My Blood Approves (25 page)

“
I can only be twenty-six
for so long before the neighbors start to notice,” Ezra elaborated,
but it still took a minute for it to sink it. They were never going
to age, but everyone around them would. “We move every five years
so, but we’ve been staying around Minneapolis for quite
awhile.”

“
I’ve never lived anywhere
else,” Jack added.

“
You were born here?” I
gave him an odd look. For no real reason, I had just always kinda
imagined that he was a transplant from California or Vegas or
something like that.

“
Stillwater, actually, but
it still makes it tricky living that close to my family.” He had
said it casually, like it was no big thing, but something had just
dawned on me, and he noticed the shift in my expression. “We can’t
see our families. We change, at first, to look better, and then we
don’t change at all.”

“
And it’s too hard watching
them grow old.” Ezra had somehow managed to take something that was
really terrible sound at least vaguely soothing, but my heart still
clenched.

I looked over at Mae, standing at the stove
and chatting amicably with my brother, and felt the full
ramification of what he was saying.

“
It’s not as bad as it
sounds,” Jack said gently.

There were things that I hadn’t thought
about when I got involved with them, and I’m sure there would be
even more things that would come up later. Nothing about this was
going to be easy.

As if to solidify my point, Peter suddenly
walked into the kitchen. His jeans and shirt were slim fit,
revealing the slender lines of his gorgeous body. His blazing
emerald eyes landed on mine, for just a second, then flitted away,
as if he couldn’t stand to look at me.

Just being this close to him made my skin
tremble and my blood pound heavily in my ears. Out of the corner of
my eye, I noticed Jack flinch, but for once, I didn’t feel it. When
Peter was around, he eclipsed everything else, including the
feelings that I sometimes borrowed from Jack.

“
What’s all this?” Peter
gestured to Mae’s attempts at cooking. She’d been too distracted
with her food preparation to notice him walk in, but when he spoke,
she shot him a nervous, startled look.

“
I’ll call you back,” Mae
muttered into the phone, then quickly hung up and dropped it in her
pocket. “Peter, you’re home!”

“
I am.” Peter chewed the
inside of his cheek, and he deliberately had to keep from looking
at me. I wondered how he could even fight the urge. For me, it was
so overpowering that I could barely breathe. “Am I to assume this
is a feast for my return?”

“
Peter, she knows,” Ezra
told him quietly.

His eyes turned on me sharply, sending a
rush through me so rapidly that I felt dizzy. Behind me, I heard a
stool clatter to the floor, but I didn’t look back to see Jack
storming out of the room. Peter didn’t really seem to notice either
but walked slowly over to me, his eyes never leaving mine.

“
So, you’re feeding her
now?” Peter was looking at me, but he was asking someone else, not
that anyone bothered to answer. He reached out and touched a wet
strand of my hair and breathed in deeply. “And she’s showering here
too. Is she living here now?”

“
No.” Ezra let the word
hang in the air.

Peter just kept staring at me. In the back
of my mind, I was aware that there were other people in the room,
and it should be embarrassing that Peter was looking at me so
intently in front of an audience, but somehow, it wasn’t.

“
So you know we’re
vampires?” Even though Peter smiled at me, there was an underlying
edge to his voice. “You know that we kill? You could’ve just as
easily been food for us, but with a bit of luck and chance, you’re
standing here instead.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. I could feel
heat radiate from his body in a way that the others seemed
incapable of. My skin tingled and that tugging feeling encircled my
heart. Every single part of my body screamed out for him, and
painfully, I was starting to believe that he didn’t feel the same
way.

“
Why are you here?” Peter
asked huskily.

“
I-I-I want to be,” I
stumbled.

He occupied my brain, and it was all but
impossible for me to form a competent answer. His scent, tangy and
tantalizing, washed over me, blinding almost all my other
senses.

“
You want to be,” Peter
repeated flatly. “You want this?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but then I felt
his hand around my throat. There was a rush of air and then I felt
something hard slam into my back.

He’d picked me up by my neck and pressed me
against a wall. His eyes burned with conflicting passions, but all
I could really feel were his fingers on my throat, and the way my
pulse felt pumping underneath them.

“
This is really what you
want?” he snarled.

This time I couldn’t answer because his hand
was so tight on my throat. I couldn’t even breathe, but I barely
noticed. He pressed up against me and I could feel the hard
contours of his body against mine, and his intoxicating smell
suffocated me. If I stayed like that for too long, I would probably
die, but it seemed completely worth it.

- 16 -

Without warning, Jack slammed into Peter,
sending him flying across the room. My lungs burned as they filled
with air, and I leaned back against the wall, gasping.

Peter stumbled back into the fridge, but he
quickly regained his footing and flew at Jack. Jack was ready for
it and lunged back towards Peter, pushing him back away from me
once again.

“
Jack!” Mae wailed,
sounding utterly panicked.

Ezra stepped forward to intervene, so Peter
backed down slightly. Jack stood between Peter and me, his body
unbearably shielding me from Peter.

For his part, Peter had a look of barely
controlled rage contorting his beautiful features. His fists
clenched at his sides, and he glared past Jack at me.

“
He’s not going to hurt
her!” Ezra told Jack, and both of them stepped back, but neither
was willing to relinquish his stand entirely.

“
He had his hand around her
throat! She couldn’t breathe!” Jack yelled.

“
I would never let her
die!” Peter shouted. “I could feel her heartbeat and it never
waned!” Something occurred to him, and he took a step closer to
Jack. “What do you even care? How did you even know she wasn’t
breathing? What did you do?”

“
Stop!” Mae ran in between
the two of them, putting one of her hands on each of their chests,
while Ezra stood off to the side. “Nothing happened, okay?
Nothing!”

“
What the hell is going
on?” Peter looked to Ezra for an explanation. “Why does he care
about her?”

“
We don’t really know
what’s going on,” Ezra admitted quietly, casting a look back at me.
“This is unlike anything I’ve encountered.”

Peter studied me curiously, and my heart
started to speed up. I saw his eyes register it, and then I heard
Jack moan. Instantly, Peter’s eye flicked over to him.

“
You’re reacting to her!”
Peter didn’t sound angry so much as bewildered. He leaned in closer
to Jack, eyeing him up. “You didn’t bite her?”

“
No!” Jack groaned,
exasperated.

“
How is this even
possible?” Peter was totally amazed.

When he looked back at me, his eyes softened
and grew even more confused. That didn’t help slow my already
quickened pulse.

“
Alice!” Jack
snapped.

“
I can’t help it!” I
lamented.

“
Jack, go over there,” Mae
commanded, pointing to the far side of the dining room. He grumbled
something in protest but did as he was told. She walked over to me
and hugged me to her.

“
She might have… somehow
become attached to Jack,” Ezra explained slowly. Pain and confusion
spread over Peter’s face when he looked back and forth from me to
Ezra. “She reacts the strongest with you still, but it seems that
some of it may have transferred.”

“
How is that even
possible?” Peter repeated, and Jack scoffed.

“
Why do you even care?”
Jack growled. “You don’t even want her!”

His words sliced through me like a knife,
and I flinched, so Mae tightened her arms around me. What hurt the
most is that I knew Jack was right. Peter only felt things for me
because his body made him.

Peter snarled, and Ezra took a step closer
to him, just to make sure he wouldn’t lunge at Jack.

“
Enough!” I shouted. “I’m
not going to let you kill each other over something as stupid as
me. If one of you could please just take me home, I’ll be happy to
leave you all in peace.”

“
Alice, none of us wants
that.” Mae stroked my hair and held as me close to her as I would
allow. “We don’t want you to go.”

“
We’re trying to sort this
all out,” Ezra agreed.

“
I’m going for a drive,”
Jack announced suddenly and strode across the kitchen. “I’m taking
the Lamborghini.”

“
Be careful!” Ezra called
after him. The garage door slammed in response, and he stared after
it indecisively. “Maybe I should go with him.” He looked over at
Mae, who nodded in approval, and he started hurrying after
Jack.

Mae still had her arm around me, and I knew
that she would be one of those moms that would never let go.

One of the benefits to being a vampire was
that she’d never really have an empty nest, although she’d never
exactly have a full one either. She played mother and nursemaid to
the boys, but in reality, they were grown men and needed very
little of her.

The great appeal of me was that I was very
fragile and dependant, and on top of that, a girl. For her, I was
some kind of enchanted doll, and that explained the great deal of
time she spent playing with my hair.

“
I still need to make you
supper!” Mae burst into life and rushed over to the stove.
Fortunately, she had yet to turn it on, or whatever she would’ve
been cooking would’ve been completely burnt.

“
I’m really not that
hungry,” I repeated for the tenth time.

“
Nonsense!” Mae had her
back to me and was already flitting about with ingredients. “Why
don’t you go in the other room and relax, and I’ll call you when
the food is done.”

“
It’s easier to just go
along with what she wants,” Peter told me. He took a step towards
the living room and paused, waiting for me. “Come on. We need to
talk.”

I walked with him into the living room,
breathing in how wonderful he smelled. My body felt relieved just
to be so close to him. It was exhausting staying away from him.
Every part of me felt pulled to him, and I had to use all my
strength to keep me any distance.

“
How is your throat?” Peter
asked sadly, admiring my neck.

“
It’s okay,” I lied. It
felt like I had terrible whiplash, but I didn’t want him to feel
bad about hurting me. I sat down on the couch, so very
purposefully, he sat in the chair on the far side from
me.

“
I’m sorry.” He looked at
me sadly, then dropped his eyes. “I shouldn’t have done that. But
you should know that’s what I’m like.” When he spoke again, his
voice was barely audible. “I’m not very nice.”

“
I don’t believe
you.”

“
You should.” He met my
eyes evenly. “You’d be so much better off with Jack. I’m…” He shook
his head, unable or unwilling to say exactly what he
was.

He knew how I felt about him, that I had no
control over it, and yet he still tried to convince me that he was
a bad. The choice had already been made, and whether he was good
for me or not didn’t matter.

“
But I want to be with
you,” I insisted, and something about my voice startled him into
softening a bit. But he quickly recovered, and his face hardened
again.

“
You don’t know who I am.
I’m not like them. I’m not good.”

“
How are you different?” I
asked.

I hated that he was so far away from me, and
it had finally gotten to be too much. I got up and walked over,
kneeling directly in front of him.

He smiled at me, a rather sweet, sincere
one, then reached out and touched my cheek gently, brushing back my
hair. It sent shivers of pleasure through me, but I fought to keep
my eyes open, to keep them locked on his.

“
You should be so afraid of
me, but you’re not,” he murmured, bemused. He studied my face, his
hand resting wonderfully on cheek. “If you weren’t…” He licked his
lip and sighed. “If I didn’t feel this way about you, I wouldn’t
hesitate to kill you. Do you fully understand?”

I’m not sure if I would’ve told him that I
did or not, but I had started trembling too much to speak. He
leaned in closer to me, and his hand moved back, so he was burying
his finger in the thickness of my hair.

“
I am a real vampire. I’ve
killed people.”

“
You… you have?” I
whispered. My heart, which still pounded desperately for him,
twisted with fear and revulsion.

“
Mmm.” He sighed again,
this time more resignedly. “They didn’t tell you. I’m surprised
Jack didn’t, but Ezra always tries to protect me. After…” Raw pain
flashed over his eyes. “Elise died, I went on a rampage of sorts.
Eventually, I got myself under control, but there’s still that
thirst.”