CHAPTER NINETEEN || TOBIAS
B ryan and I spent the rest of the day in bed, save for a much-needed shower that we’d taken together. We hadn’t showered the first and second time that we’d made love, and so we’d both been covered in blood. I’d had to use a fair amount of magic to clean everything, because the bed looked more like a crime scene than a place of sex and intimacy.
Still, I almost couldn’t believe any of this was real.
I had known he was my mate from the moment I laid eyes on him, but I hadn’t understood what that actually meant until now. It wasn’t that the sex was incredible—though there was no denying that, either. And it wasn’t that he was so fucking adorable that it made me want to hold on to him and never let go. Again, no contest there. Nor was it the fact that my body craved his on a basic animalistic level. All of those things were extremely true in a way it would have been hard for me to ever really believe before I’d met him. But they were the easy part. The expected part. They were the completely unsurprising aspects of finding one’s mate.
But the part that I never would have guessed was that being with Bryan was easy . It felt effortless. Like I didn’t need to be anything at all other than myself in order to be with him. I didn’t need to be in control at all times, I didn’t need to always have the right answer, and that was perfectly okay. For the first time in my entire life, with Bryan in my arms, I felt like I could just relax and let myself be.
There was something immensely freeing in that.
Bryan, while he’d learned how to shield his mind from me in record time, wasn’t that great at maintaining the wall between us. His concentration on it seemed to slip regularly. Then the barrier between us would dissolve and his thoughts would abruptly be running through my mind. I had taken to casually letting him know each time it happened. On some level, maybe I was hoping he’d let the walls stay down, but I wasn’t about to ask him for that. If he ever felt ready to do that, it would be his choice and not because I’d pressured him into it.
However, it was one such slip that keyed me into how dire his condition was becoming. The light filtering in from between the shabby motel curtains had started to fade, growing murky with twilight. I was on the knife edge of sleep, with Bryan securely pressed up against me, with my arms around him. The sudden sensation of his mind against mine startled me fully awake.
Bryan was wondering, with mounting alarm, where he could ethically source blood in a town this small. His throat was practically on fire with his thirst. I could sense the pain it caused him through the link that connected us.
He was extremely aware of every single beat of my heart.
“The wall is down again,” I warned him, yawning, and pushing myself upright in the bed. “Also, when was the last time you’ve fed? Because I can feel your level of need and holy shit, Bryan.”
That had been the wrong thing to say.
I felt raw panic sweep through the connection. Then, abruptly, I couldn’t feel Bryan’s mind at all.
I let out a shuddering breath, feeling like icy water had just been dumped on me. You’d think that it would get easier to have the connection abruptly severed between us, that I would get used to it the more times it happened. But you would be very wrong. The opposite seemed to be happening, in fact. The feeling of loss was getting worse each time.
“My feeding habits are none of your business,” he said stiffly, scowling at me. Then his stomach literally growled. He grimaced, then added, “But I do need to feed soon. I’m not going to have a choice.”
“Feed from me, then.”
“Damn it,” he swore, clapping his hand over his mouth and turning his head away from me abruptly. “No. No way am I doing that.”
“Why don’t you want me to see your fangs? You’re a vampire. This is a natural part of it. I’m not freaked out or anything.”
Bryan didn’t answer me.
“Is it because it would seal the mate bond?” I asked him, confused. “Because I don’t mind if you can hear my thoughts. And you could still throw up a wall between us any time you wanted.”
“It’s not that,” Bryan muttered, pushing himself up in the bed. He drew his knees up to his chest, still avoiding my gaze. He looked so small that way, like he was trying to take up as little space as he possibly could. And he sounded so lost and miserable that it broke my goddamn heart.
That was when it all clicked into place for me.
I had, somewhere in the back of my mind, assumed that Bryan felt irrationally guilty on some level, like he hadn’t done enough to resist the compulsion Giles had used on him. Hell, Bryan was probably filled with a metric fuck ton of emotions about what had happened to him. I knew I would be. Anyone would be. Because what Giles had done to him was the worst kind of violation.
And none of it was Bryan’s fault. None of it. Nathaniel, acting as the city’s vampire king, had known that. And even Tatiana Solomon, the Queen of the Witches, had known Bryan was innocent. Even the families of the witches Giles had forced Bryan to kill understood that it was Giles who had committed those murders, not Bryan.
But now, it was so painfully obvious once I saw it that I kicked myself for not realizing it earlier. I knew that I didn’t know everything Bryan was feeling. But I knew one thing with absolute certainty. After what Giles had made him do, Bryan was ashamed of being a vampire.
That’s why he was refusing to feed himself. That’s why he hid his face from me every time his fangs dropped. That was at least part of why he’d run from me in the first place.
Because he’d been forced into a situation that caused him to hate who and what he was now.
No. Absolutely not. Not on my fucking watch. No way was I going to sit idly by while my mate suffered. Not when there was something I could do about it.
An idea slid into place almost immediately.
“Hey babe, the sun’s almost down,” I said, fighting to keep my voice normal and even. I reached for my jeans and started yanking them on. I was so furious that my hands were shaking. “You should get dressed. We’re leaving.”
Bryan did look up at me then. He blinked at me a few times in confusion, but the misery and shame were still etched across his face, plain to see. Seeing his pain further added to the righteous fury that had ignited in my heart.
“Leaving? As in… like, the town? Like, leaving for good?”
His eyes widened and I sensed how startled and alarmed he was, as I pulled a clean shirt out of the duffle bag that I’d brought with me and yanked it on with more force than was strictly necessary.
“You’re angry with me,” he said quietly, sounding even smaller than before.
If I could have brought Giles back in that moment, I would have happily done it so that I could make him suffer for what he had done to Bryan. But my fury was just self-indulgence. It wasn’t helping anything. And I was careless enough that now my mate thought it was directed at him.
I crossed the room and dropped to my knees beside the bed. I took Bryan’s hand in mine.
“I’m not angry with you,” I told him. “I’m angry with Giles. If I could kill him all over again, I would.”
“Then why are you getting dressed?”
“I’m getting dressed because we need to get you fed properly. You won’t drink from me. And I’m guessing you won’t feed on anyone else, either. Which means we need to figure something else out.”
And also because I now planned on showing Bryan exactly what kind of good he was capable of bringing into the world as a vampire. I couldn’t undo what Giles had done to him. But I was going to give Bryan something else to hold on to, a counterbalance to the darkness he now saw in himself.
But I’m not an idiot. I didn’t tell him about phase two of my plan.
“I’m okay. Seriously. I just had a hunger pang,” Bryan said, crossing his arms over his chest. “It’s nothing.”
“You had a hunger pang because you’re starving yourself. What happens when you reach the point where you’ve gone so long without fresh blood that you’re not rational anymore?”
He froze and his eyes widened. I could see that he clearly hadn’t thought of that. Which made sense, because he’d probably never tried to go long enough without drinking blood that he lost all of his self-control. I’d never seen it happen firsthand, but I’d heard some of the older witches in the coven talk about things like that happening to vampires.
They weren’t exactly pleasant stories.
“Okay,” Bryan said, giving my hand a squeeze. “So, um, what’s the game plan? All-night butcher? Slaughterhouse?”
“No,” I informed him. “We’re driving to the nearest hospital. We’re going to rob their blood bank.”