Flutter mba-3

by Аманда Хокинг

  Going through security was very hard, but Ezra told me to just keep saying the alphabet backwards in my head. It didn’t necessarily soften the burning thirst inside of me, and even though I couldn’t help but keep my eyes locked on the throbbing pulse in the security guard’s neck, I didn’t bite him. So I counted that towards a success.

  Ezra gave me the window seat and buckled me in, which I think made both of us feel a little better. I closed my eyes tightly, and I tried not think of Jack. He was lurking painfully in my thoughts, and he only made my bloodlust increase. The whole situation felt very precarious, and I was starting to think that maybe I wasn’t ready for this trip.

  When the engines of the plane started revving up, Ezra leaned over and whispered, “This time, if the plane crashes, it’ll be in the water. The ocean’s full of sharks, and well, they can kill us. So you actually have something to be afraid of this time.”

  “Is that supposed to comfort me?” I asked through gritted teeth as a new fear started to take hold.

  “No, not at all. I wanted to scare the hell of out you so you’d stop thinking about… things.”

  Ezra squeezed my hand back, and that felt reassuring somehow. “But it’s still true. Sharks are brutal.”

  The instant we were free to move about, Ezra grabbed the duffle back full of blood from the overhead bin and led me back to the restrooms. We got a lot of weird looks from the other passengers and the flight crew, but nobody stopped us. I doubted that any humans ever stopped Ezra. He was too beautiful and confident and imposing.

  He didn’t even try to mask the fact that we were going into the bathroom together, and for some reason, I admired him for that. Ezra didn’t care at all what people thought about him as long as they didn’t think he was a vampire. There was hardly enough room in the bathroom for one person, let alone two, so he swiftly lifted me up and set me on the sink. Then he clunked the duffel bag on my lap and tore it open. When he pulled out a can, I imagined that I could smell it, and I actually started to shake with hunger, but he stopped to look at me.

  “You are so pale,” Ezra murmured more to himself than me. He pushed a strand of hair out off my face and looked at me fully in the eyes, inspecting them for their level of hunger. “Hmmm.

  I’m going to give you two cans, okay?”

  “Yeah, whatever, fine,” I nodded quickly. I didn’t care at all what he said as long as I got the blood. It was so close and my body was going completely insane for it.

  “Put your hair back,” Ezra commanded.

  It didn’t make sense to me, but I did what he said. I had a hair tie around my wrist, and I pulled my hair up in a messy bun. He was eyeing me up still, trying to figure something out that I didn’t understand, and the cans of blood were in his hands. There was a bag full of cold sitting on my lap, and I bit my lip, hard.

  “This is gonna hit you hard, but I need you to walk back out to your seat, okay?” Ezra continued.

  “And you can pass out as soon as you sit down.”

  “Okay!” I snapped.

  He pursed his lips, but unscrewed the can. The small room was instantly full of the scent, and I practically ripped the can from his hands. A small drop splashed out onto my dark green sweater, but I doubted that anyone would notice. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been so positively obsessed with it.

  Greedily, I guzzled it down. As soon as I felt the cold sliding down my throat, I felt an ease growing in my muscles. Even though it was very cold, it spread warm over my body. Before I had even finished the first can, Ezra had unscrewed the second one. He wanted me to get them down me as fast as possible, so we had a chance of me making it to the seat before I looked totally blitzed out.

  I drank them both, and Ezra shoved them back in the bag. I licked my lips clean, but he inspected me for any signs of his blood on my face. The world was already starting to get that hazy glow to it, and that wonderful relaxed feeling wanted to take over. With Ezra so close to me, I had the strangest urge to kiss him.

  That was just the blood talking, so I lowered my head before I could accidentally act on it.

  We walked back to our seats, him with his arm on me to steady me. It took all my strength to keep from stumbling or doing anything ridiculous. All the colors seemed to shine brighter. My shirt looked like grass, and I wanted to pet it, but Ezra was sliding me into the seat.

  “How are you feeling?” Ezra whispered as he buckled me back in.

  “Dreamy,” I murmured with a hazy smile on my lips.

  Before he had even put the bag back in the overhead compartment, I had passed out. It was that wonderful really heavy, deep sleep that most people only dreamed about getting on an airplane. Even with Ezra’s new threats about sharks and this gnawing ache for Jack, I slept soundlessly the entire way to Finland.

  Ezra started to gently shake me awake, and somewhere while I had been sleeping, he’d gotten me a pillow and blanket to sleep with. He had a blanket folded on his lap, and I wondered if he’d slept at all. I had managed to sleep through an entire eight hour flight, but I’m sure he barely closed his eyes.

  “We’re about to touch down in Helsinki,” Ezra informed me quietly.

  “Really?” I yawned and stretched a little, then looked out my window. It was dark out, but the city was aglow with twinkley lights. “What time is it?”

  “It’s ten o’clock, Wednesday,” Ezra answered.

  “Oh.” My brain scrambled to figure when we left, but it didn’t seem right. “Wait. Did we leave at ten on Tuesday? We haven’t been en route for twenty-four hours.”

  “There’s a time change. It’s only two pm in Minneapolis. You might suffer a bit of jet lag, but then again, thanks to that nice nap you had, you might not,” he smiled at me.

  “I hope not.” In truth, I didn’t even really know what jet lag was, but from what I heard, it didn’t sound like something I’d want to suffer from.

  A flight attendant came to collect our blankets, and the captain came on, saying things about making the descent into Helsinki. Then he repeated the same message in Finnish, or at least I assumed he did since I didn’t understand a word of it. As we got closer, I realized the city was much more stunning than I had expected it to be. In my mind, it had been more of a cold, desolate looking place, but in reality, it looked kind of glamorous and historical, like the way I imagined Paris or London to look. Not that I had ever seen either of them to have any real comparison.

  “This is where Peter went to live off the grid?” I asked skeptically as I admired the architecture.

  “No, he’s not here,” Ezra shook his head. “We have one more flight to make.”

  “Really?” I wrinkled my nose. Even though I had slept through this flight, my body felt stiff, and I was sick of sitting around waiting.

  “Just up to northern Finland, in the Lapland,” Ezra said as if that meant anything to me at all. “I’ll explain more once we land. We have another layover.”

  “Fantastic,” I sighed.

  Getting off the plane, I noticed for the first time how well everything must sit with Ezra. He hadn’t slept in I don’t know how long and he’d just been sitting on a plane the entire time, but his clothes weren’t even wrinkled. He wore a buttoned down white shirt with some kind off shiny white pattern hidden on it, and as always, he left a few of the top buttons on done, as if he wasn’t tantalizing enough. He wore fitted jeans, as had I, which looked out of place when he got off the plane. Most people wore much more comfortable clothes for a long flight, but neither of us really seemed to mind. Everyone was looking at him, noticing how stunning he looked, and I realized belatedly that they were looking at me the same way.

  Being really attractive is a weird thing to get used to.

  Ezra got everything sorted for the next flight, and then we prepared ourselves to wait for our flight out. This time, I made sure to hang out by a window. I had missed all of New York City, and I was determined to at least admire the view of Helsinki. Not that there was a view from t
he airport. It was mostly planes, landing strips, and some traffic. But that was more than I had seen in New York.

  “It really is a beautiful city,” Ezra admitted, coming up to stand next to me.

  We watched as plane taxied down the runway, and I knew that wasn’t he was referring to.

  He knew that I was trying to catch a glimpse of something that I was going to miss entirely. I sighed but refused to leave my post at the window. Besides, standing up for a change felt good.

  “You’ve stayed here before?” I glanced him out of the corner of my eye even though I thought I knew the answer.

  “Many times, mostly before Mae,” Ezra nodded. “I’ve managed to drag her out here a few times, but she doesn’t like to leave the city very much. But Peter loves it here.”

  “How come?”

  “The cold, the dark, the wilderness, the seclusion. He stays up further north mostly. There’s a couple really fantastic national parks and some ski resorts, and that’s where he spends most of his time. And Helsinki, Stockholm, Amsterdam, they’re all not that far away, whenever he requires bustling city life,” Ezra explained.

  The way he said “life” I knew he meant more than dinner and a show. Actually, he just meant dinner.

  Peter might enjoy seclusion, but he needed a population to eat, preferably a mixture of vampires and people.

  Vampire bars and blood banks made eating so much easier, and the fewer the people, the less the options.

  “So that’s where we’re going? Up north?” I turned fully to Ezra. “What’d you call it? The Lapland?”

  “Yeah. It’s just the northern most territory in Finland.” He took a deep breath, and he sounded reluctant when he continued. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  “There’s lots of things you haven’t told me,” I corrected him nervously.

  “This is important.” He licked his lips and shifted his gaze. “You’ve heard of stories of werewolves, right?”

  My stomach dropped. Sure, I may be a vampire now, but there were certain things I couldn’t take.

  Like finding out an endless stream of monsters and folklore were real. After this, maybe we’d roll with a Yeti or go swimming with the Loch ness Monster and a Leprechaun. There had to be some point where fiction remained fiction, and I was determined that ended it immediately after vampires.

  “No, no, no,” I shook my head. “Jack told me there weren’t any werewolves. There’s no such thing.”

  “No, there’s not!” Ezra agreed emphatically. “Shape shifting of any kind is a complete impossibility.

  Or at least as far as I know.”

  “So…” My heart had slowed a little, but he was still holding something back, and that wasn’t comforting. “Why even bring them up? How do they relate?”

  “You’ve heard the stories about them, though, haven’t you?” Ezra continued, his deep brown eyes looking at me intently.

  “Yeah,” I answered uncertainly.

  My knowledge of werewolves was very limited, and mostly based on Michael J. Fox’s portrayal in Teen Wolf. I had never thought the film was very factual, because I couldn’t imagine how surfing on a van could be possible, werewolf or no. So I hadn’t given any credence to the lore, and the only thing I carried from it was that wolves were good a basketball. This information did not seem pertinent to the situation.

  “How the full moon makes them come out, and they attack without reproach?” Ezra went on. “They turn into vicious animals, unfettered by remorse or logic.”

  “Okay, sure,” I nodded, hoping he would just hurry and make his point.

  “Do you remember when I told about the vampires I had encountered when I first turned?”

  Ezra grew even more solemn, and I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. I didn’t want to see how he tied those two thoughts together. “They were … rabid animals.”

  “You’re not… they’re not…” I faltered. “What are you saying exactly?”

  “Sometimes, some vampires, either by choice or just be design, don’t ever fully civilize,” he explained carefully. “The ones that are entirely primeval are usually killed pretty early on. Even vampires can’t stomach rampant monsters. But some willfully seek out a different life, one very separate from people and humanity.

  They live on the fringe of both our societies.

  “This has been the case since the beginning of our kind, of any kind, I suppose. They’ll always be something that lives just outside the limits.” Ezra took a deep breath and looked back out at the night sky.

  “We believe the early stories of werewolves are based on vampires living like this. In small packs that hunt together, living more like animals than people. While they are forced to live like us necessity, meaning they can’t kill most of their food, they want to hunt and kill. They hunt big game, like bears and elk, even wolves.

  Not for food, but for sport.”

  “People do that too,” I interjected, but I’m not sure what point I was making with that.

  Mostly, I was trying to freak myself out less.

  “We call them lycans. It’s short for lycanthrope, which just means werewolf. Its a little inside joke for vampires.” Ezra smiled at me with that, but I didn’t really think it was funny. “Lycan, I think, just means wolf, in Greek or Latin.”

  “This was a round about way of giving me a lesson in Greek?” I asked dryly.

  “There’s a pack of lycan that live in the Finnish Lapland,” Ezra ignored me. “I’ve come across them before, but it’s mostly an ever changing group, with only the leader staying the same. From what I gather, he’s a bit of a sadist, and the life expectancy for his pack isn’t anywhere near what it is for the average vampire, or even for other lycans. They are known for their brutality, and they’ve killed innocent people and vampires indiscriminately. They’re just too strong to take on as a whole, so most of us are satisfied to let them be.”

  I swallowed hard and tried to focus on the bright lights flashing in the darkness outside of the window. By now, I had started figuring out how this story ended up with us here, waiting for a plane to take us to where these lycans lived. Our destination was very much connected with theirs.

  “Last week, for reasons that aren’t yet clear to me, Peter killed a member of their pack. They want revenge, and they don’t want to stop until they get him. And, Peter, in his current state, seems happy to offer himself up,” Ezra finished quietly. “We have to track him down before they do.”

  I could barely control my own bloodlust, but we were going to go trekking out into the wilderness to track down a pack of crazed werewolves-cum-vampires so we could save a vampire that had tried to kill me before. It all made perfect sense in my mind. I couldn’t see how any of this could possibly go wrong. We were guaranteed to come out ahead.

  “Alice?” Ezra asked when I just kept staring out the window. “Do you have any questions or anything?”

  “Nope,” I shook my head. “But Jack’s gonna be so pissed when he finds out what we’re doing.”

  Chapter 4

  The hotel felt like a cross between a Holiday Inn and a hunting lodge, with fireplaces and antlers hanging on the wall, but I was still pleasantly surprised by the set up. After another two hour flight, followed by a short drive, we finally checked in. Since it was after two in the morning, the place was deserted, and Ezra spoke briefly in Finnish with the desk clerk.

  The room had hardwood floors, but generally, it had that same nice, generic look that any other hotel would have. They had internet access and a television, and I didn’t know exactly what I had expected. Some sort of run down hunting lodge with only one bathroom in the whole place maybe. But when I peaked out the window at the snow covered dark, based on the cars in the parking lot, it was relatively busy.

  “There’s a lot of people here,” I commented.

  Letting the shades close, I turned back to Ezra. He had already started to busy himself with unpacking, while I had just dropped my luggage on o
ne of the beds. I had claimed the double bed closer the window, and his was nearer to the bathroom.

  “There’s a ski resort,” Ezra explained absently. “I think I’m going to go ahead and take a shower.” He gathered up his change of clothes and toiletries, then looked over at me. “Then we’ll get some rest and have a go at finding Peter tomorrow.”

  “Do we really have time to waste?” I tried to ask without accusation. We had left in such a hurry, and I wasn’t sure how imminent the danger to Peter was.

  “We have to rest, or I’ll be of no use to Peter.” He shrugged tiredly, as if he couldn’t see any way around it.

  Once he’d gone in the bathroom and I heard the familiar sound of the showering running, I changed into my comfy pajama pants and a cotton shirt. They felt tremendous after spending the past twenty hours or so stuck in jeans and a sweater while traveling across the world. Thankfully, in my rush to pack, I had thought to pack pajamas, otherwise it would’ve been incredibly awkward sleeping in my underwear while sharing a room with Ezra.

  I had gotten sleep on the plane ride over the ocean, and with the time difference, I would just be getting up back home in Minneapolis. On top of that, Ezra had amped me when he dropped the news to me that we were really chasing after werewolfian vampires, so I didn’t exactly feel like sleeping.

  When I pulled out my phone, I was surprised to find that I had a signal (subconsciously I guess I had been thinking that Finland was in the stone ages) and that my charger didn’t work in the outlets. Fortunately, I’d had it shut off the entire travel time, so the battery was fully charged.

  Crossing my fingers, I sat down on the bed and hoped he would be awake enough to answer the phone. This had been the longest we’d gone without talking to each other since I’d turned, and it felt very, very strange. Like the chemicals in body were slightly off balanced without him.

  “Hello?” Jack sounded almost frantic when he answered the phone. “Alice? Are you okay? Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” Irrational tears welled up in my eyes. It was stupid how much I missed him when I’d barely even been gone for a day. “We just got to the hotel. I was just calling to let you know that we got in alright.”