“Then we can explain!”
“How? By talking about emotions that he thinks are nothing but a product of some fever? He finds it so hard to believe beyond that. He doesn’t think anyone could ever choose to want him, no matter how you put it. He doesn’t get how . . . how . . .”
“How amazing and bright and brilliant he is?”
“Exactly, exactly. He thinks he’s cold and cruel, and he is . . .”
“But he’s more than that too. And we can show him, Zeke. I know how to show him—the fever isn’t what he thinks it is. He’s certain it’s this one mystical bond between two people, but I know now that it isn’t. That feeling between us happened because of my desire, not the other way around. I wanted him long before it happened, and I think he wanted me too. All the fever does is reveal what is already there,” she said, in a rush of excited realization.
Now Zeke would see, she thought.
But the problem was—he already did.
“I know,” he said, so sadly she almost guessed the truth of what had happened. She could feel it breaking through the clouds now. She could feel it, but still she persisted. She suggested more things they could do and say, from forcing Merrick to hear all the way around to hugging him into understanding. And when he told her it was too late, that Merrick was already gone, she responded with hopeful words about fetching him and bringing back.
It was only after Zeke had shaken his head that she finally started to see clearly. How could she not? His eyes were too wide and dark when he did it. His mouth made a trembling line. It was the silent shake of someone responding to a wife asking if her husband had made it. There was too much grief in that one movement, for a happy ending.
She knew, she knew.
“You can’t,” he said. “It was already too late when I woke. And it will be worse for him, because he’s so much older. The sun is coming up.”
She waited until his attention was elsewhere to do it, then snapped up a blanket and ran out of the door before he knew she was moving. She could hear him screaming after her, however. She could hear him, and knew why he sounded so desperate.
The sun hadn’t even cleared the horizon, but its touch was broken glass against her skin. Even after she’d covered her face and her hands with the blanket, she could feel it slicing into the slightest gap in the material. She could feel it through the material, like an impossible weight bearing down on her back and head and shoulders.
She’d barely taken ten steps before exhaustion started setting in—and that was bad on a number of levels. For a start, it made moving quickly an almost insurmountable ordeal. She could hardly get up to that speed she’d achieved before, which made finding Merrick before the sun rose fully more difficult. And then there was the thought of what Zeke had told her.
It was worse for older vampires.
It was worse than this absolute hell.
God only knew what state Merrick was going to be in, if that was the case. Most likely he was already a cinder—though she refused to let that thought settle. There was a chance, she was sure there was. There had to be one. If there wasn’t, then how could she ever tell him what she now knew to be true?
She hadn’t realized before, but she did now. Speaking to Zeke had sealed it, it had shown her. And more than anything, she wanted the chance to show Merrick too. She wanted him to feel differently about himself, to have a chance to live free of feeling cursed, to come out from beneath the frost, and if he was dead . . .
She wouldn’t be able to bear it if he was dead. She could hardly bear it now, not knowing. Sometimes she was sure she could make out his scent, but then it would fade into the general must of the forest, and disappointment would flood in again. He is lost, he is lost, she thought. She felt no better once he was found.
He was on the ground, half in shadow and half in light. The shadow was hardly helping him, however. Smoke rose up from various places—like his right hand, curled helplessly against his leg, and the curve of his jaw, now almost bloody with the burn of it. He looked about done for, but she didn’t care.
She covered him anyway. She covered him with her body and with the blanket, and when that wasn’t enough, she packed snow around him. She made a little wall to shield him, even though her fingers burned and bled. But then, what did it matter if they did? Her only thought was of his safety. The only thing she cared about was his life. The sun could have melted her hands clean off and she would have found a way to continue.
So it was a good thing that it didn’t come to that.
Or at least, it was a good thing in relation to her hands.
It was less good in terms of his first words.
“Just leave me to rot.” His voice was so low and dark she almost didn’t realize he’d spoken. For one heart-thumping second she was sure some other supernatural creature had come across them, and decided to have a vampire meal. Her sore hand went to her chest. She bared her teeth without thinking.
Then she realized.
She realized, and came close to losing it all over again. He was alive, thank God, he was alive. He was being a complete asshole, but he was alive.
Now all she had to do was convince him to stay that way.
“If you think I came all the way out here with that death ray burning down on me only to be told to turn around and leave you here, you’ve got another think coming. Now get up, Merrick, we’re going back to the cabin.”
“And if I refuse?”
“If you refuse I’ll drag you up. I’ll get hold of your ankles, and I will bodily drag you through the forest and then hurl you into our home.”
“You will do no such thing.”
She could hardly believe him. Somehow he managed to maintain his clipped, condescending tone even in the most dire of circumstances. It made her want to scream, but other urges came first. Like grabbing hold of him by his left leg to show him she really meant business.
“Unhand me immediately or I will be forced—”
“You will be forced to what? You’re half-melted. I doubt you could raise your right arm,” she snapped, only now he had something to prove. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d given him something to prove.
And he proved it all right.
The grip he got on her wrist was firm.
In fact, it was pretty close to painful.
“I can raise my limbs without any trouble at all. It is simply that I do not wish to. I wish to lie here and die and you will not stop me.”
“So nothing I say will make a difference.”
“Indeed it will not.”
“There isn’t a single sentence I can use to change your mind.”
“I cannot imagine what sentence you think there could be.”
She meant to make a frustrated sound at that—one that conveyed just how ridiculous he was being and how angry he made her. But unfortunately something else came out instead. “I love you.”
Of course he looked at her for that. During the entire conversation he’d kept his face away, and now he looked. He looked so long and hard her skin started crawling off her body. Apparently she didn’t need the sun. She simply needed to say a stupid thing to Merrick and it happened all on its own.
And his words made her condition even worse.
“So then—you have gone mad.”
She hated him. She hated him.
She didn’t hate him at all.
“I’m perfectly sane.”
“How can you be?”
“I just . . . I just am, I just—” she tried, but nothing would come.
It was only after he’d delivered this punch to the heart: “How can anyone love a thing like me?”
That everything burst out of her in a rush.
“How could I not? You think you’re cruel, even though you’re kind. You think you’re evil, even though you’re good. Anyone in the world would love a man like that. Women wait their whole lives for a man like that. You know what we usually get? The fucking opposite,” she said, and was so thrilled with
herself for doing it.
For around three seconds.
“But I am not a man, am I?” he spat. He turned in such a way that some of his arm emerged into the sunlight, and she could immediately smell it burning. Not that he gave a single fuck. “What I have done to you is not what any man would do. They might be as evil as they please and never do what I have done. I have cursed you forever, and I did it purely because I had no self-control.”
The loathing in his voice was so thick and rich it almost swallowed her whole.
She could feel herself drowning in it, and she wasn’t even its target.
He was his own target—though not for long, oh, not for long.
“Why is it always talked about like a curse? Why is that always the first thing every vampire says—even here in fucking reality where you must be able to see what is really going on. You must know what it actually is.”
“Oh, and what might it actually be?”
“A goddamn gift, Merrick,” she said—much to his shock. He drew back to hear the words and then didn’t seem to know what to make of them, but that was absolutely fine. She could use his confusion. She could use it to grab his entire world and turn it on its fucking head. “Do you have any idea what my life was like before this? Have you lived so long and suffered so much that you’ve forgotten how dull it is to be human? You’ve made me able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. You’ve made me fast, and strong, and most of all something magical. Something honestly supernatural. Do you understand what that means?”
She could see he didn’t—not completely.
But he was definitely starting to bend. He had drawn his hand back into the shadows, and his frown was less withering than it had been a moment ago. Now there was a hint of something else in it—and in his eyes too. They had a kind of shine to them that sort of hurt her heart. There was too much fear in it.
And too much hope.
“I understand that you are currently burning alive because of me,” he said.
“And I would endure that fate a thousand times over for one scrap of proof that there was more in this world than meaningless, endless mundanity. I would rather burn to death knowing that such fantastical things exist, than live painlessly for another hundred years thinking humans are the only thing there is.”
“You do not mean that. You cannot mean that—how else to explain why you kept to the rules we set for you? If you truly loved the thought of being a monster, you would have broken your chains again. But you did not.”
“Do you honestly think I stayed like that all this time because I hoped I would become human again? The minute I knew what I could do—the second I knew it was real—I stopped caring whether I ever went back. The only reason I stayed chained was because you both seemed to need me to so badly. But if I could have convinced you, I would have. I understand that, now. Why don’t you?”
“I . . . I . . . That is not . . .”
“Come back with me, Merrick. Please, come back with me. Nothing need stand between us now. We can live together—you and Zeke and I. We have found each other at last. Come back, come back,” she said, and for one brief moment she really thought he might do it. That hope was in his eyes again, far deeper than it had ever been before, and when she dared to reach out and touch him, he touched her back.
She felt his fingers shift against hers, just a little.
Just enough, she thought.
Only it wasn’t, it wasn’t.
“I swore I would not do again what was done to me,” he said, in a voice that reminded her of the wind rolling down into nothing. It should have been easy to talk over, to push down, yet somehow it wasn’t. If anything, it was worse, to hear him speak so quietly. To hear all the force go out of him. “I cannot go back on my promise.”
“But you know that you didn’t hurt me. You know that, right?”
“I was cruel to you. I did not mean to be so cruel, but I was.”
“You were trying to protect me.”
“I will always protect you,” he said, and suddenly she was crying. She hadn’t cried when she thought he was dead or over his eyes that seemed to reach for her, even as he tried to back away. But she wept now, and once he’d repeated the words she understood why. Had anyone ever told her anything like that to her before?
Had they told her it, and made her believe it?
She wasn’t sure she’d ever believed anyone the way that she did him. When he spoke, the world shifted on its axis. His every word was a weight on her soul, to the point where she couldn’t imagine never hearing him again. All the things he had inside him—all the things she could learn and understand through his eyes.
She couldn’t let him go because of a foolish promise based on nothing.
She didn’t even know why he would make such a promise, when neither her nor Zeke were suffering monsters. It just seemed like masochism, like punishing himself for things he hadn’t done and couldn’t fully express.
“Then you have to come back. If you really want to protect me, you don’t have a choice, because if you stay here and die, then I’ll stay too, and die with you. I won’t go unless you come with me. I swear I won’t go.”
“You cannot mean that.”
“I do mean it. I won’t leave without you.”
“In a little while you will have no choice. These shadows will not keep me forever—eventually I will burn, and long before you. What else can you do then but return?”
“I can lie on your bones until I am burnt to nothing too.”
His eyes flashed with something other than softness now.
They were back to that flint, and all the better for it.
“I do not believe you. You would not.”
“I can tell by your expression that you know I would. But in case, maybe I should stand up now,” she said, and did just that. She left him beneath the shelter of the blanket, and allowed the sun to hit her full force.
It was like being smacked by a giant, red-hot hand.
“Cora, come back here immediately.”
“Maybe I should burn now, so you know I’m serious.”
“Cora, you cannot do this. You cannot threaten me in this manner. Please—return to the shadows at least, so that we might talk further.”
“Isn’t that what I’m asking of you? A little more time to talk?”
“It is hardly the same—please, for the love of God, stop this. I cannot stand it, I cannot stand it, I beg you to just—”
He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead he seemed to reach some terrible limit inside himself—one that didn’t allow for any kind of calm or measured reaction. It also didn’t let him carry on lying there while her skin started to turn an alarming shade of red. He jumped up so quickly she hardly saw it happen, and grabbed her with such force she didn’t have a chance to stop him.
Not that she needed to.
He wasn’t trying to get her back to the shadows. He was scooping her up, into his arms. He was holding her and holding her and then he was running. The sun didn’t keep him back. The blackening of his skin didn’t stop him. He just ran and ran until they were safe again, all of them together in what was once her prison.
Now her home, her home.
She was sure he would be angry, once he woke. He had a lot to be angry about—or at least, she thought so. Zeke was of another mind altogether. As they watched over him and cared for him and soothed his rapidly healing wounds, he whispered words to her like you and are and amazing. He told her she had made him see sense.
And she could understand what he meant. It was true that Merrick’s promise was based on concerns he didn’t need to have and torment he only believed he had visited on someone else. Yet somehow, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d done something really wrong. She had forced him to come back, hadn’t she?
What choice had she really given him?
He was bound to be furious about it.
Only he wasn’t. He wasn’t in the slightest. He first opened his eyes when
she was on her knees by the rough-hewn bed he shared with Zeke, clasping one of his almost healed hands in hers. But he did it so calmly and quietly she didn’t even notice, until she happened to glance in his direction.
Then she saw him just looking and looking at her.
“We were wondering when you would wake up,” she said, but only to fill the silence.
It was one thing she was learning very quickly—even when you weren’t locked up in a basement, things were very still here. It was like being in a bubble. A little bubble outside time and so far from the world she’d lived in before. Some days she couldn’t even remember what that world looked like. The mundane patterns of the everyday eluded her.
They had been replaced by Zeke’s kisses—awkward at first but now less so.
They had been replaced with Merrick’s eyes, like winter fire.
“For a moment I thought I had not. You seem so much like a dream I once had, when I was still human and whole.”
“You’re whole now,” she said, and this time, blissfully, there was a flicker of something other than doubt in his eyes. That gleam of hope was back, and it was reaching toward her. All she had to do was reach back and take hold.
“I am odd. I know that I have grown odd.”
“Yeah, you are. Yeah, you have.”
“And I am cold. I cannot help it.”
“You don’t have to. I can see beneath it. Zeke can see beneath it. That’s why we love you, right? Because we know that you’re not all frost and fierceness.”
“How do you know? How though?”
She reached out to stroke his face then.
She had to, she had to.
“If you were, you wouldn’t have saved me in so many different ways. You wouldn’t make a promise to never hurt someone like someone hurt you. Would you?”
“Any person might make such a promise, with memories like those haunting them. I still see his face behind my eyes, whenever I taste blood at the back of my throat. I can still see them sobbing—the ones he brought to me when I was too hungry to stand it anymore. No one would ever want to hurt another person, after that.”
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