by Myers, AJ
“Or something,” I said, taking another deep breath of the scent coming from his aura. God, he smelled delicious. “We used to be a thing, but we’re kind of on the rocks right now. What about you? A hottie like you must have a girlfriend?”
Clay beamed at me like he’d won the lottery when I started sliding my hand up his arm. I just felt sick—and even knowing what I was doing was despicable wasn’t enough to stop me. I was too far gone; my demon had too much control.
With each word, I found myself getting closer to my completely oblivious victim. His essence was all I could smell, his luminous aura the only thing I saw. I wanted it. I wanted it with a driving need that was just plain terrifying. I wasn’t going to be able to fight the demon sharing my body. I was going to feed on this guy whose only crime was that he’d been unlucky enough to stumble across me in the dark, and there was no one there to stop me.
Or, at least, I didn’t think there was…
“Yes, he does,” a cold voice said behind me. My head snapped around to find Nathan standing on the back steps, Tyler and Sierra right behind him. Nathan’s arms were crossed over his muscular chest and his eyes were flashing furiously as he studied my almost-snack. “Her name is Lisa, and she’s next door. Where he needs to be.”
A feral snarl rumbled in my chest as I glared at Nathan, and my fingernails dug into Clay’s arm. I was like a wild animal defending my kill. Later, I would be glad for that, because it snapped my drunken victim out of the trance I’d managed to put him in. Clay shook his head like he was trying to remember what the hell he was doing there, and then looked at me in confusion—that quickly turned to fear when he saw the way my eyes were glowing.
“Go. Now,” Nathan told him, walking over to jerk me out of my chair.
When I snarled again, Tyler moved to put himself between me and my victim, that beautiful glow he put off getting brighter. I cowered away from that light, as terrified of getting near it as I’d been that first day as a darkling. There was just something about it that both mesmerized and scared the shit out of me.
Once Nathan saw that Tyler had me under control, he turned back to my would-be victim. Staring deep into Clay’s eyes, he snapped, “You will forget all of this. You came outside, you got sick. You’re going to go find Lisa and call it a night. Right?”
The compulsion in his voice was so strong that even I reacted to it. I felt dazed, but he’d probably fried a circuit in that kid’s brain with his vampy little mind trick. Clay went completely blank for just a second, then nodded dreamily, got up, and walked away.
I watched him go, sanity returning all at once. I could have killed him. And for what? To win some stupid pissing contest between me and Sierra? Was that who I’d become?
Was that what I’d become?
By the time the side gate closed behind Clay and Nathan turned his full attention—and the full force of his anger—on me, I had already started to shrink into myself, so full of horror and self-loathing that I couldn’t even defend myself.
“We shouldn’t have let it go so far, Nate,” Tyler said, his voice calm and soothing.
“She should have fought harder,” Nathan growled, glaring down at me.
“Don’t be such a prick, Ashley,” Tyler snapped back, headed right for me. “This was Sierra’s brilliant idea. If you want to get pissed, at least turn it in the right direction.”
“She has to learn to accept her limitations, Tyler,” Sierra said, giving me a sympathetic, yet exasperated, look. “She knew she had been out too long, yet she was too stubborn and pigheaded to come inside. She has to learn that it is not weakness to admit when you’ve reached your limit. It’s the only way she’s going to survive.”
Tyler reached out to touch me, but I caught a whiff of his essence and stumbled back, forcing my frozen body to respond to my commands. Another wave of shame crashed over me when I realized just how badly I wanted to taste that essence.
“I have to go,” I told them, backing toward the door and the promise of escape from the revulsion in Nathan’s eyes, and the pity in Tyler’s. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered as I turned to run.
I heard Tyler call my name, but I didn’t stop. Forcing my sluggish muscles to keep moving, I stumbled into the house and down the hall. I had to get warm. I had to find some way to get some heat into my aching body, had to find some way to thaw my blood before my demon could trick my body into letting it have control again.
Stumbling into the bathroom, I turned the hot water in the shower on full blast and started jerking my clothes off. I ignored the stinging heat that beat uncomfortably against my frozen skin as I stepped beneath the scalding hot spray. Praying it would work, I sat down on the floor of the shower and just let it wash over me while I tried to muffle the dry, heaving sobs I couldn’t hold back against my drawn-up knees.
Chapter 6: Project Ben & Jerry’s
After nearly killing the guy next door, sending that text to Kim was a whole lot easier. After the first couple of texts, she insisted that we Skype instead, using the excuse that she hadn’t seen me in weeks and she was starting to miss the sight of my face. I knew what she was really up to. She was worried and she needed to see me to assure herself that I was okay.
It took her a while, but Kim finally got the whole story out of me from beginning to end. She sat there quietly, taking in every word, as I told her about my near miss with Clay. When I was done, I could barely look at her.
“You didn’t see me, Kim,” I told her miserably.
And thank God for that, I added silently. It was bad enough that Tyler and Nathan had seen me acting like a starving animal. If it had been Kim or Blake who’d looked at me the way Nathan did that night, I honestly don’t think I could have taken it.
“I know this is hard for you, honey,” Kim said after a few moments of silence, the soft tone of her voice in distinct contrast to the angry look on her face. “But, Em, you don’t have anything to feel guilty about. I will not let you blame yourself for this. You might want to tell those two blockheads who are supposed to be taking care of you to watch their backs. It was their fault, Em. They shouldn’t have left you out there alone, and they damn sure shouldn’t have let you near that guy.”
“Nathan said I should have fought harder,” I told her, cringing inwardly as I saw that repulsed look in his eyes again in my mind.
And he was right. So, I was cold? So what? That didn’t give me the right to gorge myself on someone else’s life force. But the thing I was most ashamed of was that part of me had known what I was doing was terrible, and I hadn’t listened to it. I had just brushed it off and let the demon inside me have its way.
“Nathan’s a dick!” Kim snapped when I dropped my eyes, so sick with shame that I wanted to die. “Listen to me, Ember Leigh Blaylock. You are the strongest person I know, but even you have limits. Now we know what one of those limits happens to be and we can work around it.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I muttered.
Before she could give me one of her famous pep talks, I heard a knock in the background. Kim looked over her shoulder and smiled as a pair of big hands lifted her out of her chair and took her place before pulling her into his lap.
“Hey there, hot stuff,” Blake said, giving me one of his trademark, stop-your-heart smiles. “How you holdin’ up, Em?”
“I’m fi—” I began, but Kim cut me off.
“I don’t even know why you bother asking her that,” she said on a sigh, adjusting her webcam so I could see both of them clearly. “She’s fine. She’s always fine. She breaks her leg, ‘I’m fine.’ She falls into a well, ‘I’m fine.’ She gets attacked by mutant ninja squirrels, ‘I’m fine.’ Seriously, she should record it so she can just put it on repeat and save her air.”
“Let me clue you in on how fine she is,” Kim continued ranting while Blake and I laughed. “She’s stuck in the house with a couple of idiots who don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground and some demon Barbie doll Nathan brought in to help who’s
doing a really shitty job of it. Not only that, she’s lonely, bored, and in desperate need of a latte. Someone please tell me how that equates to ‘I’m fine’.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that. It was just so Kim. Blake smiled, too, but he looked worried. “Did I miss something?”
I really wasn’t up to going over it again, so I let Kim fill him in. The whole time she was telling him about my nightmare journey into the back yard, I was wishing I could sink into the floor in humiliation. Once she was done, Blake was quiet for so long that I finally forced my eyes back to the screen to see how he was taking it.
“That’s what I was waiting for,” he said softly when our eyes met on the screen. “Do you want me to come over and kick their asses, Em?”
I started to laugh, but a sob came out instead. Dropping my face into my hands, I just kept sobbing, those painful, dry, heaving sobs that were the only kind I was capable of anymore. It was so easy for Kim and Blake to blame Tyler and Nathan, but when it came right down to it, Nathan had been right. I hadn’t fought hard enough. Hell, I hadn’t fought at all. No matter who they pointed the finger at, it was my fault.
I forced myself to get a grip when the soft sound of a muffled sob echoed to me through the speakers. Kim had her head tucked under Blake’s chin—who was looking a little misty-eyed himself—unable to witness my misery without experiencing it with me.
I watched the two of them, trying not to remember when I’d had someone to hold me when I cried. I realized at that moment that I was right back where I’d started, watching my friends share something I wanted so badly it hurt. Something that, for a brief, wonderful second, I’d had, too. Something I wasn’t sure I could ever get back. Because I wasn’t sure, at all, that my special someone still wanted that job.
By the time Kim pulled herself together and excused herself to go wash her face, it was time for my shot…or should I say shots. I’d taken it upon myself to double my dosage the night before. After my encounter with Clay, I wasn’t taking any chances.
“What is that?” Blake asked when I pulled a syringe out of the desk drawer and pulled the top off.
“Nexus,” I told him without actually meeting his eyes. “It’s artificial essence. Tyler got it from some guy named Skipper.”
“Skipper Reed?” Blake asked, sounding nothing less than awed.
“Maybe,” I told him, shrugging. “I didn’t really ask for last names, Blake. Why? Who’s Skipper Reed?”
“Only a seriously badass vampire,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Ty must have some major pull with somebody if he got in to see Skipper Reed. As far as I know, nobody ever gets to see him. The guy’s like a ghost.”
He watched in apparent curiosity as I worked the leg of my baggy pajama pants up and gave myself first one shot and then another. When I looked up again, he seemed a little pale.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“You get used to it,” I told him, tossing the empty syringes in the trashcan next to the desk. “It’s that or eat somebody. That would kind of give new meaning to ‘The Other White Meat’, so I think I’ll take the shots.”
“I’d probably just eat someone,” he muttered, looking a little sick. His skin had taken on a slightly greenish tinge that I didn’t think had anything to do with my screen resolution.
“I forgot you were scared of needles,” I teased, grinning.
“I’m not scared of needles, Em,” he grumbled. “I just don’t like them.”
“What a load!” I laughed. “Did you forget who was in the ER with you when you broke your ankle? If your mom hadn’t shown up when she did, you would have forced that quack to set the bone with no anesthetic at all.”
“Do you ever forget anything?”
“Not when it comes to you and Kim,” I told him, shrugging. My voice dropped to a whisper when I said, “Those memories are about all that’s keeping me sane, so you might want to let me keep them.”
I saw a sad look cross his features before he leaned closer to the camera, as if he could get closer to me that way. And, for just a second, it felt like he had, like he was right there in the room with me and I just had to reach out to get the hug I needed even more than I needed a latte.
“Listen to me, hot stuff,” he said softly. “We’re going to get you through this. One step at a time, we’re going to bring you back, Em.”
I forced back another sob at the sincerity in his vow. It had always been me, Kim, and Blake. They were more than my friends. They were my family, the foundation that kept me firmly grounded. If anyone could help me find my way back, it was the two of them.
“So, where do we start?” I asked him, forcing myself to smile.
“With a latte!” Kim crowed cheerfully, just out of camera range.
A stack of papers suddenly appeared in front of Blake, delivered there by two thin, disembodied arms, before Kim made him scoot over and pulled up another chair. I couldn’t help but notice that she had that Mother Hen look on her face that, over the years, I had come to dread seeing. It very rarely meant anything good for me.
“I can’t have a latte, dingbat,” I told her, laughing weakly. Kim just arched her eyebrows at me in an ‘Oh really?’ kind of way.
“We’ll just see about that, won’t we?” she said, pulling some papers from the stack in front of Blake. “I’ve been doing some research while you’ve been ignoring me, and according to this…” She waved a paper in front of the camera that looked like it had been photocopied out of someone’s personal journal.“…you can. Well, maybe not a latte, per se, but some kind of human sustenance. Now. This is what we’re going to do…”
∞§∞§∞§∞
I put the first step in Kim and Blake’s plan into effect that night. Kim had decided Sierra had just jumped into the deep end too fast when I’d taken my moonlit stroll through Hell in the back yard. Baby steps, she’d said, were the key. It was all about pacing myself, teaching myself my limitations and figuring out a way to deal with them.
Therefore, she had decided it was time for me to have a snack—that didn’t come in a human-shaped package.
Getting to the kitchen was like sneaking into a den of assassins on red alert. You know, the kind who slept with their eyes open and a gun in both hands, ready for anything? That’s what I was walking into.
I dressed for the part, making use, once again, of the outfit I’d worn the night Nathan and I had broken into Moonlight’s funeral home. When I cracked my door open and peeked out, I heard the sound of canned gunfire coming from down the hall, letting me know that at least one of my jailers was indulging in a little Halo therapy. Feeling it was safe to proceed, I slipped out of my room and closed the door softly behind me.
I inched my way down the hall, wondering when it had gotten so long. It seemed to take forever just to make it to the living room. I held my breath as I peeked around the corner only to find both Nathan and Tyler sprawled at opposite ends of the big leather sectional that dominated most of the room, controllers in hand. Sierra was nowhere to be seen.
Okay, you’re almost there, I told myself as I shot a nervous glance at the dark entryway to the kitchen. If I could just get past Nathan without being seen, I was good to go. Pretend you’re a ninja. Become the shadows or some such crap.
As it turned out, that was harder than I’d been counting on. I was just about to take my first step toward the Ben & Jerry’s I’d decided to try my luck on when I finally heard the conversation they were having.
“That’s the second one in a week, Jordan,” Nathan was saying, though his eyes never moved from the screen. “One witch going missing could be anything; two that close together spells trouble for all of us.”
Wait. There were witches missing? When had that happened? I had seen the paper that morning, and there hadn’t been any articles about people going missing around Moonlight. Trust me, I would have noticed that. Especially after Bastian’s brief stint as Blood Red, Moonlight’s first and only serial killer, the month before.
“Not necessarily,” Tyler said, his fingers flying across the buttons on his controller as he tried to outmaneuver Nathan. “I just think we should wait, get some more specifics, before we pack her up and try to move her. Besides, if they come after her—”
Tyler’s mouth snapped shut when Nathan, his body suddenly rigid, hit pause on the game and took a deep breath. I held mine, waiting for him to turn around and look at me, but he didn’t. Instead, he relaxed and threw his controller aside, a slight grin on his lips.
“You want a beer?” he asked Tyler as he stood up and stretched like a cat. I tried not to notice the way his t-shirt rode up, revealing his chiseled abs, but by the time he put his arms down I was practically drooling.
“Sure,” Tyler said, rubbing the back of his neck. “You go get the beers; I’ll go check on Em.”
“Go ahead,” Nathan said, grinning. When Tyler arched an eyebrow at him, he shrugged and chuckled. “You won’t have to go far. She’s eavesdropping around the corner.”
“How did you know that?” Busted, I stepped around the corner with a pout firmly fixed to my lips and my hands propped on my hips.
Nathan’s eyes raked me from head to toe, taking in my all-black ensemble, and I knew he was remembering the last time he’d seen it, too. Turning on his heel, he hurried toward the kitchen muttering something about getting the beers. Changing my plan, I grinned at Tyler and went after him.
“So, what are my jailers up to tonight?” I asked, hopping onto one of the stools at the island as he pulled two beers from the fridge and closed it. “I noticed one of you is missing. Did your Barbie pack up and go home?”
“We’re not your jailers, Em, and, for the last time, Sierra isn’t ‘my’ anything. She’s out running an errand. She should be back soon.” Popping the top on his beer, he leaned back against the counter behind him and studied me over the top of the bottle. “A better question would be what are you up to? The last time I saw you dressed like that, you were breaking and entering. What were you up to this time?”