Flutter (9 page)

“I’m fine, he’s fine.” I was tempted to say that Ezra
was fine, but at that moment, I didn’t know if that was true. “We
just found him last night. He needed to rest, and now we’re getting
some things sorted out. We should be leaving soon.”

“What things sorted out?” Jack asked. “Why don’t you
just get on the next flight out of there?”

“Peter’s still in pretty bad shape. He needs some
more time to recuperate. He’s had a rough go of it here.”

“I thought that was the whole idea. That’s why he
went there.” Jack tried to keep the edge to his voice, but it faded
a bit. As angry as he was with Peter, he wasn’t a hateful guy.

“We’ll be home soon. You don’t need to worry
anymore.” That actually hurt to say. I knew there was still a good
chance we wouldn’t make it out alive, but I couldn’t tell Jack
that. So I lied, and tears welled in my eyes.

“You better be,” Jack said. “Things are going crazy
around here.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Your brother and
Bobby
.”

“Who’s Bobby?”

“He’s… I don’t know. You’ll have to make Milo explain
when you get back,” Jack answered vaguely. “All I know for sure is
that he’s around all the time now.”

“All the time?” I asked. “I’ve only been gone for
like ten days!”

“It’s been a pretty wild ten days around here,” Jack
said. “And Bobby showed up like the day after you left. So yeah.
It’s been eventful.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ll see when you get home,” Jack said. “It’ll
give you more of an incentive to get here quicker. As if I weren’t
incentive enough.”

“No, you’re definitely enough,” I laughed sadly.
Laughing at his silly jokes made me want to sob.

After I hung up, I knocked on the bathroom door to
let Peter know the coast was clear, and he came out a minute later.
He was much more subdued, so we said very little to each other.

I showered and got dressed, and after that, there
wasn’t much else to do. Peter lay on the bed with his fingers laced
behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. I paced the room and
frequently peeked out of the curtains.

We just waited for Ezra to return.

Sun filtered around the edges of the curtains, and
that scared the hell out of me. The lycan were even more strict
about their nocturnal habits than we were, so the odds of them
continuing a discussion into the daylight didn’t seem likely. If
Ezra weren’t back soon, he probably wasn’t coming back.

“He’s still not here.” I peered out the curtain,
letting the warm morning light stream in, burning my overly
sensitive retina, and then shut it. I looked behind me, where Peter
laid immobile, the same way he had all night. “Peter?”

“I’m aware that he’s not here, Alice.”

“Don’t you think we should do something?” I glowered
down at him. Lying in bed did not seem like the right answer for
this situation.

“I’m thinking.” He closed his eyes, as if that could
block out my voice.

“You’ve been thinking all day! We knew that Ezra
might not come back, and he’s obviously not going-”

“I have been thinking, Alice!”

“Well… you should let me in on it!” I crossed my arms
over my chest. “I could help!”

“You mean like pointing out the obvious and peeking
out the curtain?” He pushed himself up into the sitting position,
letting his legs dangle off the edge of the bed.

“I don’t know what else to do!” I felt powerless and
on the verge of tears, and I didn’t like it at all. I took a deep
breath, and pushing a strand of hair behind my ears, I decided to
start over. “What did you come up with?”

“Nothing useful. I just can’t see a way around
anything.” He sighed, then muttered to himself. “I suppose that’s
why he brought you.”

“What are you talking about?” I stiffened, as if he
claimed something derogatory.

“Ezra brought you with because he knew how utterly
useless you would be,” Peter explained. “And I’ve been going back
and forth between it all day long, wondering what I would finally
do when it came down to it.”

“What?” I asked, filled with an aching sense of
uselessness.

“If I go after Ezra, and I bring you along, you’ll
get killed. If I leave you here, they’ll follow my scent back, and
you’ll get killed. If I try to put you on a plane to get out of
here, you’ll probably do something horrible in bloodlust, and get
yourself killed. There’s nothing I can do except stay here and
baby-sit you!” Peter growled.

“I don’t…” I started to stumble out some kind of
protest about needing a baby-sitter, but everything he said was
true. After the initial sting of that wore off, I thought of
something even stranger, especially given the way that Peter talked
to me. “What do you even care if I die? So what? Let’s just go out
there and give them hell.”

“Like you could really give them hell,” he laughed
hollowly. “You’d just slow me down.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “What you’re saying … or
thinking… If Ezra isn’t coming back and they’re only going to come
after us… Why don’t you just go? I don’t want to slow down your
fight. But it’s better than the both of us waiting here to
die.”

His expression changed instantly into something
foreign. It took me a minute to realize that it resembled concern
for me. Even when we had been bonded, he’d never looked at me like
that.

“That’s an idiotic plan,” he shook his head.

“That’s pretty much what your plan is,” I said.

“I’m not gonna just
leave
you
here.”

“But you’re saying they’ll kill me no matter what. At
least this way you can get in a few good punches, take out some of
the bastards that-” I stopped myself before I said anything about
Ezra being dead. It was too terrifying to say aloud.

“You’d be completely unprotected. You wouldn’t even
stand a chance,” he shook his head again, sounding tired of the
conversation, and stood up.

“So what? You almost killed me once before and now
you’re suddenly my body guard?” I wrinkled my nose at his
hypocrisy.

“Oh, god dammit!” Peter rolled his eyes. “I’m so sick
of having that thrown in my face! I did that because I loved you,
Alice!” He immediately regretted saying that and stared off
anywhere but at me.

“Yeah, cause that’s a healthy way to express love! By
killing another person!” I was purposely pushing his buttons. If
the only chance at a rescue mission was Peter going off without me,
then I had to piss him off enough to leave me.

“I wasn’t trying to kill you! I was
trying to kill
me
!” He rubbed his eyes, looking as if he’d said too much and
not knowing how to take it back. “Jack was in the house. I knew he
was tuned in to your heart. When I grabbed you in the kitchen, he
came flying in to save you. I thought if he found me, draining the
life from you, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.” Tiredly, he
exhaled. “I knew he was a better match for you than I was, and I
didn’t see any other way out.”

I was too stunned to say anything. I’d always
suspected Peter hated me. But he loved me so much, he’d been
planning to die for my happiness. My heart thumped dully in my
chest, and I tried to think of something say to him.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Peter snapped when he
finally met my eyes again. “I don’t know why it’s so shocking that
I wouldn’t want you to die. Do you really think Ezra would be so
willing to sacrifice himself for me if I was such a
psychopath?”

“Peter, I am so sorry,” I whispered, unable to muster
the full strength of my voice.

“Stop!” Peter repeated. “Ezra is the one out there!
We need to be worrying about him, not us! Because there isn’t even
an ‘us’ to worry about!”

“You’re right.” I shook my head, clearing it of any
confused thoughts about Peter.

It was hard, though. It changed the
way I thought about
everything
. All the time I had been
messing around with Jack, falling in love with him, the one thing
that had given me the green light was that Peter had tried to kill
me.

But when I thought about it as his own suicide
attempt, that he had loved me so much he had been willing to give
me up... We had been bound together, and he had truly loved me, but
I had run off with his brother instead.

Peter didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I’m not
sure if he was really trying to come up with another plan, but I
certainly couldn’t. Part of me was really trying to, but I felt
like all the wind had been knocked out of me.

The door to the hotel room thudded softly,
interrupting my thoughts. Not a knock exactly, but more like
something falling into it. I looked to Peter, his eyes already
fixed on the door. He moved in front of me, blocking me in case the
lycan announced their entrance.

When the door slowly swung open, we were greeted by
something almost as bad.

- 10 –

Ezra leaned on the doorframe, looking worse than I
could ever imagine him being. His clothes, the same black sweater
and jeans he had worn the night before, were torn and dirty. His
skin was gaunt and pale. He staggered into the room and Peter
rushed to him.

Bite marks covered his neck and wrists. The lycan
territory was nearly an hour drive away, plenty of time for a
vampire to heal, but his bites were red and swollen. Ezra had been
so drained he didn’t have the strength to heal.

“He needs to feed,” Peter told me and attempted to
hand Ezra off to me. He hurried to the bathroom to get blood for
Ezra, leaving me alone to struggle with the situation.

I’d been frozen in shock, but I put my arm around
Ezra and helped him on the bed. His deep brown eyes were glassy.
I’d never seen a vampire look so ill before. It had never even
occurred to me that they could even look like this, especially
Ezra.

When I sat down next to him on the bed, he collapsed
back on the bed and rested his head on my lap. He gripped my thigh
with a painful desperation, like he needed to hang onto
something.

“I brought blood,” Peter said when he walked back
into the room. He looked down at Ezra, clinging onto me, and
pressed his lips into a thin line.

“I can’t eat. Not right now.” Ezra grimaced, as if he
was in too much pain to even think of eating.

I brushed his hair from his forehead, his skin
feeling clammy. After blood loss, I’d think eating would be the
only thing that would make him feel better. Then it dawned on me
what was going on.

The lycan had fed on him. That was something vampires
never let other vampires do, unless they were lovers. There was
something sexual about the exchanging of blood, but it was more
than that.

When Jack bit me, I felt him flow through me, and his
love and kindness consumed me. Ezra had been bitten by a pack of
rabid monsters. All their pain and rage burned through him now.
Physically and emotionally, they drained him.

Ezra made a pained sound but fought to suppress it.
He gripped me so tightly, that had I been human, he would’ve broken
bones and ruptured organs. Despite his weakness, his muscles felt
like concrete underneath my hands. He tensed so tightly, his body
was completely rigid, and his legs curled up a bit, closer to
me.

“My blood…” Ezra forced a few words, but he barely
managed that.

“Just rest. We don’t need to talk.” I tried to
reassure him, running my fingers through his blond hair.

“No,” Ezra said, his voice tight and weak. “My blood
for your blood. It’s over. We need to get out of here. Peter, can
you…”

“I’ll make all the arrangements,” Peter said when
Ezra trailed off. He tried to keep his composure as much as
possible, but his eyes burned. It killed him knowing Ezra had
exchanged his own blood for Peter’s life.

After a moment of staring remorsefully at him, Peter
went into action. He got his cell phone and started making calls,
most of which I couldn’t understand because they were in
Finnish.

“I shouldn’t be burdening you with this,” Ezra said
and tried moving away from me.

“No, you’re okay,” I insisted. “Don’t worry.”

“No. I …” Ezra trailed off again, and a spasm went
over his body. He gripped even tighter and I could barely breathe.
It passed, and he relaxed, as much as he could. “I’m sorry.”

“Ezra. It’s okay.”

When Peter got off the phone, he watched Ezra for a
moment as he struggled to keep his breaths even. I could feel Ezra
biting back screams, and I looked to Peter for help, but he
wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“The best thing for him to do is rest,” Peter said.
“The feelings will fade, with time. Our flight leaves in seven
hours. He can get some rest and eat, and then he ought to feel good
enough to at least make it home.”

Peter packed our things and got us ready to go. I
felt like I should help him, but I didn’t want to leave Ezra alone.
Eventually, Peter suggested we get some sleep. Ezra went in and out
of consciousness. I managed to doze off a little bit, but Ezra woke
me frequently with moaning or writhing.

When Peter woke me in the evening, Ezra was still
tangled up with me, but the fierceness in his grip had disappeared.
Peter helped him to the bathroom to eat and get cleaned up, and I
got up to stretch. My whole body ached terribly from the way he had
held me.

Just comforting Ezra had been exhausting, and I
couldn’t fathom what he was going through. I stood next to the bed,
feeling more emotionally drained, and Peter came out of the
bathroom to give Ezra privacy. He looked at me with concern, but I
didn’t deserve any, so I busied myself with straightening up the
room.

“Alice.” Peter placed his hand on my arm, stopping
me. “How are you holding up?”

“Better than Ezra,” I gave a hollow laugh.