WHEN EVERETT GOT BACK LATE THAT NIGHT, I WAS ALREADY IN BED, TRYING TO sleep again. I heard a soft murmur of hushed voices in the living room, then they faded and Everett’s footsteps came softly down the hall. He paused when he reached the door, hesitating.
He cracked the door open and slid inside. “Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked.
I smiled a bit, sitting up. “How’d you know?”
“Breathing’s different when you’re sleeping,” he said, reaching down to pull off his shoes and socks. He shrugged out of his coat and sweater. There were rips in his soft V-neck t-shirt, though I wasn’t sure from what. The stone skin beneath them, though, was entirely intact. I cringed, wondering where they came from and trying to not wonder at the same time. “Will you try to sleep?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I’m okay without it,” I said, though I was feeling more exhausted than I had been even in the six months I had stopped sleeping.
“But will you try? Can we just lie here together for a while? It’s been a long day,” he said. I slid back to the center of the bed and let my head fall back and my hair spread gently across the pillow, a clear indication of my assent. This was the problem with Everett. His presence was so convincing, so intoxicating, that all day I’d been thinking of his monstrous side, and now I felt safe lying next to him, unprotected.
I simultaneously loved and hated that he was capable of that.
Everett lay on his side, the line of his body mirroring mine. I looked into his eyes. I began to lightly trace the lines in his arms he had huddled in front of him in the distance between us.
“How was your day?” he asked softly.
“Uneventful,” I said. “Are we going to stay here?”
“Have somewhere you need to be?” he asked.
“We need to be in Montana, obviously. Or out trying to find my family and stopping them before they do anything like I saw in the vision again,” I said.
Everett tensed. I felt very strongly that he was holding something back, but before I could ask, he kept talking. “We can talk about it on Friday. Tomorrow is Mark’s birthday, and even though we’ve had thousands between us, it’s a big deal to my mom for the family to be together, so we have to stay for that,” he explained.
“Should I go ahead and leave for Montana so that I’m not here when you’re celebrating family things?” I asked, suddenly insecure, afraid of imposing.
“Are you kidding me?” he asked incredulously. “When we use the word ‘family’ now, you are included. I thought you realized that.” I shrugged sheepishly. It frustrated him that there was any question. “You’re a hard girl to love, Sadie. You don’t take it well,” he said. Something about that felt more insulting than he meant it.
“Sorry,” I whispered. I was embarrassed.
“Nothing to apologize for,” he said. “Hey, didn’t we lie down so you would sleep?”
“Sleep doesn’t come easy these days,” I said. My fingertips continued their glide over his satiny skin, down his arms and back up, from his collar, up his neck, and across his cheeks. I laid my palm on his cheek and stroked it. He tilted his head and placed a slow kiss on the inside of my wrist. He wasn’t breathing.
I let my hand drift down his neck again and then across the material of his soft undershirt until my fingers found his cool skin in one of the tears in the shirt. Everett shivered and inhaled sharply. I slid my fingers down the shirt until they found another tear, this one larger and more on his side. I let my fingertips rub back and forth across his granite skin, feeling the hard ridges and grooves of his muscles. Everett closed his eyes and swallowed hard.
“Are you okay?” I whispered, my own voice breathier than I expected. He nodded. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“How I’m touching a part of you I’ve never seen,” I said.
“I noticed that,” he said. It feels amazing, he said in his mind, entirely by accident. His guard was down. I was able to feel warmth wrap around my body, radiating off of him — a kind I didn’t feel from him often, even in our more tender moments. A kind that found something deep in my core and embedded itself there, creating a hum of alertness, heat, and tension in the scariest way. The best way.
I moved my hand from the open tear and back to the t-shirt, trusting the security even the thin fabric gave me.
I don’t know how in control he was, but I knew he didn’t want me to stop. I laid my palm flat against the valley between his stomach muscles, and I took a few deep breaths to steady myself. I was having my own conflicting but powerful emotions, and I felt his too as he let his guard down. Though my battle for control was entirely different from Everett’s, it was still a battle. How far was too far? How far wasn’t far enough? Everett and I had once confined our physical relationship to what our 19th century selves would be more comfortable with, rather than our 21st century selves. Or, at least, we planned to.
And yet, here we were, lying in bed together, my skin undeniably magnetized to his.
I suddenly slid my hand under his shirt so it rested exactly where it had been only without the barrier between us. His breathing caught but then steadied again. I didn’t know what I was doing.
He was so lean, his body so smooth and taut. “I think I would like to see this part of you,” I said, pressing my palm lightly into that place where his sternum hollowed out. I watched the thought cross his mind a fraction of a second before he acted. I never even saw him move, but instantly he was in the exact position he had been, only now more of his pale skin was glowing in the dark room. He’d taken off his shirt faster than I could see it.
I let my eyes rake gently over his bare chest and arms. “Still okay?” I asked, my voice a whisper.
He nodded. “And you?” he asked sliding a cool hand against my cheek, cradling my face. I nodded, too. I wondered how close were we to the 21st century. And how far from the 19th? Very slowly, he leaned in to me and pressed our foreheads together. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you,” I said. And then he touched his cool, sterling lips to mine. We kissed for a few moments before he tentatively put a hand on my hip. I responded by putting my hand to his side. He parted his lips and let his tongue escape, past my lips and into my mouth, which he had never done before. We walked a thin line between an innocent kiss and a venomous bite, between my safety and my becoming like him. But soon I lost myself in the kiss, deciding to trust his control. I tightened my grip around his waist, and he pulled me closer in kind. He wrapped both arms around me, hugging me against him. I felt the muscles in his back ripple with even his tiniest movements.
I broke my lips away and kissed along his jawbone and then down his neck. Nuzzling my head into the crook of his neck, I let a few lazy kisses fall on his collarbone. But then I took a long, deep breath, and suddenly froze in place. What was I doing? He tensed beside me as I did this, likely afraid one or both of us had pushed past lines we had done a poor job defining in the first place.
Dangerous. It was dangerous. But it was enticing. It was addictive. It seemed...worth it.
Almost.
I let my head rest back on the pillow, thinking maybe I was too brash. But my hair fell away from neck, leaving it long, exposed. I was surprised, even rattled, when Everett bent to kiss my throat. He didn’t let our bodies break apart, and so quickly he was on top of me, carefully hovering so almost none of his weight pressed into me. We looked at each other intently for one long moment.
And then, in a flash, he was lying beside me, his body only an inch away but not touching me at all. It had become too much, and he knew it. I should have been able to stop us, but I wouldn’t have. I wanted him that close to me again. I felt guilty and scared for being so uncontrolled but at the same time more in love with Everett Winter than I even wanted to be.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for,” I said. “If anything, I’m sorry. I started it.” An excruciatingly long pause hung between us. Finally, he smiled, “I didn’t mind it.”
I worked my way back into the shape of his body — my forehead against his jaw, my chest and shoulders against his stomach. He took my cue and wrapped his arms around me again.
“How bad was that for you?” I asked. “You know...bloodlust-wise,” I said, to be clear on what I was asking about.
He frowned. “Doable, apparently,” he said, “But I wouldn’t trust me.” I said nothing. “How was that...you know...19th-century-wise?”
I laughed softly. “Intriguing. More powerful than I might have expected,” I admitted, “But I’m fine.”
“Sadie, you’ve got to tell me if this ever isn’t what you want. You’ve always got to be honest with me on this stuff, okay?” he said.
I nodded. “And you have to tell me the same thing,” I said. “I mean, not just when you can’t get in control. You should tell me when you don’t...want...” I wasn’t sure what I was saying, but I was suddenly nervous. These were the kinds of moments where 145 years of living somehow added up to me feeling like a teenager — an inexperienced teenager at that. I was never confident. I never knew what I wanted. And I really never knew what I was doing.
Everett put a gentle finger to my lips. “Let’s just put this out there. There will never be a ‘don’t want to’ situation. The ‘want to’ is what makes the control part so hard,” he said. His voice was soothing and affectionate. He was being gutsy admitting that. It sent electric charges up and down my spine to hear it.
As he regained composure, I could sense fewer and fewer of his feelings.
“Sadie, we need to talk about something.”
I steeled myself and swallowed hard, suddenly scared for reasons I couldn’t explain. “Okay,” I said.
“Ginny and Mark have been looking for a trail to follow to find your missing family members,” he said.
“Like tracking?” I asked.
“No, more like detective work. They found a news story about the girls from last night,” he said, stroking my hair. I felt a pang in my stomach. This was why he was being loving and calm.
I had never doubted that the murders were happening while I watched them, so I wasn’t sure why this hurt to hear. “Where were they?” I asked, my voice weak.
“San Francisco.”
“That’s awfully close to your California house,” I said to him. Pacific Grove was less than an hour’s run — for our kind — from San Francisco. “You think there’s a connection?”
“We don’t know,” he said truthfully. “Princess, you should understand. They killed four last night, but they’ve killed more than that overall.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“We found instances of an alarming number of unsolved murders over the last few months,” he said.
“We can’t necessarily tie them all to the rogue Survivors, but in the last three weeks there have been a string of them. They’ve been in towns in a straight line from Canada to San Francisco — several incidents in British Columbia, then Washington, a bunch in Oregon, then four in California.”
“What do you mean by ‘incidents’?” I asked. “As in someone died in each of those places?”
“As in,” he said, softly, “a lot of people died in each of those places.” My throat closed. “So last night wasn’t the worst?” I choked.
“It was the...least,” Everett said apologetically.
Least? That horror, that obscenity? That was the least bad it got? I swallowed hard.
“Sadie, it’s not your fault,” he said, knowing where my mind was going. Had I not left my family in Montana, likely none of the others would have left either. And if none of them had left...
“How many?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “How many?” I repeated. “I want to know,” I said, the damage I’ve done, I thought.
“Eighteen incidents,” he said. “Eighteen that we can be sure they had a part in.”
“How many murders?” I demanded.
Everett’s face was like stone. “A hundred thirty-eight,” he said.
The magnitude of the number struck me like 138 swords. A small percentage of my family — maybe not even all 28 rogue relatives! — had killed at least as many humans as family members they left behind. It was exactly how the nosferatu lynxes in Romania had explained the violent vieczy to me. This is what they said to expect, and yet I couldn’t.
I wanted to cry, to scream, to throw things, to take it all back. But it was too late. 138 times, it had been too late.
“We’re going to stop them,” he said. But if we were really going to, wouldn’t we have done so by now?
I said nothing. I only closed my eyes and pretended to sleep until I felt early sunlight shine in through the broad windows, the metallic taste of blood and the ringing of those girls’ screams never far from my mind.