Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
He tried not to show it, because Claire had just been through an actual stun-gun assault, but he was a mess.
A confused, raging, anguished mess. Every time Tai looked at her, his body was punched all over again with the reality: Claire was hurt, someone had hurt her, and he wasn’t making her attacker pay.
Bloodfiend rage didn’t dissipate easily.
It hung around, under the skin, a trapped current of electric craving for violence. But he wasn’t fighting only rage.
She hadn’t told him.
In his arms, her body was tense, resistant, but so slightly she might not realize he could feel it. Might not consciously feel it herself. She was hurting.
But he was too.
He couldn’t think straight. Claire was hurt. He was hurt. She’d hurt him. But she didn’t know it. And he had to take care of her, because she was hurt.
He ended the kiss and leaned back to study her in the bright security lights of the parking garage. He couldn’t talk about the cyclone in his chest. He tried to, and instead he said, “What you’re doing…I’m behind you.”
Claire cocked one eyebrow at him. “Really?”
“It’s risky, and it’s smart, and it’s protective. And it’s you.”
“It’s also a little angry.”
“The things that make you angry should anger more people.”
Claire made a neat jump down from his arms. She reached up to stroke his cheekbones with her thumbs. “Thank you.”
Was that the end of it? Maybe it should be.
Maybe he should move forward in support, find ways to join this cause.
Talk to Laurence and others from the Levine consortium; there must be more he could do to help.
But he couldn’t shake the off-balance feeling when he thought of how many nights she had presented herself as bait to potentially violent men while he’d gone about his evening clueless to her risks.
He tried to regain his footing on his own, but he couldn’t.
“Twice a month?” He gestured to her dress, her makeup, and tried not to focus on the wound below her neck.
“Yeah. Every other Saturday.”
The Saturdays she hadn’t been able to go out. There had been more than a few over the months. “Who else knows?”
“Just Nova. I didn’t tell her exactly. She found out.”
Maybe he shouldn’t feel shut out, if she’d treated her closest friends with the same secrecy. Except…he did. “Claire, we’ve been dating for almost five months.”
Slowly she nodded, and there it was. The source of the earlier tension. The gritting of her teeth, the tightening of her shoulders. She knew she’d been wrong. She’d been waiting for him to call her on it.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“Of course.”
He stepped in close and set his hands on her shoulders. She was rigid now. On guard against him. “When?”
She said, “Suppose I did get picked up by the police? You’d need plausible deniability.”
“And that’s why you didn’t tell me.”
“You’re a respected person—your work, your place at Laurence’s secret think tank. You don’t need to get tangled up in this.”
Not an answer. She was trying not to lie to him. Slowly he said again, giving her another chance not to lie by omission either, “And that’s why you didn’t tell me.”
Claire reached out and grasped his hands, stared up at him with a hint of battle in her eyes. “Tai. Stop. I had reasons, and they’re moot now. Okay?”
“I need the truth,” he said. “Whatever it is, I need it.”
“I just told you the truth.”
“You didn’t answer me.”
“I don’t even know what the question is anymore.”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“When I was ready.”
“And when would that have been?”
“When we’re bloodbound!” Claire stepped back as if surprised by her own voice. Her eyes flashed with purple sparks. Quiet now, she said it again. “I would’ve told you once we’re bloodbound.”
Pain knifed through Tai’s chest, so sharp he fisted his hand to keep from grabbing his shirt.
Claire’s words, suddenly freed, rolled like a landslide down a mountain, gaining speed.
“I know waiting until then seems like I was withholding something, and I guess I was, but this is just really big, Tai. Really big inside me and holds really big consequences, if I was ever identified or… But I also know you’ve told me equally big things about you.
I should have just told you and not waited. I’m sorry.”
She’d missed half the problem. She still didn’t understand.
“If you’re mad, I get it,” she said. “Waiting wasn’t fair, especially because we don’t know how long it’ll be before you’re ready.”
“Claire,” he said, and the name he loved choked off at the back of his throat.
She took a step toward him. “Tai?”
“You set this…timeline…after I told you I can’t.”
“You can’t today, but you will.”
“I won’t!”
The words broke out of him in a sort of cry. All this time he’d believed her when she said he was enough. All this time she hadn’t believed him. She’d only been waiting for him to do what she wanted. Claire took a step toward him, but he put up a hand, palm toward her, and she stood still.
“You don’t crave. You don’t fight the prey drive.
You don’t live in this body, Claire. You’ll never know, not fully, and I’m so glad.
I’d never want this for someone I love. But I need—” Sudden emotion flooded in, and he covered his face as he worked to contain it.
When he looked up, Claire hadn’t moved, stood statue-still.
He said, “It’s hard, Claire, it’s so hard, and it hurts, and I need you to hear me when I say I can’t, and it’s not because I’m not brave enough because bravery has nothing to do with this. ”
She turned away from him and shoved her fingers through her hair, and in the turning away, he knew before she spoke that he’d asked for too much. Claire’s voice broke with the same overflow of feeling that swamped his chest.
“I want you to stay, Tai. That’s all I want.”
“I will stay.” But his voice sounded flat now, because he knew. She didn’t believe him.
“You want us to be together for hundreds of years without the covenant? Without any way to be sure?”
“I’m in love with you. I’ve given my word. Over and over again.”
Slowly she faced him. Her eyes held no sparks now, only a dull sheen. “Nobody’s word is enough for centuries.”
“Yours is to me.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s the truth.” Numbness spread over the stabbing in his chest, then outward until he couldn’t feel how deeply her words had sliced him. “But you still think I’ll break my word.”
“I don’t think you will. But when we’re bloodbound, I’ll be sure.”
“Then I’m not enough. Who I am, what I’ve let you see, what I’ve let even your friends see—none of it matters.”
“Tai, stop. Of course it matters. You matter. You’re all I want.”
“No.” The word sank deep into him, a barb he’d never be able to remove if he lived his full thousand years. “You want to eliminate uncertainty, eliminate the need for trust. You don’t want me; you want a vampire who can mark your neck with a guarantee.”
“What I want is for you to be that vampire, Tai.”
“And I’m not.”
Claire drew a rough breath that left her voice rasping. “But I love you.”
Tai couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even blink. Loss was clamping down on his chest, and along with it came a wave of ice that coated him from head to toe.
She came to him, pressed her palms against his shirt, not knowing she touched the place where the iron band of fear and grief was crushing him. She looked up into his face with eyes that had gone charcoal-gray in acute distress of her own.
“I love you,” she said.
The weight he knew too well began to press in until he thought he might be flattened down to the concrete under his feet. So much heaviness on him. And so cold.
When he managed to speak, his voice was gone, nothing to the words but a whisper. “I can’t do this.”
“Wh-what? You can’t do what?”
“I can’t wreck myself trying to become what you need.”
“But you are what I need. You already are.”
“If that were true, I wouldn’t have had to find out about all this from an acquaintance. You would’ve told me.”
The light left her eyes. She said, “Let me fix it. Let me try again.”
She had never heard him. Maybe she’d convinced herself otherwise, but in reality she had never heard him, never accepted his condition even as she encouraged him to accept it. The truth was so heavy, he nearly collapsed.
“We can’t fix this,” he said.
Claire nodded slowly, and in her grief-dulled eyes the heaviness was reflected back to him. She felt it too. Then she was gone—darted out of the garage toward the visitor lot. He heard her car start. He heard her drive away. From inside her car, she never made a sound.
Tai dropped to the ground. He curled into a ball, knees up, arms around his knees, in the middle of the garage, on the cold cement floor.
He rocked back and forth but couldn’t ease the pain that came back in a roaring wave, washing the numbness out to sea, leaving him more alone than he’d ever been in his life, because this time the one who kicked him out, who said he was defective after all… It was Claire.
A car entered at the gate. Before he could be seen sitting on the concrete, Tai got up and took the elevator to his floor. He went to the den and picked up his phone. Two in the morning? He’d sat in the garage for nearly an hour.
She hadn’t called him. Hadn’t texted him.
He felt like hiding, but he knew better now. He forced himself to make the call he’d promised to make.
“Hello, Tai,” Peter said.
At the kindness in the man’s voice, Tai’s legs gave out. He dropped to his knees on the carpet and wrapped his arms around himself as he had in the garage. Alone. So alone. Always alone.
“Tai?”
“I’m cold.” He’d lost all other words, all other thoughts, everything he’d planned to say, to ask.
“Where are you?” Peter’s voice was sharp, demanding.
He heard Tai. He understood. He lived in a body like this one. Tai said, “Home.”
“Good. Are you thirsty?”
“No, just…just really cold.”
“When did you last slake?”
“This afternoon. I mean, yesterday afternoon.”
“What time?”