“Peter.” I sat down on the bed, thankful for the bit of privacy.
“You found him?” Jack shouted incredulously. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why are you still there? When are you coming home? Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”
“I’m fine, he’s fine.” I was tempted to say that Ezra was fine, but at that moment, I didn’t know if that was true. “We just found him last night. He needed to rest, and now we’re getting some things sorted out. We should be leaving soon.”
“What things sorted out?” Jack asked. “Why don’t you just get on the next flight out of there?”
“Peter’s still in pretty bad shape. He needs some more time to recuperate. He’s had a rough go of it here.”
“I thought that was the whole idea. That’s why he went there.” Jack tried to keep the edge to his voice, but it faded a bit. As angry as he was with Peter, he wasn’t a hateful guy.
“We’ll be home soon. You don’t need to worry anymore.” That actually hurt to say. I knew there was still a good chance we wouldn’t make it out alive, but I couldn’t tell Jack that. So I lied, and tears welled in my eyes.
“You better be,” Jack said. “Things are going crazy around here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Your brother and Bobby.”
“Who’s Bobby?”
“He’s… I don’t know. You’ll have to make Milo explain when you get back,” Jack answered vaguely. “All I know for sure is that he’s around all the time now.”
“All the time?” I asked. “I’ve only been gone for like ten days!”
“It’s been a pretty wild ten days around here,” Jack said. “And Bobby showed up like the day after you left. So yeah. It’s been eventful.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ll see when you get home,” Jack said. “It’ll give you more of an incentive to get here quicker. As if I weren’t incentive enough.”
“No, you’re definitely enough,” I laughed sadly. Laughing at his silly jokes made me want to sob.
After I hung up, I knocked on the bathroom door to let Peter know the coast was clear, and he came out a minute later. He was much more subdued, so we said very little to each other.
I showered and got dressed, and after that, there wasn’t much else to do. Peter lay on the bed with his fingers laced behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. I paced the room and frequently peeked out of the curtains.
We just waited for Ezra to return.
Sun filtered around the edges of the curtains, and that scared the hell out of me. The lycan were even more strict about their nocturnal habits than we were, so the odds of them continuing a discussion into the daylight didn’t seem likely. If Ezra weren’t back soon, he probably wasn’t coming back.
“He’s still not here.” I peered out the curtain, letting the warm morning light stream in, burning my overly sensitive retina, and then shut it. I looked behind me, where Peter laid immobile, the same way he had all night. “Peter?”
“I’m aware that he’s not here, Alice.”
“Don’t you think we should do something?” I glowered down at him. Lying in bed did not seem like the right answer for this situation.
“I’m thinking.” He closed his eyes, as if that could block out my voice.
“You’ve been thinking all day! We knew that Ezra might not come back, and he’s obviously not going-”
“I have been thinking, Alice!”
“Well… you should let me in on it!” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I could help!”
“You mean like pointing out the obvious and peeking out the curtain?” He pushed himself up into the sitting position, letting his legs dangle off the edge of the bed.
“I don’t know what else to do!” I felt powerless and on the verge of tears, and I didn’t like it at all. I took a deep breath, and pushing a strand of hair behind my ears, I decided to start over. “What did you come up with?”
“Nothing useful. I just can’t see a way around anything.” He sighed, then muttered to himself. “I suppose that’s why he brought you.”
“What are you talking about?” I stiffened, as if he claimed something derogatory.
“Ezra brought you with because he knew how utterly useless you would be,” Peter explained. “And I’ve been going back and forth between it all day long, wondering what I would finally do when it came down to it.”
“What?” I asked, filled with an aching sense of uselessness.
“If I go after Ezra, and I bring you along, you’ll get killed. If I leave you here, they’ll follow my scent back, and you’ll get killed. If I try to put you on a plane to get out of here, you’ll probably do something horrible in bloodlust, and get yourself killed. There’s nothing I can do except stay here and baby-sit you!” Peter growled.
“I don’t…” I started to stumble out some kind of protest about needing a baby-sitter, but everything he said was true. After the initial sting of that wore off, I thought of something even stranger, especially given the way that Peter talked to me. “What do you even care if I die? So what? Let’s just go out there and give them hell.”
“Like you could really give them hell,” he laughed hollowly. “You’d just slow me down.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “What you’re saying … or thinking… If Ezra isn’t coming back and they’re only going to come after us… Why don’t you just go? I don’t want to slow down your fight. But it’s better than the both of us waiting here to die.”
His expression changed instantly into something foreign. It took me a minute to realize that it resembled concern for me. Even when we had been bonded, he’d never looked at me like that.
“That’s an idiotic plan,” he shook his head.
“That’s pretty much what your plan is,” I said.
“I’m not gonna just leave you here.”
“But you’re saying they’ll kill me no matter what. At least this way you can get in a few good punches, take out some of the bastards that-” I stopped myself before I said anything about Ezra being dead. It was too terrifying to say aloud.
“You’d be completely unprotected. You wouldn’t even stand a chance,” he shook his head again, sounding tired of the conversation, and stood up.
“So what? You almost killed me once before and now you’re suddenly my body guard?” I wrinkled my nose at his hypocrisy.
“Oh, god dammit!” Peter rolled his eyes. “I’m so sick of having that thrown in my face! I did that because I loved you, Alice!” He immediately regretted saying that and stared off anywhere but at me.
“Yeah, cause that’s a healthy way to express love! By killing another person!” I was purposely pushing his buttons. If the only chance at a rescue mission was Peter going off without me, then I had to piss him off enough to leave me.
“I wasn’t trying to kill you! I was trying to kill me!” He rubbed his eyes, looking as if he’d said too much and not knowing how to take it back. “Jack was in the house. I knew he was tuned in to your heart. When I grabbed you in the kitchen, he came flying in to save you. I thought if he found me, draining the life from you, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.” Tiredly, he exhaled. “I knew he was a better match for you than I was, and I didn’t see any other way out.”
I was too stunned to say anything. I’d always suspected Peter hated me. But he loved me so much, he’d been planning to die for my happiness. My heart thumped dully in my chest, and I tried to think of something say to him.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Peter snapped when he finally met my eyes again. “I don’t know why it’s so shocking that I wouldn’t want you to die. Do you really think Ezra would be so willing to sacrifice himself for me if I was such a psychopath?”
“Peter, I am so sorry,” I whispered, unable to muster the full strength of my voice.
“Stop!” Peter repeated. “Ezra is the one out there! We need to be worrying about him, not us! Because there isn’t even an ‘us’ to worry about!”
“You’re right.” I shook my head, clearing it of any confused thoughts about Peter.
It was hard, though. It changed the way I thought about everything. All the time I had been messing around with Jack, falling in love with him, the one thing that had given me the green light was that Peter had tried to kill me.
But when I thought about it as his own suicide attempt, that he had loved me so much he had been willing to give me up... We had been bound together, and he had truly loved me, but I had run off with his brother instead.
Peter didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I’m not sure if he was really trying to come up with another plan, but I certainly couldn’t. Part of me was really trying to, but I felt like all the wind had been knocked out of me.
The door to the hotel room thudded softly, interrupting my thoughts. Not a knock exactly, but more like something falling into it. I looked to Peter, his eyes already fixed on the door. He moved in front of me, blocking me in case the lycan announced their entrance.
When the door slowly swung open, we were greeted by something almost as bad.
- 10 –
Ezra leaned on the doorframe, looking worse than I could ever imagine him being. His clothes, the same black sweater and jeans he had worn the night before, were torn and dirty. His skin was gaunt and pale. He staggered into the room and Peter rushed to him.
Bite marks covered his neck and wrists. The lycan territory was nearly an hour drive away, plenty of time for a vampire to heal, but his bites were red and swollen. Ezra had been so drained he didn’t have the strength to heal.
“He needs to feed,” Peter told me and attempted to hand Ezra off to me. He hurried to the bathroom to get blood for Ezra, leaving me alone to struggle with the situation.
I’d been frozen in shock, but I put my arm around Ezra and helped him on the bed. His deep brown eyes were glassy. I’d never seen a vampire look so ill before. It had never even occurred to me that they could even look like this, especially Ezra.
When I sat down next to him on the bed, he collapsed back on the bed and rested his head on my lap. He gripped my thigh with a painful desperation, like he needed to hang onto something.
“I brought blood,” Peter said when he walked back into the room. He looked down at Ezra, clinging onto me, and pressed his lips into a thin line.
“I can’t eat. Not right now.” Ezra grimaced, as if he was in too much pain to even think of eating.
I brushed his hair from his forehead, his skin feeling clammy. After blood loss, I’d think eating would be the only thing that would make him feel better. Then it dawned on me what was going on.
The lycan had fed on him. That was something vampires never let other vampires do, unless they were lovers. There was something sexual about the exchanging of blood, but it was more than that.
When Jack bit me, I felt him flow through me, and his love and kindness consumed me. Ezra had been bitten by a pack of rabid monsters. All their pain and rage burned through him now. Physically and emotionally, they drained him.
Ezra made a pained sound but fought to suppress it. He gripped me so tightly, that had I been human, he would’ve broken bones and ruptured organs. Despite his weakness, his muscles felt like concrete underneath my hands. He tensed so tightly, his body was completely rigid, and his legs curled up a bit, closer to me.
“My blood…” Ezra forced a few words, but he barely managed that.
“Just rest. We don’t need to talk.” I tried to reassure him, running my fingers through his blond hair.
“No,” Ezra said, his voice tight and weak. “My blood for your blood. It’s over. We need to get out of here. Peter, can you…”
“I’ll make all the arrangements,” Peter said when Ezra trailed off. He tried to keep his composure as much as possible, but his eyes burned. It killed him knowing Ezra had exchanged his own blood for Peter’s life.
After a moment of staring remorsefully at him, Peter went into action. He got his cell phone and started making calls, most of which I couldn’t understand because they were in Finnish.
“I shouldn’t be burdening you with this,” Ezra said and tried moving away from me.
“No, you’re okay,” I insisted. “Don’t worry.”
“No. I …” Ezra trailed off again, and a spasm went over his body. He gripped even tighter and I could barely breathe. It passed, and he relaxed, as much as he could. “I’m sorry.”
“Ezra. It’s okay.”
When Peter got off the phone, he watched Ezra for a moment as he struggled to keep his breaths even. I could feel Ezra biting back screams, and I looked to Peter for help, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“The best thing for him to do is rest,” Peter said. “The feelings will fade, with time. Our flight leaves in seven hours. He can get some rest and eat, and then he ought to feel good enough to at least make it home.”
Peter packed our things and got us ready to go. I felt like I should help him, but I didn’t want to leave Ezra alone. Eventually, Peter suggested we get some sleep. Ezra went in and out of consciousness. I managed to doze off a little bit, but Ezra woke me frequently with moaning or writhing.
When Peter woke me in the evening, Ezra was still tangled up with me, but the fierceness in his grip had disappeared. Peter helped him to the bathroom to eat and get cleaned up, and I got up to stretch. My whole body ached terribly from the way he had held me.
Just comforting Ezra had been exhausting, and I couldn’t fathom what he was going through. I stood next to the bed, feeling more emotionally drained, and Peter came out of the bathroom to give Ezra privacy. He looked at me with concern, but I didn’t deserve any, so I busied myself with straightening up the room.
“Alice.” Peter placed his hand on my arm, stopping me. “How are you holding up?”
“Better than Ezra,” I gave a hollow laugh.
I looked up at him, and I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Unwanted tears streamed down my cheeks, and roughly, he pulled me into his arms. Burying my face in his shirt, I sobbed hard.
“Thanks. And sorry,” I mumbled when I got myself under control and pull away from him. He kept his hand on my arm, as if severing contact would reduce me to tears.
“Don’t worry about it. I saw how hard that was on you,” Peter said.
“He’s not even crying.” I wiped the tears from my face and hated myself for being a baby.
“It’s different for him. He’s been through this before, although I don’t think it’s ever been this bad.” His eyes got hard, no doubt thinking about how this was his fault.
“What do you mean he’s been through this before?” I asked.
“That’s what his old ‘master,’ Willem, used to do and he was a bad, bad man.” He stared off into space. “But Willem was just one man, not a pack of sadists. I’ve been bit before, by something less than them, and it’s…”
“What?” I pressed when Peter trailed off into silence.
“My blood burned in my veins. My body tried to reject it, and I was so drained of blood already. And on top of the physical pain, which is excruciating, it gives you emotions. It makes you want things you don’t want. You feel disgusting and ….” He shook his head, unwilling to elaborate further. “It’s torture, absolutely.”
“Will he be okay?” I asked.
Ezra came out of the bathroom, changing our attention. He wore fresh clothes, and the marks on his neck and wrist had finally healed. His skin was still pale and his expression grave, but he moved around okay.
He barely said anything to either of us on the way to the airport. I saw how rigid he was, and he struggled to hold back what pain was left. On the plane, he mumbled several apologies to me, all of which I brushed off. I had barely done anything for him, and it was nothing that he wouldn’t do for me.
This made me gain even more respect for him. Whatever made him feel this bad would’ve killed anybody else.
On the rest of the flight back to America, he kept his eyes shut tightly an
d his lips pressed together. I couldn’t stop staring at him, terrified he would fall apart or die if I did.
- 11 –
By the time we landed in Minneapolis, Ezra returned to something that resembled his normal self. A very subdued version, but he could talk and walk without grimacing. Thanks to my preoccupation with him, I hadn’t texted anyone to let them know that we were here. We took a cab home, deciding a surprise return was better at this point.
As soon as the plane had touched down, I felt a pull in my heart. After days and days of a dull ache at being away from Jack, it screamed with pleasure, knowing how close he was. The cab had barely stopped at the house when I jumped out .
I dashed through the front door, and Jack rounded the corner to the entryway, his blue eyes wide. He broke out in a gigantic smile, and I dove into his arms and wrapped my arms around his neck.
I could feel his heart beating through my chest, and that was the connection I had been so sorely missing. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, I felt complete and contended again. Squeezing my eyes shut on happy tears, I wanted to stay that way forever.
Jack’s muscles tensed around me, and I realized Peter walked in the house. I could hear Mae and Ezra talking, but Peter didn’t say a word.
As close as Jack was, I didn’t feel close enough. I wanted to cover him in kisses and… and well, a lot more than that. Instead, I would have to untangle myself with Jack and act in a civil manner around people. I opened my eyes and looked over Jack’s shoulder to a different problem. Standing behind Jack were my brother Milo and some kid I had never seen before, looking curiously at us.
I use the term “kid” loosely. He looked older than me, with black hair falling across his forehead and almost an olive skin tone. Shorter than even Milo had been as a human, he had tattoos visible on his chest below the low v-neck of his shirt and all down his arms. If I hadn’t been so distracted in my excitement over Jack I would’ve noticed him sooner.
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