by eden Hudson
I scraped my fangs across his pec, slicing into the skin near his nipple. He exhaled and pressed his lower body to mine again.
That was his release. The pain took him away from thought, pulled him out of his head, and focused him in the moment.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him down. For a second, I just held him close, feeling his fire all around me, licking the blood from his chest, listening to him take deep breaths of my hair.
Then he gripped the tines of my wrought iron headboard with one hand and began to move his hips. The muscles in his forearm flexed and relaxed.
My fangs ached to tear into his throat, slash and rip until they were bathed in that hot, red life. He was moving too slowly. I was too close for tender and drawn-out. I needed him inside me.
“Colt, please.”
“Fuck,” he breathed. “This isn’t going to take long if you keep talking like that.”
“I don’t care. Now.”
Fire burned through my nerve endings as he slid inside. I groaned. My vision faded out to heat signatures in the dark.
“Tiff.”
I couldn’t answer. Just started moving my hips. He took the hint and sped up. In seconds, I was at the breaking point. The orgasm crashed into me. I buried my teeth in his shoulder, sucking at the scorching blood that poured out. Colt growled, a primal sound that whipped the crow magic into a frenzy.
Emotions that had been dead and buried for years flowed to the surface. This was really happening. For so long I’d wanted the body I was holding to be him. So many nights I’d spent fighting tears, knowing I’d lost him forever. Now here he was. I had Colt back and he was mine. Just mine.
My chest felt like it was unfolding, expanding. I was breathing. Deep, ragged breaths that scratched my vocal cords as they passed.
This time the climax seemed to burst from deep inside my bones and flare toward the surface of my skin in sparks and surges. My teeth ripped into the closest bit of flesh, hit bone and tendon. Thick, hot, salty blood filled my senses. I heard Colt’s wordless shout, felt his rhythm stutter as he came. He didn’t stop moving until I pulled him down on top of me.
It felt like hours later that he rested his forehead against my temple. His panting warmed my ear and throat.
For a minute, I thought my heart was beating at full strength. Then I realized it was his. It was pounding so hard I could feel it through the wall of his chest.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “I probably could’ve kept going if you wanted to.”
I shook my head. Kissed his jaw and kept my face pressed to his.
Suddenly, Colt pushed up onto his elbow and swiped his thumb across my cheek. “What’s wrong?”
The words caught in my throat. I was crying. Real tears.
“Tiffani?”
I couldn’t.
He laid down beside me, pulled me onto his chest. He ran his fingers through my hair while his heat soaked into me. I kept my face nestled in the hollow of his jaw and waited for the tears to stop.
Colt’s stomach growled.
I lifted my head.
“Hungry?” I asked.
Tough
Every light in the house was off when I got there. Jax’s little piece of shit car was in the driveway. Harper must’ve driven it home from the hospital. Or maybe Scout drove her home and left the car here. For a while I just sat in the truck and stared at the dark taillights.
Gone, gone, gone, gone. That candy-pop melody was still burning itself into my brain, the same crap over and over again. The damn thing was going to make me crazy if I didn’t get it out where I could hear it.
I got out of the truck and walked across the yard to the porch, slowly, keeping my eyes on the ground the whole time. I think I was looking for something like blood or flattened grass, but the summer had been too dry. All the grass was scorched and dead, and none of it cared enough that Jax had died on it to leave a sign.
Something sliced open the inside of my bottom lip. One of my fangs. Without thinking about it, I’d been rubbing my hand across my mouth. I must’ve pushed a little too hard. Having something touch my face didn’t feel good or comforting anymore. I tried grinding my teeth, but all I got was a dull ache. The high was slipping away.
Pretty soon it’ll be gone, gone, gone, gone.
Like the dark. The sun hadn’t started rising yet, but the night bugs had stopped making noise, and you could feel everything else getting ready to wake up. I sat down on the porch and looked up at the sky. Just a couple stars left.
Sometimes, before this whole thing with Jason and Jax stealing my voice, when I’d get back from being with Mitzi, I wouldn’t go inside right away. There’s something about being around people right after you screw somebody. Even if the people are your best friends, even if they’re probably asleep, you just want to be alone for a while. A lot of nights, instead of heading right in, I would stand out in the yard and breathe in the air. Early morning felt different than daytime. Like it was a different place altogether, some foreign country or other planet. The air even tasted different. Cleaner. Purer.
I put my face in my hands and bawled.
Later on—I don’t know how much later on, but long enough for me to stop crying like a little bitch—the screen door screeched open, then bounced shut. Bare feet crossed the porch.
I smelled the tequila first, then Harper. She dropped down onto the top step next to me.
For the longest time she didn’t say anything.
Then she said, “Go away.”
I didn’t move. Honestly, I wasn’t too sure I could.
“I hate you, Tough,” Harper said. “I hate you.” She screamed it, “I hate you!”
Down the street, a dog started barking.
“I wish you were dead instead of him. You, Scout, me—” Her voice cracked. “—anybody but him.”
I wanted to put my arm around her, do something, anything to stop her from crying, but I couldn’t. I took a long breath of the clean early morning air. In, out.
“And I can’t even retaliate,” she said. “It’s so pointless. There’s nothing I can take away from you to make you understand.” Harper wiped her cheeks with both hands and shook her head. “You’re not like a real person, Tough. You never were. You see something you want and you go for it. You pour everything you have into that one thing. But then when that one thing is gone, you go after something else. Me. Mitzi. Desty. That’s not what people do. Do you understand? No, of course not. How could you? You’re you.”
You’re telling me.
Harper stared up at the sky. “Do you know why I loved Jax? Because he loved me. He didn’t just want me. He knew I wasn’t perfect. You think every girl you like is perfect, but we’re not. Jax got that and he loved me anyway.”
And now he’s gone, gone, gone, gone. Like everything inside me. Or maybe there’d never been anything there to begin with. I took another breath and held it just so I could have something between my chest and my spine.
“I used to wonder what you were looking for,” Harper said. “Now I just hate you. I hope you never find it, you…man-slut…murdering…drunk.”
It wasn’t like she was saying anything I hadn’t heard before. Half the town talked shit about me to my face and the rest of them did it behind my back. Hell, I talked that shit to me. But Harper never had. Ever since January of our tenth-grade year, her and Jax had always had my back.
The dog down the street finally shut up. I could hear a teardrop roll down Harper’s cheek and drop onto her shirt. It soaked into the material like a snowball into a mud puddle.
We just sat there. The sky started to turn gray at the edges and I remembered that last dream I’d had—the last one I was ever going to have—of me and Sissy sitting on the porch at the farmhouse, watching the sun come up.
That’s it? I had asked Sissy.
I pushed myself up off the porch because, yeah, that really was it.
The vamp speed kicked on. I was upstairs in my room in a coupl
e seconds. I dug a shirt out of my clothesbasket and pulled it on. It felt like I needed to. Like a layer between me and the rest of this awful world would help.
I grabbed the guitar case and brought it back downstairs with me. Mom’s guitar was inside, along with the agate pick Colt got me for my thirteenth birthday, the one with my name on it.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Harper was still sitting there, staring down at the dead grass. I stepped into the yard and held the case out to her. She didn’t move. I tried to force it into her hands. She shoved it away.
I wanted her to take it, take the last little bit of me out of the case and smash it to pieces and then tell me everything was okay now. I wished I still had my voice so I could scream at her, beg her to hurt me and get revenge for Jax and then forgive me and be my friend again.
But Harper wouldn’t even look at me.
I snapped open the latches, flipped the lid up, and got the guitar out.
Mom’s guitar. Shannon Colter’s tattooed acoustic—worth thousands of bucks to a Lost Derringer fan. To me… When I was little and Mom let me practice with it, I thought I was the hottest shit in town, the king of rock. I thought I was her favorite. That me and her were just alike.
My heart squeezed like it was trying to beat again. If I had ever needed the vamp speed to get something over with before I could think about it, it was right then. But the speed didn’t kick on. If anything, it felt like I was watching in slow motion. I grabbed Mom’s guitar by the neck, felt the strings against parts of my fingers they’d never touched. I lifted it over my head and swung it like a splitting maul.
There hadn’t been any rain in Halo for months. The ground was hard as concrete. I knew the guitar had about as much chance of surviving as a guy swan-diving from a plane with no parachute, but the out of tune scream it made when it hit the dirt made my stomach bottom out.
“Ouch,” Mom used to say when I would play a chord wrong. “Fix that, baby.”
The tattooed face of the guitar was smashed in at the bottom and there was a crack running all the way up to the sound hole. I swung again. The pick guard snapped. The wood around the bridge broke and the strings came loose. They whipped along a hair behind the rest of the guitar when I swung it the last time. The neck broke away from the body.
I threw it down in the grass. As often as we cleaned up the yard, the broken bits and pieces were as good as a grave marker.
Harper was crying again, harder than before. I was, too, I guess.
There wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t talk to her, I couldn’t glare at Jax until he made her feel better, I couldn’t do shit.
I got back in the truck and hauled ass out of there.
Desty
“Let me get this straight,” Kathan paced the sitting room of his suite like a panther circling its next meal. “You’ve decided that you want to become joint-familiar with your sister.”
“Yes,” I said.
He gestured at the floor like it was a point in time. “Just now you decided this?”
I started to say that it had actually been in the shower, but that was the old Desty talking. The spineless freak who never understood anything and always made everything awkward.
“Yes.”
“Modesty, I don’t believe you’re thinking clearly. It’s the middle of the night. You’ve been through a very traumatic few days. Have you even had a chance to research this thoroughly like we discussed?”
I glared at him. “I know what you’re doing. I’m not stupid.”
Kathan stopped prowling the room and cocked his head at me.
“Pretending to be interested in my welfare, pretending like you want what’s best for me,” I said. “Saying no when I expect you to jump all over my offer.”
“How dare you—” Tempie lunged at me.
I braced myself, ready to get knocked on my butt, but Kathan grabbed her by the arm before she could touch me.
Ever the chivalrous gentleman. Always protecting me from my twin’s violent mood swings. My twin who had never hit me before she’d gotten enthralled.
“You know I talked to Colt, right?” I said. “I’m probably the first person who’s ever had a conversation with a lucid castoff.”
“That you probably are,” Kathan said. “There are APIM scholars who would kill for that opportunity.”
“Colt said that most of the time he couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. He had no idea what was going on outside his head.” I nodded at Tempie. “Does she even know I’m here?”
Kathan smiled. “Modesty, I’m impressed. A week ago, I would never have guessed you could show half the backbone you are right now.”
“In other words, you’re not going to answer the question.”
“I apologize if I led you to believe I was changing the subject,” he said. “Seeing you try on nerves of steel is thrilling. It’s proof of what you were meant to become. But I prefer my familiars fully aware and cognizant of their actions. I’m not controlling or coercing Temperance. She decides what she does and when. I only reward her good behavior.”
My spinal fluid turned to ice. And punish her bad behavior.
“Will it be like that for me?” I swallowed. “Will you…reward…me?”
“Your deepest desires, hopes, and dreams,” he said. “The moment you and Temperance are bound as one to me, joint familiars, anything you’ve ever wanted is at your disposal.”
And if he was punishing Tempie, then I could help protect her.
Kathan was still talking. “I’ve told Temperance this before, but I believe the two of you are powerful enough to become not just a Destroyer of Worlds, but the Godkiller. If you’re certain this is what you want—”
“I have conditions,” I said.
He waved an open palm at me as if he was saying But of course.
“Leave them alone. Colt and Tough.” I shifted my weight to my other foot and tried to explain what I’d been thinking about. “It’s not their fault. They didn’t get to decide to be who they are, who their dad was. Colt’s not bad, not on purpose. He just needs help.”
Kathan canted his head back and looked down his nose at me. “And Tough?”
“What about him?”
“What do you want for Tough? Ask and I’ll give it to you.”
“I just want…” I tried to think how to explain. “Just don’t hurt him. Leave him alone. Let him be free or…or whatever he wants. I don’t care, just don’t hurt him or Colt anymore.”
Kathan clasped his hands behind his back. His wings folded like they were mimicking the gesture.
“I can’t ignore what Colt did,” he said. “You must realize that. But I can put an end to his suffering.”
“Kill him?” I asked.
“It may sound extreme, but if you knew what it was like inside the insane mind, you would understand that death is a mercy.”
“And you do know?”
Kathan smiled. “How many healthy, well-adjusted humans do you think come knocking at my door, begging to be enthralled?”
I glanced at Tempie. She didn’t seem to mind the insinuation. She just kept staring up at Kathan like he was her knight in shining armor.
“I understand that it’s hard for humans to believe that death could be a release,” Kathan said. “You’re conditioned from infancy to believe that there’s nothing worse than dying. If you’d like, though, I can show you.”
Kathan stepped closer. I took a step back.
“Just for a few seconds,” he said. “I’ll show you what it was like in Temperance’s head before I stepped in. If you saw what your sister was going through, what she was wrestling with every day—”
A knock at the sitting room door cut him off.
Kathan scowled, but the door swung open. Possible Fatigues stepped inside.
“An anonymous tip just came in. Colt Whitney’s at the bakery in town.”
“Have you radioed Rian?” Kathan asked.
Possible Fatigue
s nodded. “They’re going in.”
Colt
Tiffani scooted her spatula under a lobster tail pastry and held it up. “Want another one?”
“If you’re not going to run short,” I said.
She slid it onto my plate. “Bakery’s closed today. Tomorrow, too. If you don’t eat them, they’ll just get thrown out.”
“Pretty big weekend to shut down,” I said.
She shrugged.
“And you definitely don’t have any cinnamon rolls?” I asked.
That got her smiling. “I didn’t hear you complaining while you were eating the scones. Or that first lobster tail pastry.”
“Yeah, right. Like I’m going to start crap when the food’s this good.” I also couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. Right then I could’ve probably put the bakery out of business. I tried to slow down on the pastry. Take some time, actually taste it.
Tiff put the spatula down and came to lean against the counter next to me.
“You should let me clean those scratches,” she said. She was looking sidelong at the scrapes down my back.
“Nah. I can barely feel them.” And I didn’t want her to have to stare at the verses that made up my back piece, even if they were a little torn up now. Crawling around in some messed-up psycho’s head was probably enough physical and emotional pain for one night.
She pulled my shoulder down and licked some blood from the bite marks. I looked at her.
“What?” she said. “I’m hungry, too.”
“You want to take this back upstairs?” I picked up my plate and pushed away from the counter like I was ready to go.
She frowned. “Absolutely not. No crumbs in my bed.”
I took another bite and looked around the kitchen at all the filled sheet pans.
“Be honest,” I said. “You made everything but cinnamon rolls, didn’t you?”
“Smartass,” she said.
I snorted. I knew this wasn’t normal by a long stretch, but it felt so good. With Mikal, things had been awful, but the moments of what my brain had decided were love seemed lit up with electricity. She had hurt me and turned me on and left me feeling ashamed and disgusting and needing more all at the same time.
