“Off,” Nathan said firmly, only to be ignored. With a curse, Nathan moved to pull the dog off only to throw a glare over his shoulder when a low growl had the dog jumping off the bed and following Trace out the door.
“I hate that bastard,” Nathan muttered as he walked over and sat down on the bed next to her.
“The dog?” Samantha asked, nodding because that little bastard was definitely out to get her.
“No, the asshole that I’m going to shove in a fucking volcano,” Nathan said, sounding tired as he rubbed his hands roughly down his face before dropping his hands aside with a sigh and asked, “How are you holding up, Sammie?”
“Please don’t call me that,” she said with a glare that had him chuckling as he pulled the comforter over her.
“Why not?” Nathan asked, settling the comforter around her before climbing over her, making sure to push her over and be as annoying as humanly possible as he did it, reminding her of when they were growing up and had to share a room.
When their parents found out that they were having twins, they were thrilled. They’d been together since high school, married for less than a year, just bought their first house, and their father had finally been able to afford to quit his job and start flipping houses fulltime. Finding out that they were having twins, a boy and a girl had made everything perfect.
They’d set up adjoining nurseries, picked out names, talked about all the things that they were going to do, the vacations that they were going to take, imagined all the possibilities, and then…
They were told that the baby girl that they’d always wanted probably wasn’t going to make it. It had been difficult, but their parents had prepared themselves for the worst. They’d never realized that Samantha surviving would be the worst thing in the world that could happen to them.
Nathan came into this world a screaming healthy baby boy and she had barely managed to take her first breath before the hospital was arranging for MedFlight to take her to Portland. It had been touch and go there for a while and then, reality sank in when that first hospital bill came. That was followed by dozens more, each demanding more than the last. The insurance had paid the bare minimum and a collection from the local church had helped with meals and gas so that they could visit her, but…
It hadn’t been enough.
Her grandmother offered to sell her old house to help them with the bills, but it had already been on the verge of falling apart by that point. Her parents were faced with a choice no parent should ever have to make, keep her and lose everything or give her up, knowing that the state would make sure that she got the care that she needed. Without hesitation, their father chose her, but their mother…
Hadn’t.
While their mother had been moving in with friends from college halfway around the world, their father had been putting their house up for sale and begging for his old job back. He’d found them a small two-bedroom apartment, painted the walls of their nursery an ugly green that they used to color on, and worked his ass off to keep a roof over their heads.
They hadn’t had much growing up, but they’d had each other. Nathan was her best friend. They’d been through everything together, been there for each other, and could always count on each other. She loved him more than anything in the world, which was why knowing that he’d lied to her hurt the most.
“You’re not in the Marines, are you?” she asked, glancing over to find Nathan watching her with an unreadable expression.
“No, I’m not,” he said softly with a sad smile.
“What’s going on, Nathan? I don’t understand any of this,” Samantha said as he wrapped his arm around her and pulled her closer.
“You were never meant to, Sammie,” he said, sighing heavily as he pressed his lips against the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Nathan?” she asked, laying her head against his chest as she waited for him to say something that would help her make sense out of everything that happened.
“Do I have a choice?” Nathan asked only to wince when she jabbed her finger into his side and turned it…hard.
“Brat,” he said with a long-suffering sigh as he settled more comfortably against the bed before admitting, “I don’t know where to start.”
She worried her bottom lip as she glanced at the door where Trace disappeared a little while ago and asked the one thing that she’d been wondering since this whole thing started. “Why was he in that wall?”
“You’d have to ask him that.”
“Fair enough,” Samantha said, biting back a wince when she shifted to get comfortable only to decide against it when her head started to hurt again. She should have asked for prescription-strength ibuprofen before they left, but she’d been unconscious at the time and hadn’t had a chance to ask for anything.
“Are you okay?” Nathan asked as she somehow managed to reach over and grab the extra-large bottle of Advil that wasn’t going to last the week with the way that her head was feeling.
“Fine,” she said, dumping three liquid gel pills in her hand and swallowed them with a sip of water before she leaned back against him.
“You want to tell me what happened?” Nathan asked, gesturing to the bruise that was finally starting to heal.
“You want to tell me why you disappeared at the hospital?” she countered, asking the question that she’d be wondering about since she woke up alone in that hospital bed.
“We miscalculated,” Nathan said, making her frown.
“Miscalculated what?”
“How much morphine it would take to bring down a Pyte,” he said, repeating that word that she’d been wondering about. Granted, there were so many things about this situation that she was wondering about, but she decided that she was going to start with the hospital first.
“Are you going to clear that up?”
“Do I have to?” he asked with a long-suffering sigh as he threw his arm back around her and pulled her closer.
“If you want to live,” she said, tempted to poke him again.
“Fine,” he said, making sure to sound put out as she laid her head against his chest and…couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t as comfortable as Trace.
“Trace is a Pyte,” he said only to roll his eyes when she tilted her head back so that she could shoot him a questioning look. “He’s a freak accident and an asshole.”
“Thank you. That really cleared everything up,” Samantha said, nodding only to shake her head in disgust as she laid her head back on his chest with a sigh.
“I’m not done yet,” he said, reaching up to give her hair a gentle tug. “He’s the product of a vampire and a human. His father is a vampire,” he said, while she laid there, absently nodding because she hadn’t known that part.
That was something else that she would most likely panic about later when this was all over, but for now…
“He can go out in the sunlight,” Samantha pointed out, even as she had to wonder if everything that she’d learned from movies and books about vampires, shifters, and all those other things that she probably didn’t want to know about was true.
“None of that shit affects him. He can’t die, doesn’t need to breathe, is fast, insanely strong, has enhanced senses, drinks blood, is dangerous, and is a fucking asshole that better keep his hands off my sister,” Nathan said, stressing the last part as she laid there unable to help but frown when something occurred to her.
“Then why did you give him morphine?”
“Because we didn’t think that it was a good idea to bring a Pyte, who appeared to have spent the last few centuries locked away in a tomb, into a hospital filled with unsuspecting humans. So, as soon as we got you into the wheelchair, we poisoned the bastard so that the other asshole could take him back to the house and lock him up. What we hadn’t anticipated was pissing off the bastard. We barely made it to the back of the parking lot when he tore one of the doors off. It took us over an hour, but we finally got
him to stop kicking our asses and convinced him to go back to the house and wait for you, but then he heard you say his name and rethought that plan.”
“He heard me say his name?” she asked, trying to wrap her mind around everything that he was saying.
“Enhanced senses,” Nathan murmured absently.
“Nathan?” she said, worrying her bottom lip as she debated whether or not she really wanted to know.
“Yeah?”
“How do you fit into all of this?”
There was a heavy sigh and then, “Because it’s the reason that I was born.”
Chapter 32
“What are you talking about?” the small woman that he’d never planned on seeing again asked as Nathan sat there, absently wrapping his finger around a strand of her long curly brown hair and let his finger slide free only to do it again.
When they were kids, he used to hold her like this, wrapping her hair around his finger while he tried to think of something, anything, to say to make things better for her. He loved his sister more than anything in this world and it killed him that she always had to struggle so damn hard for everything. She’d always been smaller than the other kids, shyer, quieter, and so damn sensitive.
She’d never complained, never let anyone know how hard it was for her, but late at night, when everything was quiet, she’d curl up onto her side and cry. Without a word, he’d crawl into her bed, put his arm around her, and gently twirl his finger around a strand of her hair as she let it all out. When she finally fell asleep in his arms, he continued to hold her, promising her that things would be better one day.
“I’m a Sentinel, Sammie,” Nathan said, absently twirling his fingers through her hair.
“You do realize that I have no idea what that means, right?” she said, making his lips twitch.
“Every ten years, ten Sentinels are born. Five mated pairs, who share a human soul and the soul of an angel. We’re born to humans along with a human twin who makes it possible for us to be born,” Nathan said, wishing that he didn’t have to have this conversation with her.
When he first found out what he was and what he was supposed to do, he’d wondered how he was going to tell her. The entire ride to Boston, he’d worried about how she would react when she found out that vampires existed. She would have probably been okay after a few minutes, but he knew that she would have lost it when she found out what that meant for him.
During the entire ride there, he’d worried about how she was going to handle the news only to decide that he was keeping her as far away from this world as he could when he’d reached the Boston compound and found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. As he’d waited for the minion that had snuck into the compound to pull the trigger, the only thing that he could think of was his sister and how fucking relieved he was that Eric had talked him out of bringing her with him.
“Sentinels live for two hundred years. We’re stronger and faster than humans. Our senses are also stronger than a human’s and we age differently. When we die, we wait with our mates to be born again and take our turn on earth,” he explained, staring at the wall as he waited for her to understand what he was telling her.
“What does that make me?”
“Lucky to be alive,” he said hollowly as he continued wrapping his finger around her hair.
“I don’t understand,” Samantha said as he allowed himself one last twirl of her hair before climbing off the bed, needing to put a little space between them before he told her the rest.
“Most human twins die at birth. It’s difficult for them to survive sharing a womb with us, but somehow you survived. Your scent is sweeter than it should be, but that’s it. You’re still human,” he said as he leaned back against the wall, watching as her eyebrows arched in confusion and-
“Wait. This doesn’t make any sense, Nathan. We’re twenty-nine years old, which means that you’ve stopped aging and in a few years it will be noticeable. When were you planning on telling me about all of this?” Samantha asked as she sat up and forced him to tell her the one thing that would make her hate him forever.
“I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t going to tell me?” she said, frowning in confusion only to swallow hard as she met his gaze as she finally understood what he’d been trying to tell her. “You were never going to tell me,” she repeated hollowly.
“No, I wasn’t, Sammie. Keeping you out of this was the only way to keep you safe. I didn’t want anything to-”
“When?” she asked, cutting him off and he didn’t pretend to misunderstand.
“Next week,” he said, watching as she sat there, absently nodding as she dropped her gaze to the floor.
“I was never going to see you again, was I?” she asked, staring down at the floor.
“No,” he said, moving to go to her so that he could explain that he’d been trying to protect her only to stop when she said, “Get out.”
“Sammie, I-”
“Just go, Nathan.”
*-*-*-*
“God, he’s a fucking idiot,” Kale said, shaking his head in disgust as Trace sat on the small cot that he used to share with his father, taking in the old cottage that looked exactly the way it had all those years ago except for the addition of a new table and a wood floor.
“He shouldn’t have lied to her,” Trace said absently as he sat there wondering just how differently his life would have turned out if he’d listened to his father.
“No, he shouldn’t have,” the shifter agreed as he leaned back against the wall.
“When’s the next full moon?” Trace asked, forcing his mind back on the only thing that should matter.
“Six days,” Kale said as Trace stood up, absently nodding as he headed for the door, deciding that he’d given the Sentinel more than enough time to say goodbye. He headed towards the door and-
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Should I?” Trace asked, glancing back at the shifter as he opened the door.
“Probably not,” Kale murmured absently as he pulled his phone out of his back pocket and stared down at it, something that Trace noticed that he did often.
Throwing the shifter one last curious glance, Trace stepped outside just as the Sentinel threw the backdoor open and-
“Goddamn it!” Nathan roared as he slammed the door shut behind him.
For a moment, Trace considered following him and finding out if Sentinel blood was really as dangerous as his father claimed only to have his attention drawn back to the house where his heartbroken wife was-
“Ouch!”
Attacking her brother, Trace belatedly realized, blinking as he tried to make sense out of what he was seeing.
“You ungrateful little son of a bitch!” his wife yelled as she pulled her bare foot back and-
“Ow!”
Cried out when she made contact with her brother’s leg.
Sighing, Nathan went to help her only to back up with his hands held up when she leveled a murderous glare on him. “Do you have any idea what I went through? Huh? Do you?” Samantha demanded, her sore foot quickly forgotten as she went after her brother.
“They were going to kill me and all I could think about was trying to figure out a way to save your ungrateful ass!”
“Sammie, I-”
There was an outraged gasp and then…
“You don’t ever get to call me that again! Do you hear me? Do you?” Samantha demanded as she shoved the large Sentinel back.
“I was trying to protect you!” Nathan snapped, reaching for her only to have his hands slapped away.
“By leaving me by myself? You were going to leave me alone in a town that I hate with that asshole?” she demanded, gesturing towards the dog that was watching them, looking bored.
“Charlie loves you!”
“Charlie’s an asshole!” Samantha snapped back with another shove that had the Sentinel stumbling back.
“This area is safe. I made sure of it. That’s why I wanted
you back here. There hasn’t been a Pack in this area in over a hundred years,” Nathan explained while Trace stood there, shaking his head in pity.
“God, he really is a fucking idiot,” Kale said, sighing heavily as he joined him.
“Oh, there hasn’t been?” Samantha demanded in sputtered outrage with another shove. “Then explain the six assholes that tried to shove me in a tomb with him!” she yelled, gesturing wildly towards Trace while he stood, wondering if he should do something.
Nathan opened his mouth only to grunt when Samantha shoved him back. “I never would have come back here! I hate this damn town! I hate my job and I hate the fact that I had to cancel my Netflix account so that I could pay for a stupid roof for the house that I hate!”
“I was going to take care of that, Sammie,” Nathan said, making him wince.
“How exactly were you going to take care of that when you were supposed to be dead, huh?” she demanded with another shove.
“I made sure that you were set for life,” Nathan said with another grunt as she shoved him back again.
Shaking her head in disgust, Samantha said, “I don’t want your money. I want my brother, you dumb son of a-Ow!” she cried out when she stepped on a rock, but she didn’t let that stop her.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” Nathan said, moving to go to her only to once again rethink that when she slapped him on the arm. “What the hell was that for?”
“You know exactly what that was for, Nathan Lukas!” Samantha said, pointing a damning finger at the Sentinel.
“Sammie, I’m sorry,” Nathan said, once again reaching for her only to sigh when she slapped his hand away, again.
“No, but you will be as soon as I get my hands on a really big stick!” Samantha bit out with a determined look in her eyes as she glanced around the immaculate lawn, searching for something to hit her brother with right around the time that Trace decided that he’d let this go on long enough.
Walking over to his wife, he shoved the Sentinel out of his way, grabbed his wife, and threw her over his shoulder with a sigh when she yelled, “A really big stick!”
Tall, Dark & Furious (A Pyte/Sentinel Novel Book 6) Page 20