“Your school?”
“Yeah. My school. I got to see her at lunchtime every day. The kids were mean about my mom being a cafeteria lady, but I didn’t give a single shit because I knew what she was doing for us. It was me and her against the world, and I was lucky. It sucked losing my dad and always feeling that rejection, but she did her best to be mother and father for me.”
“She didn’t ever find someone else?”
Dawn shrugged away the pain of that question. “She almost did once.”
“He left?”
Dawn’s eyes were beginning to burn thinking about Gary, so she scooted closer to him and changed the subject. “Tell me about your mom.”
Garret huffed a breath and rolled onto his back, linked his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling with a slight frown. “I don’t remember her.”
And there was tragedy in that. How many lifetimes had it taken for him to forget the people he knew as a human? “You don’t remember anything?”
Garret swallowed hard and murmured, “Sometimes I think I remember her voice. She sang this old lullaby when I was a kid. And then she sang it once when I was grown and I’d come home from battle badly wounded. She thought I couldn’t hear her. By that time, her voice was old and frail, but still had the same tone.” He swallowed hard and sang a string of guttural sounding words in a language she didn’t recognize. His voice was rich and deep, but broke on the last word.
“What does it mean?”
“It doesn’t translate well. I don’t remember any of it but that line in her voice. Maybe because I had been clinging to life so hard the last time she sang it, I don’t know. Means… ‘And my boy will be a man someday, a man, but I’ll always love the boy, my boy.’”
Chills rippled across her skin, and Dawn snuggled against his ribs.
“My mother was there when I got my tattoos, too,” he said with a sad smile. “The chieftain, too, my uncle.” He traced his head in a slow arc from his temple to the base of his skull, but his hair was too long for Dawn to see them. “I got the tattoos to tell the stories of the battles I’d fought. I wanted to remind Odin of my bravery so he would let me into Valhalla when I died in battle.” Garret gave his attention to the rafters again. “They’re all waiting for me.”
“Who?” she asked softly.
“My family. My friends. My people. They’ll be waiting for all eternity. Asmund made sure I would always be severed from them.”
Dawn’s heart was breaking. It felt like it was ripping in two at the desolation in Garret’s voice. He should’ve died centuries ago with the people he loved in life. She hated the thought of him long-dead in a grave, but that was how it was supposed to be. She and Garret should’ve never met, but just the thought of how empty her life would’ve been without him was unbearable. She hated Asmund, but a selfish part of her was glad he gave Garret time to make it to this moment, with her. She was sick with herself.
“Why did Asmund choose you?”
“Loneliness. Selfishness. He wanted a son. He wanted to make a man into a monster just like him so he wouldn’t feel so bad about the things he did to hurt people. I left my mother, my woman, my village to go on the spring raids. I was high in our village, trusted by the chieftain, trusted by the king. I had proven myself and was confident in battle. Fearless. Stupid. I took risks to protect others. I was ruthless.”
“Geir the Destroyer,” she whispered, repeating Asmund’s words.
“That was the name I was given, and I was proud of it. My family was proud of it. My woman knew what was going to happen. Torunn refused to say goodbye, and I was angry with her for asking me to stay. The raids were an honor. Dying was an honor, but she told me I was going to die and I wouldn’t see Valhalla. I was pissed. When I left, she was sobbing. I told her I would come back for her.” Garret swallowed hard and looked sick. “And I did.”
“But you were a vampire?”
A slow nod. “We got blown off course in a bad storm and landed on the shore of a place we hadn’t drawn on our maps. There was war, but not with humans. These men were feral, and they changed into monstrous beasts with fangs and fur, and their eyes were soulless. We were slaughtered by werewolves. I was laying in this field of carnage, bleeding, dying, fighting for every breath and pleading to Odin to take me faster. I’d been bitten over and over, ripped up, and had to hold my insides in place. Some of the bodies around me were twitching, Changing into the monsters that had killed us. Most of us died, but some did not, and I could feel it, too. My blood was like fire in my veins, and there was something growing inside of me. Something dark. The wolves were howling all around us, like they were calling their new brethren. And I remember chanting, ‘Don’t let me turn into one of them. Don’t let me.’ The howling stopped, just…cut to nothing, and I couldn’t feel them there anymore, the pack. They were running away, but in their place, something else approached. Something worse.”
“Asmund?”
Garret nodded slightly. “He said he would keep the wolf from eating me. I couldn’t think straight. It was like he was in my head, and the pain was getting worse. He told me he would save me from the pack, and that I could go back to Torunn. He knew her name. He pulled it from my mind, and I knew I was in the presence of evil, but it hurt so bad. Everything hurt, and I wasn’t dying. I could feel my body mending itself, but my insides felt like fire. I was straining, screaming, begging him to kill me before I Changed into a wolf. ‘Just kill me,’ I was chanting mindlessly. And he did. He drained me, and I went easy, staring up at the sky. But four days later I woke up a creature of the night, thirsting for blood like a man in the desert thirsts for water. Vampyr. That’s what my terrifying childhood stories had called them, and I was that creature now. I was angry. I was Asmund’s first monster, and he thought I would be like a son to him. But I hated him. Hated him for everything he’d done. I’d asked him to kill me, and he’d given me eternal life instead. It took me two years of working, of hating Asmund and refusing his urgings, to give into my instincts, but as soon as I could control the hunger and travel, I went back home. I went back to Torunn because she had been right. I thought she was the weak one, but it was me. I was a slave to the thirst now, and my instinct was to kill everything with a pulse. To drain everything alive to make myself feel better, so it was me who was the weak one. I went back home because I thought maybe she could fix me.” His voice sounded hollow and heartbroken now.
“Did you kill her?” Dawn asked in horror.
“No. She killed me instead.”
Dawn slipped her arms around his waist and rested her cheek on his chest. “How?”
“I reached my old home, and everything had changed. The village was quieter without all the men. The market was smaller, and everything was coated with sadness. Torunn had put reflective glass all around my cabin, not just on the door, and I couldn’t see myself. I was nothing. I remember waving my hand in front of the mirrors and thinking she’d bewitched them. It was deep in the night, and I pushed open the door, but I couldn’t go inside. It wasn’t my home anymore and I wasn’t invited. I could see her laying in my bed, under my furs, in the arms of another. She’d always wanted babies, and I hadn’t given them to her, and she’d taken another husband. I was stuck, and she had moved on.”
Dawn squeezed her eyes tightly closed at the pain slashing through her chest. “Asmund said I look like her. Is that why you approached me?”
“No. That’s why I encouraged Aric to move the entire fucking coven here. You look just like her, and I couldn’t stay away. I tried, but there has been no one since Torunn. It’s like my heart latched onto her, because she was the last good thing I could remember from my human life. And in that two years I was fighting for control to be able to get back to her, she was the only thing that kept me from turning into the monster Asmund wanted me to be. There have been empty fucks, but nothing deeper, do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered. Slowly, Dawn sat up and gave him her back as she sat on t
he edge of the bed. “I’m not her, Garret.” She cast him a look over her shoulder. “You aren’t Geir the Destroyer anymore, and I’m not Torunn, and this isn’t a repeat of your love story with her. My feelings for you are my own. I don’t want to be your replacement Torunn. I want to be your Dawn.”
Garret huffed an amused sound. “It took me all of thirty seconds to realize you weren’t Torunn reborn, Dawn. You’re nothing like her. You have her looks, but you were never her replacement. The first time you told me your name, do you remember?”
She giggled and turned on the bed, drew her knees up. “You laughed at me, and I was mad. I called you a butthole. I thought you were rude for making fun of my name.”
“It was just ironic to me. I am the night, and your name is Dawn, and we couldn’t be any more different, you and I. It was like fate telling me to back the fuck off you, and I couldn’t. I watched you serving drinks that night.”
“I remember. You sat in the corner booth and barely drank anything. I felt your eyes on me the entire shift. I figured out what you were when one of the guys got too handsy and your eyes turned black.”
“I wanted to kill him. I came home and asked Aric if I could.”
“You did?”
Garret chuckled. “Yeah. I found out his name and everything. That asshole didn’t know it, but he was stalked hard for a couple weeks before Aric laid down the law and ordered me to let him be. It’s why I stopped coming to visit you at work. My protective instincts are a little ridiculous around you, and Aric told me I needed to let you alone, too. And then you showed up to be a feeder.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Dawn admitted. “And then there was this ad in the paper to be a feeder for your coven, and the money was good. I could help my mom pay off some of her debt with my shifts at the bar and the extra from feeding. The big draw was the thought of seeing you again, though. You terrified me, but at the same time, you excited me. You wouldn’t have hurt me.”
“How did you know that?” he whispered, suddenly serious.
“It was the way you said goodbye that first night. You made sure not to interrupt me while I was working, but when Trager went to shut the bar down, you approached me slowly, and you were trying to hide your eyes from me. You seemed nervous, and it didn’t make sense because you’re”—she waved her hand at his sculpted torso and striking face—“you. You could’ve had any girl in this town with a look, but you were almost shy around me. And do you remember what you said?”
Garret nodded, and his sexy smile was back. “I told you if you ever needed anything, call my name.”
“I was so stunned by what you’d said. I asked you what your name was, and you leaned in slowly, gripped my shoulders, and whispered your name in my ear. It sounds crazy, but I’d never felt so safe. I thought surely it was some power you vampires had to get humans to trust you with their necks, but I couldn’t get that fluttery warm feeling out of my head after you left. I wanted to feel it again, so I showed up for the feeder interviews and requested you because I just knew down to my bones you wouldn’t hurt me. And you didn’t until the day I tried to kiss you.”
Garret shook his head. “That’s not why I pushed you away, Dawn.”
“Then what was it? What did I do wrong?”
“Do you remember what else happened that night?”
Dawn shook her head and suddenly felt cold just thinking about it.
“You’d downloaded that Vampire Pics app on your phone. The special one that allows you to pick up my image? You took a picture of us.”
“You were my best friend. I wanted to be able to see you on the days I wasn’t feeding you.”
“But you posted it online, and that night I could feel him—Asmund. I’d been blocking him out of my head, keeping him off my trail, but I could feel him getting closer, and I knew it was that picture that did it. I didn’t push you away because I wanted to, D. Doing that…seeing the hurt in your eyes…that hurt worse than the wolf that was growing in me all those years ago. Your friendship meant more than I can explain, and I felt awful ripping our bond from my soul. Or maybe where my soul was supposed to be. I almost felt like I had one with you. I couldn’t repay you by putting you in Asmund’s path. I begged Aric to move the coven just to protect you, but he’s settled here. So is Sadey. So is everyone else. I was trying to protect you, not hurt you.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me all this?” she whispered. “I would’ve understood.”
“Would you? You are Torunn’s lookalike. How could I explain that in a way that wouldn’t hurt you? How could I tell you I’d hunted you for the way you look? That I’d been hunting you for centuries, always looking for your face in crowds? How could I make you understand that I care about you for more than your face now?”
Dawn’s stomach curdled, and she shrugged helplessly. “I guess that’s the hard part, right? Now it’s up to me. Do I believe you and trust your feelings aren’t just some wish that I was someone else? Or do I cut and run. I guess I have to decide which one hurts the least. Garret?”
“Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you feed from me tonight?”
He huffed a breath like it should’ve been obvious. “You were hurt by Asmund. It wasn’t a consensual feeding, Dawn. He forced you just to get to me. I don’t want to hurt you more.”
“But you’re thirsty.”
Garret gritted his teeth. “No amount of thirst could make me hurt you when you’re feeling raw like this. I’ll hold. You’ll heal. We’ll talk about feeding later.”
And there it was. He was starving—it was in his shining black eyes and the wildness of his face. She could see it in the fangs that hadn’t dulled the entire time they talked. But he would rather sit this close to her in torture than hurt her.
And she trusted him. She trusted that Garret had figured it out, that she was no Torunn.
This care wasn’t for a ghost of his past, but was just for her.
He may have hunted for Torunn, but he had fallen for Dawn.
Chapter Four
Garret opened the door for Dawn and ghosted a glance at the lightening sky. It was a deep gray now, and sunrise would be here soon. He hated this—the fear of the sun. Some days it was enough to drive him mad.
He was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and nothing else. Usually he hid his scars, but what was the point now? Dawn had seen all of him and hadn’t seemed to mind at all. She turned on the porch and hooked her fingers in the elastic waistband that hung low on his hips. Her smile was shy and soft, and for the hundredth time he was struck with how different she’d turned out to be. He’d been convinced that Torunn would be reborn, but she hadn’t been. Or if she had been, he never found her. Dawn was soft and sweet, cute and bubbly, where Torunn had been sharp as a blade and ready to battle at any moment. He used to think he needed a hard woman, but then he’d met Dawn, and she’d breathed new life into him.
Garret lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her on the inside of her thumb. God he wanted to drink her, but not until she was fully recovered.
As if she could hear his thoughts, she whispered, “Don’t take another feeder. I don’t like the thought of your lips on them. If you need to drink, come find me.”
She was so pretty in the early morning light— the ends of her blond hair lifted in the breeze, her lips swollen from kissing him, cheeks rosy, eyes hooded and sleepy, their color like the daytime sky. It was the closest to a midday sky he would ever get. She was wearing a pair of worn, pink flip-flops and one of his T-shirts over her jeans. He’d always liked that about her—she could dress down and be comfortable in her skin and still look fucking gorgeous. Soft spoken she may be, and sweet to boot, but she was also confident, and there was nothing sexier on a woman than confidence.
“Why are you smiling at me like that?” she asked, intertwining their fingers and clasping their hands together as she shifted her weight closer.
“It’s just nice to finally touch you how I want.”
“You could’ve before.”
But she was wrong. He’d been on the fence before, confused by her resemblance to Torrun, wary of his dangerous life and the effect it could have on her, worried about putting a long shadow on her life. Garret had always been careful at decisions of the heart, and he’d wanted to make sure he was all the way in before he asked her to attach to him.
Thoughts of shadows stole the smile from his face. “Do you work tonight?”
“No. Trager wanted me to take some time off while I heal up. I told him I’m fine. I could use the money. My mom has rent due soon, and I need to help her out.”
Garret frowned. “Why do you have to pay for your mom?”
Dawn shrugged. “It’s what family does. She’s got a busted knee and has been doing physical therapy. She’s recovering, but not fast enough for her job. I’m floating us until she can find another one that isn’t so physically demanding.”
“So you’re paying your rent and hers?”
“No.” She gave him a cute, little frowny smile. “Didn’t you know I live with my mom?”
Garret huffed a laugh. “No. Momma’s girl, huh?”
She giggled and pushed him in the shoulder playfully. Her touch was like goose down, but he allowed her to push him back so she wouldn’t feel weak. “I had my own place, but she needs help. It’s part of the reason I came to every feeding invite, smart aleck. That and your cute butt. Honk.” She squeezed it, and her cheeks flushed a pretty pink color as she ducked her gaze. God, she was so fucking adorable.
“Hmm,” he said nonchalantly. He had plenty of money to help her out, but something told him Dawn wasn’t one to take charity or to be a kept woman. He would have to negotiate a higher wage when she fed him and hope it helped. “Go out with me tonight.”