“So what? You almost killed me once before and now you’re suddenly my body guard?” I wrinkled my nose at his hypocrisy.

“Oh, god dammit!” Peter rolled his eyes. “I’m so sick of having that thrown in my face! I did that because I loved you, Alice!” He immediately regretted saying that and stared off anywhere but at me.

“Yeah, cause that’s a healthy way to express love! By killing another person!” I was purposely pushing his buttons. If the only chance at a rescue mission was Peter going off without me, then I had to piss him off enough to leave me.

“I wasn’t trying to kill you! I was trying to kill me!” He rubbed his eyes, looking as if he’d said too much and not knowing how to take it back. “Jack was in the house. I knew he was tuned in to your heart. When I grabbed you in the kitchen, he came flying in to save you. I thought if he found me, draining the life from you, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.” Tiredly, he exhaled. “I knew he was a better match for you than I was, and I didn’t see any other way out.”

I was too stunned to say anything. I’d always suspected Peter hated me. But he loved me so much, he’d been planning to die for my happiness. My heart thumped dully in my chest, and I tried to think of something say to him.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Peter snapped when he finally met my eyes again. “I don’t know why it’s so shocking that I wouldn’t want you to die. Do you really think Ezra would be so willing to sacrifice himself for me if I was such a psychopath?”

“Peter, I am so sorry,” I whispered, unable to muster the full strength of my voice.

“Stop!” Peter repeated. “Ezra is the one out there! We need to be worrying about him, not us! Because there isn’t even an ‘us’ to worry about!”

“You’re right.” I shook my head, clearing it of any confused thoughts about Peter.

It was hard, though. It changed the way I thought about everything. All the time I had been messing around with Jack, falling in love with him, the one thing that had given me the green light was that Peter had tried to kill me.

But when I thought about it as his own suicide attempt, that he had loved me so much he had been willing to give me up... We had been bound together, and he had truly loved me, but I had run off with his brother instead.

Peter didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I’m not sure if he was really trying to come up with another plan, but I certainly couldn’t. Part of me was really trying to, but I felt like all the wind had been knocked out of me.

The door to the hotel room thudded softly, interrupting my thoughts. Not a knock exactly, but more like something falling into it. I looked to Peter, his eyes already fixed on the door. He moved in front of me, blocking me in case the lycan announced their entrance.

When the door slowly swung open, we were greeted by something almost as bad.

- 10 -

Ezra leaned on the doorframe, looking worse than I could ever imagine him being. His clothes, the same black sweater and jeans he had worn the night before, were torn and dirty. His skin was gaunt and pale. He staggered into the room and Peter rushed to him.

Bite marks covered his neck and wrists. The lycan territory was nearly an hour drive away, plenty of time for a vampire to heal, but his bites were red and swollen. Ezra had been so drained he didn’t have the strength to heal.

“He needs to feed,” Peter told me and attempted to hand Ezra off to me. He hurried to the bathroom to get blood for Ezra, leaving me alone to struggle with the situation.

I’d been frozen in shock, but I put my arm around Ezra and helped him on the bed. His deep brown eyes were glassy. I’d never seen a vampire look so ill before. It had never even occurred to me that they could even look like this, especially Ezra.

When I sat down next to him on the bed, he collapsed back on the bed and rested his head on my lap. He gripped my thigh with a painful desperation, like he needed to hang onto something.

“I brought blood,” Peter said when he walked back into the room. He looked down at Ezra, clinging onto me, and pressed his lips into a thin line.

“I can’t eat. Not right now.” Ezra grimaced, as if he was in too much pain to even think of eating.

I brushed his hair from his forehead, his skin feeling clammy. After blood loss, I’d think eating would be the only thing that would make him feel better. Then it dawned on me what was going on.

The lycan had fed on him. That was something vampires never let other vampires do, unless they were lovers. There was something sexual about the exchanging of blood, but it was more than that.

When Jack bit me, I felt him flow through me, and his love and kindness consumed me. Ezra had been bitten by a pack of rabid monsters. All their pain and rage burned through him now. Physically and emotionally, they drained him.

Ezra made a pained sound but fought to suppress it. He gripped me so tightly, that had I been human, he would’ve broken bones and ruptured organs. Despite his weakness, his muscles felt like concrete underneath my hands. He tensed so tightly, his body was completely rigid, and his legs curled up a bit, closer to me.

“My blood…” Ezra forced a few words, but he barely managed that.

Flutter

“Just rest. We don’t need to talk.” I tried to reassure him, running my fingers through his blond hair.

“No,” Ezra said, his voice tight and weak. “My blood for your blood. It’s over. We need to get out of here. Peter, can you…”

“I’ll make all the arrangements,” Peter said when Ezra trailed off. He tried to keep his composure as much as possible, but his eyes burned. It killed him knowing Ezra had exchanged his own blood for Peter’s life.

After a moment of staring remorsefully at him, Peter went into action. He got his cell phone and started making calls, most of which I couldn’t understand because they were in Finnish.

“I shouldn’t be burdening you with this,” Ezra said and tried moving away from me.

“No, you’re okay,” I insisted. “Don’t worry.”

“No. I …” Ezra trailed off again, and a spasm went over his body. He gripped even tighter and I could barely breathe. It passed, and he relaxed, as much as he could. “I’m sorry.”

“Ezra. It’s okay.”

When Peter got off the phone, he watched Ezra for a moment as he struggled to keep his breaths even. I could feel Ezra biting back screams, and I looked to Peter for help, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.