“I think that's a good idea. You're getting sparkles all over my clean counter.” I look down and see that I am. There's even some on the cookie plate. She comes over and gives me a hug, glitter be damned.
“I'm going to lie down,” she says, giving me a tired half-smile, only one side of her mouth twitching upward.
I'm relieved when I shut the door to my room. I let my shoulders sag under the weight of everything that's happened. I can't take much more. Soon I'm going to be crushed. The tears I don't bother to stop drip down my face, grateful for release.
First things first. Shower. I throw Tex's hoodie and borrowed pants in the hamper. I'd left the dress crumpled on the floor of her room.
I turn the water on as high as it will go and scrub and scrape until my skin is red and raw. I let the water pound on my face, seep into my eyes and make me cry more. I'm glad for the background noise of the water, because I'm being quite loud. I don't turn off the water until the hot runs out and I'm shivering. The tears have stopped, but my neck hurts like hell. I wipe the steam off the bathroom mirror and examine my neck. The marks are red from the hot water, but they don't look too severe. I think I'll be able to get away with just makeup.
My phone buzzes and it's Tex asking how I'm doing. I text her back saying I'm fine and throw in a smiley for good measure.
I'm combing out my hair when there's a tapping at my window. I don't have to look to know who it is. All I want to do is shut the curtains on him. Instead, I grab some clothes, change in the bathroom, and come back in and stand by the window. He's standing on the overhang outside, wings furled, shirt off. I'm pissed and scared at the same time. He's kind of breathtaking, standing there like that.
“What do you want?” I say through the glass. I'm not opening the window.
“Please let me come in.” Dear God, I'm having vampire movie flashbacks.
“So you can let your brother strangle me again? Hell, no.” I cross my arms. If he wants in, there's nothing I can do to stop him. That doesn't mean I can't put up a fuss.
“Ava. You need to let me in.” I'm still not opening the window.
“Can't you just come in? I thought that inviting thing was a myth.” I'm playing with fire.
“It is. But I do not want to force you.” He rakes a hand through his hair and I catch a glimpse of his eyes.
“I don't want to see you. Ever again.” The words hurt coming out of my mouth. They are sharp and make me want to cry all over again.
They're also not true.
“Ava, please. Let me explain.” I've never heard him plead before and it isn't satisfying. It makes my stomach twist in a sick way.
“Go ahead. I can't wait to hear it.” My hair drips down my back and I grab my towel to dry it. I open the window a little so I can hear him better. He moves closer, somehow keeping perfect balance.
“Ivan and I have a history. It is not a good one, and I am not going into it, but you need to listen to me.” Now there's desperation in his voice. This is bigger than I thought.
I wave my hand for him to go on.
“I should have seen it coming, but I was blind. He's going to try and use you to destroy me. There are things about me that you do not know, that I cannot tell you. All I can ask is that you trust me when I say that you are in danger and I would do anything to stop it.” From what Ivan said, Peter is the one in danger, but that's impossible. Ivan must have said it just to mess with me.
“So what are we going to do?” I hate how the word 'we' just comes out of my mouth, as if 'we' are a given. My sense abandoned me back when he started begging.
“There is only one option. I would have come sooner, but I wanted to give you some time.” Time to freak out and worry a little?
“I'm not going to like it, am I?” I wrap my arms around myself against the chilly air seeping through the window.
“No.” Bingo.
“Why should I believe you?” I try to do what he does, look at him without blinking. Of course my eyes get all dry and I have to. So much for that.
“You don't have to. But I would not lie to you about this.” He's right and I hate him for it.
“What is it? This thing you have to do?” I move aside so he can climb in the window. My promise not to let him in wasn't even a promise. I always cave when it comes to Peter.
Somehow he slips in, even with the wings. I shake a little, being so close to him, a remnant of the fear left over from last night. I'm more aware than ever how dangerous he is.
“Are you going to kill me?” I grip the towel to stop my hands from shaking.
“No.” He moves around me and goes to my nightstand. The only thing on my nightstand is the Swiss Army knife I got out to protect myself that second time I went to see him. I forgot it was there. This is not going well. He's going to kill me.
“You said. You said you're not going to kill me,” I stutter. Facing him, I start to inch toward the door. He can outrun me, but I'm not going down without a fight.
“I am not going to kill you.” He flips the knife open with a click. The next moment he lifts his wrist to his lips. “Don't watch.” Of course that only makes me look closer as he bites into his wrist and blood seeps out.
“What are you doing?” I shriek and then clamp my hand over my mouth. Mom is downstairs.
“Come here, quickly.” I go to him, if only because he's dripping blood on my floor. Before I can grab a tissue to staunch his wound, he grabs my wrist with his bloody hand.
“I'm sorry.” He moves the knife over my wrist and I cry out with the pain and surprise of it. I struggle, but he's too strong.
“Stop,” he commands. Taking my arm, he turns it so the open wounds meet. An instant flash of cold rips through me, as if my blood has crystallized.
“Stay still.” I hear his voice from far away as our blood mixes and drops onto the floor. He turns my arm upside down so his blood seeps into my wound. “Shh,” he says, holding my arm so tight that I can barely feel it, as if it's not my arm anymore.
“No, no, no.” I'm spewing nonsense, but I can't stop. I'm shaking because I'm cold and I'm scared and I don't know what's happening.
“This is the only choice. The only way.” He keeps pressing and the blood loss is making me woozy. Cold burns through me. I'm crying and trying to break away. He's not saying anything and I just want it to stop. There's so much blood and I just want it to stop.
I must have blacked out because when I open my eyes I'm lying on my bed. My eyeballs are sticky and hard to move, but the first thing I look at is my arm. Someone bandaged it with white gauze, but there is still a little bit of red soaking through the white. I can't move my head, so my eyes search the room. I'm tucked into my bed, the covers up to my chin, but with my arm on top.
“Peter?” My voice doesn't come out the way it's supposed to. I listen, hearing only the sound of my clock, which is really loud.
“Ava.” His voice comes from my bathroom, where the door is open.
My stomach cramps, and I feel like I'm going to throw up, but I can't move. Then there is an arm around me and someone is dragging me to the bathroom where I do end up puking. Someone holds my hair as I heave. A Peter someone. He gets me to the sink and turns the water on.
I rinse my mouth out and he's still holding me up.
“What did you do?” my voice rasps.
“I Claimed you.”
Peter
When I thought about losing her, it made me think back to that night so many years ago. The night my human life ended and my eternal existence began.
After the ship struck the iceberg and it was clear the ship would sink, they called for women and children only to be lowered in the lifeboats. My sisters cried and clung to my father's leg, begging to stay with him. My mother was silent, her lips forming a hard line. She hadn't spoken in quite a while, except to tell the girls to hush and to hold onto her hand. The other hand clutched at the pearl necklace she'd worn for dinner that night.
My father pulled her a
side and told her that she needed to take the girls and get in the boat. She shook her head, refusing. He took her arm and dragged her toward the boats, the girls crying and fighting the whole way. One of them fell and he picked her up, shoving her into my mother's arms, but her little fingers were latched to his collar. Lucy, my youngest sister.
“Get in the boat, Princess,” he said.
It took my help to pry her little chubby fingers from his jacket, handing her to Mother before he gave his wife one last desperate kiss. The kind of kiss you remembered for the rest of your life, because it was the last. He stripped off his coat and wrapped it around them. His little ladies, he called them. I reached out my hand and my mother clasped it, her fingers biting at mine. I wished she could pull me into the boat with her. Her fingers held so tight it hurt, but I wanted it to hurt. I wanted pain to accompany this tearing apart of our family on this cold night. Other frantic passengers streamed around us like a raging river.
My father gripped my shoulder. This also hurt. We said some other things to each other, but they were lost in the chaos. The boat lowered over the side of the deck. I watched my mother's face until I couldn't see it anymore as the boat jerkily disappeared. They were gone.
The moment after we could no longer see them, my father hugged me so tight the oxygen left my lungs, puffing into the freezing air.
“We will see them again.” He said it, even though we knew it wasn't true — at least in this lifetime. We knew there weren't enough boats. We knew how cold the water was, how fast hypothermia could set in. We clung to each other, jostled about by the desperate people who didn't want to die.
I swore to myself in that moment, that if I lived, I would never feel that way again. I intended to keep that promise, even though I was not alive. Promises and memories were all I had left.
After I Claimed her, I would not be free and neither would she, but at least she'd be alive. I would do my best to keep her alive, even if it meant my end. Especially then. Keep her alive. My Ava.
Twenty-Two
“I don't know what the hell that means.” He's still holding me up, but I wave him off, using the sink for support instead. If my head would stop going like a carnival ride and my stomach would stop whirling around, I could focus on the situation. No such luck.
“It means that I will only feed from you,” he says, sitting on the edge of the tub. Oh, I really don't like those words.
“Come again?” I try to stand up, but the room spins and he has to catch me so I don't smash my face against the sink. This nurse routine is freaking me out almost as much as whatever the hell he just did.
“I can only feed from you,” he repeats. I hate the way he uses the word feed so casually. Um, it's my blood that's doing the feeding, if I understand him right.
“How does that save me from Ivan?” Sweat runs down my face as if I've run a marathon. My heart keeps racing and slowing, and my skin shifts from hot to cold. I'm a human traffic light.
“He cannot touch you now. Nor any other noctalis.” I close my eyes so the room will stop spinning.
“Well, that's so reassuring, Peter. I'm so glad we got to play blood brothers. This little arrangement sounds like it's pretty awesome for you, and pretty sucky for me. Why didn't you just kill me and be done with it?” I want to shoot daggers at him with my eyes, but I'm not really in a position to do that. Words are all I've got.
“I would not have chosen it for you.” He avoids the second part of my question.
“But you did. You did it without even consulting me. God, you really are going to kill me.” I lean down, pressing my face into the cool stone of the sink.
“I am sorry.”
“That makes me feel so much better, thank you. The least you can do is tell me what else this relationship entails.”
“I don't know,” he says.
I blink my eyes open. The room is still spinning.
“What the hell do you mean?” I move my face so I can look at him out of the corner of my eye. He looks funny sitting on the tub. If I didn't feel so awful, I might have laughed.
“I have never done it. I only knew it could be done.” So I'm an experiment. Great.
“That's just...” I clench and unclench my hands, searching for the right words. “That's just fucking fantastic.” Crass, but it's the best I can come up with. Of course there's no reaction from Mr. Cool-as-a-cucumber over there. I'd love to yell at him, but my throat hurts too much.
“Can you only Claim one person at a time?” I'm trying to avoid the blood question for as long as I can, because I don't want to hear the answer.
“Yes.”
“So it's not really beneficial to have only one source of food. Blood.” There it is, the B word. My words feel like they're stuck in my sore throat.
“It is more of a territorial thing. If there is someone desirable, then the strongest noctalis claims them for a time.” I know what comes next.
“I'm guessing it ends badly for the human.” Otherwise known as me.
“More or less.”
“You are frustratingly opaque.” I have to throw up again and Peter holds my hair. How sweet.
“Ava?” Dad knocks on my door as I'm washing my mouth out again.
“Yeah?” My voice is weak. Why does he choose this exact moment to be parental? Seriously?
“Are you okay?” I'm just fantastic.
“Yeah. I just don't feel that great.” I look up and realize the sun is low in the sky. I must have passed out for several hours.
“Do you need anything?” Please don't come in.
“No, I'm just going to lie down. I've taken some Pepto so I should be good.” Peter seems completely unalarmed that my father could walk in and find a strange guy in my bathroom.
“Are you sure?” Oh my God, will you just go away?
“Yeah. I'll let you know if I need anything.” I hear his footsteps as he walks back down the stairs.
“Why does he have to choose now to be all concerned?” I push my disgusting hair out of my face. “I need to take a shower,” I say, even though my hair is still wet from the last one. My clothes reek of sweat and I've got dried blood all over me. Come to think of it, so does he, but there's no visible wound. Great, he's also got magical healing powers he didn't tell me about.
“Are you sure you can stand?
I want to give him a withering look, but I refrain. There's no way he's watching me shower.
“Yeah,” I say, although I'm pretty sure it's not going to happen. There's a handle and I need a few moments alone to think. All my fury over what he's done sort of goes out of me when I throw up.
“I will stay, in case you need me,” he says, getting up.
“Okay,” I say, because I'm glad he's going to be here, even though I haven't had the chance to figure out how I feel about what he's done to me. I just know that I don't want him to go anywhere. The minute he closes the door, I kind of want to call him back, but that's ridiculous. He's just in the next room, but I can't deny the uncomfortable feeling that I'm missing something important. That feeling you get when you realize there's a quiz in math and you've completely forgotten to study.
I don't bother to wash my hair. I just let the water pour down my skin, wishing it would wash everything way. I make sure I hold the bad arm outside of the curtain so it doesn't get wet. I have to use my other arm to hold onto the shower bar so I don’t fall. It is possibly the shortest shower of my life. So many thoughts war for control. I don't even understand some of them. I'm a swirling hurricane of sad, crazy, angry and hurt feelings.
“I'm coming out, but I'm wearing a towel. You'd better turn your back,” I say as I crack the door open. Relief washes over me as soon as I see him. Even with the pain and how shitty I feel, my face breaks out into a goofy smile. What is wrong with me?
I still make sure he's turned around before I come out, holding onto various objects in the room to cruise over to my dresser to grab some clothes. Getting dressed is an ordeal that takes twelve tim
es longer than usual, but once I'm decent, I get back into bed. He hasn't moved at all.
“Peter.” He turns. “What happens now?” I'm ready to hear the rest of it.
He sits on the edge of my bed. “I don't know. That is the truth, Ava. I have only heard about Claiming. I have never seen it done.” He won't really look at me, which makes me want to grab his chin and hold it so he'll look me in the eye with that unblinking gaze.
“How did you even know it would work?” There's a nasty pause.
“I didn't.” Getting up, he goes to the window, pressing his forehead against the glass as if he wishes he could escape. A pang of sadness and longing jolts through me. It feels foreign, like it doesn't belong to me.
I close my eyes and lie back on my bed. My emotions rage for control.
“How are you feeling?” He studies me as if he's never seen me before.
“Like there's something crawling under my skin,” I say. I'm full, too full. Any moment now I'm going to overflow all over everything. “It's not very nice.”
“Yes.” He closes his eyes as a shudder goes through him. Earth shifting at a fault line. I've never seen him do that. The simple movement sends a similar tremor through me. This exchange of blood has done more than either of us can fathom right now.
“You feel it, too?”
“I feel different.” He sits down on the end of my bed.
“How?”
“I feel....” I've never seen him struggle for the right words. “I want to... Are you all right? How are you feeling?” His eyes frantically seek mine out. Reassurance.
“Am I going to become a noctalis?”
“No. You would need to ingest my blood for that to happen.” That's a relief.
“I feel like I should have asked you that first off.” My head starts to pound and I know I'm going to have a rager of a headache.
“Can you get me a glass of water?” He's back with it in two seconds. “Oh, and some aspirin?” He hands me two pills, our skin meeting. It's just a brief touch, but it makes my mouth dry and my stomach flutter. I want it to happen again.
I look at his face, finding his eyes through his hair. They aren't blank like they usually are. My face blooms into a blush. Given the circumstances, it surprises me as much as anything else. Another shudder goes through him.