by Roh Morgon
Nicolas was right. The rapture of the blood was magnified by experiencing it through each other. My every mouthful was its own wave of euphoria, enhanced by feeling Nicolas’s pleasure at the same time. The humans, gasping in ecstasy, seemed to be caught up in our sharing as well. As they passed out, I drifted into ruby-colored rhapsody, only vaguely aware when Nicolas gathered me up and carried me from the room.
He gently places me in his bed and undresses me, then a moment later climbs in. I snuggle against his blood-warmed skin and fade off again into the red fog, embraced inside and out by Nicolas and his unfathomable love for me.
SUNDAY
CHAPTER 60
I wake slowly, still blood-drugged, and realize Nicolas is still here in bed with me. He’s curled around me much as he was when I passed out, but is now motionless, inert. I feel him take a breath and stir as my awareness returns.
“Nicolas?”
“Hmm?”
“Were you asleep?”
“Something like it.”
“Does that happen very often?”
“No.”
His odd tone catches my attention.
“Ever?”
He hesitates.
“No.”
Oh. Huh.
But before I can ask anything more, he pulls me in closer, and I feel his blood in me start to heat up. Mine responds, and like lightning, he is all over me, nipping and growling. He slices his upper arm, and as I take it, his fangs bury themselves in my throat.
We drown in each other’s blood, and go further than ever before. And we keep taking, and taking, and then I feel a strange flutter in my core, and everything starts to go black.
And then he is shouting and shaking me, and I don’t have the strength to respond, and I feel myself slipping away. He slaps me and jars me back a little, and I fight to stay, but it’s too hard. I feel him pick me up and then hear faint sounds of doors opening and slamming.
Ice cold water stings as it sprays my skin, startling me. He’s rubbing me frantically all over, and through a black haze I see his face contorted in terror, his mouth moving as though speaking. I focus on his wild eyes and try to hold on to them, and slowly the black fades away. My vision starts to clear a little, and I realize that bloodtears, diluted by the water raining over us, are washing down his face. I take a breath and inhale water from the shower spray and cough.
“Sunny?! Sunny?! Are you with me? Sunny?!”
I can finally make out what he’s saying.
“Yeah,” I whisper.
“Oh, thank God.” And he crushes me to him, his body shaking as he sobs.
I fight to reconnect to my senses and slowly become aware that he’s quieted. He holds me tight while the icy shower washes over us.
“You are still with me?” he asks, his voice broken.
“Yeah. What happened? Did we bond?”
All that comes out is a strangled groan.
He takes a breath and tries again.
“No, we did not bond.” He tenses and hugs me tighter to him.
“What happened?”
“I . . .”
A shudder wracks his body.
“I . . . I almost killed you.”
Oh.
I feel strange, like I’m floating in nothingness. There seems to be a war in my body, and for some reason I’m not absorbing Nicolas’s blood. Instead, it feels like my veins have clamped shut, refusing to let his blood in. It weighs heavy in my belly, and his emotions have nowhere to go, no way to travel in my system. So they’re swirling, all the guilt and fear and self-loathing, round and round in my gut, and they’re making me sick. I curl tighter around myself as Nicolas brushes damp hair back from my face. He pulls the bedcovers closer to my chin, then begins his pacing again.
“Are you sure? I have donors waiting in the other room.” The rising anxiety in his voice adds to the churning chaos in my belly.
“Nicolas, please. I need a break. Just for a little while. Please, can you shut off?” I open my eyes to look at him, and he stops his pacing long enough to nod.
I feel him slowly withdraw as he struggles to shut down the flow of emotions. I close my eyes again and find the hunter where she’s defensively crouched, and encourage her to come out. As she surfaces, I grab on to her stillness and hold it tightly.
All emotion, his and mine, abruptly stops, and I take a long deep breath.
But my relief is short-lived as flaming hunger blazes up my throat and scorches my empty veins. I can actually feel them quivering under my skin. My stomach continues to roil and the nausea intensifies. My veins spasm, then spasm again.
I bolt from the bed and into the bathroom, slamming the door.
“Sunny? Sunny!”
“Stay out.”
Bending over the toilet, I heave up all of his blood. I know he can hear me, but I have no choice. Everything in me is telling me to get rid of it, now. That it’s a threat to me. I don’t know how I know this. I just do.
When I’ve thrown up every last drop, I sink to the floor. The inferno of hunger is now raging throughout my helpless body. It’s as bad as when the bear nearly tore away my life.
But I know how to fix it this time. Gritting my teeth, I grip the toilet and force myself to my feet. I stagger to the sink and wash my face, then stumble to the door and open it.
Nicolas is standing right outside, his face a mask of horror.
“Ah Sunny. Please . . . forgive me,” he whispers as he guides me back to the bed.
“I’ll take those donors now.”
CHAPTER 61
The Lamborghini weaves in and out of traffic on the busy highway. I watch as Pikes Peak approaches in the distance and feel grateful for its anchoring presence in the southwestern horizon.
We haven’t spoken much. I’m still lost in the time warp of what happened, and Nicolas is lost in his excruciating guilt. I want to let him back in, because there’s still some of his blood woven in my system from before. But neither of us seems ready. My self-preservation is still too protective, his anguish still too raw.
As the Peak begins to loom over us, I reach out and put my hand on his thigh. A tremor goes through his palm as he grips my fingers.
“Do you need for me to stop at the Club?” he asks, his voice strained.
“No, I should be fine for a while longer. Maybe later tonight.”
It took five donors and everything I had in me not to kill them. And Nicolas still had to help me stop.
I remember how incessant the healing hunger was after the bear attack. Its demands, though strong, are different this time, maybe because there’s no damaged tissue to repair. Yet my system is undergoing some sort of rebuilding. I can feel a strange internal crawling not unlike the sensation of knitting flesh.
I have no idea what kind of effect this latest experience will have on my ever-evolving Change, and I don’t think Nicolas does either. I feel like some sort of lab experiment and can picture the notebook in his head as he records the data of my bizarre life.
The gates open and we pull up the driveway. The forest of creatures is welcoming in the twilight, and I decide a walk among the greenery might feel good.
He parks in front, gets out, and opens my door. His face is taut as he reaches down for me, and I resist the urge to snap at him, to tell him I’m fine and to just leave me alone. I let him help me from the car, then gently pull away from his clinging grasp and look at him.
“Nicolas. Please. I’m all right. You need to take a breath and try to relax. I’m here, and I’m alive, and we have both survived. We will get through this as we have everything else.”
He seems so fragile right now and I don’t really know how to handle it. This is a complete role reversal from our previous crises.
He nods and steps back, then heads up the stairs. He opens the door and holds it, waiting.
“I’ll be in shortly. I’m going to walk in the garden awhile,” I say, trying to sound gentle and strong at the same time.
What
a strange balancing act. Now I know how he feels whenever I’m having some sort of emotional breakdown.
He nods and goes inside.
Crossing the driveway, I walk out into the garden. I wander among the creatures, tucking a stray vine back into place here and there. Pegasus beckons me, and I drift over to him and run my hand over his outstretched wing. Strands of greenery still dangle from where I tore them loose so long ago, and I work to re-weave them back into place.
When I’ve done as much as possible to repair the damage, I take a last look at his shape embracing the sky, then continue my walk through the manicured forest.
I reach what must be the center and come to a dead stop in front of a new topiary sculpture. As I examine it, I realize it is actually two.
Two life-sized leopards.
They’re entwined around one another, and it’s difficult to tell whether their embrace is one of affection, or one of battle.
Tears well up as I wonder when he put them here. They appear to be newly planted, yet their forms are filled and covered with mature vines and leaves. I doubt he had them made—that is not Nicolas’s way. He must have a greenhouse somewhere on the grounds, as they speak of his carefully crafted work.
I touch them gently, noting the details he somehow managed to reproduce with living plants. The talons on the outstretched paws curve to slender points and I can even make out the shape of the pads on the bottoms of their feet. I walk around to the front and stop, stunned by what Nicolas has woven. My throat tightens as I look at their faces.
One is fierce, his mouth gaping, his long fangs poised over the throat of the other. His body is large, almost coarse in its shape, with foliage so dark green it’s nearly black. The other is slender, sleek, and her foliage is variegated, mostly silvery green with darker green spots on the leaves. Her lips appear to be curled, but no fangs are exposed, and her expression seems softer. One lethal paw is inches from his throat, the extended claws sharp and deadly.
Nicolas steps up behind me, and I close my eyes and let the tears fall as he gathers me into his arms. He rests his cheek against my hair and we stand there in the rising moonlight. I stare at the living statues he created of us, and slowly release the stillness I’ve been holding.
I feel him tentatively reach out as my emotions begin to function again. I focus on my feelings for him and welcome his answering warmth, heavily laced with worry and guilt. My sense of him is muted though, and I realize that other than what I threw up this morning, I have not had any of his blood for several days.
He, however, had nearly all of mine, so I need to manage my emotions carefully. I gently take a little bit of the stillness back, hoping to provide some sort of buffer without shutting off the flow entirely.
Some of the tautness drains from his body and I rub his arms, trying to ease him further.
“They’re beautiful,” I say quietly as I look at the cats in the moonlight.
“Yes, they are,” he replies.
Modest as ever. I force a smile and face him.
His expression is unguarded, and I see pain that he is somehow blocking from me. He quickly smoothes his features and brushes the hair back from my face.
“It’s not your fault. We didn’t know,” I say, trying to project reassurance. But I don’t think it’ll do much good. He’s going to eat himself up about this for a long time.
“I should have known. I . . . I did know. But I foolishly thought I could somehow work around it. Your Change seemed so complete I let myself grow complacent. No . . . arrogant. I believed I could somehow circumvent the laws of Chosen nature.” His pain shifts to anger, and the tension mounts again in his blood and in his body.
“And then I tasted your lifespark, your human lifespark, as it started to come apart . . .” His voice breaks as his body shudders.
“But it’s still here, inside me. I can still touch my human part. You did not damage it. Besides, wouldn’t that just have furthered the Change?”
“No. You would have died. Ceased to exist in any life. We do not consume the lifespark of those who are being Changed.”
Oh. He really did almost kill me.
His anger melts back into anguish. I try to cope with his needle-like agony and self-reproach that’s now rushing through my system.
“But I didn’t die. Whatever it is that I got from my . . . Maker . . . protects me somehow. I’m not as fragile as you seem to think.”
He looks at me and touches my jaw.
“No, perhaps not. But there is one thing you are not.” He pauses, takes a breath.
“You are not immortal. You can die.”
Not immortal.
I step back and turn around. I look at the cats immortalized in mortal greenery.
Huh.
I don’t know when I started assuming I was. Maybe from the beginning, when I looked down at the drained body of the dog in my arms. I haven’t aged in the five years since that night. Even when he said I was still part human, I thought I was like him and the other Chosen. Timeless. Like the Peak.
“Then why didn’t I die when I lost my blood from the bear attack? How is that any different?”
“Because your blood drained freely. Your Chosen safeguards maintained enough reserve to protect your lifespark.” He takes another breath and continues.
“It is not the same as having your blood forcibly withdrawn from you.”
You mean having the life sucked out of me.
Not immortal. And he is.
Aging. Able to die. And he is not.
My throat tightens and I walk over to the leopards. I reach out and stroke a fang, then look over at Nicolas. His eyes reflect the horror I feel, but he makes no move toward me.
I close my eyes and focus on the hunter, seeking a little of her calculating coldness while still keeping the connection with Nicolas open. It seems to work and, calmer now, I redirect my attention to something he said a few moments earlier.
“So, if you don’t take the lifespark of someone who is undergoing the Change, how is theirs any different from mine?”
“The lifespark of a Chosen is permanently altered, becoming immortal, when they consume their first lifespark from a human. That is the final moment of their Change.”
When they kill their first human.
And I feel the chasm that’s been lurking between us since this morning open even farther.
We get back from the club just before dawn. It took another four donors to calm down the hunger fires that started building again about midnight. But it went a little better this time. At least I was able to stop on my own.
Nicolas accompanies me upstairs to our bedroom and watches while I undress and get into bed.
“Aren’t you going to join me, even for a little while?” I ask. I’m starting to crave him. The distance he’s been maintaining all night is only making it worse.
He looks at me with sorrow in his eyes, and I feel it in his blood, and he is starting to scare me.
“Nicolas, you have to talk to me. You have to tell me what is going on. We need to work this out together, isn’t that right?”
He nods. “I must make some phone calls and try to get some answers. We will talk when you wake.”
“Promise?” I ask . . . no, I demand.
“Promise.” With a last look at me, he leaves and closes the door.
He is really starting to spook me. I drift off to sleep with knots in my stomach.
június 3., vasámap
My world collapsed today. All my careful planning, all my precise preparation, was undone by my arrogance and lack of control once again. In spite of my own intentions, I went too far. The need to bond with her has been driving me insane, and in a moment of weakness, I gave in to it.
And I nearly killed her—again. But this time it was directly by me, not by some poor dumb beast. This time it was by my lust, my need, my fang.
I will never forgive myself, and I can never trust myself with her again. I have proven time after time that I hav
e little control when I am with her. I know that I will eventually remake her, or worse, kill her, as long as she remains in this shadow-state of a Chosen.
And so I am left with my final Choice—to take away hers, or give her up entirely.
MONDAY
CHAPTER 62
I wake, and he’s sitting in the chair, watching me.
“Come here.” I pull back the covers.
He takes a breath, then gets up and walks over and kneels on the floor. His hand hesitates as he reaches out and touches my face.
“I miss you,” I whisper, clutching his hand to my cheek. “I can feel you fading, and I don’t like it. Please, don’t leave me with this . . . this emptiness that’s starting to grow in me.”
Bloodtears blur my vision as a sob escapes.
He closes his eyes and clenches his jaw. I can feel him nearly vibrating with tension, and I release the last bit of stillness I’ve been holding on to. I focus on my love and worry for him, and can see its visible effects as he catches his breath. I can barely feel his response. My fear of its loss rips through me and then into him.
His eyes open and my pain is reflected in their dark green depths.
He whispers, “I am sorry. Please, only a little.”
My tears spill in disbelief as he unbuttons his sleeve, rolls it up, and offers his forearm. His forearm. Not his chest, or his throat, or anywhere intimate. Shaking my head at his determination to keep distance between us, I pierce his vein and take a small mouthful, waiting to see how my system reacts. I can detect no threat and take more.
The inner conflict in his blood is overwhelming, a swirling chaos of longing and love, guilt and fear. I pause, then take a little more and his out-of-control feelings continue to intensify.
This is almost too much to bear. I reluctantly stop.
I slowly let go of him and roll back down onto the bed. He leans back, pushes his sleeve down, then stands and walks across the room. I get up as alarms go off throughout my body.
