She swallowed with a dry throat. "Why didn't you tell me all of this at the time? We could have worked through it--" "No," he said. "There was no working through it, not then. It exploded out of me without any warning. I lived most of my life never knowing what my fury could do. Once it got loose the first time, it owned me. I left Germany because it was the only thing I could do. It took the better part of a year for me to finally bring the fires to heel. By the time I returned, you were already with Roth." Claire listened, struggling to put all the pieces in place in her mind. "So, all your life, you never knew anything about your pyrokinetic ability?" "Not until the last night I saw you." "We argued," she said, remembering their parting words. They'd been out most of the evening in Hamburg, enjoying each other's company as they had for the handful of months they'd been together. But then she'd become jealous when another woman started flirting with him. Andreas had always been a magnet for female company, with his good looks and easy charisma, but he swore to her that he was interested only in her. Claire hadn't believed him. She told him she wanted proof--a commitment that his love was true.
When he hesitated, she had become upset and scared that he didn't really love her. She called him selfish, irresponsible. Unkind things. She'd been unreasonable and she knew it, even then. "I regretted my words the minute I said them," she told him now, an apology some decades too late. "I was young and stupid, and I was unfairly harsh with you, Andreas." He shrugged. "And I was a pigheaded fool who should have known better. Instead, I had been all too eager to prove you right. After I left you at Roth's Darkhaven, I went into the city looking for a fight. I found a few, actually, and after I had sufficiently bloodied my knuckles and used my face to crack a few others, I found myself in a rundown hotel in the company of two intoxicated women I brought with me from a bar along the way." Claire's disappointment to hear this now was couched by her concern for what had apparently happened to him next. "At some point, there was a knock on the door. Another woman. I let her in, and because I was ... distracted by my own idiocy, I didn't realize she had a knife in her hand until she'd sliced it across my throat." Claire winced, her heart twisting at the thought. "What did you do?" "I bled," he answered simply. "I bled so much, I thought I would die from it.
I nearly did, in fact. I was too weak to struggle when a group of Breed males came into the room and carried me to a truck in the alley outside. They chained me and dumped me in a remote farmer's field to bleed out and then fry to dust with the sunrise." "Oh, my God. Andre... I saw that field, didn't I? You showed it to me in your dream yesterday." His answering look was a grim confirmation. "Sometime between that awful hour and daybreak, I felt an unnatural heat beginning to burn inside me. It kept growing, until my entire body was bathed in blistering energy. And then it exploded out of me. I don't recall everything--that's one of the least unpleasant aftereffects, as I would learn. The fires burned from within me, but my skin didn't ignite. By the time dawn started to rise, the chains had melted away. I tried to scramble for some shade, but I was weak from blood loss. I didn't see the young girl until she was standing right next to me." A knot of dread tightened behind Claire's breastbone.
"A girl?" He nodded, only the slightest movement of his head. His mouth was drawn tight, his face rigid with regret. "She only could have been about ten or twelve years old, out in the field that morning calling for a missing cat. She came upon me struggling in the dirt and asked what she could do to help me. Because of the injury to my throat, I had no voice. I couldn't have warned her away, even if I had any idea of what would happen to her if she got too close to me while my body was still deadly with heat." Claire closed her eyes, understanding now. She placed her hand against his cheek, having no words to express the pain she knew he must have felt for what he'd done to the child. Pain it was clear that he felt even now, all this time later. "I crawled away from the field like an animal, which is what I felt I was.
Worse than an animal, to have destroyed someone so innocent and pure. I found shelter in a cave so I could heal. Once I was recovered, I fled. I couldn't stay... not after what I'd done. And in the time since, even though many years passed without the fires returning, I still lived with the fear that I might hurt the people I cared about the most." His fingers were light in her hair, tender as they brushed her brow. "Leaving you had never been in my plans. After I came back and heard you'd been mated to Roth, I stayed in Berlin and told myself you were better off with him. That way I could be sure you would always be safe from the death inside me." "I've seen your power, Andre. I've seen what it can do. But it hasn't hurt me---you haven't hurt me." "Not yet," he replied, his tone dark. "But now it's stronger than it ever was before.
It was reckless of me to summon the fires the night my Darkhaven was attacked. It's more deadly than before, and each time the fury comes alive in me, it burns hotter than the last time." Claire saw his torment, but instead of rousing her sympathy, it stirred a biting anger. "Is your vengeance worth all of that? Is anything worth killing yourself in order to have it? That's what you're doing, Andre. You're killing yourself with this awful power of yours, and you know it." He scoffed sharply, a wordless denial. "I'm doing what needs to be done. I don't care what happens to me in the end." "I do," she said.
"Damn it, I care what happens to you. I'm looking at you now and I see a man who is destroying himself with fury. How many more times can you come out of the flames without losing yourself to them? How long before the fire consumes your humanity?" He stared at her for a long moment, his square jaw held tight. He shook his head. "What would you have me do?" "Stop," she said. "Stop all of this, before you no longer have the ability to end it." The logic was so clear to her. He had an obvious choice here: Let go of his rage and live, or continue his pursuit of vengeance and perish--either by the power that she could see was destroying him, or by the war he was purposely stoking with Wilhelm Roth. "There is no stopping it, Claire. I've come too far to turn back now and you know it. I've pushed Roth too far these past few nights and weeks that I've been hunting him down." He exhaled a clipped sigh and his mouth curved into a humorless smile. "Ironic, isn't it? That what drove me away from you then is now the thing that's brought us back together, such as it is. But what you said earlier is right. You do deserve peace now... and I should leave you to it." He moved close and pressed his lips against her forehead, then dropped a tender kiss on her mouth. He drew back, then turned and started to walk away. Claire watched him start up the lawn. Her heart broke a little with every step he took. She couldn't let him go--not like this. Not when every fiber of her being was crying out for him to stay.