CHAPTER EIGHT || BRYAN
T he nightmare was the same one as always.
It was Teresa Dames, the first witch Giles had forced me to kill. A handful of humans I had hypnotized were standing so close to us that I could practically feel their breath on the back of my neck. It was a move I had been forced to make during every killing in order to stop my victims—all of them witches and warlocks—from using truly lethal magic against me in order to protect themselves. Someone like Teresa never would have risked hurting an innocent person. Not even to save herself from a monster.
Their glazed eyes were upon us, watching without understanding anything.
“Please don’t do this,” Teresa whispered, staring at me with wide, terrified eyes. She was trying to appeal to my humanity. But I had none. She was talking to an empty vessel. A brick wall. Tears spilled over and she added, sounding like she was fighting to remain calm, “I have family. I have friends. I’m in love with someone. Please, I don’t want to die.”
The compulsive spell didn’t let me speak, though if I could have, I would have begged her to run instead of trying to appeal to my humanity. Or, I would have pleaded with her to at least use a spell to save herself, even if that meant setting me on fire and burning me to ashes. But the compulsion was so total that it didn’t allow me to express any outward emotions at all.
I couldn’t even blink under my own power.
But somewhere, deep inside, I was trapped inside of myself, watching this happen and fighting to stop my body from moving to hurt her.
Kill her.
The voice was silent and sounded insidiously close to my own mental voice, even though I knew it wasn’t.
No no no no no no , I begged silently, my voice distant and useless, rising up from the darkest corners of myself I had been locked into. But my body didn’t obey me.
Instead, it obeyed the voice.
My fangs dropped and a raw, awful hunger swept over me. The urge to feed flooded into every part of me, possessing every cell of my body. It was the darkest vampiric instinct, one that lies dormant in all of us, suppressed by our humanity, to take and take and take until nothing was left at all. It was an instinct I had always been able to fight against with such ease that it was barely noticeable, even in my first few months after turning. But this time, it took me over completely, eclipsing everything else.
Teresa seemed to understand, in that split second, that there was no reasoning with me at all, because she did launch into a spell. I didn’t know what it was supposed to do, and my body didn’t wait for her to finish; it sank its teeth into her neck.
The animalistic vampiric aspect of me delighted in the intoxicating rush of warm blood flooding into my mouth. Pleasure swept through me—even though the part of me that was still me tried to shove it away—at the sensation of tearing her life away from her.
Teresa screamed, but no one came.
In a mixture of horror and disbelief, I watched from my own flesh, unable to stop any of this. Unable to believe that this was happening. That this sort of violence was something my body was even capable of doing to another person.
I wouldn’t have believed it before.
I prayed that she felt no pain. Vampire bites could be completely painless if we wanted them to be. And I couldn’t do anything else except want desperately, with every fiber of my being, for her to feel no pain.
But then, when her body was spent, my bloodied hands dropped her to the ground. And her vacant eyes stared back up at me, lifeless and accusatory.
And then, from the darkest place inside of myself, where I was trapped and watching, I screamed.
*
I sat up in bed, tears already burning tracks down my cheeks, my stomach clenched in revulsion and horror. I was used to waking up this way, because it was the same way I woke up every single day now.
Panic tightened around me like a straitjacket. I felt like I might be sick. I wanted to be sick. I sucked in deep, gasping breaths, drawing my knees up close to my chest, struggling to hold myself together. Fresh grief and horror surged through me.
Had I fought against the spells hard enough? Was there something—anything—more that I could have done to stop myself? And then came the worst fear of all, the one that had the power to shatter everything good inside of me: deep down, had I enjoyed it?
Fresh tears poured over and I shook my head against the awful thought, smothering a sob with my hand. I screwed my eyes shut, willing myself to stop crying. It didn’t work.
I felt a weight settle next to me on the bed, then warm, strong arms encircled my shoulders, pulling me close to a very masculine body that smelled intoxicatingly like nutmeg and cinnamon. I froze for an instant, surprise tearing through me and rendering me immobilized. In the wake of that hideous nightmare, I had forgotten I wasn’t alone.
Tobias.
I must have woken him. I knew I should resist, but he was so warm and solid as he held me in his arms that I couldn’t bring myself to. And his scent enveloping me somehow managed to drive away the horror of what I had just relived.
“I’ve got you,” Tobias whispered, pulling me closer to him. His body felt so good against mine and, even though I knew I should have pulled away, I relaxed into his embrace. He added, “You’re okay. You’re safe. I’ve got you. And I’m not going anywhere.”
It was a different sort of magic than the kind I usually saw him work. It was the sort that was just words, but still somehow had the power to right the world just enough so that I could breathe again . Figuratively speaking, of course.
After several minutes had passed, my hyperventilating turned into ragged gasps as the last of my panic receded and left me feeling shaken and used up. But the tears kept on coming, pouring down my cheeks. It should have been humiliating, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t sure if I was crying for Teresa or at the horror of knowing what I had been forced to do to her. Both, probably.
After several minutes of him holding me, the tears stopped. And I could just relax into the sensation of Tobias— my Tobias— with his strong arms wrapped protectively around me, an anchor keeping me in place, preventing me from sliding back into the darkness. The warmth and goodness of him, the solidity of him, felt like everything I might ever want or need.
In that moment, I wanted this to be real so badly, so desperately, that it felt like it might ruin me. Underneath everything else, I just wanted to be a regular man who loved him. I wanted to be someone who could never ever have hurt him. I wanted to even halfway deserve him.
A shimmering sensation of closeness arose, like an invisible cord abruptly connecting us. It was inexorable and irresistible, a force like gravity, binding us together. And it felt so right I didn’t even want to try fighting it.
I knew Tobias felt it too, because his body went slightly more tense for an instant, the same moment when it started. It had happened before, lasting for only a few seconds at a time, in the days after we had first met. But I hadn’t really understood or believed what it was then.
But now I knew it for what it was.
A mystical bond chaining my good, kind, and noble mate to a fucking monster.
At that thought, the connection popped like a soap bubble. Not so inexorable, after all.
I swallowed hard, pulling away from him. “I’m good now.”
Tobias hesitated for a split second before dropping his arms. Even though I didn’t ask him to do it, he still scooted a few inches back on the bed, giving me the space I needed. As though he somehow knew, without even being asked, what I required.
He drew in a breath that sounded ragged to my vampiric hearing. “Yeah, okay.”
I wiped the half-dried tears from my cheeks with one hand. I dragged in a shaky breath of my own, more a reflex than anything else, a hold-over from when I had been human.
I hated myself a little that I was pushing him away. I could practically feel the longing radiating off of him. Not to mention the hurt and confusion that I was fighting this so hard.
I couldn’t stand it.
“Thank you,” I said, meeting his eyes. I put words into the silence between us, desperately wanting to fill it up. “I, um, have nightmares now. It’s a thing.”
“How often is it like that?” Tobias demanded. Then he paused, as my words seemed to register for him. His eyes went wide with dawning horror. “Wait. You said nightmares. In the plural. As in—”
“It’s every night.”
The agonized look he gave me was so raw and genuine that it broke my heart all over again. “ Bryan. I can make you a potion you can take before you sleep. It’ll stop all the nightmares. You’ll sleep peacefully, you won’t have to—”
“ No. ”
He stared at me, stricken.
And even though I really didn’t want to, in that moment I couldn’t help but understand exactly how he felt. Because if the roles were reversed, if he had gone through what I had, I would have done anything I could have to protect him from the horror of it. And he had that capability.
He could protect me from the agony and grief and guilt I felt. Hell, he could probably do it without half-trying. And here I was, refusing to give him permission to make me feel better about being a monster.
Knowing any of that didn’t make it better or easier.
It just made me feel worse.
But he didn’t understand, did he?
I needed the guilt. I needed the agony. I needed the nightmares. Because the feeling of horror and revulsion I always felt upon waking was the only lifeline I still had to my own humanity. The way I felt now was a visceral reminder that I was still me.
“Bryan, you don’t deserve any of this,” Tobias said at last, sounding so forlorn it almost broke my heart all over again. “No one in the coven blames you. The witch queen herself pardoned you. She even offered to take these memories so you wouldn’t have to live with them. It wasn’t your fault. Everyone knows that.”
“Please don’t,” I begged, wishing that he could understand how agonized I felt, how ugly and awful. “Look, I don’t need you—or anyone else—to fix this. And I don’t need you to talk me out of it, either. I just…” I trailed off, shaking my head, trying to find solid ground again. But when I grabbed for what I actually craved in that moment, it was all just coming up Tobias. And that was less than helpful, wasn’t it? “Look, the worst part here is that I don’t even know what I do need.”
A lie, of course. I needed him .
“I’d give it to you. Whatever it is. Whatever you need, whenever you need it. Once you figure it out, just say the words.”
He said it so earnestly and unselfconsciously, without so much as a moment’s pause, that he had to have meant it completely. It wasn’t the words, so much as the inner certainty that he had put everything he was behind them, that made them matter.
Something inside of me melted. And some of the icy-cold resistance I had been harboring gave way. If I was a frozen winter, then Tobias Hawthorne was the dawn of a warm spring.
Basically, he was my kryptonite. He always had been. There was a reason I had run from him, after all.
I knew that I ought to say something to push him away from me, to maintain the distance between us, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I chose selfishness and said what I really felt in that moment. I gave in to what I wanted, more than anything else.
“I think what I need right now is for you to hold me.”
Something lit up in his eyes at my admission, and it was awful. Because I knew that I was just setting us both up for heartbreak in the end. But I felt so scraped raw and fragile that the idea of banishing him back to the floor was suddenly impossible to entertain for even a moment.
The awful truth was, I needed him. I needed his solidity and his goodness and his warmth. I needed it like the monster I was.
Without another word, I laid down on the bed, rolling away from him, so I couldn’t see how terribly happy he was at my selfishness. And Tobias plopped himself down behind me, drawing his arms around my body protectively, cradling me to his chest.
And even though it was painful, knowing that nothing had really changed between us, I couldn’t help the deep feeling of rightness that stole through my body anyway. And something within my chest finally fully relaxed for the first time in months as he nestled close to me.
My eyes drifted shut as the exhaustion I had been shoving off for months finally pulled me under. And even though it was the most dangerous thing of all, for a split second, before I drifted off into sleep, I couldn’t deny to myself how happy it made me, to be here in his arms.