Sacrifice (Crave (Quality))

by Melinda Metz

  Mom continued to run her fingers through Shay’s hair as Shay fed. “You’re home,” she said again and again, soft and sweet as a lullaby.

  Shay closed her eyes, allowing herself to feel safe and relaxed for the first time in days. The sun’s warmth stole into her mind, but it wasn’t a threat this time. More like a warm blanket cuddling her as she drifted off to sleep. Everything was all right. Finally.

  Agony.

  Shay’s eyes snapped open, and she jerked away from her mother. Pure pain—physical, emotional—shot through her, filling her with anguish beyond anything she’d ever known.

  Gabriel. It’s Gabriel’s pain. Our communion is still there, she thought.

  Shay moaned, almost sick with the intensity of the feeling. Gabriel was awash with hopelessness and despair. It felt as if he’d just lost everything in the world he cared about.

  I’ve got to help him, Shay thought.

  But then the sun came up, and she was helpless.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  GABRIEL FLOATED BACK into consciousness. The sun had gone down. He wished he could see it one last time. It would be a better way to die than this, lying here chained in the cellar. He stretched as much as he could with wrists and ankles shackled to the stakes planted deep in the ground.

  Immediately, he searched the communion for Shay. He felt his family’s communion—Millie’s sorrow and panic, and Tamara’s fury and hot anticipation of the ritual that would continue later that night. He felt Luis’s numbness and resignation. But Shay . . . Where was she? Last night, close to dawn, their bond had almost been severed.

  The sensation of Shay slipping away from him had sliced through the pain of his blood being stolen from his body. In that last hour before dawn, he’d fought to keep their communion tight and he’d thought . . . it had felt as if she was trying to keep the communion too.

  That had to be a delusion, something his brain had conjured up to give him comfort. Shay wouldn’t want to be connected with Gabriel. Not now that she knew he was responsible for Sam’s death. She hated him.

  And last night he’d confirmed for himself that his father did too. If it wasn’t hatred, then Ernst would have protested when Gabriel said those words, when he forced himself to say aloud that Ernst hated him. Ernst hadn’t protested. He hadn’t replied at all. It had been like a bomb going off in Gabriel’s chest. His guardian, his mentor, his friend, his father hated him. Gabriel had succumbed to the death sleep with that truth filling every cell of his body.

  They had lived together for four hundred years. Even after everything Ernst had done to him, to Sam, to Shay, Gabriel still wished for his father’s love.

  He continued reaching for Shay through the communion. If what he’d felt from her last night was a delusion—and how could it be anything else?—he wanted it again, a sweet drug to ease him through this night and the next. Then he’d be free, free of guilt and shame, free of having betrayed and being betrayed by others, free of the world. Dead. That was still what he wanted. There was nothing left for him in this life.

  Shay.

  Gabriel drew in a deep breath, relieved. He could feel her, faintly but definitely. Was it his imagination? Could his brain really create this feeling of Shay with such accuracy? Or was it truly her? Gabriel decided to let himself believe he had found her. He focused his entire being on what he could feel from her through their communion.

  She was safe. He savored that emotion. She had found a secure place to undergo the death sleep, and she’d fed recently. Shay was hungry, all new vampires were hungry, but the craving for blood wasn’t tearing at her. She was in control.

  What happened to our communion last night? he wondered. Why did it almost break?

  Gabriel promised himself he’d be vigilant. He had no reason to think that concentrating on her would strengthen their connection. But it certainly couldn’t hurt. His communion with Shay would end forever tomorrow night. While he still had it, though, he wouldn’t let his attention wander even for an instant. He played memories of Shay over and over again in his mind, the way a simple touch of her lips had set his entire body on fire when they first kissed, and that moment when he realized he loved her, just as she was being dragged away from him.

  When he died, his love for Shay would live on. He was sure of it.

  He lived in those memories and in the communion with Shay until the soft sound of footsteps pulled him back to the cellar and the second night of the blood ritual. Gabriel raised his head as much as he could, so he could watch his family return to the circle. Tamara glared back at him, running the tip of her tongue over her lips as if tasting his blood already. Luis kept his eyes straight ahead as he walked over to his position, and Millie didn’t look up from the ground as she took hers. Ernst didn’t avoid Gabriel’s gaze, but his steely eyes told Gabriel nothing of how he felt.

  It doesn’t matter. I know how he feels—he detests me and blames me for Richard’s death. Maybe it was a kindness that Ernst showed so little emotion, a kindness that their communion had been shattered by the hawthorn dart.

  “Tonight we act as one,” Ernst announced. “That is because in all the ways that matter, we are one. Our lives are so tightly bound together that what is good for one is good for the entire family, and that which threatens one, threatens the entire family. Tonight we continue to take the blood, and the life, of Gabriel, who was once family but is now a stranger who brings danger to us all.”

  Gabriel let his head fall back onto the ground. A stranger. He might be many things, including a threat to his family, but he could never be a stranger to those gathered around him, much as they might wish he were.

  “We will again drink in the order of youngest to oldest,” Ernst continued. “You may not be able to withstand as much of the poison blood as you did last night. Take only as much as you are able. This will be the last night you drink deep. Tomorrow night I will finish this, while the rest of you stand witness, until the end. Then together we will take the last drops, sharing the responsibility among us.”

  This time Millie did not wait for Ernst to call her name, although her footsteps were slow and reluctant as she approached Gabriel. His eyes sought hers, but he didn’t try to pick her emotions from the communion. He was concentrating on Shay, only Shay.

  Then, suddenly, he heard Millie moving away, rushing toward Ernst.

  “I can’t do this again,” she cried, her voice quavering. “I can’t!”

  Luis put an arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay. It’ll all be over soon.”

  “We’re all here with you, Millie,” Ernst told her. “I know it’s hard, and that’s why it’s something we do as a family.”

  “Family?” Millie exclaimed bitterly. “Gabriel was right when he said if we were truly a family, we would have accepted Shay.”

  “I don’t want to hear that name,” Ernst warned her.

  Tamara jumped in. “If Gabriel cared about his family the way he should have, he would have fought by Richard’s side, as a brother should.”

  “Richard should have stood by his side, too!” Millie insisted. “That’s what we’re supposed to do. When Gabriel fell in love, we should have shared his joy. Instead, Richard mocked him and hated him for it. We all did.”

  “Millie—,” Ernst began.

  “No! If being a part of this family means vengeance and hatred and anger, then I don’t want to be in this family.”

  Gabriel was shocked by her words, by her empathy and bravery. Millie had done what no one had done for Sam. No one had seen Sam’s side. Every member of the family, none more than Gabriel, had believed Sam’s death was just and necessary.

  There was a clatter as Millie ran up the cellar steps. Out of the corner of his eye, Gabriel saw Luis start after her. “No,” Ernst told him. “I’ll do it.”

  But first he stepped up to Gabriel’s side and stared down at him. “I thought you’d damaged our family as much as was possible. But you continue to destroy us.”

&nb
sp; “Not me. You.” Gabriel wondered why he’d never realized it before. “I brought a new member to our family. Someone who would have made us stronger and better. You turned her away. It’s you who are destroying us, Ernst.”

  Ernst didn’t reply. He signaled for Luis to come and drink, and Luis obeyed.

  He loves me. Gabriel loves me. That’s true. I can feel it in every bone, every inch of skin. I can feel it deep in my heart, and even deeper in his soul. I can’t feel much from him through the communion; Martin’s dose of hawthorn almost ripped it apart. But I can feel Gabriel’s love.

  What do I do with that? He betrayed my father—his own best friend. How many visions did I have of Gabriel with Sam, loving Sam? He thought of Sam as his brother, and still he told Ernst that Sam was going to marry my mom. What did he think Ernst would do? Did he know the punishment for loving a human was death? Because in my vision, Gabriel didn’t seem too surprised. And he helped carry it out—he drank Sam’s blood. He killed him.

  That’s all I need to know, right? Gabriel killed my dad. End of story.

  But I can’t unknow him. He said that to me once. That he had tried to keep from thinking of me as Shay, and to only think of me as “the human girl”—so that he wouldn’t feel anything for me. Because I’m human and he’s supposed to hate humans, all of them. But he had spent time with me, he knew who I really was. And he couldn’t go backward. He couldn’t unknow me.

  And I can’t unknow him. The Gabriel I loved was sensitive and loyal and funny and brave. He suffered a terrible trauma at the hands of human beings, and that’s why he hated them—us. I understand that. And he loves his family more than anything. I get that, too. I can’t help it, I can’t go backward. I fell in love with him. How can I turn off that kind of feeling? No matter what he did in the past, he’s still the guy I knew.

  But still, to kill a person you love? Your own brother?

  It seems unforgivable. Monstrous.

  I guess that is all I need to know. My father would still be alive if it wasn’t for Gabriel. I’d have a father. I’d always have had a father.

  Shay lifted her pen. It felt good to have her actual journal back again. But it wasn’t really helping her figure out her emotions. He loved her. But he killed her father. He loved her. But he killed her father. On and on and on, the same argument marched through her brain.

  She glanced over at her bed. Her mother lay there, sleeping. She’d stayed up with Shay until about three, then finally dropped off. If she was dreaming, the dream had to be nice. Her forehead was smooth, her lips curved into the beginning of a smile. Is she dreaming about Sam? Shay wondered. She hoped so. With all the badness that had happened, at least there was that—Mom had gotten her love back.

  How could Gabriel have thought the love between my mother and father was dangerous to his family?

  I know the answer. I don’t like it, but I know. He thought we were all the same, humans. He thought we were all like those people who slaughtered his family. Ernst thought that too, and so did all the other vampires I saw in Tennessee.

  Well, except maybe Millie.

  But if you think that, then you think any human who knows of the existence of vampires will automatically want to kill you. Gabriel thought my mother would want to kill him. Kill his family. So in a way, he was acting in self-defense.

  He’d never had the chance to know a human, not until me. And then he saw, he really saw, that we aren’t all the same. He changed. He let go of his fear and prejudice. He couldn’t have fallen in love with me if he didn’t.

  A sudden blast of vertigo hit her, and the pen slid out of Shay’s hand. The room spun and dizziness churned through her—dizziness from Gabriel.

  Shay grabbed on to the edge of her desk and dug her fingers into the wood. She forced herself to look at her bedroom and realize that the walls weren’t moving. It wasn’t her feeling. She wasn’t sick and woozy. It was Gabriel.

  “I thought he was getting better,” she murmured. Ever since she woke from the death sleep tonight, she’d felt love coming through their tenuous communion, but not pain or dizziness.

  A jolt of hot agony ripped through her, so strong that it made her gasp. Shay groaned and put her forehead down on the desk, just trying to breathe through the pain. What was happening to him?

  My communion with Gabriel is weak, and this is still almost unbearable, she thought. How must it feel to him, experiencing it firsthand?

  “Shay? Are you okay, sweetie?”

  Shay gripped the desk with both hands as another bolt of searing anguish attacked her. “Yeah,” she mumbled.

  “No, you’re not.” Her mother jumped off the bed and rushed to Shay’s side. “Do you need to feed? What’s wrong?”

  “Not me. It’s Gabriel,” Shay managed to say. “Something horrible is happening to him. I thought he was getting better, but he’s worse.”

  “The communion,” Mom breathed. “Sam told me everyone in his family was connected through the communion, but I didn’t imagine it was so powerful.”

  “It’s weaker than usual,” Shay answered. “The hawthorn almost destroyed it. For me to feel so much pain, Gabriel has to be in agony.” She wrapped her arms around herself, as if that would help control the waves of dizziness.

  “Maybe we could put just another drop on your skin,” her mom suggested. “I don’t want you suffering like this. We need to break the tie between the two of you.”

  “No!” Shay cried. She knew she should want the communion broken, but the thought made her feel cold and empty.

  “But you said Sam’s family killed him. That means Gabriel . . .” Her mother let her words trail off.

  “He was there. He . . . he helped,” Shay admitted, but she couldn’t bring herself to say that Gabriel had been the one who had exposed Sam’s relationship with a human. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel now. Gabriel saved my life. But he helped kill my father. But then he saved me by transforming me.”

  Her mom gazed at her for a long moment. “I can see why you’re confused,” she finally said. “Right now what you need to do is take care of yourself. You’ve been through so much, Shay. You need time to recover and to learn how to deal with . . . what you are.”

  “There is no time!” Shay cried as another blast of pain hit her. “He’s dying.”

  “What?” Mom said. “Why would you think that?”

  “I feel it.” Shay’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God. They’re killing him. That’s what it is—the devastation he felt, the misery, and now the pain.”

  Her mother’s brow was furrowed in confusion. “Who’s killing him? Why?”

  “I can’t believe it took me so long to realize this,” Shay said. “It’s Ernst. His family. They’re killing him because of me! Because he loves me. He tried to bring a human into the family. It’s just like it was with Sam. . . .”

  “But you’re not human anymore,” Mom said.

  “They hated me. They called me an abomination,” Shay told her. “And then Martin showed up. It was just like before, when humans massacred their family in Greece. Martin was there to kill them all—except for the one specimen he took to run experiments on.”

  She leaped to her feet, then had to stand perfectly still for a moment to battle the nausea. I’ve got to get to Gabriel.

  Except she didn’t know where he was. The vampires wouldn’t still be at the research facility, not now that Martin had discovered its location. Shay sank down onto the floor. Her mother crouched next to her. “What, baby?”

  “I have no idea where he is,” Shay said.

  “What would you do if you did?” her mother asked, brushing Shay’s hair away from her face. “I know you’re stronger now, much stronger. But you’re not strong enough to go up against Gabriel’s whole family.”

  Shay pushed her mom’s hand away. “So I’m just supposed to let him die?”

  Her mother sighed. “Shay, it’s not a matter of you letting him die or not die. You don’t have any con
trol over it. Like you said, you don’t even know where he is.”

  “And you’re happy about that!” Shay accused her.

  A moment of hesitation told Shay all she needed to know.

  “See, you can’t even pretend you’re not,” Shay snapped. “You still don’t think of him as a person—not even after what you found out about my father.”

  “I am happy about it,” her mom said, anger creeping into her voice. “He took Sam from me. From you. Don’t you think he deserves to die for that?”

  “But they’re doing the same thing to him that they did to Sam. If it was wrong then, it’s wrong now,” Shay protested. And as she said the words, she felt the deep truth of them. It wasn’t right of Gabriel’s family to kill him for falling in love with her.

  “I can’t be expected to care what happens to the creature who destroyed my life,” her mother shot back.

  “Creature! Creature?” Shay cried. “Is that how you thought of my father? Is that how you think of me?”

  “Of course not. You’re you. And Sam wasn’t the same as those other ones. Look at how they treat one another. They say they’re a family, but they go around murdering each other,” Mom said. “Everything about that family is selfish and always has been! They took children just because—”

  “You keep saying ‘they.’ Like all vampires are the same,” Shay cut her off.

  “No. You’re different,” her mother protested. “Your father was—”

  “We’re all different,” Shay insisted. “Just like humans are all different. You can’t lump us together. I thought you understood that when you were talking to Martin, but obviously, you don’t. You’re willing to let Gabriel die for loving me, because you think he’s a creature, just some evil thing.”