Page 36 of Twice Bitten
Nate Hawthorne sent me a text message the day after—everything I didn’t want to think about, telling me that the ritual had been a success and that they’d given Jack the agreed-on discount as a consideration for letting our prisoners escape and having one of them get eaten by magic scorpions. Privately, I thought I’d have paid extra for that last bit, but I didn’t tell Nate that.
I sent him back a quick thanks and asked him to pass on the same to Arik.
When I told Esther the somewhat abbreviated story of the whole clusterfuck, I had the sour displeasure of watching her laugh hysterically for several minutes—I’d never seen Esther laugh before, and it figured that it’d be at something like that—and then having her tell me that Fenwick would be delighted. Apparently, one of his hierarchy supporting Nate and Arik’s freelance magic business would make for some excellent neighborly relations.
Well, whoop de fucking doo. (I didn’t say that out loud either.)
Essentially, I hated everyone and everything except my cat.
Our missing vampire, Emile, still hadn’t been found, adding to my general anger and unhappiness. Weeks passed. The weather stayed cold and miserable. It fucking snowed, and then it iced, and then it thawed into slush and then iced again, and I discovered that no, I hadn’t actually reached my limit for how much I could hate everything.
Late at night, as I lay in my heaps of pillows staring up at the ceiling I’d painted with silver stars on an indigo background in a fit of whimsy, I couldn’t escape the sensations: two bonds, the one with Louis weakened by intentional magic but still horribly, eternally present, and the faint, crimson-gold shimmer of the partial bond I’d formed with…I refused to think his name, dammit.
How I could have two bonds at once eluded me. Maybe someone like Nate, with his warlock magic-sight, would be able to explain it, or at least investigate it.
But I didn’t want to know. The likeliest answer, that—Jack, dammit, Jack, and the sound of his name even in the privacy of my own head made my belly clench and my cheeks get hot and the rest of my body twitch with helpless, futile desire—that Jack and I had some fundamental magical and spiritual compatibility…well, that only made it all worse. In some other universe, we could’ve been happy together.
Not this one. Never this one.
If my pillows got damp with the tears that squeezed out from under my tightly-closed eyelids, well…no one but Rodney was there to see it. And he only snuggled up closer to my hip and flicked his whiskers at me. If that constituted judgment, I couldn’t interpret it.
And if I thought I’d concealed my pathetic misery from the world, that illusion came crashing down the day almost a month after…after, when Ian Armitage came sauntering into one of the bars I tended to frequent.
I made some half-hearted remark about the smell of wet dog, inspired by the rain pouring down outside. Ian simply looked me up and down, sighed, and shook his head.
“Dude, I’m not getting in a fight with you right now. How about I buy you a drink instead?”
I ended up drinking a martini while Ian sat at the bar next to me sipping his beer and telling me stories about Nate and Arik’s various catastrophic magical experiments, in what appeared to be an attempt to cheer me up.
Even more humiliatingly, I was at such a low point that while it didn’t work, I actually deeply appreciated the effort.
And if nothing else, that little interlude forced me to take stock of a few things I really didn’t want to face.
I went home that night and flopped down on my couch, absently petting Rodney. My living room looked like what my colleague Jason laughingly called “a whore’s boudoir,” and I loved it. Multiple strings of fairy lights, some white and some pale blue and one strand of pink hanging behind a gauzy red curtain and making that whole wall glow like fresh blood—cozy, if you asked me. A battered upright piano that I kept meticulously polished so that it gleamed. Rich, jewel-toned rugs, so soft my feet sank into them up to the ankle, almost.
Fact: I’d created this sanctuary away from the world so that I could hide from anything that could remind me I didn’t truly have a life. I hadn’t really been in denial about that, but it bore repeating.
Fact: Werewolves weren’t so bad after all. So many vampires, myself included, spent too much time focusing on the ways we were set apart from other supernaturals. Maybe that point of view was shortsighted and self-defeating. Well, probably a real philosophical epiphany lurked in there somewhere, but for now I set it aside and simply took a moment to marvel at the fact that Ian Armitage, past bar brawls and ridiculous taste in music and all, had the potential to turn into a real friend if I let it happen.
And final fact: I had to live my life, or what was the point? Spending time at home alone, or working, or drinking at a bar surrounded by colleagues but never really connecting with anyone…well, those were ways to exist. But not live. So I had a bond I could never break free of. And I had another bond with—Jack. I had to have the strength to use his name, because I had to try to be less pathetic in general.
Make friends with Ian, and possibly get to know Nate, too, and forgive him for that awful sweater. Branch out. Live a little, in short. Maybe even live a lot.
So I couldn’t have what I really wanted, but I could have…something. Something more than this.
It felt like a sign that the faint, tissue-thin half-bond with Jack gave a little pulse as I thought about him, about my life. As if it’d gotten stronger? No, thoughts didn’t have that power. It almost felt like increased proximity, but that had to be my imagination.
I focused on it, necessarily focusing on my other bond, too, my real blood bond with my bastard of a mate, since their magic ran side by side.
And as I did, my blood bond—vanished.
I popped upright, my heart racing and my hands shaking, staring wild-eyed at the fairy lights as if they could give me an explanation.
They didn’t.
The bond had disappeared. Just like that, poof, gone.
As if…as if Louis had died.
