Silence pressed in on my ears.
“Thames?” I tried.
I moved as silently as I could, but knew the crunching of twigs beneath my boots was impossible to hide if a V was close by.
The longer I walked, the more the rustle of leaves and rattle of branches made me suspect I wasn't alone.
I readied the stake in my palm, moving onward as fast as I could, trying to convince myself I was imagining things.
Nothing here.
Nothing is following me.
But the air was fraught with tension; I could feel the eyes of a predator on me.
My breathing was unsteady and the more I tried to slow it, the more ragged it seemed to become.
I picked up my pace, hurrying to a jog, knowing it was useless if I was being stalked. A V could outpace me easily, but my instincts still urged me into a run.
The boughs passed me by, making a whooshing sound in my ears as I fled. I turned the torch off on my tablet, knowing I was making myself more of a target with the light. I was plunged into near-total darkness. The clouds were thick again, concealing the moon and all illumination with it.
Panic invaded my heart. I was furious at myself for succumbing to my base instincts, moving faster and faster, small murmurs of fear squeezing up from my throat.
I glanced over my shoulder, sure I could see shadows darting through the mist.
With a jolt that felt like I'd hit a wall, I ran into someone.
I crashed to the ground, gasping in fear as I gazed up at my assailant.
The breath was crushed out of my lungs at the sight of him, my heart slamming into my throat.
“Varick,” I whispered, the name passing my lips in a puff of vapour.
I only had half a second to register his bloodshot eyes and snarling features, then he was upon me.
His hands were ice, strong as metal clamps as he lifted me into the air and slammed me into the nearest tree trunk.
My vision spun, my head aching from the impact. In my panic, I started fighting back, clasping his arms and pushing. He bared his fangs as I choked, his eyes blazing into mine without a trace of recognition. But something must have been holding him back, or I'd surely be dead by now.
“Va-rick,” I managed through the press of his hands, my legs flailing beneath me. I didn't recognise him any more. The only resemblance was his long hair and lake-green irises. And even those were marred and bloodied.
In a flash, he replaced one of his hands on my throat with his mouth, holding me against the tree with his fist, pressing painfully into my stomach.
His teeth pierced my neck and I screamed. Pain tore through me like pincers were buried in my skin. He became frantic, crushing me to the tree with the full press of his body.
Without warning, he flung me from the tree onto the ground. My world spun as I skidded through the mud and mess of leaves, trying to scramble away in my dazed state. Terror gripped my heart like claws.
I clasped my aching neck, fumbling for the stake I'd dropped, despite the fact I knew I wouldn't use it. As he pressed his weight onto me again, I tried to relax, filling my mind with reassurances.
He just needs to drink. Then he'll become human again.
But I prayed his senses returned before he killed me.
Dropping my head back and squeezing my eyes shut, I let him take from me what he was going to take anyway. I'd been prepared for this. I knew he might be in this state. But the reality was more frightening than I ever could have predicted.
His knees pressed either side of my legs and his hips dug painfully into mine, pinning me down. I didn't know when it happened exactly, and I didn't know quite why, but at some point, I started to cry. I knew it wasn't fear – though I was admittedly terrified – something else was causing the tears. A dull ache in the depths of my heart.
Him. This.
Mad as it was, I actually pitied him. Because I knew, whether I died or not, he was going to hate himself for what he'd done.
Slowly, crazily, stupidly, I slid my arms around his back, holding him close. He wasn't as rough now, but still frenzied. And I was growing weaker by the second.
“Please come back to me,” I whispered.
The sky was thick with clouds and I wished that it was clear. It didn't seem right to die here on the ground without seeing the stars again. Like in the movies when your soul seems to slip away into the sky.
A veil slid across my eyes and for the first time in my life I realised how alluring death was. How peaceful.
If everything just stopped, I wouldn't have to fight any more. No more fear, no more pain, no more games.
I stilled beneath Varick's weight, my arms falling limp in the mud either side of me.
Just as my vision faded, Varick lifted his head. And oh, there were the stars. I could sink into his beauty for the price of death. It wasn't difficult at all.
A small smile crept onto my mouth and, at last, I let go.
Varick
The intoxicating taste of blood flooded over my tongue. Slowly, my senses returned, like a heavy curtain lifting from my mind.
My thoughts sharpened in a wave and I was suddenly hyper aware of everything.
A slow pulse. The rustle of leaves. The faraway hoot of an owl. The crack of twigs beneath my knees where they pressed into the ground.
Ripping my teeth free from my victim's neck, I blinked back into clarity, trying to understand the words she'd spoken: Please come back to me.
I'd been lost inside myself, missing for god knows how long, but the memories remained and Christ they hurt.
I focused on my victim, my gut tightening and tightening as I prepared to face what I'd done. Her face was angelic, paper-white, her crimson lips turning blue. With a rush of recognition, horror poured through me like needles pushing into my heart.
No! Not her. Not Selena.
Without a second's hesitation, I tore my wrist open with my teeth, pressing the wound to her mouth, forcing her to drink.
No no no no.
What have I done?
When I'd given her enough blood to revive a horse, I scooped her into my arms, knowing she needed more than just my blood if she was going to live. Her dress was damp and her skin was peppered with goosebumps.
Shelter, fire, safety. I chanted the words in my head.
Memories overwhelmed me. The game. The forest. Selena. I moved through the trees at speed, heading to a cave I'd passed by earlier. I moved so fast, it was like being sucked into a vortex, the world spinning around me.
When I reached the small cave, I laid her carefully on the ground; her slow pulse reaching to my ears was the most comforting sound I'd ever heard.
It took less than two minutes to collect firewood and start a blaze with flints. The cave began to grow warm and I pulled Selena into my lap. I didn't want her to wake with me here: the monster that had drained her of life. But I couldn't leave her until I was sure she was going to be alright.
My body was going through the strange, uncomfortable motions of becoming more human. I was weighted with guilt like a tonne of lead mounting up in my gut. My heart thumped erratically, out of tune, out of sync. I was still a monster, I just had to live with the consequences now.
When Selena began to stir and a flush of colour returned to her cheeks, I slipped away, unable to bear speaking with her. The shame. The hate.
I detested myself. It was visceral, rising in my throat like bile.
I paced beyond the cave, anxious energy pouring through my veins like liquid magma. But nothing would dispel the horrors unfolding in my mind. What I'd been. What I'd done. What I came so close to doing.
I halted, dropping my hands to my knees and gulping down air. I didn't need to breathe, but it still helped, my lungs prickling as the icy mist enveloped them.
There was only so long I could endure this. Only so long I could remain this close to Selena and not lose my mind with guilt.
“Varick?” her small voice ran over me like a hot wave of air. A few hours must have
passed, but that time was nothing to me. And now she'd come to find me. But why?
I turned my head so my ear was angled toward her, but I couldn't look at her directly. Couldn't face her. Too cowardly to face the repulsion in her expression, the fear.
“I'm sorry. Christ...” I shook my head, despising myself. “I'll never be sorry enough.”
Her hand found mine and I jerked away, turning my back to her. “Don't.”
“Varick,” her voice broke on my name. So much pain, all of my doing. And I couldn't leave. I had to stay and protect her, even if it killed me to do so.
“Please don't feel guilty,” she implored.
A beast gripped hold of my insides, taking the driver's seat, making me turn and look her in the eye. She seemed so small. Smaller than I remembered, but perhaps that was because she'd always appeared so strong to me.
“How can you say that?” I demanded. My throat was loosening by the second, the thirst quelled by what I'd taken from her. It repulsed me to my core. “How can you-?” I didn't get the last of the words out as she pressed herself into my chest.
Something snagged on my heart and words filled my mind I had no right in thinking.
She belongs to me.
Mine. Entirely. But that concept was alien and so very, very wrong. Because Selena didn't belong to anyone but herself. She was an Atlantic storm, passing over the ocean. And I was fairly sure that's how she wanted things to remain: temporary. And truly, I didn't want to own her.
When I was a boy, I'd found an injured seal pup on a beach on the rocky coast of Cornwall. She was large, had almost lost the pale colouring of her youth, but the sea had been unseasonably rough and a storm had no doubt landed her injured on that beach. So I took her onto my father's ship, fished some seawater into a large bathing tub and kept her in it. It was a whole day before my father realised I was hiding something.
He'd been confused but strangely proud of me, which pretty much summed up our relationship in a nutshell. But once his crew found out I was keeping a fleshy seal onboard, they wanted a taste. A literal one. We weren't exactly carrying around London's finest grub and a fat seal pup would have made a better meal than most of the men had had in weeks.
So I guarded her, day and night, sitting by her tub, feeding her fish I caught on a reel. It was almost a month before she was fully healed and I felt so deeply for the little creature that it broke my heart to let her go.
My father had taken me aside one morning, insisting I either throw the seal back into the sea or let the men have their feast. 'She doesn't belong on a ship, my boy.' My father had always seemed so tall, but I guessed that's because my memories of him were from my childhood, before I'd grown tall myself. But he hadn't lived long enough for me to meet him eye to eye, man to man. 'You could keep her well for a while but eventually she'd fade, she'd lose her desire to live. Because what is life worth if it is not lived the way she was meant to live it?'
Those words resonated with me now. Selena didn't belong in this life. She was a slave to rules and games she'd never asked to be a part of. And I was so much a part of it myself, that for me to try and keep her would have been the same as me having tried to keep that seal. She was destined to return to the life she came from. And I had to find a way to accept that.
“Please, come inside,” she whispered, tugging at my ruined shirt. Her blood stained it, filling my nostrils with its overwhelming scent.
“No,” I rasped, my jaw tightening.
“Please,” she tried again, gazing up at me, looking as lost and as broken as the seal pup I'd once saved. For whatever reason, she needed me at that moment. But I couldn't give her the comfort she was craving. I didn't trust myself to, nearly as much as I didn't deserve to.
She stepped back, sadness filling her eyes. And something else. Like she was the one that wanted to help me. “I wanted you to find me. I prepared myself for the fact you might not be able to restrain yourself.”
I hung my head, ashamed, but she moved closer so I met her eye, gazing up at me as she continued. “I hoped you'd feed from me.”
Her words felt like a fist to the gut. I shook my head, groaning my frustration with her. “How could you hope for such a thing? It kills me that you're here, do you know that? You had a chance at freedom.” I grasped her shoulders, glaring into her eyes. “Why, Selena? Why did you come back? Tell me they forced you to be here. Tell me the Helsings made you.”
She chewed her bottom lip, evidently thinking over her answer. Suddenly I knew what she was going to say and I couldn't bear it. I scraped a hand through my hair, gazing up at the swaying trees and asking the universe why Selena had been planted in my life. Why was she cursed with meeting me? Trapped by some imagined allegiance to me? Putting her own life on the line to be here.
“I came for you.” She said the words with no hint of a tremor in her voice. No regret, no ounce of doubt.
She came for me.
I cupped her cheek with my wintry fingers and she leant into them, closing her eyes.
“I couldn't leave you, not after everything you did for me.”
My heart shattered. She felt she owed me. That was why she was here.
A voice slid into my head from the darkest crevices of my mind. Nothing to save. Nothing worth saving.
Selena had sacrificed everything for someone who was nothing. Someone who had died over two hundred years ago and couldn't come back. No matter how much I wanted to be that human again, he was gone. And she'd risked her life for the idea of that man. Nothing more.
I took her hand, placing it on my chest and holding it there, readying myself to put an end to this insanity. “This body is a grave, Selena. My bones are still here, but my soul is gone. You've risked your life for a dead man.” My words were cutting. I could hear them resound in my own head and – if possible - I despised myself a little more for them. Not because they weren't true, but because they undermined all the effort she'd gone to to find me.
Thick tears slid down her cheeks, her expression aching as she gazed at me. “Do you really believe that?”
I nodded once, firm. Yes and I need you to realise it, too.
Her expression crumpled and she stepped away, resting a hand over her heart. At last, she was getting it. She was finally understanding how much she had given up for no reason. But it was bitter to witness.
She took a shuddering breath, looking uncomfortable as she screwed up her eyes, preparing to speak. “I don't know much about you, Varick. I don't know what you think or feel. But I do know this; that you did more for me in a week than any man has ever done for me in my entire life. You describe yourself as a monster and yet the only monsters I see are sitting in that hotel, watching us. So please don't stand here, trying to convince me that there's nothing left of you to save. When there is so much.”
I didn't register exactly when I made the decision to move. Or when my body had given into her again. But in seconds I had her in my arms, as soft as I could manage, brushing my lips over the crook of her mouth and asking permission I didn't deserve to be given.
She wound her fingers around my neck, turning into my kiss with a passion that startled me.
Three things occurred to me at once.
I would never understand the way Selena saw me.
I was never going to stop craving her.
And so long as she was nearby, I would always be too weak to stay away.
Our kiss was profound. There was no other way to describe it. Our bodies tangled, the lines blurred, the monster inside me was nowhere to be seen. How was it possible that one girl had changed everything in the blink of an eye? Simultaneously providing me with hope and the glimmering possibility that maybe, just maybe, there really was something worthwhile left within me.
I didn't want the kiss to end, and I sensed she knew that, my arms encasing her, keeping her caged like everyone else in the world did. Despite my efforts, ultimately, I wasn't good enough to let her go. I wasn't strong enough to keep away, so I held on for
dear life instead.
Selena
Emotionally, it was the most difficult thing I'd ever done. I started to tear down the walls that had protected me from people for years and I invited him in: Varick. A Vampire. The most unlikely person to cross my path and illicit such a response from me. But there it was.
I was so used to walking life alone that it was nearly impossible to believe that I'd actually met someone who'd slipped under my defenses.
Varick broke the kiss first, muttering more apologies that made my heart hurt.
I knew why he hated himself. I'd borne witness to what he'd done, and no doubt that was a single occurrence amongst many. So why was I here, defending him? Certain to my core that he could still be saved?
I didn't have the answer. All I knew was, it was the Vampire in him who had done those things, not the man.
“Enough.” I pressed a hand to his chest. I gazed up into the dark trees, the bare branches reaching into the moonlit sky like gnarled fingers. The spectators were watching; they'd see how we cared for each other and it made me fear for Varick more than ever.
He nodded, backing away and moonlight spilled through the clouds, casting him in a halo of light.
How was it that death could look so alive? His eyes were emeralds laying in the shade, his hollowed cheeks touched with the milky paleness a long winter might bring. All of his quiet beauty seemed to be waiting for sunlight to fall on him and, if it did, I was certain he'd captivate the whole world.
I took his hand, silently guiding him into the cave and dropping onto my cloak which was laid out by the fire. Patting the space beside me, he reluctantly sloped into it, leaving a sizeable gap between us.
I closed it, unstrapping my tablet from my wrist and resting it on our touching knees. Sucking my lower lip, I typed out a message on the screen so our words could be kept secret.
We need to make a plan to escape.
He read my message, a sigh passing his lips as he took the device, deleted the message and wrote a reply.
How? There's only two ways you can get off this island: winning or in a body bag.
V Games: Fresh From The Grave (The Vampire Games Book 2) Page 23