CHAPTER TEN || TOBIAS
I ended up having to do a major casting, right there in the middle of the diner, to cause everyone in the establishment to forget that the last ten minutes had ever happened.
Magic like that has a cost. And, even more well-rested than I had been in recent memory, the spell took far more out of me than I cared to admit, even to myself.
Rather than calm me down, it just left me even more pissed off. And shaky as well, because in addition to taxing my powers first thing in the morning, we had never even ordered food.
I left money on the table to cover the cost of our coffees and towed Bryan—who was watching me in silence with wide eyes—out of the diner. The patrons were starting to lose the glazed expressions of the recently compelled and I didn’t want us to be there when they fully snapped out of it.
I half-expected the hunters to jump us in the parking lot. I wanted them to. I would have turned them both into a smoking pile of ashes for threatening us.
For threatening Bryan.
Earlier, when we’d left the hotel, we’d decided it was easier to just take one vehicle, and it was safer for me to drive us, in case the weather report was wrong and it ended up being a sunny day instead of a cloudy one. Bryan was still a very young vampire and he didn’t do well in direct sunlight.
So, my car—a shiny new black Volvo—was the one we slipped into after our confrontation with the hunters. I barely waited for Bryan to put on his seatbelt before I put the car in drive and peeled out of the parking lot.
Bryan sat in silence, darting looks at me every few seconds, an unhappy expression on his face.
Only when I was in relative safety did I notice that I was so angry I was practically shaking.
I drove us to the edge of town before I pulled off into a deserted parking lot of some big box store that had long since closed down, its windows boarded up with plywood. I wasn’t sure I trusted myself to drive, with how violently I wanted to go back and start something with the two hunters.
I was the good guy, always.
I was who you called if you needed someone to help you move. Or put down a demon. Or bury a body. Or when you needed someone reliable and steadfast to help you get stuff—even the big stuff—done. That’s who I was and who I had always been.
I didn’t ever get angry. Not like this. Not where it felt like my whole body might split apart from it at any moment. Like the rage might double me over and leave me gasping and murderous.
But I could tell, from the wretched look on my mate’s face, that I was scaring him.
And that was unacceptable.
So, for lack of a better idea, I got out of the car.
I slammed the door behind me with more force than I intended to use.
I stared out at the dusty, abandoned parking lot, focusing on controlling my breathing until my fury with the hunters started to subside.
I wasn’t even half as good at locator spells as Poppy, but I still knew about a half dozen incantations that would help me find those fucking assholes. I could try them all until one of them worked. And once I had found them, I knew another handful of spells that could have set them on fire where they stood.
After several long moments, I began to feel a bit calmer.
Behind me, I heard a car door open.
“Are you okay?” Bryan asked me, sounding hesitant.
“No,” I told him. I went for honesty because I didn’t know what else to say.
“I get the feeling they’re used to people being afraid of them,” Bryan replied. He added, “You really… um… defended my honor.”
“Those assholes are hunters , Bryan. If they figured out what you were, they wouldn’t be after ghosts anymore. They’d come after you .”
I let out a breath and grimaced, realizing that was a big part of my desire to hurt them. It was because I was scared of what they might end up doing to Bryan.
“Fuck it. I should track them down, destroy whatever amulets they have that ward them from magic, and then wipe their memories so they don’t know they ever even met us. It’d be way safer that way. I could call the coven for backup.”
“No way,” he said, his eyes going wider with alarm. “They both had guns. I could smell the gunpowder. They’re armed.”
I gave him a dark look. “So am I.”
“Listen to me, my maker is a hunter, too. She hunts vampires who murder innocent people—one of them had gotten really close to killing me. It was how I got turned. She saved my life. But she warned me not to cross paths with any human hunters, ever. They don’t stop long enough to ask questions. They hit hard and fast, always. Because if they don’t, whatever they’re hunting usually gets them first.”
“What do you want to do, then?” I demanded. “Do you want to leave town? Let those jackasses chase us out of here?”
Bryan winced. “Look, I—” He broke off, then let out a breath, shaking his head. “I don’t know what we should do. I think we need to take a beat, though.”
“Bryan, if they figure out that you’re a vampire—”
“They won’t,” Bryan told me, too quickly. “They said it themselves, back at the diner. They think I’m a warlock, just like you. So, we have time to figure this out.”
“Figure what out? This matters to you,” I gestured back to the town, which was sprawled out across the horizon behind us. “I’m not going to lie and say I get all the reasons why, but if it does, then that’s all that matters to me. We’re not leaving. I’ll protect you from them. And from the ghosts. And from whatever else decides to fucking come for you.”
“That’s an awful lot of protecting.” Somehow, my words seemed to relax him a little, like we were back on familiar ground in his mind. “And yeah. I do need this. I need to know that I’m still capable of…” He gave a hollow sort of laugh. “I don’t know? Doing the right thing?”
He said it like it was even a question, and that pissed me off all over again. If there had been enough left of Giles to conjure, I would have summoned his happy ass back from the dead, just so I could kill him all over again for what he had done to Bryan.
“It’s not even a question,” I told him, my anger evaporating the instant I realized how earnest Bryan was. How much he needed this. “You’re a good person.”
“I’m an okay person,” Bryan corrected, giving me a little shake of his head. His voice went thicker than it should have, and he added, “Or, well, I was. I mostly made it to my classes on time. I had family pizza-and-game night every Sunday with my sister and my folks. I partied a little too much and I even did a bunch of things I can’t even spell with a couple guys I barely even remember. But I had friends and a job and a life. And, I mean, I wasn’t this great person or anything, but I was okay .”
I wanted to argue with him, to make him see that he could still have those things—minus the random hookups, of course—and that he could still be just fine, if he wanted to be. And that he was far better than okay , in my book. I wanted to convince him that the way I saw it, he was just about fucking perfect.
But I would have been saying those things for me. I would have been arguing with him to try to fix him. To set him right, so that he could be okay for me .
And there was nothing, no magic on earth, that was ever going to undo what Giles had done to him. And I wasn’t selfish enough to let him be anything other than what he was, anything other than whatever he needed to be, right here, right now.
In fact, I couldn’t bring myself to even want to be selfish with him, no matter what pain it might cause me somewhere down the road.
So, I didn’t say anything at all.
Instead, I took his hand and he let me, even as he sucked in a breath like the physical contact caused him pain.
He raised his eyes to meet mine and I saw that they were wet with sudden emotion. He gave me a small, crooked smile I had never seen before. “I really wish we could have met before any of this happened. I’m pretty sure I would have jumped in with both feet. I wish I was still that guy, because he would have fallen in love with you so hard.”
“You don’t ever need to be anything other than whatever you are with me, Bryan. And besides, I don’t want that guy. I want the guy standing in front of me, right here, right now. He’s more than enough for me to love.” I paused and fixed him with my gaze dead-on. “I want you , however you are”
At my words, Bryan’s whole face crumpled, and he sucked in a short gasping breath that almost immediately broke around a sob, like something deep inside him had wrenched itself free at my words.
The sound of it tore me in half too.
Desperate to undo the pain I had just caused him, I drew him into my arms and clutched him to me. His body fit perfectly against mine, in a way that wasn’t even sexual—it was just right . Inwardly, I swore to myself that if I could have shielded him from anything that would ever try to harm him, I would have.
Bryan swallowed the sobs back down. He seemed to force them away with an act of sheer will, in fact, because he barely let himself give in at all. But, even after his breathing returned to normal, he still allowed me to hold him for a very long time before he stepped away from me.
“I’m sorry,” he told me, shaking his head, avoiding my gaze. “I shouldn’t have let any of that happen.”
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“Yeah, I do, actually,” Bryan told me, raising his eyes to meet mine. “Because the thing is, I don’t know how to be that person again, Tobias. I don’t even know who he was anymore. And I don’t know how to make any of this right for myself or anyone else. But I do know that there’s some serious evil out there. And maybe I can make the world better somehow if I protect other people from it. Maybe if I can fight it, I can prove to myself that I still belong here. Maybe that’s how I can make all of this right. I know that sounds crazy, and I know it’s not what you want from me, but it’s what I need.”
I stood there for a long moment, stunned, as I realized that he had just confided one of his deepest truths to me. He was struggling through the darkness, grappling blindly for a way to put himself back together after something unspeakable had been done to him.
This whole thing wasn’t really about becoming a monster hunter just to do it, or even because he was trying to go off and get himself killed in a blaze of heroic glory.
The truth of it was far simpler, far more fragile, and far more precious than any of that. He was doing all of this because he was still trying to find a way to live . He was still fighting for a way forward. And I could read between the lines well enough to understand the consequences if he failed.
That’s what was at stake here.
That’s what these hunters were threatening to take away from him.
We couldn’t just leave. That was completely out of the question.
But still, these hunters might very well be the threat that ended Bryan’s life. They might be the reason I was here in the first place. They might try to hurt Bryan if we stayed.
Which meant we needed to deal with them. I needed to deal with them.
“If that’s what you need, that’s what we’re going to do,” I informed him. “We’re going to hunt some fucking ghosts.”
“Wait—” Bryan’s eyes got big, and his lips parted with surprise. He shook his head. “Tobias, no , that’s not why I told you all of that. I just wanted you to understand where I’m at—why I came here in the first place. I want you to understand that I can’t just go back to my old life and pretend like none of this ever happened. But that doesn’t mean I want to be dumb about this, either. I’m not placing either one of us in danger. I won’t do that.”
“As opposed to hunting a murderous spirit?”
“Which you could probably deal with by yourself, in your sleep. And the ghost doesn’t have guns and amulets that protect it from your magic.”
“Look, I get it. But the thing is, you do need this. And I can’t let a couple of dumbasses with more guns than sense take this away from you.”
“But the hunters—”
“Are only human. We’re more than that. We’ll be fine.” I paused, an idea occurring to me. “I’ll call Ethan and have him check the mirror. That would give us some warning, at least, as to what type of threat they might pose if we don’t leave town. And maybe how to avoid it.”
Bryan frowned at me, biting his bottom lip. He seemed to consider my words. Reluctantly, he said, “I could call my maker, maybe? See if she’s ever heard of any hunters matching these guys’ description.”
I let out a breath, feeling relieved. The last trace of my anger left. And I felt strangely scrubbed raw and new.
Things had changed. I now understood more about where Bryan was, emotionally speaking, and what he needed. And while I knew I couldn’t fix him , I could sure as hell see to it that he got what he needed out of this situation. Especially now that I knew we weren’t just here for kicks. This was far more serious than I had imagined. Pulling this off—helping him prove to himself that he was still good —was a matter of life and death for Bryan.
How could I not help with that?
“That’s great,” I nodded. “We’ll call her later and see if she knows anything. But we’re going to Portland.”
Bryan’s eyes widened a little. “Portland? That’s like two hours away.”
“An hour and a half. And that’s where Lee Chamberlain’s wife is. Poppy did a locator spell earlier to help us find her. She’s apparently staying with her sister. And if we’re still working this case, we’re going to need to go question her.”
“Tobias—”
“Let me help you do this. Please, just trust me.”
Bryan hesitated for a long moment, his eyes searching mine. But, at last, he nodded. “I do. So, yeah. Okay, we’re still doing this.” He let out a long breath, like he was trying to steady himself. But then he brightened a little. “You know, maybe I can finally get a good cup of coffee. Ooh, and maybe we could stop off at Voodoo Donut? They’ve got a maple bar that has a strip of real bacon on it. It’s super weird, but also delicious.”
I smiled and shook my head, relieved at his sudden enthusiasm. “I grew up knowing vampires existed, but it’s still weird to me that you guys tend to eat human food, even after you’re turned. You literally don’t need to eat anymore.”
“Sure, we don’t technically need to eat human food, but we still can. But, I mean, why would you give up something you enjoy if you didn’t have to?”
“You enjoy bacon maple bars, huh?”
“They’re totally delicious, I promise.” Bryan flashed me a sudden smile that almost—but not quite—reached his eyes, seeming cheered by the prospect of forward momentum. Or maybe it was just the idea of leaving Poplar Creek and getting both of us away from the hunters. In fact, now that I considered it, it was almost certainly the latter.
He added, “This is great. Let’s go. Right now.” He paused. “I’m assuming Poppy gave you an address?”
I nodded, eyeing him. “I know where I’m going.”
“Then let’s hit the road.”