Page 13 of Mortal Blood
“No I’m not! I’m not human!”
Heat prickled behind my eyes and Thaden drew back, an appalled expression on his face as he took me in.
“Yeah, go ahead and hate me. I’m not human. I’m a freak and everyone round here is going to know soon enough. I shouldn’t even exist!”
I rushed past him, and this time he didn’t try to catch or stop me—and why would he? Astor had been right. I was…an abomination. An atrocity. And everyone would know and they’d hate me, too, and Darkveil had finally been becoming a home to me, and it wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair. Hadn’t I been through enough?
I jammed the key in the lock of my dorm room door with shaking hands, rattling it when it didn’t want to turn, and then barging it open and tumbling inside, holding the tears exactly long enough to slam the door shut behind me and then sag back against it.
It was too much. It was just too much. I wasn’t strong enough for this, I wasn’t strong enough tobethis. I was just me, I’d always just been me. Weak, human…but me. Enough. And now? Now I wasn’t even me. I didn’t know who I was. What I was. I didn’t know how to be this thing they said I was. And I didn’t know how I could survive knowing that everything I believed about myself my entire life had been a lie. The girl who looked back at me from the mirror, she’d been a lie. A fabrication. Acreation of my warped, inhuman mind.
I gasped, and the tears flooded down my face, and each breath I drew was more shuddering than the one before as my grief escaped me so that I couldn’t even have the solace of drowning in it.
And then arms were wrapped around, holding me up, holding me close, drawing me against Cole’s familiar heat.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he murmured in my ear as he tucked my head against his shoulder, one of his hands stroking my hair as the other held me to him. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
Despite his soothing words, I could feel the alarm thrumming through his chest.
“No,” I gasped into his shoulder. “It’s not okay. Nothing’s ever going to be okay again.”
He tensed, and a growl rattled through his chest before he exhaled and smoothed my hair again.
“Tell me who I need to kill, and I’ll kill them.”
I gasped another shuddering sob and drew back from his grasp to stare up at him.
“Me. You need to kill me.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen. But I’m gonna kill whoever made you feel that way.”
“You shouldn’t waste your time.” I wrenched the words from the bottom of my stomach, feeling like I was ripping out my soul by its roots. “Your father was right. You should find a way to dissolve the mate bond.”
“Never going to happen,” he said, his words a fierce rumble. “You’re mine, and I’m yours. And you might not be ready forforever yet, but I’ll be here for you when you are. And I will defend our bond to the death.”
I shook my head, swallowing the lump in my throat. “No. You don’t get it. It was bad enough for your pack when you thought I was human. But I’m not human.”
He was motionless except for his eyes, which searched my face as I spoke. “Cole, if you take me as your mate, it could destroy your pack. I’m a dhampir.”
He blinked. “Dhampir?”
I wrenched my eyes from his. Any moment now his loyalty and confusion would turned to disgust and hatred, and I didn’t want to see that. My heart had already been burned to ash, but I couldn’t facethat.
“I’ll find a way to free you from me,” I whispered. “I swear it.”
Abruptly, arms wrapped around me from behind.
“I don’t want freedom,” he murmured in my ear. “I want you. All of you. No matter what that is.”
“But your pack…”
“Is pack. They can choose to follow me or fight me, and it won’t make a difference to how I feel about you.”
“But…”
He turned me and captured my lips with his, drawing me into a kiss that tasted of hope and desire, of passion and promise. His tongue explored mine, tentative yet familiar, and it would be all too easy to lose myself to his timeless pledge.
I twisted my head a fraction to the side, breaking the contact between our lips.
