ELIAS
Pain woke me. It had its hands buried in my chest, squeezing, and I came up out of the dark gasping around it, my knees dragging toward my ribs and my fingers twisting into the sheets before my eyes had even opened.
My heart. Something was wrong with my heart.
It beat once, hard enough to hurt, and then it hung there and did nothing, and the nothing stretched, went on and on into a silence that turned every inch of me to ice, and just when I was certain it had quit for good it slammed down again and knocked a broken sound out of my throat.
I lay there, unable to move. Cold sweat poured off me in sheets, frigid on my skin, my teeth clicking together, and I couldn't even lift my head off the fucking pillow.
My mouth was a desert. My joints throbbed.
And under all of that was a sense of dread that something at the center of me was flickering, guttering, going out.
A bad night.
The thought popped into my head and I held onto it with both hands.
Yes. A bad night. That's all this was. I'd had a few of them lately, and they always passed, always, and this one would pass too if I just got up and moved through it like a man instead of lying here shivering like some kind of helpless pussy.
Talin's side of the bed was empty, sheets thrown back and cold.
We were at Killian's, in my old room. No one had wanted us to go back to my mate's apartment, just in case.
Down the hall, I could hear water running.
Good. She was up. She was busy. She hadn't seen me like this, and I meant to be on my feet and dressed before she got back.
So I forced myself to move. Pushing up onto one elbow, I waited as the room swung around me, breathing through it until it steadied.
Then I got my legs over the side and my bare feet flat on the floor, where I sat hunched over like an old man with my forearms on my knees, dragging in air I still didn't strictly need.
My shirt was on the chair where I'd left it. I reached for it and my hand missed by an inch.
I tried again and got it this time. Slipping my arms into the sleeves, I worked the buttons one at a time in the proper order, from the bottom up.
It took me three tries to line up the first one because my fingers wouldn't stop fucking trembling.
That was fine. I could do this. I would button this shirt and pull on my pants and I would tie my boots and I would walk downstairs, just a man on his way to work, and this feeling in my chest that something was seriously wrong would go the fuck away.
The shower still ran. And under the metallic smell of the old pipes, down the hall and into my parched throat, came something else…
Her.
My mouth watered.
It happened before I could stop it, a rush of saliva across my tongue, my eyes snapping toward the doorway and the sound of the water.
For one shameful second I could taste her without her anywhere near me.
Sweet and warm and something that had a name I refused to say because saying it meant admitting what this was.
I straightened, pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth until the ache dulled.
You are not a vampire anymore.
I said it to myself like a fact, because it was one.
I ate food. I ate too much food, actually.
I ate all fucking day long, waiting for things to cook while I stood in the kitchen and felt the sun come through the window and land warm on the side of my face and I wanted to weep like a child.
I walked in daylight. My heart beat. I was a man.
I was a MAN. Not a vampire.
So the water in my mouth meant nothing. It was habit. Muscle memory. A ghost limb aching for a body part that was gone.
I repeated that to myself as I got the second button lined up, and I almost had myself convinced. Then the room tilted again.
It wasn't dramatic. The floor didn't rush up at me. The world around me just leaned, slow and enormous, like a ship taking water. The cold in my chest gathered itself into a fist and squeezed, and my heart did the same thing it had done at the bar. It beat, and waited, and didn't beat again.
One second. Two. Three.
I went down as black shadows filled my vision.
I came back to the sound of my own name, with no idea how long I'd been gone.
Talin was on her knees in front of me, her long, dark hair dripping onto her shoulders.
She had a towel wrapped around her and clutched at her chest with one white-knuckled hand, self-conscious even in an emergency.
She had my face in the other, and she was saying my name over and over in a voice raw with panic.
"Elias. Elias, look at me. Look at me, you stubborn — Elias!"
"'M fine," I said. It came out slurred. Wrong. "Slipped."
"You didn't slip." Her thumb was moving on my cheek, hard, like she could rub the color back into me. Her eyes were huge and wet and furious. "Your heart, Elias. I felt it stop. Again! I felt it! Don't you dare tell me you slipped."
I wanted to tell her something that would put the fear back in its box.
I was good at that, at giving her the calm she needed so she could stop carrying all the shit she worried about and let me carry it instead.
That was how I loved her. In small precise deliveries of steadiness, in kissed scars and knelt-down worship and locks checked twice so she never had to lie awake wondering.
I opened my mouth to hand her a piece of that steadiness now.
Nothing came out but a breath, and the breath was cold.
Something crossed her face then, some final thing giving way, and she was on her feet and gone, the bedroom door banging against the wall, her bare feet slapping the hall floor and the stairs, her voice echoing through the house.
"Killian!"
I sat slumped against the side of the bed where she'd left me and I thought, with the strange floating clarity of a man watching himself from where I floated on the ceiling, I've frightened her. I need to fix this. And then I thought about getting up to go after her and my body laughed at me.
Footsteps were on the stairs. More than one set. The house was waking around me, doors opening and closing and the low urgent hum of people who loved each other and were badly frightened.
Killian came through the door first, and a jolt of real fear went through me at the sight of him. Alex and Kenya were right behind him.
I'd known this male for a hundred and sixty years.
He'd found me in the mud with my chest laid open and given me his blood and his protection and a place in the world when the world I'd bled for had thrown me away.
In all that time I had seen him grieve, seen him rage, seen him carry this coven through a dozen kinds of hell with a level stare and a straight spine, because Killian was the one with the answers.
Killian was the shore you swam for. I'd built part of my own steadiness out of watching his.
But the man who dropped to his knees in front of me now had no answers at all. And that scared the living fuck out of me.
His hands hovered over me, going first to my shoulder, my chest, my face, hunting for an injury he could fix.
"Elias. Elias, talk to me. What do ye need?
Tell me what ye need and it's yours, I don't — " His accent had gone thick, the way it did when everything was out of his control and his emotions got the best of him.
"I don't know what this is. I don't know how to —"
He didn't finish. He didn't have to. There was nothing he could do and we both knew it. I felt a terrible tenderness for him even as the room grayed at the edges, because I knew exactly what that helplessness cost. It was the same helplessness I'd been drowning in for days.
"Move." Dae's voice, from the direction of the doorway.
He crossed the room so fast I only felt a shift in the air and then he was suddenly kneeling beside me. I watched his face do that thing it did when he was looking past what everyone else saw. Watched it go still and careful as his dark eyes unfocused.
All this seriousness from him made me extremely uncomfortable. If I could get up off the floor, I would've walked right out of that room. Dae was the one I could count on to wrap everything he felt in a joke, but there was no joking in him now.
"It's worse," he said quietly. "It's a lot worse than last night. The color's almost gone completely."
"What did you say?" Talin was back, having just caught up to the vampires.
I tore my eyes from Dae's face to find her and breathed in her scent, so much stronger now with her in the room.
She was slipping one of my shirts over the towel.
It hung off one of her bare shoulders, and she managed to mostly button it with shaking hands as she looked between the three of us with wild eyes.
"What does that mean, the color's gone?"
Dae's eyes never strayed from me. He remained crouched in front of me, eye to eye, and when he spoke it was slow and flat and straight up, because facts were the only language he knew I'd take.
"Elias. You need her blood. Now, or your heart stops and it doesn't start again."
And even then — gods help me, even then, with the cold climbing up my throat and the room going soft and dark at the corners and my mate on her knees begging me with her whole terrified body — even then the wall held.
"You don't know that." My voice was a rasp. "I'm not…I'm not a vampire, Dae. I don't feed. I got out. I got out."
Because that was the whole of it, wasn't it, and I was too far gone to keep it to myself anymore.
I'd gotten out. I'd spent a hundred and sixty years as little more than a parasite, cut off from sunlight and spicy mustard and the ordinary fucking business of being alive, and I'd grieved that man I used to be for so long I'd forgotten his face.
Forgotten what it was like to be human and accepted my fate.
And then the djinn had burned the vampire out of me and handed him back. Given me a heartbeat and the sunrise.