.
He only looked at me and blinked, but I thought I saw a light of recognition in his eyes. Maybe I was imagining it, or maybe he was too intelligent for my own good.
Could werewolves speak to raccoons? Was this little creature going to tell that he’d caught me eating innocent furry friends?
I held out my hand, and the raccoon shuffled forward. He chirped as he sniffed my fingers. Soon enough, he realized that I didn’t have anything to offer him. A lance of disappointment cut through me at the betrayed look in his eyes, then he scampered off back into the trees.
If that was Leo’s friend, I couldn’t help thinking I hadn’t made a very good impression on him.
Back in the cabin, I shifted the bed away from the window and crawled beneath the blanket again.
I could read in the dark, the contrast between ink and page enough for my eyes to make out clearly.
It wasn’t as nice as by moonlight, but tucked under the blanket while it formed a little tent around my head, I read a chapter of the sappy, melodramatic romance before I went to bed.
I jerked awake to the sound of voices nearby, and picked them out immediately. There were three women and a man—voices I recognized from the coven house. The witches had found me, and worse, the sun was still shining bright beyond the north-facing window.
There was no way I could dart out the front door and hope to escape magic users before I burnt alive.
Even that back window—I’d be in full sunlight. I’d die.
For a bitter second, I thought that might be better, but then I heard a woman speak.
“What do you think Ivan’s going to do when we return him?”
“Who cares? We give him back, and we’re done with it.”
“No,” she said. “The first thing that vamp does is turn on the water works, say we kept him caged to save his own skin. It wasn’t his fault he’s been missing, it was ours. Then Ivan takes his anger out on us.”
Another woman spoke, and I swear there was a tremble in her voice. “So then . . . isn’t it better for him to just disappear? Ivan doesn’t know we held him. He just knows that he couldn’t sense Altair, and when he escaped, he could. In this area. That’s not, like, proof of anything.”
The man scoffed. “Do you actually think proof matters to a creature like him?”
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
A bolt of panic stripped any thought but survival from my mind and I looked around wildly.
There was the bed, the blanket, a towel hanging on the bed post, and that was it. Hiding under the bed wouldn’t do me any fucking good.
I took half a step back, and the floorboards creaked underfoot.
They were rotten. Soft. There was some kind of space beneath the cabin. It was better than nothing.
I crouched, tearing up the boards. They creaked and snapped, almost dusty at the broken edges, they were so rotten.
“Did you hear that?” one of the witches asked the others.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Every single thought boiled down to that one curse as I squirmed my way through the small hole. It was musty down here, damp from the uncovered earth.
It was dark, at least, and the old foundation was made of stone. They’d have to pull me out if they wanted to get at me—to take me out and return me to Ivan, or to try and save themselves by slaughtering me.
If they fucking tried, I’d eat them alive. Every single one of them.
Yes, I’d leave them no choice but to kill me, and if I could take out any of them on the way, good. It was better than they deserved, because I could tell them right now that my death wouldn’t save them from Ivan’s wrath.
I could tell him that the witches had found me on his behalf, that I’d never seen them before, and he’d still lay waste to the coven the second they were of no use to him. He’d do it just for fun.
I dug my hands into the dirt. If only I could bury myself in it, they wouldn’t find me. I could hide. I could—
The dirt beneath the heels of my palms began to shift, softening and rolling back like the ground itself had opened up so I could prance my way straight to hell.
It was cool and damp, and it kept shifting while I pressed myself flat to the ground. Soon, it was covering over my head, burying me alive.
This was new.
I’d always thought the powers that Ivan had—powers that none of his progeny had ever demonstrated—were trapped behind his releasing us, but maybe it was . . . Was it age?
I’d been imprisoned so long, maybe it was just getting older and I hadn’t realized.
Right then, it didn’t matter. I could only be grateful for this new trick, as the witches came into the cabin. Their footsteps were careful and slow over the old floorboards.
“He should be here.”
“What’s that hole?”
“Maybe he got out.”
“No, the crystal says he’s right here. Where the fuck would he go?”
They continued searching the cabin, even considered that I had crawled out beneath the house or had found some way to block their scrying, but they couldn’t find me.
Eventually, they left, but I stayed in the ground.
If their goal was my death or handing me to Ivan, I didn’t dare peek my head out and get caught in a trap. Better for me to live the rest of my life in the dirt than let them find me.