by Anne Malcom
I felt responsibility for that.
And I’d never gotten that until now. All those idiots who blamed themselves for the deaths of others. I had believed the only time you were responsible for someone’s death was if you actually killed them with your own two hands. Or your own two fangs.
It was just fucking dense to try to land the weight of that death when it was dealt by someone else.
But I felt it now, that weight, pressing down on me.
A small and warm hand slipped into mine.
It was such a shock that I jerked out of my stupor to look downward. Lucille was staring up at me, for once not showing me a toothless grin. Instead she smiled sadly with her twinkling eyes, squeezing my hand with her meager strength as she did so.
I should’ve said something to her. Definitely should’ve yanked my hand out of the human’s grip before she got the wrong idea that she, Thorne, and I were some kind of fucking family or some shit.
But I didn’t.
I didn’t expect it, which was the only reason the wolf was successful. His clawed hand was around my throat, squeezing at my bones before I could utter the word ‘heel.’
I was lucky that the small human was no longer clutching my hand, as she had until the fire burned out, because she likely would’ve died in the impact.
And I would’ve had more on my very freshly conceived conscience.
But she had been taken away since there was nothing left but ash, yet I still wasn’t ready to leave. Thorne had kissed my head and promised to be right back.
I’d barely heard him, just nodded curtly once.
And I’d been alone in the clearing—until now, obviously, when the wolf tackled me to the frigid ground.
A rib cracked on impact but I barely felt it. My body as frozen as the ground itself.
“This is because of you,” he growled, his voice morphing between human and animal as half his body changed to exert the strength needed to keep me in place.
My extended fangs ached to sink into his jugular, but I was all but paralyzed from his grip and more because of my weakened state. For the four hundredth time that day, I cursed the Awakening. Why couldn’t males be the ones who had the babies?
Because they were obviously too big of pussies to actually have to handle one, let alone push a human—or vampire—out of one.
“Your death will be all because of me,” I rasped, my throat protesting in pain as I formed words. “No matter what Sophie does to me. Game over now, wolfy.”
His eyes turned midnight at the mention of Sophie’s name, and his grip sharpened to crushing capacity. My neck bones began to crack, protesting as my fingertips and toes went numb, signifying the fact that I would quickly be paralyzed if he didn’t stop squeezing.
He didn’t stop. Because that wildness in his eyes told me something.
Something about Sophie.
Something really bad.
And he was going to kill me. Because he considered it to be my fault.
In all fairness, it probably was.
His eyes were little more than slits at that point. “She surrendered herself to that power for you,” he hissed. “And it nearly took her from this fucking planet, from me!” he roared, squeezing tighter, and I lost feeling in my legs at the same time a small crack resounded in my ears. “Not a fucking hour after I brought her back to her place, they came. They came, and they fucking took her.”
I could taste his rage, his unyielding and wild fury at me. I guessed he was feeling equal emotions toward himself, because these men considered it to be a personal failure when we got injured.
Or in Sophie’s case, sequestered.
I was assuming that was what happened, but I couldn’t be sure because I wasn’t exactly in the right position to be brainstorming right then.
In the same quickness that the wolf had barreled into me, something barreled into him.
I had expected it to be Thorne, because he just fucking loved saving me from almost certain death. It was pretty much his cardio.
But as I crumpled to the ground, I saw a flash of a suit jacket and smooth hair that was the blur between vampire and wolf.
“Isla!” Thorne’s voice echoed across the clearing as I heard the crunch of the ground amid the crunch of bones telling me that he was sprinting toward us.
I was crumpled in somewhat an ungraceful position, since I didn’t have use of my legs—or, as it happened, my arms.
Thorne’s horrified face entered my vision as he ran his entire body over mine, then focused on my neck, which I guessed was sporting some pretty gnarly bruises right then.
“I’m fine,” I hissed. “Go make sure the two kings don’t kill each other.” I gestured to the fight with my eyes since my arms had yet to obey.
Thorne didn’t even glance in the direction of the ripping and growling. Instead, he gathered me in his arms, jogging toward his house.
“Thorne, I’m actually fine. It looks bad with all my limbs acting like jelly, but the bone the wolf broke is actually teeny tiny and shouldn’t take that long to heal, even with my reduced healing skills,” I said. “So just prop me against a tree, pull them apart, and we’ll see if we can get some information out of the wolf.”
“We’re not getting shit out of him except his last fucking rights,” Thorne bit out.
“No, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you can’t kill the wolf,” I said, my stomach tightening against the discomfort of that small but very important bone in my neck knitting back together. “He’s only doing this because the council took Sophie.”
Thorne’s step stuttered, and I didn’t get to say anything because Scott and Silver rushed forward.
“What fucking now?” Silver hissed, eyes dark.
“No time for explanations. Scott, be a dear and go break up the vampire-werewolf death match,” I demanded.
Scott didn’t hesitate, just nodded once and sprinted over. Though his cheerful smile had been absent since my wedding. And I didn’t think I would ever miss the slightly vacant grin that hinted he may have been dropped on his head as a child, but I did. His friendship with me was chasing out all that annoying joy and naiveté.
But I reasoned the world was going to do it anyway.
I had been walking around in a bad mood ever since Duncan’s funeral. No, before that, obviously. Since the second Duncan’s fucking head landed on the ground in front of me on my wedding day.
So it was safe to say that being a newlywed sucked. Because I’d witnessed a friend die at the hands of the man I thought I’d loved, who had ruined whatever part of me might’ve become a good person, despite the sadistic family and the tendency to drink human blood to survive.
Then my soul sister, the only one who might understand my cocktail of emotions and not judge me for them, had been fucking kidnapped by a witching council we didn’t know how to fucking find.
Because we weren’t witches, obviously.
And we’d burned our bridges with all the ones who weren’t Sophie, because all the ones who weren’t Sophie were massive fucking douchebags.
Thorne had his ‘contact’ that had been looking into Sophie’s whole power thing and was now searching for where a bunch of jumped-up witches would stash such power.
I didn’t even have it in me to grill him about this mysterious contact. It was all I could do to match my shoes to my outfit and have the appropriate amount of snark ready when the king came to visit.
Which was often, now that things were heating up.
More attacks on human and immortal centers of power.
More outward mass murders that were getting harder and harder to cover up. There were already dozens of conspiracy websites chatting about what was really going down.
All the kooks were wrong, of course. But the world was full of enough kooks that eventually one of them would be right.
So there were meetings.
There were battles.
The wolves had now entered the fray fully and completely; ther
e had been some sort of massive attack at their compound in Canada, and they weren’t happy. So not happy, in fact, that Liake sat in on meetings. He didn’t seem to particularly like it, but he was there. And he was answering to the fucking wolf.
True story.
I would’ve put my money on the fucker going absolutely apeshit after he’d been calmed down and had the shit beaten out of him by Thorne for breaking my neck and paralyzing me, even if it was only for just an hour.
Sophie was his mate, apparently, and he’d failed in his wolfy duty to protect that mate. It didn’t matter that they were ambushed by a small army of some of the strongest witches on earth. Witches who had obviously bound Sophie’s powers immediately, and then pretty much torn the wolf apart with magic.
Or from what I could gather.
He wasn’t that hot on talking about it.
He was hot on finding Sophie, though. And that’s how he somehow got himself back into the werewolf fold, and closer to being the king again. I didn’t think it was as easy as taking back the crown, or deer pelt or whatever, since there seemed to be a big portion of wolves that hated him, but he was definitely cracking the whip.
And I was finding it harder to hate him, because he was literally killing himself looking for the witch. I doubted he slept. He was fighting in every single battle he could—which was a lot at that point—trying to capture and torture immortals who knew locations.
But the problem seemed that no one knew whether the council—the witch version of a Sector—had well and truly gone dark side and joined the rebellion, or if they were just giant assholes with a thirst for power.
It was seeming to be the latter. But that didn’t fill me with warm fuzzies. By the way Sophie had paled when she spoke about it over the centuries, they were not about to put her in a five-star hotel on a fabulous Caribbean island.
I knew the witch could handle it, but it still blew. Especially when it was apparent that the enemy would be on the hunt for her too.
Jonathan was making his promise known to try to take down everything I’d built when he’d sent vampires to attack me in my fucking office the day before.
My father, of all people, had been there—he’d been refusing to leave since my wedding—when the well-dressed vampires disguised as humans started draining employees.
“You know, I thought when you said this war was being fought in fucking boardrooms, you were meaning that figuratively,” I hissed, snapping the neck of the final vampire left amidst the human corpses.
My father had taken down over half, because I’d been busy cradling Ashton’s bloodied body in my hands, assuring him he’d be okay as death started yanking at him.
And he’d died.
Half the humans on my floor had.
I’d called Scott for a cleanup, now that the Sector was on our side. They were indebted to me since I’d killed Ambrogio, so they’d sent a cleanup crew, then created a press release about an office shooting, more senseless gun violence melding in perfectly with the heartbreaking human news.
I got home with nothing worse than a couple of cuts and a stained dress—on the outside, at least. Thorne had been pissed, mostly because he didn’t see just how deeply it was all beginning to affect me.
How Ashton’s terrified gaze was burning into me as I stepped into my apartment.
“You’re not going back there,” he growled after surveying every inch of my body to make sure there wasn’t a gaping hole in my chest.
He looked at that area a lot now, and not just for the fantastic rack. I guessed that when he saw it crumpled and exposed and on the brink of killing me, he now needed to remind himself that I had indeed healed.
I jerked out of his grasp, though it was more painful than a caved-in chest. It was the only thing that made me feel these days. With all this death and fucking despair hurtling around this godforsaken rock, his warm and rough grip stopped me from slipping into my old skin, the tempting one where I wasn’t troubled with sorrow or despair, I only made it happen to others.
It was something that I obviously hadn’t shared with Thorne. And I couldn’t share it with Sophie since she wasn’t there, but Jonathan’s appearance, the words he’d used, it had coaxed that monster in me out from its shackles. Not the regular monster I was now. No, the proper ‘hide under your bed, run for your fucking life’ type monster.
The one who killed without remorse and didn’t care about a thing but creating more suffering than what lived inside her.
Jonathan was working to create that being again by giving me suffering. Death. Putting it at my feet like my mother had with his body five hundred years ago.
And had it not been for Thorne’s constant touch, the sweet ambrosia of his blood flowing through me, our frenzied fucking every chance we got, and—however much I hated to admit it—his little sister, I might’ve already gone fucking Darth Vader on this shit.
With a better outfit, of course.
Even now, with Thorne, and his sister’s stupid requests for fighting lessons, or to binge-watch a TV show with her, I was feeling the pull of it. That monster inside me urging me to leave these two behind before they were nothing more than rotting flesh.
Because they would die, that voice whispered. And if you leave now, maybe they won’t, but more importantly, if they do, you won’t care.
I didn’t know how much of that was true. There was nothing in this world that would make me not care about Thorne leaving it, even in my truest monster state.
Monsters needed to be loved too.
But still, I wrenched from his grasp that had warmed me so much after he’d uttered his apparently no-argument statement of me not going back to the office just because I’d been attacked there.
Just because all those humans had died there.
Because of me.
“Excuse me?” I snapped. “Remember how this conversation went down the last time we had it?” I strode over to the bar, desperate for something to warm my insides. “Because the result of that is going to be the same of this.” I poured my drink and turned. “I thought we’d established that you were not to treat me like a vulnerable china doll and try to do suicidal things like tell me what I can and can’t do.”
“That was before I fucking watched your ex-husband punch his fist through your chest at our wedding!” he roared, advancing on me and slapping my drink out of my hands with such force that it smashed against the wall.
The only reason I hadn’t moved it out of the way was because I wasn’t expecting such a show of violence from Thorne.
I guessed he wasn’t the only one trying to fight his monster.
“That was before a vampire I had come to respect and fucking like, one who you counted as a fucking friend, died in fucking front of you,” he continued yelling, snatching at my shoulders.
“That was before your fucking best friend was kidnapped, presumably to be tortured, snatched out of the hands of a wolf who would give up fucking oxygen just to give her that much more air to breathe! That same man who now has to carry around the fucking knowledge that his woman was taken from him and he was fucking powerless. He has to fucking drag around the certainty that she’s getting hurt, badly, and there’s not a fucking thing he can do to stop it.”
He shook me. “And that could just as easily be me. Could’ve been on our wedding day, had Sophie not damn near destroyed herself to do something to stop it. Could’ve been today, and it could be fucking tomorrow.” He stilled abruptly. “This isn’t about you being vulnerable or delicate, Isla. It’s about me being fucking vulnerable. Because the second someone takes you from me, the second that piece of shit gets his hands on you, my life is fucking over. I’m a walking fucking corpse, the knowledge of what’s being done to you rotting my insides like it’s doing to Conall.” His eyes were anchors, dragging me to the pit where his fear lived.
“And like him, I’ll drive myself mad until I find you,” he rasped. “Won’t sleep a fucking wink until I do so. But I also won’t blink for as lon
g as humanly possible, because closing my eyes, I’ll see what happens when I do find you. I’ll see what I can’t change, what’ll haunt me forever, what they’re gonna fucking do to you if we can’t find them and kill them first. I’ve walked this earth for thousands of years, Isla. Never been afraid of anything, especially my destiny. But now you’re my destiny, and I’m fucking terrified of it,” he whispered, the words tattooed on my soul.
“Your destiny,” I repeated, my heart pounding in my chest with his words.
He nodded once.
“So what do you propose I do, then, if it’s such a fucking torturous process for you to let me go out and do something, fight someone, kill someone in order to shake off the memory of my fucking friend dying in front of me?” I yelled, ripping from his arms. “You want me to sit here and let you and your brother do the job? Yes, wouldn’t that be grand? You can continue to do the work you’ve been doing over those thousands of years without me getting in the way. You’re a prince after all.” The words were an accusal.
Thorne’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t do this shit, Isla. Don’t push me away, try to make yourself mad enough to leave so you can protect your heart. You love me.”
I hated the way he saw through me like I was fucking transparent. “And what?” I hissed. “What does that mean? You can do whatever you want to me now because I love you?” I laughed.
“You’ve got a lot to learn, young Jedi. Because I may look human, may even feel it when I’m in bed with you,” I whispered, “but I’m not. I’m a vampire. And I may be able to feel love, but I can turn it off. The love. That’s where the humanity you think I have abandons you. Because it’s a switch. Not a magical one coming from the fact that I’m a vampire. No, paradoxically I think it’s a human trait trapped in my immortal, fabulous, and soulless body. The simplest: survival. You don’t live five hundred years by letting love dictate reason. Romantic vampires don’t exist. You know why? ’Cause they died quicker than you can say Twilight. This, between us—yes, it’s something. Perhaps the thing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t turn it off if I want to. I won’t let it make me weak. I won’t let you make me weak.”