by AJ Myers
His lips were so close that I could feel the cool wash of his breath. His scent surrounded me, cocooning me in a blanket of longing and confusion and heartache that made it hard to breathe. I wanted to pull him closer and let my imagination do the rest. At the same time, I wanted to scream at him to get away from me.
The sound of footsteps coming up the steps broke the spell he was casting over me, and I remembered how intimate our position looked. Blushing so hot I could almost feel steam coming off my cheeks, I shoved at Nathan’s shoulders.
“Move, Nathan,” I hissed, shoving harder when he didn’t budge.
“I rather like you right where you are,” he purred suggestively, a seductive smile turning up his lips.
“Well I don’t,” I snapped—because I am a colossal liar—still shoving at his shoulders. “Get off!”
“You heard her. Get off of her.”
My head twisted around fast enough to give me whiplash as Tyler’s voice echoed through the room and sucked in a sharp breath in surprise. It wasn’t the fact that he was the first on the scene after our supernatural encounter that surprised me. Considering it had probably sounded like grenades were going off in the attic, someone coming to check on me was actually to be expected. No, it was the fact that he looked absolutely furious as he leveled an icy glare at the back of Nathan’s head.
“I said get off of her,” Tyler snarled when Nathan still hadn’t moved after a couple of seconds.
“Tyler it’s okay. I’ve got this,” I said quickly, pushing harder at Nathan’s shoulders to make him move, a total waste of energy if there ever was one. “It’s not what it looks like. The light fell. Nathan pushed me out of the way before it could hit me.”
Okay, that was mostly true. Oh, all right! Fine! The only part of the story I had just told that was true was the part about the fallen light fixture. Still, Tyler looked ready to do battle, and I didn’t see him making it through another fight with Nathan with all of his limbs attached to the correct parts of his body. I didn’t want that on my conscience.
“What is he doing here?” Tyler growled, never taking his eyes from the back of Nathan’s head.
“Um,” I hedged, not sure how I was supposed to explain. “We’re kind of friends now so it’s okay. Really, Tyler. It’s fine. He’s not hurting me, I swear. He’s just annoying me.”
Is that all I am, Ember? Your friend? Nathan grumbled to me silently, not looking like he cared too much for that description.
Friend, warden, vampire kidnapper, pain in my ass…you pick.
But I want to be much more than just friends, he said with a possessive look in his eyes. And if you’d be honest, you’d admit that you want the same thing.
Never taking his eyes from mine, he slid off me one slow inch at a time, making sure as much of his amazing body brushed against mine as possible to prove his point. Miniature explosions went off everywhere he touched, powerful enough to give their full-sized counterparts a run for their money. He rose slowly to his feet and held out a hand to help me up, his smug smile getting even bigger when he saw how flustered I was.
“We should get that taken care of,” he said, glancing down at my leg when I tried to stand on it and groaned.
Kneeling down, he took my calf in one of his large hands and quickly pulled out the shard of glass with the other. I watched him warily, worried about the effect that being in such close proximity to so much blood might have on him, but he simply examined the wound.
“You’re going to need stitches, baby,” he said softly as he let his hand run down my calf in a caress that practically set my skin on fire. If I hadn’t seen the very real concern in his eyes when he looked up at me, I would have kicked him. “I’ve got a car downstairs. I’ll drive you to the emergency room.”
Emergency room? Uh-huh, sure. The nearest airport to board a flight to Antarctica? Yeah, now that I believed.
“I’d rather bleed to death,” I snapped, jerking my leg from his grip.
Tyler turned a snort of laughter into a coughing fit, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. Nathan gave him a look that should have resulted in a very slow, agonizing demise, then reached out and grabbed my hand to pull me close to his side. The way his hand splayed across my hip basically screamed possession.
I’m surprised he didn’t pee on me to mark his territory or club me over the head to drag me off to his cave. I didn’t belong to him and I was about to prove it. Therefore, I did what any girl would do. I made the situation ten times worse.
“Tyler, would you mind driving me to the hospital?" I asked, sweetly. I chanced a glance at Nathan and felt a little thrill of victory when I saw the deadly look blooming on his face. Tyler must've seen it, too, because he grinned at Nathan and said, “Sure, no problem.”
At Tyler's words, an inhuman growl started to rumble in Nathan’s chest. Tyler ignored him and gestured at the stairs. “Shall we?”
Seeing the way Nathan's eyes lit up in fury, I suddenly didn't feel so intelligent in deliberately provoking the vampire. Really, it couldn’t end well. For any of us. "Uh, okay..." I said, wishing I could take it back.
“Over my dead body,” Nathan hissed, turning on my would-be rescuer.
“That can be arranged,” Tyler said, his expression cold.
After the beating he’d taken last time he tried to play Knight in Shining Armor, you would have at least thought Tyler would be a little hesitant about going another round, but he wasn’t. In fact, he looked kind of smug. There was even a smile playing on his lips when he finally tore his gaze away from Nathan to look at me.
“Ember, why don’t you get dressed and we’ll…go…”
His voice trailed off as his eyes drifted to my neck and I literally saw the blood drain out of his face. Blushing, I reached up and pulled my hair forward to cover the vampire brand on my neck. I turned away from the furious look on his face and reached for the hoodie I’d thrown over the foot of the bed and started pulling it on.
“Well, it certainly looks like someone enjoyed their trip,” Tyler hissed, turning back to Nathan.
“It was necessary,” Nathan said, not even flinching. “I’ve seen what the demon that’s after her can do. I won’t apologize for trying to protect her.”
“And did you ask her before you claimed her?” Tyler seethed. The regret in Nathan’s eyes was all the answer he needed. “Did you bother telling her what it meant?”
“I think you’ve said enough, hero,” Nathan said coldly.
“He owns you now, Ember,” Tyler said, completely ignoring the expression on Nathan’s face that said silence was golden. “He can control you with that little brand, did he tell you that? What he wants you to do, you’ll do. What he wants you to believe, you’ll believe. What he wants you to see, you’ll see.”
I looked up at Nathan, waiting for him to explain that Tyler was wrong, but he wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t have to. The guilt I saw written all over his beautiful face was more damning than anything he might have said. I was a puppet and he was holding the strings. He could make me do anything he wanted, and I wouldn’t even be able to fight him.
“Do you want to tell her the rest?” Tyler asked when I started to back away from Nathan.
There was more? The fact that he had taken my free will from me wasn’t bad enough?
“Shut. Up,” Nathan growled.
“No, tell me,” I said, never taking my eyes off Nathan’s face. “I want to know it all.” When neither of them spoke, I screamed the order at him. “Tell me, Nathan!”
“He can also make you feel what he wants you to feel,” Tyler answered instead, his voice soft and almost malicious. “Hate, despair, passion…even love. If he wants your heart, you’ll give it to him tied up with a pretty bow.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but the softball-sized lump in my throat made it impossible for me to make a sound. I reached up with shaking fingers to touch the mark on my neck, letting them slide over it as I stared up at Nathan’s heartbroken expression. I
had been so close to giving in to him. I had wanted to. I had wanted to love him and be loved by him. Had that been him all along? Had he made me fall in love with him?
“Is it true?” I finally choked out. The ginormous lump in my throat felt like it had moved to lodge in my chest, making it hard to breathe. “Can you make me feel whatever you want me to, Nathan?”
“I would never do that to you,” he whispered, his expression pleading.
“But you could?” I asked as my fingers slid slowly toward the cross that had come to mean the difference between sanity and insanity to me. I wrapped my fingers around it and clung to it with a grip born of sheer desperation, hoping it would keep me from shattering into a million pieces—the way my heart did as Nathan drove the last nail in the coffin I would bury it in.
“Yes.”
A wave of agony hit me dead in the chest hard enough to make me sway on my feet as that affirmation seemed to echo around us, growing louder and louder instead of fading away. With that one word, he destroyed me. Not only could I not trust him…or Grams…or my parents. No, he had to make sure I couldn’t trust anyone.
Not even myself.
“Get out,” I told him hoarsely.
“Em, baby, please…” he whispered, but I didn’t want to hear it.
“Get out!” I screamed.
My fist tightened around the cross at my throat, the cross he had given me—the cross engraved with the mirror image of the mark I could never get rid of. Suddenly, the feel of it made my skin crawl. With a vicious yank, I ripped it off my neck and threw it at him. He caught it in midair and looked down at it for a long moment before raising haunted eyes back to mine. Turning my back on him, I braced myself against the dresser and tried to hold it together until I could get him out of the room.
“The sight of you makes me sick!” I hissed when he whispered my name again. “Just go!”
As I glanced up to glare at Nathan’s immobile form in the mirror, I found my eyes drawn to Tyler instead. There was something about the way he was looking at Nathan that was just so wrong. He almost looked amused! Did he think the destruction of my life was funny or something? Was telling me about my mark his sick way of getting back at Nathan for kicking his ass?
I decided then and there that all men should be drowned at birth.
As if he could sense me staring at him, he turned to look at me and his lips turned up in the coldest, cruelest smile I had ever seen. Our eyes met in the glass and a strong whiff of smoke took me by surprise. I would have chalked it up to someone burning a fire in the fireplace in one of the nearby houses, but there was something different about that smell. I had smelled it before, but I couldn’t remember where. It had a bitter scent to it. It almost smelled like…sulfur.
Just as that smell hit me, I witnessed a phenomenon that chilled me all the way to my bone marrow. The tube of lipstick my unseen friend had used to write her fist message rose up in front of me and started gliding across the glass so fast I could barely keep up. Like her last message, she kept it short and sweet. As I read it, I felt my muscles tense and a knot of terror form in my stomach.
Nathan stay! it read in the same childlike writing as before. Demon! Demon! Demon!
And then—because, you know, that wasn’t enough to turn my hair white or anything—I whirled around just in time to see a figure appear at the top of the stairs. A handsome figure with too-long, sun-streaked hair, bronze skin, and warm golden eyes.
“Ember, are you all…right…?” Tyler asked, his voice trailing away to nothing as his eyes fell on his doppelganger.
A doppelganger with pitch black eyes and a leering grin.
“Oops, looks like the cavalry’s arrived. Guess the party’s over.” Jack’s voice coming out of Tyler’s mouth was so creepy I actually shivered, hearing it. “Oh well, my work here was nearly done, anyway.”
With a darkly cheerful laugh, he started backing toward the door with both Tyler and Nathan headed right for him. Before he stepped over the threshold and out onto the widow’s walk, he paused for a second and grinned.
“I know a way to get rid of your little souvenir, Ember. Give me a call. We’ll talk about making an exchange. Information for…” I felt physically ill as he raked his eyes over me from head to toe, and his grin got bigger and creepier. “…a little taste of what you have to offer. Then again, I don’t guess I have to bargain for what I want anymore, do I? I’ll see you in the morning, my love.”
The second he stepped through the remains of the French doors, whatever charm he’d been using to masquerade as Tyler melted away and he was once again the Jack I knew—and had come to hate. With a smartass salute in Nathan’s direction, he turned around and disappeared. And I don’t mean that figuratively, either. He literally dissolved into a cloud of foul, inky-black smoke and disappeared.
I just stood there and stared at the place he had been, my body quivering with chills that wouldn’t seem to ease up. It had been so easy for him to get to me. He had simply walked through the front door and made me believe he was someone I thought I could maybe trust. Who would he show up as next? Kim? Blake? Grams?
Nathan?
Feel the Burn
“Baby, are you all right?” Nathan asked, rushing toward me.
“Don’t. Touch me,” I gritted out between my chattering teeth. “Ever, Nathan. Don’t you ever touch me again.”
“Maybe you should go, mate,” Tyler said, his tone way south of friendly. “It’s pretty obvious you’ve worn out your welcome here.”
“Baby, are you all right?” Nathan asked, rushing toward me.
“Stay out of this,” Nathan snarled without looking away from me. “Ember, you have to hear me out. You don’t understand.”
Oh, I understood all right. I would never be able to trust anything I felt for him. I would always wonder if it was some vampy mind trip. So, seriously, what would be the point of hearing him out? Unless…
“How do I remove it?” I asked coldly. “You want me to listen to your latest load of bullshit? Tell me how to remove it so I can at least know I’m thinking for myself when I kick your sorry ass out that door.”
“You can’t,” he said sadly. When I started to turn away, he reached out for me. I slapped his hand away. “Damn it, Em! Listen to me! Despite what that demonic piece of shit told you, you can’t remove a vampire’s mark. Don’t you think I would have gotten rid of mine centuries ago if you could? If you remove it, you die. I won’t let that happen, Em.”
So it was die or be Nathan’s pretty puppet for the rest of my life. Something was seriously out of whack with the universe if those were my only two choices. I mean, in most cases you had Choice A, which usually sucked, but didn’t suck as much as Choice B. But not in my life. Oh, no. Every time I turned around I was faced with two Choice B’s and no way to choose between them.
“Is that what you were waiting to gain my trust to tell me?” I asked, giving him a look that should have killed him. When he just looked confused, I laughed bitterly. “That night, when I saved you from the demon, you were saying you just needed a little longer to gain my trust, then you’d tell me. Well, you just screwed yourself. I am never going to trust you, Nathan. Never.”
“How did you know that?” he gasped, looking shocked. When I just laughed again, he started to reach for me and I backed up a step. “Tell me, Ember! How did you know that?”
“Because I saw it, all right?” I yelled, backing up another step. “Grams handed me my necklace and I felt all funny and then I was there, watching you. When I snapped out of it, my brand felt all funny.”
“Have you seen anything else?” he asked, his eyes round with what looked like terror. “Have you seen anyone else? Answer me, Ember!”
“No, I only saw you,” I told him, too hurt and betrayed to even care why he was so upset. “And you I would be happy to never see again. I think you know your way out.”
“Em, please, you have to let me explain,” he whispered, his eyes as full of pain as mine
were.
“I’m tired of hearing your explanations, Nathan,” I told him coldly. “Just go.”
When he reached for me again, I found myself backed up against a hard, warm chest. I looked over my shoulder when Tyler’s hands wrapped around my upper arms in a grip so gentle I felt like a china doll only to find him giving Nathan the deadliest look in history. Still treating me like I was made of porcelain, he moved me behind him and placed himself directly between me and the desperate vampire still trying to reach me.
“You really are a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?” Nathan asked Tyler in a voice chilly enough to cause a blizzard right there in the room with us.
“It won’t be so easy this time around,” Tyler said, his voice every bit as chilly. “Now, I believe the lady has asked you to leave—repeatedly. Why don’t you save us all a lot of drama and go?”
“What in the world has happened here?” a horrified voice asked from the doorway. We turned as a group to find Mrs. Amelia standing just inside the door, her gaze taking in the destruction of the room around us.
“Why, hello, Nathan,” she said when her eyes landed on him. Gesturing around the room, she smiled and asked, “Your work? Must you always make such a dramatic entrance?”
“This was a demon attack, Amelia,” Nathan growled, his eyes not dimming even a little. “Since when did you stop putting wards on your house?”
“Don’t take that tone with me in my own home,” she snapped, not seeming quite so frail all of the sudden as her emerald eyes shot sparks at Nathan. If anything, she sounded more like Grams. “My house is very well protected, Nathan. Now, tell me, what are you doing here and why is a demon attacking my home?”
I only half-listened as Nathan and Tyler fought to see who could give the best version of the story. Having lived it, I didn’t find it particularly fascinating. I was starting to feel kind of woozy—though from blood loss or lack of sleep and all the energy drinks I’d sucked down like Gatorade I couldn’t tell. I looked around, hoping there would be something soft for me to land on if I passed out and grimaced when all I saw was debris-littered hardwood floors. I gauged the distance between where I stood and the bed—walking through an obstacle course of glass and mangled lighting—and decided it just wasn’t worth it.