Page 81 of Love Lives
All things considered, he sounded a little too eager for my taste.
"Not gonna make any decisions now," I said. "I'm not a vampire. I still need to sleep at night." I got up from the floor where I'd been sitting cross-legged for way too long. My knees were aching in all the wrong places.
Just as I was about to walk up the stairs to my room, though, the front door opened.
In came two vampires and a person I didn't know. Talon had a body slung over his shoulder. My eyes zeroed in on the stranger. For a horrible second, I wasn't sure if the man was still breathing or not.
"What the hell is going on?" I demanded, glaring at Aldrich. This couldn't be... he hadn't actually gone out and grabbed a stranger off the streets to sacrifice to the stone, had he? For fuck's sake, we didn't even know if that was going to work!
"Don't freak out just yet," Aldrich said. "Let's talk."
“You had better have a damn good explanation for this.”
“Trust me.”
Did I? Moments like this, I wasn’t so sure, but I followed the vampires up to my room, anyway. Talon set the strange man down on the floor. He was older than me. I was terrible at telling someone's age, but I figured he might be in his forties. Early fifties maybe? He was wearing pajamas, though, which told me Aldrich had probably not grabbed him off the streets.
"Who is this man and what is he doing here?" I asked as calmly as I could.
"This is Douglas Bertson." Aldrich's tone was just as calm as mine. Meanwhile, Talon took the opportunity to step out of the room. To give us space?
I glanced down at the man once more. "What is he doing on my carpet?" And why did I feel like I'd heard his name before? Douglas Bertson... I repeated the name to myself in my head. Why did it sound so familiar?
Why was it making dread pool in the pit of my stomach?
Who was this man?
And what the hell did Aldrich plan to do with him? Kill him in front of my eyes? My gaze found the vampire again. Sure, I'd told him I wasn't going to judge him for his past crimes, but this... This was taking things a bit far. Aldrich's expression was blank. I couldn't tell at all what was going on in his head. Icouldtell, though, that he felt absolutely no remorse for his actions. Past or future.
"This is the man who killed your grandmother," he said.
My... grandmother? The knot that my stomach had transformed into pulled tighter. I'd sacrificed the memory of my grandmother, and yet, the emotion that took over me at the thought of her death, at the thought of the man who'd taken her from me... I had no words for it. It was too much. Too much for me to process and too much for me to just stand here and stare at the unconscious stranger on my floor.
I turned away from him and Aldrich, needing to get my emotions back under control. My fists clenched and bile rose in the back of my throat. I swallowed it down. Hard. Douglas Bertson... I remembered the name now, remembered seeing his face in the hospital as he'd walked past my grandma's room, never even bothering to poke his head in to see how she was doing, or to apologize. He'd never apologized.
"He owns a pizza place these days," Aldrich informed me. "Seems to be doing well for himself. Kind of funny to think that you're both working in the same industry."
"We arenot," I snapped, whirling around to face the vampire. I wasn't usually a food snob, but that moment, I didn't care. Whatever pizza this man put on the table, it could never hold up to anything I made, or anything Gran had made.
"You hate the guy," Aldrich pointed out. I still couldn't read his intent on his features. He seemed entirely unmoved by my outburst. Maybe he'd been expecting this. He must have been.
That was his plan, wasn't it?
Find the one person I hated more than anyone else in the world and hope that I would get so mad I'd allow him to kill the guy. For a breath or two, I simply looked at Aldrich, studying him. He'd really thought this would work, hadn't he?
"It doesn't matter if I hate him," I made myself say, keeping my eyes trained on the vampire because I couldn't bear to look at the man on the carpet. If I did, Aldrich might just win after all. "I'm never going to tell you to kill someone."
"He would deserve it, though."
"That wouldn't make it okay."
"What if your choice was between killing him or all of us dying? 'Cause you know, that's kinda how it is. If that prophecy comes true, all the vampires in this house are gonna die. You can change that, but only if you talk to that God… if you sacrifice someone." He glanced down at Douglas once more, then nudged his side with his foot. "The world's not gonna weep for this dude, trust me."
"I can't just... I can't..." I gestured wildly, words failing me. How did you explain the concept of morality to a vampire who'd spent decades killing whoever he wanted? Who'd spent decades feeling justified in doing just that? "This is not how I do things. This will never be how I do things."
"You can't even look at him."
"I don'twantto look at him. Big difference. I want him out of my room. I want him out of mylife." Because I knew the longer he remained here, the longer I had to stand here pondering all this, the harder it would get for me to look at Aldrich too. How could he think this was okay? How could he try to make me do this?
