“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 and he's not saying anything and I just want it to stop and there's so much blood and Ijustwantittostop.
I must have blacked out because when I open my eyes I'm laying down 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.”
***
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 aside 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 over the side of the deck. 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. 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'm understanding 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's 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 f**king 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.