Page 226 of Bitten & Burned
“You… you can’t…” I sobbed, tears blurring my face as I grabbed another stack of paper and tossed it into the fire. “I wasted my time. These are months of my life. Those are gone. You don’tget it. Because you have all the time in the world for anything you want to do. I don’t. And I wasted months of it researching something that would always be a dead end. Just marking time while I thought I was marching forward.Because someone I trusted hurt me irreparably. And now, the rest of my life… is just… this. It’sthis. It’s pain and it’s this, and it will never end.”
“Oh sweetheart…” Quil pushed forward, walking up beside me just as my knees gave out. I clung to him as he took us down to the floor in front of the fire. It roared behind him, but I was pressed to his front, small and safe. “Sweetheart…” He pressed his lips to my forehead, and I felt seen. Held. He didn’t try to fix it. He got it. He understood.
It was Anton who spoke next.
“Why don’t you let one of us turn you?” he asked, the words soft, but hitting me hard anyway.
It wasn’t as if Vael and I hadn’t discussed this a million times. But my answer had always been the same.
“No,” Vael said bluntly. “That’s not an option.”
“Why not?” Anton asked. “We were all thinking it.”
“Not all of us,” Vael said softly.
“I don’t want to be a vampire,” I said softly, my voice thick with tears and snot. “I want to beme.” I sobbed into Quil’s shirt.
“Alright then,” Anton said, pausing to breathe. “What next?”
“Well, the bond extends her life,” Cassian said. “She’s not immortal, but she’ll live longer than most humans.”
Oh gods, they don’t understand. Not at all.
My shoulders shook, and Quil spoke, his voice rumbling against where my ear was pressed to his chest.
“It’s not the same, Cassian,” he said. “She’s telling us what’s wrong, and you’re telling her to shift focus. It’s not the number of years she has left; it’s that these months were taken from her, and the future she planned for is gone. We can’t fix it.” He said, his voice thick with guilt. “We can just… hold her through it.”
A sob tore out of me as I fisted my hands more tightly in his shirt. Because gods, yes. Exactly that. The tension eased out of my shoulders.
There was a long moment where nothing happened, and then… everything happened. Quil held me, and I turned to watch the rest of them.
Cassian took the poker and began to poke back the fire, taming it as it devoured my uselessresearch.
Vael, for all his posturing, walked around the room and picked up all the fragments that I’d dropped and tossed those into the fire, too. I knew it must have hurt him to do so, but he was doing it because it’s what I wanted.
“We need wine,” Anton said softly, turning and walking swiftly down the hall to the wine cellar.
And Dmitri slid down to the ground beside me and Quil. His big hand smoothed up and down my back as I burrowed against Quil.
My entire world had shifted with one sentence. The future I had wanted was nothing but ash, like the fragments of my research in the fireplace. It was gone, never to return, and useless before that anyway.
I knew, deep down, that Inera wasn’t gone, but it would be so much harder to reach her now. It used to be second nature, but now I’d have to work. And try.
I would never go back to walking ruins by myself; I’d always have to have attendants or other help. I couldn’t plan my days because, if this continued to flare up, continue to hurt for the rest of my life… how could I ever make plans?
Normal wasn’t normal anymore. And I didn’t know what to do with that.
Thirty-Seven
PYRAXIS
Kravenspire, Sol, Verdune
11 Vony, Year 810
Heat pressed into my waist—Quil’sarm lay heavily across me. He was breathing steady, slow, little puffs of air that made my hair flutter.
I turned my head to the other side and couldn’t help smiling. Vael had nodded off against the headboard, and Anton’s head was currently cushioned on his shoulder, both still fast asleep.
