Blood Reaction Saga (Book 2): Blood Distraction

by Atha, DL

  Levi had picked up another log. “I should run you through with this one.”

  My mouth opened to deliver harsh words, but luckily, I realized how uncaring I’d sounded. Levi had his own story, and I’d not taken the time to read it. “I didn’t mean for it to sound like that,” I started.

  “You didn’t mean to sound like a selfish bitch? You think I could have possibly forgotten the smell of my wife’s rotting body? Or how light my son’s corpse was when I laid him on my wife’s chest in a shallow, unmarked grave?”

  I tried to find any other place to look than at him. “Of course not,” I answered.

  There was another flurry of embers as he slung the wood in the fireplace. “Don’t you look away from me, you little coward.” Swallowing hard, I met his gaze again. I couldn’t help but be relieved that, at the moment, he didn’t have any more sticks of wood.

  “They didn’t even get a decent funeral. The only commemoration my family had was the sea of bloody tears I cried over their bones. And you dare to say I have forgotten?”

  I stammered, looking for words, ashamed of what I’d said. “Look, that was insensitive, and I’m sorry, but how, after losing your own family, can you just tell me to leave mine?”

  “Because all you have to do is leave them. I’m not asking for anything more. I’m not asking you to watch them die,” Levi answered.

  My answer came easily, without thought. “You know I can’t do that.”

  His shoulders slumped forward as he sighed heavily and he nodded his head. “I know you can’t, and that’s why I should free you of your human attachments. I should do that for you,” Levi answered. He’d quit looking at me and was staring out the front door instead. It framed him against the darkness. “A good creator does this for his newly made. I should rid you of those who have that hold over you. It’s the duty of the maker, and it falls to me now.”

  I still had a piece of kindling in my hand. The small stick of wood wasn’t long, but it was long enough to reach the heart and it was strong enough to do it. Levi’s back was a very broad target, and wasn’t he bringing it on himself? The difficulty would be slipping the wooden dagger through the ribs of the thorax from behind. If I missed, I was dead. Truly dead. And if I succeeded, could I live with what I’d done? A coward’s attack from behind. At least when I’d staked Asa, I’d had the decency to do it to his face.

  “Never raise hand against your maker,” Levi had said. I thought of every reason I shouldn’t do this. Freely, he’d offered his blood to me, and I’d taken it. He’d offered protection, and I’d accepted. But what choice do I have? I questioned myself. I never asked for any of this. Levi was to blame for talking about my family this way. I shifted the wood in my hand, arranged it for a down to up blow. My thrust would have more strength that way. My fingers curled around the width of the wood.

  Levi was still looking out the door, oblivious to my murderous thoughts. His stance was relaxed, one hand on his hip, the other resting on the doorframe. Only his hair moved in the wind. Why is he making this so easy?

  “Never raise hand against your maker.” His words echoed in my mind. I thought of our earlier lovemaking. I could still feel the high of his blood in my veins. I thought of his hands on me. And his teeth. And I felt like a traitor. I’d been many things in my life, but a coward hadn’t been one of them. I flipped the stick up, balanced it in the palm of my hand for a moment and then flung it into the fire. My dreams of freedom evaporated up the chimney with a shower of sparks. There was only one thing more important to being with my family, and that was being someone who deserved to be.

  “Through my possession, Annalice, and through my blood, you will be made whole,” Levi said, turning towards me. Maybe he’d known I was poised to end him and maybe he hadn’t. I couldn’t be sure.

  “I have no clue what that means,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” he said. “Except that I have to find a way to make you functional. And I’d like to find a way that doesn’t make you hate me.”

  “Then threatening to kill my family is definitely a poor way to make me whole. And I’d do far more than just hate you,” I said. “I know that. So their blood won’t be on my hands. I give you my word.”

  Relief made me smile. I reached for him and started to answer, but he held up a hand.

  “Do not underestimate the words of the bond. Through my possession, you will be made whole. You are mine, Annalice. Every last piece of you, and you’ll do what I say. And I say that we’re leaving here. I’ll give you a day to say your good‐byes and wrap stuff up, but then we’re gone.”

  My back stiffened without thinking about it. Nothing made my hackles rise like being told I had to do something. “And if I don’t agree?” I asked.

  Levi leaned towards me. “Then I’ll stake you myself. You see, the rule is never raise hand against your maker. Not the other way around, and I will not leave you here alone and ungoverned.”

  “I don’t need a governor,” I hissed.

  “No, you need a teacher, and they are one and the same.”

  I studied his eyes. They were harsh, I thought at first, but finally decided that determined was the more accurate description. He’d made up his mind. “All I want is a life with my family. It doesn’t seem that I’m asking for the world,” I said.

  “And all I’m asking is that you put a little distance between you and them for now. I’m not saying I’m not willing to work through this, or that I’m swearing them off forever. But this is uncharted territory for me, a departure from everything I’ve been taught. You can never have the life you had before Asa.”

  I looked away before he saw the red tears that I couldn’t contain. “None of this is my fault,” I said again.

  “You sound like a broken record. When are you going to realize that some of this is your fault?”

  The tears evaporated in a cloud of rage. “My fault? How the hell do you figure that?”

  “You should have never tried to stay around. You talk about loving your daughter and saving your family, but all I see is selfishness. You put them at great risk hanging around here after you turned. You were a wreck when I found you, and you’re lucky you hadn’t killed half the county, including your daughter.”

  “I could never hurt her,” I answered back.

  “That is called arrogance,” he said. “The only thing that saved your daughter was your mother and her very large dollop of common sense. You had nothing to do with it. And there’s more than one way to hurt someone. Like Rumsfield, by the way. You certainly ruined him.”

  “It’s not fair.” The words came out hopeless and nearly mute. Only once in this entire deal had I bemoaned my fate. Asa had once asked me what I was thinking, and I’d told him that knowing he was going to live while I died made me sick. He’d elegantly told me, “It is what it is, Annalice,” and he’d been right.

  Some things just are and there is no equality or fairness to it at all. None of those truths changed the fact that it was happening. Like the eighteen‐year‐old with breast cancer that I’d cared for several years back. One in a million chance of it happening, and yet it had still happened. She hadn’t lived enough to have a serious boyfriend or choose a career. She never saw her first day of college or had her own place. She didn’t deserve it, but that didn’t stop her from dying, a cancer‐starved girl hugging a teddy bear in a hospital bed. Not one ounce of her suffering had been fair.

  She hadn’t even been angry. I remember that about her. She had begged a god that didn’t listen for more time, and when the time didn’t materialize, she’d accepted the fact, chalking it up to some sort of greater good or a plan she couldn’t understand but was certain it was for the best. That’s called faith, and I was flat busted of it. The exact opposite of my patient, actually, because I was more than faithless. I was pissed.

  “I never asked to be anything more than I already was. I never asked for immortality,” I stated.

  “And neither does the human ask to be bo
rn,” he answered. “That’s not the same thing. Life is a host of opportunities when you’re human. And when you die, your life is gone. Just gone. You don’t have to watch it go on from the sidelines. I lost everything to Asa. My child, my mom. My soul, maybe, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve lost that too.”

  Levi reached for me. “Why would you say that? No one is ever doomed.”

  “Asa said we were doomed to hell because of what we were.” Levi laughed darkly. “What did Asa know of religion?”

  “Maybe more than I give him credit for. But I’m facing hell right now, right here. It just doesn’t have red flames.” I said.

  Levi sat down beside me on the hearth. “Doesn’t make it burn any less,” he said. “Or any less real.”

  “Are we doomed, Levi? I told Asa that God wouldn’t hold him accountable for something he didn’t control. Because Asa honestly didn’t choose this. He said I didn’t know God. Maybe he was right.”

  He folded one hand, warmed by the fire, over mine. The sensation was almost human. “You feel doomed, don’t you? Because you did choose this. You could have let Asa kill you, and you didn’t.”

  I nodded. “I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice at the time.

  Death didn’t seem a fair deal, but now neither does living like this. Maybe I’d have been better off dead like Mom said. I don’t want to second‐guess myself or to spend multiple lifetimes asking what if. But what have I gained? I’m supposed to be strong, and I’ve been strong, but right now, I’m angry. At everyone really. Asa, my mother, Rumsfield, myself. Every life lesson I’ve ever been taught tells me to stay strong and fight back. But maybe there’s a time when fighting is the wrong thing to do and choosing death is the right choice.”

  He wrapped an arm around me for support. I guess I looked like someone who needed a shoulder to cry on. “And you’re angry at God. You don’t want to say it, but I can hear it in between the lines.”

  He had me there. “Humans have so many more options. I had so many more options, and as long as you’re human, you can turn back. Now I feel like I’m on a road of inevitability, and it’s not fair.”

  “Do they?” he asked. “If, before you were born, you could have been given the option of life or nothingness. What would you have chosen?”

  I turned toward him. “Are you serious?” “Answer the question.”

  “Life obviously.”

  “Without a doubt?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Because with life comes the reckoning at the end. Paradise requires a price of faith, devotion, and love. I know of no religion that lets you in scot‐free. So once you make that decision of life, there is no guarantee. Still ready to take the gamble?”

  I shrugged confidently. “Why wouldn’t I? Except of course that I might run into an Asa. But assuming that wouldn’t happen, why wouldn’t I accept the challenge?”

  “And now let me also warn you that you’re going to be born with a host of weaknesses. Maybe you’re born with an addiction problem or perhaps, even worse, a doubting personality. Maybe genetically, you’re the kind of person that simply can’t believe. Maybe you question everything, and it’s just who you are. You spend your entire life questioning God’s existence and in the end can’t muster the belief. So you’re doomed to hell because of a character flaw that God gave you. How fair is that? Would you still want to be born, knowing you’re a doubter? Would you still take the gamble?”

  I wasn’t so confident anymore. I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again.

  “So you see, humans don’t have any choice either. We are all born, at least the first time, without consent into circumstances that are out of our control. At least this birth you accepted of your own free will. Make the most of it. Don’t spend the entirety of your second life looking back.”

  The tears had begun at the mention of looking back. They streamed cool and red down my face. Looking back is all I’d been doing. I turned away, embarrassed at their color. “How do I not?” He reached for me, running a hand through my hair. “You learn through the years how to look back and touch only those fragments of memories you hold the most valuable. You bury them under layers of time. The barbs aren’t as sharp that way, and the hurt is a little less when you prick yourself on them. The memories of the ones you have lost lose their focus, and when you look back, they are more golden and you can enjoy them again.”

  “Everything hurts now. Everything brings a memory. Every place another recollection of my former life that’s still there. Of my family that’s still there. And I keep thinking that it’s all in my grasp, but the more I reach for it, the more everything slips through my fingers.”

  “It all fades. Everything that hurts you now will fade. Not today or even in a year, but a human lifetime from now, and you’ll start to understand.”

  Considering a lifetime of pain seemed pointless. I couldn’t even see how I’d get past next week. But Levi was right. I’d been holding so tight to the idea of my daughter that I’d forgotten to consider my actual daughter. She needed stability, and right now, the combination of Levi and me were the antithesis of that. She needed a mother. Just a mother. I could see that now.

  I wiped my tears away, resolute that they’d be the last for a while. “Give me a couple days to get things wrapped up. I’ve got some things to do. Sign my accounts and property over to Mom. Try to come up with a way to say good‐bye to Ellie. Assuming there is any way Mom will let me near her. God, I have no idea how that’s going to go.”

  “You have twenty‐four hours from the coming sunset. We’ll leave this camp then and head north. Don’t make me look for you, Annalice. I’m resolute about my decision, that this is the right thing for you. For the both of us. And don’t think your tears have softened me.”

  Chapter 28

  Inside the hearth, the fire was cracking and popping. As a human, I’d loved fire. As a vampire, it was divine. At least to look at. Oranges and reds intertwined with blues and greens and colors that I’d never seen glowed on the water-stained walls of the cabin. Those same colors glinted in the residual tears on my cheeks and reflected back into my own eyes so that everything was cast in burnt orange and deep reds.

  Just as the addition of people can rejuvenate an old house back into a home, fire had transformed this ramshackle cabin into some shade of its former self. The walls lost their chill, and the smell of a thousand long‐past fires filled the air with their homey scents. Levi had pushed the door as far shut as it would go, warming the interior by at least ten degrees. Cold didn’t bother me, but Levi was right. The fire was nice and the warmer air made me feel, I guess for lack of a better word, more human. “Let me take the pain away. At least for a while.” Levi moved towards me, his pale skin cast golden by the fire.

  I shook my head. I knew what he wanted. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want the same thing. Being wrapped in his arms with his pheromones twisting through my bloodstream was intoxicating and for an hour or so, I’d have no pain.

  “I can’t spare the blood and neither can you.”

  “I know how to keep you fed, Annie. I promised you protection.”

  Flames lit in my belly like a match had been struck. I was hungry. But wasn’t I always? And why should I resist? He’d spread a couple of blankets on the hardwood floor in front of the fireplace, and they looked very inviting. As did Levi’s full red lips. He must have drunk again on the way home from the hospital and so had plenty to give me. How had I not noticed the change in his skin when now it was all I could think about?

  I crossed the short floor space between us, encircling his chest with my arms, my legs clasping around his waist. There was no hesitation as I bit deep into his neck and found the wellspring of still‐warm blood. It spurted thick and salty into my mouth.

  Levi moaned hard, his hands kneading my back as I drank deeply. He didn’t seem to care how much I took, just stood, his erection hard against my belly while I took so much from him.

  Finally, I pulle
d back and kissed him full on the mouth, my lips staining his even redder than before. “I want your bite,” I said. “I want to feel what you’re wanting.”

  My legs still locked around his waist, he let go of my back to pull my head to one side and brushed my hair away with the other. It is risky to expose your jugular like that, and for a vampire it was like saying, “I’m open. You own me. Do with me what you want.” It was dangerous. Levi had warned me about it.

  But I held the submissive position, feeling next to naked, until I felt the sharp hot pain of his teeth. I closed my eyes as his poison spread through my body. He left a line of small bites down the side of my neck and onto my shoulder. He wasn’t drinking, just fanning the fountains of lust that had welled up in the pit of my belly with his touch.

  Pulling away, Levi smiled, his lips parting to show pared fangs, and I caught my breath. God, he was beautiful. And I mean really beautiful. Like in an “I would gladly join your harem and screw you senseless” kind of beautiful.

  “I’m going to make you realize tonight how much I own you,” he whispered. The meaning in his words sent a cold chill down my spine, and I shivered in anticipation. “Take your clothes off. I don’t trust myself to not rip them off.”

  I unzipped my boots, tossing them into the corner, and continued until I was standing naked in front of him. Behind me the fire roared, a hollow buzzing sound that reminded me of all the times as a human I’d been put on the spot and could hear the blood pumping through my ears, and I felt that way now as Levi’s eyes swept across me. I was close enough to the fire that the flames were nearly painful on my backside, my skin lit up golden red in the firelight.

  “Be careful, Annalice. Vampires burn you know,” Levi said, pulling me towards him.

  I’m pretty sure it was double speak. Either way, I didn’t need him to tell me vampires could burn. My insides were a hot mess. His pheromones were raging through me, but his desires tonight weren’t the urgent ones of earlier in the evening. This was more of a slow, persistent burn, and at the edges I caught the undertones of ownership and jealousy. This was the kind of lust that begins after the first tensions have been released; the frustration has died away and what’s rekindled has been smoldering longer. He wanted me in a way I hadn’t realized before. This wasn’t just about my family or what was best for me; it wasn’t sadistic either, like Asa. There was some loneliness here and a need to find something to make the everyday mean something again. And possession. I could taste that clearly.