“No!” I wailed, and I started trying to fight him, so I could break away from him and stop this suicide mission he had himself set on. “This is stupid! This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me! You’re such a fucking idiot, Jack!”
I was hitting him as hard as I could, desperately trying to escape from the strength of his arms, but they were unrelenting. I even slapped him, but he barely even flinched. He just let me struggle wildly in his arms until I started to tire myself out, and then he wrapped his arms even more tightly around me and pressed me against him. I could feel the slow, heavy thud of his heart beat, and it made me sob.
His heart seemed have a set number of beats left, and that was more than I could bear.
“Alice, listen to me.” Jack had buried his face in my hair, and his words came out muffled but I understood them perfectly. “He’s not going to stop until he has you, not anymore. He’s finally realized he loves you and…. And I saw you kissing him-”
“No, Jack, I’m sorry!” I sobbed. “It’ll never happen again! I promise! I’ll never-”
“Alice, no! It’s not you. This isn’t to punish you, okay?” His fingers were knotted in my hair, and I could still feel the heavy beat of his heart against mine. “I just know I couldn’t live with that. And you can’t fight it. It’s in your blood.”
“Jack…” I tried to think of an argument to counter that, but there wasn’t one. He was right. I had been fighting the way I felt about Peter for almost as long as I’d known him, yet somehow we had ended up in an embrace when Jack walked in.
Jack moved so he was looking me in the face, but he kept his hands strong on my arms, in case I would decide to bolt and spoil his ridiculous plan. I knew what he was saying almost made sense.
He wanted to fight Peter for me, and there wasn’t any other way to reason with him. I could follow that logic right up until the point that one of them would die. That’s the only conclusion that Jack could come to. One of them had to die, and I knew there had to be something else.
“Alice, I just need to make sure you’re okay,” Jack said thickly.
“I’ll never be okay without you!” I cried, and he winced at that, but recovered quickly.
“That’s not what I meant. I have to go back out there, and if something happens-”
“We can run away! Don’t go back out there! Then you’ll always know I’m safe!” I interrupted him, looking up at him hopefully, but his mind was already made up.
“If something happens, I don’t think he’ll hurt you, but I need to know that you’ll be safe,” Jack continued, and I saw tears forming in his eyes, which only made me cry harder. “I need to know that no matter, you have a long happy life!”
“You’re not listening, Jack!” I pleaded. “I will never be happy without you!”
“Please, Alice, for me.” Jack was begging me now, and he had never sounded quite as plaintive.
“What?” There was no way I could deny him anything he asked, not now. If I couldn’t convince him to run away with him, if he insisted on the most ridiculous course of action possible, then I would do whatever he asked because it might be the last thing he ever asked me.
“I want you to turn,” Jack said. He must’ve heard something because he glanced back at the door nervously, and when he looked back at me, he was even more insistent.
“What? No! You expect me to live forever without you? No!” I shook my head fiercely, revolted by the idea.
“Alice…” He leaned his forehead against mine and breathed in deeply. “I love you so much.
Please. Just do this one thing for me.”
“If you love me, I don’t know how you can even ask me that,” I whispered hoarsely.
Without warning, he bit into his wrist and tore open the skin. The room was filled with the intoxicating scent of his blood, and suddenly, his heart beat became palpable. I had never felt thirst before, not like that, but something about his blood triggered this very animal hunger inside of me. It was a dirty trick, because he knew as soon as he opened his veins, there would be no way I could deny his request.
Pressing his wrist to my mouth, his blood tasted nothing like I had remembered blood tasting. It was sweeter than honey, and flowed like wine down my throat, burning with a thrilling warmth.
Before it even hit my stomach, an intense pleasure exploded inside me, making my vision blur into white and everything about me felt alive for the first time.
On top of all that, I felt his love flow through me, pure and unadulterated, and unlike anything I had ever felt before. Even when he had been biting me, I hadn’t felt it like this. Drinking his blood was drinking him, and while so much about him was loving me, everything about him was love.
He only tasted of kindness and innocence and boundless happiness. I could feel all of his sins, and they were so minor and insignificant, it was shocking. The worst things he had ever done he had done because I had driven him to it. I was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and yet he loved more perfectly and more eternally than anything he had ever loved before.
When he pulled his arm from me, I stumbled backwards. I would’ve fallen if he hadn’t caught me, and I felt fresh tears burning hot down my face. The room was spinning and I felt disoriented and dizzy. The after affects of drinking his blood made me feel like I was incredibly intoxicated, complete with nausea and confusion, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I passed out.
“Jack.” My voice came out so much weaker than I had thought it would, and his arms felt strong and safe around me as he laid me down on the couch. There was something different in his expression, in his face, and I realized belatedly I had weakened him. Going to the biggest fight of his life, Jack had the horrible disadvantage of being weaker than ever before. “Oh, no, Jack!
You’re so weak! I’ve killed you!”
“No, no, Alice, I’m fine.” He brushed the hair back from face, and I rested my hand on his. He was lying to me, and I felt it as certainly as anything. If he walked out of the door and fought with Peter, he would die, and we both knew it.
“Jack… I love you!” I told him fiercely. He was going to leave no matter what I said, so I decided to use my time the best I could. “You were always the one I loved. It was always you.”
“I know,” Jack forced a smile, and even though I was fighting it, my eyes shut. His lips press warmly against eyelids, and I felt a tear splash on my cheek from his eyes.
I wanted to say more, and I really tried, but nothing came out. There was this epic blackness settling in over me, but just before everything went completely blank, I heard the sound of hell breaking loose just outside the door.
Chapter 24
The days I spent turning were unquantifiable. In his book, Peter had once described the change as feeling “as if my gut had been cut open and filled with eels,” and that description is the most accurate I have ever heard. Of course, that says nothing for the incredible agony my body went through as organs moved about and died. Everything inside me was shifting around and reconstituting itself to fit an entirely different way of being. Not to mention the sudden intense thirst growing inside me.
The turning was nothing short of a delirious blur. I was never asleep, but I was never truly awake.
Everything felt vaguely like some kind of nightmare, and it was nearly impossible to tell reality apart from everything else. The pain and the hunger had turned my mind to mush, and I had dreams of beetles and snakes eating my flesh. I had dreams of drowning and being thrown into a bottomless pit. Nothing I saw when I closed my eyes was very pleasant.
The first truly coherent thing I can remember is waking from a dream where I had been on fire.
Somehow, in my sleep, that had translated to me singing “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. When I started to wake, I realized that my voice wasn’t the only sound in my ears. There was another one sounding amazingly perfect compared with the dry, crackled sound of my voice. Even though it hurt my skin to touch anything (t
he silk sheets I slept on felt like razor blades), the soft touch of another hand on mine felt more comforting than I had even hoped anything would feel again.
When I finally opened my eyes, which screamed painfully at the almost non-existent light in the room, I could barely make anything out. Eventually, my vision would be better than that of an eagle, but just then, I was practically blind. Then, in the dim glow from the nightlight in the bathroom, I made out a silhouette. The details were still invisible, but the cockeyed hair was unmistakable. Even through my confused pain, delight went through me.
“Jack,” I whispered in a voice that sounded like dry firewood. “You’re really here?”
“Shhh.” Jack brushed the hair back from forehead, and it hurt like hell, but I relished the touch because it was his. “Get some rest..”
“But…” I tried to sputter some kind of an argument, but my throat was burning from singing and speaking.
“I’m right here, and I’ll be right here until you really wake up. So you just rest until then, and we can talk about everything.”
Nothing had ever sounded as wonderful as the sound of his voice, and I wanted to keep talking, just so that he would keep talking and I could hear him. Unfortunately, I was drowning in pain and exhaustion, and I quickly succumbed to both of them. But every time I awoke with any momentary clarity, he was by my side.
Finally, the thirst was taking over me, and I could hear the sound of his heart beat. Instead of finding that reassuring, it just made me even thirstier. There’s a point in the beginning where I was hungry and thirsty, for both blood and actual food, but my body was at a transition where it couldn’t digest either. They had to wait until I was completely through the change, and thoroughly weakened by the process, until I could eat.
A vampire’s thirst is unlike anything known to man. It’s more than an unquenchable thirst. It’s more than starving hunger. It’s more than a passionate lust. It’s all of those things combined and multiplied, and it’s none of them. Everything inside me became focused on getting one thing, and it blotted everything out. I have never done heroin, but I would imagine that the closest human feeling would be akin to that of jonesing for a hit. My body felt wrong and diseased until I finally drank blood.
Jack gave me a bag of blood to drink from, and Mae and Ezra chaperoned on the sides of the room. I gulped it down greedily, but it felt nothing like when I drank Jack’s blood. Well, not nothing. It tasted wonderful, and it made me feel amazing and warm, but it was nothing as intense or amazing as Jack. Still, I instantly felt better, and there was new pleasurable change happening inside of me that I didn’t understand.
Like before, and like when Milo drank, the blood intoxicated me, and I was still a lightweight. I passed out almost immediately after downing the bag of blood, but I slept better than I had in days. It felt like the first time I had really gotten any rest, and for once, it was dreamless. No nightmares about eaten alive or set on fire.
Sometime later, I’d wake up from all this.
I opened my eyes to see the world as a vampire for the very first time.
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