Chapter 13
Thirteen
Ethan slammed the door behind him when he arrived at his temporary apartment. This was a fucking nightmare!
Nothing was working out the way it was supposed to. He wasn’t supposed to give a shit about these creatures. These people.
And they were people to him. Not animals that needed to be put down. They had lives and family they cared about. They had hopes and dreams and feelings.
Did he have any actual proof that they were vampires?
For Marcus, no. So the guy was allergic to the sun. There was a rare disease called xeroderma pigmentosum that made people extremely sensitive to the UV rays of the sun. Maybe he had that. It certainly didn’t make him a vampire.
Bel?
Ethan would stake his life on the fact that Bel was a vampire. No one healed that fast. No one.
Marcus had talked Bel into eating with them and when he appeared in the kitchen, all the long scratches on his face were completely gone.
His movements were a little stiff, but he definitely didn’t look like a man who’d lost a few liters of blood across the floor of Marcus’s home just the night before.
After talking to Marcus about his mother, Ethan felt pretty sure that she was one as well. If she were a human and ill, he liked to think that Marcus would at least get her some psychological help. Maybe some drugs to calm her a little. She was threatening their lives!
But drugs probably didn’t help vampires, and you certainly couldn’t lock one up in the psych ward of a hospital. It was the only reason that made sense of why the burden was on Marcus and his brothers to watch over her.
Ethan had no idea if Rafe was a vampire, and he’d never even seen Winter.
He walked into the kitchen, jerked open the refrigerator, and glared at the contents without really seeing them. He had no idea what he was looking for or why he’d even gone in there. He slammed the door shut again, leaned against it, and slid to the floor. What the hell was he supposed to do?
Didn’t Macy and Lucy deserve justice? His sisters had been young and innocent.
They deserved to have a shot at life too, but it was stolen away by some sick fuckers.
He wanted to stop dreaming about them. He wanted to stop dreaming about walking down the blood-soaked hallway and finding their lifeless bodies staring up at the ceiling, their open hands outstretched as if they’d died reaching out to him.
Resting his elbows on his bent knees, Ethan rubbed his eyes roughly. He shouldn’t have been the one to survive. Why couldn’t the killers have gotten him and spared Lucy? She was smarter and more determined. She would have known exactly what to do. No one would have escaped her.
But he was just useless and weak.
Someone strong would have killed all the vamps by now. Didn’t matter if they were involved in the murder of his family. A strong person would have exterminated them all so no one else could have ever been hurt.
He couldn’t hurt Marcus, though. Marcus with the sad eyes and nervous smile. The man who was fighting to protect his own family and keep them safe even at the cost of his own life if necessary.
Ethan was falling for him. He knew it. With every smile and laugh and worried look, he was falling more and more for Marcus.
He’d never been in love before. Never even dated.
No one had ever captured his attention like Marcus.
He’d never met anyone who was such a contradiction.
Marcus was strong and powerful, but there was also something incredibly vulnerable and soft about him.
He was surrounded by family, and yet he felt so very alone to Ethan. So painfully isolated.
Meanwhile, Ethan had lost his family and had been floating alone for so long.
He had few friends. When he met Carl and was introduced to the Humans Protecting Humans League, he thought he’d found a group of people that would give him a sense of belonging.
But it was like they’d watched every vampire movie ever churned out and taken notes from that.
Their personal accounts of encounters were vague—and worse, clearly embellished.
He truly doubted they’d recognize a vampire if they were really faced with one.
And their agenda held only one goal: kill them all.
A few years ago, such an idea was fine with Ethan. He’d been full of anger and loneliness. He’d told himself that he was on a noble mission to get rid of all the creatures that had murdered his family and probably thousands of other families just like them.
But after spending time with the League, he realized that so much of what they did was hate speech and talk. There were few real plans that he saw.
What bothered him was that he’d never met the true leaders of the group.
They remained away from the monthly meetings.
Carl had said that they were members of powerful families or politicians who had to protect their images.
That the rest of the world wasn’t ready to deal with the truth that vampires really existed.
Of course, those same shadowy figures had no problem handing down assassination orders. He’d heard whispers of an elite team of former military League members who gathered and took out vampires when the timing was right.
But who decided which vampires had to die and when? Were they sure they were killing vampires and not humans?
Ethan knew one of those hit squads was waiting on the final information from him.
They wanted to know the address where Marcus was moving to.
They wanted the addresses of the rest of his family.
Ethan had lied to Carl on several occasions, telling him that Marcus hadn’t trusted him with that information yet, but the truth was that Ethan had been handed that info on his first damn day of work so that he could coordinate with the movers on getting Marcus’s stuff to the right location on time.
He couldn’t hand it over.
Marcus wasn’t a killer. Ethan knew it down in his bones.
Bel wasn’t a killer either. When sitting around the small table in the kitchen, the man talked almost nonstop about science and these interesting experiments that he was running.
Ethan hadn’t understood most of what he said, but his enthusiasm was so damn endearing.
Marcus had smiled at his brother, looking at him with an expression of love.
Ethan had a feeling that Marcus was relieved his brother was focused on his work rather than what had happened to him.
Ethan didn’t know much about Rafe, but if the texted image was anything to go by, the vampire was a lover, a playboy, and a perpetual partier. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t serious enough for that. Rafe was all about his next good time.
Winter worried Ethan. Marcus spoke very little about his youngest brother. He was a complete enigma, but if he was anything like his other brothers, then Ethan was skeptical that Winter would easily kill.
That left only Marcus’s mother, Julianna.
An insane vampire.
Lovely.
Ethan’s heart broke for Marcus. He couldn’t imagine what he was going through. It sounded like most days she was the loving, caring woman that he grew up with. But in the blink of an eye, she became someone determined to kill her sons. And was that rage just limited to her sons?
What if she escaped Marcus and his brothers? Would she kill innocent people while lost in her fractured mind?
Ethan hated to admit that he didn’t entirely believe Marcus when he said that she’d never hurt anyone else.
How could he be sure? What if she’d escaped just once and murdered an entire apartment building of people before they could get her back?
What if there was someone else goading Julianna on before her sons could capture her again?
Sighing heavily, Ethan rested his head against his hands and closed his eyes.
He knew his decision was made. He would not hand any information over to Carl about Marcus and his brothers.
But he needed to see Julianna, to speak with her.
He knew if he saw her, heard her voice, he’d know if she was the vampire from his nightmares.
And if she was…then he’d have to figure out if he had it in him to kill her despite his growing affection for Marcus. But he prayed that he wouldn’t have to choose between his dead family and Marcus.
A loud knock on the door had Ethan jerking upright. His heart sped up and he sat frozen on the floor for a moment. He had a dark feeling he knew exactly who was standing at his door.
Slowly, Ethan pushed to his feet. He steadied himself, fingers pressed into the cool metal surface of the fridge door, before he walked to the small foyer. He took a deep breath and worked hard to wipe all expression from his face.
Opening the door, he found Carl standing on the other side, shifting from one foot to the other as if he couldn’t contain his nervous energy.
“Carl, what are you doing here? I told you it wasn’t safe for you to stop by,” Ethan said.
“Yeah, well, you haven’t been returning my calls or messages the past week, so I thought it was a good idea if I stopped in and checked on you.” Carl shoved his way past Ethan and strode confidently into the living room like he was entitled free passage to Ethan’s apartment.
Grinding his teeth together, Ethan closed the door and silently followed behind him.
He was getting sick of Carl and his holier-than-thou attitude.
The man wasn’t his father, and Ethan was pretty sure he didn’t know shit about vampires.
Ethan was a little disgusted at how he’d looked up to him when they first met a few years ago.
At least he’d finally come to his senses about Carl and the League.
“What’s going on with you, Ethan?” Carl said as he flopped down in the big comfortable chair in the living room.
Ethan remained standing, his arms folded over his chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”