CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN || BRYAN
T he hunters had Tobias in a giant circle made from some sort of powder on the ground. There were pallets and pieces of oversized factory equipment scattered all around the room.
Michael drew his gun on me the moment he saw me.
Fury burned away all traces of reason. I rushed forward, grabbed the hunter by the lapels of his jacket, and threw him into a stack of pallets.
Danny backed away from me, both his hands empty. “We just want to talk.”
I hissed at him, so incoherent with my rage that I couldn’t even form words. It was a trick. They wanted to kill me. And then they would kill Tobias.
They were murderers. Killers. It was what they did.
“Let me out of this chair!” Tobias snapped, seemingly speaking to Danny. “Or at least break the binding circle, so I can cast!”
His words didn’t make any sense.
But Danny responded immediately. He started forward. Moving closer to my mate.
I let out an inhuman snarl and grabbed him by the arm. Not even bothering to moderate the amount of force I was using, I spun him around and shoved him backward into a massive shrink-wrapped pallet of office paper.
He hit it with a loud thud, the back of his head making contact with one of the pallets, and I heard his teeth snap together. He blinked once, then slumped down, falling to the ground.
Probably unconscious.
I would finish dealing with him later.
“Bryan, stop!” Tobias yelled.
But I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop. Not when he was still in danger. Not when we were both in such terrible danger.
I whirled at the sound of movement behind me.
Michael had pushed himself back up to standing. He pointed a gun at me.
His gaze dropped down to the spot behind me, no doubt taking in Danny’s slumped body.
His expression went cold.
Then he aimed his gun at me and fired.
One shot. Two. Then a third.
The bullets hit me in the chest, one after the other. But they were just ordinary bullets. Painful, but not even close to lethal.
In the back of my mind, I noted it was odd that he wouldn’t have used wood or silver. Either one would have dropped me and made me way easier for him to finish off. But that didn’t matter. He had clearly gotten sloppy and reached for the wrong thing.
He didn’t strike me as the methodical one of the two, anyhow.
Michael stared at me, going even paler than before.
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a needle-point sharp wooden stake.
Ah, there it was. He had realized his mistake and reached for something that was actually lethal to me. Because he planned to kill me.
And possibly Tobias, too.
I zipped toward him.
From the corner of my eye, I swore I saw someone—a blonde woman—standing next to the binding circle. My brain was so locked up with my rage and instinct to protect myself and my mate that I hardly even processed it. She was there and gone so suddenly that I might have imagined it. A trick of the light. Unimportant.
Michael moved faster than I would have given him credit for.
I reached for him, fully prepared to crush the life from him. At the very last moment, he threw himself down into a surprisingly limber somersault.
I blinked, startled. I turned, realizing he now had unfettered access to my back.
But for the very first time since I had been turned into a vampire, I was too slow.
Michael drove the stake in his hand forward. He must have expected me to turn around, because somehow the tip of the stake was lined up with the spot in my chest where my heart was.
I felt it pierce my flesh.
In the same moment, Tobias screamed out two words in a foreign language that sounded like it might have been Latin.
The stake dissolved to ashes in Michael’s hand.
“Aw, shit.” Michael backed away from me, his eyes going round with fear.
My fangs were out. I hadn’t felt them drop. I grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the ground with one hand, like he weighed nothing.
He gasped, unable to breathe. All I would have to do is close my hand and I could shatter his windpipe. He wouldn’t be a danger to me or to my mate any longer.
“Stop!” Danny cried, from behind me, apparently not unconscious after all. “Please!”
The raw anguish in Danny’s voice was impossible not to hear.
“Bryan, don’t hurt him! Please. ”
The hunter was using my name. Attempting to reason with me. How odd. I hesitated.
He tried to kill your mate. A seductive whisper rose up in my mind, snaking through me. He tried to kill Tobias. He tried to kill you. He’ll do it again…
This was followed by the sensation of the pure need that surged up within me, hot and sudden. It was akin to abruptly being human again and suddenly not being able to breathe. It was like my throat had caught fire. It was like my body screamed at me for oxygen.
I didn’t have to suffer any longer. I could feed from him. I didn’t have to let all of that delicious, hot blood go to waste.
“He was going to kill us,” I said, my voice not sounding like my own. It was tight with my fury and hunger. “He tried to kill me.”
“Go on then,” Michael gasped out. Even though he was practically turning blue, he still had enough nastiness in him to sound the tiniest bit smug, like I’d just proven him right. “Do it.”
And I wanted to. Every bit of me wanted to.
“Don’t,” Danny said, much closer now. I whirled to face him, moving Michael effortlessly, his shoes barely scraping the ground. Danny’s face was grave, rather than afraid, and he locked eyes with me. “Don’t do this.”
“I have to,” I bit off, gritting my teeth. “If I don’t, he’ll kill us both.”
But even as I said the words, an awful, terrible, shattering truth surged up in that moment.
It was crystal-clear and ugly.
Giles had forced me to kill. It horrified me, that I had taken people’s lives away from them, that I had been forced to snuff out everything they were or ever would be. That my body had done monstrous things. I would be forced to live with those memories for as long as I lived. The awful truth was that there was no escaping that.
Then there was the strangling guilt, crushing in on me every single moment of every single day, the awful, secret fear that I hadn’t fought the compulsion hard enough, that some part of me had wanted to kill , that some dark and hidden part of me had reveled in the blood and the fear and the violence. It was a noose around my throat, strangling me, preventing me from living my life. Preventing me from actually trusting myself enough to trust anyone else.
It prevented me from being happy.
But it was a noose that I had put there myself, wasn’t it?
Because, deep down, I wanted to be punished for what I had done. And I hadn’t done it. I never, never would have hurt any of those people. Not if I had been given a choice. I never would have take Teresa’s life from her. Or Phoebe’s. Or any of the other witches or warlocks I had been spelled to kill.
The noose around my neck wasn’t real. I had put it there myself.
But I also knew, with a strange clarity, that I could just let everything go and feed from Michael. I could make it all go away. I could sink my teeth into him and drink from his body until it was cold, and then from Danny, until nothing was left at all of either of them.
Or of me.
If I really let myself give in, I knew that I could live with no guilt, and no shame. And there would be no fear of suddenly one day losing myself. If I just let go of my humanity here and now, if I let myself become the monster that I feared myself to be, there would be no ugliness and no pain. I could just surrender to my darkest impulses and let them burn away everything else, forever.
It would be so easy.
And there was only one single truth remaining: it was my choice.
Tobias stepped forward. The wooden chair he’d been sitting on was a pile of ashes on the ground behind him. Another spell of his, surely. His eyes were wet with unshed tears.
“Bryan, I love you,” he said. “And I know that you aren’t this person. So please, I’m begging you. Don’t be this person. Come back to me. If you won’t try for you, then please do it for me.”
I swallowed, realizing he had just heard everything that was going through my mind. And the idea of hurting him, of leaving him again, forever this time…
It was impossible to fathom.
And I did want to try. I wanted to try for him. But I also wanted to try for me , too.
“Please let him go,” Danny said, something crumpling in his face as Michael gasped for breath, his life resting in the palm of my hand, so easily extinguished. He swallowed hard, gritting his teeth, like the admission cost him something. “I’m in love with him. I have been for a long time. And I can’t live my life without him. So, please, just let him go.”
In that moment, I decided who I wanted to be.
I dropped Michael to the ground and stepped away from him, letting out a strangled sound as something hot and vital wrenched free in my chest.
For the first time in months, I understood. I wasn’t a killer. And I didn’t ever want to be again. But most importantly, I could choose not to be.
Tobias caught me, his arms encircling me protectively, and he pulled me close to him.
I leaned into him, letting out a ragged breath. I didn’t need to breathe, but it was an instinct. Because, even though I was a vampire, I was still more human, even now, than I had let myself believe since waking up from the compulsion.
Michael fell onto his hands and knees, gasping for air.
“Thank you,” Danny said to me. Then he moved to Michael’s side and put a protective arm around him, attempting to pull him up.
Michael shrugged Danny off and then climbed to his feet of his own accord.
I didn’t miss the way that pain flashed for a split second in Danny’s eyes at the rejection. Whatever their relationship was, it was clearly complicated.
Michael stood there for a long time, just staring at me with wide, disbelieving eyes as he sucked in wheezing breaths. No one moved and no one spoke.
Safe in Tobias’s arms, I felt the last of my rage and terror subside. But I still didn’t trust the hunter for an instant.
But then, at last, Michael rubbed his throat, a mingling of surprise and fascination abruptly overtaking his face as he stared at me, motionless in my mate’s arms. “Huh. Well, I’ll be damned. You really are something different, aren’t you?”