Eyes of Ice
Page 16
It consumed him.
It wiped out everything else.
His mind, what he could feel of it, fixated on that one thing.
He didn’t stop to feed.
He knew if he stopped to feed, they would stop him from getting where he wanted to go. He knew if he fought them, hurt them, called attention to himself in any way––he wouldn’t get where he wanted to go. They would knock him out again. They would hit him, beat him, chain him, drain his blood. He wouldn’t make it, and he had to make it.
He fucking had to.
He had to make it––
Now that he was free of them, he could run.
He could run, and follow the maps and numbers in his head, lines that slid through and illuminated the darkness in front of him, telling him where he needed to go. Instinct aligned with the lights he could see, a strange marriage of machine and animal that allowed him to move at top speed, to stretch his legs, despite how tired he was.
Despite how fucking tired he was, how much his head hurt––
Then… he was there.
It happened suddenly. The forest ended.
He wasn’t there, he was running through trees––
And then he was.
He was there, and he didn’t even know what or where there was.
He knew it was right.
He knew it from the intensity of relief that washed over him.
The emotions that rose in his chest, in his very veins, nearly bringing him to his knees, a confused fullness and grief, sadness, relief, hope, fear. He would be safe here. He would be safe. He could have cried. If he were human, he would have cried.
He wasn’t human, though.
Instead, the intensity of it blanked out the parts of him that still played at being human, that still thought like a human, needed to rationalize and explain like a human. That stronger, more instinctive flare of feeling overwhelmed all of that, paralyzing his more rational mind, blanking it out with pure, unfiltered emotion.
He didn’t realize he was just standing there, not doing anything, until the door in front of him opened. He didn’t fully comprehend that it was a door until the light in front of him changed, until the white panel swung inward, revealing the dark interior of a two-story house on a street lined with trees.
It opened, and she stood there.
She blinked into the streetlight, wrapped in something gauzy, something that looked soft and flowing, like liquid fabric, an otherworldly, ghostly blue-white. He could see the curves of her through the cloth, even as his eyes grew riveted with swaths of bare, pale skin he could see on her arms, her throat, her face, her collarbones.
Then his eyes rose to hers.
Blue-green irises caught the moonlight.
They stared at one another.
She looked at him, and he saw grief there.
He saw grief in her eyes as she looked at him.
He saw confusion, grief, uncertainty, like she wasn’t sure if he was real.
He knew he should speak.
He should say something.
She walked up to him then, still clutching that mesmerizing fabric around her shoulders and arms. He watched her move, followed every incremental tense and relaxation of her muscles, every millimeter of her face, the micro-expressions there, the way her eyes studied his, cautious, the way her black hair hung down her shoulders and back, the streaks of blue and green and scarlet color highlighted in the dark strands.
She walked up to him, until he could feel her and smell her all around him.
When she was close enough that he could have touched her, where he could have reached out and touched her, his doubt vanished.
Relief returned.
That relief grew almost debilitating.
He didn’t think.
He moved with a vampire’s caution.
He knew it would be fast to her, possibly too fast for her to track in its entirety––but to him, it was deliberate, almost excruciatingly slowed down, every movement calculated, measured, executed with thought and precision. He stepped forward in a single, gliding motion, sliding his body up against hers, and his fingers coiled into her hair, cupping the back of her head, his other hand curling around her jaw.
He stroked her jaw, her throat.
Her eyes closed, her head tilting back. He felt her soften, like everything in her just abruptly surrendered. When he felt that, his whole body tensed.
He kissed her.
His fangs pressed against his lips, but he didn’t use them. He kissed her, using his tongue instead, and she softened more. He kissed her longer, deeper, and she gripped his arms, moaning a breath against his mouth.
He felt her go softer in his hands.
He kissed her again, and she kissed him back, pulling on him, her hands wrapped tighter around his arms, pulling him closer.
When he raised his head, some time later––some incomprehensible amount of time later, when he’d more or less forgotten where he was again, or why––she slid her hands into his hair, stopping him from moving away from her entirely.
“Are you coming in?” she said, breathless.
His relief intensified.
For a moment he couldn’t speak.
“Can I?” he said.
Only then did she step back.
Her blue-green eyes flashed at him, a mixture of anger, confusion, bewilderment, relief. She smacked him in the chest. When he leapt forward, grasping her wrist as she swung at him again, she didn’t look alarmed. She didn’t back down at all, but scowled up at him.
“Two weeks!” she snarled at him. “Two fucking weeks!”
He blinked, more in surprise.
“I thought you were dead! I thought you were fucking dead, Nick!”
He stared at her, unmoving, studying her face.
He didn’t understand.
His mind clicked through her words.
He grappled with them. He grappled with the anger he could see on her, that he could feel all around her. He wanted to understand, but more than anything, all he wanted was to make that anger go away.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Her mouth––that perfect, sculpted mouth he wanted to kiss again––firmed and curved into a frown. He watched every increment of that movement as she struggled with his words, seemingly wanting to understand them as much as he wanted to understand hers.
Her eyes were bright, and he wanted to kiss them, too.
Before he could make up his mind what to do, she was pulling at him, pulling at the hand of his that still trapped her wrist in his fingers. She pulled at him, dragging him backwards via his own grip on her, pulling him backwards into her house.
He kept his grip on her, and she dragged him upstairs.
He continued to hold her wrist as she brought him into a dark room lit with that blue-white glow from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
He saw her bed then, and his relief returned.
“I need to sleep,” he told her.
She’d carefully extracted her wrist from his fingers and was unbuttoning his shirt.
“Vampires don’t sleep,” she told him.
“Sometimes we do,” he said. “Sometimes we have to. I need to sleep.”
She looked up, and he stared down at her, watching her face as she absorbed his words.
“You came here to sleep?” she said, puzzled.
He thought about that.
He stared at her bed, then the window, and that blue-white light. His eyes returned to her face, to her high cheekbones, that perfect mouth.
“You look like a seer,” he told her, caressing one high cheekbone with the back of his fingers. His other hand curled into her hair, stroking it back from her face, gripping it and massaging her skull. “You look so much like a seer.”
She pushed his fingers away, but he saw and felt her skin warm.
“Why did you come here, Nick?” she said.
He thought about that.
He wanted to tell her the truth.
It felt desperately important that he tell her the truth.
When he met her gaze next, he saw her watching his face, that scrutiny more prominent in her blue-green eyes.
“It’s safe here,” he said simply.
There was a silence where she only looked at him.
He didn’t move. He could practically see her thinking about his words, understanding warring with confusion. She understood, he realized. She wanted to know the details. She wanted to know what he was talking about. At the same time, she understood. She knew it didn’t matter. She knew what he was telling her.
She finished with his shirt, pulling it off his shoulders.
“Gaos,” she murmured, caressing his chest. “Where have you been, Nick?”
He didn’t know how to answer that, either.
“Can I?” he said, motioning towards the bed. “Is it all right, Wynter?”
She nodded, watching him as he kicked off his shoes.
He wanted to strip naked, but he was worried that would be rude––
“Hey,” she said.
He stopped, mid-stride.
It hit him only then that he’d been walking to her bed.
She walked up to him, moving around in front of where he’d frozen, halfway to where she slept every night. He just stood there when she reached for his belt. She didn’t ask him. She didn’t hesitate, or even look at him first.
He watched her unhook the tongue, biting his tongue with fangs that were still extended. He stood there, unmoving as she got it undone and pulled it out from around him. He looked down when she started unfastening the front of his pants.
“You can’t sleep in this,” she told him.
He didn’t answer.
He watched her finish undoing his pants.
When she pulled them down his legs, he stepped out of them, feeling more than seeing her look at him as he did.
He didn’t wait.
He walked to the bed.
He climbed under the covers, inhaling her scent, inhaling the remnants of her warmth from when he’d pulled her out of bed. He lay there, and the relief on him grew so intense he could have cried.
He looked up, and saw her staring down at him.
He stared at her robe, at the liquid-thin shirt she wore under it.
“Take that off,” he said, his words hard, but infused with need. “Take all of it off, and sleep with me.”
He saw her blush.
He saw it more through the spectrums of light that showed him the heat of it than he did the color.
She walked over to the window.
He watched her shoulder off the white, flowing robe, letting it fall to the tile floor around her bare feet. She pulled the gauzy shirt she wore under it over her head, then tugged her underwear down to her feet and stepped out of those.
He was hard as fuck by the end, but his fatigue was coming back.
He hadn’t been lying to her.
He needed to sleep.
He had to.
It wouldn’t matter what he wanted.
He watched her shut the curtains over the window, the gauzy ones, that looked almost like her robe, then the heavier ones, that made the room dark.
When it hit him why she’d done it, he felt another intense flush of gratitude. It was a dual gratitude as her actions sank in … partly for her thinking of him, with the sun, the other for her undressing in all of that light so he could see every inch of her before she closed the drapes.
He could have seen her with the curtains closed.
He could have seen her, with his vampire eyes, but that wasn’t the point.
It wasn’t the fucking point.
He didn’t know how to tell her how much he appreciated both things.
He watched her walk back around the bed, so that she was on the opposite side as him, after he made room for her on the mattress. He watched her lift the thick comforter. He drank in her naked body as she slid under the blanket, then crawled over to him on the mattress.
She didn’t hesitate.
She didn’t just move close to him…
She moved into him.
She slid into his open arms, molding her body into his.
She coiled a warm leg around his waist, pressing her chest into his as she wrapped her arm around as much of him as she could. She lay on him as much as next to him, her belly pressed into his side, her breasts, her thighs, her hip conforming to the angles of his body.
Resting her head on his chest, she exhaled.
He felt every fragment of his own relief reflected in that breath.
She curled her fingers around his ribs, pulling the blanket tighter around her back and snuggling closer to him. He knew he couldn’t keep her warm. His body wasn’t designed to keep her warm, but she didn’t seem to mind. She stroked his skin with her fingers, pressing her cheek into his chest, gripping him and pressing into him with an intensity that caused his arms to tighten around her, pulling her further on top of him.
Once she was fully settled, it felt like she belonged there.
It felt like she fucking grew out of him.
He lay there with her like that as long as he could.
He stayed conscious as long as he could.
He listened to and felt her heart beat against his skin as long as he could.
He listened to and felt her breath, the warmth of it on his skin.
He felt her hands explore parts of him cautiously, without straying so far that he felt he had to do anything about it, to say anything about what she might want.
He felt that relief on her, and all it brought up was more of the same in him.
Eventually, though, he couldn’t remain.
He couldn’t stay with her, not in the ways he wanted.
He receded back into that tunneling darkness.
He receded backwards, but for the first time, he let it go without reservation.
He relaxed into that numbing space, one thought echoing in his head.
He was safe.
He was finally fucking safe.
Chapter 14
Hangover
They were arguing.
He heard it, in the fogged, half-consciousness of his mind.
He heard it long before he knew he heard it.
He heard it long before he understood a single word.
He lay there, half in and half out of consciousness, eyes closed, missing her body against his. He couldn’t remember if he’d been awake before now. He couldn’t remember when he’d come here, how long he’d been here. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.
He was hungry, though.
He was really fucking hungry.
His body hurt with that hunger, whining at him for how famished it was.
He lay there, thinking about eating.
He thought about eating, and heard them argue.
Then he smelled blood, and turned his head.
A cup was on the table by the bed, and it was steaming. Whoever put it there, they’d put it there recently.
Memory flooded his mind.
He remembered her waking him up, just enough to feed him. She fed him blood, and then he went out again. Some time later, she’d wake him again, feed him more. He didn’t know how often she’d done it. He didn’t know how she’d known to do it, or when.
He didn’t know how he’d managed not to bite her.
Truthfully, he didn’t know how he’d managed not to kill her.
Rolling to his side, he slid over and up without thought. He scooped the mug off the table and put it to his lips without the barest, incremental pause. He drained the cup. Wanted more. He saw the small fridge there, on the tile, the heater above it.
It hit him that she’d brought that in here; it hadn’t been in here before.
It hadn’t been here the night he got here.
He heated up two more bags of blood.
Drained those.
He heated up two more.
His mind was slowly leveling.
He’d lost count by then, but he didn’t care.
He heated up two more.
He heard a pause in the argument downstairs when the heater dinged at him, and he realized it was the first time he’d let it run long enough to ding. Rather than bothering with the mug, he ripped into the bag with his fangs, and drank it down, careful not to spill anything on the white comforter covering her bed.
The silence ended downstairs.
They went back to arguing.
They weren’t in the same room as him.
He found himself listening to words in sentences now.
He found himself making meaning out of those words.
“…He’s not going with you.”
Wynter. Wynter’s voice.
He got hard, just hearing her voice. Sinking his fangs into the second blood bag he’d heated, he drank it down, pulling from the holes he created in the bag and emptying it out in a matter of seconds.
He was getting full. Finally.
He heated up two more, just for the fuck of it.
Well, maybe not entirely randomly.
He wanted to be full. He wanted to be over-full.
Maybe to keep from biting his girlfriend the next time he saw her.
Another voice rose, male.
Jordan. It was Damon Jordon.
“…Look, lady,” he snapped. “I appreciate you think you’re protecting him, but we’re trying to protect you. I don’t think you’re hearing us––”
“I’m hearing you just fine… detective.”
Wynter again, making Nick’s eyes close, even as that desire to fuck intensified to the point of blinding him.
“…I don’t think you’re listening to me,” she was saying now. “That, or you think I’m lying to you, for reasons that are beyond me. I’m telling you, he’s not a danger to me. He came here to get away from all of you––”
“He took six bodyguards out to get to you,” Damon said, cold.
“Took… out?” For the first time, Wynter’s voice hesitated. “He killed them?”