Forget About Midnight (39 page)

The sound was painfully loud in the quiet of the early morning hours. It had been tempting to go home with Jez, but I knew I had to see Arys. He was suffering too. The least I could do was face him after everything I’d done. So I sent Jez to my place with the promise that I’d be there before dawn.

A cold breeze stirred inside me. The door opened, and I braced for the worst. Arys looked like hell. Hair standing up in disarray and clothing bedraggled, he regarded me with the same madness I’d seen in the mirror.

I hadn’t thought this through. Frozen, I stood there staring at him, wishing there was something I could say. In such a short time we’d drifted so far apart, and yet we could never walk free of each other. Would we ever learn how to coexist? To be what we were meant to be? Or would we end up like Lilah and Salem? Divided and crazy. We were already headed down that path.

Arys’s expression softened, and instead of crazy, he just looked tired. I knew he’d seen the video Briggs had sent out. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” I opened my mouth, and the same words Jez had said to me spilled out.

Arys stepped back and ushered me inside. “Come on, Alexa. We need to talk.”

“But we have talked.” I followed him into the living room, pausing when I detected the lingering scent of Shaz. He’d been here. “All the talking in the world isn’t going to change anything. I keep doing these things, these horrible things, and part of me wants to. Part of me likes it. But this other part of me, the last shred of sanity I have left, it hates these things I’m doing, Arys. I don’t know who I am, and I’m losing my mind.”

Arys let me ramble on. Then he put a gentle hand on my shoulder and steered me over to the couch. He sat beside me, angling his body so we faced each other.

“Alexa, this is all my fault,” he said, shocking me. “I fucked and killed my way halfway through Europe when I first turned. I made you like me. A killer. Not just a killer but a hunter for blood, sex, and power. Everything you’ve done is everything I did in the beginning. Some of it I still do now.”

“Arys, no.” I shook my head, unwilling to allow him to take the blame for my actions.

He held up a hand to silence me. “Our power comes from demons who use sexual manipulation to feed off the life force of others. You know this. It’s not who you are, it’s what you are. Those are not the same things. I’m the one who guaranteed that this would be your life after death. I knew better, and still I did it. Everything you’ve done is because of me.”

I sat there listening to Arys blame himself, wondering how he could possibly accept responsibility for the bodies I’d left behind and the demented encounters with Falon. It wasn’t right. I couldn’t allow it. “Arys, stop. This is not all on you. I did what I did. And I don’t blame you.” The need to touch him was greater than it had ever been. But I was afraid. “I’ve been killing. I did something so horrific with Falon I can’t even… And I handed Briggs over to Shya, which was a reckless mistake, and none of it is your fault.”

Blood tears welled up in his eyes, but he never let them fall. He pressed his palms against his eyes and shook his head. “It is though. I knew I’d be the one to kill you, and instead of letting you go, I did what I could to make sure that would never happen. It was selfish. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but right now, it’s all I want. Please, stop punishing me with your absence. I can’t take much more.”

The weight of his words was crushing. I’d spent so much effort focusing on the fact that he had killed me and enjoyed it that I hadn’t realized it had damaged him too. “We’ll never stop hurting each other, will we?” I didn’t expect a response. I knew the answer. “I’m terrified that we’ll end up like Lilah and Salem. And God only knows how many others. Lilah is in a goddamn cage right now, put there by her twin because he couldn’t handle the craziness anymore. If we don’t do something, that’s going to be us.”

Lilah and her twin flame were the only other set of twins that I knew of. Perhaps it was time to change that. Arys and I, we needed to know more about where we came from and how we were supposed to function as a unit when the same power that drew us together also pushed us apart.

“We need to know more, Arys,” I said, drawing his gaze back to me. “We need to find others like us.”

He nodded, his expression void of emotion as he struggled to bury his hurt. “Yeah, we do.”

“I’m losing my mind.” It was a whisper. I lacked the strength to proclaim it any louder. “I’m afraid of the things I’ve done, of how they make me feel and how much I want to do them again.”

Arys looked away then, out the living room window at the quiet street front. His voice was hushed. “I’ve done things too.”

A chill stole over me. There was something about his tone that triggered warning bells in my head. It held a note of detached lunacy that I’d heard only in one person’s voice before. Kale’s.

“Arys, what have you done?” I braced for his response, knowing in my heart that it was so bad.

Several long, strained moments passed. His gaze was fixed on the window as if something out there had caught his attention. I saw nothing.

The strange lilt to his voice was even more pronounced when he said, “I killed the Doghead wolf.”

Utter shock. I sat there dumbfounded. Astonished, I could barely form a reply. “But, why?”

“Why do we do any of the things we’ve done?” He shrugged and dragged his gaze back to mine. “I wanted to.”

This was it, the evidence that Arys was losing his mind as bad as I was. The stories were right. Twin flames were driven mad by separation. It had already begun.

“There has to be more to it than that,” I insisted, panic making my voice high and annoying. “Arys, I had to kill a vampire in front of Dayne to atone for that. To set an example for the others that attacks on the wolves would not be tolerated.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.” He appeared about as sorry as I felt when making bad choices. “It was all about you. Killing the Doghead wolf wasn’t nearly as satisfying, but it was a damn close second.”

The icy hand of horror gripped me. It was all so clear. Arys had sought out a wolf in an attempt to recreate the high from the night he killed me. This was all kinds of awful. Shifter blood was mortal, able to quench the vampire hunger, yet it was potent, stronger than human blood. Vampires had been known to form addictions to it. This was much worse. Arys wasn’t merely hungering for shifter blood. He wanted the high of their death.

If I’d still been mortal, I would have felt faint. Instead I just felt shocked and lost. Dayne could never know about this. He didn’t trust me as it was.

Arys’s confession on top of what Gabriel had told me about Juliet was all too much to take in. My head pounded. What was I supposed to do to fix this? Was that even possible?

“Can you forgive me?” he asked. “For everything I’ve done to you? Can we somehow find peace?”

His anguished plea resonated within me. We were both so lost without each other.

There was no condemnation in him. He was the only one who didn’t hate me for what he saw on Briggs’s video, because he’d been there once too. His past was littered with such things. It wasn’t that he allowed such recklessness or condoned it but that he understood.

When he took my hand, there was a spark of blue and gold. Overwhelmed with an onslaught of emotion, I nodded, both sad and grateful that we’d been forced on this journey together.

“I forgive you,” I said, my voice shaky. “It’s going to take some time to forget.”

“Of course.”

“Shaz can never know about the Doghead wolf. He’s joining the pack. His loyalty will be to Dayne first and foremost. Not to us.” Mentioning Shaz made me wonder if perhaps he wasn’t as safe with Arys as I’d once believed.

“He doesn’t know,” Arys confirmed. “Nobody does. Just you.”

I didn’t want to have to ask, didn’t really want to know, but I needed to. “Is this going to be a problem? I mean, the wolf thing. Is that going to happen again?”

Arys considered this so long it made me worry that perhaps it already had. Shadows passed through his deep-blue eyes. “I don’t think I can answer that. Can you? The Falon thing. Is that going to be a problem?”

It already was. That’s not what I said though. This wasn’t about shaming one another. We just had no concrete answers as far as our insanity was concerned. And it was insanity. How could our actions be anything remotely close to sane?

“I don’t want it to be,” I said, shunning senseless, empty promises.

Arys nodded. “I don’t want it to be either.” He wasn’t referring to Falon but to his new hunger for wolves.

We sat there together, holding hands, knowing we were so fucked up and yet still here. Still able to fight back against what it was that guided us into these dark places.

When dawn drew near, I left. Arys walked me to the door, looking better than he had when I arrived. Just being together had done wonders for us both. It was like having a light shone in a dark corner, exposing what hid there.

“We didn’t come this far to go down without a fight.” Arys gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “Right?”

As I turned to go, our hands began to slip apart. The broken connection echoed inside me, leaving me feeling hollow and empty. “Right.”

“I told him that he shouldn’t even be staying there full time. It’s a hazard to his mental health. But he won’t take advice from me, and I guess I can’t hold that against him.” Jez was yattering on about her last phone conversation with Kale. Apparently he’d been spending a lot of time in The Wicked Kiss Las Vegas.

I nodded to indicate that I was listening although I didn’t really have anything to add to the conversation. Kale wouldn’t talk to me. A few nights had passed since he hung up on me. Maybe he just needed more time. Or maybe it was better this way.

“He doesn’t know what he’s missing,” Jez continued. “This is going to be a blast. Is this the place?”

We approached an apartment near the downtown city core. I read the number on the door and nodded. This was the place. Brinley Kane had been reluctant to come to me again asking for a favor. I’d assured him that it was no imposition at all. It was a pleasure to help him out.

“Yeah, this is it.” I headed inside while Jez finished her nasty cigarette. By the time she joined me, I had unlocked the exterior door.

Five minutes later, we had a child-pimping pig face down on the floor of his kitchen, squealing like the pig he was. Jez had his hands pinned behind his back and a knee pressed against his spine. When he wouldn’t shut up, I crammed a dirty dishcloth from the sink in his mouth.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t kill every one of these despicable human beings. But a little torture could go a long way.

“Where’s the money?” I asked, sliding the Dragon Claw out of its sheath. “Every dime you made last night. Where is it?”

Brinley had come to me, concerned about a girl who had called him at three in the morning, crying and begging for help. She claimed this man on the floor had coerced her into turning tricks with threats and blackmail. As a recent victim of blackmail myself, I had no sympathy for blackmailers.

Of course, the guy couldn’t answer me with that dishrag in his mouth so I took the opportunity to ransack his apartment. Tossing his furniture around and smashing more than a few musical instruments in the corner wasn’t necessary, but it did make me feel better. In the past few days, I’d worked up some aggression that I needed to get out.

I found a wad of cash stuffed in a box under the couch, not the brightest hiding place. I stuffed the money into the pocket of my long jacket. Even though it was dirty money, I hoped Brinley could use it somehow to go toward taking care of the girl who was forced to earn it.

“Ok, now things are going to get interesting,” I said, rejoining Jez and our disgusting friend in the kitchen. “We’re not going to kill you today. However, you are going to promise us that you will never sell an underage kid again. Do you understand?”

Having been easily overpowered and slammed on the floor, the guy was sweating fear. He nodded vigorously.

“Hold one of his hands out, Jez. Flat on the floor.” I stood over him with my dagger in hand, and the scent of fear grew so thick it was suffocating. It was also tantalizing in its own way. Nothing like fear to spark the interest of the beast within.

Jez responded to it too. Her nostrils flared, and her eyes widened. She grabbed one of his hands and pinned it down on the floor. His wrist shook with the effort he exerted to resist, but he was no match for Jez.

She climbed right on top of him, holding the guy down with both knees digging into his spine. One hand held his on the floor and the other was on the back of his head. “Ready when you are,” she said with a smirk.

I knelt down and spread his fingers apart. “Tell you what. I won’t take them all. I’ll leave you a couple.”

The veins on his forehead protruded as he strained. He grunted and squirmed. It sounded like he was trying to beg for mercy. Too bad for him, I had none.

Even as a scream gurgled in his throat, muffled by the cloth, I lined up the dagger. Then I raised it just high enough and brought it down hard. The blade sliced clean through three of his fingers. I’d left him the thumb and index.

His muffled cries grew frantic. While waiting for him to calm down, I dug through his cupboards until I found a plastic bag. I used it to scoop up the severed fingers. They would find their way into a dumpster. Leaving them behind gave him the chance to get them reattached. He didn’t deserve that. No mercy.

When he’d calmed somewhat, I knelt down beside him again. “The fingers, that’s just the beginning. I’m watching you now. You stick to consenting adults. The second I find out you’re selling kids again, I come back, and I cut off something bigger, something you probably don’t want to live without. Understand?”

He nodded again, slower this time. Tears streamed from his eyes. Pathetic.

I nodded to Jez, and we left the apartment. The dirtbag didn’t try to be a tough guy. He stayed where he was. I didn’t expect any further trouble from him, but I would enjoy a chance to come back and finish what I started.