CHAPTER FIFTEEN || BRYAN
W e had hardly spoken on the drive back, but it wasn’t really an awkward silence or anything. Something small yet vital had changed between us. For instance, on the drive back, he had held my hand and, even though I knew I shouldn’t, I had let him.
I was being a jerk, and I knew it.
Because I was stringing him along, wasn’t I? It was cruel of me, and I didn’t want to be responsible for breaking his heart, but still, I let him hold my hand. And after Ella had taken my pain and shoved my face in it, with the added bonus of letting me know that Teresa Dames was apparently still lingering nearby, hell-bent on haunting me, I had begged him to hold me.
It had been yet another moment of weakness, no matter how good it had felt. And now something was very different between us, a connection that was so immediately there that I could almost feel it like a physical sensation. This was different from when I had woken up in a blind panic and had needed the touch.
But nothing had really changed, had it?
After all, I couldn’t build a life with Tobias. He deserved way, way better than me. And, after this was all said and done, he’d go back to his coven.
Despite his obvious fears to the contrary, they probably needed him.
And I couldn’t go back to my old life, even if I had wanted to.
I couldn’t face my sister and tell her what I had done. Worse, I couldn’t tell her what had been done to me . I couldn’t let her tell me it wasn’t really my fault.
Because it was.
Deep down, I knew that it was all my fault. It had to be. There was a reason Giles had picked me to be his puppet, after all. He could have chosen any other vampire in the city. But he had looked at me and somehow decided that I was exactly what he needed.
And before that, when I had been on spring break with my friends, roaming the streets of Vegas, drunk off my ass and deciding I was too wasted to go gambling with them after all, a murderous vampire had taken one look at me and immediately marked me for death. I’d encouraged my friends to go on without me, so I was standing alone between two buildings, surrounded by other tourists. I’d been bleary-eyed and trying to cut through the haze of intoxication long enough to figure out how to use my phone to summon a ride back to the hotel, but I had still felt perfectly safe.
That’s when he grabbed me, dragged me into the alley, and tore my throat open with his teeth.
Vampire bites are supposed to be pleasurable to mortals. When they’re consensual, at least. There’s a bit of magic in our saliva that allows us to control what the experience is like for our feeding partner. And we can make our bites become a euphoric, pleasurable, almost sexual experience. Or we can make it so that they don’t really feel like anything at all if we’re not actively trying to give pleasure during the feed.
But we can also make our bites hurt, very badly.
This vampire had wanted me to suffer, and I had. It had been torture, like hundreds of red hot and dull razor blades tearing my flesh open with excruciating slowness.
He had wanted me to struggle against him. He’d wanted my last moments to be spent in horror. For no reason at all, except that he had looked at me and he’d clearly seen something that made it okay for him to do that to me.
And I did struggle.
I fought him with everything I had. But that just made him laugh. “Oh yes, little one, you have much fight in you. You and I will have such fun together once you are able to see the world through my eyes.”
My maker, Veronika, had pulled him off of me.
Then, as I collapsed to the ground, the world already beginning to go dark around me, she beheaded the vampire with a machete. Then she dropped to her knees beside me.
“You’re too far gone for me to heal,” she said, speaking quickly. “And you will die before I can explain what I must do to save you.”
I struggled to respond to her, but I couldn’t make myself form words. I couldn’t feel anything. It was getting harder to breathe. Harder still to even care, like I wasn’t there at all anymore, but already somewhere else. And my surroundings were growing dark, fading away from view even though I hadn’t closed my eyes.
“Forgive me,” she whispered. Then the world refocused and I noticed that her teeth were suddenly far sharper than they should have been. But that didn’t matter at all. It seemed far away somehow, unable to hurt me.
My eyes finally slid shut.
Then a coppery-sweet taste filled my mouth. Without even deciding to, I swallowed.
It was pure electricity, surging through my body.
My eyes flew open. I no longer felt weak or far away. And I didn’t feel drunk anymore, either. Vitality surged into me. I grabbed her bleeding wrist with both hands, drinking gulp after gulp of the richly sweet coppery stuff that was pouring into my mouth.
She pulled her wrist back, watching me intently. “That will be enough, I expect.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. Then, in the next moment, I felt my eyes go wide as my heart suddenly raced to a gallop. I drew in a shuddering gasp. Tension shot through my entire body, like everything inside of me spasmed at once. My heart shuddered once more in my chest, then went still and silent. And then, even though I didn’t remember closing my eyes, the world went dark around me.
Veronika took me back to her home and then stayed by my side until I woke up, hours later. She spent the next three months explaining what had happened to me, and more importantly, training me how not to hurt people. She told me that I was in the most crucial stage, right after someone was first turned into a vampire. During that time, if a fledgling is allowed to kill, their vampiric nature takes over completely, suppressing their humanity. It drives them to be monsters for the rest of their immortal existence, unable to feel love or compassion, or anything at all.
Granted, she wasn’t precious about feeding or anything—she had no qualms about taking what she needed when she needed it. But her victims always walked away no worse for the wear. And so did mine, for that matter, under her watchful eye. And I eventually realized that, even if she had embraced that aspect of her nature so thoroughly, Veronika loved humanity. So much so, in fact, that she had dedicated her immortality to protecting innocent people from the types of monsters who had murdered me. It had been no coincidence that she had been there to save me.
She had been hunting the vampire who had killed me.
“I do not stand for the slaughter of innocents,” she’d told me, dismissively, when I had asked her about it. “Nor should any vampire. Such barbarism is beneath us. And someone needs to ensure that the most feral among us are not left to hunt and kill unchecked.”
Though I didn’t exactly love the fact that Veronika had turned me into a vampire, it was better than the alternative. There was little doubt in my mind that the vampire who attacked me would have killed me. Or, based on the only words he’d ever spoken to me, he might have turned me in that alleyway and then taught me how to be a merciless killer, just like him. The only reason he hadn’t was because Veronika had destroyed him first.
He had looked at me and seen darkness.
Just like Giles had.
When our three months were up, I had returned to my old life with Veronika’s blessing. And I had been able to live a lie for a long time. Long enough that I had almost convinced myself that I could have a normal life again. Albeit with a lot more blood and fangs than I’d initially planned on. I very nearly graduated from college, in fact.
Then, Giles found me.
And he had forced me to become the very same type of monster that had taken my life.
It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? First the creature who had attacked me and then Giles had both looked at me and seen darkness. That I was a monster in the making.
And now, in the aftermath of that, a part of me wanted to give in to the darkness. A part of me noticed a beating pulse and wanted to tear into it, to feed and feed and feed.
Tobias deserved way better than to be stuck with someone like that.
Tobias’s phone rang at twilight, when we were just outside of Poplar Creek.
“I don’t know if the hunters actually mean you guys any harm, but the mirror did show me that they’re about to be in big trouble.” Ethan’s voice came through the speaker on Tobias’s phone, and he sounded mildly alarmed. “They’re at a house at the end of a cul-de-sac—I’m guessing it’s the one with the spirit you guys are trying to exorcise. And the spirit is about to kill them both.”
“Shit,” Tobias said, grimacing. He glanced at me. “I mean, this isn’t really our problem. We could just—”
“No,” I said firmly. “We’re obviously not going to let this happen, now that we know it is going to happen. These hunters are dicks, and they might be dangerous, but we’re still not going to stand by and let them get murdered by a vengeful spirit if there’s any chance we can prevent it.”
“If we drive there right now, will we have time to stop this?” Tobias demanded, turning his attention back to the phone. But from the scowl on his face, it was clear he didn’t like this one bit. “Will we make it in time?”
Ethan paused and I heard him posing Tobias’s question aloud, presumably to the mirror he was using. A moment later, he said, “If you go directly there. Yes. Barely .”
“Please keep checking the mirror to see if these assholes are planning on messing with us,” Tobias muttered. “We need to know if they’re going to be a problem.”
Then he hung up and took the next exit off the highway, driving at unreasonable speeds. We began weaving through the quiet streets of Poplar Creek. His whole body was rigid with tension and he gripped the wheel so tightly his fingertips turned white.
Somehow, I could sense that he wanted to reason with me—to point out the very obvious fact that, by saving these assholes, we might be creating a whole hornet’s nest of problems for ourselves. But he didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. Besides, I understood that just fine, all on my own.
Still, the moral arithmetic was easy enough for me to do. We couldn’t just let them die if we knew we had the ability to stop it. Whatever danger these guys might present to me was tomorrow’s problem.
A few minutes later, we reached the house on the end of Pickery Road. If it was possible, it looked even more menacing in the lengthening shadows of dusk, as though it was alive and watching us as we stood in front of it on the street. The door was somehow intact once more. And even though I knew it was impossible, the house seemed to be grinning at us, like it knew we would soon have to venture inside.
Tobias and I exchanged a dark look when we reached the front door. My grip tightened around the ridiculously expensive piece of blessed iron Tobias had purchased for me.
“Are you ready?”
I nodded.
“Put your arms around me and catch my weight. I’m going to check inside.”
I didn’t even have a chance to make him explain himself, because his eyes rolled back in his skull, and he suddenly went limp. I caught him—barely—before he fell.
I looked around the street, hoping that nobody was watching, because this would probably look very strange to any bystanders. Thankfully, there was no one nearby and the windows in the house next door were all dark.
A moment later, Tobias blinked, then pushed himself back up, stepping out of my arms. There was a grave cast to his expression. Then he glanced over at me and added, “You should kick the door down.”
I nodded and launched a swift kick at the door, near the knob, using my enhanced strength. The wood shattered and the door swung inward, revealing a living room that had been torn to pieces yet again.
Tobias stepped past me, already casting a spell that caused violet energy to swirl between his palms.
The two hunters were trying to stab at the spirit with what appeared to be cast iron fireplace pokers. They didn’t seem to be harming it, though. Instead, the wraith just looked royally pissed off.
My stomach did flips when the creature looked up at Tobias and I and grinned. I saw immediately that Lisa hadn’t been wrong. This creature didn’t look like it had ever been human at all.
It had the body of a woman dressed in gray rags, except grotesquely elongated and impossibly thin. Her— its —mouth was wide open and stretched far larger than a person’s should have been. Its fingers were inhumanly long and they scraped the ground with a sound like tree branches against glass. The sound coming from its lips was more of that high-pitched, deranged laughter, utterly inhuman.
“Get down!” I yelled.
Danny turned and saw us, his eyes going wide with surprise. To his credit, he did throw himself to the ground an instant later, as the wraith swiped at the place where his head had just been.
In the same moment, Tobias threw his spell and it instantly formed a net of shimmering light around the spirit.
The wraith shrieked with fury, slamming its hands to the ground. Tobias’s enchantment began to dissolve around it.
“The iron!” he yelled, still holding his hands up in his casting position, like he was struggling to maintain the spell. “Stab it with the iron!”
Michael glanced over at us for the first time, his eyes widening, as though startled to find us there.
The wraith used his momentary distraction and wrenched one of its claws free of Tobias’s spell. It hit Michael with a savage backhand that caused a sickening crunch. The hunter wheeled several steps back. Blood dripped from his nose. He swayed on his feet, looking like he was seeing little cartoon birdies swirling around his head, but he remained standing.
I lunged forward, holding the iron spear in both hands.
My mind blank with fear, I stabbed it into the wraith’s chest.
For an instant, nothing happened. Then the creature began to scream. Where the iron touched it, white light began to spread beneath its skin. Pieces of it began to break off and hit the floor, where they turned to ash.
I turned away, realizing that I couldn’t watch this. The creature was a killer, an entity that had clearly wanted to take more lives—perhaps as many as it could. It had torn Lisa’s family apart, seemingly without remorse. It had murdered her husband in front of her. It had robbed Lisa’s daughter of her father.
But I still couldn’t bring myself to watch it die.
It didn’t go easily, either.
The spectral wind howling through the house, seemingly from nowhere, increased its fury, picking up shards of broken glass, bits of paper, and heavier objects. A lamp went sailing into the wall, where it shattered into a million pieces.
A coffee table flipped up onto its side, then went sailing into Danny, slamming him into the wall with enough force to make the entire house shudder.
He collapsed at Michael’s feet, unconscious.
“Danny, get up!” Michael yelled, his eyes still unfocused. He probably had a concussion.
The creature stopped screaming. Though I was avoiding looking directly at it, I saw from the corner of my eye that the last of it had disintegrated into ash.
Then, from the ring of ashes marking where the wraith had stood, smoke began to rise up from the floor. A charred scent rapidly filled the air. A charged static-electricity type of feeling skittered over my body, setting my teeth on edge.
“Fuck,” Michael said, dropping to his knees next to Danny and trying to shake his partner awake. “It’s going to set the whole goddamn house on fire.”
Then, as if his words had made it happen, each one of the walls of the house abruptly erupted into flames in unison, as though they had all been doused in gasoline and someone had thrown a match.
The fire was blindingly bright, and it felt like a wall of heat slamming into me from all sides. Instinctive fear tore through me. Very few things can kill a vampire. Fire is one of those things.
“We have to get Danny out of here,” Michael told us, his eyes still unfocused. A thick sheen of sweat broke out across his brow and he looked even paler than normal. But his jaw tightened with determination, and he grabbed Danny under the arms and pulled him across the floor, toward the front door.
Or, at least, he tried to.
He didn’t get very far. After making it only a few steps, Michael swayed dangerously, then face-planted into the floor, sprawled out unceremoniously beside Danny’s unconscious body.
Definitely a concussion, then. Apparently, being a ruthless monster hunter doesn’t make you immune to head wounds. Go figure.
If not for the fire, we could have just left them there.
After all, the wraith was gone now.
But leaving them behind wasn’t an option. I swore under my breath, then turned to Tobias. “We have to get them out of here! They’re defenseless!”
He scowled at that but didn’t seem willing to argue with me. He gestured at Danny. “I’ll grab him. You take the other guy.”
I nodded back at him and rushed forward to pick up Michael. Though vampire strength makes me way stronger than a regular person, it didn’t make it any less awkward to carry a full-grown man who was way bigger than me. But I managed to half-carry, half-drag Michael to the front door.
Tobias threw Danny’s unconscious body over his shoulder in a practiced fireman’s carry. He got to the door before me and wrenched it open.
“You first,” he told me.
I didn’t argue with him. There was no time for that. With the blessed iron in one hand and Michael’s unconscious body in my other, I rushed forward and dropped the hunter onto the ground.
He was still breathing, at least. And none of his bones appeared to be broken.
I turned to Tobias. He had followed me out of the house with Danny still slung over his shoulder. He deposited Danny next to Michael.
The movement must have woken him up because Danny groaned, struggling to sit upright. He blinked up at me, dazed. “Oh. It’s you guys.”
“You’re welcome,” I shot back, scowling down at him. “We just saved your bacon. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
Danny groaned at that and then passed out again.
When I turned back to Tobias, we grinned at each other foolishly. I was about to say something along the lines of ‘you know, we actually make a pretty good team.’
But I never got the chance.
Because that was the moment when the house exploded.