“If he didn’t want us to go through it, he shouldn’t have it abandoned it with us for the past five years. It’s technically our property at this point,” Jack argued.
“Plus, I am trying to solve his wife’s murder,” I justified.
“It’s for altruistic reasons, so it’s totally fine.”
I held my breath as I slowly opened the lid of the box. The hinges creaked and groaned, and the scent of old books and flowers wafted out.
I don’t know what I had expected. I had been hoping for an edition of the book he’d written, A Brief History of Vampyres. Or any clues about his history and past life. Maybe a photograph or two. The box looked like it contained important keepsakes, and apparently, I was correct.
It was filled with stacks and stacks of letters. Some of them appeared quite old, with many carefully tucked back into the envelopes they’d been sent in, but many of them appeared newer, with crisp lined paper.
As I carried the box out to our bedroom to go sift through it, I heard a rattling inside. I thought it had been all papers, but when I dug through, I discovered two small rings at the bottom – a thick gold band for a man, and a smaller one, with vines engraved in the gold and solitary ruby in the center.
“These are wedding bands.” I held them up in the palm of my bed, and Jack leaned over to investigate.
“Really? I always wondered what Peter had chosen.” He picked up the feminine one, twisting it around. “They’re simpler than I imagined.”
Jack handed me the ring back, and I returned them to the box. I sat down on our bed, crossing my legs underneath me, and set the box on the bed. Careful, so I didn’t damage any of them, I beginning lifting the papers out, and Jack lay down on the bed beside me. I started with the newer ones because they seemed less fragile when I made a startling discovery.
“These are all letters to Elise,” I said, gently flipping through to see her name scrawled on the pages. “And this one is dated 2009.” I held it up for him to see. “Jack, he was writing to his wife long after she died.”
He didn’t seem surprised at all. “It’s so morbid and obsessive and strangely romantic. That’s such a Peter thing to do.”
I picked up another one, pointing to Peter’s signature. “This one is from 1958, and he’s still signing it ‘Yours Forever.’”
Jack shrugged. “Why wouldn’t he? He never stopped loving her.”
“You’re saying you’d still write me letters if I died?”
“Probably not, but mostly because I don’t write letters now. Maybe I’d text you or make really sad vlogs where I cry and sing Sarah McLachlan songs.”
“Which one?” I asked.
Without missing a beat, he replied, “Either the one from those dog commercials, or the one from Toy Story 2. Maybe both?”
“Those are fair choices,” I allowed.
“But you’re not going to die before me anyway. If you die, I die, remember?” he asked. “That’s our deal, but hopefully, neither of us die.”
“I remember.” I leaned over to kiss him. “And I’m holding you to it.”
“So are you going to spend the rest of the night reading those letters?” Jack asked when I returned to my attention to the box.
“Yeah, there’s gotta be something in here that tells me about Elise’s murder. You don’t spend a hundred years writing to a dead woman without her death coming up.”
“I’m gonna go get my book and read in here with you. If that’s okay.”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, of course. I would like that a lot, actually.”
He left, and a few seconds later he came back with his latest graphic novel, Fatale Book 4: Pray for Rain, and Matilda trailing at his feet. He got into bed beside me, after helping the dog up onto the bed, and soon we were both lost in our reading.
There were so many letters, and it was hard to know where to start. The newest ones were interesting to me, because they discussed more of the day to day, what his life was like with Ezra and Mae and eventually Jack.
Reading about how much Peter loved Jack was heartbreaking, though. They had been so close, and Peter would’ve done anything for him. Until I came in and threw a wrench into everything. It made me so much more grateful that that he and Peter had finally been able to put that behind them and regain a semblance of their former relationship.
The older letters, the ones where he first met Elise and was falling in love with her, were heartbreaking in an entirely different way. He’d go on for line after line describing in obsessive detail how beautiful she was and how much he loved her.
I found the letter Catherine wrote detailing Elise’s death, and at first, I got excited. But then everything she wrote matched up with what I’d already been told. The letter added a few more details, but nothing that changed the facts.
So, I went back to even older letters, to the beginning of his courtship with Elise. Finally, tucked near the very bottom of the box, I found the letter describing their first meeting, dated May 23, 1852.
I leaned back against the headboard, laying the fragile paper carefully over my legs. Jack laid beside me, so close his hair brushed my arm when he moved. At our feet, Matilda snored softly.
So, when I read a line that made me cry out in surprise, Jack and Matilda both jumped.
“What?” Jack sat up and looked over at me. “What’s going?”
“When I met Cate, she very explicitly stated that she was Elise’s maker,” I said.
“Okay. So?” Jack asked.
“But in this letter, Peter mistakes Catherine for Elise’s maker, and Elise claims that they’re only friends, more like sisters.” I held the letter up for Jack to see, tapping the most incriminating line, something that Peter quoted Elise as saying to him:
My maker was a stranger that my father paid to turn me, and then he promptly abandoned me.
“Why would she lie?” Jack asked. “And who did she lie to – you, or Elise? Or was Elise lying?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Elise was lying, but she didn’t really have any reason to.”
“So Cate’s probably the liar.”
“Right. And if she’s lying about this – which is actually a pretty major thing for a vampire – then who knows what else she’s lied about?”
THE SHRILL SOUND OF A phone ringing broke through my slumber, startling me into feeling around for my phone charging on the nightstand.
“It’s mine,” Jack mumbled, his voice thick with sleep, but I’d already picked up my phone and saw that it wasn’t even noon yet, which was like middle of the night for vampires.
“Hello?” he answered groggily, and I stayed awake to listen for signs of trouble. “Yeah, I was sleeping.” He laughed. “No, you’re the first. Thanks.” Pause. “I’ll talk to you later. Have fun.”
“What was that?” I asked once Jack had hung up and lay back down in bed.
“It was just Bobby. He was calling because he wanted to be the first to wish me happy birthday,” he said, laughing again.
“Happy birthday!” I said, sounding as happy and excited as I could for being half asleep, and I snuggled up closer to Jack. “I love you.”
He wrapped his arm around me and whispered, “I love you, too.”
Within minutes, I was out again, back to a wonderfully dark, dreamless sleep. When I woke up a few hours later, the bed was cold and empty, so Jack had been up for a while. The Smiths played softly in the room, and by the gritty surface sound, I guessed it came from a vinyl record spinning on the turntable.
I stretched, then picked up my phone off the nightstand, preparing to scroll through the latest internet gossip and check my email as I woke up. It was how I started most mornings, though I planned to be quicker today because I had the celebration of Jack’s birthday ahead of me.
The door to the bedroom slowly opened, and Jack appeared in the doorway. His eyes were downcast, and his entire silhouette seemed wilted, like he barely had the strength to stand up fully.
“I heard you wake
up,” he said, his voice heavy and thick.
I sat up in the bed. “What’s wrong?”
He took a deep breath before saying, “My mom’s dead.”
Jack never had much to say about his human family, because they had never been close. His parents had divorced shortly before his tenth birthday, with his younger sister going to live with his mother, while he alone stayed with his father. He’d described his father as abusive, and his mother as a bitter man-hater after they split.
When he was still a teenager, his father had died after a nasty battle with cancer, but Jack had never moved back in with his mother, preferring instead to couch hop with friends until he could finally get his own place. He talked to his sister from time to time, but after he’d turned into a vampire at the age of twenty-four, he’d cut off all contact with them – without any regret or hesitation.
To the best of his understanding, his mom and sister presumed him to be dead, and he’d been fine with that. He went on with his life, and he hoped they went on with theirs.
“What are you talking about?” I asked in bewilderment.
Jack didn’t say anything right away. Instead, he climbed into bed and lay down with his head in my lap. He wrapped his arm around me, hugging me tightly to him, and I ran my fingers through his sandy blond hair.
“After Bobby called, I couldn’t fall back to sleep,” he said. “And I don’t know if it’s because of my birthday or going through Peter’s stuff, but I was feeling nostalgic, and I wondered what my family was up to.
“I haven’t seen them or talked to them in twenty years, but it occurred to me that I could look them up without interacting with them,” he explained. “I found my sister on Facebook, and she’s married and has kids and looks happy.”
None of us had our own Facebook accounts or used much in the way of social media – sites devoted to posting pictures and details about our lives would only draw attention to the fact that we never aged. Milo did have an Instagram account, but he only used it for posting pictures of the food at his restaurant, and I think both Jack and Ezra perused Reddit.
“It’s strange,” Jack said. “Because she’s in her forties, and she looks like she’s in her forties. For some reason, I’d expected her not to age because I hadn’t. I mean, the last time I saw her, we’d just gone out for her twenty-first birthday, and she was wild and reckless, and I remember worrying that she’d turn out a drunk like my dad.”
He let out a heavy sigh before continuing, “And maybe she did. I don’t know. Facebook seems like it’s a lot of people pretending to be happier than they are, but she really looks happy and healthy. She looks like her life is okay.”
“That’s good, right?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything right away, instead staring off into space with so much pain in his soft blue eyes.
“Yeah, it is,” he said finally. “But I was scrolling through her timeline, and I found a post dedicated to all the mothers in heaven. And she commented on it, talking about how our mom had died suddenly of an aneurysm three years ago, and how she was upset that she never got to say goodbye and still missed her daily.”
By the time he finished his story, there were tears in his eyes.
“Oh, love, I’m sorry,” I told him helplessly.
“I just didn’t expect to feel this way,” he said, his words a mixture of hurt and irritation, and he wiped at his eyes. “You always know your parents are going to die before you, and then with my dad’s death and me becoming a vampire, I was really certain she was going to die long before I did. I knew it.”
I rubbed his back, trying to comfort him. “I don’t think it matters if you know it or not. You still loved her.”
“She hadn’t said a nice word to me in the last decade of my human life,” he said angrily, sniffling. “When I was little, she was better. Before she left my dad. She’d read me bedtime stories sometimes, and she cut the crusts off my sandwiches. Normal mom stuff. But then it all changed, and she started hating me, and I started hating her back.”
He breathed deeply, sounding as if he’d barely suppressed a sob, before saying, “We said a lot of terrible things to each other, and I never fixed it. I never wanted to fix it, but now she’s gone, and I can’t. I can’t tell her how much she hurt me. And I can’t tell her that somehow I loved her despite everything she’d done.”
“I’m so sorry, Jack,” I said again, because there was nothing better that I could say.
“No, I’m sorry.” He rolled over onto his back, so he could look up at me. “I shouldn’t have looked them up. I feel like I’m turning my whole birthday into a huge bummer. It just didn’t occur to me that I would find anything like this or anything that would make me feel this bad.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” I assured him. “This is your day, and it’s your family, and you have every right to feel the way you do.”
“I suppose.” An unpleasant smile twisted on his lips. “It’s just sort of hitting me that I’m an orphan now.”
“You’re not an orphan. I mean, your human parents are gone, but you haven’t been human for a long time. And you have a big, immortal family that loves you so much.” I put my hand on his cheek, gently forcing him to look me in the eyes, so he could see how much I meant it when I said, “And as long as I’m alive, you will never, ever be alone. I promise you that.”
He put his hand over mine, “This is probably going to sound like a weird thing to say, but thank you for loving me far more than my real family ever did.”
“Always. I just wish there was some way that I could take away your pain.”
But then I realized belatedly that there was something I could do, something that could erase all his hurt – even if it was only a temporary fix, he would at least feel happier on his birthday.
I laid back on the bed, pulling my long dark hair to the side to better reveal my neck.
“Come here,” I commanded gently.
Jack seemed confused at first, but he moved up the bed toward me. He propped himself up on his arms, his body hovering over mine, and then he leaned down and kissed me. Tentative at first, but then he parted my lips, growing hungrier and more excited.
I arched my back, exposing my throat to him more, and his mouth trailed down, peppering my skin with soft kisses, until he landed on my vein. His lips lingered there, warm and wonderful against my flesh, and then I felt the quick sharp pain as his fangs broke through.
And then it was an explosion of heat and pleasure. Our hearts beat together, fast and loud, pounding in enthusiasm. Even though he was the one biting me, my mouth filled with the taste of blood – sweet and thick like honey, with a delectable copper finish.
I could feel my blood pouring into him, my energy and warmth seeping out of me and flowing into him. Our blood mixing together and coursing through his veins, filling him with all my love, letting it pour through him and over him and consuming him.
And I felt it in return. His unbridled love, raw and passionate, burning through me. There was this wonderful innocent quality in the way Jack loved, so uncomplicated and pure.
I buried my fingers in his hair as he lifted me off the bed, pressing me as close to him as I could be.
Feeing him like this, letting him drink from me, caused waves of ecstasy to overtake me. Even as I grew weaker, and the world around us seemed to fade away, my sense of pleasure remained as heightened as ever – so I could feel his love and desire setting every nerve, every part of me on fire.
Then, when he’d drank so much I was about to pass out, falling into the black stupor that came after letting another vampire drink from me – he stopped.
The jolt of separation never stopped shocking me. We had been so close, with our blood intertwined and our hearts beating as one. And now I was alone, separate, and the air felt cold as it filled my lungs again.
Jack collapsed on the bed beside me, gasping for breath, and he took my hand in his hands. “I do feel so much better now. I’m so glad you love me.
”
I laughed softly, more of a murmur than a true laugh, and the world had taken on a dreamlike quality, so it would only be a matter of minutes until exhaustion pulled me under. When I awoke, I would need to feed immediately to keep from getting too hungry and out of hand, but for now, rest would be enough.
“Hey, Alice,” Jack said, his voice sounding far away and drunk. “I never told you this but… thank you for picking me.”
“What?” I asked.
“You could’ve picked Peter, but you picked me. And I’m grateful every single day.”
THE REST OF JACK’S BIRTHDAY went okay. We both took a nap after the bloodletting, and I woke up ravenous, so I had a couple blood bags while he put in a movie. Most of the evening was spent cuddling on the couch with Jack and Matilda, watching The Lost Boys, Silver Bullet, and any other horror movie from the 1980s that struck his fancy.
When I asked him why that particular theme for this birthday, he replied, “Because my birthday fell on Friday the 13th this year, but I think Jason Voorhees is crap, so we’ll substitute those slasher flicks with something I actually like.”
Despite the way the day had started, it ended up being rather nice. With Milo and Bobby both gone, we had the place to ourselves for a change. Neither of us were working – although my job was always subject to change. We had a whole weekend just to relax and be together.
The next day, I woke with the intention of extending my relaxing weekend with Jack. His high from drinking my blood was starting to come down, but he still didn’t seem as upset as he had been when he first found out about his mom’s death.
I’d only just gotten out of bed and was about to ask him what he wanted to do for the day when my phone rang. I thought about ignoring it, but then I saw the ID said Abner Driscoll, and I’d just told him that he could call if he needed me.
“Hey, Alice, I hope I’m not bothering you,” he said when I answered.
“No, no, it’s fine,” I said, only half-lying as I sat back on the unmade bed. Matilda came in from the other room and climbed up the stepstool onto the bed beside me, pushing her big head under my hand so I would pet her.
Swear (My Blood Approves #5) Page 12