by Anne Malcom
The truth and meaning to his words had me moving, despite the possibility of death if I did so. I was willing to brave that possibility instead of the certainty of it if he was able to carry out the threat I knew wasn’t empty.
So I moved.
And the threat was carried out, the soundtrack a brutal ripping sound that combined with a sharp and intense lance of pain followed by nothing.
No, not nothing. A wave of sorrow so deep it rivaled any form of pain I’d ever experienced.
And then nothing.
The blessed and cursed nothing of the dead.
Chapter 21
“She shouldn’t take that long to heal,” a frantic voice growled.
“Nay, she shouldn’t,” a thicker, less frantic voice agreed. “She needs blood.”
The voices were far above me, like I was at the bottom of a well and two men were looking down at me discussing my fate.
“Well get out of the fucking way so I can give her more,” the voice growled.
The familiar voice. The alive one.
Thorne.
His thundering heartbeat traveled the depth of whatever underground well I was trapped in, encircling me in the reality that came with it. That heart that was sending blood around his body.
It was then I noticed the burning at the back of my throat, uncomfortable and growing in intensity with every beat of his heart. Thirst. My body craved blood to chase away the grave that still beckoned me. I could taste it, the bitter twang of death.
“You’ve given her enough. Much more and you’ll be deader than she is without the undead part of the equation. And then she’ll wake up and kill me for letting her drain you.”
“Get out of my way,” the voice seethed. “I’ll give her every fuckin’ drop if need be.”
“This would be a great time for the witch of the hour to work some fuckin’ hocus pocus,” Duncan muttered.
The air swirled with magic, even through the fog I was currently in. “Kind of busy trying to contain a witch queen and her powers so she doesn’t kill us all,” Sophie’s voice gritted out painfully.
“I thought women were meant to be able to multitask,” Duncan accused.
Not the smartest thing he could have said.
Liquid, warm and enticing, snaked between my lips.
“Isla.” Thorne’s voice was thick. “Drink. Come back to me. Now,” he ordered.
At first I couldn’t find enough strength to do more than let it trickle down my throat.
But it was blood. It was still life. So with great strength, I detached my hand from his and reached to cradle the head of the man whose neck was attached to my mouth.
Tasting him was where I realized I’d only been drinking with my fangs and filling on the surface. His blood showed me what drinking from the soul was like, the dark, twisted soul inside of me, and what it was to fill that creature up. It was the realization that those wretched human clichés about love were correct and he did complete me.
But not just to make the better me. He completed the monster within me.
And that wasn’t what I feared, the monster within me. No, I welcomed her, that beautiful, ugly thing that treated death as a tax write-off and torture as a way of life.
I feared that once I looked at it in the mirror, I’d realize I wasn’t a monster after all. Merely a broken girl from centuries past with fangs, a new hairdo, and a murderous disposition.
A monster on the surface and yet a human to the core.
Thorne’s blood revealing the lack of monstrosity within me might just be what killed me.
Because being a monster was easy. Fun even.
But being human? It wasn’t that. It wasn’t fun or easy. It was pain and suffering and death and destruction.
And love.
Which is just another word for destruction.
“There we go,” Duncan murmured, relief apparent.
I managed to flutter my eyes open to see a blurry muscled figure standing in front of me with his arms crossed. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and blood mingled with the auburn hair on his chest, trailing down his muscled midsection.
My eyes yearned for someone else, though. Someone with inky black hair. It was mussed with dried blood, framing his bruised and battered face. His jacket was off, and from the scent of it, on me. The dirty fabric of his tee clung to the ridges of his muscles and he was coated with blood like Duncan. Unlike Duncan, he had wounds to match it. Mostly they seemed merely surface scratches Apart from the nasty gash at his neck, covered haphazardly with stained white gauze. Even with his blood in my mouth, I craved to taste the wound. It was only his eyes burning into me that stopped me, gave my animal inside the restraint it needed.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice thick and rough as I used my newly healed vocal cords.
Thorne stood, seeming loath to do so, his hand on his neck, jaw twitching as if he urged to move. “Your husband broke your neck,” he explained. “And you crumpled to the floor with a certainty of death. Stayed like that, even through the battle that had all of his soldiers eating grave dirt. While he and your mother ran like cowards.” He paused, his eyes alight with the fury that was burning through me. “You stayed dead. Through that. And through us transporting you to the airstrip. And takeoff, not to mention two hours of flying.”
One word cut through the rest with the utter betrayal wrapped up in it.
Husband.
“That was real?” I asked, my voice less than a whisper. “Jonathan was real?”
Thorne nodded once, stiffly. “Real enough to snap your neck,” he clipped.
Duncan stepped forward, kicking the body of the copilot away distractedly, Duncan had obviously needed a pick-me-up too.
I noted the man’s faint heartbeat with relief.
Duncan leaned forward, clutching my chin, his eyes softer than I’d ever seen them. “Wish I could kill your mammy for that one,” he growled. “She scampered off in the chaos after the neck breaking.” He paused, searching my face with something akin to sympathy. Which I loathed. “You never knew?”
I gave him a hard and chilled look, maybe trying to seep some of the ice out of my veins. “That my family hired a vampire to pose as a human and have me fall in love with him when I was a naïve child, only to kill him in front of me in order to turn me into the vampire they’d always tried to make me be?” I asked coldly. “No. No I didn’t.”
I didn’t glance to Thorne, though I didn’t miss the way he flinched at my words, or the bitter edge to his emotions. “They’re dead, then, at least? My wretched family. Not including my mother.”
Duncan shook his head once, face stormy. “We got the two brothers, at least. Not your father. He wasn’t there.”
I remembered my mother’s words against my father. “I don’t expect he was,” I mused, them glanced to them. “I don’t think he’s involved. In fact, I think we might have an ally in him.”
Duncan let out a disbelieving snort.
I leveled my gaze at him and recounted my mother’s words.
“Just because he’s not bothered to start a revolution doesn’t mean he’s anything to you,” Duncan said, not unkindly.
“I know,” I snapped, sitting up and rubbing my neck.
It didn’t hurt, though I felt the icy handprint from Jonathan’s touch still. I craved Thorne’s fire to take it away, but he stayed away, his eyes glued to me.
I couldn’t stand his gaze so I flickered my own to a tight-faced Sophie, who was staring at a woman being held by the wolf.
I screwed my nose up. “Oh, the wolf survived. Yay,” I muttered.
Sophie glared at me. “Glad to see you’re not dead, Isla,” she hissed. Small beads of perspiration dotted her brow.
I focused on the reason for that, and the dank and stifling quality to the air that was polluted with dark ugliness.
She was beautiful, that one. Otherworldly so. Different than the others, whose ugliness flickered like a television screen on the fritz. Her picture was muc
h clearer, the truth buried much deeper.
I’d expected her to have harsh black hair and darkly beautiful features, but she was the opposite. Her hair was so golden it was almost white, tumbling down her back in shiny curls that looked well shampooed and cared for. Her face was pale and delicate with small features, apart from large brown eyes.
That’s where it got me.
Never trust a blonde with brown eyes.
But the rest of her stayed with the sweet, innocent image, her small and petite body encased in a simple white dress with long sleeves
You couldn’t hide it, though, the rotten magic seeping from her very soul, even more mangled than mine and Duncan’s combined.
“So this is Malena,” I mused. “All the trouble for her.” I focused on her dark brown gaze. “I will say, I’m not your biggest fan. At all. Maybe in another life, where you didn’t curse me and create gross and annoying abominations of my race, we could’ve been friends.” I paused. “No, even then, I could forgive all that, but not that you were having sleepovers with my mother. We’re just going to have to kill you,” I said apologetically.
Her eyes narrowed slightly and the air in the cabin pulsed.
Sophie glared at me. “Try not to rile the witch with enough power to grind us all to dust,” she gritted out.
I held up my hands. “Sorry, I was under the impression you had it handled.”
“I do,” she hissed.
I gave her a look. “If you had it handled, then you would have allowed for some gentle riling,” I shot back.
A warning glare.
“Fine, I won’t talk to her,” I conceded.
So then I was faced with looking into the quicksilver eyes that had been on me since the moment my fangs had been in him. Since the last time I saw him before my husband broke my neck.
“So we got the witch, killed half of my family and hopefully put a dent in the war. Must mean we’re done, right?”
His gaze didn’t flicker. “No. It means we’ve only just started.” He said the words with grim certainty.
I sighed. “Yeah, I was afraid of that.
The slam of my apartment door had an ominous echo to it.
I went straight for my bar, tired—no, exhausted—from the hours passed. They’d felt like years, like I’d lived the past five centuries of my existence crammed into thirty-six hours. Killing my family, facing the fact that the entire existence I’d created, the entire persona I’d created, was based on artifice. Did that make me artifice? I glanced down at my pale hand, half expecting it to flicker with transparency, signifying the end to this pretend undead life I’d created.
Thorne’s fury crept up behind me, lurking, slithering like a snake, rearing to strike.
I turned, bracing myself for it. For the explosion of everything that had been simmering for the entire plane ride that he’d been mute, sitting beside me, stoic and letting me wade through the pit of snakes that had become my psyche.
I’d seen a lot to have an idea of how to predict what people would most likely do in most situations. What I didn’t expect him to do was cross the yawning expanse of a couple of feet and clutch my face between his hands, capturing me in his gaze for a split second before his mouth plastered on mine, sending my whisky glass tumbling to the ground as it took everything I had just to hold on.
He didn’t speak the entire time he explored, worshipped and equally punished every single inch of my body, loving me, hating me and saying everything that would need a century to be said.
We didn’t need them, words. Actions spoke louder and all that.
But for two hours, I didn’t feel incorporeal or unsure about who I was. It didn’t matter who I was.
For I was Thorne’s.
And I was alive.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” His gruff voice cut through the silence of the loneliest hour. Or that’s what 3 a.m. was meant to be. For someone who’d spent five lifetimes pretending she wasn’t lonely, I’d never felt less alone than during the time when the city that never slept seemed to doze.
I glanced up at him from my perusal of his chest. Every inch of it was corded muscle, ripples and ridges I knew as well as my own body. I knew all of his scars, the ones that knotted his tanned flesh, marred it and became the part of him I loved. The warrior.
I stroked his face, which had been swollen and almost purple mere hours before.
I searched those eyes, feeling an overwhelming urge to escape the conversation, to escape my own head. Problem was, I could run from real life demons, but I couldn’t outrun the ones residing in my soul, hiding in the shadows.
His eyes offered a promise that I wouldn’t face them alone. And for once, I didn’t want to.
He didn’t say anything, just waited. Funny, I was the one with eternity but he had more patience than me, acting as if every second wasn’t sand in the hourglass of his death.
Maybe it was only me who noticed that.
“You’ve seen, met and battled to the death with my family. You know they’re perhaps the reason you exist. Their vile existence the reason for history painting us as the villain.” I paused. “And I, of course, am the reason pop culture adopted us as sex symbols, though they butchered most of the folklore. Not that it was accurate anyway.”
My eyes left his. I wasn’t ready to tell all of this with that connection. I already itched for distance while still craving the intimacy.
“Now it’s all a fucking shambles since all of that was built on a lie. Jonathan was a lie. My existence, if that’s what the past five hundred years was, was a lie.”
Thorne clutched my chin, titanium fire in his eyes. “No, don’t you let him take that,” he growled. “He will die a thousand times over for what he’s done. I’ll make sure of that. But he will not take you with him. It was a lie, what he did to you, but you, this, what sits before me is the starkest truth I’ve experienced in my years on this earth. Complicated to say the least. Magnificent. Frustrating enough to make me want to claw my hair out, but not a lie,” he said softly.
I blinked at him. “You say things like that with such conviction that I may just believe,” I warned.
He pushed the hair from my face. “Good,” he murmured.
I searched his face and felt the emotions in him that I was even struggling to contain.
“It is a terrible kind of beauty, what we have, the kind that hurts to look at and hurts even more to feel. Because I hate to quote Led Zeppelin, but I can’t fucking quit you. I know they didn’t add the ‘fucking,’ but it was needed for emphasis and I’m taking artistic liberties. It doesn’t bode well for me or for eternity, the inability to let you go.”
His arms tightened around. “It might not bode well for eternity, but it bodes well for me. Can’t quit you any sooner than I’d quit my heart from beating,” he rumbled.
“We’ve still got a lot to get through,” I whispered. “A war to fight. An ex-husband to make sure is really, really dead, and a witch-werewolf romance to kill,” I listed.
His mouth twitched. “Oh, and defeat the faction of evil creatures set to try and take over the world and enslave humankind?” he asked dryly.
His wording made me go up on my elbow to meet his eyes.
“You think this war is a battle against evil?” I asked. “I really hope not, because I fear that insanity is worse than mine. There’s no such thing as a battle against evil. You should know this. Because evil lives forever, deathless, not in the souls of those people and creatures who are depraved and wicked to the core. No, the truest of evil exists in the hearts of people who try to convince the world and themselves that they’re good. Inside the very humanity we’re trying so fucking hard to save.
“So you’re saying we shouldn’t even try to save them?”
I glared at him. “No, Buffy, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just letting you know that we’re not fighting for a cause. We’re not fighting against evil—we’re fighting for it. And the sooner you realize that, the easier we’ll be r
id of that self-righteousness that will be fatal to us all. And I’m rather attached to my existence, and my evil, wretched heart. It’s dark and bitter, but at least it’s pure. After all, what’s purer than evil?”
He moved forward to clutch my face. “If evil is your heart, your soul, then I’m evil too, baby. And no fuckin’ way is it wretched. Even if it is, your wretched heart is mine forever. And my wretched heart is yours.”
At that very moment, as if his words had willed it so, the low thump of his heart somehow became a deafening roar in my ears, vibrating my entire body with its force.
I scowled at the interruption of the moment. Then again, it had been getting far too much like a Nicholas Sparks novel for my liking.
I may have been in love, but that didn’t mean I had to hurl myself off the cliff and land in the soft clouds of hearts and rainbows. Give me storms and hurricanes any day.
Nonetheless, I was glad for the interruption, but not the nature of it. His heartbeat, which had always been so calming to me even in the midst of the hatred-filled fighting of the past few weeks, was now uncomfortable in its force, seeming like it was chattering my teeth.
“What could I have possibly done between the space of a few words to anger you again?” Thorne asked dryly, noting my scowl and irritation.
I glanced up at him. “Your heart. It’s so fucking loud.”
He laughed, the sound vibrating his throat. “Sorry, babe. I will try to rectify this in the future. We can’t all have that stillness you boast.”
As if to make his point, or maybe for some foreplay, he laid his callused palm on my chest.
The teasing look immediately left his face, and his emotions poured through me with panic and dread.
Because that resounding roar of a heartbeat was not coming from his chest.
It was coming from mine.
Epilogue
Endings always wrap everything up so neatly, don’t they?
Except there’s no such thing as ending when immortals are involved. It’s at the end of the beginning, perhaps, that things are starting to make the most sense. Fall into place. For at the edge of the destruction of this world is where reason and peace lie. If reason or peace could reside anywhere, it would be there.