Chapter 11 #2
“I’ll go,” I said. Peter looked up with pain swimming in his eyes, floating just above the much denser anger. I touched his shoulder. “It’s okay. Call me tomorrow morning, and I’ll come by again.”
He growled out his frustration but nodded.
The fight had seeped away from him when he stood.
Lazaro feigned disinterest, looking away.
I had a dozen things I wanted to say to the vampire, to the coward who’d sent someone else to kill me, but it wasn’t the time, not with Fenton in between us.
Not when I was still so powerless. I collected the anger and put it back into that metal safe in the back of my mind, where I was storing it for later.
“Be careful,” I told Peter before I got the hell out of there. The brief display of Lazaro’s unrestrained power made my legs so unsteady that I had to grab the staircase railing with both hands to keep from slipping.
* * *
Peter Fenton
God. Fucking. Damn it.
Things were just going too well with Fallon, so of course my bastard of a vampire brother would show up to ruin it.
She’d let me into the inner circle of her family, trusted me with her little sisters, made me up my own special little dog bed in the barn she was keeping me in, and she’d even come back to my place with me.
All the little fantasies I’d put together on the drive over — laughing with her over those impromptu fight lessons, breathless thanks for taking care of the people she loved most, the look in her pretty eyes when the pieces would come together in her brain that I could protect her and all she loved, and she wasn’t with that pathetic excuse of a vampire anymore, so she could rub that warm body all over me and I could kiss her until she was drunk from it and I could make her feel the best she ever felt, and I’d bury my face between her legs for as long as it took for her to fall in love with me.
“We have a situation.”
I channeled every molecule of hatred I had through my eyes, but I still followed Lazaro out the door and hopped into his car. Fallon was already slipping through the exit gate, and Laz had the nerve to watch the back of her car for two seconds.
“You could have called me,” I said, flexing my fingers and curling them to work out the anger. Lazaro had knocked me on my ass, and my brain was still spinning around in my skull, the rotation only just slowing now.
“I did.”
I yanked my phone from my pocket. A missed call and an unread text flashed on the cracked screen. “Well, I was busy.”
“I have to say, I’m surprised at you, Peter. I thought you’d be bored of the Hunter by now.”
“Shut up. You’re the one who sent a hitman after her.”
His two outer fingers tightened on the steering wheel, his only tell. Got him.
I kept my head on a swivel. There was no point asking where we were going.
Lazaro would only tell me something cryptic or empty.
We were heading south of town, though, and down a road I’d never been.
I was brushing up against the feeling of familiarity as we approached a squat, sturdy rectangle of a building.
It wasn’t until we stopped in front of it and a flood light stabbed my eyes that I slammed up against the memories.
“No,” I said. I was clawing the car’s interior like I was a cat arriving at its appointment to be neutered, pushing myself out of my seat, desperate to go backwards, even if there wasn’t a backwards to go to. “No, no, no, please, Lazaro, no!”
The jail cell. Four years almost entirely alone, almost always starving. Why was he bringing me here again? Had I behaved that badly?
“Peter.” He pressed against his door to dodge my flailing limbs. “Calm the fuck down.”
“No, I won’t fucking go back in there!” My voice broke in half like I was a hormonal teenager.
Lazaro grabbed my arm before I could flee out the door. “We’re not here for you. You’re past it. I’m not…” Frustration cut off his words as he shoved me back into my seat.
“You’re not locking me up?” I asked with all the distrust in my brain punching the inside of my skull. I gulped air. Tears were streaming down my cheeks.
“Get yourself together. I just need you to see this.” He let go of me with a shove and got out of his car.
My gut felt like it was full of garbage, and my skin was shaking, but I at least pretended to get myself together.
A few weak steps closer to the building had me breaking apart all over again.
Screams and shouts, so quiet they could have been a hallucination of my own past. My own throat was aching now, and I clapped a hand over my open mouth when I realized I was screaming, too.
“Peter!” Lazaro’s snarl was predatory. He grabbed me by the back of my shirt like I was a stray kitten and dragged me to the building. He threw me against the rough wall while he unlocked, and I panted for breath that wouldn’t help me. He dragged me inside.
The screams hit me harder than the collision with the outside wall had.
It was a full orchestra of pain, misery, despair, fury, desperation, begging for it all to be over.
Everything looked different from the other side, but it smelled the same, that dry staleness that burned my nose, nearly covered by the fear and grime of six vampire men, all in cages, pacing like animals.
Couldn’t touch the bars, though, ‘cause they burned — knew that myself. All those years, I’d hated that I was alone down here, but this miserable company would have been worse.
I stumbled away, finding my way backwards through the door.
Back outside, Lazaro slammed the door and locked it again. I breathed the fresh air and sniffled gratefully that it was over. Laz gave my cheek two quick slaps.
“Do you know what this means?” he asked, right in my face.
I didn’t know what anything meant, not with my head back in that prison, where I had been a pathetic bag of morbid bones, pressing my bare arm to those bars that burned — laced with silver, I later learned — just to feel something other than hunger eating me from within and loneliness swallowing me from the outside.
“Santos…?” I touched my own forehead, but there was no sweat like I’d been expecting. Santos had made more vampire sons? Guess I wasn’t so special anymore.
“It means we’re about to be in a lot of fucking danger, Peter.”