Dae #2
"I know," he said quietly. "I was there. But I'm okay now. I'm not taking blood from you that I can no longer replace. I won't drain you, little witch."
The silence that followed was full of all the things no one was saying, but were all thinking. Wiggles lifted his head and licked Elias's hand.
Lizzy spoke for the first time. "You're not feeding off her, Elias." Her voice was calm. Matter-of-fact. "You're sustaining a bond. Those aren't the same thing."
Elias looked at her. Everyone looked at her.
"When Killian and I completed our bond, my body changed.
" She said it simply, like she was explaining nothing more important than an inventory discrepancy at Ancient Magicks.
"My body adapted to accommodate what we are together.
It wasn't parasitic. It was symbiotic." Her eyes held Elias's unflinchingly, and in that look I understood exactly why Killian loved her.
"Whatever you are now, you and Talin together still made that.
The bond is part of your biology. Starving it because you're afraid of what it means isn't noble. "
Elias stared at her, the look in his eyes unreadable. Talin stared at her with hope she couldn't hide. Killian's mouth twitched — just barely, just for a second — but I saw it. I also saw the pride in his eyes.
But Elias didn't yield. "I'm fine," he said. "I just need rest."
Talin's face crumbled, her frustration noticeable in every line of her body. Like us, she could feel Elias slowly dying and couldn't do a thing about it because he wouldn't let her.
I pushed to my feet. But before I stepped away, I leaned over and gripped the back of his neck the way I had a hundred times across a hundred years, a wordless gesture we did instead of saying anything that mattered.
He didn't pull away. He didn't lean in. He didn't give me a smartass remark.
He just let me hold the weight of his head for a few breaths, and that frightened me more than the icy cold of his skin.
"Can I talk to you?" I said to Killian. It wasn't really a question.
He nodded and followed me into the hallway. The old floorboards creaked under our weight, and from the sitting room I could hear Talin murmuring something low and urgent, and Elias's silence answering her.
"He's going to kill himself," I said.
Killian leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. The shadows under his dark eyes giving him a haunted appearance. "Aye. I know."
"Can you make him —"
"Make him what? He's not mine anymore, Dae. I can't compel him. Can't order him." Killian's accent thickened the way it always did when he was upset. "He's the most stubborn creature I've ever known, and I turned him in eighteen sixty-four, so I've had a good long while to form that opinion."
"Then what do we do?"
Killian looked at me. He was tired. "We watch. We wait. And we pray he figures it out before his body gives up on him."
"Or we hold him down and let Talin shove her bleeding wrist in his mouth."
Killian's lips twitched. "Tempting. But let's keep that as a last resort."
"Lizzy's got a cast iron pan. One good swing, he'd never see it coming."
"Aye, and then I'd have a concussed human with a blood deficiency and a mate who'd murder us both." He rubbed the back of his neck. "We wait."
I opened my mouth...to say what, I don't know. I didn't have a fix for this. But my mind snagged on Elias's words, and they hooked into me like barbs.
I don't need to feed from you.
I'm not a vampire anymore.
I don't need to drink your blood over a bad night.
And just like that, Alice's face flashed through my mind. The way my fangs had dropped the instant her body pressed against mine. Not from normal hunger. From desperate need. From a craving that went so far past blood and lust it terrified me.
That's what was waiting for me on the other side of this if I gave in to it.
A bond so deep it couldn't survive without feeding. A connection so total that your mate became the only thing keeping you alive. Not a choice anymore. A biological imperative. A leash made of love and blood and supernatural chains that couldn't be broken or refused or controlled.
Elias had it with Talin. Had burned away his entire existence for her. He hadn't chosen to become this thing. The choice had been taken from him. The bond didn't care what he wanted. It only demanded, and if he didn't comply, it would kill him.
I couldn't do that to Alice.
I could not let the bond complete, could not let it sink its teeth into both of us until we were so tangled together that separation meant death.
She already had something inside her she didn't fully understand.
If I added a mate bond to that equation, if I let myself bite her, let myself claim her, let the ancient magic of the thing seal us together, I'd be wrapping myself around a woman who might need to fight something I couldn't protect her from.
And the bond wouldn't let me walk away. Wouldn't let me give her space.
Wouldn't let me be the weapon she needed me to be instead of the weakness.
Elias was proof.
Love wasn't enough. Love with a bond attached was a cage.
"Dae." Killian was watching me. "Where'd ye go?"
I blinked. "Nowhere. Sorry."
His dark eyes narrowed. "Ye were with Alice tonight."
It wasn't a question. Killian always knew. Master Vampires had a sense for their coven, and I knew I'd been radiating Alice's scent and my own guilt like a beacon since I walked in.
"Yeah."
"And?"
"And nothing. I went to check on her. She's fine. I came back."
The lie tasted worse than the smell of Elias's failing blood. But Killian didn't push. He just looked at me with that steady, ancient patience that said he'd wait until I was ready to tell him.
From the sitting room, Wiggles let out a long, mournful sigh.
"Go to bed," Killian said quietly. "Get some rest. There's nothing more ye can do here tonight."
He was right. I knew he was right. And I hated that he was right.
"Will you call me if he gets worse?"
"Aye."
I took the stairs two at a time and shut my bedroom door behind me. The room was dark and quiet and usually a safe place for me, but it didn't feel that way tonight. I could still smell Elias's blood, seeping up through the old bones of the house, and it made my stomach turn.
I pulled up Alice's text.
I didn't text her back, though. I didn't trust myself to say anything that wasn't I'm terrified of what we're becoming a man's heart stopped tonight because the bond wouldn't let him be human or you're the only thing I've wanted in two hundred years and that's exactly why I can't have you.
Instead I lay on my bed fully clothed with my cell phone on my chest, staring at the ceiling, and I'd almost swear I could feel the flowers on my back digging into my skin.
Downstairs, I heard Talin's voice, Elias's silence filling up the spaces between her words until they both finally drifted off to nothing.
When I closed my eyes, it was only Alice. The feel of her legs around my waist. Her soft lips under mine. The pounding of her heart and the rush of her blood in my ears.
I could still smell her.
What felt like hours later, as I began to drift off to sleep, two revelations came to me.
The first: that love, in this world, came with teeth.
The second: that I was already bitten.