She nodded.
“You want to talk about how I grabbed you and threw you down and took something very personal from you while you screamed and tried to fight me off,” I said. “How someone else had to stop me, because I was acting like an animal.”
She wasn’t a fool, my Eve; she knew what I was saying, and she paled almost to the same color she would have had in her Goth makeup. “Michael, you didn’t rape me.”
“That’s exactly what I did,” I said. “You know what Shane calls it? Fang rape.”
“Shane’s got no idea what he’s talking about.” The words lacked some force, though, and Eve sounded more than a little shaken. “You just—you weren’t in control, Michael.”
“So that’s a valid excuse now for me, when it isn’t for any other guy out there who hurts someone?” I wanted to touch her, but I honestly didn’t dare. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, and finally she just closed it. Her eyes filmed over with tears, but she blinked them away. “It’s not an excuse and you know it. It can’t be, if we’re supposed to be together.”
“You were hurt. You weren’t in your right mind. That matters, Michael.”
I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder—vampire speed, not trying to slow it down. We both felt the wrench as she tried to pull away, before she got control of her instinctive reaction.
It proved my point, and she knew it.
“Eve, you flinch when I touch you,” I said. “You pull back. You remember what it was like to have me hurting you, holding you down, not knowing if I was ever going to stop or if I was going to kill you when I was done. Of course it matters. It matters to us both.”
“I—” The words died in her mouth before she could speak them and she just stared at me. Because of course I was right. I’d seen it, and she knew that.
“Doesn’t matter whether it was my fault or not, whether I was in my right mind or just a sick bastard who got off on it,” I said. “I’m a vampire, Eve. And this is what we do. We take people’s blood. Sometimes they offer it up, and that’s nice, that’s really convenient, but sometimes we just take what we want. The fact that it’s instinct doesn’t excuse it. It all comes out the same in the end: with you getting hurt, maybe killed, even though I love you. Just like they tried to tell us from the beginning. We’re a tragedy waiting to happen.”
“No!” She lunged forward and tried to put her arms around my neck, but I’m a vampire; grabbing me isn’t that easy when I don’t want to be grabbed. I moved back just enough and before she could register the fact that I’d done it, I was holding her forearms in my hands. Tightly. She flinched and I felt it shiver all the way through her body, but she didn’t try to pull away. “Michael, no, don’t do this. I just need time, that’s all. It just happened last night. Give me a little space to deal with it and I’ll be …”
“Fine?” I let my eyes go slowly red. I let my fangs come down. “Really. You’re going to be fine with me, like this.”
Now she did pull back. Hard. And I didn’t let her go. Her strength was nothing compared to mine, not here, where I had leverage. “You’re trying to scare me, and it’s not going to work!”
I let go of one of her arms and used a fingernail to cut the scarf away from her neck. The spots of blood on the pale square of bandage made something in me growl, deep inside, and even though I loathed that beast I also knew I couldn’t keep it caged up forever. That was why Morganville had hunting licenses, and allowed vampires to hunt on a carefully regulated basis. The beast was why Amelie allowed some measure of violence in Morganville—because without it, we turned toxic. As I’d turned toxic on Eve.
“Stop,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound so strong now. “Damn it, you jackass, stop it!”
“Isn’t that what you told me last night?” I asked her, and I shook her, hard. “Isn’t it? Did I stop, Eve? Did I?”
She twisted free and slapped me across the face. It didn’t hurt, but the explosion of sudden warmth on my skin from hers made me blink. I let go of her other arm. She rocked back and then, all of a sudden, something stabbed me. Not in the heart, but off to the side, and the sensation of it sliding in was cold and horrible and yet also burning.
Silver.
I looked down. There was a small silver knife buried in my right side to the hilt. The skin was starting to smolder and burn around it.
Eve was breathing hard now, and there were tears rolling down her face, but she looked tough all the same. Unyielding.
“I can stop you,” she said. “I can always stop you if I have to, Michael, damn you. I could have put that in your heart because you weren’t ready for it, because you’ll always be vulnerable to me even if you don’t want to be. So we’re even. Because I’ll always be that way to you, too. That’s called trust. It’s called love.” She grabbed the knife and pulled it swiftly out, and I choked and collapsed sideways on the sleeping bag. God, it hurt. Badly. I shuddered and writhed as the silver’s influence continued to punish me, but it wasn’t a fatal wound—not even close. She’d picked her spot, and the duration of the blow, very well. And in a weird way, I loved the pain. I needed it.
I deserved it.
“You hear me, Michael? Don’t even try to think you’re the only badass in this room. I will not let you do that to me again, ever, so you can stop obsessing about how damn powerful you are and how weak I am. I am not weak. Screw you for even thinking it. Get over yourself, your vampire angst, and your power trip.”
She pushed up to her feet, staring at me for a moment, then walked away with the silver knife glinting in her hand.
I pulled in just enough breath to gasp, in genuine surprise, “Is it crazy right now to say I love you?”
She didn’t even pause. “Given that I just stabbed you? Seems a little weird, yeah.”
“I do,” I said, and put my head down again. “God, Eve. I do so much it’s killing me. I just don’t want it to kill you, too.”
I watched her walk away, slow and steady steps, a woman totally in control of herself and what she was feeling.
I just didn’t know what that was, but I was afraid … afraid that it wasn’t love anymore.
I collapsed on my back and closed my eyes, and tried to heal.
CHAPTER THREE
CLAIRE
The unfamiliar weight of the shotgun made Claire feel awkward. She’d fired guns, but she’d never carried them around, not like they were a normal, everyday kind of thing. Like a book bag, for instance. She deeply missed her book bag. It had symbolized everything important in her life, and suddenly being a poster child for the National Rifle Association … didn’t.
Around her waist she had added a belt Shane had dug up in the back of the armory—it held small sealed bottles on hooks that she could pull free easily. Silver nitrate. Very dangerous to vampires, and draug. She was now about as loaded down with advantages as she could be.
And she felt incredibly clumsy and awkward, but that fell away as the big, scary vampire guards manning the main entry door of the Elders’ Council building slid it open and she, Shane, and Naomi stepped outside.
It was midafternoon, but it was gray and raining. That had felt wrong enough when all this had started, with overcast skies and rain, because it almost never rained in Morganville, and when it did it was a violent burst that cleared the same afternoon. This had gone on for days … and it had brought the draug with it. Until they were gone, Claire thought, Morganville would never see the sun again.
Naomi glowed in the wan light like some kind of angel—the wrong kind, but still beautiful. She nodded to Claire and Shane and surveyed the world that they could see from the steps.