Blood Run (15 page)

She wanted so badly to lean forward and kiss him. If Lea and Mark weren’t here, she might have done it. But they
were
here, and she…she was only eighteen. And still unsure of a twenty-five-year-old man who had had a whole life before this that had included all the things an adult’s life consists of: a real job, a house, marriage, and–

A sudden suspicion burst across her consciousness, a realization about Peter and his motivations. But it was too big, too big for her to handle, and she put the thought aside. It was almost a physical sensation, like pushing a crate under an eave…hiding a disturbing artifact to be dug out and worried over later.

She smiled, instead, and put her hand on his.

~ ~ ~

The destruction at Promise’s old house gave them all pause. The vampires that had let themselves in last night had gone away missing some skin, blood, and hair–the laundry room looked like the inside of a slaughterhouse.

The trap door’s wooden frame had been cracked in four places, broken clean through in two, and the wire screening had been ripped out of three sides. It was crumpled at the back of the space. Mark had to fold it back against itself, tugging and crushing it with his feet, in order to get it out of the room.

Promise stood at the entrance to the laundry room, her hands tucked into her back pockets. “Boy, they did a number on this place,” she said and shook her head. She was shaken by the fury of the damage, by the sheer desperation that forced the vampires to batter themselves that way. What would it be like for Chance if they were able to trap him in here? Wouldn’t he just beat himself to death on the walls?

“Scary, huh?” Lea said, looking over Promise’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you were in there with them. I can’t believe we’re all still here today, actually. I keep thinking how that one almost got into the bedroom with us.” She shuddered.

“It was close,” Promise said without enthusiasm. “We’ll do better tonight, though.”

“Are you okay?” Lea asked.

Promise nodded without looking up. “Yeah, just thinking.”

“Okay, well, if you’re sure you’re okay…I’m going to help Mark in the basement. He has an idea for the doors.”

Promise nodded again and threw Lea a small, reassuring smile. She didn’t want to let on that she was on the verge of calling it off. The question of what Chance might do to himself once he was trapped was becoming too big to ignore. Gathering her courage, she stepped inside the laundry room.

She forced herself to imagine it–Chance being held in this room, consumed by bloodlust, willing to do anything to set himself free. She put a hand on the plywood wall and tilted her head into the crook of her arm. She felt the exhaustion of the last three days falling over her like a cold and stinking quilt. She pictured Chance at the lake, tipping sand out of a bucket, running to get more water, laughing–always laughing. What would he be like now as a vampire? Did he still laugh? Did he feel love?

A hand descended on her shoulder.

She turned and gasped, but it was only Peter. She put a hand to her heart and breathed. “Geez, you scared me. I was just…checking the damage in here.” She reached out and rapped her knuckles on the plywood. “Solid,” she said and smiled a hard smile.

He gazed at her steadily, his expression unchanging, and the smile melted off her face showing her true feelings: unhappy and conflicted.

“I’m scared he’ll hurt himself,” she said, the admission almost a whisper. “And I feel terrible that we’ve gone through all this and I’m about to call it off. This whole time, I kept thinking ‘just get to the next part, just get there, things will get better’, but they don’t; they just get worse.” Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. “I’m also afraid that…that he won’t be…that he won’t be himself anymore; he won’t be Chance.”

Peter nodded his understanding. “Some part of him will be. Some part won’t,” he said. “We have to catch him first to know how much of each we’ll find. Worst case: we catch him and then have to let him go again. But you have to be willing to see him as he is. You have to be sure.”

She shook her head in confusion. “Sure of what?”

“Sure that it won’t break you. Change
you
to see him changed. If there is no discernible flicker of your brother left, then what? What do you do from there?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t considered that…that possibility.” Her voice was faint, verging on panicked, and her eyes were grief-stricken.

“It’s what you have to ask yourself, Promise. Are you willing to let him go? Is there something more for you in the world? Something else to live for, work for, if Chance just isn’t
there
anymore.”

She looked at him, stunned. He’d just articulated the way she’d been feeling since losing her parents. It was the reason she’d set her sights on finding Chance in the first place, back when she had decided it was her job to put an end to his miserable existence as a vampire. Because she didn’t know if there was anything more for her. She didn’t know, couldn’t see, what came…after.

She shook her head, and the tears finally broke over her lower lashes and streamed down her face. He pulled her to him, and she laid her head on his shoulder as his arms went around her. His voice was soft in her ear.

“It’s important that you decide for yourself. It’s also important that you know that there is life beyond grief. But it can be hard to face. Especially on your own.” He pulled back enough to be able to see her eyes. “You’re so young.” It seemed a statement more of regret than fact. He hugged her again and then stepped away. “When I was bitten, for the first week after, I was different. I don’t remember a lot of that time. It was all very…red. But as I got better, as I recovered bits of myself, I became aware enough to realize it was the normalcy of my surroundings that was keeping me tethered. Once I understood that, I struggled even harder to reorient myself. I think when we find Chance, if you’re patient and persistent, he might start to come back even before he gets any kind of vaccine.” He shrugged. “That would be my guess, anyway.”

Promise nodded and ran her hands over her face, wiping away the tears. “Okay, that’s good enough. I can live with that. Even if I have to give up on him, at least I’ll have tried. That’s all I want.”

“Then let’s get to work,” Peter said and held out his hand.

The reinforced doors that would drop down were the main priority, and Mark and Lea worked on those with occasional consultation from Peter. Promise worked on giving herself a sightline to the sliding glass door and beyond to the backyard. She didn’t want to be surprised again. She made a hole in the laundry room wall, kind of a castle-defense slit, and then reinforced the sides of it with trim scraps. She could see Peter as he worked on a brace for the slider that would keep the opening to twelve inches–just enough for a small vampire to slide through.

As she watched him work, his hands competent and resourceful, she wondered again about his motivations. He’d come to Wereburg because he heard there was a horse. What would cause him to want another horse when he already had Snow? To Promise, it didn’t make sense. And why was he helping someone he barely knew? She had the oddest suspicion that it had to do at least in part with Chance. But Peter had never met him, so her suspicion didn’t make any sense. She thought back to the cafeteria when she’d first told him about Chance, about her intention to stake her baby brother. His eyes had taken on a strange look, intense and full of feeling. Once again, she was overwhelmed with the sense that there were things he wasn’t saying and things she was too inexperienced to understand. She didn’t know how to feel about that.

She watched as he tried to struggle his way through the opening, testing it. He was rough, shoving against the door, pushing himself halfway through the opening. He had taken off his coat as he worked and under it were two long-sleeved Henleys. She watched the muscles work in his shoulders and back as he pushed and pulled, trying to get through, testing the strength of the door. Something seemed to turn over slowly, low in her stomach, like a soft but muscular creature coming awake.

Promise had had boyfriends in high school, but by her junior year, the collective thoughts of her community had gone to the vampires, and during the time she might normally have been discovering her sexuality, she’d been discovering her combatant strengths, instead. In the year since she’d lost her parents, she’d had to struggle with questions of survival, and her schoolgirl crushes had come to seem astonishingly trite by comparison; almost embarrassing when she thought back on them. What she felt now…it didn’t seem like those dizzy, goofy crushes she and her friends all giggled about back then. The feeling she had now was almost the antithesis of those feelings; something to be talked of in tones of somber revelation only. Her mind turned to Lea and Mark. They looked at each other differently now, seemed to hold each other in a more serious regard. Was that the fundamental difference? Did having sex make you more serious?

Peter’s head was stuck in the door.

He flailed his arms, struggling, and almost fell over. He braced himself awkwardly against the frame. “Shit! Uh…help? Little help over here!”

Promise flew from the laundry room and put her hands under his back, bracing him as he turned sideways and slid free, stumbling across the patio outside. Promise covered her mouth with both hands as Peter rubbed the sides of his head. He had red dents in his temples. He glanced up, grimacing as he rubbed.

“I think I need to close it up by two more inches,” he said.

“Gosh, you…you were
really
stuck in there!” She bit her lips to keep from laughing, and was surprised to note that the creature that had awakened inside herself hadn’t slunk away at his show of stooge-like ineptitude; if anything, it had gotten stronger. Why would that be? Was sex serious or not? She wished again for her mother, and that thought quelled the last bit of humor. “Are you okay?”

“Besides feeling like a jackass, yeah, I’m okay,” he said and glanced at the horses. He was obviously embarrassed. Then he grinned at her. “Pretty awesome display of my manliness, huh?”

She smiled back and nodded, and her heart squeezed in her chest, and she turned to fiddle with the braces holding the door in place. She liked him so much. She guessed maybe she loved him?

Promise slid the door open, and he stepped back into the family room. She saw that he was shivering slightly. “Do you want your coat?” she asked and turned from him to reach for it.

“No,” he said and his voice was a soft rumble. “Promise?”

She turned to him, drawn by his tone, her hands forgetting the coat as it slipped to the floor. “Yeah?”

He put his hands on her shoulders, and his eyes were deep, deep gray, almost black in the dim light of the family room. He considered her for so long that she began to feel an awkward giggle building in her throat. She opened her mouth to say something, anything to break the tension.

He kissed her.

Everything disappeared under the insistence of his lips. The two of them could have been standing anywhere, at any time. Promise felt her body relax, and his hands gripped her shoulders tighter, almost holding her up, then they went to her neck and slid up under her hair, loosening her ponytail and cupping her head. She put her arms around his waist, bracing her knees against their quaking. He shivered again, and she knew instinctively that, this time, it was not from the cold.

His lips pressed against hers, warm and demanding, forcing her mouth open with firm, gentle pressure. She sighed and pressed herself tighter against him. His arms went around her, crushing and lifting, and she realized her feet weren’t on the floor. She gasped and held him tighter. With an inarticulate groan, he placed her back on the ground and stood back, holding her at arm’s length. She blinked up at him, all traces of the giggle leached from her body. She felt as though she might never giggle again.

He reached for the scrunchie in her hair…it had fallen halfway down her loose ponytail. He pulled it toward him, and her hair fell in a cascade over her shoulder. He turned her until her back was to him, and she shivered. “It’s okay, Promise,” he said, and his voice rumbled down her sensitive spine. His hand worked to gather her hair back into a ponytail, and he slipped the scrunchie around it, doubling it so that it would hold.
How had he known to do that?
Promise wondered. Then he turned her again and smiled, pushing a few errant strands behind her ears.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said. He bent to kiss her again, a quick brush of his lips over her forehead, eyes, nose, and landing on her mouth. He broke the kiss quickly this time and smiled at her. “You okay?”

She nodded and smiled, and then Mark and Lea were banging up the basement steps, obviously carrying something cumbersome. Lea laughingly called out for help.

Promise stood swiftly on tiptoe and kissed Peter, then hurried toward the basement stairs to help Mark and Lea.

Turned away as she was, she missed the sudden, almost desperate swell of pain in Peter’s eyes.

Chapter 10

“Come on, we better get upstairs,” Lea said and pulled Mark away from the rigged slider. She stopped to look gravely at Promise. “You ready? No panicking this time?”

Promise laughed. “I promise to do my best, how’s that?”

“I’ll take it,” Lea said and leaned forward to kiss Promise’s cheek.

Mark gripped Promise up in a one-armed hug, not letting Lea’s hand go. “Hang in there,” he said and winked. She winked back and laughed, but her smile faded as they mounted the stairs to the second floor.

“Ready?” Peter asked. He’d been standing at the back of the family room, but now he came forward.

“As I’ll ever be,” Promise said, smiling nervously.

“This is for luck,” he said and kissed her on the forehead.

“This is for us,” she said and kissed him on the lips, lingering.

He grinned in surprise, and she tilted her head, smiling. “I’m not a
total
innocent, you know.”