Flutter mba-3

by Аманда Хокинг

  “What things sorted out?” Jack was a little too good at reading between the lines sometimes, and I didn’t appreciate it. “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.” I felt good about saying that, because it was only half a lie. That was completely true, but that wasn’t what we had to stay around to sort out. “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 had started fading a bit. As much as he was angry with Peter, he wasn’t really hateful guy, and he found it difficult to carry around the resentment needed to properly enjoy comeuppance and revenge.

  “We’ll be home soon. You don’t need to worry anymore.” That actually hurt to say. I knew there was still a very good chance that we wouldn’t even make it out of there alive, but I couldn’t tell Jack that. So I lied, and tears welled in my eyes.

  “You better be,” Jack grumbled, trying to mask the elation in his words. “Things are going crazy around here.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Your brother and Bobby,” Jack scoffed.

  “Whose 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 human, and he’s around all the time now.”

  “All the time?” I questioned, disbelieving. “I’ve only been gone for like ten days!”

  “It’s been a pretty wild ten days around here,” Jack allowed. “And Bobby showed up like the day after you left. So yeah. It’s been eventful.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, 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. It was stupid how much I missed him.

  Laughing at his silly jokes made me want to sob.

  I talked to Jack a little bit longer, listening to him regale stories of what I had missed at home.

  Eventually, I had to get off the phone. Peter could only hide out in the bathroom for so long, and talking to Jack would only make me sadder. When I hung up, I knocked on the bathroom to let Peter know the coast was clear, and he came out a minute later. He was much more subdued after that, so we said very little to each other. I showered and got dressed, and after that, there wasn’t much else to do. Peter laid on the bed with his fingers latched 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.

  Chapter 8

  Sun had started filtering around the edges of the curtains, and while neither one of us said anything, that definitely made Peter and I nervous. The lycan we 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, the only conclusion we could come is that he wasn’t coming back. At least not on his own. It probably would’ve been a much better use if our time if Peter and I been formulating a rescue plan for Ezra, instead of wasting it pacing and laying down.

  “He’s still not here.” I peered out the curtain, letting the warm morning light stream in, burning my overly sensitive retina, and then let it swing closed. I looked back behind me, where Peter laid immobile, the same way he had all day. “Peter?”

  “I’m aware that he’s not here, Alice,” Peter muttered tightly.

  “Don’t you think we should do something?” I stood with my hands on my hips and glowered down at him. Laying in bed just did not seem like the right answer for this situation.

  “I’m thinking.” Peter closed his eyes, as if that could block out my voice.

  “You’ve been thinking all day! We should’ve been plotting for this eventuality! We knew there was a good chance that Ezra wouldn’t come back, and he’s obviously not going-”

  “I have been thinking, Alice!” Peter snapped, and his green eyes looked accusatorily at me.

  “I don’t know what you’ve been doing all day long, but I’ve been preparing for this.”

  “Well… you should’ve let me on it!” I stammered in a huff, and insecurely crossed my arms over my chest, trying to continue looking angry even though he had caught me off guard. “I could’ve helped! I have lots of good ideas!”

  “You mean like pointing out the obvious and peeking out the curtain?” Peter asked dryly, and almost reluctantly, 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 don’t know what to do!” There was an unnecessary whine growing in my voice. I felt powerless and on the verge of tears, and I didn’t like it at all. I took a deep breath, and decided to work on controlling the only thing I actual had control of us, namely myself. Pushing a dark strand of hair behind my ears, I decided to start over. “What did you come up with?”

  “Nothing useful,” Peter admitted wearily, keeping his gaze on the floor.

  “Come on,” I scoffed. “You just said you’d been preparing for this-”

  “I’ve been trying,” Peter cut me off again. “But I just can’t see a way around anything.” He sighed darkly, then muttered to himself. “I suppose that’s why he brought you.”

  “What are you talking about?” I felt myself stiffening, as if he was claiming something derogatory. “I came with Ezra because I thought I could help.”

  “No, Ezra brought you with because he knew how utterly useless you would be, and he thought I would be unwilling to facilitate in your murder for a second time,” Peter explained, his voice dripping with venom. “And I’m been going back in forth between it all day long, wondering what I would I finally do when it came down to it.”

  There was a sinking feeling growing in my chest, as if I had been used in a pawn in all of this. I had come back here to try to talk some sense into Peter, and I thought that I had managed to that, if only a little.

  But the way Peter was talking made it sound like I had been brought on as more of an anchor. I hadn’t been brought along because of my skills, but rather the lack thereof.

  “What?” I demanded, but my anger was wearing off, replaced with an aching sense of uselessness.

  “If I leave to go after Ezra, and I bring you along, you’ll get killed! If I leave you here, they’ll follow my scent back and slaughter you! 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 or something even worse. And if you managed to make it back home, the lycan would probably follow you back. There’s nothing I can do except stay here and babysit you!” Peter growled.

  “I don’t…” I started to stumble out some kind of protest about needing a baby-sitter, but I realized that everything he was said was probably true, and I was an idiot for not seeing it sooner.

  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,” Peter laughed hollowly. “You’d just slow me down.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted and swallowed. “What you’re saying … or thinking… If Ezra isn’t coming back and they’re only going to come after us… then… Why don’t you just go? I’ll just wait here until you come back or they come for me. 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 that was completely foreign to me. It took me a minute to realize that it was something that resembled concern and affection for me, of all things. Even when we had been bonded, he’d never looked at me like that. His emerald eyes were swimming with something harder, and he lowered
them before I could get a complete read on what he was thinking.

  “That’s an idiotic plan,” Peter shook his head.

  “That’s pretty much what your plan is,” I countered evenly.

  “I’m not gonna just leave you here!” Peter insisted tightly.

  “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 injured. Even though I was talking about and even thinking about, I couldn’t really believe it was true. He was Ezra, and he was all powerful. If anybody could make out through a pack of lycan, it was him. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one that thought that way, or Peter never would’ve let Ezra go off alone with them.

  “You’d be completely unprotected. You wouldn’t even stand a chance,” Peter shook his head again, sounding tired of this 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 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. Although, it didn’t really make sense that he’d need any persuading.

  Normally he couldn’t wait to get away from me, and with the bond between us broken, I figured he’d be even more eager to.

  “I wasn’t trying to kill you! I was trying to kill me!” Peter 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 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, Peter exhaled. “I knew he was a better match for you than I was, and I didn’t see any other way out.”

  For once, I was too flabbergasted to say anything. I don’t think that I had ever truly believed that Peter cared about me. The bond made him feel things for me, but I’d always suspected that he hated me. But I found out that not only did Peter care about me, 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. “Look, 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, trying to clear it of any confused thoughts about Peter.

  It was hard, though. That 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. I hadn’t been angry with him for it, but I hadn’t really wanted to pursue a relationship with him after that. 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… then I suddenly felt like a total hussy. 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 me, and it was hard to concentrate on figuring out how to rescue Ezra/get revenge, especially when I didn’t really understand what either of those things would entail.

  Before either of us could formulate what would most likely be a non-plan, there was a soft thudding sound on the door to the hotel room. Not a knock exactly, but more like something falling into it. I looked to Peter, but his eyes were already fixed on the door. He had moved in front of me, trying to block me in case it happened to be the lycan announcing their entrance.

  When the door slowly swung open, we were greeted by something almost as bad.

  Ezra leaned on the doorframe, looking more haggard 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, and Ezra had always looked tan and full of life. Ezra had started staggering into the room and Peter rushed to him.

  “Oh my gosh, Ezra! Are you okay?” I wanted to rush to him and hug him, but the way Peter was handling him, I knew that he couldn’t handle it.

  “Yeah… I just…” Ezra started to brush us off, but his voice had never sounded weaker.

  I was about to ask what was wrong, but then I saw it. Bite marks on his neck and wrists. It was a 45 minute drive from lycan territory, plenty of time for a vampire to heal, but they were still red and swollen. He had been so drained to that he didn’t have the strength to heal.

  “He needs to feed,” Peter told me almost absently and attempted a hand Ezra off to me. He hurried off to the bathroom to get blood for Ezra, leaving me alone to struggle with the situation.

  Gingerly, I put my arm around Ezra to stabilize him and tried to help him on the bed. He was horribly pale and his deep brown eyes were glassy. I had never seen a vampire look so ill before. It had never even occurred to me that they could even look like this, especially Ezra. He was in control of everything. As far as my standard for perfection was concerned, it was him.

  When I sat down next to him on the bed, my arm still supporting him, the weight of everything must have finally hit him and he started collapsing back. I could’ve held him up but it caught me off guard. As a result, I ended up falling back first, with him landing top of me. I scooted back farther on the bed so I could sit up more. His head was resting on my lap, and I meant to try and help him up, but then I felt the desperate way he was gripping my thigh. There was nothing sexual about it, but it was like he just needed to hang onto something, so he was clinging onto me.

  “I got you some blood,” Peter said numbly when he walked back into the room. He looked down at Ezra, squeezing painfully onto me, and so I gave him a questioning look. Peter just pressed his lips into a thin line and didn’t say anything.

  “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, feeling how oddly clammy his skin felt.

  After all that blood loss, I would think the only thing that would make him feel better was eating. I was about to say something to that effect when 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 could feel how much he loved him. It consumed me completely. I felt who he was flowing through me, and fortunately, he was all love and kindness. Ezra had just been bitten by a pack of disturbed, evil lycan. All their pain and anger had to be burning through him right now.

  Physically and emotionally, they had drained and ruined him.

  “Is it over now?” Peter asked quietly.

  Ezra made a sound that resembled a pained moan but fought to suppress it. He had wrapped one arm around my back so he was gripping my side and the other was still on my leg. He gripped me so tightly, that had I been human, he would’ve broken bones and ruptured organs. As it was, I had to fight to keep from wincing. Instead, I stroked his back, doing everything in my power to comfort a
nd ease the horrendous way he must be feeling. Despite the weakness that must be running through him, his muscles felt like concrete underneath my hands. He was tensed so tightly that his body had gone completely rigid, and his legs curled up a bit, closer to me. His breath came out ragged, pushed through clenched teeth. His heart beat was weaker than normal but also much faster than it should be a vampire. In order for him show any pain, it would have to be tremendous, but the fact that he was so obviously fighting it off as he openly clung to me meant that the pain he was feeling had to be worse than anything I could even imagine.

  “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.

  Seeing Ezra like this, the strongest thing I had ever met, made me want to sob, but I swallowed it back. He didn’t need to deal with my blubbering at a time like this.

  “No,” Ezra insisted, his voice sounding 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 was trying to keep his composure as much as possible, but his eyes burned with rage and pain. It killed him to know that Ezra was suffering so greatly because of him, that he had been forced to exchange his own blood for Peter’s life.

  After a moment of staring regretfully at him, Peter went into action. He got his cell phone and started making phone calls, most of which I couldn’t understand because they were in Finnish.

  “I’m sorry,” Ezra apologized quietly and tried to loosen on his grip.

  “No, you’re okay,” I insisted. “Don’t worry.”

  “I shouldn’t be burdening you with this,” Ezra insisted and started trying to pull himself away from me.

  “No, stay.” I put my hand on his back, holding him to me. It hurt like hell the way he clung to me, but I would endure anything that made him feel better. Almost reluctantly, he gave in too, his hands clenching slightly less than were before. “Would anything help?”