The Better to Eat You With: The Red Journals

by Cara Villar

  I tried to lift my arms to block him, but one arm wouldn’t move, and all he did was break the other. My scream echoed down the corridor, resounding off glass walls. I kicked my legs futilely until he straddled me, punching my face until all I could see, taste, smell and hear was blood.

  His breath rushed delightfully cool across my face, but I couldn’t see him. My eyes were too swollen. “Learn this lesson well, Willow.”

  I tried to turn away from him, but the pain, I was nothing but pain. A deep hollow throb in body and soul. In my heart. I was utterly broken. I knew it, and I felt relief. I was going to die, and I was relieved that my longing for him was over.

  “Learn it, and know. You either accept, or you die.”

  My eyes peeked open, painful against the swelling, but the words he had spoken pulled something furious out of me. I watched as Alexander tried to drag him off, but his fierce gaze held mine.

  “Never,” I mouthed, barely moving my lips at all, but the flare of gold in his cold eyes told me he knew what I’d said, and it enraged him.

  And then they were gone.

  I lay where he left me, staring down the hall at the open steel door, at the red flashing light. I wondered if the alarms had been turned off, because all I could hear was a deafening ring. My vision was dark around the edges, and getting darker. The warm wetness under my broken limbs was turning cold.

  I was turning cold. So cold. But shivering hurt and made the darkness creep in faster. They say when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. They say your memories whip through the mind’s eye like a movie on fast-forward. That everything you ever did, that you ever said, ran from start to finish and then you died.

  They’re wrong.

  What moves past your eyes moves in slow motion, forcing you to recognize what you’ve lost, what you almost had, what you’re giving up if you give up. It shifts like smoke through your mind, across your memories, making thoughts skate across the surface like pond spiders, making ripples that bring more regrets.

  What I saw was Felix.

  I saw him smiling, laughing, giving me glimpses of those dimples, from flashes to out-right lean lines. I saw him scowling, thoughtful, amused and intrigued. I heard his voice calling me ‘pet’ in tones of mirth, frustration, anger and enticement. I felt his touch, his skin, sometimes cool and sometimes warm. I saw every shade of his eyes, from luminescent lime to deep dark moss to gold lightning. I felt his rage and his passion, his desperation and his hope, and his love. Above all, his love. I remembered his kisses...

  The dark shadow around the edges of my vision became so thick my sight was narrowing down to nothing, my last memory of Felix, of his face as I let go of his hand, of my regret at having never gotten to love him as I wanted to, was overwhelmed in my mind’s eye by what was happening in the real world.

  The cavalry had arrived.

  The last thing I saw as I lay there on the floor, getting colder and colder in a pool of my own blood, was Felix. He was running through that steel door under the flashing red light and into the corridor where I was, and realized all the things I felt in my dying moments weren’t memories. They were real. Everything he felt, I felt, and was real.

  The connection we had, the bond he’d tricked me into, was still there, had always been.

  Then there was nothing at all.

  Epilogue

  I woke up in a Wiccan medical facility outside of Jacksonville, Illinois. As it turns out, Vince had a few choice secrets held back that only came to light when I wouldn’t respond to the miracle-healer that was Vampire blood. It took regular blood infusions and the resetting of all my broken bones, a Fae healer and the interminable waiting for swelling in my head to go down.

  I slept for seventeen days. I dreamed. I thought I’d passed over.

  Then I woke up, dazzled by sunlight, and aching from head to toe.

  I lifted my hand, equipped with pulse monitor and intravenous drip, and tried to block the light, but I was so weak I barely got my hand a couple inches off the bed before someone was there grabbing it. Felix and Vince were there. So were Des and Mark. Jade and Fletch. Frost and Porcia, and Osiris to control Porcia so she didn’t overwhelm me. They were all so relieved, so happy. I could smell their worry even as they smiled. It was a sour taint, and as the scent of other emotions began to fill the air, I tired quickly. The doctor, a Fae female with a sharp tone but soft eyes, kicked everyone out. Reduced visits to half an hour total, no matter who came to see me.

  I was never so thankful to be left alone. I loved all of them, all these people who cared whether I lived or died, but I needed to be alone. I needed to think about…stuff.

  I heaved a heavy sigh as I lay propped up on pillows, gazing out the window at the bright blue spring sky dotted with fluffy clouds. It would be summer soon. I wondered if my soul would still feel as shredded then as it did at the moment, or if the raw sting of it would have lessened. I wondered if I would have found my way again, and the lost feeling that had burrowed inside me so deep was only temporary. I wondered how I was ever going to love Felix the way I wanted to, the way he wanted to love me, when I couldn’t get past the all-encompassing fear that shivered up my spine and clutch my heart in an angry fist every time I thought about it.

  How could I love someone new, when my old love nearly killed me, in every sense of the word?

  And that was the crux of my thoughts.

  I analyzed my emotions obsessively. It had been so long since I’d felt anything more than a tiny bit lonely after a Rat-Pack musical, or indecisive over shoes, that being destroyed had me doggedly trying to figure out why.

  I had only one answer.

  I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.

  I snorted, and then winced as my healing ribs protested. Who knew breaking every single one of them wouldn’t even come close to what it felt like to be broken inside?

  In the end, I’d acquired a surprising number of injuries. I’d dislocated my jaw, cracked vertebrae in my spinal column, four broken ribs on the right, two on the left, with another two cracked, broken right ankle, dislocated right knee and hip, broken right collarbone, dislocated right wrist, broken left wrist, and myriad bruises, cuts and swelling all over. I was a mess.

  A rape kit confirmed what I’d already known. What shocked me was that samples taken were from five different males.

  The only consolation was the safe escape of all the other captives in Ambrose’s’ menagerie. Except for trauma and some poisoning from the regular gassing for the females, most of them were fine. They would recover in time, like me.

  I’d learned from Fletch that he’d managed to hack the second flash drive. The combined encrypted files revealed, of all things, a family tree, with Ambrose’s line gracing the bottom. Vince had taken the info and handed it over to his contacts at the wolfy archive place, wherever that was, and they were researching the names listed there, trying to find a connection that would help us.

  In the meantime, I was left to heal. Mostly.

  “Hey.”

  I knew who it was without having to look, but I turned my head anyway. Felix stood in the doorway, clad in a long-sleeved grey T and washed out blue jeans with tears in the knees. His hair was swept back and his biker boots were dirty, and the scent of him wafted over me like the most familiar of caresses. I wanted to bask in it so desperately, and I was utterly terrified to do so.

  “Hey.” I smiled weakly back.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, moving closer. The hand he couldn’t see clutched the bed sheet.

  “Weak.” I rolled my eyes. “So over being weak.”

  He chuffed a laugh, one of his hands coming out of a pocket to trace circles on the bed near my hand. “Only in body, pet.”

  Pet. I swallowed against the lump in my throat. “The doc said I could have steak—”

  “Eventually.”

  “—but someone would have to cut it up for me—“

  “Uh huh.”


  “—and I would kill for a burger—”

  “I’m sure.”

  “—maybe some French fries—”

  “Indeed.”

  “—and a big banana milkshake.” I stuck out my bottom lip, despite the fact that it was swollen and already stuck out, and gave him some big, sad hybrid eyes. “Pretty please?”

  His very proximity was driving my emotions insane, bouncing between elation and fear and it was starting to make me feel sick, trying to keep the emotion was leaking out into a scent.

  Felix brushed his fingertips over mine, and it took everything in me not to flinch at the contact. I love you, but you terrify me.

  “If I bring you an enormous bag of hamburgers,” said my Vampire, “will you promise to heal faster so I can take you home already?”

  I sucked in a sharp breath at the heat suddenly flaring in his eyes.

  I’m not strong enough for you. I gave him a wry smile. “Only if you get me fries and milkshakes too.”

  Felix laughed. “I’ll be back soon.” He leaned down and brushed his lips over my forehead, the kiss so tender my heart clenched in my chest and made my skin burn with a held-in shudder. The lump in my throat was back. God, how do I survive this?

  As he was leaving, Vince slipped into the room, mixing up the ice, coffee and anise with his California beach boy aroma, trading soft insults with the Vampire as he left. The big Alpha, back in his rocker t-shirts, leather pants and big, clunking shitkickers, blonde hair curling around his ears and shining like pale gold in the sunlight, set his pale blue eyes on me in an assessing manner.

  He moved around the bed, and took a seat beside me. I watched him recline there, staring back at me, his fingers brushing his lips. “Did you know,” he began softly, “that you look like you’ve gone ten rounds with an ugly tree?”

  I laughed, as he’d intended, then groaned in pain, for my body and my face, pulling stitches that weren’t quite ready to be taken out yet. “Asshole.” I panted, pressing a hand to my side.

  Vince smiled. “Better than when you first came in. Then you looked like you’d gone ten rounds with ten ugly trees.”

  I kept laughing, curling in on myself in a vain attempt to reduce the sting. “Stop! God, what the hell?”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll crack jokes when you’re better.” He was still smiling though. A killer smile. “You won’t be so ugly then.”

  Fucker is trying to kill me.

  While I caught my breath, he glanced between me and the window, a contemplative air about him, and I wondered what he was going to say. Never had I seen him hesitate. It was…disconcerting, to say the least.

  “Spit it out, Cujo,” I finally demanded, twitchy enough as it was given Felix could be back any moment, and I’d have to pretend everything was fine.

  Vince’s smile flashed again, and then he leaned forward to lean his elbows on his knees, all serious and shit. “I have a proposition to put to you, darlin’.”

  I waited for him to continue, and after a moment, he did.

  “The Were Council and the Immortal Commission want to offer you a job.”

  My brow arched. Didn’t see that coming.

  “I, and many other Immortals, work for them as a sort of task force, employed to enforce the laws of our kind so that beings like Ambrose are caught as soon as they transgress.”

  Jeez, even his name made a small part of me shrivel up and cower.

  “We hunt them down, capture and neutralize.” He paused and stared at my face, as if to gauge my reaction. “Our teams are elite, our training is intense, and the rewards are exponential. Not only will you be policing our kind, but you’ll also be protecting it.” His gaze was heavy with intent. “You’ll be making sure people like Ambrose don’t have a chance to make Collections.”

  “So you want me to hunt someone down? As you can see,” I gestured weakly to my stitches, casts and general inability to do jack-shit, “it didn’t go so well for me last time.”

  Vince was shaking his head. “This isn’t a one-time offer, darlin’. This is an offer to train you, to make you stronger, faster, harder, better.”

  I waved my hand at him to stop talking. I’d already decided, though I couldn’t quite believe it. This was the perfect opportunity for me to get away, heal, mend, recuperate and be exactly what Vince said; better. I wanted to be better. I wanted to be whole. I needed to be. Otherwise I’d never be able to move past how terrified I was to love Felix, how terrified I was to love anyone. I didn’t want to have to fear I’d flinch whenever someone touched me.

  I was sick of all the questions, too. The ‘what if I open up and he hurts me?’, ‘what if I can’t open up and he leaves?’ and ‘what if I can’t be fixed?’.

  Getting away from the cause of all the fear was exactly what I wanted. I could answer all these questions without the added pressure of Felix hovering around me. And when I was eventually fixed, I could come back, and I could win him. It was perfect.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Vince’s brows shot up, as if he expected to have to convince me. “You will?”

  “On one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  I’m sorry. So sorry. I’m sorry I have to let go again.

  “Get me as far away from Felix as you can.”