The smiled wavered for just a moment and then faded; seconds later she was just inches from my face. “Your little show the other day has given you confidence that you don’t really deserve.” Her movements where smooth and dramatic as she made her way back to the chair. A delightfully menacing look fell over her appearance and she smiled, baring fangs. “Please sit, we need to talk.”
She waited patiently; the silence didn’t affect her, but it made me nervous. Taking a seat made me feel like she had won something. I didn’t want her to win, but if I didn’t sit we would spend the rest of the night in silence glaring at each other from across the room. After a few more moments of quiet defiance, I took a seat in the chair across from her. After more silence I met her gaze. It wasn’t cold at all; in fact, she looked dejected. “I saved him, he is mine,” she whispered. “He was a broken man when I met him. Haunted by his past, unable to forgive himself for it. A beautiful broken man with endless potential. He asked me to change him but I declined. He wasn’t ready.” She smiled at the memory of Quell that predated my birth. “He hanged himself, and if it weren’t for me, he would have died.”
“He was trying to escape from the demons you want to unleash.” I wasn’t sure why she was here trying to have a civil conversation with me since there wasn’t any civility between us. I am sure she wanted me dead as much as I wanted her to revert. “What do you want from me?”
Giving me just a hint of a glance, she returned to preoccupying herself with looking around the room. “His demons haunt him because he allowed them to. He held his humanity to a standard that no one else did. No one cared about the torture or the murders he committed. It was war and was accepted—to some, expected. The rules were different. I’ve done worse and will never allow the triviality of so-called human morality to stop me. And even once I changed him and he became one of us, where things are different, he clings to the memories and guilt of betraying humanity. How can he be so foolish? We are exempt from it, yet he holds to it.” Her chest heaved in a long sigh allowing her disappointment with him to drape over her.
I really hated her. “No. The rules aren’t different or the expectation for all of you to adhere to them. There is still a modicum of humanity expected from the vampires, but you just chose to ignore them. The loss of your human life doesn’t exempt you from humane behavior, that is a belief about yourself that only you and your Seethe hold. You want Quell to become as morally bankrupt as you? I can’t help you with that because I refuse to let him become what you are.”
In a flash of movement, she was lying across the chair, her legs dangling over the arm, her head resting on the other, her silky hair splayed over the side. “I’ve created hundreds, but only loved a select few. I love Quell and at one time he loved me, too. I was his savior and he adored me. I don’t have that anymore because of you. The relationship between Quell and me isn’t the same.”
“Well that’s a shame. Now you will be forced to just sleep with Demetrius. Can you imagine that? Forced to only be with you mate. What will people think?” I said, rolling my eyes at her. The polyamorous relationship that she and Demetrius had was beyond my understanding.
“Skylar, I miss the way Quell and I were before.” Her gentle voice was mesmeric, entreating sympathy that wasn’t warranted or deserved. “I’m unhappy.”
Michaela had taken narcissism, egomania, and self-importance and melded it together to create something that was uniquely hers. How big was her ego and thoughts of herself that she felt that everyone should be concerned about her happiness?
“Are you? Again, that’s a shame. Sadly, I can’t tell you how little I care about you being happy. In fact, I might be happiest knowing you are miserable. Was daddy mean to you? Still don’t care. Did mommy not love you enough and now you crave it like a drug? Guess what? I still don’t care. If Quell doesn’t love you anymore or adore you the same, good. You never deserved it anyway. Are we done now?”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” She was upon me so fast I didn’t have time to act. Fiery dark eyes were full of hate. “I don’t know what he sees in you. We were all intrigued by the Midwest Pack’s new little pup, but like all toy bitches the yappy little barks just get fucking annoying. You will not take him from me, do you understand? You fix this! I don’t care how you do it—but you will do this for me. I will not be replaced!”
She headed for the door but stopped, her voice a cool drift as she turned to face me “We both care about him, but if he isn’t mine, he will not be yours, either, and I will see to that. His death will be your burden to bear.”
The words had barely left her lips before my hands closed around her throat and I slammed her into the wall. In one swift move, I plunged the stake into her heart. Her eyes widened, her mouth lax as I let her fall to the floor. Since she had just recently fed from Fiona her reversion happened slowly.
I crouched over her. “Good. Now I have your attention. Let’s discuss my terms. You will allow him to have the Hidacus, he needs it. No more playing with him, he doesn’t deserve it. Any issues you have with me, you address with me. He’s not yours, he’s not mine. This ownership crap is ridiculous. Do we have a deal?”
Her eyes were screwed closed, and the necrosis that crept up her leg made it hard for her to concentrate on my words. I inched closer. “I need an answer. You really don’t understand the week I’m having so you don’t realize you are just a blip in the crap salad that is now my life.” Giving her body a sweeping glance, I leaned into her. “From the looks of it, you only have a few minutes to make this decision.” I sat back on my heels and waited for a response as she struggled on the floor. The vampires were a lot of things, but they were bound by their word. It wasn’t anything magical from my understanding but another part of vampire code. That and the narcissism that led them to always tell the truth were in a distorted way attributes.
“Yes.”
“I need to hear it.” And through clenched teeth she agreed to it.
I grabbed the knife off the sink and held it to my wrist, preparing to open it up to feed her, but stopped. I wanted her dead. Every part of me wanted to say to hell with it and just let the reversion happen and do the otherworld a huge favor. But most of all, I wished I could blame my actions on Maya. I wanted to say that a dark force was guiding my actions, but they weren’t. My tolerance had been tried to the very end. My well of forgiveness was bone dry, and the ability to deal with the cruelty of others without retaliating had withered to within a fraction of nonexistence. Michaela of all people didn’t deserve anything from me. The seconds became minutes and I sat against the kitchen counter, knife in hand, with the ability to save her and unable to do so.
Thoughts of Quell kept coming to mind. Although she didn’t deserve it, he had a pervasive dedication to her that I would never understand. He wouldn’t care that she threatened his life because she had saved him, and he believed his life was as much hers as it was his and she had the right to do with it as she pleased.
I moved closer to the body with a vile delight, which should have brought me shame, as I watched reversion slowly take over the greater part of it. In that moment I tried to find the very humanity she considered herself excluded from in me, to force me into saving her. But there wasn’t anything there. I was going to let her die. Each time I thought about Quell, I tossed the thought away. When he inevitably started to look for her, would I let him and not say anything? Would I tell him the truth and hope he would forgive me?
This secret would go with me to my grave. Everyone was better off with her gone. And no matter how reprehensible this was—I just didn’t give a damn. I was going to let her die.
“Please don’t let me die,” she finally said. It shouldn’t have gripped me the way it did, but it did. But not enough to help. Several more minutes passed, and I waited for her to die. She would be dead soon.
Dammit!
I couldn’t!
Slicing the knife across my wrist, I held it to her lips. Her hands had started to go throu
gh reversion and she couldn’t use them and I fed her until she was whole but weak.
But the worst thing about the situation was that I was saving her life because her death would hurt Quell. He was the only one keeping her alive. Whether she accepted it or not, she was alive because of him. He saved her.
I opened the door for her. The lissome way she moved was gone, her movements disjointed and laborious. I’d like to think the final look she gave me before she walked out the door was gratitude, but I knew it wasn’t. We were firmly seated in a place of mutual disdain and hate, and I was cool being in that place with her.
As soon as she left, I called Josh. “I have a dead body in my house.”
“I’ll be there in a few.” The pack and their allies had a lot of flaws—a lot—but crisis of conscience wasn’t one of them. I call and tell them I have a dead body, they send someone to clean it up, not a lot of questions asked. Preferably our witch, who cleans it up without evidence that a body existed. I tell them a skeleton is peaking out of the closet, heaven and earth get moved to stuff the bones back in there. A secret needs to be hidden, believe me they will collude with whomever to keep it just that. A few years ago this would have made me sick; now I understood some of it was necessary to remain safe in this world. It was a necessary evil.
It wasn’t surprising that Josh showed up with Ethan, who greeted me with a half-smile that didn’t make its way to any part of his face. Taking a whiff of the air he then focused on the pool of blood near the door. “Michaela was here.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I looked at the blood, too. There was more than I thought. I nodded. “I staked her.”
Expressionless, he nodded and became a fixture against the wall as he waited for Josh to clear out Fiona’s body. I wasn’t getting anything from the brothers. Josh had also adopted a stoic persona. A kaleidoscope of colors covered Fiona as her body disappeared from existence in a blanket of magic. No matter how pleasing of a spectacle it was as magic swaddled the body, it would always seem like a cruel way to end a life, glamorizing a tragic end.
I hated Michaela.
When he was done, Josh asked, “Are you okay?”
I shrugged; there wasn’t much more to offer. No, I wasn’t okay with Fiona being dead. I had to be okay with us making the body disappear.
“I’ll be fine; I just need to get some sleep.” It was inching toward three A.M. and I was supposed to meet Sebastian in the morning.
After Josh left, Ethan stayed behind, still pressed against the wall in silence that extended so long, I started to fidget. He pushed up from the wall and took a seat on the sofa. “Let’s talk,” he said softly.
It took a while for me to make a decision to do so. I didn’t want a lecture, and there was nothing he could say to me that I hadn’t said to myself a thousand times over. He couldn’t shame me about my feelings or actions toward Michaela because it didn’t bother me that I wanted her dead. And he couldn’t smooth this over and tell me it was going to be okay because everything that had happened over the past couple of days had proven otherwise. I had no idea what we needed to talk about.
“Please,” he added as I continued to contemplate the request.
I nodded slowly and approached the chair but before I could take a seat he pulled me onto his lap. The defiant part of me just did not want affection because I felt it was a smoke screen, a prelude to conversations I didn’t want to have. I assume he sensed my reluctance because he said, “I just want to talk, okay?”
Curling up on his lap, I cradled my face in his neck and listened to the slow, steady beat of his heart.
“Tell me what happened?” he asked. He was more relaxed than I expected, but I could feel the clench in his jaw against my face and the corded muscles in his neck.
I told him everything, unfiltered and uncensored, and I even told him the only reason I stopped. And for a long time he didn’t say anything. His chest heaved in slow, measured movements as he stroked my arm while he listened. After a pause, he kissed me several times lightly on my forehead.
“Are you in love with Quell?”
The answer should have been an emphatic “no,” but I hesitated. I didn’t love Quell any more than he loved me. Our relationship was complex and even I couldn’t describe the unique nuances of it. I saved his life, but it wasn’t altruistic in intent; it was selfish. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that he died, even though death was what he would’ve preferred. I forced him to live in a world where he found no comfort. So no, I didn’t love Quell, but the feelings I had for him were probably just as strong as being in love with him. I didn’t know how to explain that.
I pulled away and looked up at Ethan, trying to read the expression on his face. As usual it was indiscernible as he waited for an answer. I didn’t want to answer because part of me wanted to say yes, because saying no felt like a lie.
Ethan was patient and when I attempted to distract him by kissing him, he turned away. Shaking his head, he said, “I need an answer, Sky.”
“No, I don’t think I’m in love with him” was my honest assessment. I didn’t offer much more because I didn’t know how to answer it. Maybe he would have understood if I tried to explain—Ethan dwelled in the gray areas, and that truly fit the complexity of my relationship with Quell. But it was Quell, a vampire; I doubted he would try to understand.
Ethan nodded slowly
“But I hate Michaela and it is because of Quell. I hate the way she treats him. She was cruel to him for no other reason than she could be. She wants him to be a monster like her.”
The rigid muscles of Ethan’s chest tightened and his lips dipped into a frown as he suppressed his own words. He considered Quell a master as much as he considered the other vampires. The were-animals or the vampires never considered the hypocrisy of their beliefs. The vampires considered us animals although their deeds were far more savage than a beast’s. And the were-animals considered vampires soulless fiends—I’d seen some of the things we’d done, knew our history and what has been done to keep the pack safe—we weren’t saints.
I relaxed back against Ethan, cuddled in his arms in silence for what was nearly five minutes before he spoke, “Skylar, things are a mess.”
It was obvious he wasn’t just talking about the Michaela situation or Fiona. The last couple of days had been a mess, and it didn’t seem like there was going to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Ethos had the books, and I was pretty sure we could agree that Maya was a Faerie that we had underestimated. There was a weird manimal or some odd-animal hybrid that we couldn’t figure out. Kelly was missing and probably connected to the manimal thing. We were still doing damage control from the curse we removed. Ethos wanted to take over the otherworld, and the Ares were acting as his henchmen. And if I had actually gone through with killing Michaela, we could have added a war with the vampires to that list.
Ethan wore his emotions so close to the surface I usually knew what he was feeling, but tonight he was different. Was this desolation? I couldn’t take it from Ethan or Sebastian, because they always seemed to have a trick up their sleeve, a plan for the worst-case scenario. Was every possible avenue exhausted and they really didn’t know how to fix it?
“Has Dr. Jeremy found out anything about the were-animal?”
“Yeah,” he sighed, and when he tightened his hold on me, there was a part of me that just didn’t want to know. There weren’t bunnies and rainbows at the end of that tunnel. “There was a synthetic virus in his system, similar to the one that’s found in us.”
Yep, no bunnies or rainbows there.
“Someone’s trying to make were-animals?”
“Seems that way, but Jeremy thinks that whoever is responsible doesn’t want them to change, just take on the other characteristics of were-animals. That’s why his change was so difficult and he didn’t survive it.”
It wasn’t the elves then because their genetic manipulation involved magic.
And Kelly might be going through the same
thing. “We have to find Kelly,” I said.
“Gavin’s on it. He won’t be any good to us now.” That was the strength and weakness of Gavin. He targeted a single mission. When he set his sights on something, he had tunnel vision and nothing else mattered. He was good at what he did, which was only a problem when you were the target.
Ethan was comfortable with silence: we could stay there for hours and not speak another word and he would be okay. I was fighting the urge to turn on the TV or hum or something just to distract.
“Let’s go to bed,” I suggested. I don’t think either one of us was going to sleep and it wasn’t going to be because of amorous activities.
Things were a mess.
My attention kept moving between Ethan and Josh, both of whom had fallen into an annoying silence. Ethan at the wheel, his long fingers drumming against the steering wheel but not to the quiescent beats of the low music on the radio, but to what they usually did, the beat of my heart. It was fascinating and amusing at first, but I just found it hauntingly freaky at the moment. The double beats and then the slow downbeats as I attempted to calm down were echoed into the beats against the steering wheel.
He responded to my glower with a grin. “Stop that,” I said.
A smirk replaced the grin but the beats continued. I rolled my eyes and turned to face Josh. “Why do you think this is a good idea?”
“Samuel made me think about it. If we are able to call Ethos like his friend was then we have the advantage.”
“How is that going to help us get the Clostra back? You think he’s just carrying them around in a satchel or something?”
“Getting them back is secondary. Ethos is the primary threat. We’ve found the Clostra before. We can do it again.”
I wanted Ethos dead as much as the others did. Once he was, life got a lot simpler. I understood that, it’s the calling thing that didn’t sit well with me. When things seem too easy, there was always a price to pay. Nothing about magic was easy, especially strong magic.
Lunar Marked (Sky Brooks Series Book 4) Page 23